Sweeping Strings

Re the ice-skating ... I'm just glad they'd the good sense to avoid Bond and Bibi banging (although interestingly, Carole Bouquet is only a year older than Lynn-Holly Johnson).

It's a Shudder production, and will be on the site from April 19th. They offer a 7-day free trial, so there's an option to see it for nada.

For Your Eyes Only - 007 firmly back on Earth after Moonraker, and we get a superior Moore Bond as a result. Good action sequences, the 'cheesy' humour is kept under control for the most part, silkily urbane villainy from Julian Glover, a great ally in Topol, a beautiful AND believable leading lady in Carole Bouquet and a truly Cold War 'McGuffin' (and speaking of which, the 'That's detente, comrade ... ' ending here is just about perfect). Drop Dead Gorgeous - blackly funny Nineties mockumentary centred on a small-town teen beauty pageant in Minnesota. Starring Kirstie Alley, Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards, Amy Adams, Ellen Barkin and Allison Janney. Life Of Brian - annual Easter rewatch of the Pythons' peerless religious satire. He's not the Messiah ...

Back on the first Saturday night in December I double-billed Hammer's bizarre martial-arts/bloodsuckers mash-up Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires and the 2010 remake of Piranha, accompanied by beer. It was the same night as my work Xmas bash, and I maintain that I had a better time at home ... gore, chop-socky, laughs and plenty of tits. What's not to love?

Late Night With The Devil - have seen this Seventies-set horror described as 'Rosemary's Baby meets Network' ... seems about right. Late-night US talk show 'Night Owls' is flagging in the ratings, so its host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) decides to do an occultism-themed special on Hallowe'en night. Amongst his guests is a parapsychologist and her subject, a teenage girl who was rescued from a Satanic church's mass suicide but who is apparently possessed by a demon she's named 'Mr Wriggles'. Without giving too much away, let's just say things go ... somewhat awry. This manages to land a fair few shocks and also some satire about TV's sensationalist nature, 'selling your soul' to be a success on it etc. Dastmalchian is pitch-perfect as the show host.

For me it doesn't hit Skyfall's heights, but neither does it drop the ball anywhere near as badly as NTTD ends up doing.

SPECTRE - 'Brofeld', Sam Smith's dirge and the odd piece of illogical plotting aside (Madeline being left to wander off alone after her and 007 get back to London following the destruction of Blofeld's base, for example), fairly solid middle-tier Bond.

Meteor's original SFX director got fired and his work up to then was unusable, so others were brought in to reshoot the sequences with whatever was left in the budget. They were also fired, and again others were brought in to finish the effects with the (now presumably diminished even further) remaining budget cash and with 2 months to go to the release date.

The 'visionaries' line is a nice callback to Connery's 'World domination, same old dream. Our asylums are full of people who think they're Napoleon ... or God' from Dr No.

'Here you are, sir. One prolytic digestive enzyme shake.' 'Do me a favour, will you? Throw that down the toilet. Cut out the middleman.'

Bond and a meteor? They already did that, and it apparently didn't turn out too well. That reminds me, one of the ideas that was mooted for Zorin's eeeevil scheme in AVTAK was him manipulating the course of Halley's Comet.

Ghostbusters : Frozen Empire - another eeeevil supernatural entity threatens the world, and 'busters old and new step up to stop it. Reasonable fun, but unfortunately it doesn't really manage to find enough for all of the characters to do.

To me, Bond changing gender is a crazy conversation that doesn't even need to happen. Guess I'm a dinosaur.

'It's OK, I've got you.' 'You've got me? Who's got YOU?!?'

Ghostbusters/Ghostbusters : Afterlife - spooky comedy double-bill, ahead of seeing Frozen Empire tomorrow. The original is a beloved movie from my early teens, and Afterlife nicely carries things on with Egon Spengler's daughter and grandkids moving to the dirt farm he left them. Naturally, it's not long before the supernatural shit starts hittin' the fan. Warm-hearted tribute to the late Harold Ramis is paid, and the disastrous 2016 movie is wisely ignored.

007 is the agent/code number yes, and can be redesignated (as shown in No Time To Die). But James Bond is his actual name.

While we're ghostbustin' ... 'He slimed me! Man, I feel so funky!' 'Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by dickless here.' 'They caused an explosion!' 'Is this true?' 'Yes it's true ... this man has no dick.' 'Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god ... you say YES!'

'We're back, we're bad, he's black, I'm mad!'

'You blow up my beloved car? Fine ... I'll blow up my ancestral family home in order to destroy the 'copter that did it. How do you like THEM apples, you bastard?' is what I imagine went through Bond's head, lol.

Indeed. And technically speaking, the only 'truly English-born' Bonds were Moore and Craig ... Dalton was born in Colwyn Bay in Wales and Connery was (famously) Edinburgh-born. An actual Black Widow/Bond link was finding out (from her fair-to-middling origin movie) that Natasha is a big fan of Moonraker.

Didn't know Taylor-Johnson had already dismissed the rumour. Interesting.

Bond used to filter in influences from other action-type genres in fun ways (blaxploitation in Live And Let Die, martial arts in Golden Gun etc). Now, it filters them in from movies that are more fun than it is (the John Wick-esque stairwell shootout in NTTD).

Indeed. It's a balance that Skyfall struck damn near perfectly IMO, a deft blend of the old (Bond makes dry quips, has casual sex, the villain has an island lair, he drives the DB5 and uses its weaponry for the first time since the Sixties) with the new (Q is now a cyber-geek type, the 'McGuffin' is a computer hard-drive, said villain is a bisexual cyber-terrorist and the DB5 (shockingly) gets blown to bits).

Hehehe. Branagh would probably make for a fairly decent M.

Think Ben Whishaw has said that he doesn't see himself returning. Strictly a Craig-era Q.