Casino Royale
Dec. 10th, 2006 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat[To get away from my heat problems took off to the movies this afternoon. Apparently the thermostat that controls the heat in the building switchs off when the room it is in reachs 69 degrees, which is all well and good, except for the fact that that usually happens when it only reaches 60 or 61, if I'm really lucky 63 or 64 degrees in my apartment. Woke up yesterday morning at 10 am to 57 degrees and this morning to 60. Hot is 66 degrees, which is what it is right now because I used the stove and it is only 50 degrees outside. The landlord promises me he'll remedy the situation - I've been bugging him about it off and on all weekend. Have decided to give him until Tuesday. Then I'm buying a small space heater. It's ridiculous considering how much I pay each month in rent. I chose Casino Royale after it had been enthusiastically and rather vehemently recommended by a gal I met on Friday night at Chez Laurence prior to seeing the Bob Dylan Historical Retrospective at the Morgan Library and Museum on 38th and Madison. It's free on Friday nights by the way. ETA: Heat problem solved for now - it came on tonight and am warm for first time in five days. A ptich perfect 68 degrees. YAY!!!]
Casino Royale is the perfect film for anyone who wants to see a bit of ass-kicking or feels an overwhelming need to punch a boxing bag. After seeing it I understood why the critics loved it. The film is "old-school" Bond, going back to the flavor and nature of the Ian Fleming Books. Having read several of them, I can say that without compunction. Bond in the books is as Judi Dench's "M" describes him, "little more than a blunt instrutment" or "weapon" aimed at the enemy and intended to take it out without remorse or hesistation. Fleming meant the books to be a commentary on how men were turned into weapons, and Bond was supposed to be no more than an passably attractive and occassionally charming thug. But still a thug. Connery kept some of the thuggishness there, but over time the image got romanticized. There's something almost bare-bones about the violence in Fleming's novels. You are following the adventures of a "hitman" after-all. They are noir fiction, which admittedly is not for everyone, and Bond is a compelling anti-hero, from poor roots, no family, constructed and made by his country. A human weapon. Robert Ludlhum in a manner of speaking constructed a similar hero with Bourne. The cold-blooded killer who kills for Queen and Country, yet is still just a cold blooded killer.
Of the books - the one's I remember the best, and it was over 20 years ago that I read them, were The Spy Who Loved Me and Live and Let Die - neither bore any resemblance to the films that carried their names. There were no gadgets. No fancy villians. No huge plots. Just Bond, with his gun, chasing men who were killers like himself. Reading them reminds me of reading Dashielle Hammett or Raymond Chandler orJohn D Ross McDonald's Harper [*thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oursin for the correction]. And of the films carrying Fleming's character only Connery's Doctor No ever felt like the books.
Connery, a former Mr. Universe put the stamp on Bond, a stamp that no one else has come close to until Daniel Craig, who may not be as "pretty" as Connery, but still contains the same rugged deadly charm. You believe Craig will kill you, not just that he will but that he can and with his bare hands. I believed the same thing of Scean Connery. I did not believe it of the men who performed the role in between, even though I was highly entertained by them and will probably watch just about anything Pierce Bronsan does even if it involves reading a phone book. But Bronsan did not fit the image of the character I envisioned from the books, while Craig does.
Craig is not what I'd call a pretty man. His ears stick out oddly, his hair is sparse, and his face worn, but I see the experience etched in the planes of his face. And while the chest, those perfectly formed abs, make up for it - I tend to like leaner builds. So, no, I would not call him photogenic. But, when you watch him on screen, he draws you in, there's an almost thuggish beauty to his manner and while he does not move with the panther like grace of a Connery, his style is similarily beautiful and simarily deadly - much like a tiger's or perhaps a gorilla - as he races and jumps through the chase scenes. And like Connery, you realize the playboy, the rich-boy beneath the veneer is nothing more than a practiced charade.
The movie itself, casting aside, may well be the best written Bond film since the Connery era. And in some respects is better written than the Connery films, eschewing the gadgets, supervillians, and multiple babes.
There are three babes and all are beautiful, but Bond only really sleeps with one and not until they've known each other a while. Also of the three women, she's by far the most intelligent. Unlike most films, including prior Bond films, we do not see the love scenes, they are implied. The violence on the other hand is not, and you know what you are getting into within the first five minutes of the film, where we watch Bond brutally beat up a man with his bare hands in a bathroom. A sequence that is filmed in black and white with splashes of red.
