Die Another Day...

[fajrdrako]

I hadn't seen this, the latest of the James Bond movies. So we watched it after dinner.

A few comments:

• Pierce Brosnan has aged an awful lot since I last saw him. Well, haven't we all. I always think of him as he was in the Remington Steele days. He has a great body, and it was fun seeing him all hirsute and ragged. (Evocation of Aragorn and Wolverine.)




• Halle Berry is great to look at but I see so little personality there that I can't really enjoy looking at her. She had a little more oomph this time than as Storm, but... not much. To my ears, this woman always sounds as if she's reading her lines off a cue card. Is that just her normal diction? She won an Oscar, she must have talent. I just find it hard to see.



• I very much like Toby Stephens as the villain Gustav Graves. I often like Bond villains. (Robert Carlyle springs to mind, and Alan Cumming.)


• Numerous things made me think of scenes and items from comic books. The one-man flight thingummies were like the Legion of Super-Heroes used to have; the electric glove of the villain (with its purple lightning), the transformer-like armour, the exchange of DNA/looks/bodies, the ice palace (like the fortress of Solitude), and so on.... Of course, this was a good thing.



• It didn't seem so exotic this time: the settings (Iceland, Korea) were irrelevant and the only one with landmarks was London. I love that mysterious wall in the Embankment!



• Loved the final scene with Miss Moneypenny.


• As usual, I loved Judi Dench as M and John Cleese as Q.