Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

We still have time to mess this up!

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Everybody saw this coming.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

You are here: Home / TV & Movies / Movies / Late Night At the Movies Open Thread

Late Night At the Movies Open Thread

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Esquire guy Stephen Marche with “A Eulogy for Daniel Craig’s 007, the Best Bond Ever“:

… Bond was born not out of luxury but out of privation. Ian Fleming wrote him into existence in the England of the early 1950s, when war rationing had not yet ended and the British Empire was drifting into the complacent irrelevance it currently enjoys… Accompanying the fantasy of power was a fantasy of permission—the license to kill—and an equally essential fantasy of consumption. Bond ate luxurious meals when his audiences could not. He smoked 60 custom-made cigarettes a day. He gambled. He traveled. He spent as much money as he could. The qualification for playing James Bond is to be the man of your generation who looks best in a Savile Row suit…

…[T]he series, against its will, reflects history. Each Bond is an argument concerning how men felt about the masculine ideals of their period. In the early ’60s, before and during the sexual revolution, Sean Connery exuded the supreme confidence of a man who has never questioned, nor been questioned about, his sense of his own manhood. Through the Roger Moore years, the ’70s and ’80s, Bond devolved into a relic of British gentility and louche nightclub sexuality until the movies veered dangerously close to being parodies of themselves, and sometimes crossed over—in Octopussy, 007 literally saves the world as a faded clown in a circus. Many years of confusion followed, during which Bond was little more than a branding opportunity, fulfilling, halfheartedly, a tired contract with fans: the woman in a bikini who utters “James” meltingly, the threat to the world, the capture, the improbable escape, “shaken, not stirred” as a joke somewhere in there. The portrait of male fantasy by way of James Bond was not flattering to men: a sometimes stupid, sometimes violent pompous joke addicted to cheap puns, executive toys, and vacuous women.

Then came Daniel Craig. He kept all the Bond clichés in place while utterly reinventing all of them; he played Bond as a real character rather than as a cipher for adventure. He refused to take the man as a joke but was willing to laugh at him nonetheless; he helped create a kinder, more thoughtful Bond, who listens when women speak, but also a more dangerous and more selfish Bond, who knows he prefers adultery to sex with available women. You can sense the desperation in this 007. Self-consciously traditional, he believes in the decrepit loyalties to Britain but at the same time feels betrayed by his country and its institutions. In short, Craig is the PTSD Bond. He is the Bond for an era in which a million and a half American men and women, and a significant number of British and Canadian and Australian men and women, have been fighting actual shadow wars against actual madmen with actual dreams of global domination, and have drifted home from their encounters in various states of brokenness…

Reader Interactions

226Comments

  2. 2.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    I still believe that Queen Elizabeth agreed to be in the opening film for the London Olympics because she got to hang around with Daniel Craig. She may be old and long-married, but she knows a quality chunk of man-meat when she sees one.

  5. 5.

    hells littlest angel

    Haven’t watched a Bond movie for a long time. It was the racism more than the misogyny that I couldn’t take. Bond was always popping in to some Third World country whose citizens were mere props, scattering out of the way in popeyed panic as assassins pursued Bond through open-air markets, destroying their merchandise. It got to be rather sickening, somehow even worse than the more overt racial imperialism of the 1960s (eg: “Fetch my shoes.” — Bond, shortly before shrugging off the death of his guide, who was burned alive in Dr. No). I don’t understand how the franchise survives all the baggage of bigotry it carries.

  6. 6.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
    But she doesn’t have a lot to say
    Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
    But she changes from day to day

    I want to tell her that I love her a lot
    But I gotta get a bellyful of wine
    Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
    Someday I’m going to make her mine, oh yeah
    Someday I’m going to make her mine

  7. 7.

    NotMax

    Saw both Dr. No and Goldfinger in original release. That was sufficient and since then never had the slighttest iota of interest in seeing another Bond film.

  16. 16.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    Looks like anything with more than one link or an internet link goes to moderation. FYWP.

  17. 17.

    David Koch

    Anyone see Ben Carson’s meltdown tonight during his press conference?

    I just got around to watching it and he freaks out and starts demanding why hasn’t the liburel media investigated Obama’s college transcripts. He repeated it multiple times, flailing his arms around in anger.

    Then he alludes to a conspiracy theory that Obama’s real father isn’t Barack Obama Sr. but someone else.

    His total loony display was mind blowing.

  20. 20.

    Aleta

    @David Koch:
    I think he might be rocking to try to calm himself, at that point where he is so upset. And needing to move his hands, though still in control of them. Just a guess, could be wrong. He reminds me of a close friend of mine.

  22. 22.

    David Koch

    @BillinGlendaleCA: that’s the wacky thing. all college transcripts are private. they’re not public records, regardless of whether the school is private or public. but they tell the rubes (presumably people who never went to college) that all transcripts are available

  24. 24.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @David Koch: The student/alum can authorize release of official transcripts, I’ve done it for both grad school as well as perspective employers.

  26. 26.

    mclaren

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Love love Goldfinger, Goldeneye, and Skyfall.

    One of these things is not like the others.

    Skyfall easily qualifies as the shittiest Bond film ever made, far below even the degraded level of Moonraker, and a self-parodic pathetic downgrade beneath even The Spy Who Loved Me and Live and Let Die.

    So the good news, presumably, is that since it’s impossible to make a worse Bond film than Skyfall, this latest one has got to be better.

    Alas, it seems to be written by the same team (Neal Purvis and Robert Wade) that wrote or heavily rewrote all the Daniel Craig Bond films — and after 2006’s Casino Royale, every Bond film has gotten drastically and progressively worse. Purvis and Wade started well and then fell into a grotesque series of cliches. Every Bond film now follows the same tired formula, the scripts are so brain-damagingly predictable that they follow the wretched Save the Cat! screenwriting book’s cliches. Save the Cat! truly is the book that ruined Hollywood, and :Purvis and Wade’s reliance on its stale rote formulas have surely ruined the Bond series.

    See “The 2005 screenwriting book that’s taken over Hollywood—and made every movie feel the same.”

    If you’ve gone to the movies recently, you may have felt a strangely familiar feeling: You’ve seen this movie before. Not this exact movie, but some of these exact story beats: the hero dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship); the villain who gets caught on purpose (The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Skyfall, Star Trek Into Darkness); the moment of hopelessness and disarray a half-hour before the movie ends (Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6).

    It’s not déjà vu. Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster.

    The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking since the late 1970s.

    When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.

    Which explains why Skyfall is such total shit: the hero dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes (check!), the villain who gets caught on purpose (check!), the despair nadir of chaos half an hour before the film ends (check!). The formula has now become so rigid that there’s nothing left for the Bond films but to turn out the lights and go home and let the blind mindless mechanism run on by itself in an empty room.

    If Brocolli had fired Purvis and Wade, maybe there would’ve been a chance for the Bond series. But since they churned out the latest Bond film, Spectre, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out it’s probably going to be shit too.

  27. 27.

    mclaren

    Also, the genius web designers who fucked up this website design by eliminating comment numbers and introducing that brilliant new feature that any post with an internet link goes straight to moderation, have, in their infinite wisdom, also decided to eliminate italics.

    Cole should fire Tommy’s ass and demand his money back.

    What next? Tommy already eliminated boldface and boldface italics. Will the genius Tommy decide to get rid of punctuation marks? Hey, here’s an idea — how about just eliminating all whitespace between characters? THAT will save LOTS of server space!

    Ignorant incompetent web design halfwits.

  29. 29.

    David Koch

    @BillinGlendaleCA: exactly. you need permission. which is why I say they’re private, in the sense that the underlying person controls who gains access as opposed to public records.

  30. 30.

    bago

    @mclaren: You confuse style with substance sir. This site now loads in a far more performant manner and with much more reliability than it has in the past 2 years. The decision to include comment numbers is a simple stylistic choice, one that pales in comparison of the utility of having a page that can load and parse on the browsers legion.

    Take your petty grievances and treat them as you would the beam in your eye, sir.

  33. 33.

    Donut

    @mclaren:

    In all seriousness, you are totally getting exactly what you pay for when you visit this website. Think about that for a second, maybe. Then you go calm the fuck down.

  35. 35.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @mclaren: You, again, have not been paying attention to what’s been said. This is a temporary comment module. So, listen for a change before you open your pie hole.

