I Read the Booze Today, Oh Boy...

 Drink up, folks, the party is over.
 The writing is on the wall, the jacks are back in their boxes and the queens have gone to bed. The jig is up, the fat lady is singing, and the band is playing their last number.
 The government - bastards that they are - are going to introduce a minimum price for alcohol, based on the number of units contained in a recepticle.
 That minimum price, they tell us, is now likely to be forty-five pence.
 Or, as the drinking world knows it: "Hahaha, you-fucking-what?!"
 Let's backtrack.
 Alcohol is measured in units, these days, based on an arbitrary scale that means nothing at all.
 For example, in the UK, one unit is defined as ten millilitres of alcohol, whereas in Australia, it is defined as ten milligrams. In practical terms, this means that in one hour, a human body metabolises 95% of a UK unit, but only 75% of an Australian unit.
 This is one of many, many reason why Australians can usually be found in bars.
 Still, once we understand how much a unit represents in a given country, we can extrapolate how much it is safe to drink, right?
 Can we fuck, straw man.
 The guideline amounts for people in the UK were "plucked out of the air" by doctors who admitted they had no hard evidence, but felt obliged to say something to justify their pay.
 So, we don't know how much a unit is, objectively, and we don't know how many of these non-objective units are really going to harm us.
 Based on this, the government decided to impose a hard limit of 50p per unit of alcohol per drink.
 The average bottle of spirit contains 700ml of liquid. Purely in the interests of research, I decided to see how much booze I could buy for fifteen pounds.
 Three days later, with a tattoo I don't recall asking for and a nasty rash, I decided that maybe the best way to work this problem out was with solid maths instead of field research.
 Assuming a volume of 700ml, that means each bottle of booze contains 28 shots.
 Once again, if we assume that a spirit is 40% alcohol by volume, which is standard, we arrive at about one unit per shot, meaning that there are 28 units of alcohol in a full bottle of spirits, and at fifty pence per unit, that bottle will cost fourteen pounds.
 Assuming that ASDA is the cheapest UK supermarket (and the ad campaign keeps assuring us that it is) then, as of their website tonight (29/11/12), a bottle of Jack Daniels costs fourteen pounds.
 Or, to put it another way, it costs exactly as much as the government is trying to make it cost, already.
 How much is Gordon's gin? An admittedly under-priced twelve pounds. Only slightly under-priced, however, as Gordon's is only 37.5% ABV, and thus the new guidelines would mean it should cost twelve pounds and sixty pence.
 A staggering 60p increase.
 Smirnoff Vodka? ABV of 37.5% again, meaning it's 40p over-priced at £13.00.
 I could go on.
 In fact I will, because, in light of complaints from the National Association for Drinking Like Old People Fuck (or similar) , the government is now watering-down the law* so that shops only have to charge 45p per unit of alcohol, meaning that nothing will change at all, ever, except that the government will be able to say that they made a law to change things, without actually having to change anything.
 I'm picking generic, brand name booze because anything fancier would automatically cost more, but there are, admittedly, products out there that sell for less than the proposed 45/50p per unit limit.
 These are the sort of products you see on the bottom shelves, with blank labels that just say "Gin" and "Whisky" and "Vodka."
 These products are almost exclusively bought by alcoholics and the homeless, and even then, are not that much cheaper than the government proposal would force them to be.
 Richmond Gin, for example, is the cheapest gin product on the ASDA website and costs £9.65. With the proposed increase, this means the price would jump less than two pounds.
 What difference would it make?
 According to today's BBC report, these price-per-unit increases would save 700 lives annually.
 Again, let's work out the numbers.
 With 70 million people in the UK, this means that we'd be saving 0.001% of the population from death, and, objectively, it's the drunkest 0.001%.
 Forgive me for being hard-hearted, but the drunkest 700 people in England (Scotland is working a different scheme) are probably not the ones who are ever going to contribute much to society.
 As a frequent, heavy drinker myself, I'd like to point out that I'd have to give it some serious fucking welly before I became part of the drunkest 0.001% of the population.
 Even if we were determined to save these people, they're hardly a first priority.
 A quick search of NHS shows that, in terms of annual mortalities, 700 people clocks in below many other fatal things, like, for example, murder. (Murder takes out 970 people per year, apparently.)
 So, provably, the government is more worried about the price of a drink than it is about the murder rate.
 Maybe - hell, demonstrably - the government should really be spending its efforts on more important things, like policing, before it worries about increasing the price of a drink by a pittance.
 Either that, or they should at least raise the cost of stabs per murder, concurrently.

