Bond. James Bond.

**We're back to movie reviews. Yay! Thanks for the support re my icky cat calling evening though :)**

***There are some Skyfall spoilers here, but no Spectre ones. You've been warned!***

I saw Spectre (2015, Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes) last night. Definitely highly enjoyable.

Let's talk plot:

Basically, Bond has received a cryptic message in the wake of Skyfall (2012) (by the way-although you probably would be fine watching this if you haven't seen Skyfall, you'll be happier if you go back to the previous Bond first. Plus, that was a good one. Just watch Skyfall. Don't live your life with regrets) so he has some shenanigans in Mexico City. This starts him on an unofficial wild goose chase.

Meanwhile, M (Ralph Fiennes as we discovered at the end of Skyfall. Still weird seeing him with a nose, by the way...) is dealing with a new guy-C (Andrew Scott. You know him as Moriarty on Sherlock from BBC). C wants a massive global intelligence network. Whether it is actually a good idea or not is kind of debatable for most of the movie (3 guesses whether we've discovered whether or not it's a good idea by the end...).

Since 007 wasn't really supposed to be blowing up city blocks in Mexico (he did it to make sure a whole stadium didn't blow up. I know they filmed this ages ago and it's been out since before the Paris attacks but that still hit a bit close to home...), he's grounded. Q (who gets a lot of screen time in Spectre. It's great) won't give him anything except a watch (although he shows him a very pretty new Aston Martin that's already been marked for 009 and the pieces of the car he accidentally destroyed during Skyfall. Q remarks that he told Bond to bring it back in one piece, not to bring back one piece-the steering wheel. He is repairing it though, and we can all expect it to, at some point, be good as new). "What does it do?" Bond asks about the watch. "It tells the time," Q tells him, before warning him to watch out for the alarm because it's "quite loud."

Q does, however, give him a medical exam, which includes some funky blood technology that allows his coordinates and vital signs to be under surveillance world wide.

Naturally, this means 007 needs Q's help to sneak out of the country.

So, Bond begins his wild goose chase, Q starts lying to M, C starts playing politics, and Moneypenny joins Q in covering 007's tracks.

More things explode, Bond has some fight scenes. Bond has some sex. Secrets start to come out, and eventually all hell breaks loose. It's pretty standard, frankly.

But I loved it. Bond movies always have great cinematography and soundtracks and this one absolutely holds up. One particularly great moment came when our secret agent man was in a car chase in Rome, driving an Aston Martin. The Italian man chasing him was driving a fancy Italian sports car. My brother (a car fanatic) leaned over to me to point out that this wasn't just a race between a British guy and an Italian one. It was between a British car and an Italian one. It seemed very appropriate.

It wasn't nearly as homoerotic as Skyfall was but then the creepy villain from Skyfall wasn't there, so who's surprised. It did have a lot of naked people hanging out with octopuses (octopi?) in the opening credits, though, so your slightly weird and highly sexual moments were there anyway.

It didn't pass the Bechtel Test, but when a woman character who had previously never demonstrated any fighting skill starting fighting there was an explanation as to why she could fight (and it wasn't a practice fighting montage that made it look like she mastered her skills in, like, two hours. So yay plausibility?).

Bond only had, like, one martini. Said "shaken, not stirred" out loud (yay! I always look for it. Also, why does he drink vodka martinis in this movie?? Go for gin, people. Tastes like Christmas tree. Delicious).

*Side note: I looked up Bond martinis on Wikipedia for this review (plus this is me not doing my NaNoWriMo. I'm at like 40,000 words though. Totally fine). Apparently scientists have done tests to find the difference between shaken and stirred martinis. And here I always thought President Bartlett on The West Wing was right that "he's ordering a weak martini and being snooty about it." Also, apparently he's inconsistent about vodka versus gin. Go figure.*

All in all, kind of predictable but also fun. So yay. Go see Spectre. But maybe don't be like me and keep wondering if M is going to disappear in a cloud of dandruff because you still haven't forgiven David Yates for ruining Voldemort's death (HE'S SUPPOSED TO DIE AS A MAN. COME ON). But I digress. I will review all the Potters at some point. But not now. Now is Bond. Ok.


*obligatory special shout out to Megan Beckett. A fictional character in my head who is finally coming to life this month and whose name is finally being publicized in the world in this blog as soon as I hit publish*