[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
I murmured to myself, “Here you go, mate. Don’t spend it all in one place.” 
[/QUOTE]
But the $500K chip was a tournament chip, meaning it was entirely worthless. He could have equivalently given the dealer a bunch of Monopoly money. But it was still funny. And I loved how nonchalantly the dealer accepted it. Maybe he knew it was worthless? 
[QUOTE=Mayo Speaks!]
But the $500K chip was a tournament chip, meaning it was entirely worthless. He could have equivalently given the dealer a bunch of Monopoly money. But it was still funny. And I loved how nonchalantly the dealer accepted it. Maybe he knew it was worthless?
[/QUOTE]
I guess I don’t understand. Couldn’t the dealer have immediately cashed it in with the Casino Royale management?
Another great moment I forgot to mention: Bond takes a dress to Lynd’s room for her to wear later. The cheek! Then he returns to his room - the music changes abruptly, as if he’s just noticed one of Le Chiffre’s goons in the room, pointing an anti-tank gun at him - and then Bond is back in Lynd’s room, peeved because she returned the favor and picked a tuxedo for him. I love that this was given the same dramatic impact, if only for a moment, as an assassin lying in wait.
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
I think it was Ebert who suggested that “James Bond” might be a codename for a series of different MI6 agents, over the span of many years.
[/QUOTE]
This seems to be a somewhat popular suggestion but I don’t think it makes much sense. His code name is “007”. I’m pretty sure he was already referred to as “James Bond” before he completed the two kills which rated him double-oh status and I don’t think they would have bestowed such a presumably illustrious codename on some newbie who hadn’t proved himself yet.
Plus the whole idea just doesn’t seem to fit the character; I don’t think any previous Bond flick (except, I understand, the other “Casino Royale”) has hinted at such a thing, and this is James Bond, not the Phantom.
[QUOTE=MEBuckner]
this is James Bond, not the Phantom.
[/QUOTE]
I agree.
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
I guess I don’t understand. Couldn’t the dealer have immediately cashed it in with the Casino Royale management?
[/QUOTE]
No. Regular casino chips can be exchanged for face value in cash. But the chips used in tournaments have no monetary value.
And speaking of the poker, did anyone else notice that Bond never bluffed? He gave Vesper that speech about bluffing, and then never did it.
Didn’t care for it; it was a rather disjointed mess of a movie with an ending that falls apart on minor analysis.
I also miss the Cold War, where Le Chiffre’s bosses (and executioners) were Soviets acting as the overarching bad guy. Generic “terrorism” is a weak motivation. M’s attitude toward Bond doesn’t work in a reboot, though it was somewhat understandable in earlier films when Dench was inheriting a 00 whose style annoyed her but who’d had too many successes for her to really get on his case. Why did she promote him, if all he does is irritate her into impotent Yosemite-Sam expressions of rage?
Also, if Vesper was being pressured to steal the money, didn’t she do that the instant the money was transferred? If not, couldn’t she have done so at any time afterward, since Bond had (rather sentimentally) revealed the password? What was the point of the briefcase? She couldn’t be carrying $120 million in it; did she withdraw a cashier’s check? If the organization she was working for was that sophisticated, why not just make another bank transfer? I was kinda hoping the mysterious Mr. White would be revealed as working for a rebooted SPECTRE, with this cash being their seed money to start all kinds of mischief, but I guess that’d be pushing it.
I’m also kind of annoyed by the poker game and the clichéd manner in which each player in the big showdown has a progressively better hand, and the 5-7-9 on the table only telegraphed that Bond had the straight flush. It’s typical of bad poker movies where bluffing is completely ignored (or given minor play, at most) and the “best” player is the one who gets the ridiculously lucky hands.
The relentless exposition was annoying, too. “Five million to buy back in! Don’t forget, FIVE MILLION IF YOU LOSE ALL YOUR MONEY AND WANT TO GET BACK IN THE GAME!!” Okay, we get it.
I’m a little surprised by the amount of misinformation being told about the original novel in this thread. Bond didn’t run over a dummy (that scene, more or less, is in the novel The Man With the Golden Gun). In fact, Bond crashed his car after Le Chiffre dropped a blanket of tire-shredding chains and razor wire from his car.
I loved this movie and my wife, I could tell was really really into it. A lot of the more tense scenes she had her hands over her mouth and then she would reach over and grab my leg. I think she really thought something would happen to Bond, even though we know nothing will.
I didn’t let the poker game bother me too much. I mean it was written for dramatic effect not for an inside look into how poker is really played. I don’t see why some folks think it should have been bacarat. For one thing, how many people would have known what was going on in a game of bacarat. Second, while Bond’s preference may be bacarat this wasn’t his choice but a game set up by the villian. Third, can you play bacarat against the other players or is it against the house?
