Die Hard. In a building

This is a post about movies in which a person or persons are trapped in a building by other persons. Kinda. Read on!

REAR WINDOW (1954)

Not really an action movie, but in many ways, the forerunner of every claustrophobic thriller from WAIT UNTIL DARK to DIE HARD. Enough has already been written about the virtues of this masterpiece. Go watch it. NOW.

THE MARAUDERS (1955)

I have not seen this movie in 12 years. It might be shit. But from what I remember it was about a lone farmer protecting a watering hole from a gang of unpleasant reprobates with only an immigrant woman and her little son to help. It also boasts one of my favorite genre cliches - the main villain who initiates the plot is taken out early and his place is taken by his insane and depraved subordinate. Thus a tense standoff is turned into a bloodbath. Or in this case, a dustup. Surprisingly dark for a mid 50s western, it boasts a memorably ironic climax. 

WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967)

Maybe the first proto-slasher movie, the climax to this tense thriller works just as well as a mini-action movie, with its disabled heroine using all her wits to MacGyver the baddies' attempts to break into her basement apartment.

Audrey Hepburn makes for an unlikely badass and Alan Arkin makes an equally strong impression as  her terrifying antagonist. Director Terrence Young, a veteran of the Bond films, earns his stripes with a cruel, ironic touch which turns a hoary premise into a truly hair-raising ride.

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976)

Scary as hell, this movie gets LA in a way I can relate to. It's the movie that put John Carpenter on the map, and it serves as an inspiration to low budget filmmakers everywhere on how to turn out a memorable genre film on limited resources.

DIE HARD (1988)

The macdaddy of 'people stuck in a something' action films. While movies like SPEED and THE RAID come close, DIE HARD's clockwork plotting, sense of verisimilitude and a cast of memorable characters elevate it beyond the realm of mere genre classic.

THE RAID (2011)

This movie is great. I'm not as high on it as a lot of other people, but it is great to see someone pick up the bloody mantle of John Carpenter and John McTiernan to deliver an action movie that feels like a genuine roller coaster ride. 

Some people say it's better than DIE HARD. It isn't. But on its own terms, it's excellent and boasts a final fight that stands with the best of them. 

DREDD (2012)

This feels like the kind of movie Walter Hill used to dash off in his late 70s/early 80s heyday. A stripped down vehicle for Mega City One's resident badass, every aspect of this film is pared to the bone, from the terse dialogue, action-speaks-louder character moments and the economical choice to keep the story contained to one mega-block.

While not as imaginative in its set pieces as THE RAID, DREDD is far from the poor second cousin some critics shrugged it off as. Like ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, DREDD is a tribute to the work of a talented group of filmmakers overcoming the economic constraints imposed by a low budget.

WHITE HOUSE DOWN (2013)

Okay, so this movie is Die Hard. And it's set in the White House. But it is awesome.

If OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN felt like an 80s throwback (earnest, R rated, kinda racist), WHITE HOUSE DOWN feels like it just fell out of a time warp from 1996, sharing the same ironic bluster of Roland Emmerich's INDEPENDENCE DAY, the heavy hitter of that year's blockbusters.

Fast and funny, the makers of White House Down know exactly what kind of movie they are making. The kind where Channing Tatum threatens a squirrel with his gun, the President fires a rocket launcher and someone wears a necklace of hand grenades.

A breath of fresh air in a summer of grim'n'gritty misery (MAN OF STEEL, WORLD WAR Z), WHITE HOUSE DOWN did not get the love it deserved. But that love starts here, dammit! Go see it now!

Random post to show I am not dead

Rocket, SUCKER PUNCH [22-8-2011]

Jena Malone is a fine actress, with street cred up the wazoo, and a chin that remains an endless fascination to me. Which makes it all the more interesting when she takes on a more commercial project.

Sadly her instincts in these cases can be hit-and-miss. CONTACT was cool, apart from the crazy ending. STEP MOM was hokey, mawkish nonsense that'll make your grannie cry. Her last fling with Hollywood was jungle horror THE RUINS. She was pretty good in it, turning a token 'final girl' into an untrustworthy, mixed up twenty-something. THE RUINS  could have been great, but it was about killer weeds. So I laughed at it.

