I saw this last night. Had to go to an 11:00 showing because the 9:45 was sold out, which I found surprising with a Bond film. I had a very good time with it, but it wasn't the revelation the reviews led me to expect. Pretty much on a par with the previous two Craig films. But MEGA gorgeous and with better acting, perhaps.

My one major complaint is that the Aston Martin had the gadgets, honestly. Because in this continuity it's not from Q branch, he won it off Dimitrios. So when did all that get put in, and why does M know about it? Alternatively, if these films are suddenly meant to be sort of prequels to Dr. No now, he STILL shouldn't have it, because it was new in Goldfinger. Also, the Komodo dragons were shit.

Now, somebody smarter than I am chime in here; is this a sexist movie? Severine is fucking useless and not even Bond gives a shit when she dies. Moneypenny starts as a field agent but is so crazy bad at it that she ends up a receptionist. M dies and gets replaced by a man. Not necessarily sexist on the surface of it, but I think the execution might make it so. M dies because she's shit in a gunfight. That's really all it is. She's so shit she gets shot and drops her gun. Whereas Mallory is so badass that he can get shot, then be pretty much totally fine, scrounge up a gun, and take down some thugs. Just something that's been floating around in my head, I hate being the guy who calls sexism...

So I've been listening to episodes in chunks spread out across the week for a while now, just about an hour and twenty-five minutes into this one... Can we PLEASE get t-shirts that say, "Holy shit, Thor was right"?

Good episode, weird scenario. It's weird how much of my childhood Disney now owns. Their original animated films they actually made, then they bought the Muppets, they bought Pixar, now Star Wars and Indiana Jones... They just need Ghostbusters and it's all there.

Something that I haven't seen a lot of discussion on, and it wasn't addressed in the episode; Disney owns Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light and Magic now. What, if anything, does this mean for them?

And you guys joked about Lucas finding out he has cancer and trying to sort everything out before he dies... But is it just me, or does he seem really off in that Future of Star Wars Movies video Owen shared?

I'm pretty positive. It's Walken and his wife in the Quaker's place in that flashback. It's him for sure we see in the hospital for his neck, with his wife. Walken makes a reference to God having lost his kid too at some point, and in the psychopath story it was the Quaker's kid that got killed, by the born-again fella pre-born-again. Walken corrects Marty on his story in the car, saying that he was never alone stalking the guy, which is when it's revealed that his wife was with him. Marty ultimately has "the Quaker" whatever on his psychopath list, and Zeljko Ivanek talks about having killed "the old Quaker guy" near the end, after he's shot Walken. I do think it's kind of weird and confusing that two of the Seven Psychopaths had matronly black wives, but that's kind of a thing with McDonagh, I guess. Brendan Gleeson's dead wife was also black.

Certain details of the graveyard shoot-out are fuzzy to me. Is the dog present? Did Charlie talk about his dog? I only remember the reference to Zachariah's rabbit as far as animals. He gets away, because you can't kill the animals. If Bonnie was in that sequence, I don't remember him.

Regardless, I'll say that the fact that this confusion is present enough for us to have the debate is perhaps a sign that there is a lack of clarity about the fictional script's relation to the story. That Charlie would be in there talking about his dog doesn't necessarily represent a 1:1 relationship between the fictional script and the actual movie we're watching, but on the other hand it certainly could.

Although now that I think about it, if what we're seeing is the movie that Marty's written, the semi-post-credits sequence with Zachariah shouldn't be there.

For every Transformers 12 as many as forty potentially good movies could have been made.

I'm so glad to see somebody say this. I've always been a fan of Pierce Brosnan as an actor, and I know he really loved the franchise. It was nice to see him being genuinely enthusiastic with the press when he talked about the movies. I think his first three are all actually pretty good, (or amazing if we're grading on a curve and putting the Moore films in there), but he could have  been a really great Bond if he'd had better material. It seemed shitty to me that he was always pushing to go darker with Bond and when they finally did it they canned him.

