Hater's Guide to "Skyfall"

Opening theme:  On a scale of 1 to 10, with Nancy Sinatra being a -2 and Wings being a 19, I'm going to say that Adele's contribution to this hit parade of the most tragically dated-sounding songs in the history of pop music ranks somewhere between Shirley Bassey and ... Shirley Bassey.

I know invisibility is cool and all, but Daniel Craig really needs to stop wearing The Ring.

Roger Deakins deserves an Oscar ... for every Coen Brothers film he's ever worked on.  Denzel deserved an Oscar for "Malcolm X."  Denzel got an Oscar for "Training Day."  If Deakins gets an Oscar for "Skyfall", it's basically the Academy saying, "we're sorry we had our heads so firmly implanted in our @$$es for the past 20 years that we somehow zoned out on all of your most brilliant works ...  I mean, to be clear, this ain't one of them, but why don't you just go ahead and take a statue anyway?  You can scratch out the name and put 'Miller's Crossing' on there if you want."

Seriously, if I were designing a building, one feature I would not include is the ability to log in remotely and trigger a natural gas leak.  And while we're on the subject, does no one in the building have a sense of smell?

If you're going to make such a big fizzing freak of a deal over exposing the identity of five MI6 agents, it kind of cuts into that drama a little bit to have your flagship agent walk up to a random, gun-toting, clothing-challenged female stranger in the very next scene and blow his own cover ... just like he's been blowing his own cover for the past 50 years.  I mean, if anyone in the underworld doesn't know who James frickin' Bond is by now, they are seriously in the wrong business.

If you're going to make a film about a hacker, here's a tip:  cast Angelina Jolie.  It keeps the geeks interested.  And if you're going to make a film in which large sprays of machine gun fire are directed either from, or toward, the main character, that main character's last name had damn well better be McClane, Rambo, or T1.  As it stands, "Skyfall" was 30 minutes of Bond, 15 minutes of "Sneakers", 75 minutes of "The Last Boy Scout", and 20 minutes of "Witness."

Did he really just quote Tim Rice?  Yeah, I think he just quoted Tim Rice.

Is it just me, or does stashing a hardened criminal in a 50-square-foot Lexan hexagonal prism in the middle of a 2500-square-foot cavern seem like a bit of a waste of space?   I mean, at least store some files or janitorial supplies in there or something.

Seriously with the subway crash?  I mean, that's not even one of the better rides at Universal Studios anymore.

In conclusion:  way too heavy on the bullets, and way too light on the submarines, Persian cats, martinis, and sex.  The only female badass in the entire picture retires to become a secretary?  Really?!  If Pussy Galore were dead, she'd be rolling over in her grave (and probably doing the splits as well.)

Fact from Fiction: Learn the Secrets of the Pros

A friend of a friend of mine who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of one of the foremost books on Internet urban legends once sat down with me and opened up the keys to his kingdom.  It turns out that there is a very simple procedure that anyone can follow to determine whether a story that gets forwarded to you via e-mail or social media is complete, accurate, and unbiased.  Read below to find out this world-renowned journalist's carefully-guarded secret:

1. It isn't

AutoFlavor

Food is one of the few remaining artistic media to have escaped computerization, but it is inevitable that someone will eventually invent a computerized food generator.  At first, there will be a movement toward digitization-- converting the best hand-made dishes and making them reproducible with 100% accuracy in anyone's kitchen.  This will be followed by the inevitable debate as to whether the generators reproduce the original dish 100% accurately or whether you can "taste the digital artifacts."  Eventually, though, it will be a moot point, because chefs will stop using the food generators simply as a distribution mechanism and will embrace them as a medium of expression, thus allowing them to synthesize new and different flavors that wouldn't have been possible without computers.  But then, someone will inevitably invent an AutoFlavor feature.  The best chefs will use it as it was intended-- as a way of accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative.  Some urban chefs will even embrace it as a way to make their food taste intentionally computerized and thus obviously unique.  Among the mass marketeers, however, AutoFlavor will become a tool of expedience, used to hide a lack of talent so that chefs can be marketed based on their looks rather than their skill, or as a way of pushing true culinary talent to churn out way more new dishes than would otherwise have been humanly possible.  Eventually, the average American palate will become so accustomed to AutoFlavor that any dish that wasn't prepared with it, including the lovingly hand-crafted dishes of decades past, won't even taste good to them anymore.