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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1289 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 27, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Casino Royale. No corny gadgets so far, just plot, characters and setting.

The film is the only one of the Daniel Craig Bond movies I've seen. I rewatched it in January and found it held up quite well (Mads Mikkelsen, in particular, is magnificent). Curious how it compares to the source material.

That's pretty much why I chose it, I like reading the seminal pieces of genre fiction to see how they compare to their popular depictions.

Unfortunately the subsequent Bond films slowly regressed closer to the mean and I gave up on them entirely after watching Skyfall.

I thought the last Daniel Craig film, No Time to Die, was surprisingly quite good. Not amazing or anything but very solid, some memorable chase scenes and action, good actors, good enough plot. Some people hated it because Bond dies at the end but I thought it was a good send-off for the Craig series of movies.

It stays pretty close to the plot of the source material. The only major changes are geopolitics updates (LeChiffre is a terrorist financier rather then a KGB agent), and making up excuses to actually have action scenes. This makes it pretty rare among other Bond movies, which usually range between loose adaptations (Goldfinger), very loose adaptations (Moonraker) and “we just grabbed the title and made up our own plot” (most of the rest of them).

It's been years since I've read Casino Royale but FWIW, ISTR coming away from it thinking that the movie was a good overall adaptation of the book.

Decent book. Primal spy novel with Fleming's distinctive, somewhat cheesy cold war sentiments. Different feel from the films which made it worth the time, but I can't say that I craved a sequel.

Some lines in that book are interesting to read in 2025. In particular how Bond describes his desire for Vesper.

To be fair, a lot of Fleming’s writing was considered unusually puerile and trashy even contemporaneously.

While this seems true, arguably this was from literary circles, who would also have panned amy number of popular novels for the masses.

I'm thinking specifically about the "sweet tang of rape" line. Don't get me wrong, I've read all the Bond books except The Spy Who Loved Me ( I couldn't handle the jarring perspective change). But that line sort of sticks in the head.

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