BJMDDS:EON's direction with James Bond

[sas]

Casino Royale - 06-03-06
Barbara Broccoli sets the record straight about Daniel Craig and production of Casino Royale

Variety yesterday set the press rumors straight with insight from the both veteran producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli (and Sony chief Amy Pascal) - who are committed to the franchise and the support of newcomer Daniel Craig as 007 #6.

"His teeth are fine, his driving is fine, he doesn't have heat rash and he's not afraid of the water."

That's producer Barbara Broccoli's assessment of the new James Bond. If she sounds prickly, you can't blame her. Tabloid reports that 007 thesp Daniel Craig has been taking a beating on the set of "Casino Royale," the Martin Campbell-helmed Bond pic due out in November from MGM/Sony, have rained down on the production almost from the first day of shooting.

Dealing with around-the-clock Bond gossip -- of which Broccoli says, "We're aware of it, but it doesn't mean anything to us" -- is just one challenge facing Broccoli and her producing partner Michael G. Wilson. It's also a challenge for Sony, which inherited Bond from MGM last year in the hopes that the 007 franchise can become a cornerstone of its release slate on par with "Spider-Man."

James Bond is famously one of the most idiosyncratic properties around. What other franchise has producers who own a controlling stake, or has a 20-film legacy that must be simultaneously preserved and updated?

And Bond is at a critical juncture in its history. Despite all the goodwill toward Pierce Brosnan, who starred in the last four Bond pics, Craig -- the first "blond Bond" -- was selected for "Casino Royale" to give the film a grittier, 21st century feel. (There is much hearsay as to why Brosnan wasn't rehired; some say the problem was his $25 million and 5% gross asking price. No one but the producers have ever gotten gross points on Bond pics.)

The $100 million-plus "Casino Royale," which is the story of Bond's first mission, is not being touted as a special effects or "gadgets" pic -- something that some consider the very essence of Bond.

"There will still be effects, but they won't be obvious to the audience," Wilson says. "We have great action sequences, a lot of things blowing up ... but not space effects or things disappearing or invisible cars."

All this is being tackled by Broccoli and Wilson -- known as being extremely detail-oriented and hands-on producers -- and by Columbia Pictures topper Amy Pascal.

All are working together for the first time. Leaning on Campbell and screenwriter Paul Haggis, the trio is trying to contemporize the franchise and grow its audience in a younger direction.

The move is pre-emptive considering that Bond isn't exactly suffering. The last few pics have each made between $350 million and $450 million worldwide, not to mention lucrative homevideo returns. But Bond has faced fresh-faced competition from films such as "The Bourne Identity" and "XXX."

In the videogame world, Bond has become one of the best known and most lucrative franchises in the biz ever since Nintendo's hit game "GoldenEye" in 1997. Industry giant Electronic Arts took the franchise in 1999 and has been releasing approximately one "Bond" game per year ever since. In 2003, EA signed a seven-year extension of its deal with MGM that's believed to be worth around $50 million. Not all the titles have been as successful as the first, but Sony and MGM certainly can't be upset that EA's efforts have kept Bond alive in the minds of a new generation of gamers and potential moviegoers.

As to the newly forged partnership with Sony, Broccoli says the team has come to "happy agreements" on all Bond matters, and that "all casting and director decisions were made with Amy.... The script and everything."

Sources familiar with the producers' arrangement at MGM say so long as Broccoli and Wilson stayed within the budget the studio had approved, they had the right to make all creative decisions, including casting and script, but that they never invoked that clause, instead opting to include the studio in the filmmaking process.

Presumably, the situation is the same at Sony, but neither the studio nor the producers would comment, saying only that the working relationship between the two parties has been collaborative.

The Bond producers' deal dates back to 1961, when it was forged between Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and United Artists. Back then, UA operated mainly as a marketing and distributing company, providing the producers with an enormous amount of autonomy.

As for the producers' financial arrangement, people with knowledge of the deal say they do not put up money for P&A, but receive gross points as well as an upfront fee. Most contract deals and legal work are done through Eon Productions (the U.K.-based production shingle that owns the Bond production rights), costs that are put on the film's budget and then reimbursed.

