Friday, October 14, 2005

Bonding News

So....Daniel Craig is OFFICIALLY the new James Bond ending months of silliness.

Eon and Sony are using Craig and Casino Royale to essentially "reboot" Bond (again). I'm not sure how I feel about all of this being the Bond fan that I am. On the one hand I've enjoyed the film universe of Bond (even in it's silly moments), but on the other hand it is time for some real change to bring the screen Bond even closer to the book Bond (who we haven't quite seen on the big screen yet).

I don't really know Craig as an actor, but he looks fine (even looks a bit like Hoagy Carmichael whom Fleming had described Bond as kind of looking like). The real test will be in the script. If it's anything like the book, it should be a tight and taut little thriller (although we already know for a fact that the big card game has been changed from Baccarat to Texas Hold 'Em Poker...not sure how I feel about that). And then we'll need to see where they take the entire series after Casino Royale. Will they start "from the beginning" and remake books they've already done (and make them closer to the novels only with an updated slant....which would be very interesting for the second book, Live and Let Die, as it's got some very antiquated racial stereotypes tied into a rather dated plot) or will they start adapting the Bond novels of John Gardner or Raymond Benson (which are ripe for adaptation and don't really need any moderning) or will they go back to what they had been doing of late, original stories with things stolen from Fleming's novels.

I'm very interested to see where all this goes. I think it's an exciting time to be a Bond fan.

I'll be back over the weekend with some catch up movie and TV reviews as well as a piece on what's going on in comic books these days.

Be seeing you.

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