However, just as her performance in THE RUINS was rather better than it deserved, so it goes with Zack Snyder's idontknowhathehellitsabout movie.  

Now I'm not suggesting her performance is Oscar calibre, but she certainly made me care a damn sight more about Rocket than Emily Browning's Babydoll. A part of this is in the writing. Generally speaking, it sucks. HOWEVER, intentional or not (hey we can hope), Malone is considerably better served by the script (okay stop laughing) than most of the other actors. Her characterization and backstory are also better served by the fact that writer-director extraordinaire Sack, I mean, Zack Snyder does not show said backstory in flashback, thus allowing the viewer to imagine what could have landed her in a brothel/madhouse/whateverthehellitis, without the ridiculously over-stylized aesthetic he brings to Babydoll's "tragic" past (although I can understand how she's so traumatized. I'd be pretty screwed up too if the first twenty years of my life were telescoped into a music video).

Another factor is looks. Without meaning to sound cruel, Malone is not traditionally good-looking. Which is not to say she is not good-looking or sexy, she is just not as idealized. She stands out from the other actresses, who are a little more along the lines of classical notions of feminine beauty (certainly the kind you find in a brothel/comic book/video game/whathefuckisthispos). For this rather superficial reason (hey remember what we're dealing with here) Rocket comes off as a little bit more relatable. 

The final factor is the performance itself. As I said before, it ain't perfect. There are (quite) a few moments where she seems to strain with the "dire-logue" Snyder gives her. While I may be suffering from the delayed effects of some forgotten hallucinogen, here's my take on why Rocket works and the rest of the movie doesn't:

As I said before, while the script is poor, it does give Malone's character the barest pieces of an arc (or at least more of an arc than Browning), and the actress does manage, however inconsistently, to produce a more solid characterization than her peers. 

At first, Malone plays her as a sarcastic and less tough version of her sister Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish). However, as the story progresses (READER: What story?) there are several key moments in which our perceptions of Rocket are forced to change. The moment after Babydoll rescues her from being raped is a great little character moment. She attempts to laugh it off and resume her sarcastic veneer, yet in the following scene we see her lose the fake smile as she turns to get a glass of water with deadened eyes. When she tells her sister that she can't "take much more of this", Malone utters the line with a tremulous voice, as though she fighting the mother of all panic attacks. There is a sense of fragility about Rocket which is lacking from the other girls. Rocket seems to be the only character with a believable reaction to being stuck in a brothel/WTFdontcarenomore - and that makes us (or me, at least) care.

I don't want to overburden Malone with too much praise. If the other actresses had been better served with more developed characters, and the whole fantasy action crap ripped out, I'm sure they would have delivered proper performances, instead of striking manga poses. However, as it stands, her performance makes SUCKER PUNCH just a mite more tolerable. 

Obscure musicians I'm currently diggin'

I wish I could of a clever pun for the title of this post, but ah well. Here's a few artists I've discovered over the last year. They aren't that famous and they could not be considered 'in' with current musical tastes but that's what makes them interesting to my eardrums after a decade of repetitive dance beats and Auto-tune extravaganzas.

KEITH WASHINGTON

This guy's music was close to being my soundtrack to last summer, which is somewhat ironic since Washington hasn't had an album out since '98.

An odd beast in the climate of the early 90s, and even more so now, Washington is more of an old-school balladeer. In the age of hip hop and new jack, his first two albums sound both out-of-date and timeless in their use of lush orchestral arrangements and restrained use of synthesizers.

Benefiting from the lush production of Qwest Records (Quincy Jones' old outfit), Washington's first two albums are a sign of the path RnB did not take, standing out as a modern extension of the ballads Luther Vandross, Freddie Jackson and Alexander O'Neal produced in the Eighties. A worthy compliment to the influence of new jack swing and gangster rap that rose to popularity in the early 90s, Washington was unable to maintain a consistent output and his last LP, despite a strong neo-soul pedigree failed to keep his star on the rise.

Talk of a new LP has been floating around for the last few years, but for now Washington remains a worthy yet under-utilized talent.

Key tracks: While his first album is filled with strong tracks, 'Kissing You' was the big hit, and for good reason.

