Are you absolutely sure about that?
Outstanding movie, and Craig was a great Bond. He managed to be, and to look like, a thug and a gentleman with equal authority. That really impressed me. The idea was to make a grittier, more real-world Bond movie, and that’s just what happened.
Random thoughts:
The reference to September 11 surprised me. That’s real-world, all right, but I’m not sure it contributed anything. I think it was a good move not to have a SMERSH in this movie. Fancy terrorist organizations aren’t as impressive as they used to be.
Other than the climactic hand, the poker scenes were not great. I blame the exposition. The worst, thought, was the scene on the boat with Le Chiffre calculating the odds, because his “you have a 17.4 percent chance” line made me think of ESPN, and how the TV shows always tell you the players’ odds.
A few of the romance scenes fell flat, and yes, the movie was long - and it felt longer because you knew she’d double-cross him and die.
Talking of the title sequence (which I loved by the way), did anyone else notice the way the club symbols grew into a fractal pattern very much like a Mandelbrot set? Kind of cool, I thought, and not what you expect to see in a Bond film.
Yeah, I called her up and asked…
Hmm, her cell is busy.
Can I get back to you on that?
Saw it yesterday, a really good movie. I agree with the posters who said “best Bond since Goldeneye”. A very different Bond, more likeable, not so much a Superhero with magic powers but a man who does what needs to be done and excels through stamina, willpower and physical prowess.
I enjoyed the opening chase a lot. It established that while there may be people who are better at certain things than 007, he can still prevail because he just wants to win more.
Lots of eye candy, but not too much. Vesper was stunningly beautiful and erotically intelligent. Bond was nice eye candy, even for this lesbian woman. I do not get the people here complaining that the movie is geared at “females and gay men”. What is it that makes many straight guys so uncomfortable when an attractive male is on the screen? And since when do females and gay men enjoy 225 minutes of exploding things?
Like others, I also felt that the movie was about 10 minutes too long. When Bond was sailing around the world with Vesper, I told my wife: “She’s dead, a traitor, or both.” We really did not need that long to establish that Bond was in lurve with her.
Some bits and pieces that I think were asked but not answered in this thread:
They used it 3 times: once on the boat when he explained that it was caused by malfunctioning tear ducts. Once on the balcony in the hotel and the third time when he lost the poker game.
Bolding mine. They said at the beginning that Le Chiffre might be Albanian, not Algerian.
And someone asked what the balloon-like things were in the house in Venice: they were gas-filled pontons keeping the house “afloat”.
Ok, I have to ask about the blood coming from the eye. It’s so unusual, and such a point is made of it, and yet it seems to figure into the plot so little in the end. What part does it really play? I mean, I’m sure Le Chifrfe blows his nose sometimes, but this is not shown on screen. If the director is going to make such a point of such a weird thing, I totally expected it to figure into a sign of stress when he bluffs, or something.
Which reminds me of a question I had. Is the water deep enough for the entire building to go underwater? Sorry if this has already been asked & answered.
I thought the point was made that blood tears weren’t necessarily stress induced and therefore weren’t a reliable tell. It just made him look creepier and more sinister.
I don’t think that the airbags were so much keeping the building afloat as keeping it stable even though the footings had eroded or become unanchored. Once the support from the pontoons disappeared, the building started to collapse. It was an incredible sequence, IMHO, and far more believable than many others (like the dsintigrating cargo transport in the excreble Die Another Day).
Stranger
I thought I saw sand spew from one. Could they have been keeping the water out?
Maybe it was just the hankie, but Mikkelsen’s version of Le Chiffre occasionally made me think of Peter Lorre - who played the role in the first adaptation of Casino Royale. Actually, I think it was the hankie and something about his lips.
And the huge chalk “M” on his back.
IIRC, the girl was looking right at him, then intentionally inhaled water.
The evidence for this is that lots of bubbles abruptly came out of her mouth, followed by her eyes going glassy.
A person holding their breath can continue to extract oxygen from the air remaining in their lungs, but it’s all over once you intentionally inhale water.
