Aside from how brutishly, gremlin-ugly Daniel Craig is

Michelle and I watched Casino Royale last night. Aside from how brutishly, gremlin-ugly Daniel Craig is, the thing that was the biggest barrier to enjoying it were the long, ultra-choreographed fight scenes

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reviewed by: Russell Wardlow
May 10, 2007

Michelle and I watched Casino Royale last night. Aside from how brutishly, gremlin-ugly Daniel Craig is, the thing that was the biggest barrier to enjoying it were the long, ultra-choreographed fight scenes. My brain just shuts off during these things. I often use the time to grab something to eat or go to the bathroom. The martial arts and other bodily movements involved are depicted as being brought off to precisely that there’s no sense of danger or suspense, just of actors proud of how much work they put into contorting their bodies that way. One of the reasons I refused to see any of the Matrix sequels except on DVD, apart from not wanting to give those Wachowski jackoffs the price of a movie ticket, was that I wanted the ability to fast-forward through the interminable, absolutely pointless combat filler (so as to get more quickly to the sparkling dialogue and philosophical musings of the script, I suppose). How much more entertaining all of these movies would be if fight scenes were relegated to a few seconds of intense, and even relatively clumsy, action. Not only would this give them an added sense of realism as opposed to the semi-“bloody ballet” they end up becoming, it would also add tension and suspense to the rest of the movie by heightening the feeling of danger during those periods where the hero is not physically fighting, because it would impress upon the audience how aberrant and therefore affecting having to suddenly kill another person in personal combat is. By making the act a relative marathon of acrobatics, the audience instead feels like the hero, and by extension they, have slogged through a combination of an aerobics class and long division.

Posted by: miles
Casino Royale was terrible. I could write a whole long piece on this if I were still blogging, but it’s no surprise that it was written by Paul Haggis, the Crash guy.

The movie made Bond:

1) a brutal thug rather than a debonaire spy (e.g. “shaken or stirred? Do I look like I give a damn”, or the part where he gives out his name at the casino when checking in, or the part at the end where he *shoots the guy* and then says “Bond. James Bond.”)

2) “human” and a f**kup (screws up at the embassy, loses the card game and has to get bailed out, gets himself poisoned, gets captured, gets tricked by the woman)

3) someone to be rescued/defied by “strong women” (e.g. train scene w/ hostility by Vesper [that banter wasn’t sexy], heart attack scene)

It’s basically the destruction of the franchise. The sophisticated secret agent has been replaced by an unsophisticated, straight ahead thug. In every aspect of the film, the refined and complex (language, tactics, gadgets) is discarded for the simple and unsubtle. Moreover, the man is (quite intentionally) made a fool of by the woman.

Bond’s most heroic moment in the film is pummeling a guy to death in a stairwell. That about says it all.

Posted by: Udolpho

My friend is a huge 007 fan and he’s angry about this one.
He didn’t like that Bond’s not suave and debonair but pretty much a thug.
What had my friend the most outraged was that the opening credits didn’t have silhouettes of hot, nekkid women but images of 007.
They definitely changed who and what 007 is and I don’t know if that’s a good thing.

Ahhh, I kind of liked the first Casino Royale even though it was a little too 70s silly.

Posted by: Bill
Technically, I thought Casino Royale was okay, but not great. It was an honest attempt to get back to the feel of the Ian Fleming novels. Unfortunately, it fails because the character should have been left in the 50s or early 60s. Every time I see Judy Densch overplaying M, my eyes roll. I was also piqued by the recasting of Felix Leiter as a black man, which was a jarringly obvious PC move. These things would be just fine if the characters were something new, but they’re not. You’re imposing a worldview on the story that was never intended by its creator.

The biggest annoyance for me was the utter cowardice the producers showed by having a film about terrorists, of whom none were Muslim. The one group they showed, the African thugs, were shown to be Christian when the leader appeared wearing a big cross. Yeah, the old Bond movies could be corny, but when they talked about the Soviets, you knew they were the bad guys, or at lesser bad guys. No one could outdo Spectre, of course.

The best Bond movie they could make would be one set in the Cold War. That way you could dispense with the modern hysteria over gender and race relations (or at least a good part of it), and tell a more honest story.

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