CLEAR LIGHT

A one album wonder, but one that boasts eclecticism and bat shit insanity in abundance. Seen as a possible follow-up to Elektra's heavy hitters, The Doors (their titular album was produced by Doors producer Paul Rothchild), the band collapsed shortly after its release due to a combination of its poor chart performance and corporate pressure to become more commercial. The punchline to their sorry story is that half the band ended up enlisted as session players to beef up the Doors' sound in the studio.

Key tracks: 'Sand' is fun, crazy and vaguely annoying all at the same time. 'Mr Blue' is a remake of a folk song by Tom Paxton that turns the jokey irony of the original into a dark phantasmagoria of encroaching paranoia. Bizarre yet inspired.

WILL DOWNING

Boasting a silky, full-blooded baritone, Downing is something of a dinosaur in today's musical landscape. Originally marketed as a flat-out RnB singer in the style of Luther Vandross, it took a while for Downing to define himself. He had a few minor dance hits in the late Eighties and gained a strong following in the UK and Europe, but artistic satisfaction and stateside success eluded him.

Facing pressure from the money men to go in a more commercial direction following the middling returns of his second LP, Downing chose to focus on a project which foregrounded his love of old school soul and jazz standards. The result, A Dream Fulfilled (1991), overcame his label's dour predictions to become his most popular release. It also laid down the blueprint for the rest of his career.

Managing the trick of never being fashionable or predictable, he has overcame changing labels and personal illness to produce a run of strong albums that manage to run the line between vintage and contemporary sounds.  Now an independent, the 'Prince of Sophisticated Soul' has taken the radical approach of meeting the short attention span of the iTunes generation by issuing EPs of 3-4 tracks, with little reduction in quality.

Key albums: Downing is the most consistent performer of the bunch, having produced albums at the rate of every 1-2 years. The early albums are fun, but the most dated of his work, with early tracks like 'Free' and a memorable adaption of Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' pointing toward future ventures. I haven't listened to all of the albums from Dream Fulfilled on, but from the ones I have heard, 1995's Moods, 1998's overtly jazzy Pleasures of the Night, 2002's Sensual Journey and 2007's After Tonight provide an excellent spectrum for showcasing Downing's timeless, unpretentious approach to his brand of jazz-inflected RnB.

A few TV pilots that should have been given their wings

HEAT VISION & JACK (1999)

"If I feel so much as one bullet hit me, I'll come over there and pull your lungs through your nostrils."

One of the chief joys of this incredibly bizarre un-aired pilot is the chance to see Ron "the bad guy from TIME COP" Silver send himself up in great style as 'Ron Silver', a former astronaut-turned-super villain (with an occasional sideline in acting) on the hunt for the titular duo. When he's not being recognized as the villain from a Van Damme movie ("Get a pen and I'll write you an autograph!"), Silver is a ruthless killing machine, destroying anyone who gets in his way. He's so diabolically evil he even monologues to himself about how diabolically evil he is. 

And who are the heroes standing in this fiend's path?  Well, there is Jack, a former astronaut-turned-fugitive who gains super-intelligence when his brain is literally baked by the sun. His only weakness is that when the sun goes down, he loses his super-intellect. 

And then there is Heat Vision, a motor bike possessed by the mind of Jack's former un-employeed roommate, whose weaknesses include running out of petrol and being pushed over. Why is he called Heat Vision? No idea.

Sadly, we shall never know how this clash of the titans would have ended. Fox cancelled series production and any chance of a return (talk of a feature film has been bubbling since '08) ended when Silver succumbed to cancer in 2009.

KORGOTH OF BARBARIA (2006)

"I've dated girls uglier than you for breakfast!"


The title sequence alone had me wanting a series. For anyone who loves 1982's gloriously unhinged CONAN THE BARABRIAN and has a sense of humor, this is for you! The makers of KORGOTH take no account for good taste, diving into the goldmine of cliches which is 30s Sword-n-Sorcery fiction. Not only do they take the tropes of the 80s flicks they inspired (sex, violence, gore), there are gags which reference the cover art of Frank Frazetta, 80s heavy metal and even a few shout outs to HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.   

Directed by SAMURAI JACK creator Genndy Tartakovsky, KORGOTH benefits from a similarly  deadpan approach to its subject, albeit with an R rating.