  36. 36.

    Baud

    Someone at Vox was having fun.

    Early Friday afternoon, it looked like Ben Carson’s presidential campaign had just imploded. After a CNN report cast doubt on Carson’s claims to have attempted to murder a friend as a classmate, Politico came out with a clear-cut case of Carson fictionalizing his biography: he claimed in his autobiography to have been offered a spot at West Point, when the school had no record of him ever having applied. And when Politico asked Carson’s campaign, they acknowledged that he had never actually been admitted.

  40. 40.

    Peale

    Bond managed to set back the cause of “men with cats” decades. I wonder if they’ll address the cultural shift in the new movie…men who stroke Persian cats are not dismissed as suspiciously evil as they once were. In fact, men who prefer cats to dogs are quite common these days and are generally welcome in all but the most discriminating circles.

  44. 44.

    Brachiator

    @mclaren: RE: If Brocolli had fired Purvis and Wade, maybe there would’ve been a chance for the Bond series. But since they churned out the latest Bond film, Spectre, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out it’s probably going to be shit too.

    I can understand your reviewing a movie that you have seen, and giving it a negative review. But this pre-crime thing you do here is a bit of a waste of time, despite the interesting detour into the merits of Save the Cat!

    BTW, is this where Jeb! got his exclamation point?

  45. 45.

    mclaren

    @Donut:

    In all seriousness, you are totally getting exactly what you pay for when you visit this website.

    Great thinking, buckaroo — “the website is free, so fuck off if you don’t like it.”

    Let’s turn that around. My comments are free…so fuck off it you don’t like ’em.

    See? It works both ways!

    I swear, sometimes I think I’m the black monolith at the start of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and the rest of you clowns are baboons screeching and howling in hydrocephalic incomprehension.

  51. 51.

    Major Major Major Major

    @mclaren: I couldn’t even get through Quantum, but you don’t have to pretend I’m not aware of the Save The Cat! shit.

    It’s always been there, just recently codified.

    ETA: I like stupid shout-outs to fans, I don’t go to a Bond movie expecting high art. Same reason I like Doctor Who. Semi-official drinking game (may your liver be spared): When the Doctor says run!, drink

  53. 53.

    mclaren

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I suggest you vote with your feet.

    You first, shit-for-brains.

    @Brachiator:

    I can understand your reviewing a movie that you have seen, and giving it a negative review. But this pre-crime thing you do here is a bit of a waste of time, despite the interesting detour into the merits of Save the Cat!

    Reading comprehension fail there, buckaroo. You apparently didn’t notice the early suggestion that “So the good news, presumably, is that since it’s impossible to make a worse Bond film than Skyfall, this latest one has got to be better.”

    But I’m going by the early reviews of Spectre. They’re universally negative. “SPECTRE is the worst 007 movie in 30 years” — Forbes. “SPECTRE is the worst of Daniel Craig’s Bond films” — slashfilm “In Spectre…no surprise,” — New York Times. “Spectre review — the most disappointing james Bond film of the Daniel Craig era” — Polygon.

    The list goes on.

    At a certain point, you have to face the fact that you don’t need to eat a whole egg to know whether it’s rotten. The sulphur fumes are reeking on this one.

    On the other hand, Bridge of Spies (written by the Coen Brothers) was excellent, The Martian was outstanding, All Of Me was great, and Crimson Peak looks like it’s going to be first-rate. So there’s that consolation, at least. Maybe the Bond franchise has slid into the toilet and the suction is drawing it down, but there are plenty of other excellent films out there.

  54. 54.

    David Koch

    @Baud: I get a good laugh at Politico being called “liburel media” and how ¿Jeb? knows he’s toast but he’s going to take down as many people with him by planting damaging oppo material.

    I love the smell of fratricide in the morning. That smell, that gasoline smell… smells like a circular firing squad.

  55. 55.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @raven: Home game for your guys? My guys are up at Corvallis, game’s on the Pac-12 “network” which I don’t get. I may go for a hike.

  57. 57.

    mclaren

    As for Ben Carson, why are any of you people paying attention to this weasel? He took a week off for a book tour while he’s supposedly running for president. His burn rate in his direct-mail fundraising is 69 cents on every dollar he makes. Compare with Bernie Sanders’ burn rate — 4 cents on every dollar.
    This behavior makes no sense if Carson is really running for president. But it makes perfect sense if Carson is building up a direct mail list of gullible dupes to whom he can hawk his Mannatech snake oil, and a loyally devoted cult of readers to whom he can sell his quack Egyptian-pyramids-were-really-granaries crap repackaged in book form.
    Carson is another Palin. He’s just grifting. The guy has no actual interest in running for the presidency, and he’s already starting to implode.
    Didn’t I tell you people that the debt ceiling was a non-issue? And how did that work out?
    Carson is another Caribou Barbie, only in this case he’s peddling W. Cleon Skousen’s wacky rewriting of the constitution-as-bible, complete with young earth creationism and evolution denial. Ignore him. He’s in it for the direct-mail-list and book sales grift, nothing more.

  58. 58.

    David Koch

    Tension between Carson and the media came to a boil Friday night in Florida, where at a combative news conference the candidate asked why President Obama had not been subjected to such scrutiny.

    yes, there was never a firestorm over rev wright. nobody ever questioned Obama’s religion or birth place. nobody ever used ugly racial attacks. nobody ever called him a socialist and linked him to dead community organizers. nobody ever questioned his loyalty said he was paling around with terrorists. It was all a cake walk.

  62. 62.

    Baud

    @David Koch:

    On one hand, I’m hoping for a brokered convention. On the other, I hate to see anything that would make their side more interesting to the media.

  63. 63.

    mclaren

    @David Koch:

    Tension between Carson and the media…

    I think that might better be stated as “Tension between Carson and observable reality came to a boil Friday night…”

  64. 64.

    mclaren

    @Baud:

    On one hand, I’m hoping for a brokered convention. On the other, I hate to see anything that would make their side more interesting to the media.

    Nary a chance, buckaroo. The last brokered convention was the Adlai Stevenson nomination in 1956. Since then, both parties have changed the rules to eliminate any possibility of brokered conventions.

    So the Repubs are stuck with what they’ve got: a claque of incompetent ignorami as crazy as they are evil. This presidential election is going to be a blowout win for the Democrats. And as an added bonus, the Bush crime family seems to be self-destructing too, like convicts on a life boat cannibalizing each other after they run out of food.

  65. 65.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @mclaren: I realize you have this insatiable need to prove your superior mental acuity over all others but let me assure you, your infantile tantrums aren’t the way to do it.

  66. 66.

    Baud

    @mclaren:

    How can you completely eliminate brokered conventions? What if different people win different states and no one has a majority of delegates?

  67. 67.

    gene108

    @mclaren:

    I swear, sometimes I think I’m the black monolith at the start of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and the rest of you clowns are baboons screeching and howling in hydrocephalic incomprehension.

    Considering how boring 2001: A Space Odyssey is and how entertaining, even if predictable, the “Save the Cat!’ films are, I’ll take the formulaic entertainment over boredom any day.

  68. 68.

    David Koch

    Carson believes the idea of evolution was encouraged by the devil and rejects the big bang theory,

    I wonder if physicians everywhere are cringing

  69. 69.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @mclaren: The 1976 GOP convention was pretty close to a brokered convention. Ford didn’t have the nomination sewn up prior to the start of the convention.

  70. 70.

    mclaren

    @David Koch:

    You also have to wonder how Carson can countenance the use of vaccines if he doesn’t believe in evolution.

    More and more, it seems as thought that man should never have been graduated from medical school, let alone allowed near a scalpel.

  74. 74.

    Botsplainer

    @Baud:

    What scandals do you plan on facilitating or covering up while in office, and have you decided yet on a fee cap for post Presidency speeches?

  75. 75.

    raven

    @BillinGlendaleCA: yea, the reeling dawgs play the reeling Kentucky Wildcats! We’re going to the beach for 10 days (even though we can’t afford it) so this will be my last game!

  76. 76.

    mclaren

    @Baud:

    How can you completely eliminate brokered conventions? What if different people win different states and no one has a majority of delegates?

    By using winner-take-all state primaries and convention rules changes. Long before the actual convention, one candidate is now guaranteed to have a majority of delegates. The modern convention rules no longer allow backroom bosses to negotiate for delegate blocks, sa they once did.

