Spectre

Léa Seydoux as Madeleine Swann

Not a great movie. I think I may be done with James Bond. There wasn't really anything wrong with the movie, it had all the requisite pieces of a typical James Bond adventure:

• multiple exotic locations
• destruction of expensive cars and aircraft
• explosions
• smarmy bad guys
• fight scenes
• car chases
• gunfights
• Bond girls
• improbable escapes from impossible situations

But the story, such as it was, didn't really grab me. Shoot, didn't grab me at all.

Bond made a number of mistakes:

• when he walks into the house in Austria, he doesn't disable the TV camera. That comes back to bite him not once, but twice.
• he fails to stop the kidnapping at the mountain top clinic. Come on, the bad guys had three big, black cars parked out front. Think that might have been a clue?
• he chases the kidnappers down with his airplane and manages to stop them, but he fails to ensure that they are all dead.
• he walks into the center of the bad guy's lair. He does get a bit of information, but he only escapes because it was in the script. Any half competent bad guy would have had him ground up for dog food. An airstrike would have been more appropriate.

The guy in charge of a competing British intelligence agency is no good. You can tell because he is not clean shaven, unlike Bond.

Daniel Craig's suit may be fashionable, but it looks snug, and completely wrong for all the action he gets involved in.

In Mexico City he manages to throw the bad guy out of the helicopter, but then he attacks the pilot. WTF? They are flying over a big crowd of people, let the chopper pilot fly out of the area, shoot, let him land someplace before you pick a fight with him. He's not going to be able to hurt you while he's flying the chopper.

Then there's the business of shooting down aircraft with handguns. If the aircraft is small and close and you manage to get a bullet into the turbine's intake, you could cause some trouble. Or if you are very lucky you might hit a critical system, but at any distance or it's going away, forget it. Unless you're in a movie.
During the kidnapping, the big bad guy was shooting at Bond with a double barreled 45, a very foolish gun. I'm not going to provide a link because I've been down that rathole before and while it is entertaining from a mechanical point of view, it's more of a fantasy than a useful weapon

Orient Desert Express

The best part was the Orient Desert Express, a real train across the Sahara desert.

There is one scene where a character says the word 'careless', but it's a Brit accent, so it could have been 'callous'. Either one would work, they both have similar meanings.

The whole point of the story is corruption in high places. Corruption is endemic. The higher you go, the worse it gets. I'm thinking nations are no longer there to provide for the common defense. They are now just fiefdoms that the rich have carved out for thie themselves. If we want to fight them, none of our old standbys, like law, order, and tough minded prosecutor are going to cut it anymore. The Weapon Shops of Isher is one of my favorite stories, but I've never been able to figure out how it might work. Now I'm thinking Anonymous might be the first step in being able to counteract the oligarchy.

Finding pictures is becoming painful. More and more websites are talking longer to load. I blame all the adware. I would gladly pay real money to avoid having my time wasted by all this advertising crap.