*Geddit?!

Cry If I Want To...

 As the title implies, this is my blog, and therefore I get the sole say about content. So this is just going to be a late-night reaction to the news that Ricky Hatton has lost his comeback fight and retired.
 Non-boxing-fans can probably skip this one.
 Ricky Hatton is, by nature of his sport, a solo artist. He's not part of a team that has just lost; he takes everything, winning and losing, defeat and glory, upon his own shoulders first and foremost.
 Whilst any solo athlete (tennis players, snooker players, track and field athletes of all shades) can lay claim to this honour-cum-burden, almost nobody can lay claim to have captured the public imagination like Ricky Hatton.
 Few athletes, if any, have become so loved by the people. And it is precisely because Hatton has always been a man OF the people that he is so beloved. A humble, likeable everyman with an extraordinary gift who fell on hard times as his glory days deserted him, he was both a superman under the limelight, and all too human once it faded.
 Many decried his decision to return to the ring after a four year absence - an absence plagued by depression, desolation and drug problems. Personally, I didn't think this return was necessarily wise, but I understood it completely.
 Jerry Boyd, the great cut-man who wrote "Million Dollar Baby," prefaced his second and final book with a quote from the Illiad. Hector, knowing that his death at the hands of Achilles has been foretold, prays only that he can have some measure of glory before his end. "Let me not die without doing some great thing that men shall talk of hereafter," he implores. The same line becomes the preface to Boyd's book.
 This burning desire to be more than nothing is what forges athletes, and fighters in particular. For all of his telegraphed punches and hackneyed sequels, Stallone understood it perfectly in "Rocky." Having seen the venue for his improbable fight against impossible odds, Rocky, crushed under the weight of reality, returns home to bed and stares into space as he tells his wife that he cannot possibly win. That he knows the task ahead of him is beyond his means.
 "But you've worked so hard," she protests.
 "That don't matter," he shrugs, "It really don't matter if I lose this fight. It don't matter if this guy opens my head, 'cause all I wanna do is go the distance."
 That desire to prove self worth is what has driven many fighters. To prove, as Rocky put it, that someone "wasn't just another bum from the neighborhood" drives many young men into gyms, and many young men into fights, both sanctioned and illegal. The need to fight for one's own dignity is a universal constant of the human psyche, from professional athletes to suicide bombers.
 It is what drove Hatton to put his crippling depression and substance problems behind him, to shed his bloated frame and return. He would rather have died on his feet than in a drug-addled daze. Rather meet his end in a fight than in his bed.
 He lost, of course.
 Miracles are so rare, and time so unforgiving, that there was little chance for an over-the-hill fighter to come back and make history.
 Hatton's loss hurts the fans who love him more deeply than any football team's failure, more than any blip in the history of an endless saga. He takes his defeats alone, and yet we, as fans, feel the pain with him. We wanted to believe the impossible. We wanted to see hope overcome the odds. We wanted to believe, just once, that a man could conquer his demons and return as good as new; that the past could be re-written. We wanted to watch, as a champion of the people, like Scrooge, sponged out the writing on the stone of time.
 He can, of course.
 Hatton's career might be over, but the very fact that he could even return to the ring after becoming the bloated mess he once was proves that the human spirit can overcome enormous odds.
 With his fighting days behind him, he could still become one of the all-time great trainers. Any young man in the country would crawl over broken glass to train with a legend of his stature.
 Sure, we didn't get the fairytale ending. We didn't get the improbable pay-off where Ricky becomes champion and the recession ends and we all walk off into the sunset with a supermodel, because this is real life. And in real life, you can't beat the odds. But you can, as Ricky Hatton proved, beat your demons. You can beat your past. And you can make a future, if you're smart enough and tough enough.
 I really hope he knows this, but I think he does. I think he's given his all and can walk away knowing that he did so, and maybe forge a future full of hope.
 Ricky Hatton is one of the most loved fighters in British history. He deserves to win in life, even if he lost tonight.