Wilson characterizes the Sony partnership as "collegial." "We're all headed in the same direction. The idea that someone throws down the gauntlet--- it never comes to that."

Yet Broccoli does admit that, "We're all very strong-minded individuals," and people close to the film say there have been lively negotiations. Sources say Broccoli was the most passionate about hiring Craig (Sony initially pushed for Clive Owen), although Pascal now waxes adoringly over the blue-eyed "Layer Cake" star and is said to be looking to cast him in another Sony pic.

And while the studio pushed for A-list leading ladies, such as Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron, who turned the role down (not surprisingly, considering the no gross points rule), the producers insisted on less- expensive, lesser-known thesps who wouldn't overshadow Bond. A compromise was reached in Eva Green, a thesp with international cred (she's French) who starred in the steamy NC-17 Bertolucci pic "The Dreamers."

International box office is hardly an afterthought when it comes to Bond pics, which tend to do almost twice as well overseas as in the U.S. Even Campbell has foreign cred -- he's a Kiwi.

Somewhat ironically, considering that Bond is perhaps the most macho franchise of all time, Broccoli points out that women are calling a lot of the shots.

"I'm glad to be working with a woman executive," she says of Pascal. "It's nice for me."

Most recently, the Bond producers worked with former MGM chairman Alex Yemenidjian and vice chairman Chris McGurk.

As on all Bond pics, the production schedule for "Casino Royale" is brisk. Shooting began Jan. 30 in Prague and will wrap this summer in order to have the pic in theaters Nov. 17. Things were unusually close to the wire on this pic, and Green was cast two weeks into shooting.

The short schedule puts added pressure on Sony marketers, who were in the Bahamas (where the pic is now shooting) as early as last week gathering material for a "Casino Royale" teaser trailer.

Not that raising awareness is a big dilemma when it comes to Bond. "You have an incredible advantage with the franchise because you know what it is," Pascal says.

Wilson says the short schedule is cost-efficient. "It saves money," he says. "There's less time to fiddle in post-production. If you know what you're doing, you know what's right, having a short post is great."

People who have worked on previous Bond films say production is also beholden to licensing deals, some of which operate according to a time frame due to product launch dates, though the Bond producers downplay this notion. For "Casino Royale" cross-promotional deals were made with Ford (the Bond car is an Aston Martin DBS prototype), Taittinger champagne and Sony Electronics, among others.

As for the ruckus over Craig, Broccoli says she's used to being scrutinized by the press and sensitive fans.

"There's always a heightened interest in Bond, and every time we recast the role there's even more. (When Brosnan took over the role from Timothy Dalton, there was similar outrage.)

[Nick]

That last bit about a similar fuss when Brosnan took over from Dalton is total cobblers.

[BJMDDS]

Correct. People were excited about Brosnan taking on the role and Broccoli's statement is an utter lie.

[skywalker]

bjmdds said:

Correct. People were excited about Brosnan taking on the role and Broccoli's statement is an utter lie.

My memory does not serve me well when I think back to Brosnan's unveiling, but it is fair to say it was a popular choice and he delivered an excellent performance in Goldeneye.

[poirot]

Brosnan was well-received, and even hailed as a definite improvement for the series. Dalton had quickly dropped off the public's radar, and didn't seem at all concerned about leaving the role.

I remember watching him give an interview on the set of "Scarlett", and thinking he seemed way too happy for a guy that had just given up the role of James Bond.

[JackBurton]

poirot said:

Brosnan was well-received, and even hailed as a definite improvement for the series. Dalton had quickly dropped off the public's radar, and didn't seem at all concerned about leaving the role.

I remember watching him give an interview on the set of "Scarlett", and thinking he seemed way too happy for a guy that had just given up the role of James Bond.

I don't think Dalton enjoyed the limelight much and Licence To Kill, while a good film IMO, was seen as a misfire. But yeah, when Brosnan took over most articles dumped on Dalton and proclaimed Brosnan as a return to the old Bond panache. So I have no idea what that article from Variety was going on about. Martin Campbell compared Brosnan to Cary Grant when he was making GoldenEye if I recall. You get the feeling someone is trying to rewrite the recent history of James Bond and pretend that everyone hated Pierce Brosnan.

