Bond. James Bond.
so, while sitting at work today, between not studying and attempting to fix the microphone that was being unreasonably flaky, I absentmindedly started writing my thoughts on the most recent James Bond movie. and, as you'll see, I got a bit into it. enjoy!
(warning: 'tis a bit long-nearly twice as long, in fact, as the last paper I wrote. go figure.)
so, I finally saw Casino Royale. I’d been holding off for a bit for no good reason, but post-exam the other day I decided that I needed a study break.
so ... new Bond. Daniel Craig. I ... don’t really care for him as Bond, for a number of reasons. I suppose that, in part, it’s in comparison to the other Bonds. I cut my Bondian teeth on Sean Connery and Roger Moore and love various aspects of both of them. and, as you might imagine, I was fond of Pierce Brosnan as Bond (in fact, I’m rather fond of Pierce Brosnan, full stop). I like the idea and image of Bond as a man’s man, a ladies’ man, someone you’d like to be or know or let yourself be ravished by, equal parts suave and steely. I also support the idea of Bond having a superman streak; Bond is a prodigy, he’s not an everyman who has been trained up right proper. Bond isn’t your average Joe, he’s one of the elite, a position afforded to him due to the fact that he knows how to fight a shark, play baccarat, converse in Russian, drive anything with wheels or treads or propellers, that he can ski and shoot and seduce and look like a million bucks afterwards. I’ve never been much one for the rough-and-tumble style of Bond (I’ve watched both Timothy Dalton movies once, and that was entirely enough), so that likely contributes to my feelings towards the new Bond. however, there’s more than that.
Craig doesn’t look like Bond to me. maybe I’ve been brainwashed into the Bond = (tall + dark)^(handsome) formula, but it wasn’t the fact that he was blond that really galled me. he’s a bit bulky for my taste, yet maybe we’re supposed to assume that he’s going to swap some of the brawn for brain. but he’s got this odd ptotic, craggy look that doesn’t jibe with either my vision of Bond or the one it seems that they’ve crafted for him. neither is something they can fix, they’re just the way he’s built. as I said to one of my housemates during the recent screening of the flick, initially I couldn’t tell if I didn’t like the cut of his suit or the cut of his face. his visage, with his wrinkles and worry lines, doesn’t fit with the image of a Bond who is fresh and rough, someone who hasn’t seen horrors and heartbreak for years and is only now collecting his emotional scars. for all his cheesy lines, I always appreciated that Brosnan’s Bond could convey such anger, frustration, sadness, and conflict in the subtlest of looks. while I appreciated the potential emotion in the scene of Vesper and Bond in the shower, Craig seemed so detached, as though his body was present but his mind was elsewhere and uncaring.
part of it might just be that Craig himself hasn’t yet assimilated the role of Bond to a point where he has become the spy, rather than just playing him. I watched a couple of the extras that were featured on the DVD and he just seems like he’s still that kid playing Bond in the backyard-he hasn’t realized that he’s grown up and is visibly acting in the way that he believes Bond would instead of simply being him. I can’t tell if it was a director’s choice to make Bond less naturally suave, or Craig’s very nature, or just sloppy and inadequate guidance and editing, but subtle distracters, like the fact that Bond chews with his mouth open (!), don’t fit with the overall picture. maybe it’s just part of the general reboot idea; perhaps we’re now playing with a Bond who doesn’t know which fork to use for salad and would rather wear cargo pants, one who will train himself on how to be-or act-debonair, instead of it being second nature to him.
I think that critics were often unnecessarily hard on Craig when he was announced as the new Bond, but secretly part of me agrees with them. a Bond with a blond buzz cut? what’s that about? and apparently I can drive stick better than Craig can, which doesn’t speak too highly of his skills. also, ditching Brosnan as Bond may have been good in hindsight, if the quality of the writing in subsequent films followed the steady decline seen in his last two, but to let him go solely because they wanted to do a reboot comes as a bit of an affront. despite my reaction to Craig as 007, I’ve heard that he’s quite a good actor, and I intend to investigate his filmography. I don’t know-I imagine that time and additional films may well soften my opinion of him.
okay, let me move away from Craig as Bond and look at the film itself. I suppose I should indicate that spoilers shall follow, but really, the statute of limitations has expired by now, methinks.