I don’t know, I think it could be cool. I’m torn as to whether I’d rather see Octopenis, or a remake of Goldfinger featuring a love scene with Penis Galore.
If Bond went gay, I might actually go and see one of these movies.
Of course, they would also rename Oddjob… and nothing need be said about Jaws.
May I pose these questions again?
I’m particularly interested to hear the answer to your second question, Elendil’s Heir.
I don’t know Elendil’s Heir, I’ve been wondering about those things too. I’ve seen it 3 times so far and don’t know the answers. I just assumed that Bond’s fellow agent got left behind and there was no particular need to show him again. Hopefully the dumbass got kicked out of the service. How stupid can you get, holding the classic I HAVE A BUG IN MY EAR! pose? The first time I saw that I thought “man, stop that! that’s a dead givaway that you’re law enforcement” and right after that Bond said “Get your finger out of your ear!” It was a “take my pies out of the oven” moment…I knew I was going to enjoy the movie from then on.
Mathis? I haven’t a clue. I did notice that the agents who came up behind him at the lakeside hospital (just as he’s trying to get Bond to drink a concotion) didn’t kill him as I had first thought. They only tazered him then dragged him away. We might be seeing more of Mr. Mathis. (I haven’t read the books to know that, well duh, he shows up again or, nope, he never does)
What a fun fun fun movie! It keeps getting better with each viewing. The poker game seems much shorter, the whole movie seems shorter once you know what’s going to happen next. That’s true for me anyway. I wouldn’t want a minute cut out of it.
Although some viewers here have expressed that the poker scenes were too long, I agree that you needed those scenes to get into the heads of Le Chiffre and Bond and see how their mental one-upmanship develops in the plot with Mathis giving a twist to it. Mathis informing Bond about Le Chiffre’s “tell” and Bond biting on it to lose his initial stake (LC’s 4J’s over Bond’s Full House) might have given Bond the clue that Mathis was a traitor. Heh, that’s just MHO though, and I’ve only seen the movie once. And since I’m a poker junkie who also saw a little bit of “Rounders” in this film, I ate it up like pocket Aces flopping quads.
Yes, it was a fun movie, especially since my wife liked it just as much as I did. And a happy wife is a fun wife, if you know what I mean!
I’ll take a stab at this. [ul][li]What happened to Bond’s fellow agent: He draws his weapon, falls in the pit, the gun goes off, and the crowd scatters. Given the trouble Bond gets in later, his associate probably tries to distance himself as much as possible, but we don’t see or hear from him again. (BTW, I like the fact that Bond keeps criticizing him for touching his earpiece; doing so is totally a movie thing and dumb as hell.) [/li]
[li]What tipped off Bond to Mathis’s treachery?: I think he realized that someone must have betrayed him with regard to Le Chiffre’s “tell” and it had to be Mathis (assuming, as he did at that point, that Vesper didn’t). It’s actually not clear whether Mathis betrayed him or not; Le Chiffre seems to confirm it with his comment ("…your friend Mathis is actually my friend Mathis,") but that may well have been a dupe so that Bond continued to believe that Vesper was with them. In the end, M seems convinced that Mathis is clean, but Bond (having been betrayed by Vesper, trusts no one) claims that they should “keep sweating Mathis” because it might have been a double blind; both Mathis and Vesper against Bond and neither one knowing of the other. [/ul][/li]
I just watched the movie again a couple of nights ago, and I have to say that it gets better with a second viewing. Aside from a couple of continuity errors (the password Bond types into the bank machine is clearly not “VESPER”) it’s really quite tight. If the building falling down was CGI or miniature work I can’t see it; it really looks like a building on the Grand Canal (or at least one of the larger Venice canals) being demolished. I still think they could have trimmed a few minutes out of it, and that the suspense of the story is somewhat diminished by the knowledge (foreshadowed, and widely known in any case) that Vesper would betray him, but all in all, a really excellent movie, with the action sequences being nicely offset by other more intimate scenes (the scene in the shower with Vesper, the joyous, non-cliched lovemaking in the hospital). Even the title track seemed…well, if not good, less obnoxious than before.
Stranger