Everyone loves a sequel, and everyone else loves a remake.

After all, why should you have to get to know confusing new characters and unfamiliar situations when what you really want is a temporary lobotomy to shield you from the trials and banalities of actual life? It’s far more comforting to see a slightly different version of something you already know about, like the recent TRANSFORMERS 2: HELL YES and STAR TREK: BUT FASTER.

With that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of films for you to watch next summer while you sink into your air conditioned seat, overdosing on Minstrels. I hereby proudly present my Top Twelve Non-Existent Sequels…

1. PORCUPINES ON A HOT AIR BALLOON – After the underwhelming Bees In A Car, Samuel L Jackson teams up with ‘hilarious’ ‘actor’ Martin Lawrence to deliver the final instalment of the animals-in-vehicles trilogy in a movie event that can only be described as ‘awesome’.

Martin Lawrence wants to get these monkey-fightin' porcupines off this Monday-to-Friday hot air balloon.

2. REMIND ME AGAIN WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER – Jennifer ‘Love’ Hewitt and Freddie ‘Prinz’ Junior receive threatening phone calls from an old man who can’t remember why he is trying to kill them with a hook. So scary you will literally shit yourself.

She's happy because she's forgotten about the hook.

3. MY NEW BEST FRIEND’S BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING AND A FUNERAL – Martin Freeman navigates a series of awkward parties, fumbling his way through faux pas after faux pas until he dies of food poisoning and has to be cremated. Contains awkward nudity.

..and a funeral

4. THURSDAY THE 12th PART NONE - Horror prequel in which a group of young friends packs to go on holiday, with a nagging sensation that they’re forgetting something. Contains bad decisions and extreme violence.

Young Jason

5. BATMAN BEGUINES - Bruce Wayne must win a ballroom dancing contest to prevent clown shaped villains from taking over the town hall with their clown shaped knives and guns.

6. DIE HARD ZERO – Rookie cop John McClane (probably played by Shia LaBeouf) busts heads on the streets of New York City while his wife grows ever more disillusioned and drops hints that she might one day think about moving to L.A.

Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker

7. TERMINATOR 5: SOFT TARGETS – a robot carefully designed to look like an old Arnold Schwarzenegger travels back to Victorian times to kick John Connor’s great-grandfather in the nuts. Contains mild peril, and kicks in the nuts.

I need your clothes, your boots, and your penny farthing

8. MATRIX: REMORTGAGES – an old man sits in a white room, painstakingly describing the other Matrix films to Keanu Reeves. Contains padding.

He totally gets it

9. INDIANA JONES AND THE EPISODE OF THE CRYSTAL MAZE – Indy, young Indy, old Indy, and the shadow of a former Indy, explore four challenge zones, completing basic tasks to collect crystals, while Richard O’Brien plays the harmonica sarcastically.

Turns out it's an alien spaceship. Seriously.

10. MAD MAX: THE PASSION OF THE MAX – Mel Gibson directs and stars in this action redux. Contains unsettling graphic scenes of genuine masturbation.

Almost... there...

11. ALIEN VERSUS KEVIN: LOST IN NEW SPACE – Hilarity ensues as Macauley Culkin rigs up a collection of tar-and-feather style booby traps in an abandoned spaceship, during a violent alien onslaught.

Tee hee! It's gonna get hit by a bucket of paint!

12. AUSTIN POWERS: A QUANTUM OF BOLLOCKS – Mike Myers fantasises about the 1960s in a Scottish accent.

Dr Evil

There. Hollywood can have those ideas for free. All I ask for is a 5% cut of Minstrel sales and an advanced copy of the special edition DVDs. Apart from the Mad Max one.

This was a guest post by Jimi Odell from Blogtired, and he’s pretty much Captain Brilliant as far as we’re concerned.

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What’s hot and what’s not. That expression falls into the latter category.

