Matthew's Journal

I saw the new Bond offering, Skyfall, and very much enjoyed it. If you've seen the entertaining 50 years of Bond montage, a plausibly-coherent film constructed of 5 minutes of each Bond film in order (i.e. the first 5 of Dr No, followed by the second 5 of From Russia With Love, etc.), you'll be more than aware that the franchise has a somewhat formulaic plot structure. Skyfall plays with this phenomenon somewhat, for example in the opening chase sequence, and the use of snippets of the "classic" Bond theme at "classic" Bond moments. It continues the trend of the Daniel Craig Bonds of having a rather darker tone, but there's a great deal of well-timed dry (dare I say, rather British?) humour. The moment where a gamekeeper says "Welcome to Scotland" after blowing a couple of people away got a big laugh in Inverness. Also, there is some very stunning scenery. The plot is as full of holes as any Bond is, but feels plausible enough to pull you along as it goes. Judi Dench gets rather more to do as M, a role at which she excels. Skyfall asks how Bond can continue to be relevant in a world that is very different to the one of Dr No, but doesn't overplay its hand in doing so.

On a completely different note, we saw "Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen" at the Inverness Film Festival. This is one of those classic love stories, except it's actually made up of clips from over 500 famous films, cut together to tell a story. It could have been dreadful, but actually it was really really great. The clips are very cleverly cut together such that the story is clear to follow (so it works as a film, it's not just a clever trick), but that doesn't mean that all the clips are used in their original context - some of the funniest moments are where a clip is re-used in a manner contradictory to its place in its original film. The music is taken from the films too, and at the end there's a list of the clips and sound-tracks (in order of appearance). I suspect this film will never see a general release due to the rights issues, but if you get the chance to see this at a festival or similar, really do go. The programme described it as "a celebration of cinema; the greatest mix tape ever made", and it won the audience prize at the festival.