    See the book Fundamentally Flawed: Understanding and Reforming Presidential Primaries, John Haskell, 1996.

    From page 3:

    For all intents and purposes, the two major U.S. political parties have eliminated any institutionalized form of peer review — that is, review by leaders within the party — in the selection of their presidential candidates. (..) The two major parties have gradually drifted away from representative means to legitimize their nomination procedures and now rely almost exclusively on plebiscatary means.

    [Haskell, John, op. cit.]

    A reminder: up to WW II, all American cities were run by bosses. After the GIs came home from the war, they rose up and threw out all the bosses between 1945 and 1952 or so. It’s one of the most remarkable eras of American politics. With the bosses gone, the ability for smoke-filled backroom deals to select a president vanished. (The bosses were the “rerpresentative means” Haskell mentions, since the bosses as a practical matter controlled the delegates regardless of how the actual voting went.) As the bosses running the cities went away, the nomination process changed radically, as Haskell remarked.

    The plain fact is that even if someone wanted a brokered convention today, neither of the two major political parties has any mechanism in place any longer by which a convention might be brokered. After Super Tuesday, it comes down to brute numbers, and with the amplifying power of TV and the internet, slight first-mover advantages quickly turn into overhwhelming delegate counts nowadays.

  77. 77.

    mclaren

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    The 1976 GOP convention was pretty close to a brokered convention.

    As Haskell points out, assertions that “this time we’ll have a brokered convention!” are perennial. We hear that crap in just about every election cycle. We heard it in 1976, we heard it in 1992. It never happens.

  78. 78.

    mclaren

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I concur. I too know multisyllabic [sic] which would make one cringe in fear, yet I try to write at a 7th-grade level or so, at least when I’m doing fiction.

    Really loving this line of criticism. “Y’all use too many a them thar big words. You’s writing sounds like a attack on us average folk!”

    Yeah, so we’re back to the accusations that a person is a “pointy-headed intelleck-shew-all” ( circa the Joe McCarthy era) if they express themselves articulately.

    Wow. You guys are really giving us a show-and-tell demo of the epigram that

    There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” — Isaac Asimov

  79. 79.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @mclaren: You don’t remember the 1976 GOP convention, do you? I do.

    ETA: Neither Ford or Reagan had the required committed delegates to secure the nomination going into the convention.

  80. 80.

    Satby

    McLaren quote: “After the GIs came home from the war, they rose up and threw out all the bosses between 1945 and 1952 or so. It’s one of the most remarkable eras of American politics. With the bosses gone, the ability for smoke-filled backroom deals to select a president vanished”

    So you’ve never been to my hometown I take it.

  81. 81.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Baud: Yup, I can see a convention going into multiple ballots. It’s true that winner-take-all primaries make it less likely but it could happen, especially with such a large number of candidates.

  83. 83.

    mclaren

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    I remember the 1976 convention with pellucid clarity.

    Did party bosses negotiate to broker the convention? They did not. They no longer had that power.

    The chances of the 2012 race being settled at the convention are magnified by the fact that four candidates are dividing the delegates. In 1976 there were only two, but enough delegates were uncommitted, or controlled by a state party boss like Mississippi’s Clarke Reed, to leave Reagan and Ford short of a majority when they reached Kansas City, though Ford was close.

    As president, Ford had crucial favors to give away, from meals at the White House to seats on the deck of a carrier, the Forrestal, anchored in New York harbor, where he reviewed tall ships on July 4, 1976, the nation’s bicentennial. At the convention his forces repeatedly surrendered to Reagan’s team on platform issues, unwilling to risk floor votes that would confirm Spencer’s view, as he put it recently, that “Even then, Reagan owned the heart of the Republican Party.” In the end, Ford eked out a victory.

    Source: “The Campaign of ’76,” The New York Times, 21 March 2012.

    Notice, by the way, that the 2012 NYT article predicted a brokered convention in 2012. Never happened.

  84. 84.

    Brachiator

    @mclaren: RE: But I’m going by the early reviews of Spectre.

    Of course, if you went by the first UK reviews, you would have to brand Spectre a hit.

    “Spectre review: James Bond is back, stylish, camp and sexily pro-Snowden,” Guardian, 5 star review.

    “An exhilarating James Bond spectacle that really didn’t need to add depth,” The Independent, 4 star review

    “SPECTRE review: ‘a swaggering show of confidence’ ” The Telegraph, 5 star review

    In short, you are making yourself look like a fool. But you are, of course, a master at this.

    RE: On the other hand, Bridge of Spies (written by the Coen Brothers) was excellent, The Martian was outstanding, All Of Me was great, and Crimson Peak looks like it’s going to be first-rate.

    Is this your own opinion, or are you simply yammering some arbitrary critical consensus, based on what you’ve heard? Oh, and by the way, “Crimson Peak” has already bombed at the box office, so catch it fast if you think that it must be a good film.

    ETA: thanks for helping cure by bout of insomnia.

  85. 85.

    tybee

    it is seriously foggy on de island, mon.

    gonna slither out anyway to the redfish place…see if the bulls wanna play tug o’ war for a bit.

  86. 86.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @mclaren: Not all delegates are locked in 2016. As I said, it’s not likely that one candidate would not have the majority needed to be elected on the first ballot, it could happen and is more likely to happen with a large number of candidates not leading to an early front runner and the proportional split in the pre-March 15 primaries.

  87. 87.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @mclaren: I think I see the problem. You actually think you matter, that the things you write are intelligent, insightful, and full of wisdom that us lesser beings are just too ignorant and obstinate to see, and if only we would recognize your superior genius and give you your rightful adulation and follow your lead in all things…

    The act gets old.

  89. 89.

    mclaren

    @Brachiator:

    In short, you are making yourself look like a fool. But you are, of course, a master at this.

    And to support this extravagant claim, you cite a grand total of three British newspaper reviews.

    Now let’s take a look at more American review of Spectre:

    ‘Spectre’ Movie Review: Daniel Craig Is Perfect, But the Film Is Not. — ABC News movie review.

    What’s the problem? Maybe it’s the script. It’s credited to a murderer’s row of gun-for-hire writers, but it can’t seem to come up with anything but undistinguished chases and fights and quips pasted together by exposition that’s half baked even by Bond standards. — Roger Ebert website, review by Matt Zoller Seitz (two and a half stars)

    ‘Spectre’ Review: 007 Goes Through the Motions in a Perfunctory Adventure — The Wrap website.

    The first act is great, full of dark portent and bravura film-making flourishes. However, the final hour disappoints, with too many off-the-peg plot twists and too many characters conforming to type. While its commercial prospects seem bulletproof, Spectre ultimately feels like a lesser film than Skyfall, falling back on cliche and convention. — The Hollywood Reporter

    So far I’ve cited 7 damning or poor reviews to your 3 good reviews. Let’s take a look at the overall balance of reviews: Metacritic site gives Spectre an average score from all critics of 60.

    A really good movie typically clocks in at an average of above 80 or 85.

    So much for your cherry-picking of movie reviews, and so much for your foolishly failed and futile claim that I’m “making a fool” of myself by pointing out that the overwhelming majority of the reviews for this film are bad.

    While we’re at it, let’s take a look a the metacritic scores for The Martian, Bridge of Spies, and Inside Out:

    80% for The Martian, 81% for Bridge of Spies, 94% for Inside Out. The general consensus among both critics and audiences is that these are excellent films.

    Of course, you can continue to deny and ignore the general consensus of opinion. Perhaps you’re one of those folks who stubbornly continues to believe that everyone else is wrong, that the moon landings were faked, that 8-track tape is going to make a big comeback any day now, and that Ishtar was one of the greatest movies ever made.

    Good luck with that.

  90. 90.

    PurpleGirl

    Haven’t seen a whole Bond movie; just bits and pieces on TV. I wasn’t interested in seeing the he-man male fantasy. However, note that in the 7th grade (or there abouts) I read all the Ian Fleming books. The whole series and in sequence. That was enough Bond for me.

  93. 93.

    PurpleGirl

    @Peale: Isn’t there an internet group for men with cats. I don’t remember its name, I saw a mention of it somewhere.

  96. 96.

    mclaren

    @PurpleGirl:

    Ugh. Bond is atrociously misogynistic and manipulative toward women in the films, but he’s even worse in the books. In the books, he’s a sociopath.