LOOKWELL (1991)

The story of a former star of yesteryear making a comeback as a latter-day crime fighter, LOOKWELL should have been the beginning of a comeback for BATMAN star Adam West. West is in his element, playing a delusional actor who believes his experience as a 70s television cop qualifies him to aid the police. 

A worthy companion to POLICE SQUAD! and SLEDGEHAMMER!, LOOKWELL never made it to air, consigning West's second greatest performance to the dustbin until the fame of its co-writer, Conan O'Brien, and the enduring appeal of its star resurrected it on Youtube.

THE GIRL WHO MADE ME WANT TO SET MY EYES ON FIRE

Rooney Mara, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

In light of Mara's recent success, I feel almost cruel in posting this, but her work in the awful 2010 remake really had my capillaries flowing. I really don't know how to describe it. I'd like to say you'll have to see it for yourself, but that would  involve taking two hours out of your life to actually watch it.

Broadly speaking, Mara takes on the role of the heroine played by Heather Langenkamp in Wes Craven's 1984 original. Unlike Langenkamp, who played a vague approximation of a normal teenager, Mara is stuck playing some kind of damaged emo chick with a mysterious past. The most frightening part of uncovering her character's past is the chilling number of times the script ticks off various cliches: emo hair, emo music, crappy job, creepy emo male friends, pretentious emo sketching. 

And then, on top of this Necronomicon of bad signs is the performance itself. Or more specifically, the voice. The only way I can describe it is if Lee Marvin's monotone had met Sylvestor Stallone's patented mumblemumble, and had a casual booze-soaked fling that resulted in this sad troglodyte creation. It's horrible, it's nigh-on unintelligable and it is frickin' hilarious.

It felt almost like Mara did an impression of Kristen Stewart in TWILIGHT for the gag reel, and the director didn't tell her to stop. When I wasn't laughing my head off, her mumbling  had me reaching for the rewind just to figure out what the hell she was saying. I gave up because the movie was so crap I could not bear to watch it again.

While even the hounds of hell cannot convince me to re-watch the movie again, her performance was so flaccid it dips over from merely stiff to some kind of weirdly memorable anti-performance that I can't help but want to re-visit. Thankfully I've been able to resist the urge... so far. 

A Short Walk Out A High Window

I'm sitting here in a moment of reverie. The day is officially retired. Obligations met, challenges dismissed, overlong pontifications endured. Fred Neil is singing 'The Water Is Wide'. Life is about to turn into a flood of major projects and equally, insufferably important minutiae. But right now, nestled in a comfy chair with my feet perched on its brother, I feel at peace.

Casting for my short film is now, hopefully complete. It has been an interesting search and I think I have found players capable of ripping my characters away from me and making them breath. It's exciting. I just hope I have done my homework so I can do them justice. Our first read-thru is this Saturday. Our rehearsal dates are already booked, which feels me with an indescribable sense of relief. It feels like the ship is on course and heading for its destination.

Next week I have to put on a production of the key scene from Tennessee Williams' black comedy BABY DOLL. It's a good scene. I can see why Elia Kazan chose to expand it into a feature-length movie. It's got a weird, loping gait to it that is alternatively comic, vulgar, sexy and disturbing.

The story is a doozy: Jake Meighan, a middle-aged plantation owner burns down his competitor's property and gets his business. Learning of the arson scheme, his damaged rival, Silva Vicarro, chooses to rectify his sense of injustice by taking the one thing the old man prizes more than his cotton: his very naive and very disturbed nymphet bride, the titular Baby Doll...

The scene I'm doing is the key confrontation between Baby Doll and Silva. It's a juicy piece of Southern Gothic, spiced up with Williams' ambiguous presentations of his characters' motives and impulses. I'm having a great deal of fun with my Director's Notes. It's going to be hard work but I'm getting the scene into a good piece, at least in my own mind. The first rehearsal is booked for this Thursday. I would have liked to start earlier, but casting for this has been a difficult, torturous process mired in all the cliches associated with the casting process.

I've been reading Elia Kazan's notes on A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and they have been a huge help to me, especially in terms of releasing me from my fears of attacking what I feel are the flaws of Williams' text. While interesting, Williams too often resorts to having his characters blatantly highlight the themes of the story and the motivations of each character.

