Breaking My "No Blogging About Movies" Rule

UPDATE: I saw Casino Royale, and I thought it was fantastic.

I don't like to blog about a movie unless I feel strongly about it. Honestly, nothing turns me off more than someone posting their uneducated and blinkered opinions about a transient piece of pop-culture and trying to pass it off as a high historical fact by starting their written statement with the words "Uhm, actually,"

Example: "Uhm, actually, Kindergarten Cop is the template upon which all post-modern action-comedy-dramas are based."

Barf. You especially don't need to hear that crap from me, the amateur cartoonist. I hope you come here for the comics. You can go read PVP or Ctrl-Alt-Del for that other nonsense.

Regardless, I ate crow for breakfast this morning along with everyone else who assumed that Daniel Craig was hired as a cheap gimmick to make another soulless and overpriced Bond movie. I was blown away by what they did, which was to make the first James Bond movie that was about James Bond. Most reviews have bestowed Craig with the title of "Best Bond Since Connery" and many have gone so far as to place him even higher than that. I agree.

Casino Royale is not just "Good for a Bond movie" or "One of the best Bond movies", it's a damn good movie, period. It sticks with you after you see it. Most of Bond's assassinations are executed with his bare hands, and you can see in his face a couple of times how he struggles to accept that he's so capable of killing another man. This was also the first Bond move to be based off of one of Ian Fleming's novels in years, and I thought it had a very literary feel.

My mom used to say "If you've seen one James Bond movie, you've seen them all." She was probably right. But you've never seen this James Bond movie.

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Since I was old enough to get past the box office without a parent, I've seen every James Bond picture in the theater from A View to A Kill on up. Unimpressed with the latest actor cast to play him (especially after he broke his two front teeth filming his first fight as Bond), I was planning to skip Casino Royale.

Then I woke up this morning and saw that whopping 96% on the Tomatometer, and all of a sudden I have tickets for tonight's 7:15 show. I'll report back later.