random: royale (parenthetically)

[iainpj]

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.



Honestly, I really did like it, and all I have are quibbles. And I don't even know why I noticed the quibblish stuff, I really don't.

But ... Bond out in his car with the cartiac defibrillator thing. Why on earth would Vesper go to look for him out there? (And, as I said, purely a quibble: at the time, I just thought, "Huh? What's she doing out there? What made her decide to look for him there, or at all?" and then didn't think about it again during the film.)

That godawful torture scene that had probably every man who saw it crossing his legs and weeping in sympathy. So ... Vesper was behind that door doing a lot of screaming, right? The idea was for her pain to induce Bond to tell, one assumes. Only ... she came out of that pretty much entirely undamaged, as far as we could tell. Now, if Le Chiffre didn't know that Vesper also worked for the people running him -- and it makes the most sense that he didn't, I think, otherwise leaving her in the road earlier was a seriously unwarranted risk, because that meant she had to be another agent, and she might also have known the key codes -- then he'd really have done whatever was producing the screams. If he knew that Vesper was working for one of his clients, then he'd have left her alone, and she'd have been unbruised -- in fact, he'd probably have left her out of the equation altogether, because, again, the risks were too great. In short, either you have a rather battered and bruised Vesper, or you should have a highly suspicious Bond, and we didn't really get either one. (And, yes, she could have been battered and bruised from having obviously been dumped onto asphalt from a car at speed -- and again, an enormous risk there for Le Chiffre -- and he could have been deceived by those bruises into thinking they were from a beating, but we didn't get that, either.)

And then there's this:

Bond Buzz: Is Abbie Cornish Meeting With Bond 22 Producers? - Cinematical:...A major villain role in Bond 22 -- Vesper's Algerian boyfriend -- is also reportedly being cast, and Croatian actor Goran Visnjic, most known for his role as a doctor on the television show ER, has been talked about as an ideal choice for the role....

That was the one thing that completely baffled me during the movie when M explained it all. Vesper did all this for her boyfriend? Then what the hell was she doing canoodling with Bond if she was willing to go to such self-destructive extremes? She certainly didn't need to; she got the codes from Bond back at the hospital, and was owed those codes in her role as treasury agent. If she was willing to go through all that for her boyfriend, then why would she put his gift away and get involved with someone else before she knew he was safe? Did she know he was going to be a big giant villain terrorist or whatever it is that he's going to be? Seriously, what? And why would she have waited as long as she clearly did to get her boyfriend away from them? Vesper's motivation in all this is the one seriously weak point; I can understand blackmailing her over the safety of someone dear to her, but either don't explain what they were blackmailing her over (which would have been immensely frustrating to the audience and really a bad choice), or make it something that hangs together. Kidnapping her allegedly dead parents, something like that. (Then Goran could be her vengeful brother. Which, you know, would actually work, aside from the Thunderballishness of it all. The same sort of dark, lean looks, the same sort of unspecifically European [to Americans] accents... And I do kinda sorta have problems with Goran as an Algerian, but I couldn't tell you why. Except, you know, the whole "But he's Croatian!" thing.)

As far as Vesper herself goes, she does feel a little bit like a step back for Bond girls, in some ways; not all the way back to the era of round-heeled bimboes, but maybe back to, say, Holly Goodhead. She's clearly competent within her own sphere, but she doesn't seem to have the same sort of toughness that we've seen recently. While at one level she shouldn't be -- she's a bank analyst, for heaven's sake! -- but then, the same thing could be said of Natalya Simyonova, the computer programmer in Goldeneye, and she was plenty tough. That said, Vesper was tough enough to run this rather peculiar deception past Bond and all of the British secret service, so appearances might be somewhat deceptive. She's also the only Bond girl in recent memory who doesn't get rescued by Bond, albeit not for lack of trying (repeatedly). True, she does get rescued from the torture room by the mysterious Mr White we see Bond confronting at the end ... but then, so does Bond himself. And the one real chance he has at rescuing her, she doesn't let him take.

It is going to be interesting to see where they go with the next Bond girl. (Abbie Cornish notwithstanding.) If Bond 22 follows Casino Royale so closely that Vesper's Algerian Boyfriend will be a character, then very technically, there really shouldn't be a Bond girl, unless, as Vesper says, he's completely got his armor on again. (Which, of course, he will.)

So, that last line to M in the phone call: "The bitch is dead now." I know -- I know -- that's a near-quote of something. I just don't know what. (I mean, yes, the line's in the original book, but the book is quoting something there.) Shakespeare? Jonson? I think the actual line is, "And besides, the bitch is dead," but I'm not sure. Where is that line from?

Comments

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I assumed Vesper saw him run out to the car. After all, she was in the room when he ran out of the game, obviously ill. The problem WE had with the cardiac scene is that we don't believe a remote diagnosis tool that fast or accurate actually exists. But this is, as you say, a quibble.

Remember that Le Chiffre knows about both Bond and Vesper because the traitor is Mathis. I can't remember how the book handles the Vesper business during the torture and I'm not sure if Mathis is at all traitorous in the book - the "who's the mole" aspect, and Vesper's motivations for betrayal, are the only places the film works serious changes on the original storyline - and to my mind, the film's explanations make less sense (see your comments about M). So I'd have to reread. I will say, though, that apart from changing the carpet beater to a rope end, Le Chiffre's treatment of Bond is EXACTLY as described in the book. (In the book Bond gets "rescued" - sort of - by SMERSH, who are there to kill Le Chiffre because he's been gambling away their money. The SMERSH man cuts an M in the back of Bond's hand to mark him as a spy but does not actually kill him.)