Let Them Eat Cake...

...Or anything else, really, except pussy.

 I don't know if anyone has ever cracked my impenetrable shell of Fonzie-like cool and noticed this, but I'm really quite geeky.
 I know, I know. Take a moment to let that sink in.
 I'm sorry, I should have broken it more gently. God, this must be what women felt like when they found out Liberace was gay...
 If you've recovered from the shock, I'll continue. I'm quite geeky, and as such I always have half an eye on the nerd scene, or half a finger on the pulse of geekdom, or some fraction of a body part on the relevant metaphorical measure of dork-ness. This is how I came across the below article from the New Statesman that deals with the always-tetchy subject of women in geek culture.
 To summarise a fairly long article, comic writer Tony Harris (that's "comic" as in muscular men in tights, not as in "funny") has gone on a long, misogynist rant on facebook and everyone hates him for it.
 There are plenty of good reasons to hate him for it, too. Aside from being unpleasant and nauseatingly sexist, it shows him to be a whining, petty asshole and - perhaps most heinous in my eyes - a paid writer who can't understand where punctuation is meant to go.
 As a side note, I think I take umbridge at this because there's no excuse. If you're a sheltered or embittered loser who hates women, that's not necessarily your fault. Sure, you're wrong, but moreover, there's something wrong with you. On the other hand, everyone in the western world spends years and years of other peoples' tax money learning where capital letters go. This isn't a matter of ill-thought-out opinion or an unfortunate symptom of some psychosis, it's just a case of getting things wrong, and it's annoying, especially coming from "writers."
 But back to the sexism.
 Harris' point seems to be that women who hang around comic conventions dressed as hot characters from fiction ("cosplayers," for the unaware) are a group of evil harpies who are ugly anyway, and he totally didn't even WANT to have sex with them in the first place because they're probably all lesbians and don't deserve to be there with the real geeks.
 If a lemon rolled itself in salt and joined a convent, it still wouldn't be as bitter and un-sexed as this jackass.
 Sadly, it's by no means a minority viewpoint in geekdom. There seems to be a genuine sense of wounded pride when attractive people with breasts partake in nerdy, male activities. Like these alien, menstruating beings couldn't possibly find geek stuff entertaining, so they must all be phonies and posers.
 It's not hard to see where this all comes from. The kids who played Dungeons and Dragons in school or who went to the chess club or who were no good at sports (there's a lot of overlap on that Venn diagram, in my experience) didn't get laid very much. By which I mean "ever."
 Maybe things have changed since my day; maybe the whole "Harry Potter" thing meant that kids with coke-bottle glasses and an interest in wizards got access to hot and cold running titties in their formative years, but it sure as hell wasn't that way for my generation.
 So there's a lot of bitterness and resentment towards women in the geek community, and to a certain age, it's justified. Smart kids tend to have things like "personalities" and "a sense of humour," and this is what females claim to want. It makes for a frustrating and lonely life. After the age of about seventeen, however, the karma seems to even out and most geeks end up in stable, loving relationships. Women, I like to think, finally realise that a guy who can make them laugh and program HTML can probably figure out the clitoris better than the guy who is good at lighting his farts and thinks Irving Berlin is the Jewish part of Germany.
 A lot of this karmic balance, however, involves give and take. I was never, for the record, into Dungeons and Dragons, and I can't write HTML for shit, which is why I still only use the qualifier "quite geeky" for myself. One thing that does stand out, however, is that I got laid a lot more often after I lost some weight and stopped being such a whining, bitter asshole.*
 So maybe this is the problem. Maybe the true, super-geeks never quite make the jump into functional society well enough to meet some girls and chill out.
 Maybe people who go into things like hardcore gaming (I'm talking "World Ranking" type gaming, not just playing "Batman: Arkham City" for eight hours because you're too hung over to move like the rest of us) or, say, full-time comic writing are the people who never bothered to develop even the rudimentary social skills of an internet blogger who is currently wearing Spider-Man socks.

