Organized
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Raindrops on Roses
Topic: Elisabeth's Entries
Stephen is STILL on annual leave! I've been back to work 3 times now, and trying to keep a calm head. It's always different showing up to work after a holiday, than right before you go on one.

But I'm combating the temptation to let work stress me out, but periodically taking big breaths and small breaks.

Last night we saw Casino Royale...we had high hopes for the film as there has been positive reviews, and tags like "Best James Bond film in 20 years... or even..." and actually, it feels like one big capitalist commercial. The action sequences were few and far between, and I'm sorry ladies, but Daniel Craig didn't do it for me. I like a Bond who looks effortlessly sexy and charming. Craig looks like the type who will spend more time at the gym than with a lady.

But Stephen can fill in the rest. I must go to WORK now.

signing off....

...and Stephen signing on:
My thoughts of Casino Royale:
Too damn long. It it had wrapped up after the poker match with, I don't know, a chase through the casino, some shooting, a stunt or two and then Bond killing the baddie and getting the girl, I'd have considered it a pretty good Bond flick and a return to the days of Timothy Dalton.
(Damned with faint praise, perhaps?)

Instead they dragged the movie out for an extra hour to show us an excrutiatingly embarassingly bad love story and a 'climax' in Venice that basically ripped off Don't Look Now (I truely was expecting to see a dwarf killer pop out at some point and cut someone's throat) all so that we could watch a CGI building tip over and sink.

I mean, I'll have to think about the movie and maybe see it again to appreciate it but the action sequences were way too long (With no real build up to them or rising stakes that would have made them interesting and, let's be honest, now that everythings done with computers, I really don't find them that thrilling anymore - Compare Bond and the burned dude running up the crane in this movie to the cliff scaling in For Your Eyes Only and I challenge you to say that Casino Royale's stunts were more exciting. But I digress...).

Anyway, the makers of The Bourne Identity must be happy because this is basically a knock off of that film. I also agree with Elisabeth about Daniel Craig's muscles and lack of personality. Oddly enough, this was the same complaint (sort of - Dalton's Bond was clearly spending more time being suave & debonnaire than pumping iron in the gym.) made about Timothy Dalton and, I think once the Hollywood hype machine dies down(The same machine which now says Pierce Brosnan's Bond flicks were too over the top and silly when, in fact what they really mean is that his last one sucked [I did - thanks to the hollywood hype machine trying to salvage Hayley Berrie's carreer and putting Madonna {I mean, fucking Madonna?!} into the mix]. They omit that the other 3 were actually quite good and I consider The World is Not Enough to be a top-5 bond movie that sort of seamlessy combines Connery & Moore era Bonds.), people will have the same complaints about him.

In conclusion, I ask you dear reader, why is it that, ever since Lord of the Rings, every damn movie that comes out of Hollywood has to be 2 1/2 hours long and the first part of a trilogy?
Yawn.