The majority of the film time, which came to two hours and twenty minutes or thereabouts, since it started around 1:20 and ended around 3:20. (Actual start time was 1pm, but we had 15 minutes of commericials and 15 minutes of previews, the best of the bunch was possibly the Spiderman trailer. I am growing tired of the Will Smith - "The Pursuit of Happyness" - trailer - which moved me the first time I saw it and now merely grates, this round I entertained myself during it by switching the gender roles and realized how unrealistic that would be. A notion that still depresses me.) But I digress. The majority of the film consists of rather lengthy chase sequences. Some so long that I actually glanced at my watch during one and the guy in front of me went to the bathroom and came back without missing that much of it. We had at least three. And I found them to be dull. Chase sequences lost their appeal for me a long time ago, ever since television procedurals and cop shows began to copy them. I blame the director of The French Connection for the trend, which he brought back with Ronin. Although Run Lola Run and the Bourne films with Matt Damon are equally to blame. Preferred those. Watching two guys chase after each other, jumping over obstacles, and around corners is about as entertaining as watching two people groan and similute sex, wait I take that back, less interesting, prefer to watch the sex scenes. But clearly I'm in the minority, because no one else seems to mind these sequences, otherwise they wouldn't keep getting filmed, would they? That is my only major cricism of this film - the lengthy chase sequences, which could have been trimmed. Actually a good percentage of this film could have been cut - it drags in places. There's a whole sequence at the end that I would have trimmed. But then I think most films today are twenty to thirty minutes too long. And I could have done without the gratutious torture sequences that you always seem to see in this films, reminding me of how sadistic our culture is. Not sure if that's really a spoiler - it is after all a *Bond* film, they all have torture sequences.
That said, quite a few things work here. So many in fact that I'd say the film may be the best "action" film of the year.
It accomplishes what it sets out to do, which was simply to redefine the series and go back to the original intent and themes of the novels. The dialogue is sharp. The acting pitch-perfect. The plot brainy. This is a thinking man's Bond - you watch him detect and figure out things, as opposed to go into the fracas guns blazing. Judi Dench's "M" acts as a good counter-point to the testrone, and was truly the only thing worth keeping from the prior series. She acts as an odd moral center to the work, part mentor, part disciplinarian. With Eva Green's Vesper Lynde the perfect Bond gal since perhaps Pussy Galore in GoldFinger or Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. In Vesper, he meets his intellectual match. Barb for barb. And through her character, we see not the polished playboy of the earlier films, graced by the likes of the slick Bronsan or the tongue firmly in cheek Moore, or if you will, the overtly serious Timothy Dalton, but the vunerability of the thug, the anti-hero, the tiger who wishes inside that he could choose another path, trust people, fall in love, be something other than what he is, more than another killer working for MI 6. We also meet a few old friends from the books, rarities in the other films - such as Felix Lieter. The violence is real here and less gratiutious than usual, with real consequences - following in the paths of other more recent action and horror films that feel a need to go back to the cinematic realism of the action flicks of yesteryear (specifically the early to mid-70's when cinematic realism hit its gritty high point).
In most of the Bond films, particularly the most recent ones, Bond emerges unscafed, with barely a scrape from his skirmishes and we never feel he is much jeopardy, an undestructable robot. And the bodies that fall around him seem unbloodied, neat almost. Here, not so much. From the get go - it is clear we will feel the violence. It is raw. It has blood. Bond does not emerge from it unscathed either emotionally, intellectually, or physically. Nor for that matter do his opponents. Or the British service he works for. Cinematic realism is at work here. The credits, the style of the film is less slick, more raw. With almost, I want to say, a late 1960's feel to it. If you were to ask me which Bond film it reminded me of, I'd say Dr. No, Connery's first excursion as 007, and if you were to ask which recent action film it resembled, I'd pick the Bourne Identity starring Matt Damon as opposed to Tom Cruise's lavish Mission Impossible III.
Casino Royale is overall a character driven, thinking person's action thriller with a hint of romance. The women unlike the other films, are bright and savvy, not just arm candy with provocative names. And the man at the center is multi-dimensional. I'd rate it as the best written James Bond film I've seen since Doctor No. And perhaps the best action film I've seen this year, which is admittedly not saying much, since the only other one I've seen or remember seeing is The Departed, also far too long. I found the characters more interesting and appealing in this one than the Departed, but then I'm admittedly not a Matt Damon/Leonardi Di Caprio fan. To each their own, as they say.