                                           Journalistic integrity is everything around here...

 So, the reason there's so much misogyny in geekdom is because the hardcore geeks still hate women for not having sex with them.
 And y'know what? Good! Fuck 'em. (Not literally.)
 If you're so stupid that you hate women for not seeing how smart you are, and immediately propositioning you, you don't deserve the female attention you so obviously crave in the first place. If you're simultaneously that smart and yet so dumb that you can't learn to come out of your shell and stop treating women as a separate species, then you have no right to an opinion on gender relations.
 And ladies? Don't be mad about it; don't be offended or intimidated. Just don't have sex with these people, like you're already not doing.
 Nothing could be a better revenge than that.
 (Well. Nothing except sex with internet bloggers who have a whole range of comic book socks...)

                                           I really want the Wolverine ones. I'm not proud.


*Marvel, for a moment, at the fact that I used to be more of a bitter asshole.

Get Your iForks and Torches Ready...

 It's been a great few weeks for the tiny fraction of the population who like their headlines to be about rodents and pederasty.
 First, Freddie Starr, he of hamster-eating fame, was accused of kiddie fiddling and then Phillip Schofield, having caused outrage by eating a guinea pig while on holiday, handed the Prime Minister a list of suspected paedophiles that he'd found online.
 If you ever predicted that so much of the news would be taken up with rodenticide and child sex, you're either a liar or some form of time traveller. Or a witch, who must be burned.
 The whole "eating rodents" thing I don't really care about. The old Starr/Hamster headline was obvious tabloid bullshit, and what Philip Schofield does while on holiday in a culture that habitually eats guinea pig is really none of my concern. Although it does make me wonder why we haven't heard from Gordon the Gopher in recent years.
 Internet vigilante justice, however, is a little more interesting.
 Sure, on the surface, Phillip Schofield's actions were childish and ill-thought-out; we don't need to listen to "who the internet thinks is bad" to form a system of criminal justice, not least because the main Google result for "childhood" and "raped" is probably going to be George Lucas.*
 None of this is news, except the surprising fact that people look for hard-edged, well thought out journalism on a breakfast show presented by the bloke who used to host kids' telly from a broom cupboard.
 Somewhere under the surface of it all, however, there's the faint glimmer of an idea.
 What would happen if we DID listen to the internet about matters of the law?
 Obviously, first and foremost, police would spend a lot of wasted time looking into alleged incidences of pwning, reported by people with names like DaveBigcock321.
 Underneath all that, though, there's a serious point: The internet is, for better and worse, a largely un-governed entity.Nobody edits or censors content, or at least not in any immediate sense. Things can be taken down, sure, but nothing can be stopped from being published.
 This means that there is no such thing as an internet injunction; no such thing as bribing people to keep quiet. Once information hits the net, it never truly goes away. This makes crimes increasingly tough to cover up.
 Demographics are also worth looking at.
 The internet, generally speaking, is populated by the young.
 Young people tend to be idealistic and left-leaning and reactionary.
 Whilst reactionary kids shouldn't necessarily be handed any power at all, I can't help but wonder what would happen if we put them in charge of the law.
 People like George Bush would get arrested for war crimes; Rupert Murdoch and David Cameron would almost certainly be arrested for perjury. Donald Trump would be arrested for harassment, wasting legal time and at least four billion counts of being an unutterable cunt.
 Scores of slippery, odious, corrupt people who have flouted the law for years would finally be brought to justice because there would be nobody left to hide behind. You can't pay people to look the other way when "people" means everybody, and they're looking from every direction. You can't bully cyberspace as a whole into letting you get away with things, because it is comprised of everybody and nobody at once.
 Most importantly, angry young men (and women) are hard to stifle.
 This doesn't mean, of course, that there is any truth whatsoever in Schofield's magic list of bad people.
 On the other hand, if there does prove to be anything verifiable in that list, it's going to be an interesting wakeup call to the legal orthodoxy.
 In the same way that the internet is slowly strangling print journalism, and a good many other forms of media besides, might it one day play a part in the justice system? In an increasingly digital society, can the will of the governed finally force its way to making a difference through the internet?
 Probably not. Most likely, the awful things about the internet will prevent the great things about the internet from ever achieving their true potential; the most we'll get is a positive but diluted outcome. Some progress, but not a revolution.
 Still, there are glimmers. Ten years ago, Ian Tomlinson would have been a newspaper vendor who died of a heart attack, because the police said so.
 Ten years ago, the students at various "Occupy" protests would have been maced because they were dangerous or threatening, or so we'd have been told.
 And for thirty years, child molesters would have been seen as upstanding members of the public.
 Now, we don't believe any of that, because we all know better. We've seen the evidence on youtube.
 The internet is all of us, and if all of us know something, sooner or later, it comes out.
 Maybe one day, if all of us know someone is guilty, they won't be able to sweep things under the rug.
 Just maybe, internet justice could be a force for something good.
 As long as we don't leave it in the hands of that bloke from "The Cube."
 


