I'll probably swing by the cinema when it's on, like I did with the other films from Goldeneye onwards. Even though I don't think Daniel Craig is suave enough looking for the role of Bond, looks like he should be off playing footy or something.

Batman and Robin : Batman Begins :: Die Another Day : Casino Royale

I can't cope with a blonde Bond personally; the look is completely off-putting to me. Especially some South African.

In the Playstation game 007 Racing (2000), the character R (voiced by John Cleese) specifically says: Q could drive better than that, and he's dead!. The game's canonicity is debatable however (as is the good taste of the line itself, given that Llewelyn died in a car crash).

Spoiler stuff

I love how it uses bond streotypes to play with the audience a little bit.

I mean, maybe it's late to the party in that, after the Bourne movies, Tony Jaa, Jason Statham and MI:III, but I think it's a turn for the better, after 10 years of unadulterated shit and wasting Pierce Brosnan's tenure in everything since Goldeneye.

No, Q isn't in Casino Royale. Neither is Miss Moneypenny. It's based on the very first James Bond story, you know. Of, basically, how "James Bond" became "007".

See, the thing to note about James Bond is that he is a trained killer, and he's rather ruthless and cautious about it. The movies play up the "secret agent" aspect; the books tend to focus on the targets of Bond's missions. They read like profiles of villains. The movies play up the villain's eccentricities, and kind of turn them into cartoons.

Bond is somewhat superstitious. "Casino Royale" is his first big mission (basically, he has to win a huge game of baccarat to bankrupt a KGB funder) and during it, he genuinely falls in love with a girl. The bad guy uses Bond's love of this girl to, as it were, raise the stakes.

What it comes down to is a real emotional investment in the mission on Bond's part. And by the end, he's had something of an emotional scarring. This is basically how Ian Fleming set up Bond as a ladies' man for the rest of the series. Ever since that mission, it's kind of a superstition of his, that he has to have a woman involved. Notice how he picks up and sleeps with the first girl he meets on-site at every mission? Like Solid Snake would be searching for a gun. It's obviously a psychological complex of his.

What the movies have never captured of the books is how James Bond genuinely and sincerely falls in "actual love" with all of the "Bond girls". In the movies the "love" aspect is always trivialized, and turned into just plain something to stare at. The girls who survive until the end of the mission are always given a final love scene, and if the image fades to black while they're kissing, the viewer generally gets the impression that, once the credits have started rolling, Bond opens his eyes, asks the girl who the hell she is, puts on his clothes, and walks out the door. Such is the near-robotic nature of the James Bond character.

In a way, you could say that his "always" "falling in love" with a girl is merely an expression that the author would find a spy story boring without some kind of love interest. In other words, the girls -- and, then, Bond's complexes surrounding them -- are narrative devices. Everything is a narrative device. This would make it pointless to argue continuity; Bond's relationships with women are as individually significant as Wile E. Coyote's hospital bills.

In other words, yes, the stories are all fluff.

The Bond character quickly became a legend; and then, eventually, became a pretty huge joke. He became something everyone wanted to parody.

Had it not been for Sean Connery, however, few people today would know who Bond is. Few people would have cared to give Roger Moore a shot if Connery hadn't already built up the notion of who the character was. Connery gave James Bond a voice and a personality just slightly different from the novels. The Bond in the novels isn't funny. He's charming, though he's always thinking about his mission. Sometimes he speaks a little strangely.

In the movies, it's "A vodka martini. Shaken, not stirred."

In the books, it's "A dry martini. In a deep champagne goblet. Three measures of Gordons, one of Vodka, and half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice cold, then add a thin slice of lemon peel."

At any rate!

An American television company bought the rights to the Casino Royale story, and then did a shitty TV movie of it in 1954. No one cared. Then, when EON started making Bond films and the character attained worldwide fame, the owners of the original Casino Royale rights made a shitty parody movie as a cash-in attempt. Now, EON has the rights to Casino Royale once again, so that's where this movie is coming from.

Man!! It looks pretty good, too. There will obviously be a lot more action than in the book, which is par for the course (it apparently opens with an elaborate action set piece, as per Bond film tradition). Though it also seems to be that Daniel Craig is so different from Pearce Brosnan because they wanted him to be able to act the character in a . . . well, a new way. They basically want him to not rely on the colossal image of the character. They want him to try to be himself. You know. The way Sean Connery did. It's no secret that the "movie Bond" was born because Sean Connery basically added a thin layer of his own personality on top of the script for "Dr. No" and then "From Russia with Love", which had bascially just added a thin layer of personality on top of the books. What they're doing with "Casino Royale" is, apparently, ignoring Bond's reputation and playing it straight.

It's actually a pretty big gamble for them! Because if the actor isn't a hit, then it's a failure. Judging by the trailer, I think this Craig guy is totally perfect. Some are comparing him to Timothy Dalton, though I think that's kind of unfair. He seems to have his own nuances, he's not just robotically going through nuance-resembling motions like Dalton was. Craig has emotion and he's not sappy. He has humor though he would look vaguely wrong grinning in a tuxedo. He's an interesting actor for an interesting character.

To think there were people boycotting this film because Craig has blond hair!! "James Blond", they were calling him. Man! Sick fuckers in this world!! He has blue eyes, though. James Bond is supposed to have "piercing blue eyes" -- I don't recall any "look at Bond's blue eyes!!" shots in any other Bond movies, and lord knows I've seen them all a dozen times. Even the really bad ones.

The worst Bond movie, if you ask me, is "The World is not Enough."

The best is "From Russia with Love"! The second-best would be "Goldfinger" or "You Only Live Twice" -- the former for its tight plot, the latter for its complete ridiculousness.

"Goldeneye", however, is very, very, very good. So I'm glad "Casino Royale" is by the same director. I'm certain he can pull this one together.

I will go see it on opening day!!

Like how they used the Bond car?

But holy crap:

The irony of the 007 franchise is that there are Bond pastiches (Metal Gear Solid, Transporter, Bourne Identity) that are better than the original series. Now we finally have a Bond that's lives up to the potential shown in the copycats, and this is important.

Metal Gear Solid is complete rubbish compaired to Bond

Bond is complete rubbish compared to Metal Gear Solid.

Bond is complete rubbish compared to Metal Gear Solid.

That was awesome, what they did with the Bond car.

Yeah, saw it. It was pretty great. I hope the next one's just as good, but this movie will be a tought act to follow.

Bond is complete rubbish compared to Metal Gear Solid.

Yeah, they're alike in that they both have spies in them.