how much of a loser.

Alright, Daniel Craig, I'm on board.

Josh and I are big Bond fans. I used to hear people arguing about Bond movies and wondering how much of a loser you would have to be to know which actor played the main character in any given movie in the franchise. I have since discovered how much of a loser you have to be. Some Bond movies are good and some of them are so bad, they're good. Most of them are dated in many ways, each of them little showcases of what Americans thought was cool back then. I enjoy all of them. I'll just let you know now that if you aren't reasonably familiar with all the Bond movies, you're going to spend a lot of time clicking on Wikipedia links for this entry. Or you might just ignore the links and wonder what kind of loser you would have to be to know one henchman from another.

I was really disappointed with Casino Royale. I'd heard mixed reviews about it, most of them good. But I didn't like it. It was dark and weird and neither what I expected nor what I wanted.

It starts out great. The opening sequence is one of the best in the series, because it makes use of parkour. While the villain is running all over Madagascar to get away, doing crazy gymnastic feats, Bond struggles to keep up. He falls, stumbles, and barely makes jumps that the other guy lands with ease. I appreciated this little bit of realism.

But then things go downhill from there. Bond shoots up an embassy, which seemed like the kind of thing that would be hushed up by the government and then revealed later once the administration changes. I really think they lost me with the torture sequence, with Bond naked and tied to a chair while the villain swings a knotted rope at his testicles. I have to give the scene some credit, because it was in the book. But I didn't enjoy it. I didn't need to see it. I would have much preferred that the scene ended right before Bond's double-ohs had been damaged.

The pacing of Casino bothered me as well. There was a point when you thought the movie was over. Bond and the girl were together, they were happy and snuggly, they had all the bad guy's money, everything was cool. But then the movie just kept going for about ten minutes. Of course, then there was a twist, and you had another half hour of movie after that.

As I watched Casino and realized that I wasn't going to like it, it made me dislike Daniel Craig. He always seemed to be swaggering, and his face constantly has the expression that he might be leaning in for a kiss in a minute. You see the expression he's wearing in the poster? That's his expression for the entire movie. Actually, it's probably not even him in the movie. They just took that one picture of him and glued his face on some other actor in every frame of the film. James Bond should not have pouty lips.

After Casino, we rented Quantum of Solace with low expectations. After being disappointed with Casino and with Craig in general, Josh didn't even want to watch it. But what kind of Bond fans would we be if we didn't even watch it? I mean, what if someone struck up a conversation at a party about which movie had the best villain, and we couldn't even participate? "Okay, well, I've never seen Quantum, but there's no way the bad guy...whose name I don't know... is better than Hugo Drax." And then we surprised ourselves by actually liking it.

I would not say that Quantum was particulary well-directed. You know that last part of the Godfather, where Michael is having all those other guys killed off, and the shots are editted together with scenes from the baptism of the sister's baby? Man, that was good. This director, Forster, must have really liked that scene, because he tried to recreate the technique of interspersing shots of violence with shots of other things. In fact, he did it twice: once in the opening action sequence, and once again when Bond is escaping an opera house full of bad guys. And he did it badly. I'm not sure if the scene he picked just didn't capture the violence properly or what, but it didn't work either time. It was just distracting. Okay, Bond is chasing the bad guy, now we're looking at horses, oops, there's the bad guy running again, here's some more horses.

There were some good scenes. The first fight with the bad guy has them dangling from ropes and fighting. It reminded me of marionette fighting, but was still kinda fun. My favorite scene was of an opera, where the various members of the big bad guy organization, Quantum, have gathered for a meeting. They have little earpieces for communicating with each other while pretending to watch the opera. Of course Bond gets a hold of one of the earpieces and wrecks their meeting, but I just thought the idea of having a super secret villain meeting at the opera was very cool.

There was also a scene which was a nice touch for other Bond fans. The bad guys capture and kill one of the Bond girls (named Strawberry Fields, *snicker*) by throwing her in a vat of bubblin' crude (Oil, that is, black gold, Texas tea). Then they left her on the hotel bed in Bond's room. Her positioning was exactly like that of Jill Masterson, who was killed by being covered in gold in Goldfinger.

I haven't been particularly impressed with either of the villains in the movies. I mean, they're fine. Le Chiffre (Casino) is from the creepy Peter Lorre school of villainry, while Dominic Greene is more of confidently powerful and unconcerned bad guy, like Christopher Walken in A View to a Kill. I would have been right to say he was not better than Hugo Drax. We have yet to see any interesting henchmen in the style of Jaws or Oddjob, but perhaps that's a bit too comedic for this era of Bond. I could live without freakish henchmen if it prevented another Nick Nack. We haven't met the leader of the bad guy organization, as both villains thus far seem to be just minions in the overall web of evil. Or rather, they are individual evil fingers in individual worldwide pies in this very extensive network of bad dudes. It will be interesting to see how the movies proceed as Bond, MI6, and the audience slowly discover the extent of QUANTUM.

Some people have complained that there are no gadgets. There's not even a Q. Again, the gadgets might be too high up on the cheese factor for Craig's Bond. He does use his cell phone a lot, which I'm okay with. And you'll notice that M and company have some really amazing touch screen computers. It makes you think that the technology you're seeing could actually exist, which is a nice change after seeing all those amphibious Astin Martins and exploding pens. The gadgets are things that could possibly exist and be useful to us non-spy types. Of course, at this point, it's probably not as smooth and shiny as they portray in the movie. In reality, you'd get about three blue screens of death in the course of a couple of hours of use.

Judi Dench is a marvelous M. She's hard as nails but will go to bat for her people. I've liked the Bond girls, too. Pretty, smart, and sassy, they also take part in the butt-kicking when necessary. I'm glad we've come into an era when the female leads in movies do something besides scream helplessly and break the heels of their shoes. You would get sloshed in half an hour if you took a drink every time the girl shrieks "James!" in A View to a Kill. I've also really liked Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter, the representative American in the series. He's cool, intelligent, and not the square, but efficient dude that he frequently was in previous movies. Also, can I just say that I like Felix as a black guy? I have no idea why.

When I think about it, I can't think of a good reason why I didn't like Casino. I wonder if I'm only succumbing to the notion that cheesy Bond is the only Bond, and I can't handle this dark and not-particularly-nice Bond. But that's not fair. If you're going to watch Bond movies, you can't really judge them all on the same scale. They have different strengths and weaknesses. The fact that I did enjoy Quantum so much makes me think that I need to give Casino another try. Maybe I'll just fast-forward through the torture scene.