anyway, the movie. ye gods, what happened? there were, like, seventeen relatively interconnected plots going on, none of which were really well developed to my satisfaction. so, we start with all kinds of rough’n’tumble black’n’white action and a ridiculously ugly gun barrel scene, and then we jump into chaos: there’s this bad guy in Uganda who gives money to this even badder guy under the direction of this other dude whose face you should remember but won’t by the end of the film, because there’s no indication that he’ll be important later, and then we go galloping for about six hours through the streets of Madagascar with a somewhat inept Bond who is aided by even more inept junior agents, then Bond blows up shit (in a way that is physically impossible -- thanks, Mythbusters!) and gets in trouble but isn’t really, and seduces the girl who is killed, then figures out the bomb plot and goes driving around for about eleven hours destroying thousands upon thousands of dollars of aviation-themed props before we even get to the beginning of the main story. more spying, Bond, fewer explosions! yeesh. also, it would be impossible for them to telegraph the resolution of the “suspenseful” scenes any more clearly, e.g. bomb + carabiner + close shot of Bond restraining the Bad Guy #23 by his be-belt-looped waistband = no shit, Sherlock. honestly, it was more surprising that the bad guy looked amazed that the bomb was attached to him rather than the fuel truck (good acting, Bad Guy #23!). but I digress. the scenes of verbal sparring and Texas Hold ‘Em (and, what the fuck? it’s baccarat! maybe I’m an elitist.) and the smaller-scale fight scenes were more my speed, and there were a few scenes that gave me a good chuckle. I had some conceptual issues with the whole Bond-is-poisoned storyline (again, with a telegraphed ending-can anyone say that they didn’t bet that Vesper was going to come along and help Bond in his time of need?) due to the fact that he was apparently given digitalis, a favorite cardiac poison in movies, but one that typically causes bradycardia, not tachycardia. (and then Bond progressed from v-tach to ... some random and illogical heart rhythm (instead of the more logical v-fib, which is correctable by defibrillation.) y'know, I probably shouldn’t deconstruct the fragile movie logic.
anyway, the big action scenes were too damn long; I was bored of them before they were even half over. it also bugged me that in the initial freerunning scene, every time they cut to Bond pausing to regroup and plunge along in pursuit again, he was increasingly dusty and sweaty, but never out of breath. yet, mid-chase, in the longer shot of him loping up the crane, he was huffing and puffing all over the place (sudden-onset, brief exercise intolerance? sure.) also, and most damning of Bond/Craig for me, I couldn’t reliably pick out Bond in the final fight scene. at first, I honestly thought “why are these two bad guys fighting with each other? ...ohhhhh.” I was able to identify Bond as one of any two goons engaged in a firefight or fisticuffs and left it at that. whether that was due to bad costuming or bad editing, it just didn’t work for me.
can we take a quick aside to look at the torture scene? so, I’m clearly terribly naive, because as they were cutting the seat out of the chair, I had no idea what was going on, and thought maybe they were going to string Bond up and make it more difficult to keep himself balanced. then they cut to a long shot and I figured out fast that dangly bits are clearly a big liability. I found a promo shot of the scene online but have a question-the lateral supporting pieces of the chair would get in the way of the carpet beater, no? unless Le Chiffre has amazing aim, or took the side strut out with the first hit, the mechanics of the chair and the torture method don’t jibe. for reference:
the plot wasn’t too bad, it just didn’t have a ton of substance. I never became too fond of Vesper, or the idea of Besper = twu wuv, so I didn’t find her fate troublesome (though the development of her story felt very rushed at the end). I was amused that, for all the talk of the Bond reboot and a new style, they stuck to the formula of Good Bond Girl, Bad Bond Girl, and Dead Bond Girl (with some necessary overlapping). maybe next time they’ll surprise us and have an Undead Apathetic Bond Girl or a Bond Guy (!?!).
in the end, I think that it’s an okay movie, neither awesome nor terrible, which seems to put me in a very small group of people who aren’t slavering on one side of the CraigBond debate. clearly I had enough to say about this to write an epically wandering diatribe, but the thing that makes me most frustrated about the movie is that it didn’t make me care much about Bond. the idea of Bond is that he’s kind of a jackhole, but he earns his smugness in proportion to his displays of coolness, which always puts him in my good graces for the other actors’ Bonds. Craig’s Bond persistently didn’t grow on me; he didn’t make me care about his character, either to love him or hate him (even Timothy Dalton inspired emotion-granted, that emotion was ire, but still). Casino Royale was a solid action flick, but that’s not good enough when said action flick is a member of such an established series. and it’s true that I’m not a devotee of Fleming’s books-I have a few of them, but I don’t have a good background in the literary canon to justify the paradigm shift that has happened in the films, ostensibly to bring the style closer to that of the books. I still look forward to the next Bond film (though “A Quantum of Solace” is a spectacularly dumb name, and the promo poster featured on the wiki page has Bond holding a machine gun instead of his walther ppk/p99 ... I’m not holding out hope for a subtle, suave spy film). yet I predict that when I feel like I need a Bondian study break, I’ll throw in some Thunderball or Live and Let Die or Goldeneye, rather than revisit the Casino.
plus, Daniel Craig has two first names. what’s up with that?
p.s. if you don’t know what ptotic means, go look it up. it’s a cool word.
p.p.s. holy cow, did you read this whole thing? what are your thoughts 'bout the movie?
