More Bond blabberings
Nov. 22nd, 2006 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieYes, I am still obsessed with Bond.
This picture totally cracks me up though, as it's Bond (or at least Daniel Craig) with the Real Her Majesty:
I've also really liked the Slant's review of the movie which had interesting points about trends and consumerism. The whole review is excellent and worth reading (to be found here), but I've excerpted my favorite part below:
There's an internal war raging in Bond—a sociopath who still possesses some remnants of a soul, and Casino Royale charts his journey toward an eventual and quite chilling renouncement of his humanity. When he declares himself at film's end (uttering the immortal catchphrase, "Bond…James Bond" with a weight and authority its previous interpreters have scarcely mustered) we bear witness to, and are asked to celebrate, an act of absolute destruction: the demolition of a conflicted human being and the erection, in its place, of an amoral icon that exists solely to satiate our Pavlovian bloodlust. And damned if this blindingly beautiful golden calf doesn't deserve our every single round of applause.
Entertainment Weekly also liked it:
Casino Royale, which is based on the first of Ian Fleming's British spy novels (it was published in 1953), relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again — a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love. Daniel Craig, the superb British actor who has taken over the role, has small, wounded-looking eyes of coldest android blue, ears that stick out, and a mouth that puckers into a scowl. With his blondish hair trimmed to a thatchy bristle, Craig is handsome, and buff as hell, but not necessarily the most handsome guy around — he looks like a dyspeptic Steve McQueen. The fact that he isn't tall adds to the sense that he's always working a bit harder, that he's a badass with too much eating away at him to bother playing pretty-boy games. Craig's 007 has an itchy trigger finger, he treats M (Judi Dench) like a meddlesome aunt, and he growls at a bartender who asks if he wants his martini shaken or stirred, ''Do I look like I give a damn?''
That's the beauty of the movie. A Bond who doesn't give a damn, who's made affectless, even haunted, by what his job brings out in him, is a Bond we can all give more of a damn about. He speaks to an age of desperation, when the cosmetic barely holds sway over the cutthroat. In Casino Royale, Bond does many things he's done before — turns criminal pursuits into high-flying death stunts, plays world-class poker, faces worldclass torture. At one point, he engages in such a fierce battle inside a Venice palazzo that the building comes crumbling down (that's beyond spectacle — it's blasphemy). Yet Craig, speckled with facial cuts, plays Bond with an almost bruised virility, making each of these actions an expression of unruly will. Casino Royale, the most exciting Bond film since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, has everything you want in a pop entertainment: physical audacity, intrigue, romance, but also a charge of personality that stayed with me for days....
There is also, of course, a girl, but this time she's a true romantic adversary. Vesper Lynd, played by the dancing-eyed French actress Eva Green, is a British Treasury official assigned to stake Bond in the poker game and, generally, keep tabs on him, and as these two fling insults back and forth, they melt each other's armor. Bond hasn't just met a babe; he has met his match. And we have met him, as if for the first time.
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/review/movie/0,6115,1559753_1_0_,00.html
And a few hot pictures just for fun:
This picture totally cracks me up though, as it's Bond (or at least Daniel Craig) with the Real Her Majesty:
I've also really liked the Slant's review of the movie which had interesting points about trends and consumerism. The whole review is excellent and worth reading (to be found here), but I've excerpted my favorite part below:
There's an internal war raging in Bond—a sociopath who still possesses some remnants of a soul, and Casino Royale charts his journey toward an eventual and quite chilling renouncement of his humanity. When he declares himself at film's end (uttering the immortal catchphrase, "Bond…James Bond" with a weight and authority its previous interpreters have scarcely mustered) we bear witness to, and are asked to celebrate, an act of absolute destruction: the demolition of a conflicted human being and the erection, in its place, of an amoral icon that exists solely to satiate our Pavlovian bloodlust. And damned if this blindingly beautiful golden calf doesn't deserve our every single round of applause.
Entertainment Weekly also liked it:
Casino Royale, which is based on the first of Ian Fleming's British spy novels (it was published in 1953), relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again — a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love. Daniel Craig, the superb British actor who has taken over the role, has small, wounded-looking eyes of coldest android blue, ears that stick out, and a mouth that puckers into a scowl. With his blondish hair trimmed to a thatchy bristle, Craig is handsome, and buff as hell, but not necessarily the most handsome guy around — he looks like a dyspeptic Steve McQueen. The fact that he isn't tall adds to the sense that he's always working a bit harder, that he's a badass with too much eating away at him to bother playing pretty-boy games. Craig's 007 has an itchy trigger finger, he treats M (Judi Dench) like a meddlesome aunt, and he growls at a bartender who asks if he wants his martini shaken or stirred, ''Do I look like I give a damn?''
That's the beauty of the movie. A Bond who doesn't give a damn, who's made affectless, even haunted, by what his job brings out in him, is a Bond we can all give more of a damn about. He speaks to an age of desperation, when the cosmetic barely holds sway over the cutthroat. In Casino Royale, Bond does many things he's done before — turns criminal pursuits into high-flying death stunts, plays world-class poker, faces worldclass torture. At one point, he engages in such a fierce battle inside a Venice palazzo that the building comes crumbling down (that's beyond spectacle — it's blasphemy). Yet Craig, speckled with facial cuts, plays Bond with an almost bruised virility, making each of these actions an expression of unruly will. Casino Royale, the most exciting Bond film since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, has everything you want in a pop entertainment: physical audacity, intrigue, romance, but also a charge of personality that stayed with me for days....
There is also, of course, a girl, but this time she's a true romantic adversary. Vesper Lynd, played by the dancing-eyed French actress Eva Green, is a British Treasury official assigned to stake Bond in the poker game and, generally, keep tabs on him, and as these two fling insults back and forth, they melt each other's armor. Bond hasn't just met a babe; he has met his match. And we have met him, as if for the first time.
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/review/movie/0,6115,1559753_1_0_,00.html
And a few hot pictures just for fun:
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Date: 2006-11-23 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-23 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-23 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-23 05:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-23 07:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-23 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-23 09:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-23 06:44 pm (UTC)Yeah, I went crazy. Long meta, picspam, the works :)
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Date: 2006-11-24 05:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-25 06:18 am (UTC)Mmmmm...
*goes off to happy place*
no subject
Date: 2006-11-29 10:50 pm (UTC)I don't think Craig is that conventionally good looking (I would have picked Clive Owen for Bond as I think he could have done the tough as nails acting too), but he, like several other British actors who I wouldn't pick out of a line up, can sell themselves. There's an aura to them when you watch them in action that makes them very appealing (take Christopher Eccleston as one).
no subject
Date: 2006-11-30 05:37 pm (UTC)And agreed on Eccleston. Have you seen Jude?
no subject
Date: 2006-11-30 10:59 pm (UTC)