by Gordon Ashley

Created on: February 07, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

Yeah, so I'm a fan of the whole James Bond series. I remember the first Bond movie I saw - it was "From Russia With Love," and I saw it on TBS around the same time the Berlin wall came down.

And the movies were cool enough to make me look into the series of novels and short stories by Ian Fleming. And those ... good God, those were infinitely better. Oh, the books always are, aren't they? But take it to another level of magnitude entirely, because Fleming's books and the United Artists movie series may as well have existed in different planes of reality. Where, on film, Bond was always cool, suavely perfect ... the Bond of the books was not. He was human. He had thoughts, and among them were doubts and fears. The superiority of the books stemmed largely from the insight they provided into Bond's mind. There was one other thing about the books that, while they seemed to try from time to time, the films could never capture: Bond was a mean bastard.

My favorite among the books was always the first, Casino Royale, in which a young James Bond - relatively undistinguished and still new to Double-O status - was sent to bankrupt the villainous Le Chiffre in a high-stakes game of baccarat. What made it the best? Bond's thoughts and reflections, the simple descriptions of his mind and persona. Need more? His attraction to Vesper Lynd (a fellow agent seconded to the French in the novel, not an employee of the British Exchequer) that grows into love ... love which is horribly and utterly betrayed in the final chapter, prior to Vesper's suicide.

So when I found out they were finally going to make a (serious) film version of the first James Bond novel, I was a bit ... undecided. I heard all kinds of people saying how it was going to be just awful, Daniel Craig would never be Bond, the new style was all wrong ... these people most likely joined the series with "Goldeneye" or, far worse, one of the Tim Dalton abominations. They're the same ones who have never heard of George Lazenby, and they never liked that one movie with Telly Savalas and that other guy who played Bond before Connery came back for one last hurrah in "Diamonds Are Forever."

(I, by the way, think that OHMSS was one of the best films, certainly better than any of those that did not star Connery. Still, Lazenby was never James Bond.)

In short, they're probably jackasses who talk too much.

I went to see it several times, and it is - in the opinion of someone who devoured all of Fleming's novels repeatedly as a child,

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