Interesting yes, it was last friday night, a premiere for the press and celebs and I was likely to be invited by my friend, I sat in behind Jonathan RossOriginally Posted by bondboffin
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Interesting yes, it was last friday night, a premiere for the press and celebs and I was likely to be invited by my friend, I sat in behind Jonathan Ross
Senior Member
Please get your facts correct Mr H, without being offensive here can i point out a few things.
The Premiere for Casino Royale is on Tuesday 14th November, Odeon, Leicetser Square for celebs, cast and some lucky winners of tickets.
The only screening prior to this has been the cast and crew screening last Saturday, one screening for those involved in the film.
Friday night is when Jonathon Ross has his show "Tonight With Jonathon Ross", so I doubt he can be in two places at the same time.
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You will say sorry, when I find the articule because Jonathan Ross, is not filmed on a Friday Night believe it or not ! Plus how did he manage to also discuss it on his Radio show Saturday Just Gone !!
Ever one hates a smart
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Go to the BBC's Radio 2 website and listen to Jonathan Ross's show get to one hour and 6 minutes and then he talks about going to the PREMIERE on the Friday night being the 3rd November ! There was premiere but it was not a public premiere like the one next week !
Get your facts right before you start next time Mr Bond !
Senior Member
Total Film's review of Casino Royale, sounds very promising indeed, not long now folks!!!
Having earned his 00, James Bond (Daniel Craig) globetrots on a mission to foil the funding of world terrorism – facing off with poker-faced card sharp Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) and trading come-ons and putdowns with treasury totty Vesper Lynd (Eva Green). Can Bond find love and avoid death in Venice?
If you’ve lapped up the pre-release hype, you already know this is a different Bond. Harder, leaner, tougher, meaner. Well, to a point.
Let’s not forget that Casino Royale’s (relatively and – in the torture scene – literally) stripped down approach is actually part of Bond’s regular binge-and-purge cycle. The world’s most bulimic agent has an established routine. First, the constant appetite to top the last film bloats the franchise with ever-bigger but not better adventures. Then, on the brink of parody, comes the purge: the extravasate, the rethink. Bond actually goes ‘back to basics’ remarkably frequently: the lunatic excesses of You Only Live Twice precede the emotionally wrought On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; the space operatics of Moonraker make way for the smarter, darker For Your Eyes Only; the geriatric antics of A View To A Kill provoke the keener edge of the underrated Dalton debut The Living Daylights. The best example? Perhaps the tentative 007 of Licence To Kill leading to the arch, self-aware smarts of GoldenEye (“Sexist, misogynist dinosaur” etc). But even that James got flabby (it was the invisible car that did it). Time then for another purge. And the latest crash diet involves no more silly gadgets, no lame innuendo, no dreadful puns, no bikini-clad ‘equals’ and no Q.
What it does have is The Man With the Golden Hair, Daniel Craig. Yes he is blond. More pertinently, he’s also the first 007 who genuinely looks like he could kill a man with his bare hands. A useful quality for playing an assassin...
The pre-credits set the scene. In a toilet. In grainy black and white. Two kills – one grottily violent – and a couple of pithy remarks later and Bond begins. The credits themselves may look like a slightly lame flash animation (early scripts suggested a more satisfying montage of Bond’s SAS background, crime scene photos from his kills, the double 0s being added to his ID badge), but this misstep doesn’t result in a stumble. Instead, we launch into the much-blarneyed-about Madagascar free-running chase – the refreshed franchise playing its ace early: Craig’s physicality. Never before has a Bond sprinted so hard, fought so meanly or blazed quite so fiercely. By the time the Nambutu Embassy is smouldering, so is Craig’s Bond – this is a killing machine, a lethal weapon. Moore didn’t fit this much action into his entire seven movies. In quick, short breaths we learn the new Bond is a raw, brutal maverick (breaking into M’s house); unsentimental (he prefers married women because, “It keeps things simple”) and uncouth. But he’s also smart and effective, tracking the villains to Nassau, winning his Aston Martin on the casino’s green baize, seducing the sultry Solange (Caterina Murino) with a surgeon’s precision. The foreplay finished, it’s down to the main event: dealt a tough hand by Le Chiffre (Mikkelsen), ego challenged by Vesper Lynd (Green), balls battered in a wince-wrenching torture scene. All events which – for the first time in a long while – are actually based on Fleming’s words.
