Long before I took a “serious” interest in cinema, I was a serious James Bond fan. Or at least as serious as any 8-year-old can be with a pulpy detective franchise. That was my age upon the release of Moonraker (1979), a film which capitalized on the Star Wars buzz created two years prior and that represented the height of the gadget-heavy, mentally light Bond films. When I was a kid, movies were something you occasionally went to see on one of the 6 screens in town (spread across two different venues, mind you) or on one of the 6 (maybe) channels that came through the television. Luckily for me, though, it seemed as though they played all of the time on the major networks. In the eleven films that followed Moonraker, the ingredients of a bond film have changed with the times, the films employing alterations in the cast, tone, and politics, not to mention theme music. But the anachronistic essence of the sinister and exciting world of James Bond has remained.
From the opening frames, Casino Royale dances the line between the familiar and the new with remarkable aplomb. In exchange for a familiar opening structure (Bond’s cool resolution of some extraneous assignment followed immediately by the iconic gun barrel transition to the credits sequence), we must ignore the irreconcilable conflict that although the film is set in the present day, our new Bond, Daniel Craig, is indeed the first Bond, a young MI-6 agent whose transformation to 007 occurs within the first minutes of this 144-minute tale (the longest Bond film to date, and only slightly longer than it needs to be).
I will refrain from waxing fanatical about the phenomenon of a Bond opening credits sequence, and instead say that this one really succeeds, again by combining the familiar with the new. Among the new was a credit I had never seen before that invoked immediate curiosity: Free Running Stunts. The credit belongs to Sebastien Foucan, who plays a badly scarred bomb-maker in the first post-credits scene. The explanation for the credit? Easily the most exciting live-action stunt work I have ever seen. Jackie Chan may never work again.
As Bond, Craig is in top form. (And by that I mean his acting, not the form upon which Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd comments during their first meeting.) Frankly, the über-physique doesn’t seem right for one’s expectations of Bond over the years. It clearly works here, as 007 is put through more physical challenges than ever before. Not the least of which is a torture scene, the details of which I will not reveal. All I will say is that it involves preparing a wicker chair for reasons I could not have imagined.
Green and the rest of the cast are excellent. Sadly, Jeffrey Wright is underutilized, yet his appearance registers positively in the nostalgia column, and perhaps we will see more of him. Generally speaking, though, the plot contrivances of past Bond films (for instance, the villain who explains his plan) are cast aside, which makes way for a series of subtle and satisfying plot twists. Other Bond staples are ceremoniously skewered (most notably the shaken martini), in a way that seems both reverent and refreshing. The film’s biggest fault is that it takes too long trying to figure out how to end. When it does, however, we are literally re-introduced to the most fully-formed and complex James Bond ever to make our acquaintance. Now, if we can just get him back in space . . .
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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