One ting almost all Bond movies, good and bad, have going for them is the amazing locations and this was no differnt. In fact, this had some of the most beautiful and stunning locations I have seen in any movie ever.
I guessed wrong on Bond’s winning hand. I turned to my wife and said, “Ace eight” which would have given Bond a higher full house.
Fantastic movie.
One of my few nits, is on Felix. Did he have to be such a total pussy? I know we don’t want to overshadow James, but he was terrible.
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
Bond crashed his car after Le Chiffre dropped a blanket of tire-shredding chains and razor wire from his car.
[/QUOTE]
It was spikes in a mat. 
Ouchies in a blanket, one might say.
Saw it last night. It was very good, with no doubt the best Bond movie since GoldenEye.
But I don’t think Craig was that great at delivering witty quips. It might have been the script, because there was some dialogue that felt awkward to me. Especially Bond’s layman psychology in the train. I mean, I don’t want Brosnanesque one-liners, but what humorous attempts Craig had didn’t feel that smooth, unless it was visual, as with driving mrs. Dimitrios or tipping the cropiere.
But the shower scene takes the prize. Lynd is in mental shock after having witnessed a cold-blooded murder and says that he can’t “watch the bloods off her hands”. Bond proceeds by sucking on her fingers. That was just so wrong.
I read the original books. James Bond is, in no particular order, a frothing patriot of the first order, a swain, a brilliant mind, an amoral man, a sexual predator and a serious athlete.
He is a man who can relate to women on an extremely narrow scale- and is aware of it. How does he comfort someone he truly starts to care about? The only way that he can because of who he is as a person- by relating sexually to her.
In the context of who James Bond was in the novels, that scene in the shower was one of the most honest and acurate in the entire film.
I thought the guy was perfect in most ways. James was a buff guy but not a glam queen. He was focused and great at his job, but not an office-maven.
He was exactly the kind of suave killer machine that was portrayed in this film. Even more ruthless than James Bond ( and I think that is not because of Connery, but because of the era when the early Bond films were shot. Less tolerance for a certain visualization of brutal violence ) was in the early days, this was the real deal.
This is who Ian Flemming created. Spot on, I say.
Cartooniverse
[QUOTE=Mayo Speaks!]
No. Regular casino chips can be exchanged for face value in cash. But the chips used in tournaments have no monetary value.
And speaking of the poker, did anyone else notice that Bond never bluffed? He gave Vesper that speech about bluffing, and then never did it.
[/QUOTE]
Good point. I’ll bet what happened is the writers couldn’t find a way to clearly communicate to the audience that Bond’s hand was junk and that he was bluffing. You could have him turn over his cards, and have the dealer or another player indicate it, but that would never happen in a real game. Suggestions from the kibbitzers here on how to do that?
I liked the line about “Skewered. One sympathizes.” When I saw this in this hick town, no one but me laughed.
Well, it’s great that it’s true to the original material, but I don’t think that makes it any less tacky.
I want to add that on the whole, I’m for the re-invented and darker James Bond portrayal. It makes a lot of sense.
[QUOTE=cactus waltz]
but I don’t think that makes it any less tacky.
[/quote]
The shower scene, that is.
[QUOTE=audiobottle]
To be fair, he did have to attach the AED electrodes. Although I didn’t quite understand if the electrode came undone because of foul play or clumsy handling?
[/QUOTE]
The pads are replaceable, and one of the things they cautioned us about in AED training was to make sure that the electrodes were still properly attached. It was just incautious, frantic fumbling.
[QUOTE=carnivorousplant]
SMERSH is mentioned in the novel, is said to report directly to the long dead Beria. Both organizations, fictional or not were creatures of the USSR, which no longer exists in 2006.
[/QUOTE]
Smersh (Smert Shpionam) was a bureau of the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) and the Soviet Navy during Stalin’s reign. While in the Bond canon it is treated as some kind of elite counterintelligence and hit squad, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (his semi-memoir and comprehensive expose of the Soviet prison camp system) describes them more as opportunistic thugs; most of the “spies” they uncovered, tortured, and killed were, like Solzhenitsyn, nothing more than unfortunate soliders who lost a battle or people picked up randomly to meet quotas. Viktor Abakumov, not Beria, was the head of Smersh for its relatively brief (1943-1946) existance, though obviously its functions went on to other groups of the Soviet intelligence and internal security organs.
SPECTRE is a totally fictional literary creation of Ian Fleming, Jack Wittingham, and Kevin McClory, as indicated above. They co-wrote what was intended to be a screen treatment for the first Bond film (what ended up as Thunderball) but lost funding. Fleming wrote the novel Thunderball per the existing treatment, being the first introduction of SPECTRE and its head, Ernst Starvo Blofeld. After three successful films based upon earlier Fleming novels, Thunderball was made after [url=Thunderball (film) - Wikipedia an extended legal batttle. McClory ended up with producer credit for the film and cinematic rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld (though Fleming retained literary rights and transferred them on in his estate to future Bond novelists).