Casino Royale is the perfect film for anyone who wants to see a bit of ass-kicking or feels an overwhelming need to punch a boxing bag. After seeing it I understood why the critics loved it. The film is "old-school" Bond, going back to the flavor and nature of the Ian Fleming Books. Having read several of them, I can say that without compunction. Bond in the books is as Judi Dench's "M" describes him, "little more than a blunt instrutment" or "weapon" aimed at the enemy and intended to take it out without remorse or hesistation. Fleming meant the books to be a commentary on how men were turned into weapons, and Bond was supposed to be no more than an passably attractive and occassionally charming thug. But still a thug. Connery kept some of the thuggishness there, but over time the image got romanticized. There's something almost bare-bones about the violence in Fleming's novels. You are following the adventures of a "hitman" after-all. They are noir fiction, which admittedly is not for everyone, and Bond is a compelling anti-hero, from poor roots, no family, constructed and made by his country. A human weapon. Robert Ludlhum in a manner of speaking constructed a similar hero with Bourne. The cold-blooded killer who kills for Queen and Country, yet is still just a cold blooded killer.
Of the books - the one's I remember the best, and it was over 20 years ago that I read them, were The Spy Who Loved Me and Live and Let Die - neither bore any resemblance to the films that carried their names. There were no gadgets. No fancy villians. No huge plots. Just Bond, with his gun, chasing men who were killers like himself. Reading them reminds me of reading Dashielle Hammett or Raymond Chandler or
oursin for the correction]. And of the films carrying Fleming's character only Connery's Doctor No ever felt like the books. Connery, a former Mr. Universe put the stamp on Bond, a stamp that no one else has come close to until Daniel Craig, who may not be as "pretty" as Connery, but still contains the same rugged deadly charm. You believe Craig will kill you, not just that he will but that he can and with his bare hands. I believed the same thing of Scean Connery. I did not believe it of the men who performed the role in between, even though I was highly entertained by them and will probably watch just about anything Pierce Bronsan does even if it involves reading a phone book. But Bronsan did not fit the image of the character I envisioned from the books, while Craig does.
Craig is not what I'd call a pretty man. His ears stick out oddly, his hair is sparse, and his face worn, but I see the experience etched in the planes of his face. And while the chest, those perfectly formed abs, make up for it - I tend to like leaner builds. So, no, I would not call him photogenic. But, when you watch him on screen, he draws you in, there's an almost thuggish beauty to his manner and while he does not move with the panther like grace of a Connery, his style is similarily beautiful and simarily deadly - much like a tiger's or perhaps a gorilla - as he races and jumps through the chase scenes. And like Connery, you realize the playboy, the rich-boy beneath the veneer is nothing more than a practiced charade.
The movie itself, casting aside, may well be the best written Bond film since the Connery era. And in some respects is better written than the Connery films, eschewing the gadgets, supervillians, and multiple babes.
There are three babes and all are beautiful, but Bond only really sleeps with one and not until they've known each other a while. Also of the three women, she's by far the most intelligent. Unlike most films, including prior Bond films, we do not see the love scenes, they are implied. The violence on the other hand is not, and you know what you are getting into within the first five minutes of the film, where we watch Bond brutally beat up a man with his bare hands in a bathroom. A sequence that is filmed in black and white with splashes of red.
The majority of the film time, which came to two hours and twenty minutes or thereabouts, since it started around 1:20 and ended around 3:20. (Actual start time was 1pm, but we had 15 minutes of commericials and 15 minutes of previews, the best of the bunch was possibly the Spiderman trailer. I am growing tired of the Will Smith - "The Pursuit of Happyness" - trailer - which moved me the first time I saw it and now merely grates, this round I entertained myself during it by switching the gender roles and realized how unrealistic that would be. A notion that still depresses me.) But I digress. The majority of the film consists of rather lengthy chase sequences. Some so long that I actually glanced at my watch during one and the guy in front of me went to the bathroom and came back without missing that much of it. We had at least three. And I found them to be dull. Chase sequences lost their appeal for me a long time ago, ever since television procedurals and cop shows began to copy them. I blame the director of The French Connection for the trend, which he brought back with Ronin. Although Run Lola Run and the Bourne films with Matt Damon are equally to blame. Preferred those. Watching two guys chase after each other, jumping over obstacles, and around corners is about as entertaining as watching two people groan and similute sex, wait I take that back, less interesting, prefer to watch the sex scenes. But clearly I'm in the minority, because no one else seems to mind these sequences, otherwise they wouldn't keep getting filmed, would they? That is my only major cricism of this film - the lengthy chase sequences, which could have been trimmed. Actually a good percentage of this film could have been cut - it drags in places. There's a whole sequence at the end that I would have trimmed. But then I think most films today are twenty to thirty minutes too long. And I could have done without the gratutious torture sequences that you always seem to see in this films, reminding me of how sadistic our culture is. Not sure if that's really a spoiler - it is after all a *Bond* film, they all have torture sequences.
That said, quite a few things work here. So many in fact that I'd say the film may be the best "action" film of the year.
