Brian's Thoughts on Movies

Skyfall teaser The teaser for the James Bond film Skyfall was released this week and I have a few thoughts about it.  First of all, as anyone who knows me is well aware, I am an enormous Bond fan and have especially liked the character based approach the films have taken since Daniel Craig first played the part in 2006. Bond is such a rich character that when the films focus more on his story than on plans to conquer the world the audience experience is more profound.  Skyfall was delayed for about a year due to MGM’s bankruptcy issues and the extra time seems to have given the principals time to polish the script, in much the way the four year wait between Die Another Day and Casino Royale benefited the latter. In 2009 the seventh season of 24 debuted a year late due to the writer’s strike of late 2007-2008 and the result was one of the best seasons ever. As a true Bond fan I value quality over quantity and I would far rather see a superb Bond film every four years, a...

Blackthorn One of my favorite films is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The film to me is nearly flawless, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford perfect in the first real buddy picture, a film that starts out light and funny and gradually grows darker as reality catches up with these two characters, based on the real life outlaws of the early 20th century. At the end of the film (Spoiler Alert-skip the rest of the paragraph if you haven’t seen it) the two, who have been hiding in South America for eight years, are surrounded by Bolivian Army and charge them, (the screen freezes mid charge but the shots are heard implicating they were shot down. This was a dramatization of the true event, which was a shootout in 1908 in a house but included no charge. Blackthorn assumes that Butch somehow survived that shootout due to a case of mistaken identity, and in 1927 is in his sixties living under the name “James Blackthorn” raising horses in another part of Bolivia. Sam Shepard plays Ca...