Tag Archives: Bond

Article – Films, an Exercise in Selling you Stuff.

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TL;DR – While films are here to entertain, they also have an increased chance of selling you all sorts of things

CAT in Skyfall. Image Credit: MGM.

Article –

Today one of the biggest films in recent memory Avengers: Endgame has launched and with it comes reviews, calls for no spoilers, marketing and PR, but also a similar trend we see with every major movie release recently and that is comments about product placement. This is something that is not new for the movie universe, indeed it was being lampooned all the way back in 1992 in Wayne’s World. However, it does feel like it is becoming more of an issue these days, or at the very least it is more in your face.

So why is this important? Well, for many reasons, the first being that companies are using films to pepper you with ads when your subconscious has lowered its usual defences that it uses to ignore advertisements. Sometimes these are very obvious like when on Chuck they would stop to explain the Subway sandwich they are having, or on Cougar Town when they would stop to explain the Subway sandwich they are having, or on Community when they … okay look Subway does this a lot. Fun fact, when writing this article I double checked I was right about the Subway integration and lo and behold before the YouTube videos of the shows was a new ad for Subway. While this is all a bit silly, it is also important because advertisers pay a lot of money to do it. PQ Media found a 14% increase in spending on product placement in 2017 alone.

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Map-It – Bond, James Bond: Charting the 24 Films of the Spy Franchise

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TL;DR – Today we chart every location visited on screen in the James Bond film franchise

James Bond. Image Credit: MGM and others.

Article –

Over the last little while, I have been rewatching all the old Bonds now that they are all streaming here in Australia. Watching the old Bonds I have been struck by a lot of things, like how did they ever get away with calling a film Octopussy? But the one really interesting thing is just how much of the world James Bond visits in his travels. Indeed back before air travel was as available as it is now, this was one of the core drivers of the Bond franchise. Because you got to see exotic parts of the world that you would never get to see in your lifetime and this is still the same today.

So with this map, I have tried to get every location that I could find but this did lead to some issues. There are a lot of places where there are no clear locations, indeed there are a few fictional countries as well. With that in mind I have made some educated guesses, and when there are not reasons otherwise I have used the actual filming locations as a guide. It was also fun to see the locations that films like coming back to like Hong Kong, Istanbul, Venice, and Austria. Well, without further ado, here is the James Bond World Map.   

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Movie Review – Kingsman: The Golden Circle

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TL;DR – A great follow-up, but it does struggle to find its feet in places.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Kingsman The Golden Circle. Image Credit: 20th Century Fox.

Review –

So the original Kingman: The Secret Service was one of the first films we reviewed back in 2015 when we started (and you can read it HERE). Overall we really liked the film, it had great action, a fantastic cast, a magnetic lead villain, and it was a star-making turn for lead Taron Egerton. Overall the movie worked bar one ill-placed ‘joke’ at the end which was out of place, tacky, unnecessary, and literately brings the whole movie to a stop to get it out, but that didn’t stop Kingman from getting on our Top Films of 2015 list (see HERE). So I was wondering if they could make the follow-up as good as the first film and I think they may have just pulled it off.

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