Post by hassan1024 on Nov 10, 2006 13:36:09 GMT 3
www.guardian.co.uk/Film/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,,1943415,00.html
On the big screen, Daniel Craig has shown himself fully capable of taking on a British icon: a man of cool, cruel determination, mesmerising sex appeal and a fatally destructive way with women. But that's enough about his performance as Ted Hughes. Now he has taken on the mantle of 007, and the result is a death-defying, sportscar-driving, female-back-fondling, cocktail-recipe-specifying triumph. Daniel Craig is a fantastic Bond, and all those whingers and nay-sayers out there in the blogosphere should hang their heads in shame.
Craig was inspired casting. He has effortless presence and lethal danger; he brings a serious actor's ability to a fundamentally unserious part; he brings out the playfulness and the absurdity, yet never sends it up. He's easily the best Bond since Sean Connery, and perhaps even - well, let's not get carried away. With Craig's unsmiling demeanour and his unfashionably, even faintly un-British dirty blond hair, he looks like a cross between the Robert Shaw who grappled with Bond in From Russia With Love and Patrick McGoohan's defiant Prisoner. The key to his X-factor is that Craig looks as if he would be equally at home playing a Bond villain.
This is the story of James Bond's beginning, transferred forward in time to a loosely imagined post-9/11 present. After a very nasty and violent killing in a men's room, shot in grainy monochrome, Bond earns his official double-0 rating with a second wet job: the unofficial whacking of a traitor in the higher reaches of MI6. His spurs earned, Bond must now tackle his first super-villain: Le Chiffre, banker to Smersh in the original, now accountant and financier to international terrorists everywhere, though al-Qaida and anyone else from the Middle East are coyly left unmentioned. M even implies that manipulating airline stock prices was a motivating factor for 9/11 - a sly piece of cynicism that would have amused Fleming himself.
The supremely silly idea is that Bond, that über-amateur card-player, will relieve Le Chiffre of all his money - and thus, the terrorists of all their resources - at a single high-rollers' card game, although the game is not chemin de fer, but a rather more déclassé one of poker. Le Chiffre is played by Mads Mikkelsen, in which role he has the privilege of following Orson Welles from the 1967 spoof version.
The Treasury official accompanying Bond to the casino and fronting up zillions of pounds of taxpayer's cash is the slinky Miss Vesper Lynd, played by Eva Green, who speaks English in a residual French accent that makes her sound permanently sarky. Despite the big hair, she is no run-of-the-mill Bond girl; with her Olympic-standard embonpoint and inverted triangle face, she has a sexy head-girl haughtiness, and the many close-ups of her tensely appalled expression by the card table make it look as if she has witnessed Bond dissecting a frog on the green baize.
This is not exactly back-to-basics Bond. The franchise is still apparently stuck with branding and concealed advertising, as well as the naff euro-trash hotels, with receptionists who get their plug in - "Welcome to the Hotel Splendide!" - as plonkingly as they used to greet the winning couples on TV's Blind Date in the 1980s. There is even a subliminal glimpse of that chief blagger of product placements, Sir Richard Branson. M is Dame Judi Dench, splendidly icy and disapproving, yet caring. And though Bond wins a vintage Aston Martin (without ejector seat) in a card game, it's not a very gadgety movie, excepting all those mobiles and laptops with their impossibly lightning-fast graphics and streaming video.
As far as Bond's erotic life goes, the movie retains one important element from Fleming's 1953 novel: Bond gets tortured - in the nude! - by Le Chiffre, who whips his scrotum with knotted rope after commenting that he has "looked after his body". It's a gamey scene that has caused generations of Bond readers to nurse and then uneasily suppress certain wonderings about the nature of 007's fanbase. These wonderings will not, I have to say, be quashed by Daniel Craig's pert swimming costume. But Craig strikes some very erotic sparks from Vesper Lynd, with some loaded bantering over dinner in a first-class railway compartment, and finally, from him, a dead-straight passionate declaration of love. Sweetly, Bond doesn't have sex with anyone else in the film. Vesper is to break his heart, though, and the movie cleverly shows that all Bond's mannerisms and steely reserve grow from this prehistory of doomed romance.
It is all ridiculously enjoyable, because the smirking and the quips and the gadgets have been cut back - and the emotion and wholesome sado-masochism have been pumped up. My only regret is that the classic Barry theme tune is saved for the closing credits. Mr Craig brings off cinema's most preposterous role with insouciant grit: I hope he doesn't quit too soon. I'd like see the next few films tackle 007's off-duty life more: his hangovers, his money worries. Daniel Craig could make it work. For the first time in ages, I am actually looking forward to the next James Bond movie.
