Casino Royale

As a long-time James Bond fan, I was quite curious to see how the new Bond character was going to play out. I went to see the new one on the second day and tried to keep an open mind about it. I don't like to reject something just because it doesn't conform to the routine. This last one was definitely an anomaly in the Bond tradition. As far as I've seen in the trailers, I absolutely didn't like the new Bond (Daniel Craig), I figured it was going to be another Timothy Dalton who will never get the play the role again. Plus I was too much in love with Pierce Brosnan whom I think just as hot and appropriate for the role as Sean Connery had been in his day.

To my surprise I liked it. Granted it could have been shorter. Towards the end there were many false endings and I was afraid we were going to watch another movie. But this was one of the rare instances where you saw Bond as a human being and not a super hero with magical powers! It also played with a lot of Bond traditions too. Some are:

• M's real identity was almost revealed when Bond broke into her apartment. To which M replied "One more syllable, and I'll have you..."
  
• M was shown at one point in her bed with her husband waking up to a phone call?!!! Never knew she was married...
  
• Bond lost all his money in the poker game and the woman who represented the treasury (and who was pretending to be his lover for appearances) refused to give him more money to Bond so he can try again. Has any woman ever said "no" to Bond? Another poker player gave him the money...
  
• When Bond asked for a martini at the casino, the bartender asked "Shaken, not stirred?" To which he replied "I don't care." WHAT??? Are you out of your mind? OK, that was outrageous.
• Bond fell in love with the treasurer of the bank (good choice, I might add). There was one instance in previous movies where Bond fell in love and got MARRIED. But the woman was killed shortly after by the dark side. So my assumption was that they were going to kill her off at the hands of the enemy. Well that did not happen, but what happened was that she stole all the money Bond won and gave it to some other party. During the last chase, she got stuck in an elevator in an old building located in one of the canals in Venice, as the building came down, she drowned. So ultimately she died (no big surprise about that).
• Shortly after he fell in love with this woman, there were a series of tacky love scenes, to which my reaction was, god let this be over soon, I think I am going to puke! In one of these moments, as he and his lover were approaching to Venice in a boat. And he was in his laptop e-mailing his letter of RESIGNATION to M. Ok, nevermind the absurdity of the act, how in the world are you going to get wireless in the middle of the sea??? A lot of movies omit this little detail. I assume they rely on the audience's suspension of disbelief. Well it sticks out.
• The torture scene was particularly hilarious. What better way to hurt Bond than hurting his masculinity. He was strip naked while the villain kept hitting his you-know-where with a rope-ball. His response? Apart from painful screams, he said that everyone will know that he (the villain) scratched his (Bond's) you-know-where... That was a moment of comic relief that you normally don't see in a Bond movies.

But I liked it, isn't that interesting? It should definitely be shortened and tightened a bit though. I mean, there are some parts of the plot that I didn't quite understand how to relate to the rest of the movie.

The story project

Funny, I am reading through the forums and I constantly come across interesting posts. We have a story project that we are writing as a group. I figured, let them experience digital culture in its full potential, with all its glory and frustrations. Let them bless it and curse at it at the same time. So I guess somebody deleted another student's chunk of the story. Boy was s/he ever upset. Nevermind the fact that I can compare versions and see what changes have been made as an administrator, the post was too funny.

It read "Ok, whats the point of having a story where everybody contributes when people are just going to erase what you wrote anyways? Just cause you may not like it doesn't mean you can erase it! Thanks to the jerk who did that to me. I hope your grade drops!!"

Wrar, cat fight!!! The "jerk" would have been considered a "griefer" in Second Life and he would have been temporarily banned from the game. This student decided to play the story game a little bit differently than others. He just had a bit of a sense of humor, is all. Of course, in real life, where users from all over the world are collaborating in a project like this, an incident like this happens all the time. And you get really frustrated, and you get deleted, and you re-add your stuff again, and then get deleted again, and so on and so forth. I think this was a telling experience for both students. All I can say, it was interesting to see it play out.

Reconfiguring narrative

Well that was a surprise... We were discussing Landow's Hypertext 3.0 in class last Wednesday. We actually read the introduction couple of weeks ago, but our assignment was Reconfiguring Narrative chapter. As I explained to them the wildly popular debate between narratologists and ludologists and asked them whether they thought narrative existed in videogames, everyone said yes and looked at me as if I just came from the moon. I would have expected more of a reaction, or even resistence. So many gamers have refused it stubbornly. My class actually made some insightful comments on the topic. Who knew??? Either as a culture we are moving beyond certain dichotomies or our class was an anamoly. Either way, I didn't even feel the necessity to convince them. They were there (before I was).