EDITORS Note: Dirty Benny's weekly rants became a staple of our forum January 2014. We've enjoy them so much we asked Benny to publish a few here on the main page. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have.
You can see more of Dirty Benny's Weekly Rants here in our Classic Bond Forum
RANT #1 The Beginning
I feel it appropriate to start at the beginning both literally and figuratively, with Casino Royal. As all of you are well aware this is the first novel staring Ian Fleming’s world famous British spy, it is also the start of this site and the coming together of all us classic Bond fans in protest of Craig’s casting and his debut of the acting style I call “Method Mumbling”. We have the beginning of the total disregard of the “formula” which will be a future article unto itself! We also get the beginning of the full-fledged, unbridled ruin of the franchise at Babs’ hands. Here Babs has a golden opportunity to finally finish what her father started by filming the last un-filmed Fleming novel, but alas they decided this was to be a ham-fisted “origin story” as if Bond needed one let alone three in a row, now four including Spectre! How do you screw this up! Fleming did all the heavy lifting for you! Yet they cut out most of the story only leaving in three elements, a gambling show down, Vesper’s kidnapping, and the testicle torture. All three fail.
First the showdown, Bond played Baccarat for 45 years on film because of this book! Yet when it finally comes to the big screen we are treated to a Texas hold’em tournament, I guess to ensure the self-absorbed Vegas douche crowd feels included?
Vesper’s kidnapping was a tense, taught, car chase which encompassed several pages culminating in a terrific crash followed by several more pages running down the aftermath, CR does all this in a throw away 30 second scene.
As for the ball busting, literally, in the novel the torture scene was intensely written, causing any man to squirm in his chair as he read. However in the film we get a laughable homoerotic ball slapping which is so comical, it’s the only time we see Craig laugh during his tenure as Bond!
Though I suppose I could have gone on I decided to keep this rant short and sweet since I was sort of testing the waters. It's an honor to have been invited to post here on the main site, I hope these rants are as well accepted here as they were in the forum. They will grow in detail and content as time goes on, I hope this has whetted your appetites. Thank you.
Up next Purvis and Wade, the same movie five times.