Thursday, September 14, 2006

Bond...James Bond
yes peeps! the MI6 superagent is back this november in grand style with Casino Royale!

a little background knowledge first.
Casino Royale is of course the first published novel of the series by Bond creator Ian Fleming. apparently when fleming was himself an agent of the naval intelligence division during WWII, he made a trip to Estoril Casino (which had a number of spies present) en route to the US. the book basically came out of his fantasies of beating German agents at games of poker and bacarrat ha!

ok so what's the story about you ask? actually it's about a villain named Le Chiffre, who manages the operational funds of SMERSH, a russian counter-spy bureau. he's in pretty deep shit for losing SMERSH's money in some lousy investments so he's out to win back some cash by playing card games at Casino Royale.
Enter James Bond, who's just got his 00- rank and the license to kill by assasinating 1) a japanese cipher expert and 2) a norwegian double agent. and besides being the best women-player in the service, bond is also known to be Her Majesty's best gambler, and off he was sent to play some cards with Le Chiffre, in the hopes of beating him so that his mounting debts will provoke SMERSH into getting rid of him for good.
in this endeavour bond is aided by felix leiter of the CIA, who provides some extra funds in case bond's down on his luck, and vesper lynd as the requisite beautiful assistant. turns out miss lynd is a russian double agent who's out to make sure bond doesn't make it out of Casino Royale alive. indeed bond was eventually beaten by le chiffre and got his balls hit pretty bad (literally!) vesper commits suicide in the end and bond is happy to report to his superiors,
'The bitch is dead now.'

ok so i don't know how faithful the new movie is going to be towards the book but it looks reeeeally promising. daniel craig is a fresh and unexpected choice to take on the mantle of the superspy although from whichever angle he just doesn't look like bond (more like vladimir putin) to me. one thing's for sure, the guy's got acting chops in spades (no pun intended). anyway, in case you have no idea who he is, here's his pretty pic:



here's a couple of smashing posters for the film before i end off this overlong post!

the class united @ 10:23 PM