    In the novel Casino Royale, Vesper Lynd falls in love with Bond and visits him while he’s in the hospital and he falls in love with her, and contemplates leaving the secret service to be with her. The next morning she commits suicide. Her suicide note reveals that the Russian spy agency SMERSH kidnapped and tortured her Polish lover and forced him to reveal secrets that they then used to blackmail her into working as a double agent against Bond. When she saw a SMERSH agent the previous day, she realized she would never be free of them and committed suicide to avoid entangling Bond.

    Bond’s response in the novel? “The bitch is dead,” he tells his superiors in the British secret service.

    Wow. Just…wow.

  98. 98.

    lethargytartare

    @mclaren: “The Martian was outstanding”

    The Martian was outstanding.

    It also follows Blake Snyder’s beat sheet to a T.

    which sort of blows up your entire argument.

  99. 99.

    debbie

    @David Koch:

    Yesterday, Glenn Beck and his minions were defending Carson. Regarding Carson’s theory on the pyramids, they ran the audio clip where Carson stated it was his personal opinion. That, Beck said, was okay because a candidate’s personal opinions don’t count. Of course, Obama’s personal opinion of Jeremiah Wright does make a huge difference in BeckWorld.

  101. 101.

    debbie

    @Baud:

    “Hard to know. I simply have no idea how Republicans think.”

    And yet you expect to win? What happened to “Know thy enemy”?

  102. 102.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @raven: You can sandwich 2 1x4s with a 1×3 between them (or better yet a piece of 1/4″ x 1 1/4″ lattice) and screw and glue them all together. A little thicker but no machining.

  103. 103.

    Gin & Tonic

    @OzarkHillbilly: Although, you have to admit, “you clowns are baboons screeching and howling in hydrocephalic incomprehension” is a pretty inspired piece of invective.

  104. 104.

    Splitting Image

    Daniel Craig is a very good Bond, but I have a lot of trouble processing the idea that British intelligence is a major player in the world in the 21st century. It worked in the ’60s because Britain still had skilled people who came up while Britannia was still a global power, and the U.S. could plausibly be described as a Johnny-come-lately with less skilled people but more money to spend. I don’t see how it works today though.

  108. 108.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: Maybe there will be a brokered convention, and then faithless electors cause an Electoral College tie throwing it to the House of Representatives, who pick a third-party slate, but the President-Elect they pick dies before Inauguration Day, and the person who actually gets in promises to serve a partial term and resign in favor of their VP so they can be the incumbent in the next campaign. And all the political reporters in the world die of a 48-hour orgasm.

  110. 110.

    mclaren

    @debbie:

    Yesterday, Glenn Beck and his minions were defending Carson.

    There’s a reason for that. Glenn Beck has cited the wacko far-right conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen as the major influence on his life. And Ben Carson happens to be another massive W. Cleon Skousen fan.

    Both of these guys have fallen the fringe lunatic Skousen’s spell. They’re like scientologists defending one another. Essentially, they’re both believers in an elaborate set of cult crackpot beliefs. Read Skousen’s “The Five Thousand Year Leap” if you want the full details on his crazy theories. I couldn’t make it more than about ten pages in. It’s one of those “The Founders of America were secret Biblical prophets carrying out the preordained plan of God” things. Every bit as historically accurate as Carson’s pharaonic grain elevator pyramids.

  112. 112.

    Amir Khalid

    @Splitting Image:
    It’s a fantasy universe. In it, Britain can still be a superpower. In it, spies can wear fancy suits, flash their cash and bling, drive custom sports cars by Aston Martin, drink like a fish, fuck every woman in sight, announce themselves everywhere they go, and still not be conspicuous.

  113. 113.

    mclaren

    @lethargytartare:

    The Martian was outstanding.

    It also follows Blake Snyder’s beat sheet to a T.

    which sort of blows up your entire argument.

    Not so much.

    Who’s the villain in The Martian?

    Oops.

    Which NASA honcho chews out Matt Damon in the first 15 minutes, after he’s stranded on Mars?

    Oops.

    Where’s the villain who deliberately gets caught by the good guys as part of his master plan?

    Oops.

  114. 114.

    WereBear

    @Splitting Image: Sense has nothing to do with it. Bond films are fantasy from beginning to end. Which is why they work. Or not.

    Those interested: My first Chromebook has lost its trackpad at the age of three years, seven months. Not bad considering the price and the heavy usage. Though its most recent users have been the cats watching bird and squirrel movies.

  115. 115.

    Poopyman

    @raven: Yeah, the dado on the bottom piece bothers me because it’s a trap for water. I think OH’s is superior in that regard.

  117. 117.

    Germy Shoemangler

    @PurpleGirl: Isn’t there an internet group for men with cats. I don’t remember its name, I saw a mention of it somewhere.

    If there is, I’d like to join just to complain about how I can’t get a full night’s sleep. Damn cat sleeps all day, then decides to yell at me 1:30 a.m. (We always make sure her litter box is clean and her food dish is full before we go to sleep, so it isn’t that.)

    https://vimeo.com/144773963

    The guy in the above video apparently likes getting high with his cat.

  118. 118.

    Poopyman

    @raven: Also too, what are you using for the wire infill? I’ve been plagued in the past by collapsing tomato trellises (trellae?) and I’ve wondered about using a heavier gauge wire fence material.

  119. 119.

    Germy Shoemangler

    @Amir Khalid: It’s a fantasy universe. In it, Britain can still be a superpower. In it, spies can wear fancy suits, flash their cash and bling, drive custom sports cars by Aston Martin, drink like a fish, fuck every woman in sight, announce themselves everywhere they go, and still not be conspicuous.

    And after sixty years, Bond is still remarkably STD-free. And his liver is fine.

  120. 120.

    Tommy

    @WereBear: Three years for the price I assumed you paid is a pretty darn good deal isn’t it. You might call me a “power” user. My desktop CPU alone cost me $3,000. But when my almost “gaming” quality Sony laptop was “getting long in the tooth” I got a Samsung Chromebook (I’ve become a huge fan of Samsung BTW). I knew it was more of a “surfboard” then a computer, but I flat out love the thing.

    Plus since I have moved 110% to Chrome as my browser, it turned out to do more than I thought since many of the day-to-day apps I use have Chrome extensions (Evernote, Todoist, Flipboard, Trello, Google Play Music, Google Keep, Pocket, you name it). Often people ask me for computer advice and I almost always push them to a Chromebook, since 95% of what they do is surf the web and email.

    These are literally the perfect computer for this. And with mine, I got 100 GB of cloud space on Google for FREE!

  121. 121.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Poopyman: Yep, always an issue. For the bottom I always use short pieces of lattice so the water can drain out.

    @raven: Also, if you glue be sure to use an exterior grade glue. Obvious, I know, but…

  124. 124.

    Germy Shoemangler

    @Tommy: disk drive? Or does that come as an external option? I’m tempted (when this macbook finally dies) to make the switch.

  125. 125.

    Tommy

    @Germy Shoemangler: You get almost no disk space. I have 16 GB. They really expected you to use the “cloud.” Another nice thing is they use solid state disk drives so the thing boots in under 10 seconds. Never gets even remotely warm sitting on your lap. And 7-9 hour battery life is actually 7-9 hours of battery life using the darn thing.

  128. 128.

    Gin & Tonic

    @PurpleGirl: “High regard” may be overstating the case, but I find mclaren entertaining, in a comfortably familiar way, even if ofttimes unmoored from reality. Kind of like a James Bond film.

  129. 129.

    ThresherK

    For more on the subject, I recommend “The Man Who Saved Britain” a book about Bond and his country and culture, by Simon Winder, published in ’06.

  130. 130.

    Chris

    @hells littlest angel:
    Haven’t watched a Bond movie for a long time. It was the racism more than the misogyny that I couldn’t take. Bond was always popping in to some Third World country whose citizens were mere props, scattering out of the way in popeyed panic as assassins pursued Bond through open-air markets, destroying their merchandise. It got to be rather sickening, somehow even worse than the more overt racial imperialism of the 1960s (eg: “Fetch my shoes.” — Bond, shortly before shrugging off the death of his guide, who was burned alive in Dr. No). I don’t understand how the franchise survives all the baggage of bigotry it carries.

