Beautifully articulated. I hated Skyfall upon first viewing. I had a really visceral reaction to it. Precisely because of what Lucius has said here. No one else in my world understood my point of view. I have warmed to it since, but it will never be a favourite.

I’m very sad to hear of the passing of Walter Koenig, aka Pavel Chekov from Star Trek. I got to meet him on a few occasions, and he was always genuine, thoughtful, and a little anxious in a way that made him very relatable. R.I.P.

This is actually the standard "in-shape" physique of the pre-1980s. Calisthenics and sensible eating. Steve Reeves would have been called "absurdly jacked" but nowadays would be a natural bodybuilder with great genetics.

I miss spy thrillers like Spy Game (2001). No world-ending threat, no superhero-level action. Just intelligence officers, political manipulation and people making impossible decisions. Tony Scott knew how to make all of that genuinely exciting.

The movie I hate the most in the series also is at the bottom of my list. In the scene where Severine died, I wanted to close this film and put it in the ass of the Bab's and MGW's ass. They persistently tore their asses so that James Bond wouldn't be like himself before.

Tonight's film is Skyfall, the third entry in Daniel Craig's James Bond reboot, and the picture released to mark the franchise's fiftieth anniversary. One must begin with a necessary clarification. Dame Judi Dench's M in the first three Craig films is not the same character who appeared opposite Pierce Brosnan. The Craig era is a reboot; the two Ms belong to separate continuities. That Dench was retained at all for the reboot remains something of a mystery. There was no narrative necessity for the same actress. I do not believe she should have been present in Craig's Bond at all. The later decision to kill off the character and install Ralph Fiennes as Mallory, though evidently intended to render Bond powerless once again, ironically serves as a clearing of the board and, in that sense, the correction of a mistake. She was Brosnan's M, and that is how it ought to have remained. The camera is thankfully less punishing to the eye than in Quantum of Solace. Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins favour longer takes and more legible geography; the Shanghai and Macau sequences possess a genuine visual elegance that the previous film largely denied itself. Even so, these are the only scenes that seem to possess any colour, for the remainder of the film is, regrettably, rather desaturated and visually bland. Is the film enjoyable to watch? For my part, yes. Javier Bardem's Raoul Silva provides the satisfying rivalry that Quantum of Solace lacked, and the central confrontation between the two men is among the more memorable of Craig’s tenure. Bardem's performance is controlled, witty, and genuinely unsettling. Yet my one real objection to Craig's Bond is that his run is, fundamentally, a project of demythologising the character. There is a period of decline after Bond is accidentally shot by Naomie Harris's nascent Moneypenny; he is at first presumed dead, fails his re-entry tests, and is suffering the effects of what I would call moderate drinking. He's a Lightweight. Bond is frankly diminished. He is no longer merely wounded by betrayal; he is, for a time, reduced to a spent force. The film devotes considerable screen time to insisting upon that reduction before restoring him. In essence, this is the Dark Knight Rises of Craig's tenure. Nolan's architectural influence is visible throughout: the damaged hero who is not what he once was, the theatrical and personally aggrieved villain who functions as a distorted reflection of the protagonist, the return to a childhood home for the climactic defence, and the quasi-origin material that excavates a past the earlier films had left largely unexamined. The return of the Aston Martin DB5 is straightforward fan service, calculated to reassure those attached to the earlier films that the familiar iconography had not been permanently discarded. After two pictures that had largely stripped the series of its traditional furniture, the producers reintroduced the Goldfinger car and the ejector-seat joke in a single gesture. Yet this reassurance is also undercut by Q, portrayed by Ben Whishaw, who supplies Bond a radio, a palm-print-coded pistol, and little else, while informing us that the old exploding-pen business has been decisively consigned to history. Skyfall is handsomely made and, on its own terms, gripping, though the action still resembles a Call of Duty video game. The film does not, however, reverse the trajectory established by its two predecessors. It merely continues the dismantling of the James Bond legend, whilst also featuring my second-favourite gadget-laden antique Bond car. My first, for the curious, is the Lotus Esprit S1 from The Spy Who Loved Me. The original cinematic power fantasy of James Bond is not restored by the Aston Martin DB5. The charm of Ian Fleming's literary spy is supplanted by a character whose power lies in Call of Duty shootouts; the damaged figure of the reboot who is denied his catharsis is given priority. #JamesBond #Skyfall #DanielCraig #JavierBardem

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On this day in 1973, the Kojak series premiered with the episode "Siege of Terror". Telly Savalas brought the tough, lollipop-loving Detective Kojak to life, creating one of TV's most iconic characters. Who loves ya, baby? #Kojak #TVHistory #TellySavalas

Now showing on the big screen. A series of films based on stage plays. And the joy of watching Harlow and Barrymore on an 11-metre-plus screen.