I need to get my head out of the workzone, so I thought I'd do a quick post about something completely inconsequential.
I had an email from a recruiter just now with an invite to a wine-and-fingerfood networking event to coincide with the launch of Skyfall, the next James Bond movie. I'm torn about whether to accept. On one hand, I'm not known for declining free food or free wine. I'm also really trying to overcome my instinctive discomfort with social events.
On the other hand, I'd rather stick my tongue on an electric fence than sit through another slab of Daniel Craig as James Bond. I know I'm a voice in the wilderness on this one, but I think it's close to killing the franchise.
I should explain.
I sat through Casino Royale with Joni not long after we got married, and it was a nasty argument that followed. My gripe with the approach in the movie was that, in being so keen to get away from the (admittedly extremely formulaic) Bond movie to that point, they'd remade the story into "just another big budget action movie". For one thing, the dialogue could have come out of any given movie (Transporter, The Bourne Miscellany and Die Hard) come to mind, which duly knocked out the humour that usually went with Bond films.
Equally, no matter how buff Daniel Craig is, he's not a particularly interesting actor to watch. Yeah, he tried to draw out the inner life thing, but I kind of wasn't convinced about this as he only seemed to speak in a monotone and he didn't have many facial expressions (specifically, after 20 minutes you'd seen them both).
The other thing was that the product placement in the movie was almost laughable. It's been said before, but you could have been forgiven for thinking you'd grabbed the wrong DVD and were watching a 2.5 hour Samsung commercial.
The thing that really irked me about the movie, though, was the completely gratuitous scene of the collapsing house in Venice at the end of the movie. I know Roger Ebert thought it was brilliant -
With "Casino Royale," we get to the obligatory concluding lovey-dovey on the tropical sands, and then the movie pulls a screeching U-turn and starts up again with the most sensational scene I have ever seen set in Venice, or most other places. It's a movie that keeps on giving
- but to be honest, I was hopelessly lost as to who was trying to kill whom, and why. And by that stage, I was pretty sure I no longer cared.
Actually, I think writing this has helped me answer my essential question: it might be worth going and cranking out a review afterwards. The only problem will be how to keep an open mind.
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