A shame the franchise can’t quite commit to going gritty and relying on audience intel – forcing in Giancarlo Giannini’s local liaison to explain poker for the hard-of-thinking, plus a gimmicky defibrillator scene almost as daft as that car... There’s also the issue of Bond’s volte-face, from callous ******* to lovey dovey doormat, the producers missing the opportunity for the bollock-bruising torture scene to allow for a non-physical connection to develop between 007 and Lynd. Her troubles, too, are barely hinted at, clouding everyone’s motivation at the concluding set-piece in Venice and leaving Bond’s final word on Vesper – a chilling conclusion to the novel – now floating aimlessly.
Still, the decision to dial things down and replace camp with a prickly sense of humour (Martini shaken or stirred? “Do I look like I give a damn?”) does pay dividends. Other gripes – the oh-so-wrong title tune, soulless product placement and David Arnold’s ersatz John Barry score – are forgiven because this is Bond, James Bond and there’s no disputing the icon is re-energised by Craig. It’s been noted he’s an actor more than a star, yet here he needs to be, providing heart to a character that even in this brave new Bond could so easily have become a cipher. Vibrant, vital and violent, when he utters the immortal final line (and the classic theme finally kicks in), your neck hairs spike and your pulse pounds. The purge is complete. Craig is a triumph. The franchise is reborn. As always – and was it ever really in doubt? – James Bond Will Return...
Senior Member
Empire's Film Review:
Plot
Newly-promoted to the 00 section, James Bond (Daniel Craig) thwarts a scheme of shady financier LeChiffre (Mads Mikkelsen). LeChiffre stages a high-stakes poker tournament in Montenegro, hoping to recoup his lost money, and M (Judi Dench) has Bond enter the game, intent on bankrupting his opponent. He is teamed with Vesper Lynd (Green), a treasury official who holds the purse-strings on Bond’s table stakes
Empire Review
The only thing missing from Casino Royale is a truly memorable theme song. Otherwise, this has almost everything you could want from a Bond movie, plus qualities you didn’t expect they’d even try for. It does all the location-hopping, eye-opening stunt stuff and lavish glamour expected of every big-screen Bond, but also delivers a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Fleming’s short, sharp, cynical book with the post-WWII East-vs.-West backdrop persuasively upgraded to a post 9/11 War on Terror.
From Goldfinger on -- especially in the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan films -- the usual gambit has been to open with a pre-credits sequence highlighting amazing stuntwork and a larger-than-life exploit. Here, with a new actor cast as a Bond only just issued with his license to kill, we get an intense, black and white scene set in an office in Prague. Bond has just killed his first man – as shown in brief, brutal fight flashbacks which strain the 12A rating – and confronts a traitor in British Intelligence, exchanging pointed dialogue which leads to the ice-cold agent’s demonstration that the second killing is easier (‘Considerably’). The famous iris pose brings in colour, and a brilliantly-designed (shame about the song) titles sequence that highlights not an anonymous beauty but the silhouette of Daniel Craig himself.
For a few reels, Casino Royale lets the new boy settle in to what could almost be a Brosnan or Dalton movie – hard-hitting, but tinged with the fantastical. Bond goes off the map to harry the organisation of ‘banker to the world’s terrorists’ LeChiffre, with a beddable beach beauty along the way, and a thwarted attack on a super-sized jet aeroplane which could have been the climax of any other adventure. Then, with a notable click into focus, the movie segues into Fleming’s tight, twisted plot. Readers will be amazed to find the book’s most memorable scene (involving a wicker chair with the bottom cut out) is included, as is Bond’s brutal Mickey Spillane-ish last line (though, here, he doesn’t quite mean it).
Director Martin Campbell, who set a high mark in GoldenEye that subsequent craftsmen haven’t matched, returns, and regular scripters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade get Oscar-polishing assist from Paul Haggis. There are nods to tradition, with respectful Aston-Martin product placement, but also refreshing breaks from established practice. Judi Dench’s imposing M is held over, but supporting comedy characters like Q and Miss Moneypenny sit this one out. Mads Mikkelsen’s LeChiffre has a physical tic and a lethal girlfriend, but this villain interestingly has as much to lose as the hero, playing cards because he lost terrorist money and needs to make up the shortfall before his clients kill him.
There are miscalculations (a collapsing building in Venice is a gimmick too many in an emotional finale which would play better without all the noise) and audiences who just want a handsome fantasy figure might find a muscular Bond with perpetually bruised knuckles and the beginnings of a drink problem too much of a stretch. But long-running series can only survive through constant renewal. Casino Royale is the most exciting Bond film, in conventional action terms but also in dramatic meat, since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with the added advantage of a star who finally delivers what the credits have always promised: ‘Ian Fleming’s James Bond’.