Folded:

• James Bond Sundays (classic Bond movies being shown at sixty cinemas across the UK. That should shake your hangover off)
• Bizarre ER (the cartoons are funny)
• Wearing socks (just because it’s been a bit warmer lately doesn’t mean we need to dress like we’re on holiday in the Dordogne)
• Ray Mears (he likes his tea)
• Heather Graham (at 39 years old she is only one vital step away from being the hottest milf on the planet)

Creased:

• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (baffling and boring, and not in a Kafka way either)
• Birds twittering in the morning (at 3 am now?! Cursed summer)
• Miley Cyrus to kill Radiohead (thanks for the heads up by Joke Police. Don’t expect Miley was that chuffed with Thom’s response here. Though she speaks so damn fast who really knows for sure?)
• Bear Grylls (he likes boy scouts)
• Isabel Lucas (see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The girl is orange. Literally orange)

9 – A bunch more reasons to be terrified of caterpillars – Environmentalgraffiti

8 – Bear Grylls and Will Ferrell – a marriage made in… what? They’re not married? Fine – YouTube

7 - 20 flat-out amazing TV adverts for different sorts of Star Wars crap - Gunaxin

6 - Here’s that Cassetteboy/ Apprentice mash-up you’ve already seen a million times – YouTube

5 – Beating a man up with a live swan: cruel or awesome? Cruel, obviously. But, you know… - Spiegel

4 – Look at this quite nice picture of an iceberg – Flickr

3 – Here’s a disturbing video of a man in a dress rapping about why he doesn’t like long films – YouTube

2 – This just in: you are DIRTY – Nationalgeographic

1 - This man will be in the next James Bond film. Guaranteed…

Here’s a killer pitch for you. James Bond and Wolverine team up to fight crime together. Sounds good, huh?

Wait, we’re not finished. James Bond and Wolverine team up to fight crime together… within the strict confines of the law. And nobody kills anyone. And nothing explodes. And there’s probably a lot of crying. And it’s not even a film, it’s a play. God, we take it all back. This is a rubbish pitch.

But it’s going to happen. Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman are going to star in that exact play on Broadway. Not James Bond and Wolverine. Sorry.

Right now, both Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman are at the top of their powers. Daniel Craig has transformed James Bond from an entertainingly suave spy into a nightclub bouncer who punches stuff for a living, and Hugh Jackman has transformed Wolverine from an entertainingly wisecracking superhero to a wimp who can’t go any longer than four seconds without dropping to his knees and shouting “Nooooo!” at the sky. They’re both remarkable achievements.

So what’s next for them? Why, isn’t it obvious? It’s the theatre. After all, the theatre is where stars of the big screen go to reconnect with their craft, slowly realise that they get more money and better food on films and then pretend that they’re dying of a sushi overdose so that they can cut their run short and bolt off back to Hollywood. Or, if they’re uncomfortably young, it’s where they can get their genitals out night after night.

And best of all, Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman are doing it together, as AP reports:

Nothing has been officially confirmed but two of Hollywood’s reigning hunks may be paired next fall on Broadway in “A Steady Rain,” a two-character drama by Keith Huff. The actors are set to star in the play about two Chicago policemen, friends since childhood, whose lives take divergent paths after an unnerving incident. The Chicago Tribune called the play an “exceptionally rich, gritty and emotional drama.”

We’ve got high hopes for A Steady Rain. The combination of Hugh Jackman’s tested Broadway popularity and the instinctive masculinity of Daniel Craig coming together in a haunting play by an exciting new playwright promises to provide audiences with a night of electrifying intensity. In particular, we’re looking forward to seeing the songs This Steady Rain Has Got Me Moist, (I’ll Show You My) Warrant To Boogie and I Killed And Ate My Vietnamese Nephew Because I’m A Cannibalistic Serial Killer, which – SPOILER ALERT – is performed from inside an enchanted flying car.

So good luck to Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman. We hope that A Steady Rain runs and runs and runs. Admittedly that’s because Wolverine and the last James Bond film were so terrible that we’d like for neither of them to ever star in another film ever again, but shut up.

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And he might have chosen a really crappy one. Apparently, Danny Boyle is thinking about directing the next James Bond movie, even though a) the last Bond film was so awful that we wanted to kick our own eyes out about 15 minutes in, b) a monkey could direct a Bond film and c) if you give Danny Boyle millions of dollars, he’ll give you back a giant turd.

