Allow me to introduce Miss Penny Sterling, secretary at M.I.6, being menaced by a slinky Australian super-spy…

:;): 10th December, coming to a screen near you!

I’ve done a few spy themes in the past, always been meaning to do it with a proper spy in a tux and a deathtrap for RE. Some of the Evil Magician props make good death-traps! I guess the closest I’ve come is actually:

Evil Magician: Agent Doubledare

no Bond figure, but Rob the Magician makes a very sinister Blofeld (complete with Mr. Tibbles, the sinister white cat…)

On the new Bond and the new Bond film… I thought the film itself was entertaining enough, but wa a bit disappointed by how it was like looking at a “Hollywood 2000’s colouring book”. The cinematography and direction were SO by-the-numbers. Wobbly shaky-cam fight scenes? Check. Fashionable soap-opera nod towards character development? Check. All chase sequences at least 33% too long? Check. As far as the film-makers were concerned it seemed to be identical to every other Hollywood action movie stamped out in the production line in the last five or six years.

I thought the plot was OK, it is a bit of a mangling of the book but given that the book was written fifty years ago that’s inevitable. The soap-opera character development was mildly excruciating, I think because it was shoe-horned in quite intrusively in places. Not as intrusively as the Sony product placement, mind you.

As for Daniel Craig as the new Bond… I don’t think he looks the part the way Brosnan did, and his acting skills didn’t exactly get stretched, but he was OK. Sean Connery he ain’t, though.

Completely agree that getting away from the invisible car silliness back to a bit of grit. The dreaded cheapo BMW’s thankfully ditched for two gorgeous Aston Martins. Although they needn’t have bothered as the cars really were also shoe-horned in as product placement.

You know the one thing I really couldn’t help but notice? That loads of violence and a male torture sequence like that is acceptable in a 12-rated film, but if it had been Vesper Lynd being tortured on-screen we’d have been looking at 18 material. Sigh.

It was fun, but not one to rush out and buy the DVD. Sin City, it wasn’t. At least the opening parkour chase scene on foot was excellent (although it should have been cut down to two thirds length as usual) and at least some of the girls were very prettily barefoot! :devil

Cheers, Hywel.

Edited By Hywel on 1164872493

Yeh, what *IS* it with the modern obsession with soap-opera character development shit? The rot started in Star Trek: The Next Generation, where every episode had to have at least one or two characters mooning around whilst being patronised to death by the drippy ship’s councillor (to crying man… “I sense that you are feeling… upset”. Your awesome empath powers astound me…)

Now it isn’t that I object to character development. It is the whole soap opera way of presenting it I hate. Character can be displayed and developed in a subtle, slick and unobtrusive way by how the character reacts to the events and the plot. It doesn’t need the addition of dozens of endless talking head scenes for the hard-of-thinking.

Which reminds me- one thing I am guilty of in the RE videos is too much talk and not enough action to get across the story. It is largely the limitation of having to shoot the videos in a relatively short space of time with no detailed script and a very small or non-existant crew (which is also a reason why some of the improvised videos can turn out much more as comedies than originally intended- it is a lot easier to improvise comedy than dramatic tragedy I reckon).

This is one of the aspects I wanted to work on in the film, which I promise honest-to-goodness I will have edited into a presentable cut in the New Year to show you what I mean. That’s one direction I would like to explore more next year, to expand the range of styles of videos we do. Watch this space!

Cheers, Hywel.

Edited By Hywel on 1164916247

Do NOT go and see “The Notorious Bettie Page”!!!!

The is nothing wrong with the film per se….

Except the missus has been new to this scene, and we have been watching some choice cinematography to put her at ease (Hywel, thanks for all the Chanta-Ariel scenes, the idle gossip and chit chat really made it seem relaxed)

Well, Hywel’s work, films like “Secretary” etc…. Good.

The Notorious Bettie Page…. Bad.

Lets just say the end does not come across as very bondage friendly.