Verdict
Contrary to pre-release nay-sayers, Daniel Craig has done more with James Bond in one film than some previous stars have in multiple reprises. This is terrific stuff, again positioning 007 as the action franchise to beat.
Senior Member
The Times
WHO would have thought that the casting of a blond Bond would stir up such a hornet’s nest of controversy? Daniel Craig has been the subject of fevered speculation and a good few personal attacks since he signed on as the sixth Bond, and even now there are threats of boycotts in some sectors of the online community.
But despite the antipathy to the idea of Craig as Bond, it’s all good news for EON productions. Although the previous instalment was drubbed by critics and audiences alike, the fans still care enough about the Bond series to get angry.
While Die Another Day was a box-office draw, in it Bond was in danger of losing something equally valuable to the franchise in the long term: his cool. It was the invisible car that did it. That, and a blanket of special effects that could smother the life out of the best of screenplays — and let’s face it, Die Another Day was not the best of screenplays.
In The Bourne Identity’s Jason Bourne and 24’s Jack Bauer, special agents who share Bond’s initials but little else, the lumbering, longrunning franchise met its match. That much-derided vanishing Aston Martin in Bond’s 20th official outing sealed the fate of 007 as we had come to know him.
With Bond No 21, in what the producers are describing as a “reboot” of the franchise, Casino Royale takes us back to basics: to Bond’s early years as a newly appointed 00; to a leaner, lower-budget production and to a Bond who looks like he can do some serious damage, rather than just smarm his way out of a tight spot and disappear on a mini-nuclear submarine disguised as a Biro.
For this picture, which lists Paul Haggis, who wrote Crash, as one of its screenwriters, the action is less reliant on the sillier gadgets favoured in the Brosnan era (although fortunately Bond does have a portable defibrillator in his car). Instead the film stakes its reputation on one formidable weapon — Daniel Craig’s ruthless, reckless Bond.
Every decade gets the Bond it deserves and we are living in some pretty scary times. Craig is up there with the best: he combines Sean Connery’s athleticism and cocksure swagger with Timothy Dalton’s thrilling undercurrent of stone-cold cruelty. While the rather foppish Pierce Brosnan had the bland chiselled looks of a male catalogue model, Craig’s face is endlessly fascinating. It’s brutishly ugly — he looks like he’d stab you in the eye if you crossed him, and would probably enjoy doing it. But his sex appeal is off the scale. He even makes his first assassination (shown in grainy black and white) an unsettlingly erotic experience. His Bond bleeds, bruises, makes fatal mistakes.
The chemistry between Craig and his co-star and love interest Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) is explosive. The relationship is founded on prickly admiration, but it’s when they both peel away their defences that things get interesting. A scene where Bond comforts a traumatised Vesper in the shower by gently sucking her fingers is impossibly sexy.
Vesper is the treasury accountant who is bankrolling Bond’s mission to break the bank at a high-stakes poker game in Montenegro. The target is Le Chiffre (Danish star Mads Mikkelsen), an international money launderer with a Hitler haircut, a platinum asthma inhaler and a tendency to bleed from the eye. They might as well have just tattooed the word Evil on his head.
In this new, edgy Bond, the stunts are more physical and the violence raw. An early chase sequence appropriates the free running techniques popularised in Paris to impressive, if ludicrous, effect. And there’s a genuinely horrible torture sequence where Bond suffers some unpleasant genital trauma.
Craig has an impressive physique (generously displayed) that makes him a far more plausible Bond than many of his predecessors. But his main asset quickly becomes evident. He can act.
Intresting how its sister paper the Sunday Times has given the film two stars, the only review in the entire uk/usa to be so critical and negative, the reviewer is clearly talking out of his
Last edited by Bryan; 12-11-2006 at 18:11.
**Debs Official Stalker**
Any nice pics of Bond as he walks out of the sea in those divine blue shorts at all Bry....
Although I will be watching having been brought up with Bond...not for the eye candy
Just Meh.
I'm going to try and make it to this Wednesdays premier - all for the eye candy of course!Any nice pics of Bond as he walks out of the sea in those divine blue shorts at all Bry....
Although I will be watching having been brought up with Bond...not for the eye candy
**Debs Official Stalker**
I'll have to wait....wedding anniversary Wednesday, so I'm off to a concert with my eldest son - hubby babysitting
May have to catch it whilst I'm the US though...
How much eye candy for the male audience this time though!!
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