Still, following up an Oscar win with a Bond film didn’t hurt Halle Berry’s career. Oh.

Slumdog Millionaire has opened more doors than anyone would have thought possible. Not only has it won every single award on Earth and revitilised Danny Boyle’s career, but it’s also meant that Dev Patel is contractually obliged to shout “I’m 18 and I’m at __________” like some sort of wild-eyed maniac no matter where he goes, plus we all get to look at Freida Pinto’s big smug face every single bastard time we open a newspaper or a magazine, plus it’s sort of started a bit of a race war. Wonderful stuff.

Best of all, though, Slumdog Millionaire’s success has meant that Danny Boyle gets to spunk all his new-found respect up a wall by directing the next James Bond movie. The Sun reports:

A source said: “Danny is the man of the moment and he is being bombarded with offers from studios. He has been offered the chance to direct the 23rd Bond film. The EON team love his vision and think that it would work perfectly for the new look of Bond. With Daniel Craig’s involvement and the way the films are now structured — with the emphasis on the characters and plot rather than gags and gadgets — it is right up Danny’s street.”

Yeah, phew, thank heavens for Danny Boyle’s favoured emphasis on characters and plot rather than gags and gadgets. We’ve always thought that ending a big-budget movie by making a ropey Plasticine animation of Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz dancing around to an Oasis B-side is probably the best way to drive character and plot.

Also, did nobody involved in this story actually see Quantum Of Solace? Instead of character and plot there was a mute caveman doing a shot-for-shot remake of the Jason Bourne films while looking a bit sad. That’s hardly the same, is it?

But you know what? Maybe Danny Boyle and James Bond are a good fit, after all – if you look at Slumdog Millionaire and Sunshine and Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary, you can tell that Danny Boyle isn’t too great at ending films. And if you look at A Quantum of Solace, you can tell that the new James Bond films aren’t even slightly good on any level at all. At least they’re reading from the same page.

If Danny Boyle does decide to make the new Bond movie, this is what will happen – Boyle will find the scale of the production too huge for him and the film will be flabby and unfocused, while Eon will freak out about his eccentric little quirks and straitjacket him into making a formulaic picture that nobody will be truly happy with.

Which, to be fair, will still make it a billion times better than Quantum Of Solace. OK, we’re convinced.

Read more:

The Name’s Boyle… Danny Boyle - The Sun

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9 - Heartbreaking self-written celebrity Wikipedia pages - Cracked

8 - Snowmobile idiot - I Am Bored

7 – This man is a fool – Metro

6 – Today in ridiculous Dark Knight news: a recasting of The Joker - MTV

5 – James Bond fights everyone – Spikedhumor

4 - Discover what’s on the exact other side of the world to where you are. Us? Water - Antipodr

3 - Sweet baby Moses, that new Pixar movie looks good - Slashfilm

2 - Rappers + movies = hilarity - King-mag

1 - The best advert against online dating that you will ever read - OKcupid

They realised that Pierce Brosnan was only going to turn the films into girly musicals with spontaneous dance routines, so they had to relieve him of duty. Or put a bullet in his brain.

Enter Daniel Craig, the moody-looking sod who took over. His turn as Bond made sure that the films were at least semi-watchable. Despite the franchise getting back on its feet after a slight wobble, there is a potential villain waiting in the wings to destroy everything. Diddy wants to be the next James Bond, and no doubt wants to try and kill his enemies by spraying his fragrance in their eyes.

There’s nothing more annoying than people who think they can do everything. Despite our attempts to avoid him, we’ve all heard a song where Diddy will blab on about a large amount of money or some woman he pimped out. To say he repeats himself time and time again would be a slight understatement.

The only real acting experience that Diddy has is in his music videos and even then they aren’t that impressive. Once the jewellery trucks arrive to bling out everyone, a director simply shouts action and everyone sways around for a few moments. And there you have it, how to make a rap video.

Despite being confined to these sorts of videos, Diddy still has the confidence to want to audition for the role of James Bond even though nobody needs a new James Bond.And he’s got the cash to prove it.