*That was intended as a throwaway joke; I then Googled it out of mild curiousity to see if it was true. All I got was some terrifying, terrifying cartoons from Japan.

Remember, Remember...

 Yes, it's that time again.
 November, a month of burning people in effigy (including, hilariously, disgraced cyclists) and spending money on things that you're going to set fire to and gain three seconds of pleasure from.
 It's a stupid fucking month, objectively, and what's making it stupider is Mowvember.
 Let me backtrack, a little.
 For the three people left who don't know, Mowvember is a sponsored charity event that asks men to grow a moustache - or at least not shave their upper lip - for thirty days.
 It's all done in the name of prostate cancer charities, which is a fucking good cause. How could I possibly object to that?
 Don't worry. I have this covered.
 I have nothing against the concept of Mowvember. It's admirable. What I have against it is the dilution of a good idea by mass acceptance.
 Here's me, two years ago, with a moustache for the month:

 Yeah, I look like a fucking dickhead. But that's the point.
 When the whole idea started, it meant five percent of the male populace had to look stupid for a good cause. It was under-the-radar and unique.
 These days, Mowvember has just become an excuse for any dickhead to grow a moustache. In 2012, if you see a person with a laughable moustache, you'll just shrug and say "Oh, that guy's doing Mowvember."
 The whole point of doing something for charity is that it should involve effort or hardship of some kind.
 Back when nobody had heard of Mowvember, this meant the hardship of looking like an absolute cock in public.
 Now that it's become widely recognised, it's just an excuse for people to try a new look.
 Charity shouldn't be about fashion, or about people who don't have the balls to attempt a moustache unless they have a pretext.
 Lately, I feel Mowvember is the equivalent of a band I liked before it was cool.
 People aren't doing it to humiliate themselves for charity, but just to join in with something popular.
 Mowvember used to get you laughed at. Now everyone just ignores it.
 And that, ironically, makes me bristle.

From The Man Who Wrote 1976's Best Picture Screenplay...

 Although nobody except me could ever be aware of it, this blog, like an ice-berg, is only ten percent visible.
 Hidden in the "drafts" section, there are usually half a dozen pieces that never make it to the light of day, because I struggle to find a through-line; I struggle to find a coherent message that justifies their inclusion.
 Granted, quite often I'll get drunk and publish them anyway, which I hope goes some way to explaining the often-patchy logic around here.
 This brings me to something I read today. I can't find anything to say about it, I can't make it part of a bigger picture, I can't really do ANYTHING with it, so I'm just going to hang it out here, all pink and naked for the world to see.
 Below, please find Sly Stallone's recent post about the upcoming and inevitable Expendables 3.

