boys' club

hard core feminist conspiritors wishing to turn women to militant politically motivated lesbianism behind the making of the latest bond movie? quite possibly. you heard it here first.

the recipe:
1. take the ridiculously well toned muscles of several body builders and plant them all on one body of a not bad looking bloke (but not so much he'll be called a 'pretty boy', mind!)
2. add lashings of pointless violence. lots of running. jumping. make your hero slip once or twice early on so the lads think he's one of their mates. but cooler.
3. throw in more machismo that you can shake a stick at, oh and on the subject of sticks: silencers on most of the guns, even when not needed. very long silencers. lots of them. together they spell out the word P.E.N.I.S. (or was that my imagination?).
4. add some hardly-at-all-veiled homoerotic sadomasochistic torture.
5. mix leading man with a "complicated" (read: intelligent) woman, who might as well have shagged James (to be said breathily) from the get go given she was gonna give in all along, but who instead waits til he's down to his last shred of masculinity, see previous ingredient, and then succumbs.
6. blend in blatant product placement. and some rather cool cars. act kind of like silencers when revved hard.
7. oh, a cherry for the top in the shape of dame judi to save the whole shebang as the stern-but-caring-matriarch who orders her boy to kill whilst being worried he's "putting up walls", doing it all wonderfully as only she can. bravo.

i prefer my men a little more lithe and bohemian and little less psychotically violent thank you very much. they've tried to make 007 a little more "new man" these past few years, but quite frankly the only difference is he only actually shags one woman and she plays harder to get than her predecessors. and to compensate, it's more violent than the old skool. i tried to disengage my brain. that was easy since some of the dialogue definately suggested the writers thought the audience were a few cans short of a six pack. it was plot-line-by-numbers.
but i did my best. this was after all entertainment. and so i allowed myself to be entertained. and i laughed. although curiously not when the blokes all laughed and sometimes on my own. i think maybe we were getting different jokes or something.

to be frank, and in short, it was kind of like sitting in the cinema with a couple of hundred men laughing as they all spanked the monkey together.

or, in other words, entertaining in its sheer ridiculousness. and if it's lads getting entertained with some mindless testosterone fueled cinematic action rather than actually killing other blokes on the street, who am i to complain?

casino royale. in your local multiplex now.

LB,x