Yes that’s right, Diddy decided to show that he is a) a moron and b) has too much money by blowing silly amounts on a tape to show that the next role as James Bond should go to him. Digital Spy reports:

The rapper took a private jet to the south of France to produce the action segment, which he hopes will sway Bond executives. The clip will apparently double as promotional footage for Diddy’s fragrance, I Am King.

Great, we’ve basically got a really expensive advert for a product we can’t really tell is of any use. Fragrance adverts at the best of times are pretentious piles of poo due to the fact we can’t smell them via our TVs. Genius work, there, Mr Diddy. We’ll definitely rush out and pick up a bottle. Diddy also said:

“This is my audition tape for the next James Bond. There is a black President and it’s time for there to be a black Bond. God bless…”

We’ve all heard Diddy’s incisive political thoughts before the American election. Maybe it’s about time to tell him that Barack Obama is a real person and James Bond is the creation of a writer. Perhaps Diddy also believes in Santa. Perhaps he’ll be leaving a trap out to capture him this month before unveiling him to the world.

If Diddy did get the role, you’d know he’d balls up James Bond something rotten. He’d change the character’s name to something daft like Jay Bonza or J Bod before getting the character to travel around the world with a 50-strong gang of minders, makeup artists and managers.

But you know what ruined Quantum Of Solace for other people? All the technical and factual mistakes that were littered throughout the film. In fact, movie mistake spotter Jon Sandys has listed all the mistakes in Quantum Of Solace and emailed them to us. So, after the jump, our favourite of the 24 Quantum Of Solace mistakes.

By which we were obviously referring to the 24 individual mistakes that can be found in Quantum Of Solace. Not the one big mistake where everyone working on Quantum Of Solace seemed to think they were making an episode of 24. Although that should be one of them. OK, there are 25 mistakes.

It doesn’t matter that Quantum Of Solace was so pointlessly action-packed that it was a giant urinating robot away from being Transformers. It doesn’t matter that the Bond baddie was just a bloke with a pond. It doesn’t even matter that halfway through it we started to bewilderingly get nostalgic about invisible cars, because Quantum Of Solace is a box office sensation.

And, never ones to muddle with a successful formula, that means that producers will continue making James Bond more and more thuggishly aggressive while the movie titles get more and more pretentious until, in 2013, we’ll be presented with a 007 movie called Polyodontidae Of Thalassography that consists of nothing but two hours of Daniel Craig kicking a burning toddler in the testicles.

So, as you may have guessed, Quantum Of Solace isn’t a perfect movie. But we hadn’t realised how imperfect it was. Luckily Jon Sandys of Moviemistakes.com has gone through Quantum Of Solace in forensic detail and has picked out all 24 mistakes found in the film. These mistakes include:

*At the end of “Casino Royale,” Bond is wearing a three-piece suit. Although “Quantum of Solace” begins just minutes later, Bond is wearing a completely different, two-piece, suit.

*When Bond is changing his clothes in the bathroom, he puts them in the sink where there is a movement sensor, which should have made the water turn on and soak all the clothes in the sink.

*In the opening car chase, Bond’s Aston Martin switches from silver to black.

*When Agent Fields meets Bond & Mathis at the airport in La Paz, Bolivia, she claims to be from the Consulate. As a capital city La Paz actually has an Embassy, whereas Consulates are generally found in secondary cities.

*In the opening car chase, the Aston Martin and Alfa Romeo go round a pack of cars stuck in traffic. When the policeman uses his radio, you can see a blue Vauxhall Corsa in the background. You can see the badge on it and it is actually a Vauxhall Corsa with Italian number-plates, which is incorrect as Vauxhall cars are branded as Opel in continental Europe.

*During the airborne chase, to escape certain demise in the canyon, Bond applied full power to both engines using the prop control levers (blue) and not the throttle set on the left of central quadrant.

In retrospect, we can see that Sandys has a point – the real reason we didn’t like Quantum Of Solace is because there aren’t even any Vauxhall Corsas in Italy. Stupid film.

Although a majestically pedantic and entertaining read, the Quantum Of Solace list isn’t exhaustive by any means. Here are a few that were omitted from the big Moviemistakes list:

*In one scene, James Bond can be seen wearing a cardigan. This is a mistake for about a million reason.

