Movies & Music & Review Wojtek on 25 Nov 2006 12:07 am
A word on the new James Bond movie
Yesterday, I went to the cinema with my girlfriend to watch the new Bond movie, “Casino Royale”. I must say that I liked it very much and in my humble opinion it’s the best 007 flick since “Golden Eye”. The agent himself is as coy and full of British sarcasm as always, but he’s more brutal than in the previous movies. Even the other characters call him a ruthless killing machine. But I can’t say that I liked everything in the movie…
This time, the “Bond car” is a prestigious Aston Martin DBS. It ain’t exactly “gadget packed” (I only saw a high-tech retractable glove box, in which Bond kept his silenced hand gun, a set of drugs and a portable defibrilator). There’s also a nice nostalgic car aspect, because for a couple of scenes Bond drives the Aston Martin DB5 from the late 60’s (I guess this was also a Bond-mobile in one of the previous movies, but I can’t recall which. Maybe you can tell me ?). But the weirdest thing for me was that in one scene Bond drove a guess what ? A FORD MONDEO ! I literally broke into a heavy laugh when I saw this. Apparently, Ford payed a huge sum in order to place that boring car in the movie. As a matter of fact, I’ve done some researching and I came up with Ford’s statement from their website regarding this matter:
“When filmmakers approached Ford, Mondeo’s design was just a sketch on the drawing board. The result was a misty blue five-door Mondeo equipped with a sports body kit that hinted at what the new model would look like in ‘07. It took crews several weeks to build the vehicle by hand. It is basically a body shell, without amenities like air-conditioning, and an engine just big enough to go 30 mph.”
Funny, isn’t it ? It makes you wonder to what heights can carmakers leap in order to promote a product (and a still-in-prototype-phase one at that!).
The film locations are quite beautiful. Bond visits the Bahamas, Prague, Montenegro, London, Venice and some other lovely places.
One thing that bugs me from head to toe about this movie is the music. In my opinion, it’s THE worst Bond score ever. It’s not as captivating and special as any of the former movies. Even the intro theme sucks. The intro animations themselves weren’t very high tech. They reminded me of the many short “demoscene” clips which were made by semi-pro 3D animators on Amiga home computers back in the early 90’s … And I’m really not joking here …
Anyway, these are just small details and out of an overall perspective I can safely say that “Casino Royale” is a good and pretty well made movie. Maybe it will break the recent popularity loss from the previous 2 movies. Even my girlfriend was pretty reluctant to see the movie, cause she had a kind of “James Bond movie? You gotta be kidding me!” type of stance. But I convinced her by saying that I’ve still got one “Get out of Jail” card, because she once dragged me to this shitty Polish movie (based on a bestseller book she liked) and since then I have yet to drag her to a crap movie of my choice ;). In the end, she liked “Casino Royale” too, so I guess you can treat that as a kind of measure of success for the movie.
On a sidenote: I decided to put the Google ads also back on the blog’s home page sidebar. They will only appear while you’re on the home page. The main goal of me placing these ads is to earn enough money for a better and more stable web hosting service and I hope that you won’t be offended much by the ads (I know that not every person likes those ads).