[BJMDDS]

jackburton said:

poirot said:

Brosnan was well-received, and even hailed as a definite improvement for the series. Dalton had quickly dropped off the public's radar, and didn't seem at all concerned about leaving the role.

I remember watching him give an interview on the set of "Scarlett", and thinking he seemed way too happy for a guy that had just given up the role of James Bond.

I don't think Dalton enjoyed the limelight much and Licence To Kill, while a good film IMO, was seen as a misfire. But yeah, when Brosnan took over most articles dumped on Dalton and proclaimed Brosnan as a return to the old Bond panache. So I have no idea what that article from Variety was going on about. Martin Campbell compared Brosnan to Cary Grant when he was making GoldenEye if I recall. You get the feeling someone is trying to rewrite the recent history of James Bond and pretend that everyone hated Pierce Brosnan.

The Craig fanatics for the most part, not all, cannot relate to Brosnan nor what he actually did to revive a failing franchise. Craig did not revive anything, DAD was very successful, and Craig was given the luxury of a realistic script the other 5 lacked.

[sas]

It was a coup that Columbia Pictures had banked on: the one 007 property that got away from Broccoli and Saltzman's cash cow series. Producer Charles K. Feldman had hoped to equal or better the popularity of his Woody Allen-scripted "mod" bedroom farce of two years earlier, What's New Pussycat? and trotted in a dozen stars and their star friends for the occasion. David Niven had already suggested cinematic mayhem in Life's 1966 multipage color spread by admitting that it is "impossible to find out what we are doing," and the magazine claimed the film was a runaway mini-Cleopatra at a then outrageous 12 million dollar budget. Despite all the rumors and delays, the film seemed to have its finger on the pulse of psychedelia, the swinging London myth, and it would beat the real Bond entry, You Only Live Twice, to the box office in a March 1967 release. It was popular enough with audiences and received mixed critical reaction, but has since unfairly been labeled as one of the flops of the era. After more than 30 years, it is high time to ask why this film continues to be a nearly poisonous topic among "serious" film scholars and what it has to say about the world that created it.

In his provocative exposé The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, author Roger Lewis insists that the actor's career decline was first signaled by his self-indulgence in Casino Royale, in particular, his inability to stick to the script(s) and his desire to turn the flattery of the role (love scene with Ursula Andress and a hefty sum) into a long-sought Cary Grant-type image. His lack of discipline and his demands caused several more rewrites in an already plot-du-jour concept that employed Wolf Mankowitz, John Law, and Michael Sayers as credited writers (with uncredited fragments by Woody Allen, Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, and Billy Wilder, among others) and five directors to helm the various segments of the film: John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish, and Joseph McGrath. The multitudinous talent here did more than mimic the Bondian shifts in the plot and locale. What emerged was a kaleidoscope that utilized the original "serious" Ian Fleming novel, already given television treatment in 1954, as the core of a fabricated frame of plots and subplots that reduce the showdown between Bond (Sellers) and Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) at Casino Royale into the single dramatic moment of the opus.


Charles K. Feldman

Casino Royale is thus a metafilm on the process of the "real" Bond cinema, which, beginning with Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, updated and altered Fleming's original novels until only character names and vague plot directions were employed. Ultimately, even the titles ran out, but this 1967 film is far more Weltanschauung than spy narrative. Feldman, in his belief that he could make a Bond to break all banks, went to extremes to cover up the lack of two major elements in this "Bond" film — Sean Connery and the James Bond theme. Instead, the film was stocked with in-stars, in-jokes, and an in-style that would surpass not only the grandeur of the original series and its penchant for outrageous cold-warrior escapades, but in turn, influence the megalomania of the "real" Bond series.

Bond purists have always loathed the film, while others have preconceived notions of a spy parody and miss the point. The mistake has been to buy into the publicity propaganda and the original sell of the film as a new "trippy" Bond, a funny Bond. This was bound to cause dissension, since a parody cannot be parodied, and the series was already there. The only true mocking of the Broccoli/Saltzman productions occurred in their own series during the tenure of Roger Moore, as that sophomoric silliness made Casino Royale's deadpan humor and sophistication seem more like the original Fleming by comparison. The film is also an ill fit among Bond imitators like the Flint series or Matt Helm, or even Saltzman's own Harry Palmer.

