Daniel craig

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a franchise murderer — and Indiana Jones is her next victim

Phoebe Waller-Bridge must be destroyed before it's too late. The short-bob comedienne fond of wall-breaking and lazy edits has, in very short order, emasculated and destroyed multiple franchises thanks to the overwrought praise for her adaptation of her one-woman show, a descriptor that should itself elicit a bit of vomit in the back of the throat. Not content to politicize Star Wars as an irritating droid in Solo or to chop off the balls of James Bond in Daniel Craig's swan song whose name no one remembers, Waller-Bridge has now set her sights on a firmly American man to take down: Indiana Jones, whose fifth edition box office she will eradicate in spite of all the goodwill of these United States. https://twitter.

phoebe waller-bridge

Mission: Impossible makes the Daniel Craig Bond movies seem anemic and dull

The British comedian, actor and author Charlie Higson is famous internationally for being one of the writers that has carried on the mantle of Ian Fleming by writing novels and stories that continue James Bond’s adventures, most recently On His Majesty’s Secret Service, published to coincide with King Charles III’s coronation. Yet in a recent interview with the Sunday Times of London, Higson was openly dismissive of the recent Daniel Craig-starring 007 films. He said “I went to see No Time to Die with my oldest boy, Frank, who is thirty, and he said, ‘That felt like a Bond film made by people who are embarrassed to make a Bond film.’ You had to watch two films in advance to know who such-and-such is and you think, ‘Oh, fuck off with that.

mission: impossible

Is Glass Onion a victim of its own success?

Screen adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries never go out of style. The problem is that they're so often concerned with literal fidelity that they get bogged down in self-seriousness, so desperate to “update” everything that they veer into the ludicrous. With 2019's Knives Out, Rian Johnson successfully updated the Christie-style whodunit because he had a deep knowledge of its formula and he played it with a pitch-perfect, kooky sensibility. For Knives Out’s sequel, the newly released Glass Onion, Johnson does what you should do when Netflix gives you buckets of money to make a whodunit. There are expensive locales and production design, a bevy of great character actors and a twistier murder plot.

Macbeth on Broadway: a Very Modern Scottish play

The new Macbeth on Broadway starring Daniel Craig ends up about where you’d expect: a Macbond unhinged and raving about Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, splattering the castle walls with the gore of his enemies and pummeling Macduff mercilessly until the showstopping reveal that the latter was “of no woman born” but, in fact, “from his mother’s womb/ untimely ripped.” Omit the full-cast kumbaya circle at the end (a too-sweet cherry atop a bloody sundae), and the denouement essentially gives you Shakespearean drama at its most unimaginative — as a Hollywood action blockbuster. This isn’t to say that Shakespeare cries out for bold reimagining. Nor is there anything wrong with giving people what they came to see. It is Daniel Craig, after all.

Macbeth

The secret to exploring Istanbul

Two weeks before Covid began to hit Europe, I stood in the Basilica Cistern beneath Istanbul, steadily getting dripped on. Built during the reign of the Emperor Justinian I in 532, just before another deadly pandemic — the plague of Justinian — the cistern lies beneath Istanbul’s tourist hotspot, and despite it being damp, dark and having stands of 007 merchandise at its entrance and exit, it is one of the most enchanting places in a city that has captivated its visitors for over a thousand years. "If the Earth were a single state," Napoleon once pronounced, "Istanbul would be its capital," and upon visiting you begin to understand why.

istanbul

The spy’s the limit

No Time to Die is Daniel Craig’s last mission as James Bond. Clocking in at well over 180 minutes, it might more accurately be called No Time to Pee. The epic length and general air of slothful despair derive from the picture’s tortured development. Mess and confusion are the inevitable product of two directors, platoons of writers, a tangled residue of multiple plotlines and the star’s blatant misery at being once again vacuum-packed into a tuxedo one size too small. ‘We did our best,’ Daniel Craig has said repeatedly in promotional interviews. M wouldn’t accept that, so why should we? Bond begins No Time to Die with plenty of time to die. He has retired with his heart broken and the rest of him in little better shape.

no time to die bond