*The bit where the baddie lived in a hollowed-out volcano, killed people by dropping them into a shark tank  or was actually genuinely menacing had been completely edited out, rendering the movie largely unintelligible.

*There was a slight factual error at the start of the movie. The title of the film was displayed as Quantum Of Solace, instead of the more factually-correct title – The Bourne Ultimatum.

Read more:

Quantum Of Solace Mistake – Moviemistakes

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Quantum Of Solace isn’t just the number one movie at the weekend box office this week. In fact, Quantum Of Solace is the biggest James Bond movie ever to open at the US weekend box office, taking $70 million in the process. And that proves one thing about Quantum Of Solace above anything else – people really, really like the Bourne movies.

But, hey, Quantum Of Solace features a James Bond who’s dispensed with the wit, style and panache that we’re used to seeing to become a scowling robot whose job mainly seems to involve driving speedboats through explosions and punching Frenchmen. And that’s popular in America. Who knew?

So Quantum Of Solace is the number one movie at the weekend box office. That’s not a surprise – it was just about the only movie opening this weekend, and people don’t hate themselves enough to go and see Saw V again – but was is a surprise is how Quantum Of Solace was released.

Aside from maybe Japan, America was the last country to see Quantum Of Solace. It’s been out in the rest of the world for weeks. And given its huge weekend box office opening, maybe other movies will start to follow this formula too. Oh, OK, this is just wishful thinking on our part – we want to see the Jennifer Aniston movie about the funny dog before anyone else, that’s all. But can you blame us? It’s a funny dog! Ha ha! Dogs are funny. Here’s the weekend box office top five…

1 - Quantum Of Solace (You know what offended us most about Quantum Of Solace? Not the unrecognisable James Bond. Not the lack of witty dialogue. Not the rubbish baddie. What offended us most was the lack of staggeringly obvious product placement in it. Come on, this is James Bond movie – there are supposed to be 400 close-ups of every single product Sony has ever made flashing up every couple of seconds. Haven’t any of these people watched Die Another Day?) $70,400,000

2 - Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (As well as being a successful animated movie, Escape 2 Africa is also the name of the secret operation that Zahara Jolie-Pitt and Madonna’s adopted son plan to put into action on the day of their respective 16th birthdays) $36,130,000

3 - Role Models (A film where some children look to Seann William Scott as a role model and end up spelling their names in annoyingly eccentric ways and starring in rubbishy, quickly-forgotten sci-fi comedy movies starring David Duchovny) $11,710,000

4 - High School Musical 3 (See, naked Cheetah Girl? All this could be yours if only you decide to stop being such a weed and sanction the release of those photos of you with your arse out) $5,879,000

5 - Changeling (Proof that Angelina Jolie hates you: last week she announced that she was quitting acting when,  as we all know, the world would be a much better place if she decided it about a year ago before she decided to make Changeling) $4,247,000

Read more:

Weekend Box Office – Box Office Mojo

Not any more, though. Daniel Craig is James Bond now, so that means that when you watch a James Bond film you’re essentially getting whatever happened in the last Bourne movie, but without any of the interesting bits about amnesia.

And this has upset Roger Moore. Moore says he’s saddened by all the flashy violence in the new Daniel Craig James Bond movies, and he wishes that 007 films could be more like the ones he made. The thing is, he’s got a point – we know we’d have enjoyed Quantum Of Solace quite a lot more if all the parkour scenes starred a wheezy old man in a corset who looks like he smells of urine-soaked leather instead of Daniel Craig.

Everyone has their favourite Bond. Purists like Sean Connery, discerning connoisseurs like George Lazenby, ironic students like Roger Moore, idiots like Timothy Dalton, people with weird preoccupations with space lasers like Pierce Brosnan and lonely single female office temps like Daniel Craig.

With each new James Bond comes a new reflection of the times. And, if you’ve seen Quantum Of Solace, you’ll know that the times we’re in now require a mute cardigan-wearing nightclub bouncer who smacks people in the face a lot and never ever tells any jokes ever.

