WHY BOND IS BACK - A COMMENTARY

January 21, 2007 by PT Rothschild.

Casino Royale – A Film Commentary 

Months ago I first shouted ‘Bond is back’ even before I saw the latest installment of the James Bond franchise. Now tonight, after finally seeing the movie that is the top grossing film worldwide, Casino Royale, I can say ‘I told you so’. Blame it on my ‘Spidey Sense’, my crystal ball, a hunch, whatever. I am so happy to finally see that I was right that not even an argument with my teen age son, or the noise coming across the valley from one of the three, yes count them, three rock shows tonight can dull my collective memory of judging this movie as the best, or as good as anything Sean Connery did for Her Majesty’s 007. If Sean Connery played Bond as dashing and fit for the times (50’s and 60’s, before ‘camp’), then Daniel Craig fleshes out the ‘James Bond’ character and puts him squarely into the last quarter century up to the present. Craig’s Bond has gadgets but not too ‘Sharper Image’. He has an Aston-Martin but with no machine guns behind the headlights. He plays cards but he doesn’t always win, and like the rest of us, he needs a little help from his friends, ‘compney chums, wot?’ And when someone takes aim at his genitals this time, it’s not with a laser. In short, Craig’s Bond is very believable and the retelling quite faithful to the ‘origin’ story of James Bond. Craig’s Bond is a scrapper, quite athletic being narcissist, and a bit of a rebel, having broken into ‘M’s apartment to use her laptop. The Bond of the book was that type of man and agent. He showed a wit, but not like the cheese ball one-liners you hear in the films, or most of them anyway. Bond had come from humble beginnings but was sharp enough and lucky enough to have received a much superior education and breeding than was his station. As such he developed a fondness for the lifestyle and the glamour of it. Being upwardly mobile Bond adapted well to the agent lifestyle before becoming a ‘00’. This movie’s ‘Bond’ fits the books’ (Ian Fleming) description of Bond almost to a ‘T’. Besides Craig’s chops as Bond being right on, the action, the chases, the gun fights, plot twists, and sense of danger bring back the early feelings from those first few 007 films and a number of the books. You also come to grips with the worlds of some of the most ruthless men on the planet, their exotic locals and trophy women that inhibit them. We know the big sharks swim at the same places you see in the travel magazines when celebs travel the world. In the books the combination of the picturesque and the violent weave an adventure addiction to suspense. When I read them, it was usually within a few days or a week. This movie, the longest Bond Film to date at 144 minutes, maintains that kind of sustained suspense right up until the end. Appearing now at the Temeku, and on a DVD soon at your video store. 

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