Combined with my desire to present a stream-lined treatment of my chosen scene, I felt free to cut and tighten the parts of the scene which would impede both its drama and (crucially) my cast's ability to learn their roles. In my role as editor I did not re-write anything. I simply cut lines which repeated and over-emphasized important points, or detracted from the scene's overall sense of impeding doom.

The most overt example of this process was the character of Jake. In the original text, Jake appeared for roughly the first 1/5 of the scene, and contributed a lengthy monologue on the attributes of his wife's large figure. After completely embarrassing his wife and Silva, he leaves to go to work. Now, in refining this role, I considered what I felt was Jake's main contributions to this scene.

- he provides the context for the confrontation between Silva and Baby Doll (such as the fire) so the audience would understand what was going on without a lengthy spiel from me.

- his antagonistic, demeaning treatment of Silva would make his actions later in the scene more understandable, while still despicable.

- he sets up the notion of 'tit for tat' that Silva takes to a most idiosyncratic and disturbing extreme in his attempts at retribution for the destruction of his property.

Nowhere could I find a justification for Jake's love of big women. And so it fell out, and Jake's role was reduced to a highly charged page of repressed sexual and racial rage. In summary, he remained a tosser, and that was all that was needed.

How successful my task was will be proved this Thursday in rehearsal, and at next week's performance. But for now, I am appeased. The cast have read through the script and no one has asked any questions, so I'll take it as an acknowledgement that my surgery was successful.

Well, that's about it for now. It feels good to have a bit of a cyber yack to myself. I hope it was entertaining in some way. Good night.

The Best of Bond

With the release of the 23rd entry upon us, here is my personal list for the best Bond flicks. I've dropped a few of the more obvious ones, and tried to keep it focused on the rather broad mandate of Bond films that make a more than valiant attempt at being 'good films' with characters and stories rather than rigid adherence to formula. Enough from me. I can already hear the howls of outrage at the absence of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE's volcano, MOONRAKER's space marines, OCTOPUSSY's circus, and TOMORROW NEVER DIES's remote controlled car. Read on!

FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE

DR. NO may have gotten the ball rolling but FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE is where the key creatives learned how to score. 

Considering the direction the series took, it's amazing to see how different FRWL is from the films which follow it. In contrast to the increasingly predictable plot structure adopted by the films post-THUNDERBALL, Connery's second stab is a relatively small-scale spy thriller, spiced up with a few trappings (gadgets, sex, action) that would soon come to overwhelm the series.

Darker, tougher, sexier and funnier than DR. NO, FRWL would come to represent the promise of a different direction for the series. From the introspective OHMSS, to the grounded FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS and CASINO ROYALE, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE's focus on the hero's vulnerabilities and wits, rather than gadgets and puns has been emulated but, arguably, never bettered. 

Signature scene: The fight on the train. Still Bond’s toughest, nastiest brawl.

GOLDFINGER

The most iconic of the early Bonds, this is the one movie where everything works. The cast are at the top of their game. The score is awesome. The technical standards are high and the direction combines stylish panache with a fast pace. It could only go down from here.

Signature scene: While the film is filled with terrific scenes, for me it doesn’t get any better than the divine bit where Bond blithely lights a cigarette while a bomb goes off behind him. 

OHMSS

Probably, along with CASINO ROYALE, the only Bond movie that steps out of formula and manages to come into its own as an honest-to-goodness great movie. With one of the best Bond Girls, and the best version of perineal foe Ernst Stavro Blofeld, OHMSS manages to be both faithful to and (way) better than its source material, and most of the films which succeeded it. An underrated gem.

Signature scene: That ending.

LIVE AND LET DIE

After the rather ramshackle DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, Bond got his mojo back in a movie that ignores most of the classic Bond hallmarks and still manages to feel like a very good Bond movie. While it lacks the strange atmosphere of Fleming’s novel, it makes up for it with a better plot, a great villain and some cracking repartee. Great theme tune as well.

