Blogging & Self-Importance; Daniel Craig as Bond

According to some of my best friends, using a blog simply to chronicle the day-to-day events in one's life indicates self-importance. Because I fear that may be true, and because I did not create this blog in order to track my daily life, I will do my best to stay away from those types of posts. I suppose the reason my last post came off that way is that I felt I needed to explain my prolonged absence from this forum. Now that I am posting more regularly, however, no such need exists.

Instead, I thought I would write today about my excitement for the Quantum of Solace release today. For whatever reason, I never really got into Bond movies growing up. I suppose the reason for this is that my father was not all that much of a Bond fan, and thus never showed me the old films growing up (this, in my opinion, evidences the remarkable degree to which the things to which people are exposed growing up is a function of their parents interests -- e.g., I have never seen an Indiana Jones film because my parents didn't care for them).

I was first introduced to Bond in the nineties. Whenever the Pierce Brosnan films were released, I watched them; I suppose the popularity of the Goldeneye video game piqued my interest. While I saw the films, I did not find them all that entertaining; Brosnan, as suave as he may have been, was not all that convincing as a special agent who interacted with and killed some of the world's most dangerous villains. His success luring attractive women was persuasive; however, the more important aspect of Bond -- his special-agent prowess -- left something to be desired.

This stands in stark contrast to Daniel Craig's Bond in Casino Royale. He had the badass routine down to a T. From the first scene of the film, in which he chases a man through an African town, battling the enemy atop an industrial crane and eventually disposing of him, to the way he endured the infamous (at least to any male) scene in which he was repeatedly struck in the jewels with some sort of orb on the end of a rope, he was quite convincing. More importantly, as opposed to Brosnan, whose romantic pursuits seemed to be the crux of the character, Craig's female interactions flow from his badass-ness. Sure, he may lack the smooth game that Brosnan had, but what seems to make him attractive to women is his brusque, badass mentaility rather than his charisma.

This, in my opinion, is a much more convincing Bond character. I won't go so far as to make a normative statement about what Bond should be, for I admittedly can't speak to the Connery or other previous versions of Bond. But when combined with his elegant, modern style (perfectly tailored, simple black Armani tuxes and suits over crisp, slim white dress shirts; sweet Tom Ford aviators; etc.) and the fact that he's super jacked, Craig much more closely embodies a character that grown men boyishly imagine themselves being: an ass-kicking, world-saving, vixen-enticing badass. It is for this reason that I am more pumped to see Quantum of Solace than any movie I have seen in a while.