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I'm looking forward to talking these movies over with people after they've seen them. There's much to spoil in each and I tiptoed around that. But maybe signal you've got a spoiler in your comment when you post.

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Lamb look fascinating, and me would like to see it at some point, but at risk of losing indie cred, me more excited to finally see Bond than anything else coming out this year. So me relieved to see good review here. Craig has been so good in role, but even apart from that, writing (Spectre excepted) and direction really took step up from previous Bonds. And me appreciate approach series this long-in-tooth take, of deconstructing Bond mythos and then reconstructing Bond into more complex character.

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How upsetting/horrific is Lamb? I’ve seen several reviewers mention that it edges horror, but without specifics for fear of spoiling the plot. Is it doable for those with weak stomachs?

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Great reviews, both. Recently sat down to watch Spectre finally and actually thought it was slightly better than the initial reviews had suggested, though it still lacked the magic of Skyfall and Casino Royale. Hope that No Time To Die is at least as enjoyable as Spectre was. Having seen so many Bond films with my dad as a kid, it’ll be nice to go see another one with him; we have tickets to see it early next week.

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*SPOILERS FOR LAMB*

Given that so many Disney movies are based on old dark fairy tales such as the ones Lamb clearly takes inspiration from, let's hypothesize what a Disneyfied "Maria and the Little Lamb" would look like. The cat and dog would obviously be the wisecracking Greek chorus/sidekicks, right? Played by the comedy duo du jour, getting into all kind of hijinks. Who would be the big bad? Petúr? The giant Ram Man thing?

I think it's only right that Bjork writes the songs.

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No Time To Die:

Non-spoiler thoughts:

Though I largely enjoyed it in the moment – even the worse Bond films have a base level of enjoyment; and it passed the hot beverage test, which is to say I was sufficiently engrossed that my hot chocolate went cold before I finished it – that’s probably more frustrating than if it was just disposably crappy, as there is a decent B+ standalone Bond film in there somewhere. Ultimately, my overriding response is annoyance that the last 9 years since Skyfall have just been wasted. (Make it 7 years to account for the Covid delay, that’s still the same length of time Brosnan did all his films in.)

Skyfall capped a solid and self-contained trilogy but Spectre was pointless and awful, and I resent it more because No Time To Die feels it had to pay all that nonsense off, and does so in such an ungainly manner. (Especially, if memory serves, as Skyfall had ignored the whole Quantum plotline altogether to the disappointment of no one, so already proving that this MCU-type world-building was wholly unnecessary.) It also maybe tips The Dark Knight's influence on cinema into the net negative - it feels like because they couldn't get their fantasy pick of Nolan to do one of these, the producers got a talented but cheaper filmmaker to do a decent enough impression, topped it off with a Hans Zimmer score, and figured that’s close enough. Even its best moments were largely derivative or superfluous – the sequence in the forest has heavy Insomnia vibes (which I suppose is at least a bit more imaginative than ripping TDK or Inception), the seemingly-one-take action scene is inferior to those in, say, Atomic Blonde or True Detective, and, delightful as she was, the Ana de Armas section added an easily-excisable 20 minutes to a film that needed 20 less even without her.

**SPOILERS BELOW**

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Thankfully, I’d avoided specific spoilers for the ending but, given what we already know, it wasn’t hard to see coming. It just didn’t work for me, largely because Craig and Seydoux have absolutely no chemistry, compounded by their all-too-visible 20-year age difference, and thus their tragedy was utterly weightless. But the greatest sin was to bring back Jeffrey Wright just to kill him off ten minutes later - get stuffed, movie. (Actually, the greatest sin is to cast Jeffrey Wright in the first place when you’re only going to give him something like 15 minutes of screentime in the entire series - get stuffed, movies.)

Bond fans talk about their formative experiences, that the one you see at aged 12 sticks with you, and likely to be the one you remember most fondly. The kids in the row in front of me were around 12 (they surely weren't born when Jeffrey Wright was last in a Bond film) so, regardless of what they’ve previously watched at home, this was almost certainly their first in-cinema Bond experience – a mostly grim, humourless 3 hour dirge, that requires knowledge of other, often grim and humourless, films… and Bond dies at the end. Sucks to be them.

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Finally caught up with No Time To Die. Liked it quite a bit, but probably ranks fourth in my Craig rankings (I am a huge Quantum defender). I think it sort of got worse as it went on, because I was fully involved at the beginning.

Am I crazy to think that this was the worst-looking Craig movie though? I found it too dark in quite a few action scenes to make out what was happening, very little in the way of interesting blocking, and the second half to be very disappointing in locations between the vague foggy forest that looks like it’s from a new X-Men movie and the bland concrete hallways of Rami Malek’s lair. Even Malek’s character gets a big downgrade visually - he really should have kept that Noh mask on because THAT was a striking image.

But maybe there are aspects of the cinematography I’m overlooking, I can’t really speak to any technical analysis

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