    And this is why I don’t really understand all the “give us a black James Bond!” people.

    I mean, yes, they’re right that there’s no real reason why Bond can’t be black. And yes, Idris Elba would probably be a perfectly good James Bond. And yes, I definitely would enjoy watching Rush Limbaugh and his entire audience lose their shit (over a character who’s not even American, but by God, a nonwhite James Bond is a threat to white men everywhere!)

    But black or white, he’ll still be a British imperialist’s wish fulfillment fantasy crossed with a male wish fulfillment fantasy. A black James Bond wouldn’t be any great progressive milestone by any stretch of the imagination. He’d still be James Bond.

  131. 131.

    mclaren

    @Cervantes:

    Why are you debating the merits of Bond movies?

    Because, like slasher flicks and superhero films and Rambo-type American military superhero films and torture porn, Bond films offer a convenient window into the diseased soul of America.

    Example: in their early outings, the Bond films featured Bond as a somewhat gallant defender of the innocent. In Goldfinger, Bond stops dead and lets the villains capture him when Oddjob murders Tilly Masterson.

    Fast forward 40 years, and Bond’s response to the death of the woman he loves is “The b*tch is dead.”

    That same arc of self-degradation and dehumanization and misogyny traced by the Bond films (as they grow progressively coarser and more brutal and more woman-hating) has been traced by America as a whole. Polls show that 60% of American now approve of torture. Republicans holding hearings designed to shut down Planned Parenthood services for women offer the real-world counterpart of Bond punching women or quipping about their murder in the films. And you can tell where America is headed by watching the films. They offer a preview of the new depths to which the United Snakes of Amnesia will sink.

  132. 132.

    Poopyman

    @NotMax: Not on a half-inch wide groove (“dado” is technically a cross-grain groove). He woulda used a plow plane or one of them new-fangled Stanley 45s.

  134. 134.

    Barry

    @Aleta:
    “I think he might be rocking to try to calm himself, at that point where he is so upset. And needing to move his hands, though still in control of them. Just a guess, could be wrong. He reminds me of a close friend of mine.”

    This is the second lie about his background he’s been caught in. The first was denying that he ‘had a relationship’ with the quack cancer cure company for which he was paid make video endorsements.

    That’s on top of a barrage of other lies – about President Obama, history and just about everything else.

    It’s clear that he’s a pathological liar, and if I were an editor, I’d assign a reporter to go through his background with a magnifying glass.

    I wonder if he senses that if the media narrative changes, not only will he not get away with lies, but that the massive number of lies on public record will be used against him.

  135. 135.

    Tommy

    Really kind of depressed that the movie reviews of the new Bond movie I have skimmed seem to say it kind of really sucks. I was never a huge fan of the all the movies, but some of them are pretty darn good. I just really like, and I know for many this might be the worse thing I can say, but I really like Daniel Craig as Bond. With many action movies I have this problem I don’t know if other people have, which the actor playing the “badass” isn’t believable to me as a badass. Daniel Craig is believable to me as Bond and a dude that could kick some ass if needed.

  136. 136.

    Poopyman

    @OzarkHillbilly: Thanks! When I finally found my “local” Tractor Supply a couple of years ago they didn’t carry them, and I wasn’t going to pay to have them shipped. Since then a couple moreTSs have popped up closer to home. Guess I’ll give them a look-see.

  137. 137.

    Amir Khalid

    @Germy Shoemangler:
    I remember than in one of the Pierce Brosnan movies, Bond is examined by an MI-6 doctor who finds that his liver is in poor shape after all them vodka martinis.

  139. 139.

    Chris

    @mclaren:

    Huh. I thought I was the only one who found Skyfall wildly overrated. Not necessarily the worst of the series, but nowhere near as good as both critics and fans seemed to think.

    That title, Save The Cat! … Lethal Weapon reference?

  140. 140.

    Poopyman

    @Tommy:

    I don’t know if other people have, which the actor playing the “badass” isn’t believable to me as a badass.

    .

    Roger Moore. And I don’t think it’s a problem at all.

  141. 141.

    Another Holocene Human

    @hells littlest angel: At least Skyfall came home to trash parts of London. I enjoyed that bit.

    I mean, of course you’re right; everything about Bond is pretty gross, starting with the books, yet it enjoys massive worldwide popularity so they will continue to make these movies.

  142. 142.

    Poopyman

    @OzarkHillbilly: It came through just fine, but FYWP kicked my thankyou comment back at me twice before letting the third (identical) comment though.

    I think bad juju is happening behind the curtain.

  144. 144.

    Another Holocene Human

    @David Koch: “I know if you showed the transcripts the record would show that I got better grades than that pothead slacker. Why do women throw themselves at that con while I get shunned? There’s something suspicious about that guy, I can see it–you’re too stupid to, obviously. I bet your grades weren’t too great either, were they?”

  145. 145.

    Zinsky

    Daniel Craig is a shitty James Bond, IMHO. Give me a Sean Connery Bond any day – even a Roger Moore. But Connery was still the King of Cool!

  146. 146.

    Germy Shoemangler

    @Amir Khalid: Never saw that one. A nice dose of realism.

    @Chris: And yes, Idris Elba would probably be a perfectly good James Bond. And yes, I definitely would enjoy watching Rush Limbaugh and his entire audience lose their shit (over a character who’s not even American, but by God, a nonwhite James Bond is a threat to white men everywhere!)

    Want to really make them lose their shit? Cast Idris Elba, and make James Bond the agent of an African country instead of the UK. And stage his chase and fight scenes in the middle of northern European open-air markets, with blonde, blue-eyed purveyors of taffy and swiss chocolate knocked over and their merchandise destroyed.

    He could battle shady operatives who wish to set up environmentally-catastrophic diamond mines. He could fight shadowy government officials who wish to bribe African countries into allowing water to be poisoned for goldminers.

  148. 148.

    Gin & Tonic

    Does anyone have recommendations for a paint I can use on my basement floor? It’s an “unfinished” basement, concrete floor, which was at one point painted with something or other, as there are remnants of that, but it’s mostly worn off. Trying to keep some of the damp from coming up. Ventilation isn’t so hot, so I don’t need anything with a lot of VOC’s; I can deal with two-part systems if they’re worth it.

  149. 149.

    Tommy

    @Another Holocene Human: It is kind of strange that Bond has sex with anything that moves, drinks, gambles, and doesn’t mind killing people (seems to take pleasure in it BTW) and he is such a popular franchise. I can see that working in the 60s but a little stranger now. I mean I know this isn’t close to apple to apple comparison, but in the last Superman movie (I have not seen it) fans of the comic kind of freaked out in the last, final battle Superman pretty much destroyed the entire downtown.

    Fans said tens of thousands would have had to die, and that wasn’t what Superman would have done. Or you look at a show like Person of Interest, the “hero” is always trying not to kill people, shooting them in the legs and not the head. It just seems more and more killing people has become not that cool even in many movies. Not so much with Bond.

  150. 150.

    mclaren

    @Splitting Image:

    Daniel Craig is a very good Bond, but I have a lot of trouble processing the idea that British intelligence is a major player in the world in the 21st century.

    Have to disagree on both points. Daniel Craig comes across as more of a street thug than a secret agent. He strikes me as a miscast soccer hooligan.

    The notion that a small nation can have a world-class intelligence agency, though, seems credible. Look at Israel’s Mossad. World-class, even though they’re a tiny country, without a big budget and without global clout as a military power. The Mossad excels because of their skill and smarts.

    America screwed up their entire intelligence apparatus when they decided, foolishly, to go hog-wild with technology starting in the 1960s. America now hoovers up trillions of exabytes of sigint…but because there’s so much of it, the CIA and NSA and FBI and DHS are all drowning in sigint. There’s no way to make sense of all that data. So America’s idiot intelligence agencies fall back on the fantasy of AI, some omniscient magical computer program that will supposedly sift all those trillions of exabytes of sigint and find meaningful patterns. But that’s just dumb for two reasons. First: hard AI has gone nowhere in 60 years. AI still can’t solve even the simplest problems that are trivial for humans, like figuring out the meaning of the sentence “The astronomer married a star.”

    And second, there’s the problem of false correlations. Random matrix theory tells us that the more data you amass and analyze, the more likely you are to find false correlations. See the article “Beware the Big Errors of Big Data” by R. Nassim Taleb, WIRED magazine, 8 Feburary 2013.

