Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

The arguments against: it’s £200. I’m almost swayed already. But hang on…

It’s 23% of the purchase price of the middle of the range MacBook. It’s £100 per year for the second and third years (cover in the first year already being included). That’s not so bad…

How about this: £880 buys you a computer that’s guaranteed for a year, but might break down in the 53rd week. In which case it’s cost £2.41 per day (it gets cheaper if it lasts longer, but that’s really a bonus). £1080 for a computer that’s guaranteed for 3 years is just 99p per day (and any longer is still a bonus). If you’re not the kind of person who’ll need to upgrade in that time, that’s looking better value.

My iBook lasted over four years (and only towards the end was it getting noticably slow). And out of five close friends/family with iBooks, three have had failures (logic boards) within the first two years.

I think I’m going to get AppleCare.

Yes, it’s 43 years ago tonight that the an An Unearthly Child was broadcast. The 30th and 40th anniversaries of Doctor Who passed whilst the show was off air, but right now, the franchise is looking incredible strong.

It would appear that over Christmas, we will have Torchwoods on Christmas and New Year’s eves, Doctor Who on Christmas Day, and Sarah Jane Adventures AND new 8th Doctor radio adventures on New Year’s day. With two current TV spin-offs, that will put Doctor Who on a par with the Law & Order and CSI series in the states (L&O has twice tried to add a fourth spin-off but twice failed). If you count the radio series, it’s ahead!

So a very happy birthday, Doctor.

Well, MacBook first impressions, really, since I’m not doing anything particularly 64-bit here. Rather, I’m comparing the G3 iBook with the MacBook. Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot faster.

Top 3 Things So Far

1. iSight. This is such a simple, yet brilliant idea. The upshot of having a tiny built in WebCam, is when you start up for the first time to register, you can get a mugshot on the spot. And you can have neat little apps like PhotoBooth, allowing you to change your account picture or iChat pic using a dozen groovy effects. I’m currently changing my iChat picture every half hour.
2. The Screen. I was worried about the shiny screen but it’s incredible. Side by side with an iBook, it looked far brighter, and that was before I discovered it wasn’t on full brightness. The other thing that bugged me was the fact that there is less height to the screen, but I’ve got used to that almost immediately. Strangely, the extra width more than makes up for it (two finger scrolling helps, too). I should also mention the keyboard here, so as to not go over my 3 things, because I also want to mention
3. FrontRow with R/C. I know this is old hat, but it’s new to me, and it’s sooo nifty. Admittedly, it sometimes seems to take ages to load a playlist or whatever, when it should be snappy like an iPod, but I love the gallery of movie trailers just waiting for me to view. They look terrific, too.

Runner up: The sound quality on this machine is a very pleasant surprise. A definite weak point on the iBook, there is more volume and more base on the MacBook, and the hidden design of the speakers is really very neat.

Least Great 3 Things So Far

1. Noise. It makes a hell of a racket, and when the fan gets going, it’s like a plane taking off. Okay, a plane taking off about 10 miles away, and by racket I mean if you stop all the other noises in the house and put your ear close to it, it’s distinctly audible, unlike my old iBook. But I believe the noise is principally the hard drive which is easily upgradable, so if I get a quiter one I can improve things on this score.
2. Region Locked DVD. This is really, really pissing me off. The DVD drive is a Mat****a which can’t be region unlocked and won’t even let VLC (which reads the data direct from the disc) play my Region 1 discs. My only option appears to be rip my R1 discs and reburn them without the region coding. How is it a good thing to force the law abiding consumer to re-rip DVDs bought legally?
3. Er… That’s it..

Okay, it’s still the honeymoon period, and I haven’t had a chance to play properly because I’ve had to do lots of boring trying-to-recover-valuable-data-from-variety-of-backups, so there may be better and worse than I’ve found so far. In particular, I intent to get hold of Parallels very soon, and play with some different OSs.

Before the title was known, this project was referred to as Bond 21. It is the 21st film to be produced by a Broccoli, and the 21st film to feature Monty Norman’s famous theme. Besides the producers returning, writers, the composer and even one of the regular actors returned. But this James Bond is not the same James Bond of the previous films. This is a new take, a different adaptation of Fleming’s character.