It accomplishes what it sets out to do, which was simply to redefine the series and go back to the original intent and themes of the novels. The dialogue is sharp. The acting pitch-perfect. The plot brainy. This is a thinking man's Bond - you watch him detect and figure out things, as opposed to go into the fracas guns blazing. Judi Dench's "M" acts as a good counter-point to the testrone, and was truly the only thing worth keeping from the prior series. She acts as an odd moral center to the work, part mentor, part disciplinarian. With Eva Green's Vesper Lynde the perfect Bond gal since perhaps Pussy Galore in GoldFinger or Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. In Vesper, he meets his intellectual match. Barb for barb. And through her character, we see not the polished playboy of the earlier films, graced by the likes of the slick Bronsan or the tongue firmly in cheek Moore, or if you will, the overtly serious Timothy Dalton, but the vunerability of the thug, the anti-hero, the tiger who wishes inside that he could choose another path, trust people, fall in love, be something other than what he is, more than another killer working for MI 6. We also meet a few old friends from the books, rarities in the other films - such as Felix Lieter. The violence is real here and less gratiutious than usual, with real consequences - following in the paths of other more recent action and horror films that feel a need to go back to the cinematic realism of the action flicks of yesteryear (specifically the early to mid-70's when cinematic realism hit its gritty high point).
In most of the Bond films, particularly the most recent ones, Bond emerges unscafed, with barely a scrape from his skirmishes and we never feel he is much jeopardy, an undestructable robot. And the bodies that fall around him seem unbloodied, neat almost. Here, not so much. From the get go - it is clear we will feel the violence. It is raw. It has blood. Bond does not emerge from it unscathed either emotionally, intellectually, or physically. Nor for that matter do his opponents. Or the British service he works for. Cinematic realism is at work here. The credits, the style of the film is less slick, more raw. With almost, I want to say, a late 1960's feel to it. If you were to ask me which Bond film it reminded me of, I'd say Dr. No, Connery's first excursion as 007, and if you were to ask which recent action film it resembled, I'd pick the Bourne Identity starring Matt Damon as opposed to Tom Cruise's lavish Mission Impossible III.
Casino Royale is overall a character driven, thinking person's action thriller with a hint of romance. The women unlike the other films, are bright and savvy, not just arm candy with provocative names. And the man at the center is multi-dimensional. I'd rate it as the best written James Bond film I've seen since Doctor No. And perhaps the best action film I've seen this year, which is admittedly not saying much, since the only other one I've seen or remember seeing is The Departed, also far too long. I found the characters more interesting and appealing in this one than the Departed, but then I'm admittedly not a Matt Damon/Leonardi Di Caprio fan. To each their own, as they say.
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Re: Clarification...
Date: 2006-12-11 08:32 pm (UTC)I think that Casino Royale will fill my quota of on-screen violence for a little while. I sometimes worry about inputting that much violence into my brain. It can't be good for me no matter how artistic I think it is.
Re: Clarification...
Date: 2006-12-11 10:44 pm (UTC)1) it desentizes you to violence, or you get used to it (sort of like cops might or a boxer, I suppose, although I doubt they ever really do)
2.) It gets rid of your own aggression and fury.
I find them somewhat cathartic at times. But again depends on the violence. Casino Royale and Buffy didn't bug me that much. Saw (and its sequels), Hostel, Descent, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the other hand - I can't watch. Too gratutious and too much emphasis on torture. I also could handle Angel and Buffy over Alias, which also went a bit too far with the torture sequences. 24 occassionally grates. And I'm finding the procedurals - Criminal Minds, CSI, etc a bit too much. BSG - on the other hand - does not bug me. Maybe because with BSG - the violence is reacted to. Much like it is here.
After the fight sequence in the stairwell - we see how Vesper reacted.
It's not *just* another fight scene. And the opening fight sequence is equally important. Same with BSG - the violence of the boxing match is commented on, you are supposed to feel it, supposed to wince.
It doesn't dissentize you and it is not meant to be merely cathartic.
That violence - I can deal with. It's not there to entertain so much as inform. IT's meant to tell me something about the character and something about society at large. Mission Impossible III's violence bugged me far more - because it felt like pyrotechnics and stunts, fancy footwork, comic bookish, as opposed to have consequences. Granted you could say the same about the style of BTVS and ATS, except there were always consequences to the violence depicted in those shows. I think a violent scene or fight sequence should have the same character weight as a sex scene - it should be used to push character and plot forward, not just throw out there for gratutious entertainment. The films that do the former - last longer, resonate, the ones that do the latter may be fun at the time, but we tend to forget and not want to watch again.
Re: Clarification...
Date: 2006-12-12 12:35 am (UTC)I like your idea of the balance of a violent scene - I am going to keep that in mind when I close my eyes! Did it actually forward the story?