Honestly, Quantum Of Solace is so brainlessly devoid of wit or substance that it’s just one giant Ebonics-speaking robot away from being a Michael Bay movie. In Quantum Of Solace, James Bond isn’t the stylishly bulletproof playboy that he’s supposed to be; he’s a squat thug who grunts a lot and – this is heartbreaking – doesn’t get to have sex with one of the Bond girls because she tells him that his mind is like a prison cell. He doesn’t even try to rape her. It’s such a letdown.

And we’re not the only ones disappointed by the new James Bond. The old James Bond is equally disappointed. Although he initially stuck up for Daniel Craig after his appointment as 007, Roger Moore has now decided that there’s too much bang bang and not enough kiss kiss in films like Quantum Of Solace. Reuters reports:

“I am happy to have done it, but I’m sad that it has turned so violent,” Moore said before “Quantum of Solace,” starring Daniel Craig as a darker Agent 007, opens in North America on Friday. “That’s keeping up with the times, it’s what cinema-goers seem to want and it’s proved by the box-office figures.”

Although Roger Moore does have a point – Quantum Of Solace would have been slightly more bearable if James Bond managed to crack a smile for even a second during it – we could all do well to remember that Roger Moore is an 81-year-old man and therefore automatically hates violence. Give him a week or two and we wouldn’t be surprised if he also starts complaining about how young policemen look and those fiddly new 5p coins.

And, who knows, maybe in 30 years’ time Daniel Craig will also complain about how violent James Bond has got. Admittedly for 007 movies to get any more violent than they already are, the next James Bond will need to be a cyborg with chainsaws for arms and a flamethrower rectum, but let’s not rule that out right now.

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They have all these crazy ideas of world domination, but are barely fit to tie their own shoelaces without help. Plus the fact they are up against James Bond, a guy who could find a way of decapitating you with just a dessert spoon.

Well, inspired by that pointless bug-eyed Frenchman from Quantum Of Solace, Hecklerspray has come up with a list of the worst offenders – and what a sorry bunch they are! To make it interesting, we have decided to include the henchmen who have tried their luck against 007, as well as the main villains. Enjoy.

12. Whisper
Film: Live and Let Die

He’s fat and he talks very quietly – hardly the stuff of nightmares, is it? Not even a match for Jane Seymour, never mind Bond.

11. Kamal Khan
Film: Octopussy

Let’s get this straight. This is a French actor playing a snobby Afghan prince, who lives in India and speaks English – badly. He should have volunteered to be the clown in his own circus.

10. Sandor
Film: The Spy Who Loved Me

The bald and rather wide henchman was introduced alongside Jaws. But do you remember him?

9. Snake
Film: Moonraker

They could have at least got a snake which didn’t look like a draft excluder.

8. Mr Bullion
Film: The World is Not Enough

One of the worst acting performances in a Bond film ever.

7. Brad Whittaker
Film: The Living Daylights

Possibly the worst piece of Bond casting since, errr, having Timothy Dalton play Bond in the same film. To make matters worse, Joe Don Baker returned in Goldeneye to play a different character. He was rubbish in that too.

6. Gustav Graves
Film: Die Another Day

Posh boy Toby Stephens doesn’t quite pull it off as a North Korean warlord. Wonder why?

5. Hugo Drax
Film: Moonraker

We cannot believe he had the nerve to come up with a plan to destroy the world and set up a colony is space where only beautiful people can live. Has he looked in the mirror lately? He looks like a cross between a toad and a big, gay bear. Also, can you really take someone seriously when they look thoroughly disinterested throughout the whole movie?

4. Dominic Greene
Film: Quantum Of Solace

Number six in this list is a berserk North Korean general who had a face transplant, built a dream machine because he can’t sleep and wants to chop the world in half with a massive space laser. Whereas this bug-eyed goon’s crime is keeping some water in an underground lake. Hardly compares, does it? And he screams like a girl when James Bond punches him. And he can’t use an axe properly. The twerp.

3. Max Zorin
Film: A View To A Kill

Now, this just hurts. Here at Hecklerspray Towers, we love Christopher Walken. But not even he could rescue the worst Bond film ever made. Upstaged by Grace Jones – the shame.

