Yesterday I went to see Casino Royale. It was in fact the second day in a row I went to the 3:25 showing. Here’s a mini review and SPOILERS are possible…
Daniel Craig is, in my humble opinion, the best Bond yet. Yes, I am a woman and I have followed the Bonds, even though they started well before I was born. My mother was a devoted Sean Connery fan so my earliest Bond exposures were the edited for TV Bonds and my mom sighing in her most pathetically-sexually-repressed-Mormon chest heaving sigh that I didn’t understand at the time. As I got older and went to the Bonds voluntarily several men had tried and failed to capture the part well, then came Pierce Brosnan who, I believed struck it perfectly in the Sauvé and debonair category but failed miserably to draw me in as a human being. He had great sex appeal, and little lovability.
Tragically, I guess that’s also part of the writing and the inability to somehow portray James body as a living breathing man but instead must focus on his place as an object. Not that I don’t mind ogling a beautiful man and giving my best imitation of a pathetically-sexually-repressed-Mormon chest heaving sigh but for purposes of a good story and characters that I can find endearing because they have an Achilles heel or a soft underbelly they fight to protect, I preferred not only the writing in Casino Royale but also the depth which Daniel Craig added to the part in his amazing ability to show a lot of humanity without saying anything. The stunts were fantastic and breath catching, the occasional weird camera shot or angle added to the sense of things beginning, the soundtrack fit snuggly to the action and the drama which let me to feel more moved – pulled in rather than held at bay. And I have to say, the shower scene was the hottest sexless shower scene I’ve ever sat through – twice.
It’s possible that because Casino Royale was the beginning of the Bonds, that Ian Fleming actually wrote Bond as a man rather that a tool and that over time and commercialization that aspect of what makes him, in my opinion, a stronger character was lost to the lack of vision by producers and the elites that calculate value by the marketability of pathetically-sexually-repressed-Mormon chest heaving sighs, after all, those sighs sell tickets.
Obviously half of the reason I went back two days in a row was that Daniel Craig is a stunning man with powerful charisma and a gorgeous body, and I’m not ashamed to say I did a fair bit of sighing myself, but the other reason I went back is because there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I went home the first night and told D that I really liked the movie, but I couldn’t put it into any better words than that. Something about this Bond film was infinitely better than the ones I’d seen before. I wondered if it was the generational shift, or the ability to see him as a fledgling Suave and Debonair, the glimpse into his boyish underbelly, the first really intelligently written Bond girl Eva Green or perhaps the best plot being something believable to the times, terrorism on a much more understandable scale rather than world domination and destruction at the hands of a mad scientist with an unrealistic fantasy weapon of mass destruction.
I think it was all of the above. His beginning has been set in motion, I don’t see the legacy of James Bond fading anytime soon, so I hope for the sake of everyone involved that the scripts henceforth will continue to be written with this much better quality, and that Daniel Craig is given a fair chance to put his mark on the on the Bond legend. I also think part of the reason I felt compelled to write this blog had a great deal to do with the backlash that the actor Daniel Craig endured upon accepting the Bond gig. I was astonished, actually that people had such strong reactions to him winning the part. I needed to see the movie for myself so I could determine with a pathetically-sexually-repressed-Mormon chest heaving sigh, Daniel Craig and this new writing made this the best James Bond movie I’ve seen yet.
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