"The bitch is dead" is what Bond actually says about Vesper at the end of the book. However, he doesn't mean it; he's trying to sound remorseless because he believes his call is being tapped. As far as I know the book isn't quoting anything.

[nonelvis]

I saw this fantastic post about a Casino Royale comic strip on scans_daily and immediately thought of you and columbina.

Also, you get points for coining "quibblish" in this entry.

[iainpj.livejournal.com]

If Le Chiffre knows about both Bond and Vesper, then dumping her into the road is just brain damaged; at that speed, there's a very real risk that he wouldn't be able to turn or stop in time, and if Bond does break and give them the codes, they still need Vesper to get to the money. The treasury man and banker will only work with one or the other of them, and preferably both.

I thought there was some doubt as to whether or not Mathis was the traitor. During the phone call with M near the end, she says that they can stop sweating Mathis, and Bond tells her not to stop, that just because Vesper was a traitor doesn't mean that Mathis isn't also one. Which is true enough, but it does mean that they don't know for certain, and we're never really told or shown anything to indicate either way.

It's kind of a pity that they did that to Mathis; the conversation with Bond on the nature of evil would have given some interesting depth to Bond for later films. Of course, it would also have made the movie sail comfortably over 2.5 hours, so I can understand why they didnt keep it in.

According to the comic strip that nonelvis linked to, Vesper's motivation actually didn't change that much. SMERSH kidnapped her boyfriend, just as Le Chiffre's unspecified terrorist bosses did in the film. Which, again, means that she took up with Bond before even trying to get her lover out of danger, which is kind of a bad thing for your heroine to be doing.

[iainpj.livejournal.com]

Remember that Le Chiffre knows about both Bond and Vesper because the traitor is Mathis.

I just realized that I was unclear about something. I wasn't confused because Le Chiffre knows that Bond and Vesper are working for the British government. I was confused because it's not clear whether or not he also knows that she's working for the terrorists. Either way, dumping her in the road, while a really spectacular scene, is an incredibly stupid thing for him to be doing. Either way, he's putting at risk the one person who can get the money for him once he's done with Bond, because it's pretty clear that Bond won't be going anywhere for a good long time after all that, even if he's left alive. And if he knows that she's working for the terrorists, then he's risking seriously pissing them off even more if she gets seriously hurt or killed. (All this assuming his scheme to get the codes works.)

[iainpj.livejournal.com]

That is an impressive entry, that is.

Titan Books, about a year or so before Casino Royale, started compiling the old James Bond newspaper comic strips into A4 sized graphic compilations. (http://www.mi6.co.uk/sections/articles/comic_cr_review.php3?t=&s=comics) About half of them are serializations of the books, and the rest are original stories. I haven't really read them, just looked at them in the store. One was written by Kingsley Amis (http://www.amazon.com/James-Bond-Colonel-Sun/dp/1845761758/ref=pd_sim_b_4/002-3822872-8117612), of all people. And from the looks of the summary, it may have inspired Gardner or whoever did The World is not Enough for part of the Elektra King storyline.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Did you not know that Kingsley Amis was like the world's hugest Bond fan? He wrote the novel Colonel Sun too, under the pen name Robert Markham, which makes him the first non-Fleming person (i.e. NOT John Gardner) to write a Bond novel. Amis also wrote The James Bond Dossier, practically the first of the James Bond fanboy guides.

I haven't read Colonel Sun, which is an authorized Bond - the Glidrose people, the Fleming print licensing company, asked Amis to do it. (He also critiqued the MS of The Man With The Golden Gun for them.)

The Bond Files by Lane and Simpson says of Colonel Sun, "In our opinion, this is equal to a lot of the Fleming canon, particularly the sixties [i.e. late-period] novels, and far superior to a lot of what has appeared subsequently."

[iainpj.livejournal.com]

No, I didn't know. But now I have to read Colonel Sun, just because.

...And something I just found by accident. Did you know there's a Teen James Bond series for kids?

No, really.

REALLY. (http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Fever-Young-James-Bond/dp/0786836628/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-3822872-8117612?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173980406&sr=8-1)

Haven't read them, of course, since I only just this second found out they existed, but that kind of seems a bit ... misguided, somehow.

kind of offtopic

[aet.livejournal.com]

Colonel Sun - the Russian translation, that is - was one of the first of the Bond books I read in early nineteen nineties.

I must confess, though, that I got it only because I was trying to get rid of some clutter in my parents house and so had the 5 kg of wool textiles to recycle that gave me the right to buy that otherwise hard to get book ... (wow, I should not post this, probably, as such shortages and rationings are bound to sound weird to American ear).

I also should confess that the volume had two stories - one by Fleming, one by Markham - and the only thing I recall are the different tortures Bound experiences (so, can you tell what was the other book, if in one Bond gets a genital beating and in another metal instruments are poked into his head - I am not entirely sure just ears or nose too).

[nonelvis]

Charlie Higson wrote these? Randall and Hopkirk: Deceased Charlie Higson? Who is now fishing for a role on Doctor Who? And who apparently was a member of a band called the Higsons, which I know about because I love the Robyn Hitchcock song "Listening to the Higsons"?

My head is about to explode here from the number of my fandoms colliding. EXPLODE, I tell you.