Casino Royale's relationship to Bond is only emblematic; it is a prismatic translation of Fleming's milieu, not a linear adaptation. And it remains, even today, a wry and provocative sociopolitical satire. The often criticized inconsistencies of the film's multiple James Bonds, including the banal 007 of Terence Cooper, brought in to cover Sellers’s unfinished characterization, intentionally work to confuse the issue of Bond, to overwork the paradigm until it has no value. As Walter Benjamin in his influential essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" would have it, the original artwork, with its auratic value, has been replaced by accessible but worthless copies. Here, the most unique icon of the era is intentionally made common — a fashion, a fad, a façade: the multiple Bonds are all copies of a first copy, Connery's Bond. Moneypenny, Hadley, and Mata Bond are all mirror-image copies of their much more substantial parents. These facsimiles are then joined by the "thousand doubles" Dr. Noah has created to replace the "world's most important figures in culture, politics and the arts." Although three major world leaders have already been replaced, no one seems to notice. As yet another female James Bond remarks: "Oh, well, that explains a lot of things." So much for the conspiracy theories of the 1960s. By the release of Goldfinger everyone wanted to be Bond; now everyone was. Like Andy Warhol's canvas of multiple Marilyns, the original is mythic and its copies are a poor but stand-in fantasy for an era that so floundered between faith and cynicism.


Woody Allen as Dr. Noah, with Daliah Lavi

The subversion of the modern Übermensch is already apparent before the credits, when Bond films customarily feature a spine-tingling mini-adventure on skis or in the sky. Sellers's Bond, however, is simply picked up by a French official in a pissoir. Casino Royale clearly turns its back on the contemporary and enshrines the icon of David Niven, as the retired, legendary Sir James Bond. "Joke shop spies" is how Sir James reacts to the technology of Cold War agents, and indeed, Vesper Lynd's (Ursula Andress) billions and Dr. Noah's (Woody Allen) confused attempt to gain global control through germ warfare/robot master race/nuclear threat are no match for Sir James's stiff upper lip. Like a demonstration of the failed theories of limited nuclear war, the power-hungry are annihilated in attempting to make the world safe for themselves. Woody Allen's sex-hungry schlemiel persona may have already been standard expectation in 1967, but here, garbed in a Mao suit, he suggests the infantile psychosexual complexes behind the vengeful modern warlord. Allen detests the film and takes little pride in his creation of Dr. Noah, but his own Third-World farce Bananas, and the futuristic totalitarian satire Sleeper, seem to spring from the still edgy political black comedy of his self-written role in Casino Royale.

To understand Casino Royale as a courtly adventure — Niven's Sir James as Siegfried, Arthur, Barbarossa, or Parsifal, a figure the German Romantics called the Welterzieher — the knightly poet who is fated to lead the world to a new golden age — is to see the chivalric genealogy of the idealism surrounding the James Bond phenomenon. Without the use of Connery's modern update however, Casino Royale taps directly into the messianic concept at the root of 007: Sir James is resurrected to save a blundering world with its collective fingers on the nuclear button, but extinguishes himself in the final battle, one that might lead humanity to a new beginning. The film has a heavy medieval, even biblical feel: the brilliance of Richard Williams's illuminated-manuscript titles; the testing of Sir James’s purity at the debauched castle of M's impersonated widow (Deborah Kerr); the Faustian redemption of Vesper because she has "loved"; the representatives from the world's powers (here it is the four Kings) who beg for the grace and wisdom of a knight of the (black) rose. M (John Huston), like post-Profumo scandal Britain, is a façade of majesty resigned to his own inadequacy. LeGrand of the French Cinquieme Bureau (Charles Boyer) is obsessed with absurdity. Ransome (William Holden) is a source of arrogant and undecipherable CIA double-talk, and KGB head Smernov (Kurt Kasznar) spews Marxist jargon as he cowers from the monarchist symbolism of a lion. That these pathetic emissaries are unknowingly helping evil, aiding Dr. Noah's wish to expose and destroy his childhood idol — or as Sir James puts it, "to make up for feelings of sexual inferiority" — is a subtext engineered to hold the ever-more-distant plot stations (and Sir James's Stations of the Cross) together into a consistent whole. And the film, with all its ideas, directions, and visions, seems to relish its own sprawling, about-to-fly-apart structure, folding over and under itself as medieval epics do and reflecting the serpentines of the art nouveau so present in several of the film's sets.

