Casino Royale (2006)
a friend of mine expressed interest in seeing Skyfall at some point soon and so i thought i should catch up and watch Daniel's first foray into Bond-dom. The last Bond film i saw was i think Pierce Brosnan's first one which i wasn't particularly impressed with.
The first 45 minutes or so of Casino Royale was a mess of contradictions in my head. I grew up watching Bond films, saw all of the Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Timothy Dalton films, and even though i don't remember more than snippets of details about those movies, there's something very unmistakeable about them, a signature to them that makes them Bond. Casino Royale had that characteristic, and the nostalgic part of me reveled in it - while another part of me, the critical part of me, looked at it and said, "huh. Daniel Craig hasn't said more than one or two word lines for most of this movie so far. Oh look, another really absurd high-adrenaline inducing Thing happening. oh look, daniel craig seducing the girl within the span of five minutes and with little to no dialogue whatsoever. yaaaaawn."
Based on that opening i expected to really dislike the film for the same reason that Craig had initially hesitated to take the role - that it, like most Bond films, had descended into formula. But after the first act was out of the way, the movie and how Craig was written vastly improved, and this is where Craig shone as Bond. His acting in the torture scene and the writing of it was pretty remarkable, reminding me crazily of the Wash and Mal's torture scene from the Firefly episode >War Stories, Eva Green was a great Bond Girl in that she wasn't a straightforward swooning sex object (i guess they had to get that out of the way with the first girl), and the movie became more fun because of that as well as other depths. By the end i came to the conclusion that it was all pretty good - not stellar, but not a disappointment by any means.
The amount of time that they spent on the hold 'em tournament and the sort of complexity they were trying to convey in the final hand surprised me at first until i realized that the film was made when the hold 'em craze had swept the nation after Moneymaker's WSOP win in 2004. The final hand of the tournament felt unrealistic to me only because there's no way that four people should have been in that hand after the flop. With a BB of $1m, token black guy, first to act and with an M in the red zone would have shoved preflop with his short stack. Depending on the size of the raise (it's not very clear what happened preflop) La Chiffre would either fold his A6 or reraise to try to isolate heads up since token black only had $5m left in front of him and then would have folded if Bond 4-bet into him - which with Bond's speculative hand would have been unlikely. Even if for some reason it played itself preflop weirdly, all of the shoving action should have occurred on the flop when the token asian guy flopped the flush draw and the token black guy flopped the set.
but okay, dramatic hand tension needed, and of course the showdown had to be done like every single hold 'em showdown hand is done in movies or TV where they show the weakest hands first to the dramatic super nuts hand last. No wonder so many novices in the poker room try to slow-roll.