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So, does it work? Well, the producers essentially had three options in adapting Casino Royale:

• Leave out the “Bond begins” elements, and just go for the back to basics feel.
• Make a period prequel to Dr No
• Reboot

I thought the reboot the least favourable option, and would have like to seen a more subtle use of Fleming’s material worked into the series (after all, we’re prepared to suspend our disbelief about the fact that Bond has been around for 40 years without ever ageing more than 20). This is what they did with For Your Eyes Only and The Living Daylights with, in my view, reasonable success. A 50s or 60s set Cold War story might have been good, but would never have had the broad appeal an up to date Bond could have. It would also have suffered unfavourable comparisons with the films that would then be supposed to follow it: an unfair challenge, how could a period film compare with a contemporary picture in capturing the exuberance of the era or the sinister menace of the cold war?

Instead, the reboot gets its edge from the current global political climate, and it works. Casino Royale is a great opening to a new Bond series, and I’m looking forward to see Craig’s Bond in several more films evolving into the sophisticated super-spy he is destined to become.

It’s arrived.

Channel 4 did one of their “greatest” countdowns, purely on Bond themes, on Saturday night. The programme was rather amusing, with a selection of Bond artists and rejected singers bitching about each other (Alice Cooper on Lulu, John Barry on a-ha: “well, they call themselves a-ha, for a start”) and some cheeky editing of clips from the movies.

Here are Channel 4’s results:

1. Goldfinger
2. Diamonds Are Forever
3. Live and Let Die
4. From Russia With Love
5. For Your Eyes Only
6. Nobody Does It Better
7. You Only Live Twice
8. Dr No
9. Die Another Day
10. View To A Kill
11. Goldeneye
12. O.H.M.S.S
13. Tomorrow Never Dies
14. The Man With The Golden Gun
15. Licence to Kill
16. The Living Daylights
17. The World Is Not Enough
18. Thunderball
19. Never Say Never Again
20. Moonraker
21. Casino Royale
22. Octopussy

For Your Eyes Only at No. 5? Blimey!

Beside the inevitable fact that they ranked the themes wrongly, it wasn’t clear whether they were taking into acount all the music for the films, just the songs, or just the title song. For example, Casino Royale (number 21) seemed to be there on the strength of “The Look of Love”, which was not a title song. For O.H.M.S.S (number 12) it was “We Have All The Time In The World” that was mentioned, and it’s a great song, but would any one regard their Bond theme collection complete without Barry’s terrific instrumental title theme? And whilst they mentioned closing title songs “Surrender” and “If There Was A Man” they didn’t mention “The Experience of Love” from the end of Goldeneye. But they did discuss the score to Goldeneye (compared to the music from Tetris by one commentator, but as “ahead of its time” by David Arnold who has scored every Bond film since). So does the score count? Do the other songs count? Should we mark down “Nobody Does It Better?” because of Hamlisch’s cheesy score, or boost a-ha’s feeble “Living Daylights” because of the contributions from Barry and The Pretenders?

No the only way to do it is to rank soundtracks separately from the title themes and songs, and rank each song separately (and forget the unofficial Bond movies). So, here’s my themes and songs ranking:

1. The James Bond Theme
2. Goldfinger
3. Nobody Does It Better
4. View To A Kill
5. Live and Let Die
6. O.H.M.S.S
7. You Only Live Twice
8. We Have All The Time In The World
9. From Russia With Love
10. Surrender
11. The World Is Not Enough
12. Tomorrow Never Dies
13. Thunderball
14. Goldeneye
15. Where Has Everybody Gone?
16. Licence to Kill
17. Diamonds Are Forever
18. Under The Mango Tree
19. Moonraker
20. The Man With The Golden Gun
21. All Time High
22. If There Was A Man
23. The Experience of Love
24. The Living Daylights
25. For Your Eyes Only
26. Die Another Day
27. You Know My Name
28. Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?
29. If You Asked Me To

I’ve probably missed a few. Let’s say they didn’t make it into the top 29.