The mythical French casino itself provides a semiotic mapping of the film's subversion of the modern establishment. Below the bourgeois finery of the palatial building and an art collection spanning the century (read: Western elitism), a female army garbed in Paco Rabanne's gladiator uniforms, an extension of the designer's actual mid-‘60s metallic fashions, relates the modern power structure to the barbarism of ancient (and anti-Judeo-Christian) Rome. With their leader, Dr. Noah, acting on behalf of a vaguely Soviet SMERSH but interested only in his own gratification, the static Cold War ideologies become reflections that turn on themselves. The Berlin sequence summarizes Germany as the focal wound of political folly: the Wall divides a sex-crazed West from a silent and red-lit East (both deemed political whores), while the sinister Frau Hoffner (Anna Quayle), Polo (Ronnie Corbett), and Sir James's prodigal daughter by Mata Hari (Joanna Pettet) flirt on the edge of the nuclear Goetterdämmerung in a stunning parody of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Like the question of sanity raised in that Expressionist classic, Frau Hoffner's "very democratic" espionage school, which trains "Russian spies for America and American spies for Russia," suggests the entire world is the asylum. The film features the music of Burt Bacharach and Debussy, as well as Michael Stringer's wide catalogue of sets ranging from a Palladian estate to an East Asian temple, all linked by heraldic tones of orange/pink and blue/green. So much art, so much architecture, so many sideswipe references to high culture. Too rich for a simple spy saga, this stylistic puzzle instead implies what is at stake in the battle between the "immaculate priesthood" of the individualistic and genteel Sir James and the false promise of social Darwinist technocrats.


Orson Welles as Le Chiffre,
facing Peter Sellers as 007

The failure of modernity and a celebration of what Umberto Eco would call the postmodern "crisis of reason" permeates nearly every scene of Casino Royale. The false widow of M espouses the heroic deeds of "her" Scottish ancestors, turns her back on high-tech spying for the love of the hero, and, quoting Robert Burns, retreats to a convent. The remote-controlled, dynamite-loaded milk truck finds the wrong target, while Le Chiffre's "torture of the mind," which conjures associations with trendy psychiatry and military LSD experimentation, is an utter failure. Dr. Noah's flying saucer symbolically displaces the icon of Lord Nelson in Trafalgar Square (already bought and removed by Vesper) with a futuristic technology used to kidnap and torture Mata Bond. All the "weapons of our time," which Sir James is encouraged to use, are disasters.

Although she is saved from a descent into damnation, Vesper is perhaps the most challenging of all the modernist images in the film. This femme fatale character (she has Sellers's Bond and still kills him), along with, as the ad for the film proclaimed, "a Bondwagon of the most beautiful and talented girls you ever saw," attempts to defeat the objectification of the female so prevalent in the "real" Bond. What it instead offers is a male sex-fantasy of women's liberation and a female impersonation of the worst aspects of James Bond's Playboy philosophy. The deadly women are foiled at every turn, not by contemporary man, but by the Edwardian guardian of gentlemanly tradition, Sir James. Yet he is not a misogynist and actively recruits women, including his daughter, to help the cause.

An icon of worship as the name implies, Vesper disposes of her enemies in a kitchen process that offers an update of concentration camp stratagems. She clearly represents a fascist modernism that places itself into history and glitters, but which must also destroy all that inhibits the New Order. At home in her Olympus-like arena of world control, a pagan goddess shrouded in feathers and surrounded by Greco-Roman art, she poses an immediate opposition to Sir James’s Christian nature. She ultimately descends from the heights (the moving conversation pit) to give herself to a mere mortal (Sellers) in order to bend more than his ear. The image of Hitler descending from the clouds to those who would do his bidding in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will springs to mind here. Sellers's subsequent impersonation of that dictator, Napoleon, a British officer, and Toulouse Lautrec (Euroculture again) for Vesper's camera (Riefenstahl again) is the very message of her madness: seduction, deception, and image make the modern superman/woman. Compared to her sophisticated ammunition, Q's outfitting of the new Bond seems needless by comparison. As "the richest spy in the world," Vesper is both capitalist and pragmatist. Her manipulation and use of male-dominated politics to satisfy her own needs may demonstrate the female as "outside" male society, but the multitude of women in the service of male megalomania in this film have yet to know they are an enslaved "class of woman," as feminist theoretician Monique Wittig insists. The Detainer (Daliah Lavi), whose sexuality is her only weapon but who doesn't really "do anything" as she waits for male self-destruction, perhaps points to future realization when she regards Allen's phallocratic leader manqué as a "wretched, grotesque, ridiculous, insignificant little monster."