2. Karl Stromberg
Film: The Spy Who Loved Me

Has anyone looked more bored about his plans for world domination?

1. Renard
Film: The World is Not Enough

How did they manage to mess this one up? Robert Carlyle is a fine actor and scared the hell out of us as the nutter Begbie in Trainspotting. Add to that the fact his character is dying and feels no pain, and you should have all the right ingredients to make a great Bond baddie. Instead, what we got was as pussy-whipped villain who is upstaged by his slightly more impressive girlfriend. Rubbish!

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9 – Or this geeky, come to think of it – Pwnordie

8 – Cat Deeley. On a horse. That is all – Popsugar

7 - Aside from the part about standing on some wicker next to a flamethrower thousands of feet up in the air, here’s why hot air balloons are dangerous – Telegraph

6 - Want to make a robot that walks like a chicken? OK! – Instructables

5 - Can someone please employ Olly Moss to do more film posters, please – Drawn

4 – Will Blur reunite? Yes, yes they will. They definitely will. They won’t - Radio 1

3 - Here’s how CNN pulled off that hologram nonsense on Tuesday night. Now we’re just waiting for the explanation about why they did it – Gizmodo

2 - Stupid James Bond plots. All are better than Quantum Of Solace - I09

1 - And now, a preview of your next 400 nightmares, courtesy of a creepy old toymaker – I Am Bored

It’s a tough job – because, as we all know, films don’t get any better than overlong Bourne rip-offs about a man who cries blood when he’s losing at cards – and it seems like it might have been too much of a tough job for Quantum Of Solace.

Early reviews for Quantum of Solace are starting to trickle in, and they’re all fairly scathing. But James Bond movies always tend to be a direct reaction against the previous one, so we can all relax. The follow-up to the emotionally bleak Quantum Of Solace – provisionally entitled Daniel Craig Punches A Laser-Shark In His Little Knickers – is sure to be a belter.

The omens for Quantum Of Solace weren’t great from the outset. Following a success as big as Casino Royale was always going to be tough, but following it with a movie with the world’s worst name directed by a man whose last film was about kites, written by a bald Scientologist, featuring a theme-tune that sounds like an angry wasp smacking against the inside of an upturned metal dustbin and starring a 12-fingered woman doing an impression of a Torrey Canyon gannet probably wasn’t going to help very much either, to be honest.

Having said that, though, nobody thought that Casino Royale was going to be any good either, so maybe Quantum Of Solace could pull off the impossible and end up halfway decent too, couldn’t it?

Well, no. Not if the early stream of Quantum Of Solace reviews are anything to go by. Here’s the best of what we’ve seen so far…

Kim Newman from Empire says that “while it’s exciting, it’s not exactly anyone’s idea of fun. To keep in the game, perhaps the next movie could let the hero enjoy himself a bit more.”

Richard Brookes from The Times was especially unimpressed. “Bond is a boorish oaf who simply rushes from country to country with the manic speed of Jason Bourne, including sequences shot in Panama, Chile, Italy, Mexico and Austria, in a plot about holding a country to ransom over its water supply. Quantum of Solace lacks any wit, ironic or otherwise, which has been a strength of so many 007 films.”

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw claims “I was disappointed there was so little dialogue, flirtation and characterisation in this Bond: Forster and his writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade clearly thought this sort of sissy nonsense has to be cut out in favour of explosions… I was also baffled that relatively little was made of the deliciously villainous Amalric: especially the final encounter.”

The Mirror’s Dave Edwards thinks that Quantum Of Solace “doesn’t feel like a Bond film at all. Not once does Craig say: ‘The name’s Bond. James Bond.’ There’s no Q or his gadgets. Heck, we even see Bond in a cardigan.”

A cardigan? Well eff that. Anyway, it was always fairly obvious that Quantum Of Solace wasn’t going to be particularly amazing, because of the well-worn ‘one good, one bad’ James Bond formula. Casino Royale was good, so Quantum Of Solace has to be bad. Then the movie after Quantum Of Solace will be good, and the one after that will be about a man with a dream machine trying to saw the world in half with a space laser that only an invisible car can stop. That’s just how it works. Don’t shoot the messenger.

