For me, this coming holiday season marks what I expect to be a damn fine movie.
That film is Casino Royale and it brings with it the personal ideal that I hold for the man known to the world as "Bond, James Bond."
You see, for me, James Bond is a secret agent. He is a badass mother who is supposed to get down and dirty, get the crap kicked out of him, and still rise up out of the ashes like a phoenix and beat down the bad guy. If you've read the original novels by Ian Fleming, this is how Bond was intended.
Sadly, most of the James Bond films that have come out over the years are not at all like this. Connery never got down and dirty enough in my mind, Moore was too prissy (although he was the Bond I grew up with, so I have a special place in my heart for him), and Brosnan had potential that was wasted by horrific scripting. Oh, and I never saw the one outing that George Lazenby had as 007.
Notice that I did not lump Timothy Dalton in this list. Why? Because he, in my mind, was the best Bond, despite being the least popular. Dalton was awesome in the role and showed a side to our favorite secret agent that we had never seen before. He was rough and tumble, he got tossed around, left for dead, etc., etc. All the things that make me happy.
And now that aspect of Bond is being explored further with Royale and the new Bond Daniel Craig who was, I might add, awesome in Layer Cake.
If the new theme song is any indication, this new film is going to rock. Literally. The new song is "You Know My Name" by Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Audioslave fame.
I'm not a huge Cornell fan. He's really hit and miss with me. I like about 50% of Soundgarden's music and could care less about Audioslave at all. Sorry, I know they're quite popular, but they just don't do, well, anything for me. It's not that I don't like the genre. In fact, there are very few of Cornell's contemporaries that I don't like. He is just anomalous in this regard for some reason.
But this song is entirely badass and may make me rethink my stance on Cornell as a vocalist.
They have a teaser trailer available at YouTube for the movie featuring the song that you should really check out.
But if you'd like an MP3 version of the song, you can find it here as well; until they make me take it down or I come close to killing my bandwidth, that is. It's not a high-quality MP3, by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe that's why so many people are able to host it without a problem.
November 17, 2006... you can't come soon enough.