    There’s a hilarious website called Spurious Correlations that finds random data sets that are highly correlated. The results are ridiculous, like the spending on U.S. science and technology correlates with suicides by hangings and strangulations. But this is exactly the kind of thing that dumb mindless computer programs vomit out because they have no idea of the meaning of the data they’re cranking and grinding, so even the silliest result gets presented as though it made sense.

    The conceit behind the Bond films is that unlike the stupid Americans, the clever Brits spend their money and expertise on humint instead of sigint, which gives stellar results. Whether that’s true in the real world I don’t know. But it’s at least plausible.

  152. 152.

    Another Holocene Human

    @mclaren: You might be right, but why engage you seriously when you just spewed a bunch of abuse upthread? I’m not going to watch this Bond movie, most likely; I just scrolled past it. Daniel Craig sounds like a cool guy. Anyway, why come here to pick Bond fights anyway? I’m sure there are some IMDB commenters just waiting for a live one.

  153. 153.

    Chris

    @Splitting Image:
    Daniel Craig is a very good Bond, but I have a lot of trouble processing the idea that British intelligence is a major player in the world in the 21st century.

    Ah. I don’t, actually. For European powers, I think, losing their colonial empires and superpower status would mean investing more, not less, in the tools of intelligence, black ops, and dirty tricks, as a cheaper way to exercise their influence (cheaper compared with the American and Soviet models of power-through-massive-military-juggernaut, at least) outside their borders. And they did want to keep exercising influence outside their borders, even if they were never going to be in the same class as Washington or Moscow.

  154. 154.

    Tommy

    @Poopyman: On my list of things to look into, once I get the go ahead the servers are “stable.” No settings were changed, but from reading the comments late yesterday and today, clearly something has changed. Will seek to determine what that is. My gut, and this won’t make John happy because he needs to cover his costs, is it is these ads that were added (not by me). I tend to look to cause and effect when trying to troubleshoot a site I am working on. And since those ads went up anything I do on my end tends to lock me out, if only for a few minutes on the backend.

  155. 155.

    Another Holocene Human

    @mclaren:

    I swear, sometimes I think I’m the black monolith at the start of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and the rest of you clowns are baboons screeching and howling in hydrocephalic incomprehension.

    Well, you heard it here first, volks–mclaren thinks she’s Ben Carson. Respect, monkeysons and monkeydaughters.

  156. 156.

    Another Holocene Human

    @David Koch: I wouldn’t be so sure. For example, there’s Frist! Remember him?

    Wingy doctors are nothing new. Clinicians are kind of like tradesmen and a lot of them can work on the old car-body without understanding the physics (chemistry, biology) behind how it works. Some docs are really brilliant about that STEM stuff, and I would trust a research doctor implicitly, but knowing SCIENCE! is not at all the sine qua non of being an MD.

  159. 159.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Steeplejack: I’ve always hated [em]. Thought it should make text bold. Never understood the hate for [b] and [i]. Felt the same way for 20 years. Thanks for listening.

  162. 162.

    Another Holocene Human

    @PurpleGirl:

    Isn’t there an internet group for men with cats. I don’t remember its name, I saw a mention of it somewhere.

    4chan???

    Okay, boyz.

  163. 163.

    Germy Shoemangler

    Above I posted a youtube link to Bill O’Reilly (steroid fred flintstone) and George Will (lockjaw kermit the frog) battling it out on O’Reilly’s show. Bill calls George a hack and a liar. George calls Bill a liar and a tool of the left.

    A tool of the left!

    And my stomach is full of popcorn now.

  165. 165.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @Chris:

    But black or white, he’ll still be a British imperialist’s wish fulfillment fantasy crossed with a male wish fulfillment fantasy. A black James Bond wouldn’t be any great progressive milestone by any stretch of the imagination. He’d still be James Bond.

    My mom was a big fan of the books when she was young. I’ve seen a few of the movies, maybe one in the theater (Live and Let Die?), but it’s never really clicked with me. The over-the-top destruction is certainly part of it.

    Apparently in the books, Bond is almost a country bumpkin playing the roll of a sophisticate. Jethro Bodine, if you will. That’s why the “shaken not stirred” is such a big deal – “real men” stir a martini because shaking somehow bruises the liquor.

    But characters and memes morph over time. Even if James “really was” a bumpkin working for a racist, imperialist system initially, that doesn’t mean he has to stay one. Elba getting the role would be a great thing, if only to demonstrate – yet again – that talented actors exist in all stripes of humanity. Movies should exist that speak to everyone, not primarily old white guys with money who run the studios and hormone-ravaged teenage boys with delusions of being ubermenschen.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  168. 168.

    Chris

    @mclaren:
    The conceit behind the Bond films is that unlike the stupid Americans, the clever Brits spend their money and expertise on humint instead of sigint, which gives stellar results. Whether that’s true in the real world I don’t know. But it’s at least plausible.

    Doesn’t SIGINT tend to cost more than HUMINT, too? That might be a practical reason for the French, British, Israelis et al to invest more in the latter than the former – not being clever so much as not having America’s elephantine budget to sink into their intelligence agencies.

  169. 169.

    Tommy

    @Poopyman: Agreed. My father might know something about the military and intelligence. Clearly the Israelis are the shit. Not only do they have most likely the best intelligence service in the world, they tend to hold grudges. You fuck with their nation and it might take 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, but they will find you and deal with you.

    I have always been told the Brits are about the best of the best as well. Part of that is because we share much of our electronic intelligence with them (see: James Bamford books). But they are good with human intelligence, which everybody that seems to know what they are talking about says is by far the most important intelligence to have.

    I have no idea the reason, but always kind of felt it was a “holdover” from when they were a world power, plus the former reach they had where the “sun never sets” so they have Brits and expats living in and accustom to nations all over the world, often hotspots in 2015.

  171. 171.

    mclaren

    @Another Holocene Human:

    Wingy doctors are nothing new. Clinicians are kind of like tradesmen and a lot of them can work on the old car-body without understanding the physics (chemistry, biology) behind how it works.

    Yes! Thank you. Finally. Someone who gets it.

    Doctors are not scientists. They do not have an understanding of the scientific method. Ask a doctor to use Bayes’ Theorem to deal with the results of a test that is 99% accurate on a population 99% of whom actually have a disease when the test is positive. and the typical doctor fails completely.

    Suppose you’re worried that you might have a rare disease. You decide to get tested, and suppose the testing methods for this disease are correct 99 percent of the time (in other words, if you have the disease, it shows that you do with 99 percent probability, and if you don’t have the disease, it shows that you do not with 99 percent probability). Suppose this disease is actually quite rare, occurring randomly in the general population in only one of every 10,000 people.

    If your test results come back positive, what are your chances that you actually have the disease?

    Do you think it is approximately: (a) 99%, (b) 90%, (c) 10%, or (d) 1%?

    Surprisingly, the answer is (d), less than 1 percent chance that you have the disease.

    Every doctor I have ever talked to gets this wrong. And not just slightly wrong. Wildly wrong. They always answer (a) 99 percent, and never answer (d) 1%.

    I find that just shocking. Unbelievable. Startling and disgusting. Doctors are glorified plumbers, but not even as smart as most of the plumbers I encounter. Doctors use rules of thumb to diagnose and fix medical problems, but they persist in prescribing treatments which studies have shown to be ineffective or even harmful.

  173. 173.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Germy Shoemangler: I would watch the shit out of this movie (and I’m not even that big of a fan of Idris Elba–I know, heresy!)!!!

    Tell me Jill Scott is in it and I’ll buy 10 tickets. :DDD

  174. 174.

    NotMax

    @Gin & Tonic

    First and foremost, is it sealed concrete? If the paint has worn off, as you state, applying a new slather of sealant is probably well in order before painting. Otherwise you’re pretty much throwing money away.

    As for paint, stuff formulated/recommended for garages would be very high ion the list.

  175. 175.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @raven: Ifn’s you want a good laugh, TradeTools.com has a video up on their facebook page with a carpenter throwing a circular saw blade at a 2×4 and cutting it. My carpenter son just showed it to me, laughing me ass off still. I don’t facebook so I can’t give a link but maybe it is easy to find.

  176. 176.

