New James Bond = Daniel Craig.

I *liked* Pierce Brosnan. I've never read the books, but he looked good and camped it up in some of the campest Bond films, so yeah, horses for courses, he was the best actor for those films. Imagine someone playing them for serious, ugh.

However, Daniel Craig was marvellous. As was the film. And you lot whinging about Chris Cornell just because he's Chris Cornell, get over yourselves. As a "Bond theme" (and let's face it, there *is* a genre of that), it pissed all over, say, Die Another Day. You listened to that Cornell song alongside the credits which were great and stylish and retro enough for a revisitation of the start of Bond's career but without the wavey women, and the whole thing just screamed "HELLO!! THIS IS A BOND MOVIE"!!! Is that not all one wants from a Bond theme?

(note, I never need to hear it again in my life out of context, but it worked perfectly fine where it was for what it was)

I couldn't disagree more.

Die Another Day I liked out of context. In context, urgh.

There was Richard Branson going through airport security,

er, wasn't it a cardboard cut out? something to do with virgin airlines

uh guys she didn't have blood on her hands, she was going sorta loco right then.

I distinctly remember her saying the blood wouldn't all come off even though she had been in the shower all that time, but perhaps your post is also metaphoric!

Read yet another "Could Bond be black?" piece in the Grauniad the other day, the issue being the difficulty in reconciling Bond being black and British in a way that suggested the writer may have never met the likes of me ;-).

I remember when Pierce stopped compensating for the shortcomings of his movies, which was right around The World Is Not Enough. Did anyone besides me enjoy The Matador, btw?

I wasn't a fan of the Cornell, but on reflection, think it could've been aces if a woman (Bjork!) sung it.

Hm, I can hear that.

Duuuuuude.

Russian girl from The Good Thief as Bond Girl.
Directed by Doug Liman.

I'm there.

Supoib. Absolutely nothing to complain about apart from the titles which I thought were a bit Catch Me if You Can silliness rather than Maurice Binder's dancing girl glamour. I assume they decided dancing girls to be too tacky for the new Bond. Fair enuff.

Some wonderful scenes and Vesper ispossibly the most beautiful Bond girl ever, as well as the most convincing relationship. is it the first time Bond has ever said "I love you"?

The action was wicked and did not miss the silly explosions at all. Long but not too long. I wanna see it again already.

"And now he knew that she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape."

lol Ian Fleming wtf

yes

Movie has now made around the same amount worldwide as Die Another Day, which was a huge hit = odds are very unlikely they'll ease back on the style and approach in this one for the next film. Good thing too.

Finished _Casino Royale_ and found it was fascinating to compare the movie with the book; what they say about popular culture changing -- but more than that, instructive about the differences in storytelling in the two mediums. The torture scene in the movie is straight from the book (and could not have been filmed at the time), but many plot points were shifted or expressed metaphorically, and two important characters were profoundly changed, but not without regard to the integrity of the story.

A case in point is the basic plot turn, a casino card game. In the book it's baccarat, unfamiliar to most readers and thus explained fairly meticulously. Rather than slow down the movie, they used tournament-style Texas Hold-'em, and explained nothing.

The difference in believability is profound. A large amount of money has to be bet and lost, so in the poker game it's done with a combination of bluffing and absolutely unbelievable luck -- you'd have to play for years, a lifetime, for those hands to come up.

But the only way to win a huge pile in baccarat is to bet a huge pile and wait for the cards to fall. It changes the psychology in an important way, because nobody can bluff. I think the technical term is "balls to the wall."

Of course the role of coincidence is different in movies. Impossible poker hands in a book make me put the book away. But movies treat reality differently: that guy _does_ have a royal flush. I can see it.

I think the book's story is better. The characters have to be viewed with a bit of a filter, allowing for the half century that's passed. Women are primarily sexual commodities to Bond and the Soviets are out to conquer the world, preferably with evil tools. But after almost being tortured to death by a monster, Bond has an extended epiphany where he realizes that he is no less monstrous -- that his "license to kill" is permission to perform psychotic acts for God and Crown. The earlier Bond movies had a touch of that, and so does this latest, but the middle ones feature a denatured hero with a killing smirk...

I like the bit about the cards.

Actually, one of the worse bits of the movie was that guy explaining all the hands to Vespa just to clue in the noobs in the audience.