Ewan McGregor is praised for making Renton funny, charismatic, and emotionally legible despite extreme behavior. — Andy Greenwald
Danny Boyle is chosen for the visual invention that unlocked the material. — Chris Ryan
The soundtrack and marketing team are additional winners because the sound, orange-gray palette, font, and campaign made the movie a global cultural object. — Andy Greenwald
The final collective answer is people who were 19 in 1996 and received a path into a larger culture of music, books, film, and friendship. — Andy Greenwald
Yale professor Stephen Carter's theory that M is Silva's adopted mother, with 'Raul Silva' and 'think on your sins' as anagrams; the James Bond codename theory; alternate titles Silver Bullet, A Killing Moon and Once Upon a Spy; the Golden Dragon Casino interior was built at Pinewood; Silva's island is based on Hashima off Nagasaki
Yale professor Stephen Carter believes there is a deeper mystery to Silva and M, possibly that she is his adopted mother; Raul Silva is an anagram for a rival soul and think on your sins for your son isn't in HK, readable on Bloomberg and in blog posts.
Codename theory holds that James Bond is a codename used by different individuals, one per actor; one host does not buy it, finding it overthinking a series that before Casino Royale had no such intentionality.
Heroes like Superman or Bond don't expire, yet like Unforgiven and the Rocky films the best entries are about a hero no longer as powerful, and this movie's genius is being both; a further wrinkle says the Bond of this film does not know about the codename theory, was brainwashed into believing he is an orphan, and that Silva is also a James Bond.
The franchise used to just not worry about continuity, bringing back an old actor and ignoring the dead wife; the spreadsheet-making impulse is mocked, Silva knowing the layout of Skyfall is explained by recon or Google Maps, and gaming out archetypal themes is called a bummer.
Asked whether they want continuity across the next films, one host says Skyfall would then be the logical end of the franchise and nothing with Craig will be as good; another notes the series rarely takes risks and wonders whether Carrie Fukunaga (as transcribed) will break the formula against the controlling Broccoli family, who could not accommodate Danny Boyle; both look forward to Bond 25.
Alternative titles were Silver Bullet, A Killing Moon and Once Upon a Spy; the Golden Dragon Casino interior was Pinewood Studios, production visited China, Turkey, all over England and Glencoe in Scotland, and Silva's island was shot off Macau but is based on Hashima, an abandoned mining town off Nagasaki, prompting jokes about dial-up and Prodigy.
Judi Dench literally has aged the best: seventy-seven when she gave a performance of just-enough British acting, with the stature and gravitas to make standing over six coffins feel important; Adele's song is an all-time jam.
The locations are sensible rather than volcano-and-Tokyo Bond locations: Istanbul and London, very London-centric, like a board of tourism; the fiftieth anniversary of the series and the Broccoli family's hubbub may have driven the reminder that this is a British spy from Scotland, and M's garage line about the car not being ostentatious is a favorite Dench moment.
Waning empire keeps waning, the ministers' hearings read as Brexit, and movies about washed-up middle-aged men are on trend for 2019; the cast has not a single error, and the Deakins photography would be cutting-edge if released today.
Casting a prestige director for a franchise has aged well: Mendes had just bricked with Away We Go after American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead and Revolutionary Road and retreated to theater, with the New Yorker covering him and Jez Butterworth; the Bond films had been a schlocky volume play that needed re-engineering into an event, and the move leads to Ryan Coogler doing Creed and Black Panther.
Tarantino was long rumored for a Bond film, Danny Boyle left the most recent one, and Nolan would be bank-breaking but only makes Warner Brothers movies; Mendes openly lifted the Dark Knight aesthetic, and Nolan's films are themselves a commentary on Bond, with the orphan avenging sins in common.
Costumes have aged well: Ben Whishaw's climactic Dries sweater and museum parka, the cut of Craig's suits, Moneypenny's business casual, the barber jackets (as transcribed), the final Skyfall look with boots, and the wool-looking training tracksuit with low-top Adidas that only Craig could wear; everyone's sweatpants should fit like that rather than like the Ad Astra moon base.
Albert Finney's last film performance has aged well: a perfect role for an actor of his age as a father figure to old Scotland, old England and Shakespearean movie acting.
The song has the highest approval rating and is chosen; an Oscar winner.
