Quantum of Solace: YES!

As I'd mentioned earlier, on Friday we closed our entire company for a few hours and went en masse to see Quantum of Solace. My verdict on the new Bond movie is in this entry's title; go see it.

Daniel Craig continues to remake the role, and he is definitively my favorite Bond. Even Connery, the previous best Bond by a large margin, could not deliver the blend of thug and sophisticate that Craig portrays. The director and writer continued the practice from Casino Royale of creating a more realistic Bond, one with real rage who both hurts others and suffers himself. That's not to say, of course, that the movie is anywhere near realistic; it's not, and that's fine. You still get the great stunts, the extraordinary locations, and many of the other trappings of a Bond flick. Still, if the Roger Moore movies with the Jaws character are at the far left end of the realism scale, firmly holding their grip on unreality, then Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace anchor the far right side, pushing Bond as close toward realism as anyone yet.

The best fight scene in the movie, by the way, was a small one, just Bond and another guy in a knife fight. It had the brutality, speed, sense of danger, and unpredictability of a real fight, and Bond's violent nature has never been clearer than during this battle.

Yeah, the title song does suck, and Olga Kurylenko proves yet again that Americans will accept any accent that isn't their own as being any other accent, but those are quibbles. I liked this movie quite a lot, and I heartily recommend it.

Max Payne

was consistently visually interesting, completely overwrought, entirely too obvious in plot, and only occasionally painful. Sarah, Scott, and I didn't regret going to see it, but none of us emerged from the theater thrilled that we'd gone. Still, if you let Marky Mark shoot up a bunch of bad guys, you'll get my money.

On a more promising movie note, we are now four weeks from the opening of Quantum of Solace, the new Bond flick. What kind of Bond geek am I? We're closing our company for three or four hours to attend the first afternoon show on opening day. I already own Casino Royale, of course, but I bought it on Blu-Ray just so we can have an open warm-up viewing party the night before Quantum of Solace.

Oh, yeah: I'm that kind of Bond geek.