random: royale (parenthetically)

Reprinting the first three points from a flurry of emails between me and columbina, just because:

So, having seen Casino Royale, finally, on the spiffy EXTREME WIDESCREEN DVD, I would like to make the following completely irrelevant observations:

First, what's up with the aspect ratio? I have never seen such a savagely letterboxed film in my entire life. Fully half the screen is lost to letterboxing, and it doesn't matter if you have a widescreen television or monitor; the black boxes don't go away. It's clearly a deliberate, artistic choice; it's just a weird one.

Second, Craig's Bond is far and away the quietest Bond I can remember having seen. Not a bad thing at all, actually. Works for the character.

Third, I wonder what the difference is between the theme song that Chris Cornell delivered to the producers and the one that got put on film. That's the first genuine Bond song I've heard in quite some time, with the lone exception of kd lang's "Surrender"at the end of Tomorrow Never Dies, and it can't possibly be the song he delivered. ("Genuine Bond Song" being defined as, something you can imagine Shirley Bassey -- or, in a pinch, Tina Turner -- singing without making you wonder in a bemused or appalled way, "What could she possibly have been THINKING?" I'm a traditionalist like that.) I mean, I like Chris Cornell now and again, but you wouldn't normally find floods of violins and brasses within a parsec of one of his songs. I remember Shirley Manson from Garbage being seriously annoyed at what the Broccolis had done to "The World is not enough", and I've heard the Garbage original version, which is comparatively quite spare ... but it's not a Bond song as written, and it was when the Broccolis were done with it. That's what makes me suspect that the song he delivered and the song we got were very different; if you pull the sweetening from that song, you get something much edgier and darker and less romantic-sounding. The Bondification would also explain why it pretty much crashed and died on the charts; he's not a big enough name that he could sell the song on his own, and it's so far from his normal style that his fans wouldn't have helped it along much, and frankly, even with the hard rock stylings breaking through, the Bondification just makes it too old. (Besides, a proper Bond song needs a Beltin' Babe, even one that's not Shirley Bassey. Guys doing Bond songs -- with the sole exception of Tom Jones -- is just wrong. And yes, I'm including a-ha and Duran Duran in that wrongness.) In any event, the song itself is copyrighted by both Chris Cornell and Danjaq (the Bond producers' company), so they must have done something to it.

Fourth, there was all this stuff in the press -- especially the gay press, bien sur -- about the "fetishizing" of Bond's body, about Craig's Bond being presented as if he was his own Bond girl -- but aside from the "Honey Ryder rising from the sea" shot in the blue swimsuit, I really don't see it. Mind, I do believe this is the first time that we've had a clearly and completely naked Bond in one of the movies, even if only in side view and shadow, but since Really Awful Things were happening at the time, I'm not sure that counts as "fetishizing." (At least, not the type of fetish of which the media was speaking.)

And now, let's talk story, just a little! Which means that here be spoilers! Lots of spoilers! Whoa, nellie, you ain't never seen so many spoilers!

And apologies to anyone looking at this through RSS, which ignores the lj-cut tag. If you haven't seen it, and plan to, then Stop Reading Now.

In other words, You Wuz All Warned.

( So let's see about a couple points in that story now, shall we? Let's shall. )