MGM just released the first official still from Skyfall, the Sam Mendes-directed 23rd Bond movie. If nothing else, our fears that they’d turned Bond into a female impersonator in blackface appear to have been unfounded. Same old Bond, y’all. Though Daniel Craig does look a little more brow-heavy than usual. Quite a neanderthal take on Bond, this. “Name Bond. Jame Bond.” (*bonks lady on the head*)

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"Quit it with the AC Slater stuff. Don't you respect chairs?"

I haven’t read the Stieg Larsson books or seen the Swedish-language film adaptations, so you’ll get no comparisons here (GOD, I’M SO IGNORANT!), but as rendered by David Fincher, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is basically an above-average murder mystery with a sloppy ending, mostly unnoteworthy — but for one thing: Lisbeth Salander, who, as a character, is damn near groundbreaking, and no, dummy, it’s not because she dresses like suicide girl Barbie. With Salander, Fincher/Larsson do right by “strong female heroin” in a way that movies have been f*cking up for probably 100 years. Then they totally screw it up again, but we’ll get to that later.

Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a recently-disgraced journalist (loser of a high-profile libel suit by a wealthy industrialist) who gets hired by another wealthy industrialist, this one retired, played by Christopher Plummer, to investigate a decades-old murder. Plummer comes from a family of kooky ex-Nazis (Stieg Larsson was himself a journalist who investigated right-wing extremists), almost all of whom still live on a sleepy island in the north of Sweden (with shades of Wicker Man, Insomnia). Plummer wants Craig to find out how his niece disappeared into thin air one day at a family reunion back in the 60s. In exchange, Plummer promises to provide Craig some dirt on the industrialist who disgraced him. Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander, a bisexual, antisocial ward of the state with a photographic memory, works with a firm of investigators. She comes into the picture first as the operative who does the background check on Craig for Plummer, but soon she and Craig find themselves working together on the murder. OOH, DOES ANYONE ELSE SMELL AN UNLIKELY PARTNERSHIP? I’ll be your Danny Glover. Just let me get my merkin.

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Looks like you can add Daniel Craig to the list of people who thought Quantum of Solace sucked, meaning he must’ve seen it.

From a recent interview in Time Out London:

It seems that the script is sometimes an after-thought on huge productions.

‘Yes and you swear that you’ll never get involved with sh*t like that, and it happens. On “Quantum”, we were f*cked. We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers’ strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, “Never again”, but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes – and a writer I am not.’

You had to rewrite scenes yourself?

‘Me and the director [Marc Forster] were the ones allowed to do it. The rules were that you couldn’t employ anyone as a writer, but the actor and director could work on scenes together. We were stuffed. We got away with it, but only just. It was never meant to be as much of a sequel as it was, but it ended up being a sequel, starting where the last one finished.’

I tend to find it refreshing when actors admit certain movies they were in sucked, but the last time someone blamed the writer’s strike for a movie sucking it was Michael Bay on Transformers 2, and then he followed it up Transformers 3, which was just as sucky except for one scene with wingsuits, which doesn’t exactly seem like something you need Charlie Kaufman for. But it’s a lot easier to believe a movie will be better than its predecessor when the director is Oscar-winner Sam Mendes than it is when it’s Michael Bay, who won’t eat pancakes unless his personal chef makes them in the shape of explosions.

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As predicted a few weeks ago based on Sony’s domain name purchases, the 23rd Bond movie will indeed be called “Skyfall,” which was confirmed by EON pictures, Sony, and MGM during a press conference this morning.

The film, from Albert R. Broccoli’s Eon Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, and Sony Pictures Entertainment, is directed by Academy Award® winner Sam Mendes and stars Daniel Craig, who returns for his third film as James Bond 007. The screenplay is written by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and John Logan. SKYFALL, which goes into production on Monday, November 7th, will begin its worldwide roll-out in the UK and Ireland on October 26th 2012 and in North America on November 9th 2012.
Joining Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Director Sam Mendes were members of the cast of SKYFALL, including: Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Dame Judi Dench, Naomie Harris and Berenice Marlohe. The filmmakers also announced Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney and Ben Whishaw.
In SKYFALL, Bond’s loyalty to M is tested as her past comes back to haunt her. As MI6 comes under attack, 007 must track down and destroy the threat, no matter how personal the cost. [via ComingSoon]

So it seems they went with another vague-sounding, inscrutable title in the vein of Quantum of Solace, which doesn’t exactly bode well. Come on, you can’t just smash some vaguely-related violent words together and call it a day! That’s not a title, at best it’s a failed portmanteau. Why not “Smashwreck” or “Bloodwound” or “Gasfart?” I liked it better when the titles were made out or real words, and gave you the distinct sense that you’d be seeing a James Bond movie. I’d feel much better about this if it was called something catchier, like The Slut Who Jet-packed Me, or The Island of Dr. Velociraptor. License to Skysurf.

The 90-second teaser for David Fincher’s remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo came out back in May and people lost their sh*t, so I can only imagine what’s going to happen now that we have almost four minutes of it. I wasn’t as impressed with the first one as everyone else seemed to be, mainly because it was just random action cut to the beat of music, and that’s like high school video editing 101. Cutting video to music makes it look cool: fact. It’s kind of cheating. Anyway, this new one has no such tricks. Just four minutes of intrigue from the movie without really giving away much about the plot. Pretty damn impressive.

The film is based on Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling novel centering on a murder mystery looking as far back as 40 years at the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption. [RopeofSilicon]

Anyone else find it strange that the original book was in Swedish, as was the first film adaptation, and now that we have an English version, it’s still set in Sweden, but now all the Swedes speak English with different accents? There are two or three Englishman, Rooney Mara sounds Scandinavian, a couple vaguely Germanic-sounding dudes — we always just accept it because it sounds fancy and continental, but it makes no logical sense. Just once I’d like to see them try this with a chola, some dudes from Mississippi, three Hawaiians, and a Ukrainian. It’d be like a murder mystery set at my apartment complex. “Hey, Bra. I know you’re lesbo or whatever, but I hear you’re pretty good at investigateen. You know, for a haole.”

“Fack you, cawksuckah, can’t you see I’m fackin’ busy? Didn’t ya queah mothah evah teach you ta knawk?”

"Can you help us catch the eyebrow thief who did this, Lispeth?"

No eyebrows = nothing to lose. Opens December 21st. [via TheDailyWhat]