Anyway, just because the Quantum Of Solace reviews are bad, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun watching it. Why not do what we plan to do – every time you see a piece of jarring product placement in Quantum Of Solace, shout the name of the offending brand as loudly as possible. You’ll be thrown out by the twelfth “SONY!”, promise.

Daniel Craig isn’t exactly renowned for his song and dance demeanour. He’s a serious actor and questions about his teeny shorts in Casino Royale or why he wore a lifejacket to avoid drowning three years ago are bound to annoy him.

Plus if he decided to chase us over a building site we’d make it about as far as the Portakabin before going into cardiac arrest. We’re gonna just stick to the new movie instead.

In most Bond films the girls either end up dead or bedded, or bedded then dead, or dead then bedded (Roge had terrible eyesight). Either that or they have eight vaginas like that lady in Octopussy and run a lesbian circus. So how have times changed? We’ll tell you how times have changed – the girls swear now. Swear, dammit!

“I think Bond is as misogynistic as he always was. But the difference is that we try to cast great actresses playing strong women who, if he misbehaves, will tell him to f**k off” commented Craig recently.

They’re not going to say that in the film of course. No Slovakian swearwords, but plenty of Craig grimacing like he’s just seen his STI results and killing people with whatever object Jason Bourne didn’t use.

This is new Bond; he’s canned the silly jokes and wants women to hate him as much as he does. Not too hard really, being as banging the world’s most visible spy invariably means being killed – by a bullet, Dobermans, or, if they’re really unlucky, Castrol GTX.

Craig knows times have changed however, so even if these new Bond girls are going to die, they are going give him some stick first.

“Instead of it being a giggling girl in a bikini – and there’s nothing wrong with giggling girls in bikinis, sometimes it’s quite nice – there are women who challenge him.“

Quantum of Solace features two new Bond ladies who look quite similar (in that they’re both not blondes), Olga Kurylenko as Camille and Gemma Arterton as Agent Fields.

Disappointingly their character names give little ammunition for sexist jibes, unless Bond tries a “ploughing the fields” gag, which is unlikely as laughs are banned in the cinema this time around. The only laugh you’re going to hear is when you hand over twenty quid at the concessions counter and expect some change.

For all those who have just re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, Quantum of Solace opens nationwide on 31st October. That is a whole two weeks before the Americans get it. Don’t gloat however; they’ve got an upcoming presidential election to get us back with first.

For instance, we already know that the Quantum Of Solace theme-tune sounds a bit like a wasp farting through a megaphone, and that Quantum Of Solace has a trailer that’s basically kangaroo boxing for the A.D.D set, but what about the biggest spoiler of all – what will the initial Bond girl get covered with and die this time?

And now we know. Thanks to this exclusive photo from The Mail On Sunday, we can conclusively state that Gemma Arterton, the Bond girl from the first part of Quantum Of Solace, dies because she gets covered in oil.

Ah, you see – it’s a visual nod to the iconic moment in Goldfinger when Jill Masterson gets covered in gold and dies. Because, obviously, back in the 1960s gold was one of the world’s most valuable resources whereas now it’s oil. Personally we can’t wait until the great food shortage of 2034, when we’ll get to see a Bond girl die because she’s covered in bacon and Chunky Kit-Kats.

Anyway, what other spoilers can we glean from this picture? We’ve had some ideas:

1 - Quantum Of Solace revolves around the tragic moment when a leaking tanker mistakes Gemma Arterton with a gannet.

2 - The baddie in Quantum Of Solace is an out-of-control ice cream man and, after he covers Arterton in chocolate sauce, his next victims are in turn suffocated with hundreds and thousands and battered over the head with a Mivvi.

3 - That’s actually not oil or chocolate sauce, but Gemma Arterton has simply been blacked up and actually Quantum Of Solace is quite racist.

Whichever one happens to be true, it’s good to see that the Daniel Craig Bond films are just as bravely forward-looking as they promised. Ahem.

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The Bond Homage - Mail