 "We are preparing the film with the same passion and commitment as the previous two. We have confirmed Nicolas Cage, a master actor who gives a veneer intellectual group. Hopefully we can realize to Harrison Ford, Wesley Snipes and Mickey Rourke. That is the great mission of the producer. We will continue with the same narrative scheme, the agility and the frenzy, which are inherent to the saga. What will definitely be the last? I can not guarantee. In principle it would be two deliveries, but the affection of the people encouraged us to work on a third. I guess as long as we amused ourselves by offering fun and people, we can continue playing 'The Expendables'. For now we are not as expendable as it should and as some critics want."

 I'm not sure what any of that means. At all.
 It could mean that, shockingly, thirty years of injecting elephant hormones into your neck has an adverse effect on the brain.
 It could mean that Sly's secretary had a stroke right around the phrase "previous two," but soldiered on with the dictation anyway.
 It could mean that sending messages via Siri is not a good idea for someone who mumbles as much as Sly does.
 It could mean that Stallone's hair plugs have finally reached his brain and are playing merry hell with his sentence construction.
 Or it could just be more evidence of my long held theory that anything involving Nicholas Cage automatically turns to shit.
 Incidentally: Nicholas Cage?!
 Seems like they were out of A-grade action stars to recruit, so they had to go for the B's.
 Not the B's!
 NOT THE B'S! AAAAGH!!




 

Thoughts on Skyfall

 [I know I covered Bond recently, but I've just seen the new one.]
 
 A few days from now, a nice man from MGM will come to your house and informed you that there's a new Bond film out.
 That's because this is the only way left that they haven't already tried to tell us there's a new Bond film out.
 So, again: There's a new Bond film out. It's new. And in the cinemas.
 I'm not saying it's over-hyped, but under the category "News About Adele," her theme song for this movie warranted more fanfare than her firstborn child.(Incidentally, congrats to Adele on the birth of little MGM Skyfall Bond Bondington Bond Vaio Laptops Bond New Bond Bond. ....Junior.)
 Now that the hype has died down, what are we left with?
 Honestly, I'm not sure.
 On the one hand, we have an exciting, well-put-together movie (for the first two thirds) that feels in many places like classic Bond, without ever being overly silly.
 On the other hand, we have an awful third act and a film that feels like we've seen it all before.
 Briefly: Whilst searching for a disc of stolen information, Bond is accidentally shot in a way that he immediately recovers from, and swims to a pub. 
 Returning to London via the same magic, security-free, ticketless, "no passport or money required" airline that Bruce Wayne used to get to Gotham in "Dark Knight Rises," Bond interrupts M in the middle of pouring some of the brandy that she already said she didn't like in "Goldeneye." (I'm sure Courvoisier paid good money to be in this, but M emphatically told Pierce Brosnan that she preferred bourbon to brandy.)
 Apparently now completely useless after his two weeks off, Bond is shown missing a target and struggling through physical and psychological tests. We're reminded that Bond is getting older, but M decides to sign off on his mission anyway, as soon as he's met Q, who is played by one of The Inbetweeners.
 There's a bit of fighting and shagging and some Komodo dragons, before Javier Bardem turns up and allows himself to be captured, before revealing that he is, secretly, one of the best disfigured bad guys in the series' history.
 Because nobody at MI6 has had time to see any movies lately, nobody realises that Bardem has got himself caught on purpose as part of a master plan, like pretty much every major bad guy over the last few years. He then escapes, obviously, and goes after M.
 Bond gives chase by sliding down the stainless steel divider in the middle of the tube station escalators, something which you definitely cannot do.
 This was a moment of genuine annoyance for me. I'll buy into your cars-with-ejector-seats and your hand print reading guns, but anyone who has ever seen the London underground knows that there are little metal fences welded onto the escalator dividers to make sure nobody slides down them. You can even see these same metal barriers behind Bond on a different escalator in the next shot of the film. One of those strange little details that I couldn't get over, and ended up yelling about to a bemused barmaid in the pub afterwards.
 Meanwhile, back at the movie, Javier Bardem has cornered M in court, and is laying waste to what appears to be an endless line of black policemen. (Seriously, there's this one black copper who I swear turns up and gets shot twice in a row.)
 Bond arrives and decides to go rogue, abducting M and spiriting her away to an entirely different fucking movie.
 I really can't recall the last time a film had such a shuddering, lurching gear change as "Skyfall." For two thirds of the movie, everything is espionage, exotic locations, sexy broads* and private yachts.
 Then, apparently due to an unspecified head injury, Bond decides that the best way to protect his employer is to take her to his family's ancestral home, Skyfall Lodge, in the absolute bug-fuck middle of nowhere in Scotland.
 The entire tone and palette of the movie change in one scene, and once we arrive at the bleak, grey mansion and start wishing the movie was back in Macau, we meet Albert Finney, who has been cast as Scruffy, the Janitor.
 Scruffy prepares to fight the bad guys alongside Bond.
 I think, tactically, this is a mistake. I'm not one to pass judgement, but Scruffy has been living in an abandoned mansion for many years now, and he hasn't shown any signs of normal human behaviour.
 Realistically, if the owner of the mansion you worked in disappeared one day, after a few years, you'd probably move in. In fact, by the time Bond pitches up again with M in tow, the most likely scenario is that he'd walk in to find the place decked out in zebra skin and full of drunk hookers, with Albert Finney looking sheepish as he's caught in the middle of slipping the last of the family heirlooms into an envelope marked "Cash My Gold."
 Instead, Scruffy has just sat in an empty house for years on end. This isn't the sort of person I'd willingly give a weapon to, because he's either one typewriter away from re-enacting "The Shining," or else he's some sort of robot. "Welcome home, Master Bond. I will protect this human woman with you," I kept expecting him to recite, tonelessly.
 After a final shootout, some spoilers happen, which I'll put in red below. Skip past them if you haven't seen the film.

 In a move that absolutely everyone saw coming, M gets killed.
 This is a real flaw with modern movie reviewing: They tell you that there are spoilers, but they don't tell you what they are. Personally, as soon as someone says "There's a big plot tiwst in this one!" I immediately start trying to work out what it's going to be. I can't help myself, and it ruins the movie for me in a lot of ways.
 As soon as early reviews started talking about plot twists and spoilers, I thought "Well, they'll probably kill off Judi Dench, because she's winding down her acting career." I was right. It's not that the "twist" isn't obvious, just annoying that people mention it at all. STOP SPOILING SPOILERS, movie reviewers.
 And now back to your regularly scheduled ranting.

 ...With the Klingon Warship heading straight towards Bond, all seems lost until Iron Man harnesses the silicon in Posh Spice's tits. (Sorry, but it was a HELL of a plot twist back there.)
 Kidding aside, the whole movie ends on a note that can best be described as "business as usual," and that's probably my chief objection.
 Daniel Craig won fans and critics over by taking Bond in a new direction; the end of this movie essentially dumps the character in the same rut that Craig worked so hard to pull out of.
 By the end of "Skyfall," we have Q, we have Moneypenny, and M is a middle aged man again. By necessity, this means the next installment will essentially be indistinguishable from a Connery or Moore film.
 Some fans may want that, but I can't escape the feeling that the franchise has painted itself into a corner and left itself with no new worlds to conquer.
 The oft-mentioned age issue is strange, too. By acknowledging that Bond is getting older, and then surrounding him with a younger supporting cast, we risk some awkward scenes in a few years time. Daniel Craig is signed up for two more movies, by which point he'll be about fifty. The last thing we need is Bond slowly becoming Roger Murtaugh, griping that he is "too old for this shit" as his adolescent co-stars track the bad guys from their newfangled smartphones.
 It's guaranteed that "Skyfall" is going to be a huge hit, and it is an entertaining film. It manages to walk the fine line between recent, more serious efforts and the slightly comic-book qualities of the character.
 I really want to like it, but ultimately, the movie left me with a sense of foreboding about the future of the franchise. I guess we'll just have to trust that the powers that be know what they're doing.
  


*I don't know why I'm talking like James Cagney, either.