Casino Royale

You need a greater appetite for destruction than I to appreciate this exercise in mayhem and momentum, and a greater tolerance for genre formula. But I acknowledge that Martin Campbell’s direction moves right along, visiting the usual sequence of photogenic locales and staging some inventive chases, and that Daniel Craig makes a most intriguing James Bond (an intense and interesting pair with his Perry Smith in Infamous), and that Eva Green is appropriately seductive and mysterious as the feminine foil, more a woman than the typical Bond Girl, but still a plot point and not a person. I make a point of avoiding almost all pop movie franchises, but I have seen a few Bond films over the years, and this certainly ranks with the very best. But let’s face it, this sort of movie is the enemy of everything I believe film should be. So take the ride, if that’s your thing, but realize this sort of blockbuster destroys not only vehicles and buildings, not to mention the body count, but also preempts the possibilities of film as genuine art. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-80.)

I’ve watched a lot of bizarre double features in my time, but none more so than the match between this and the film I showed at the Clark earlier in the day. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) remained enigmatic on second viewing, but still a highly watchable spectacle and an interestingly perverse variant of the English country house genre, way weirder than Masterpiece Theater. Peter Greenaway’s obsessions are not mine, but I have to say my impression of his writing and direction was enhanced on a meta-level when I read that he did all the draughtsman’s drawings as well, it’s his hand we see in the frame, which made the whole subtext about looking and rendering more tangible, more graphic. The evocation of time (1694) and place (Kent) is precise yet passing strange. It’s talky and convoluted, static and stagey, but visually acute, both funny and creepy. This quintessence of art film did not cost even a hundredth of what the Bond movie or others of its ilk cost, and I haven’t the slightest doubt where the better aesthetic value lies. Give me the inaction film over the action movie anytime. You could say the world is big enough for both sorts of cinema, but I believe Gresham’s Law holds here, bad movies drive out good films.