Regarding the film: Wow! I have to agree with the criticisms about the title track (though I think the credit sequence was excellent, on par with the best of Marice Binder’s work) and that the third act kind of dragged a bit, especially since we know that she’s going to betray Bond, so there’s little reason to drag it out. I think 10 mintues could been trimmed from the film easily. I had a couple of other issues; the film occasionally got a little cute with the implicit references to/distinctions from previous Bonds, such as Bond winning the DB5, though Craig’s response to the bartender’s question about wanting his martini “shaken or stirred” (“Do I look like I give a damn?”) was pitch perfect. A lot of the plot twists were telegraphed way in advance; when M tells Bond not to trust anybody, even his collegues, you know that he’s going to be betrayed. I thought the poisoning in the casino sequence was overdone and detracted somewhat from the tension of the game. And as someone already noted, the cell phone became a rather overused device; I couldn’t help but think that these people ought to learn to at least protect their phones with a PIN lock.
But this is minor stuff, especially in comparison to the gaping plotholes and bland delivery of recent Bond films. I don’t know that I’d regard this as just a reboot of the series; it’s an entirely revamped, reimaged Bond that even the best Connery films would have a hard time holding a candle to. I easily put it in the top three of Bond films (along with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and From Russia With Love, possibly edging out the latter) and better than the best concievable distillation of Moore and Brosnan era films. The action sequences in particular were incredible; while watching them, I couldn’t help but making (favorable) comparisons to Raiders Of The Lost Ark and The Great Escape, and unlike many action films, where its clear that the stuntman is doing the bulk of the work and then you get a close-up on the actor’s face, Craig was out there doing some serious stuntwork, keeping the view “in the film”. The opening kill sequence shot in black & white “auteur mode” was excellent. Like the film itself, Eva Green tops out as one of the archtypical Bond girls, and removes the remaining traces of the likes of Jill St. John, Tanya Roberts, and Denise Richards from my memory. Making Bond mortal, egotistically flawed, and brutally ruthless gives the kind of suspense that has been missing since at least The Living Daylights. And the screenplay and dialogue was as tight as the best of the Golden Age films.
With a better title track, and a little bit tighter editing (trimming out a few minutes from the third act exposition), this would be a strong contender for best Bond movie every, though I think Diana Rigg would still keep On Her Majesty’s Secret Service on the top rung (Lazanby’s sometimes wooden acting notwithstanding). I was optimistic about the film and Daniel Craig (about whom, both of the women in my party declared to be “the hottest Bond ever”), but this film exceeded my expectations, and in fact I’d probably call this the best film I’ve seen all year, albeit the offerings have been pretty modest.
One poser for the world-at-large: since they’re doing a reboot of the series, should/are they going to reuse the titles of existing Fleming novels that have already been adapted to film (as they did with the non-canon Casino Royale) or make up unique titles? There are some of the stories that I’d love to see redone or reimagined, like You Only Live Twice, From Russia With Love, For Your Eyes Only, From A View To A Kill, Diamonds Are Forever that could be adapted in some form to the current day. On the other hand, there are some of the existing films (*On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, From Russia With Love, Dr. No) that I’d rather not see redone because they’re classics in their own right and remaking them would bring inevitable comparisons.
Regardless, I’m absolutely looking forward to Bond 22. (Or perhaps it should be considered, Bond Mk II, Mod 2.)
Stranger
Just saw the movie today. It was great.
Good points:
Craig was brilliant as bond.
The girl who was killed was really hot.
Good dialogue. I liked the miniature personality analysis in the train. I often try to guess how many siblings girls have, too.
The parkour was cool. They did some stuff I wouldn’t be able too. Well executed kong vault, for instance.
Bad points:
Craig was more naked and seminaked than all the female characters put together.
The poker was mostly stupid. We don’t see Bond playing well, we just see him hitting an incredibly lucky straight flush, and we know he has it long before he turns his cards. Also, I think it was a bad move for Chiffre to go all in on this hand. With two other people all-in in the pot before him, he should know that Bond would not call with a worse hand.
Also, why is it always about the tells? That is getting really annoying. John malkowich cracking the cookies, this guy doing something with the eye. Like the best poker players have such obvious tells. I liked it when he faked the tell, which would make sense. But then we later hear that he only did that because Mathis told him. :rolleyes:
Bond could hold his breath under hard physical exercise as long as it took for the girl to die of drowning. That can’t be right.
Why introduce a character with such a characteristic property as an eye patch, and then don’t give him any screen time?
[QUOTE=mr. jp]
Why introduce a character with such a characteristic property as an eye patch, and then don’t give him any screen time?
[/QUOTE]
Scuttlebutt is that the next film deals with the aftermath of this one.