Bond, James Bond

Yesterday we saw Casino Royale, the "new" James Bond movie. We went even though to get to the theater we had to go into the center of the shopping district in Pasadena. A spokesman for the National Retail Federation commented "It is a huge day for traffic," NRF President Tracy Mullin said in a statement today. Retailers are "encouraged by the amount of excitement and traffic that their Black Friday promotions have generated." I expect that at some point the tragedy TV people will have the obligatory story about how this "good" news about the economy (i.e. that people are doing a lot of Christmas shopping) is not really that good. Between the stock market and the shopping season the doom and gloomers do not have much to talk about - although that really never stops them, does it?

The Bond genre seems to have been revived a bit with this new person (Daniel Craig) playing 007. He mixes some of the elements that made the original Sean Connery character so interesting without trying to copy that original style. The plot has a lot of action (which all good Bond movies have) although I must admit that I was not into the characters as much as I thought I would be. The movie has an interactive game and a bunch of other neat stuff on the web. The movie's use of animation is pretty intense and there are some pretty good special effects. Not surprisingly it revolves around a Poker game instead of the old Bond favorite of Chemin de fer.

An interesting side note is that the Producer - Barbara Broccoli is a Loyola Marymount University graduate - from their film school. I have worked a bit with LMUs film program and their dean. This is certain to continue to advance the young school's reputation. Not surprisingly the LA area has the top film program in the country (USC) and a couple of others that are either nationally ranked or up and coming (UCLA and Chapman in addition to LMU).