Bond. James Bond.

James Bond, originally uploaded by knoopie.

We saw a movie last week!! It took 2 days but we saw Casino Royale, the new James Bond movie featuring the new Bond, Daniel Craig. I knew something was different when the opening credits features silhouettes of men beating the crap out of each other, instead of naked dancing chicks. For the record, Chris Cornell sang the opening theme.

The James Bond franchise has always been the David Bowie of movies (although that's kind of an insult to Mr. Bowie). He has survived so long because he adapts his musical style to the times - He reinvents himself but stays the same, if that makes sense. So does the Bond franchise. This time, the producers paid attention to 2 things, the first being Batman Begins, which was a 'reset' of the Batman franchise (and believe me, I have no problem ignoring the Joel Shumaker Batmans and I was never a big fan of the Tim Burton ones anyway). The second thing, and more importantly, is the Bourne franchise: both The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy had lots of fun, sweaty action without ever resorting to gimmicky gadgets or too-ludicrous stunts.

The sad thing is they missed the fact that Christian Bale and Matt Damon are a lot of fun to look at and Daniel Craig, well, is kinda ugly. But no matter: I never thought Sean Connery was good looking, George Lazenby was a non-entity, Roger Moore was cardboard, and Pierce Brosnan was nice-looking but not my thing (Timothy Dalton was a hottie but he didn't make it past 2 movies). The fact that Bond never was attractive to me (except in The Living Daylights, perhaps my favorite of all time) has never altered the fact that I unconditionally love Bond movies. Yes, even the really stupid Roger Moore ones.

So even though I find Daniel Craig very hard to look at, I must admit he is well-cast here as the proto-James Bond. He's just got his license to kill and he's a bit of a thug. The script actually sort of follows the book (which I haven't read since college) to even keeping a torture scene and all I can say is *owie!!* for Bond. Jon didn't like this movie because he didn't think it was a 'Bond' movie, but I liked it for just these reasons. Bond sweats, bleeds, makes mistakes, and even falls in love. The action is well-filmed and tense and not stoopid. They did keep a few tropes: the bad guy is a sweaty ugly creep of Northern European extraction (but is not trying to take over ther world for once). *I* loved this movie. I have always clamored for more serious Bond movies and I finally got one. Hooray! I hope they remake some of the other old ones.

Now that it's acceptable to have story arcs in TV shows and movies I would looooooooooove it if they built one for Bond (yes, the books had a story arc, if I remember correctly). Then we could get to On Her Majesty's Secret Service which is a great James Bond story but very few people have actually seen the movie.