Either way, “Whose set do you think you’re on, motherfucker?” isn’t the appropriate response. Either she undercut her own story by making Washington look like less of a jerk than he was, or she’s just an asshole.

She’s been extremely smart, realizing that there isn’t (and never was going to be) a career for her out there as lucrative as the role of Meredith Grey. She gets to be the big fish in a small pond who can tell Denzel Washington off because she’s decided this one role is her career. There’s a lot of actresses—many more…

The crazy thing is, you see Dalton in other roles, and the man drips charisma. He just wasn’t charismatic as Bond, and I don’t know if that was a choice he made to try to differentiate himself from Moore, or if it was just bad direction.

It’s weird that the Mission: Impossible movies had a very similar pattern, and managed to break out of it, where the Craig Bonds didn’t. Ethan Hunt’s introduced in the first movie, and by the second one there’s already meta-commentary from his former IMF colleague about how predictable he is. In M:I3, Hunt’s behind a…

Offsetting how stupid “Mrs. Charlie Sheen—Nuclear Physicist” and the character’s name are, is the fact that she’s the easiest character to ignore in Bond history. She’s very clearly only there for that opening shot where she’s dressed like Tomb Raider (it was a thing at the time) and to be Bond’s consolation prize…

I don’t get the “they’re both jerks” angle on this. Her ad-lib was also directing the other actor in the scene. Telling the actors what to do is the director’s job, and if you undermine a director like that there should be pushback. There are lots of stories about Denzel being a jerk out there (it seems like every…

Still, The Spy Who Loved Me is the best-made Moore Bond, thanks in part to a slight dip in silliness factor between The Man with the Golden Gun’s slide whistle (it was first Bond I saw and for a long time my favorite) and Moonraker’s...everything.

What? You mean you wouldn’t be a fan of Chuck having exactly the same facial expression when he’s getting sexed up by Talisa Soto as he does when he’s looking at Felix Leiter’s mangled leg?

A View to a Kill begs to disagree, but then again I might be the high man on actually liking The World Is Not Enough (the movie), stupid villain concept and onetime Mrs. Charlie Sheen aside.

That’s just a matter of budget, and at the time, I honestly don’t think the action in Bond films was quite up to Bruckheimer standards. The point is that story-wise, License to Kill could easily star Chuck Norris. The main difference would be that when a helicopter explodes in Golan & Globus’s License to Kill, you’d…

I think we have to blame Craig’s Hamlet-like approach to playing the character (driven, to be perfectly fair, by the fact that he’s suffered significant injuries in each of his Bond films, including No Time To Die). If I remember right, his original contract was three films, and so the “I’m too old for this shit”…

A much better story, better villains (maybe the only Bond where it isn’t him vs. the big bad—IIRC, Bond only ever confronts SPECTRE lieutenants and henchmen) and the character’s coldness comes off in a more interesting way.

So you believe that “tudum!” to be diegetic?

You’ve given me this image of Sam Barsanti going through the dumpster behind the AV Club office. He pulls out the “Platt is too young to play a high schooler” take. “Can you believe someone threw this away? It’s still good! You just scrape off the moldy parts, and there’s plenty to eat here.”

Eh, I think you’re overstating it. There isn’t that much slow motion, compared with the original, and what we get is mainly used to produce that occasional painterly effect that Snyder used endlessly in 300 a few years later.

There’s no denying the fight is cartoony, particularly when they add an I-shit-you-not bowling pin sound effect at a moment when a few dozen Smiths are being knocked over. The first time I saw Reloaded on video, I rewound over that moment three or four times because I was sure I imagined it.

Yeah, they needed to quit while the fight still featured stuntmen with Hugo Weaving’s face CGI’d onto them, before it just became a video game cutscene. I’ve heard it suggested that the reason the scene makes that transition is that they ran out of effects budget at that point.

If you’re for shortening copyright periods, rather than lengthening them infinitely, you’re against both the corporate entities and the lucky children of wealthy guys. Personal copyright is life of the author plus damn near three generations after his death.

Plus, I feel Tilda’s the kind who’ll cut ya if you step on her corner. I know I shouldn’t worry about Gwendoline Christie in a physical altercation, she’s taller and looks to be times and a half  Swinton’s bodymass, but somehow Swinton still looks more dangerous.

These might’ve been last-minute tests run by the Secret Service in advance of the VP appearing on the show, rather than any regular testing the View might do for itself.