Casino Royale
# 51 in my movie challenge for the year. Yet another date night, and we managed to do both dinner and a movie, because the pizza at the newest Punch is ridiculously quick, and decent to boot. My husband G. Grod’s and my second date was Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan’s debut as Bond. It wasn’t great, but we’ve gone on these eleven years to have a pretty decent relationship in spite of merely OK movies on our first and second dates. (The first was Get Shorty.) But Casino Royale was something I wasn’t expecting: a very good Bond movie. It was fun to watch, it didn’t rely overmuch on gadgets, it had a nice homage to a classic Aston Martin, and it gave Judi Dench a good number of scenes in which to chew up the screen. Daniel Craig makes a very good Bond. He’s fit, he’s handsome, he’s a good actor. My only complaint is that he’s yet a bit long in the tooth to be playing the early-career Bond from this story. But I think it’s a problem inherent in the character. By the time an actor has enough panache to play the worldly Bond, they’re old enough that the three year gap between movies means for a quick obsolescence.
Oh, ouch. Craig is almost the exact same age as I am, even a few days younger. Then again, I’m just a midwestern American mother of two; I have no plans to appear as an action hero anytime soon.