    Another Holocene Human

    @WereBear: GTFO, Sean Connery IS badass! That’s why William Shatner tried to get him on a Star Trek movie but he was off doing some Indie film, I forget the name. If Sean Connery had been in STV nobody would have noticed that the movie sucked.

  177. 177.

    Gin & Tonic

    @NotMax: You mean something like Thompson’s Water Seal? I’m thinking of, basically, an opaque version of something that will soak in to the surface. Is that best done in two steps? I don’t care how it looks that much, I’m looking more to coat/seal the surface, at least in part to lower the humidity in there.

  179. 179.

    max

    For the record, I was dragged to various Roger Moore Bond movies when I was young, and watching Moonraker in the theater when I was 12 was the end of that. I was a little puzzled when I left the theater – ‘Was that as dumb as I thought it was? Because everyone else seems to have liked it.’ Later the ran it on network TV and I saw it thought, ‘YES! This is as dumb as it seemed!’

    So I stopped watching Bond movies. (Really, Parliament should have pensioned Roger Moore off before that – paying him to wander around London all day being the 20th Century’s Most Urbane Englishman, talking to tourists and going to all the right parties. It would have saved Roger Moore and the UK a large dollop of humilation.)

    The first Timothy Dalton one that I watched on cable (it was running ALL THE TIME) was actually pretty charming, and then that was it (the less said about Pierce Brosnan, the better) until Daniel Craig showed up. Casino Royale was good, but Eva Green was the crucial additional ingredient. After that, the Craig films seemed to be following something of a decay spiral and so here we are.

    I vaguely remember reading the Bond books when I was a kid (around the same time as Moonraker came out) and not thinking too much of them in general. After all that, I’d say From Russia With Love, The Living Daylights and Casino Royale are the only ones I could even be bothered to waste time watching on cable when there is nothing else on.

    Alec Guinness in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is much more my thing.

    max
    [‘When Spectre comes on the free cable nets (is this it?) in a couple of years, I might watch it then because Monica Belluci. Blah.’]

  180. 180.

    NotMax

    Frankly, the entire chauvinist, white man’s burden, white horse universe of Bond has always been a distinct turn-off.

    Give me The Prisoner as a palliative any day of the week.

    YMMV.

  181. 181.

    max

    @max: Oh, Good Lord, what the hell is that moderation hell about?

    max
    [‘My apologies to the fucking comment filter for whatever randomly banned word I used.’]

  182. 182.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @mclaren: On the other hand, this is a very poorly done rant.

    A better commenting system is coming. Be patient.

    In the mean time, italics work for me as do bold italics.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  183. 183.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Tommy: I think Bond started as an anti-social fantasy, so he has permission to be an anti-social fantasy, an outlet, if you will?

    Superman, I think the creators of those movies underestimated how much the public in general knows and owns that character. They probably looked at the shitty comics sales and thought they could do what they wanted. Anti-social Superman or Superman analogues have been a staple of comics since the 1990s. But the public sees Superman as this paradoxically relatable hero. They don’t want to see him having premarital sex or killing lots of people or acting like a dick to his old work colleagues. They went to that movie to be reassured that you can hold onto the pro-social fantasy.

    I kind of loathe Superman in the comics but it is interesting that he started out as this Great Depression everyman hero who took on crooked landlords, although what he does is the polar opposite of community organizing.

  185. 185.

    mclaren

    It IS kind of puzzling that Bond is still popular despite being a racist, a callous sociopathic killer, a misogynist, an imperialist, and a neo-colonialist thug. The ending of Live and Let Die, where the white Bond stuffs an explosive shark bullet in the black Dr. Kananga’s mouth, is just so astoundingly racist, it boggles the mind. Even in 1973, that was just…man! It was like seeing a minstrel show, or blackface, on stage, live. Totally gobsmacking in its blithely white supremist implications.

    Then…I remembered. The big audience for movies today is teenagers. Teenagers with disposable income. White middle class privileged adolescents.

    And the Bond movies are the perfect fantasy of the privileged white middle class adolescent. The Bond films are like Ferris Buehler’s Day Off ramped off to a grotesque level: instead of Ferris stealing a car for a joyride, Bond steals airplanes and boats and tanks and trains and trashes ’em, demolishes the Kremlin, smashes down warehouses, trashes entire city blocks. Instead of Ferris infiltrating the St. Patrick’s Day parade and getting everyone to sing Chubby Check’s “Twist,” Bond infiltrated Spectre and blows everything up and kills people right and left. Instead of Ferris banging Skyler, Bond bangs everthing with breasts that moves. It’s just such a crudely cartoonish white male adolescent fantasy, you can see why the Bond franchise keeps going forever.

  186. 186.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Germy Shoemangler: your description had me howling with glee

    This is nothing new for Bill-O but the fact that the other party is George bowtie Will just makes the whole thing comedy gold.

  187. 187.

    NotMax

    @Gin & Tonic

    Commenters such as OzarkHillbilly are more versed and hands-on than I when it comes to specifics and specific (and current) products. However, that said, experience has held that 2 steps are better than one.

    One size fits all barely works adequately in clothing. In home improvement, the same shortcut can all too often lessen the efficaciousness of the results (in my – admittedly several decades removed – experience).

  193. 193.

    mclaren

    @Another Holocene Human:

    Excellent point. Superman and Captain America are both 1930s/1940s-era characters who hark back to the pre-WW II values of fair play and common decency and turning the other cheek if the person you’re facing off with is not as strong as you are. There’s a big disconnect between those characters and newer characters like Blade or the Black Widow and especially the Schwarzenegger-era movies.
    Schwarzenegger’s characters murder people and then joke about it. So does James Bond. Example: Scwarzenegger threatens a guy in the movie “Commando” by telling him he’ll let him fall off a cliff unless the guy give him information. Later, someone asks what Schwarzenegger did with the guy. “I let him go,” says Arnold. Or in another scene, Arnold slams a steam pipe through a guy, impaling and killing him. Arnold quips “Let off some steam!”
    It’s impossible to imagine Superman or Captain America doing something like that. They just belong to an entirely different era of American culture. I don’t think the makers of that recent Superman movie understood that at a visceral level. Neither Christopher Nolan (producer) nor David S. Goyer (screenwriter) really got the difference between Superman and other more modern superheroes.
    For me, the most shocking moment was when Superman murdered General Zod by breaking his neck. That would never happen. Never. It’s as out of character for superman to do that as for the Pope to dance a can-can in church.

  194. 194.

    Cervantes

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    Apparently in the books, Bond is almost a country bumpkin playing the roll of a sophisticate

    I don’t remember them that way.

    @PurpleGirl:

    However, note that in the 7th grade (or there abouts) I read all the Ian Fleming books. The whole series and in sequence. That was enough Bond for me.

    Do you recall your first reactions in any detail?

    I would say the first movies unself-consciously recapitulated most of the bigotry found in the books; which is still there in the later movies, if not totally as explicit.

    I know that the genre — not only this franchise — is appreciated for a couple of reasons, but debating its merits as Art seems absurd to me.

  195. 195.

    Gin & Tonic

    @NotMax: Yeah, I know, which is why I thought I’d catch him in this thread, but he seems now to be gone, as I will be after I post this.

  196. 196.

    NotMax

    Now that was funny.

    Today’s chapter of the Batman serial on in background on TCM.

    Bad guy science mastermind: If the beams from the neutralizer and the disintegrator ray meet at a certain point…

    Henchman: What happens?

    Bad guy science mastermind: I don’t know.

  198. 198.

    Tommy

    @Cervantes: And I am very aware of that. I will trade off something for easy of use. That with Chrome, and apps I run in it and also those apps desktop versions, that sync of course, and their “cloud” service that my phone, tablet, Desktop, and Chromebook all run the same programs and are synced 24/7 is more important to me.

  199. 199.

    lethargytartare

    @mclaren:

    that you’ve misrepresented and misunderstood the source material will surprise absolutely no one.

    that you seem to be cribbing your interpretation from a Slate article is just sad.

  200. 200.

    Cervantes

    @Another Holocene Human:

    There are good reasons, including accessibility. For example, if a blind person is perusing a web-page, and you as author want to emphasize something on that page, applying bold gets you nowhere.

  202. 202.

    Chris

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
    But characters and memes morph over time. Even if James “really was” a bumpkin working for a racist, imperialist system initially, that doesn’t mean he has to stay one.

