Just loosely 007-related but anywhere:
‘When she was asked to skid along a balcony floor on her shoulder while being shot at, in No Time to Die, “my life flashed before my eyes”
I’ve been fruitlessly pondering what quote to choose from this article. It’s such a farcically bizarre story you have to read the whole piece to truly appreciate its madness.
I particularly love the snapshot of the Aston Martin spa at the end. Reminds me of a convalescent clinic I spent some time at. Someone pitch Aston the rehab market please…(photo edsmitter/Aston Martin via Guardian)
Only acceptable with this…
I’ve actually been thinking about this as a title song back in the day; some of it has that certain arrangement, sounding like a nod to Bond without being too serious about it. Nice of her to confirm it. Wonder what didn’t work out there in the end.
New documentary
SHE HAD BRACES 
O-kay…
So sad we never saw Connery or Moore do this.
I want Daniel Craig to remake Zardoz
Daniel Craig is showcasing his range in a new Loewe campaign.
Worth it for this line alone.
Now the next time my wife complains I look a disheveled mess, I can tell her I’m just “showcasing my range.”
Here is an interesting article from The Nation. One gets three free articles, so no need for a subscription. This passage stood out for me:
Over the past 16 years, Feige’s tenure at Marvel Studios has generated $26 billion, making him the most revered Hollywood producer since Robert Evans presided over Paramount in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet while Evans successfully fostered a generation of directorial talent—the so-called New Hollywood of Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, and John Schlesinger—Feige’s innovation has been to wrest control of the creative process from the directors and writers, running movie production from the C-suite down.
Both Evans and Feige were known to exercise the power of final cut on their pictures, but while Coppola once reflected that Evans’s habit of deeply embedding himself within the quotidian churn of a film’s creation meant that, “ultimately, a mysterious kind of taste comes out; he backs away from bad ideas and accepts good ones,” there’s nothing mysterious about Feige’s taste. In an earlier interview with Joanna Robinson for Vanity Fair, Feige called himself “obsessed with deep mythologies.” Though he pays lip service to the idea that each individual film ought to stand on its own, Feige has always been most animated when talking in the lingua franca of the comic book nerd—continuity, or the ability to “bring that experience that hardcore comic readers have had for decades of Spider-Man swinging into the Fantastic Four headquarters, or for Hulk to suddenly come rampaging through the pages of an Iron Man comic…there is something just inherently great about that: seeing characters’ worlds collide with one another.”
In 2023, the novelty of the crossover began to wear off—and with it, the profitability of Marvel Studios.
Thing is, in a way the comic book world - that of the pages as well as that of the screens - is just a version of the soap opera and the telenovela: one continuous stream of action and interaction, endless love triangles, infinite buildup without ever arriving at a definite end. For a time it’s fascinating, immersive even. But after a while one just isn’t as much invested any more.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the MCU should have ended with, oh I don’t know, a film titled Endgame.
The telenovela comparison is spot on and perfect.
I fell under the marvel spell for a while, but now I wonder why - I can’t even bring myself to rewatch these films.
The number of them that have any rewatch value whatsoever can be counted on one hand.
And the number of them with any rewatch value that don’t involve Robert Downey Jr. equals about… zero.
The MCU had the good fortune, much like Jackman/Wolverine in the X-Men franchise, to start its run with the perfect actor in one of its most popular roles. That they even pegged RDJ onto Spider-Man - without real reason beyond being able to put RDJ/Iron Man on the poster - shows how aware they were of his drawing power for the entire franchise.