Skyfall: Back to basics again (spoilers)

Muck like For Your Eyes Only, SKYFALL (2012) strikes me as an attempt to get back to basics. None of the superfast hyperkinetic cutting of Quantum of Solace. No mention of the Quantum organization or the running plot threads. It’s simple, personal, and on Bond’s side, low-tech (which the previous Daniel Craig films tended toward to, of course). In fact, part of the subtext is that even in an age of cyberwarfare and high-tech hackery, the world needs an 007.
It’s also back to basics in that we end up in much the same place as the series started: A new male M (Ralph Fiennes), a new Moneypenny (Naomi Harris) and a new, young Q.
The story: In the opening, a mission to obtain a vital computer file goes horribly wrong and Bond ends up dead. Months later, someone starts using the the information to harass and embarrass M (Judi Dench) along with attacks on British intelligence. When Bond returns (not dead! Surprise!), M sends him out in the field before he’s fully recovered (though they don’t do as much with that as they should have) and he confronts the villain: Javier Bardem as a former agent and cyberspecialist whom M sacrificed to the Russians some years earlier. He sees Bond as similarly betrayed and wants to win him over. Ultimately, as Bardem keeps cutting through every security protocol, it has to be M and Bond together, alone and isolated, who settle things.
Bardem is the weakest link: He has none of the ominous evil he showed in No Country for Old Men. Despite that—and that I will really miss Dench’s M—this is an excellent film. “It’s the latest thing from Q branch—we call it a radio.”
In other movies … LOONEY TUNES BACK IN ACTION (2003) has Daffy, Bugs, studio exec Jenna Elfman and stunt double Brendan Fraser (“I doubled for that guy in the Mummy movies until he decided to do his own stunts.”) caught up in Acme CEO Steve Martin’s plan to turn all the world into monkeys (“He’ll use them as cheap labor, then turn them human again to buy his products.”). Catches the Looney Tunes spirit well, with pretty much every Warner character (and a few others) making at least a cameo; it is, however, very heavy on product placement, annoyingly so despite the “Ha ha we’re making jokes about it so it’s okay” attempt to defuse it. Joan Cusack plays the head of Area 52, Heather Locklear is a trained assassin, Timothy Dalton a super-spy posing as a spy movie star (he’s certainly gotten a lot of mileage out of his stint as Bond) and Robert Picardo, Ron Perlman and Mary Woronov as Acme execs. “What a fabulous view—unless you’re in the audience, in which case you’ve been staring at an elephant’s behind for the past 30 seconds.”