If only this movie featured the Man in Black's minions trying to kill Nikolaj Arcel to stop this movie being made, and had him rescued by Roland.

Wasn't Betty name checked in the same sequence of The Avengers(?) where they told Thor that Natalie Portman had been safely whisked away by SHIELD to the guarded island of Not-Appearing-In-This-Movie?

No

Well sure, but this presupposes the equally unlikely scenario of a woman being attracted to Benedict Cumberbatch.

This is true, but I think the inevitable lies are more important when they're regarding careers people aspire to - i.e. a gun shooting the wrong kind of ammo is still a gun, needlepoint being incorrectly identified as cross-stitch is still needlework, but presenting a misleading fantasy of careers can really fuck…

That's okay, they can probably just turn the levels up in post.

Nobody who actually thinks they're right ever says "teach the controversy." If you think you're right, you want to teach the truth. You want to teach the controversy when you want your bullshit elevated by sharing a stage with the truth.

Could be wrong - it wasn't until this newswire that I put together why people were tweeting about shark-dragging - but I thought they also used a dog as bait for the shark that they then dragged.

That was almost 40 years ago though, and still in the midst of the cold war. The James Bond from the Fleming novels would have been in his 60's in the 1980s - his generation, and the forces that shaped it were still very much part of the culture. I think moving him to the late twenty-teens would be much trickier.

I think Connery's ego would never allow that.

I don't see why. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy wasn't a nostaliga piece. The problem is that there isn't really much to James Bond aside from the affectations: Tux, Walther pistol, Martini, Aston Martin, quips & casual misogyny. And the further you get from the context of his creation as a character, the more creaky…

If Bond had been parkouring around, I would agree, but the way they guy he was chasing kept doing acrobat things while Bond just smashed his way through actually accomplished some worthwhile character work in a chase scene. Which is pretty unusual.

I remain disappointed that they didn't get Sean Connery for Albert Finney's role.

I also think the franchise was going through a period when they didn't know how they wanted to deal with women in Bond movies, and so were kind of flailing around between sexless and oversexed.

Brosnan was a great Bond actor hobbled by mostly shitty scripts.

It is interesting, now that you mention it, that this is probably the closest thing to a faithful adaptation of a book that's been done, and yet it's also the first time they managed to successfully extricate Bond from the Cold War in a way that made sense.

Pretty much. Though he lacks most of the traditional campaigning skills too.

To some extent, yes. But there is a large component of meritocracy involved in Hollywood success. It's just that the merit involved is not skill in the ostensible job (acting or writing), but skill in marketing yourself.

AAH! TOM SELLECK!

I think I've said this in nearly every Doctor Who article thread, but as near as I can tell, Doctor Who fandom seems to be mostly about hating Doctor Who.