When Sean Connery strolled onto the screen in 1962’s Dr No, James Bond was already a popular fictional character. Behind the scenes, Fleming had been unconvinced by the casting, but the producers were hoping the success of this debut would ensure it became the first of a series of adaptations of the novels. Connery had a daunting task. But if he’d failed, the project would have been forgotten.

It wasn’t, and, after 20 blockbusting films and 44 years later, an actor has stepped into the role Connery originally defined, and this time he’s being asked to begin it all again, to convince us not just that he’s Bond, but that in him lie the origins of the agent we all feel we know so well. Without any of the trademarks or the formula we recognise, Craig was asked to create a new character that already existed; to pursuade us not that he’s Bond, but that he will be Bond. That never happened to the other fellas.

Each time a new actor stepped into the role before, whether they took things up a notch (Moore) or pared things back (Dalton), the essential formula was carefully preserved with all its familiar trappings, and you felt you could get the true measure of each new Bond only by how they looked in a DJ, how they ordered a Martini, and how they uttered the line “Bond. James Bond.” It was only with Lazenby they dared to try anything new or different in adapting the novel in which Fleming married off Bond: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. With its downbeat ending it wasn’t in the mold of the five films that preceded it, and the Connery was brought straight back in for the next one, a thought that must have been present in Craig’s mind when he considered taking the role.

But there’s one reason why Craig’s been a success: he can act. There’s no doubt in my mind that Daniel Craig is the best actor to take on the role. Good actors have played the part before (as well as some clothes horses) but none as good as this man. They assembled a good cast for this film: Judi Dench, Eva Green and Mads Mikkelsen are all terrific, and contribute in no small measure to making it a drama as well as an entertainment. But the success of Casino Royale rests on the shoulders of one man: Craig. Daniel Craig.

Greene King is a company well known and loathed by Lewes people for their habit of buying up pubs and then stopping them selling beer from our local brewery, Harveys. Lewes people express dislike by burning effigies on Bonfire Night. Greene King was burned three years ago, around the time my local got taken over and Harveys was taken away.

One pub survived the take over; a particularly good pub (in a town with a good many good pubs) just under the unique second motte of our medieval castle. Due to local resistance, they’re still selling Harveys, which is great, until I read in Private Eye that Greene King were planning to remove Harveys even from there: a pub where four out of every five pints sold are Harveys.

It turns out this hadn’t just made it to the Eye, The Guardian picked it up and John Humphrys interviewed the MD of GK on Today. These articles and more are gathered on the “Hands off our Harveys” Lewes Arms blog.

Today was to have been the last day of Harveys, but there has been a stay of execution while local negotiations continue between GK and local MP Norman Baker. There’s a good few votes in this for him if he can pull this off. I hope he does.

It’s a while since I read the book, and I’d always thought they couldn’t do that scene (with the chair with the cutout seat) apart from anything else.  It’s also quite a short novel, essentially just three acts; the film, by contrast, is the longest Bond yet.

Well, all the essential elements are there, including the eye-watering torture scene (albeit somewhat shortened). The writers have done an excellent job (and I suspect a lot of the credit here goes to Due South and Million Dollar Baby writer Paul Haggis) shaping a well paced, dramatic story with some emotional depth.  It’s excellent to be watching a Fleming story again, and the modern setting works extremely well.  The plot has been adapted to fit a post 9/11, rather than a cold war setting, but for all that it makes little difference to the motivation of the protagonists and it achieves an edgy relevance that the book may have had fifty years ago, but which would have been lost in a period adaptation.

As in the book (which introduced the character), the Bond we know isn’t fully formed yet, although this is played up in the film, with teasers that play on our expectations of the character we know so well.  But all of the details; the little scenes of confrontation, the first encounter with Leiter, even the correct recipe for the Vesper Martini made full use of the source material. The epic card game at the centre of the story is made the centrepiece of the film, too, with time allowed to build the tension and explore the dynamics between the players in that room.
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I’m surprised by it, but despite the reinvention of Bond as a totally 21st century spy, this really is a true adaptation of Casino Royale, and it’s terrific.

Bond has rebooted.

All I will say for now is that this is, in my opinion, the best Bond film for 25 years.  Visit Little Storping over the next few days for more detailed analysis, but in the meantime: see it, see it, see it.