· Casino Royale is released on Thu 16
On the big screen, Daniel Craig has shown himself fully capable of taking on a British icon: a man of cool, cruel determination, mesmerising sex appeal and a fatally destructive way with women. But that's enough about his performance as Ted Hughes. Now he has taken on the mantle of 007, and the result is a death-defying, sportscar-driving, female-back-fondling, cocktail-recipe-specifying triumph. Daniel Craig is a fantastic Bond, and all those whingers and nay-sayers out there in the blogosphere should hang their heads in shame.
Craig was inspired casting. He has effortless presence and lethal danger; he brings a serious actor's ability to a fundamentally unserious part; he brings out the playfulness and the absurdity, yet never sends it up. He's easily the best Bond since Sean Connery, and perhaps even - well, let's not get carried away. With Craig's unsmiling demeanour and his unfashionably, even faintly un-British dirty blond hair, he looks like a cross between the Robert Shaw who grappled with Bond in From Russia With Love and Patrick McGoohan's defiant Prisoner. The key to his X-factor is that Craig looks as if he would be equally at home playing a Bond villain.
This is the story of James Bond's beginning, transferred forward in time to a loosely imagined post-9/11 present. After a very nasty and violent killing in a men's room, shot in grainy monochrome, Bond earns his official double-0 rating with a second wet job: the unofficial whacking of a traitor in the higher reaches of MI6. His spurs earned, Bond must now tackle his first super-villain: Le Chiffre, banker to Smersh in the original, now accountant and financier to international terrorists everywhere, though al-Qaida and anyone else from the Middle East are coyly left unmentioned. M even implies that manipulating airline stock prices was a motivating factor for 9/11 - a sly piece of cynicism that would have amused Fleming himself.
The supremely silly idea is that Bond, that über-amateur card-player, will relieve Le Chiffre of all his money - and thus, the terrorists of all their resources - at a single high-rollers' card game, although the game is not chemin de fer, but a rather more déclassé one of poker. Le Chiffre is played by Mads Mikkelsen, in which role he has the privilege of following Orson Welles from the 1967 spoof version.
The Treasury official accompanying Bond to the casino and fronting up zillions of pounds of taxpayer's cash is the slinky Miss Vesper Lynd, played by Eva Green, who speaks English in a residual French accent that makes her sound permanently sarky. Despite the big hair, she is no run-of-the-mill Bond girl; with her Olympic-standard embonpoint and inverted triangle face, she has a sexy head-girl haughtiness, and the many close-ups of her tensely appalled expression by the card table make it look as if she has witnessed Bond dissecting a frog on the green baize.
This is not exactly back-to-basics Bond. The franchise is still apparently stuck with branding and concealed advertising, as well as the naff euro-trash hotels, with receptionists who get their plug in - "Welcome to the Hotel Splendide!" - as plonkingly as they used to greet the winning couples on TV's Blind Date in the 1980s. There is even a subliminal glimpse of that chief blagger of product placements, Sir Richard Branson. M is Dame Judi Dench, splendidly icy and disapproving, yet caring. And though Bond wins a vintage Aston Martin (without ejector seat) in a card game, it's not a very gadgety movie, excepting all those mobiles and laptops with their impossibly lightning-fast graphics and streaming video.
As far as Bond's erotic life goes, the movie retains one important element from Fleming's 1953 novel: Bond gets tortured - in the nude! - by Le Chiffre, who whips his scrotum with knotted rope after commenting that he has "looked after his body". It's a gamey scene that has caused generations of Bond readers to nurse and then uneasily suppress certain wonderings about the nature of 007's fanbase. These wonderings will not, I have to say, be quashed by Daniel Craig's pert swimming costume. But Craig strikes some very erotic sparks from Vesper Lynd, with some loaded bantering over dinner in a first-class railway compartment, and finally, from him, a dead-straight passionate declaration of love. Sweetly, Bond doesn't have sex with anyone else in the film. Vesper is to break his heart, though, and the movie cleverly shows that all Bond's mannerisms and steely reserve grow from this prehistory of doomed romance.
It is all ridiculously enjoyable, because the smirking and the quips and the gadgets have been cut back - and the emotion and wholesome sado-masochism have been pumped up. My only regret is that the classic Barry theme tune is saved for the closing credits. Mr Craig brings off cinema's most preposterous role with insouciant grit: I hope he doesn't quit too soon. I'd like see the next few films tackle 007's off-duty life more: his hangovers, his money worries. Daniel Craig could make it work. For the first time in ages, I am actually looking forward to the next James Bond movie.
· Casino Royale is released on Thu 16