    True, but as the top assassin of a major Western power, it’s hard to imagine those overtones ever being really washed away without changing the character so radically that he’d be unrecognizable. (The movies are already way toned down compared to the books).

    Quantum Of Solace did something interesting in re the whole imperialism thing, by throwing Bond and Leiter into the middle of the Neocon V. Chavista conflicts of the 2000s, which kind of worked for that one movie… but it’s hard to imagine them making an entire series of movies like that.

    Elba getting the role would be a great thing, if only to demonstrate – yet again – that talented actors exist in all stripes of humanity. Movies should exist that speak to everyone, not primarily old white guys with money who run the studios and hormone-ravaged teenage boys with delusions of being ubermenschen.

    Oh, sure. Like I said, there’s no reason Bond can’t be black or otherwise different from his old counterpart. It’s more that I’m just puzzled that he in particular should be generating so many calls for a race lift.

  203. 203.

    Cervantes

    @Tommy:

    That’s great if it’s what you want and you are “very aware” of what you’re paying for it.

    Whereas this sort of statement …

    And with mine, I got 100 GB of cloud space on Google for FREE!

    … seemed a little naïve. Glad to hear that I misinterpreted it.

  204. 204.

    max

    @Another Holocene Human: I kind of loathe Superman in the comics but it is interesting that he started out as this Great Depression everyman hero who took on crooked landlords, although what he does is the polar opposite of community organizing.

    Superman was created by a couple of Jewish guys and intended as a response the Hitler’s Aryan Superman. And it was successful. So in the end, the big blue guy is essentially a not-exactly-Aryan Nietzschian Übermensch minus the bloodlust. (And the power fantasy of a couple of nerdy Jewish guys, also.)

    The transformation somewhat parallels the Americanization of the Volkswagen Beetle.

    max
    [‘I always found the Übermensch a profoundly dull concept in any version.’]

  205. 205.

    Chris

    @Tommy:
    I have no idea the reason, but always kind of felt it was a “holdover” from when they were a world power, plus the former reach they had where the “sun never sets” so they have Brits and expats living in and accustom to nations all over the world, often hotspots in 2015.

    “Charlie Wilson’s War” had a chapter about the CIA’s coordination with MI6 in Afghanistan. Apparently, for the British, getting a foothold in Afghanistan was often just as simple as making contact with the son or grandson of someone who’d been connected with them in the days of the Raj. Those connections don’t simply go away.

  206. 206.

    Marc McKenzie

    @gene108:

    @mclaren: I swear, sometimes I think I’m the black monolith at the start of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and the rest of you clowns are baboons screeching and howling in hydrocephalic incomprehension.

    Wow. I’ve read some Class A-1 NIA/HUA douchebaggery before, but this line from mclaren takes the fucking cake. All of it.

  207. 207.

    Tommy

    @Chris: Yeah again, that is my understanding. And because of their time in India, well they have a strong foothold in that part of the world, which of course is now the focal point of a ton of shit with Pakistan/Afghanistan. I think human intelligence is far superior than just running data through a super computer. Sure it takes time, you don’t get results overnight. But as you said once those connections are built they don’t do away if you treat people with respect and do as you say you will do (like protect their families).

  208. 208.

    Tripod

    Craig and Mendes handle the Bond beats well enough, but it was Deakins’ work that elevated Skyfall to master level. It’s also needs to be seen in a theater to fully appreciate. They shot and edited it in the IMAX ratio, and it looked stunning in IMAX 2D.

  209. 209.

    MBunge

    @mclaren: “It IS kind of puzzling that Bond is still popular despite being a racist, a callous sociopathic killer, a misogynist, an imperialist, and a neo-colonialist thug.”

    The competition is pretty fierce but that sentence may be the single best expression of why liberals still get their asses kicked politically even though conservatives appear to have become drooling lunatics.

    Mike

  210. 210.

    Tommy

    @Cervantes: Oh I know they are not really “giving” me anything exactly. Although it does have a monetary value, the cloud space, they want me to use as many and/or all of their service to gather more info on me to serve me more ads. I buy said ads for some clients so I am crystal clear what is going on :).

    This is the ONE reason I have not ported over my work domain name and email to Gmail. Love the app, but only use it to sign-up for newsletters, registration for stuff, and on sites like this. I will NEVER let my work related emails go through a Google server. Never. That is one place I put my foot down.

    For the same reason I rarely use the cloud for work related documents or files. Mostly I’ll use it to store images, PDFs (like white papers or tutorials), and a ton of WordPress themes and plugins.

  211. 211.

    Chris

    @Germy Shoemangler:
    Want to really make them lose their shit? Cast Idris Elba, and make James Bond the agent of an African country instead of the UK. And stage his chase and fight scenes in the middle of northern European open-air markets, with blonde, blue-eyed purveyors of taffy and swiss chocolate knocked over and their merchandise destroyed.

    Jackie Chan’s Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon movies are kind of this (with China instead of an African nation).

    The plot of all these movies is “cop/secret agent travels to foreign countries in search of criminals, but the local authorities are all corrupt, incompetent, and/or needlessly hostile, so he has to do all the work himself, along with a local sidekick he picked up along the way who’s more comic relief than genuine partner.” That plot should be familiar from any number of movies and TV shows… only for once, it’s the Western nations that’re the silly banana republics getting shown up by the hero.

  215. 215.

    chopper

    @mclaren:

    I swear, sometimes I think I’m the black monolith at the start of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and the rest of you clowns are baboons screeching and howling in hydrocephalic incomprehension

    “sometimes”?

  216. 216.

    Chris

    @kc:

    Oh, me too. Most of them, at any rate. If I only watched entertainment I agreed with in all particulars, I’d never watch anything.

  217. 217.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    Dang. I missed an entire screenwriting thread, and it’s too much of a pain in the ass to go back ans respond to everything. Two points:

    (A) Before “Save the Cat!” ruined Hollywood, Robert McKee ruined it, and before him, Syd Field ruined everything. In other words, there’s always some screenwriting guru who ruined everything.

    (B) James Bond, a character created by a British writer, played by British actors, in movies made by British directors, is an example of American imperialism? Oooookay. Honestly, I would say that the fact that the very shittiest Bond movies take place in the US is a sign that the character is intrinsically British and can’t be easily fit into American archetypes. We may love Bond, but he’s no more American than Dr. Who is.

  219. 219.

    Tripod

    Skyfall, thematically, wasn’t political at all. It’s themes were about the nature of TV & Film franchises and the process of working on them. Bond’s isms don’t fucking matter. It’s a globally popular (Brit made) franchise, it’s a fiction, the audience has expectations, and collectively those beats are hard constraints on the franchise and its production team.

  220. 220.

    MaryRC

    @Another Holocene Human: I don’t think demanding to see the President’s college transcripts is an “I’m smarter than he is” thing or even an affirmative action thing, I think it’s a birther thing. Birthers claim that Obama registered for college as a foreign student, thereby proving that he was not an American citizen (whether by birth or because he was adopted by his Indonesian stepdad) and that the transcripts will show this. Carson is daft enough to believe all that birther nonsense.

  221. 221.

    Brachiator

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): One of the best Bond movies, Goldfinger, is set in the US. And Barry Nelson played an American Jimmy Bond in a terrible TV version of Casino Royale, with an aged Peter Lorre as the bad guy.

    Fleming retconned Scottish ancestry onto Bond after warming to Connery’s performance. There is no reason that Bond could not be black or Asian.

    I agree with you big time that there is always a script writing guru who ruins everything. Equally crazy is the Hollywood executive attitude that goes “That was great! Creative! Original! Hire somebody to duplicate it!”

  222. 222.

    WaterGirl

    @bago: I am now having MORE problems with reloading pages and other error messages than I have had in the past 2 years put together.

  226. 226.

    Bonnie

    I may be a small minority; but, I thought this Craig fellow was the worst Bond. He has no sex appeal and is way too short. Even if, in reality, he isn’t short, he looks short. I only saw a couple of the movies; and, they were way, way too long. The only actor of note in those movies was Judi Dench; and, they have dropped her. He never smiled; and, when he did, he certainly did not have any kind of a killer smile. I read all the Bond stories/books; and, I never pictured a man like Craig as Bond. Yeah, Bond was a misogynist; but, so was most every other man in the Sixties. I know, I lived through the Sixties and sexual harassment and misogyny.

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