(:
(warning: 'tis a bit long-nearly twice as long, in fact, as the last paper I wrote. go figure.)
so, I finally saw Casino Royale. I’d been holding off for a bit for no good reason, but post-exam the other day I decided that I needed a study break.
so ... new Bond. Daniel Craig. I ... don’t really care for him as Bond, for a number of reasons. I suppose that, in part, it’s in comparison to the other Bonds. I cut my Bondian teeth on Sean Connery and Roger Moore and love various aspects of both of them. and, as you might imagine, I was fond of Pierce Brosnan as Bond (in fact, I’m rather fond of Pierce Brosnan, full stop). I like the idea and image of Bond as a man’s man, a ladies’ man, someone you’d like to be or know or let yourself be ravished by, equal parts suave and steely. I also support the idea of Bond having a superman streak; Bond is a prodigy, he’s not an everyman who has been trained up right proper. Bond isn’t your average Joe, he’s one of the elite, a position afforded to him due to the fact that he knows how to fight a shark, play baccarat, converse in Russian, drive anything with wheels or treads or propellers, that he can ski and shoot and seduce and look like a million bucks afterwards. I’ve never been much one for the rough-and-tumble style of Bond (I’ve watched both Timothy Dalton movies once, and that was entirely enough), so that likely contributes to my feelings towards the new Bond. however, there’s more than that.
Craig doesn’t look like Bond to me. maybe I’ve been brainwashed into the Bond = (tall + dark)^(handsome) formula, but it wasn’t the fact that he was blond that really galled me. he’s a bit bulky for my taste, yet maybe we’re supposed to assume that he’s going to swap some of the brawn for brain. but he’s got this odd ptotic, craggy look that doesn’t jibe with either my vision of Bond or the one it seems that they’ve crafted for him. neither is something they can fix, they’re just the way he’s built. as I said to one of my housemates during the recent screening of the flick, initially I couldn’t tell if I didn’t like the cut of his suit or the cut of his face. his visage, with his wrinkles and worry lines, doesn’t fit with the image of a Bond who is fresh and rough, someone who hasn’t seen horrors and heartbreak for years and is only now collecting his emotional scars. for all his cheesy lines, I always appreciated that Brosnan’s Bond could convey such anger, frustration, sadness, and conflict in the subtlest of looks. while I appreciated the potential emotion in the scene of Vesper and Bond in the shower, Craig seemed so detached, as though his body was present but his mind was elsewhere and uncaring.
part of it might just be that Craig himself hasn’t yet assimilated the role of Bond to a point where he has become the spy, rather than just playing him. I watched a couple of the extras that were featured on the DVD and he just seems like he’s still that kid playing Bond in the backyard-he hasn’t realized that he’s grown up and is visibly acting in the way that he believes Bond would instead of simply being him. I can’t tell if it was a director’s choice to make Bond less naturally suave, or Craig’s very nature, or just sloppy and inadequate guidance and editing, but subtle distracters, like the fact that Bond chews with his mouth open (!), don’t fit with the overall picture. maybe it’s just part of the general reboot idea; perhaps we’re now playing with a Bond who doesn’t know which fork to use for salad and would rather wear cargo pants, one who will train himself on how to be-or act-debonair, instead of it being second nature to him.
I think that critics were often unnecessarily hard on Craig when he was announced as the new Bond, but secretly part of me agrees with them. a Bond with a blond buzz cut? what’s that about? and apparently I can drive stick better than Craig can, which doesn’t speak too highly of his skills. also, ditching Brosnan as Bond may have been good in hindsight, if the quality of the writing in subsequent films followed the steady decline seen in his last two, but to let him go solely because they wanted to do a reboot comes as a bit of an affront. despite my reaction to Craig as 007, I’ve heard that he’s quite a good actor, and I intend to investigate his filmography. I don’t know-I imagine that time and additional films may well soften my opinion of him.
okay, let me move away from Craig as Bond and look at the film itself. I suppose I should indicate that spoilers shall follow, but really, the statute of limitations has expired by now, methinks.