Obviously inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (Terry Southern also contributed uncredited material to Casino Royale), the Berlin war room attempts to both enjoy and slam female objectification as the four superpowers bid for pornographic blackmail material. The auction that so easily turns to "war" is upset by a woman — the scantily-clad Mata Bond, who punctuates the slapstick struggle with her own vocalization of such cartoon effects as "zap!" and "pow!" Her victory is perhaps more the result of her mythic lineage than of her Twiggy-era liberation, but one message is clear: the Cold War is a comic strip that can only be dealt with accordingly. There is little to trust, even less to believe in. The reiteration of this point comes with the spoof on the ritual Bond film battle finale — here played as the apocalypse à go-go. Everyone and everything is thrown into the maelstrom of this Western brawl as nuclear war epitome, but only the messiah and his followers are worthy of ascension; the usurper (Woody Allen) sinks into flames. There is a literal deus ex machina (the forces of "good" parachuting into the Casino), but the conclusion, which critics at the time read as plot exhaustion, is completely loyal to the metaphysics of the film: the tale, which began in the clouds concludes in self- sacrificing heavenly victory. Although this denigration of modernity in favor of divinity and mythos also suggests a false totality, the illusion of wholeness found in fascist ideology, the not-so-tongue-in-cheek Romanticism here pays homage to a much earlier and more benevolent imperialistic nature, Sir James’s Pax Britannia and a laissez faire elitism.

Some critical utterances in film study seem to hold curious sway long after they have been proven questionable or have even been overturned. Susan Sontag's misunderstanding of Leni Riefenstahl is one such notorious example. Similarly, Leslie Halliwell's view that Casino Royale was a huge shapeless romp "put together with paste at a late night party" still discounts the film more than thirty years later. The critics who deride the film in their examinations of the careers of Woody Allen and Peter Sellers only encourage the politically correct scholarly silence surrounding the film. Having attempted the first analysis of the work in Films in Review in 1988, I am happy to note, however, that a thaw has begun. In 1999, the American Movie Classics (AMC) cable television channel presented Casino Royale with something akin to serious commentary.

There is a definite trajectory in the development of the sociopolitical satire of the 1960s from Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961) to the indulgence of Candy (1968) to the burn-out of The Magic Christian (1970), which locates Casino Royale as the apex and the most successful reflection of the era's anarchic impulses. In this respect, the film has no fewer teeth than Godard's New Wave attack on capitalist society, Weekend, which was released the same year. It is never claimed as an inspiration or influence, yet Monty Python, the subversive parodies of Mel Brooks, the manic visuals of 60s inspired music videos and the Gen X and Y films they inspire, are all heirs to Casino Royale. Their creators would have had to invent the film if it hadn't existed. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery is case in point. Having lifted at least half of Casino Royale to make his film an "homage" to 60's spy spoofs (though he claims inspiration instead from Our Man Flint), Mike Myers' Austin Powers has introduced a new generation to the delights of the original, albeit through an impersonation diluted with too much Matt Helm and the worst of MTV toilet humor. Although the film seems to yearn for the prototype's set pieces and its literate pop-apocalypse, it overkills with garish tones for fear that the concept might be lost on a market too young to remember or too attention deficient to understand. This self-conscious and simplistic imitation imparts nothing so much as the sentiment that there is no going home. The original already claimed that fact as its self-ironic starting point. And Myers is not the only one attempting to reinvent the event: the "real" Bond series has been taking dialogue and mimicking sets from Casino Royale since the 1970s, and now larger elements can be found in the The Fifth Element, The Avengers, The World is Not Enough, and a half-dozen other cinema adventures. They remain uncharted because of the critical neglect of the original. These re-visions also pale because, like Casablanca, Casino Royale is a film of momentary vision, collaboration, adaptation, pastiche, and accident. It is the anti-auteur work of all time, a film shaped by the very Zeitgeist it took on. As a compendium of what almost went too wrong in the twentieth century done up as a burlesque of the knightly epic, it may still frighten the modernists, but those who follow should consider it to be quite sagacious.