That said, I really love Daniel Craig and think he's made the role his own in a way nobody since Connery has been able to. And even Connery was sleepwalking through the franchise after (or maybe even during) Goldfinger.

How do you feel about David Arnold being replaced by Thomas Newman for Skyfall?

As for my favorite Bond, it's a genuinely hard choice. From Russia With Love has been at the top for a long time, but its spot gets taken over by On Her Majesty's Secret Service every once in a while. Weirdly, while I think Lazenby is the second worst Bond, he's the guy I see and hear when I read the books.

The Living Daylights, Tomorrow Never Dies, and Quantum of Solace are also big favorites of mine. But I dunno, I guess I have to give it to FRWL.

I recently went on a commentary binge and listened to the commentaries for Alien and Blade Runner for the first time. The way Ridley Scott talks, just the fact that he's full of himself and uses these bizarre sentence structures (like ending sentences with, "yeah?")... I swear to God he's the real-life David Brent.

Unless in the third one it's revealed that Noomi Rapace has been trapped in the Engineer's version of the Matrix since before the events of the first movie, and the stupidity of her "scientist" comrades was all some bizarre sociological experiment... No.

In the same vein as the Dawn of the Dead one-two punch, I'd be interested in hearing commentaries for the original Nightmare on Elm Street and the remake. The remake was pretty poorly received by critics, but having seen both of the movies for the first time recently, I thought they were more or less equal. Both of them are pretty effective horror movies, and they excel in separate areas. I do think Jackie Earle Haley's Freddy was more compelling than Robert Englund's, but that opinion will probably get me burnt at the stake.

Poltergeist might have some interesting material to mine on the subject of the Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg debate.

Does American Psycho count?

Blair Witch Project could be good, from what I remember you guys haven't talked a lot about the found footage subgenre.

Psycho, for obvious reasons.

An American Werewolf in London might be fun.

I enjoyed that. The whole thing was pretty good, but the last ten seconds or so were perfect.

After working on this for years and finding it hard to get anything more than an, "I liked it," "Eh, it was alright," or, "This specific thing isn't exactly like the book so rot in hell you pedophiles," a blunt, honest critique is very appreciated. Some of your criticism I certainly agree with. I think Drew and I both agree that it's not our ideal version of the scene, but we need it for so many things we couldn't afford to sit on it and polish it any longer.

As far as the shakycam, Drew can speak to the technical far better than I can, but it's not really director's choice, except insofar as the director chose to be bad at setting up tracking markers. We keep refining that as we shoot, though, and we're getting it sorted, I think. I do like handheld camera work, nothing too intentionally aggressive, just something on the shoulder with a little float, and that's what we're going for. I think the shot it works best in in the forest is the one where Dorothy returns and the camera follows her in as she goes to oil the neck. That one is my favorite in the sequence. But the handheld thing is never something that's applied in post, if it's there on a shot it's because the camera was on my shoulder when we filmed it.

As far as Woodman's voice being disconcerting, this is something I really agonized over. We knew from pretty early on that we didn't want to do anything like malleable tin, so there's not going to be any real lip sync as such on the character. When he talks the plan is for Muppet-style flaps of the jaw. But he's supposed to be totally frozen with rust in this sequence, and it felt weird to me for his jaw to be the exception, when the hinge that moves it is no different from what lets his elbows and knees bend. One option was to have him  speak all "mmmm's" and grunts in this bit, and that was quickly dismissed. So we decided that since there's really no mechanism that allows speech, it's all magic anyway, we'd let him talk normally and just apply a substantial echo, like the sound is bouncing around inside of him. Once he's oiled and can open his jaw, most of that echo would die away. Hopefully it will work in context, but maybe not.

In regard to weird shot choices and editing... I don't really have any explanations for myself. That's the way I wanted to shoot it and the way I wanted to edit it. Felt right at the time, I dunno.