“For those two jobs I was awarded a Double O number in the Service. Felt pretty clever and got a reputation for being good and tough…Now…that’s all very fine. The hero kills two villains, but when the hero Le Chiffre starts to kill the villain Bond and the villain Bond knows he isn’t a villain at all, you see the other side of the medal. The villains and heroes get all mixed up.” — James Bond, thinking out loud in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953)

“A superb gambling scene, a torture scene which still haunts me, and, of course, a beautiful girl.” -- Raymond Chandler, reviewing the book

While standing in line to see Casino Royale, the twenty-first James Bond film made by the Broccoli family’s Eon Productions, I was drawn into a conversation about the cinema of 007 with the man standing behind me. It was the film’s opening night, Friday evening at a giant suburban multiplex jammed with middleclass Midwesterners, good atmosphere for an event movie, and the man and I soon established that we’d been Bond fans since the advent of the franchise in the sixties. (more…)

11.15.06

Yeah, I’m back.

Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-NyAH-nyah: How about those elections? It took a lot longer than I thought, but it looks like the mainstream opinion IS in fact that the controlling party had made a series of not entirely bright moves. I was also surprised that a number of state initiatives revealed that overall, the country is more liberal than the White House thought. In reality, that’s a group that persistently only tried to appeal to one base. And like a parent with several children, you can’t dote on one too long before the other kids get pissed.

Michael Moore wrote an exceedingly funny letter on the topic from his website, assuring the Republicans that things will be just fine. I hope so. In fact, I hope that once the Iraq plan gets an overhaul, we’ll see some real progress in areas that desperately need it, namely our educational system and health care. If you can tell me with a straight face that those two things are fine, you’ve been smoking the same stuff that Syd Barrett used to.

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