[sas]

Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS) today announced record financial results for the fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2002. Consolidated net revenues for the quarter were $1.23 billion, up 48 percent compared with $833 million for the fiscal quarter ending December 31, 2001. Net revenues were driven by: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets(TM), James Bond 007: Nightfire(TM), FIFA Soccer 2003, The Lord of the Rings(TM), The Two Towers(TM), Need for Speed(TM) Hot Pursuit 2, NBA Live 2003 and Medal of Honor ...

[sas]

BJMDDS what do you think ?

[sas]

This new Bond is as beautiful as bitter almonds. He is,
quite simply, the most dangerous thing to come out of
Britain since Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. He’
s a thug, which is a shock in itself, but he’s a
particularly lethal thug, a new species of man whose
survival instinct seems to be predicated on the belief
that offense is the best defense. To watch Craig explode
into action on the screen is to see the true poetry of
violence brought vividly to…errr…life. This is not a man
who needs to be corseted in fancy weaponry to get the
job done, this is someone who kills with his bare hands
with the skill and discretion of a masseur; give him a
handgun and he’s liable to take out a few buildings.
Even walking out of the sea in nothing but a blue
swimsuit (and looking divine) he has the look of
someone who’s been wrestling sharks for fun.

Much of this is conditioning. Long years of watching
M/s Brosnan and Moore fiddle about with their cuff-
links have left us thinking of the 007 tag as a sort of
onerous duty, a kind of obligatory bad manners, never
to be discussed in public. With Craig playing the role, it
begins to dawn on you that the designation could be a
privilege, that perhaps the license to kill is not so much
a form of permission but a way of setting limits to what
the killer can get away with. Craig’s 007 status is not a
driver’s ID, it’s a hunting license. Forget bony fingers
and a sickle - if there is a Death, he has eyes as blue as
glaciers and perfectly toned abs.

It’s a testament to just how good Craig is that all the
high speed action sequences in the film seem entirely
natural - what seems like a stunt is the bit where he
stands stil, wearing his tuxedo. He looks good, but you
can’t help wondering if there were special effects
involved. The truth is that when it comes to turning on
the charm, Craig doesn’t quite cut it. Oh, he tries, and
every now and then the sheer anomaly of seeing a smile
on that butch face will get to you, but his talent for
conversation is limited, and he tackles light repartee as
though it were Shakespeare. Other Bonds deliver their
lines with polish, our man simply chips them out with
an adze.

This is not without its own raffish charm (especially if
you remember what he looks like in a swimsuit [2]),
but it means that the corniness of what he’s saying is
mercilessly exposed (at one point he greets a Swiss
banker with the line “Didn’t you bring any chocolates?”
Gah!) and the fact that he has an unusual (for a Bond
flick) amount of ‘emotional’ dialogue to get through
only makes this worse. You have the urge to push
machete wielding bad guys in his way just so he can
stop talking and start beating them up. M (Judi Dench)
calls him a blunt instrument, and she hits the nail right
on the head (or, as happens at some point, punches it
into the skull with a pressure tool). There’s a scene
where his side-kick, a Ms. Vesper Lynd (Eva Green)
says (approximately) “You’ve got your armour back on
haven’t you? You’re not going to let me in”. But it’s not
armour this Bond is wearing, he just doesn’t have the
range as an actor.

(Not that Craig is entirely incapable of charm. There is
one scene in the film where he is genuinely winning - it’
s the bit where he’s being tortured by his opponent and
refusing to talk. How can you not love a secret agent
who’s more of a smooth talker under intense physical
pain than with a woman?)