anyway, the movie. ye gods, what happened? there were, like, seventeen relatively interconnected plots going on, none of which were really well developed to my satisfaction. so, we start with all kinds of rough’n’tumble black’n’white action and a ridiculously ugly gun barrel scene, and then we jump into chaos: there’s this bad guy in Uganda who gives money to this even badder guy under the direction of this other dude whose face you should remember but won’t by the end of the film, because there’s no indication that he’ll be important later, and then we go galloping for about six hours through the streets of Madagascar with a somewhat inept Bond who is aided by even more inept junior agents, then Bond blows up shit (in a way that is physically impossible -- thanks, Mythbusters!) and gets in trouble but isn’t really, and seduces the girl who is killed, then figures out the bomb plot and goes driving around for about eleven hours destroying thousands upon thousands of dollars of aviation-themed props before we even get to the beginning of the main story. more spying, Bond, fewer explosions! yeesh. also, it would be impossible for them to telegraph the resolution of the “suspenseful” scenes any more clearly, e.g. bomb + carabiner + close shot of Bond restraining the Bad Guy #23 by his be-belt-looped waistband = no shit, Sherlock. honestly, it was more surprising that the bad guy looked amazed that the bomb was attached to him rather than the fuel truck (good acting, Bad Guy #23!). but I digress. the scenes of verbal sparring and Texas Hold ‘Em (and, what the fuck? it’s baccarat! maybe I’m an elitist.) and the smaller-scale fight scenes were more my speed, and there were a few scenes that gave me a good chuckle. I had some conceptual issues with the whole Bond-is-poisoned storyline (again, with a telegraphed ending-can anyone say that they didn’t bet that Vesper was going to come along and help Bond in his time of need?) due to the fact that he was apparently given digitalis, a favorite cardiac poison in movies, but one that typically causes bradycardia, not tachycardia. (and then Bond progressed from v-tach to ... some random and illogical heart rhythm (instead of the more logical v-fib, which is correctable by defibrillation.) y'know, I probably shouldn’t deconstruct the fragile movie logic.
anyway, the big action scenes were too damn long; I was bored of them before they were even half over. it also bugged me that in the initial freerunning scene, every time they cut to Bond pausing to regroup and plunge along in pursuit again, he was increasingly dusty and sweaty, but never out of breath. yet, mid-chase, in the longer shot of him loping up the crane, he was huffing and puffing all over the place (sudden-onset, brief exercise intolerance? sure.) also, and most damning of Bond/Craig for me, I couldn’t reliably pick out Bond in the final fight scene. at first, I honestly thought “why are these two bad guys fighting with each other? ...ohhhhh.” I was able to identify Bond as one of any two goons engaged in a firefight or fisticuffs and left it at that. whether that was due to bad costuming or bad editing, it just didn’t work for me.
can we take a quick aside to look at the torture scene? so, I’m clearly terribly naive, because as they were cutting the seat out of the chair, I had no idea what was going on, and thought maybe they were going to string Bond up and make it more difficult to keep himself balanced. then they cut to a long shot and I figured out fast that dangly bits are clearly a big liability. I found a promo shot of the scene online but have a question-the lateral supporting pieces of the chair would get in the way of the carpet beater, no? unless Le Chiffre has amazing aim, or took the side strut out with the first hit, the mechanics of the chair and the torture method don’t jibe. for reference:
the plot wasn’t too bad, it just didn’t have a ton of substance. I never became too fond of Vesper, or the idea of Besper = twu wuv, so I didn’t find her fate troublesome (though the development of her story felt very rushed at the end). I was amused that, for all the talk of the Bond reboot and a new style, they stuck to the formula of Good Bond Girl, Bad Bond Girl, and Dead Bond Girl (with some necessary overlapping). maybe next time they’ll surprise us and have an Undead Apathetic Bond Girl or a Bond Guy (!?!).
in the end, I think that it’s an okay movie, neither awesome nor terrible, which seems to put me in a very small group of people who aren’t slavering on one side of the CraigBond debate. clearly I had enough to say about this to write an epically wandering diatribe, but the thing that makes me most frustrated about the movie is that it didn’t make me care much about Bond. the idea of Bond is that he’s kind of a jackhole, but he earns his smugness in proportion to his displays of coolness, which always puts him in my good graces for the other actors’ Bonds. Craig’s Bond persistently didn’t grow on me; he didn’t make me care about his character, either to love him or hate him (even Timothy Dalton inspired emotion-granted, that emotion was ire, but still). Casino Royale was a solid action flick, but that’s not good enough when said action flick is a member of such an established series. and it’s true that I’m not a devotee of Fleming’s books-I have a few of them, but I don’t have a good background in the literary canon to justify the paradigm shift that has happened in the films, ostensibly to bring the style closer to that of the books. I still look forward to the next Bond film (though “A Quantum of Solace” is a spectacularly dumb name, and the promo poster featured on the wiki page has Bond holding a machine gun instead of his walther ppk/p99 ... I’m not holding out hope for a subtle, suave spy film). yet I predict that when I feel like I need a Bondian study break, I’ll throw in some Thunderball or Live and Let Die or Goldeneye, rather than revisit the Casino.
plus, Daniel Craig has two first names. what’s up with that?
p.s. if you don’t know what ptotic means, go look it up. it’s a cool word.
p.p.s. holy cow, did you read this whole thing? what are your thoughts 'bout the movie?
(: