Sweet Nothings

So I bought the Sunday Times this week. It's a paper I started taking (love that pompous phrase) when I was a student, for reasons which were less to do with politics and more for the value for money it offered due to its sheer bulk. Plus the sad truth was that my student days were not spent in a 24-7 haze of sex'n'drugs'rock'n'roll, and therefore I had plenty of time on my hands at the weekends. (They certainly weren't filled with actual work either). My limp-wristed, muesli and knitted sweater-y, Guardian-reading habit was not yet fully-formed then, although it had been the paper of choice during free periods in the sixth form when we were stuck in the library but didn't fancy doing any actual work (spotting a pattern here?). And it was the Sunday Times that first made me question whether the Grauniad had been right about everything, thanks to a certain Mr AA Gill. Gill is one of my absolute favourite writers, and I immediately fell in love with h...

Skyfall has justifiably been getting great reviews and there is much talk of it being the Best Bond Ever~!, which is quite the claim. Is it one that’s even remotely close to the truth? No, is the short answer. The long-winded and infinitely more tedious answer - which will almost inevitably involve SPOILERS - is below: The Bond franchise is a funny old beast, frequently rebooting or reinventing itself while still cradling the same recognisable bunch of characters and tropes tightly to its be-suited bosom. A Bond film can wander from the template, but only in some ways and never by too much. This is why rumours of an auteur type like Tarantino ever getting the director’s gig are so much hot air, even though the media still tries its best to fan the flames - Tim Burton was asked about it last week, for example (memo to Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli: I will hunt you down if you ever try this.) Casino Royale was the most recent, and best, reboot - probably becaus...