All of which leads us to an existential question - Craig is
great, but is he Bond? Who James Bond is, exactly, is a
question we haven’t needed to ask since Connery,
because it’s been well understood that every other
Bond has been a pale imitation of that hallowed ideal.
In Craig, however, we have a new original - an
alternate vision of Bond as a relentless killer who can
fake the smooth stuff when he needs to, but is, at heart,
a roughneck, a glorified bouncer on Her Majesty’s
Secret Service.

On the whole, I think I’m going to come down against
Craig as Bond. Don’t get me wrong - I love the fact that
007 has been rescued from the effete attentions of
lounge lizards like Brosnan. When M. gets a microchip
implanted under Bond’s skin so she can keep track of
him, that shot in the arm you hear is the entire Bond
franchise getting a lift out of the realms of farce. And
there’s a part of me that would really love to see a
major franchise that tracked the career of an action
hero who was entirely unfeeling and ruthless (note to
the filmmakers - can we cut out the soppy romantic
stuff next time?).

But the thing I’ve always valued about the Bond
franchise, the thing that Connery had and Craig doesn’t,
was a sense of its own ridiculousness. Connery’s Bond,
like this new one, went easy on the puns and
witticisms, but watching him on screen you couldn’t
shake the feeling that he got the joke. It was this sense
of not taking himself so seriously, even while he was
fighting in deadly earnest, that made Bond superior.
Like the new Bond, Connery’s Bond wasn’t superhuman
- but there was always a hint of bemusement in his
actions, a sense that he was play-acting just a little,
like a cat toying with its prey.

My problem with the new Bond is that he’s too sincere.
Daniel Craig’s Bond feels more like a combination of
John McLane and Philip Marlowe than a version of 007.
He has the killer cred, but he doesn’t have sense of
humour.

I also can’t help wondering whether, if Bond is going to
keep on the way he is, it isn’t time for him to defect.
This new Bond feels as though he would fit better at the
CIA (or the Hollywood version of the CIA) than at MI6.
Surely his bluntness, his recklessness, his obvious
disregard for tact, diplomacy or teamwork and, above
all, his overblown aggressiveness, are all qualities that
would be appreciated more on the other side of the
Atlantic. Watching him tear into an embassy in search
of a terror suspect, and blow it to bits in the process, is
to see White House foreign policy in the last 6 years in
microcosm. The whole point of the classy, self-aware
British agent was that he would beat the Yanks, not join
them. This new Bond may be hell on wheels, but he’s
also the defeat of the Great English Hope.

You could say that all this is stereotype, that characters
need to evolve with their time. And certainly the new
Bond does much to break free of the upper-crusted
mould of the recent films. But it’s worth remembering
that the whole point of Bond, the reason we love him, is
because he’s a cliche. In trying to break free of the old
stereotypes, the new Bond runs the risk of losing the
very things that define his identity. And that, in a world
crowded with action heros, could be as fatal as a bullet
from a Walther PPK.

[sas]

You could say that all this is stereotype, that characters
need to evolve with their time. And certainly the new
Bond does much to break free of the upper-crusted
mould of the recent films. But it’s worth remembering
that the whole point of Bond, the reason we love him, is
because he’s a cliche. In trying to break free of the old
stereotypes, the new Bond runs the risk of losing the
very things that define his identity. And that, in a world
crowded with action heros, could be as fatal as a bullet
from a Walther

Again EVOLVING is the KEY WORD HERE...........

[Bourne]

I think Craig is too old for a substantial character arc. And I think a lot of Bond fans miss the point of Bond. He isn't supposed to be a classless brute.

[sas]

I do believe BJMDDS's views are bias, outdated and without merit....BJMDDS need to be beaten with a wet noodle................

[Jake]

The explanation for Craig and the reboot according to Broccoli and Wilson was a feeling that they'd taken Bond as far as he could go and needed to go back to the drawing board and start again with a different conception of the character. If they really felt like that they should consider selling up. For me the films should change and be somewhat different but James Bond should be a relative constant. I don't mean everyone has to be like Roger Moore etc. Timothy Dalton was intelligent enough to give us a distinctive Bond but he still had the look and most of the refined characteristics we associate with the character. My solution to a feeling of staleness and lack of ideas would be new writers and better directors. Bourne got Liman and Greengrass, Batman got Chris Nolan. Does anyone honestly believe the Tamahoris and Campbells of this world are the best they can get hold of?