Daily Grab 68: Scorpion Balancing

Roger Deakins recently won the ASC award for Cinematography, and the popular (and righteous) hope is that he'll finally win a long-deserved Oscar for Skyfall. What he does is one of the many under-recognized, delicate, and important jobs in cinema.

If you don't follow cinematographers or Deakins and need reference, here are nine movies that he's lit/shot/improved by touching: The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, Kundun, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country for Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, The Reader, and True Grit.

These are also the nine movies for which he was nominated (and didn't win) the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. There are loads of other great examples of his work listed on his IMDb page.

Daily Grab 67: Agent of Change

Skyfall is very, very good, and is also the perfect Bond feature to roll out in commemorating the film franchise's Diamond Jubilee. It is not a perfect movie, nor one without weird flaws (also a Bond trademark), but following Quantum of Solace, I get why people act like it's the greatest thing in the history of action cinema.

Bond 50th Anniversary set retains most, loses some extras

The Digital Bits notes that the Bond 50 set loses some specific extras:

The only exceptions are the Mission Control menu-based content from the previous DVDs, many items from Charles de Lauzirika's original 2003 Die Another Day: Special Edition and 5 items from the 2008 Casino Royale: Collector's Edition BD (The Art of the Freerun, Catching a Plane: From Storyboard to Screen, Storyboard Sequence: Freerun Chase, Filmmaker Profiles and Bond Girls Are Forever). So if you have those discs and want to retain all the bonus content, definitely keep them.