Signature scene: While I could go for the alligator two-step or the boat chase that follows it, I'm going to go with a brief scene which highlights the best aspects of Moore's Bond: I am referring to an early scene set in a bathroom, in which Bond avoids death by a poisonous snake. Tense, atmospheric, and tinged with dark wit, this sequence highlights the rather unique tone of this rather idiosyncratic and supernaturally tinged entry, while playing to the strengths of the actor portraying Britain's Finest.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME is fun, but if you’re looking for a Roger Moore Bond movie that won’t elicit groans, this is the place to start. A complex plot, a darker tone and a more mature, measured performance from Moore ensure this is the best ‘spy’ Bond since OHMSS. From the memorable pre-credit sequence in which Bond dispatches an old foe, director John Glen establishes the more visceral, down to earth tone which would define the Bond films of the 80s. The gadgets and tired gags are retired in favor of a Cold War-tinged mission in which Bond has to survive by his brains and physical force. There's even some thematic back bone to the whole thing, as each of the main characters is forced to deal with the consequences of their violent pasts.

Signature scene: In a marked shift from Moore's established persona, Bond avenges a friend's death by kicking her killer's car over a cliff.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS

Preceding CASINO ROYALE by 20 years, the Bond producers take a back-to-basics approach that re-ignites the series (albeit briefly), laying the groundwork for the ethos behind the films of 90s and 00s. Featuring a plot filled with twists and turns, suitably nasty antagonists and a more believable relationship between Bond and the girl, THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS represents a real turning point in the portrayal of Bond and his world. 

Signature scene: A toss-up between the assault on the safe house (complete with exploding milk bottles) and the vertigo-inducing battle between an outclassed Bond and blonde giant Necros out the back of an airplane.

GOLDENEYE

Marking a clean break with the markers of the 80s (a trick Dalton could not avoid), GOLDENEYE still feels as exciting, sexy and cool as it did back in ’95. Shot and cut with real panache, it marked a return to the high style of the 60s Bonds while setting its hero out from the other blockbusters of the Bruckheimer/Bay era.

Signature scene: While I could go with tank chase, instead I’m going with the brief sequence in which Bond is surprised by a sailer onboard the yacht. Combining fast, brutal action with ingenuity (he beats him with a towel) and wit (wiping his brow with said towel), it epitomizes the Bond of the 90s at his best: Smart, suave and cool.

CASINO ROYALE

One thing about the films that followed GOLDENEYE is that while they never sank to the level of MOONRAKER or MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, they failed to maintain the high standard GOLDENEYE had set. TOMORROW NEVER DIES was a solid action picture, but lacked the freshness to be anything other than a solid action picture. It also made the mistake of most of the later Moore Bonds by giving the game away early, reducing Bond’s battle with the villain to the level of pantomine. THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH tried to combine escapism with a more character-based narrative but ended up as an unsatisfying (though intriguing) mishmash of the two. DIE ANOTHER DAY opened well, but quickly veered back to formula, turning into a cynical retread of past glories which reaped plenty of gold but left no-one happy.

So with this law of diminishing returns in mind, I was somewhat dubious when I sat down to watch CASINO at the end of 2006. Thankfully my fears were annulled. GOLDENEYE director Martin Campbell proved he really was the man with the golden touch, David Arnold made up for the repetitive nature of his last few soundtracks, and Daniel Craig proved the naysayers wrong with a combination of icy control and brutish violence. 

While his portrayal has turned off certain corners of Bond's traditional audience, Craig's portrayal is perfectly tailored to this origin story. Managing to blend elements of an action thriller with a character study is a hard thing to do (see OHMSS for a successful example; see THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH for the opposite), and overall CASINO succeeds. It lacks most of the gadgets, conventions (Q and Moneypenny) and lame puns of the latter Brosnan films, allowing the filmmakers to focus on Bond and his story (hewing it far closer to the perspective of Fleming's original stories). The action scenes are exciting, the relationship with Vesper well-handled and the overall atmosphere is tense and engrossing. It's also rather sexy, which a Bond film hasn't been since GOLDENEYE.

While QUANTUM OF SOLACE has laid open the flaws of the new approach (hopefully remedied by this year's SKYFALL), CASINO ROYALE remains a prime example of how Ian Fleming's creation can be mined for more substantial thrills than armies of henchmen and invisible cars.

Signature scene: That phone call. That suit. That gun. That line. That theme. Nuff said.