Five candidates are laid out, with an effort to keep scene distinct from sequence: the Shanghai skyscraper shootout, the new MI6 introduction in Churchill's tunnels with word association and sit-ups while Rory Kinnear briefs him on the state of the world, Silva and Bond's first meeting with the William Tell scene, the tube chase, and the church scene at the end; a Shanghai versus Macau mix-up is corrected along the way.
Smaller stuff is what connects one host to the movie: the first meeting with Q in front of the Turner painting, talking in metaphor and at cross purposes in really well-written dialogue, with Wishaw great as Q; it is not a sequence where a train bursts through the ground.
M reading Tennyson at the inquiry, cut against Daniel Craig sprinting through London with Big Ben behind him, lays it on thick but is moving every time; Craig is called a fantastic movie runner, maybe number two behind Cruise, and the film came out months after the London Olympics, which Bond kicked off in the Danny Boyle opening with the queen.
Mallory and M's philosophical conversation about whether the enemy is in the shadows is a favorite dialogue scene, read as metaphor about waging a war on terror and the rights of a government to exceed its power, reflected later in the court scene; nothing in Quantum of Solace, written during the writer's strike, has that crispness.
Two more suggestions: the planning conversation at Skyfall with Albert Finney's Kincaid, including the line about men coming to kill us and killing them first, which is right out of Eastwood, and the fight on top of the train with the excavator and the sleeve adjustment; the Istanbul opening with Moneypenny feels like typical Bond until M orders her to take the shot, and the motorcycle chase on the narrow walkway is illogical but shot beautifully.
The pick is called a category of one: the Silva intro, shot by Mendes and Deakins from right behind Bond's shoulder as the villain comes down in an elevator and starts talking from forty feet away, his face withheld until the rats story nears its conclusion; the filmmakers knew what they had and let it play, and the episode plays the rat speech from the film.
The scene inverts the Bond convention of saving the villain's big speech for the end, as parodied by Austin Powers, by putting it at the close of the first act; it is playwriting, one long metaphor monologue, spiced with the question of whether Silva is sexually attracted to Bond or something fraternal, and the hosts wonder whether the unbuttoning was in the script.
Bardem is called the greatest Bond girl, lighting Craig up more than anyone since Eva Green; the villain tilts the movie on its axis, funny and destabilizing and more unsettling than other Bond villains, while the backstory with M is brushed aside in one line about Hong Kong.
Silva hacking Bond and MI6 in 2012 is seen as prescient, a technocracy story rather than the money-and-power plots of villains like Mads Mikkelsen's; the abandoned island, shot off Macau but based on one off Nagasaki, is a faded ghost town that parallels Bond's own enjoying-death stretch.
The scorpion scene is loved, with a nitpick that a British guy doing scorpion tricks in a Turkish bar while keeping a low profile would go viral; Silva mirrors Bond as a lone wolf with mommy issues operating to his own ends.
After the action discussion, the answer is the rats speech, the Silva intro.
Nominees are Snoop Dogg in a wheelchair, Eva Mendes in a rookie performance and Tom Berenger, with Smiley and Bone added as the other two heat check performances.
Tom Berenger looks exactly like this host's father, which is disorienting, so Berenger from Training Day to Inception is like watching that father in a movie; Berenger also plays a narcotics cop here, which the father is. — Sean Fennessey
Berenger was a massive star for about six years after The Big Chill and Platoon, shows up as the Marine recruiting Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July, and Someone to Watch Over Me, with Mimi Rogers, is slated for year seven of the show.
Scott Glenn is ruled out as a Dion Waiters candidate because he is coming up in a different category and one host is not allowed to talk about him yet, though when asked for a heat check a voice still answers Scott Glenn.
Snoop, by all accounts, should have been bad and Snoop in a wheelchair should have been one of the biggest movie disasters, but his crack-corner lines are recited admiringly as really good Snoop stuff; a nomination for Harris Ewan (as transcribed) is held for another new category.
Bone was played by Klee Shahid Sloan (as transcribed), an activist and documentary director who worked to reform gang culture from inside the Athens Park Bloods, part of how much Fuqua worked within L.A. gang culture to make the movie authentic.
One host gives it to Cliff Curtis for Smiley, now on Fear the Walking Dead and great in Danny Boyle's Sunshine: Smiley did not have to be so interesting, making you feel it will be okay with menace underneath and the tattoos; another concedes Smiley is great but gives it to Snoop Dogg because it was so unexpected.
