“The Harder They Fall” on Netflix is really, really good. Thoroughly entertaining with a plot that’ll keep you guessing, great cast and characters, sharp dialogue and a fantastic, wildly varying soundtrack.
If you’re wondering about it, just start it and give it to the opening titles (about 8 minutes). Just be ready to keep going for the rest of the movie because you’ll be hooked.
“No Time to Die” is excellent. It follows perfectly the good-bad-good-bad trend, and can hold its head very high not just in this series, but in the entire franchise.
They sent off Craig’s Bond with a great blend of a modern Bond, but in a movie that was old school Bond. A mad villain bent on world destruction, an island lair - with a submarine dock to boot - and a ticketing clock ending. Also, have tissues ready because, this time, Bond doesn’t beat the countdown.
This is going to tar every one of your future reviews. For me it raced to the bottom of the Bond film list. The only good part of the movie was the Bond girl in Cuba.
You thought it was worse than “Quantum”?
I thought it was worse than Moonraker.
ETA: The Bond girl in Cuba was worth the price of the movie though.
I agree with the second contention as emphatically as I disagree with the first.
It was a brief episode with her, so I am presuming that she was being positioned for future movies; i.e. the new Felix.
Also, after the freak out over Craig being bling and blue-eyed, there’s not enough popcorn in the world for me to be able to sit back and enjoy the meltdown if the new 007 is a black woman. 
I hope so, but I reckon if Bond can be back Felix can be back.
I went back and watched Spectre straight afterwards, which I didn’t like at first, and I enjoyed it much more after seeing the new one. It’s so closely linked that it’s almost like a planned two-parter.
To wit, in Spectre there’s a throw away line when Bond is trying to teach Madeleine about guns, when she explains how a man once came to kill her father but he didn’t know she was upstairs and he didn’t know that her father kept a gun stashed under the sink. They took that one line, and made it her origin story.
FTR, what I didn’t like about Spectre was the somewhat ham-fisted introduction of Blofeld - as Bond’s brother by adoption no less (why?) - and then retconning him as the perma big bad for the whole series.
SPECTRE is irredeemable to me. NTTD did a great job putting together a sequel to that pile of shit.
For the record, although the movie itself was a joke, I was quite enamored of both Drax’s assistant and Holly Goodhead.
It’s not been explored in the movies, but there has long been a theory that “James Bond” is a code name and not an individual person. It helps explain why he’s so famous but rarely recognized in person. It also explains his far-reaching reputation, because any time “Bond” fails (likely dying in the process), they just attach the moniker to a new dude and carry on. So he appears infallible and invincible.
This is the “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” of Spectre
Exactly. But watching it again having seen “Part 2”, I was ready for that nonsense so it didn’t spoil the whole thing.
I am Iron Man
So I finally got around to downloading the Star Wars despecialized edition. 'Tis a thing of beauty.
Now, it’s only 720p, and the color saturation is notably off in a few scenes but, from someone who was 12 years old when this movie came out, and saw it at least a dozen times in the cinema (as well as dozens more times on VHS), I absolutely loved seeing the unmolested version of the film.
Don’t get me wrong, while there are occasional picture quality issues, the vast bulk of the movie is as bright and clear as it was in 1977. Also, the sound (5.1 DTS) is just gorgeous, with the restored balance meaning that Lucas’ tinkering with it no longer drowns out John Williams’ sublime score. This was most notable in the CGI editions when Red Squadron rolled into its initial attack on the Death Star and Lucas had rendered Williams’ heroic fanfare virtually irrelevant; now it’s back in all it’s fist-pumping glory.
Fuck Lucas for daubing shitty CGI all over the Oscar-winning original and (allegedly) destroying the masters. Now for Empire and Jedi.
What site did you use?
Is there a streaming option?
I got if from here. It’s a bit of a ball ache because it was clearly set up before high-speed internet was de rigueur, so it’s broken down into 23 files of 1GB each. So, no, there’s not a streaming option.
Please note that the download site will pop up a window every 4 or 5 downloads asking for you to start a subscription, and will eventually put you in timeout unless you pay or wait 5 hours to reset your counter. I got 21 segments downloaded by clicking off the pay request and waited the 5 hours for the last two.
Once I had all 23 files, I simply had to select them all and extract them using “Unarchiver” (coz I’m using a Mac) and it built the full movie (.mkv) without any extra input on my part.
I then opened the file with Subler to clean out the extraneous language tracks, and to make sure that I was keeping the correct sound mixes. I also tagged it and fixed the chapter markers (because the ones available to download all relate to the specials so the timing is off). Then I saved it as an mp4 and it was good to go.
What reminded me to finally do this was seeing 4K clips of the despecialized films. I don’t know if they’re going to do the whole thing, but these look amazing.
Also, it’s a huge throbbing mass of double entendres.
