Crammed full of amazing ideas, but the narrative falls apart somewhat and the characters are hard to like. Perhaps if I were posthuman I could relate to the characters more.

Not only is this movie bad, it’s almost 2 straight hours of bad. The FPS sequence feels interminable—like watching your retarded kid brother play the video game in slow motion. The layout of the martian facility still escapes me. All the characters in the movie keep running back and forth from one end to the other for no reason. The scriptwriters can’t even get the cliches right: “bag ‘em and tag ‘em”? You tag them first, then bag them. They should have just recorded someone playing the video game and it would have been better. Thank god bras are apparently banned on Mars. Then curse him for allowing this movie to be made. If this movie was a baby bird, its nestmates would sense its malignance and push it out of the nest to save the gene pool.

There’s a lot of great literature in the world, but returning to some of the award-winning classics that I wasn’t forced to read in grade school has proved very rewarding. The stories are timeless classics and they’re easy to read when you only have a few moments a night because of work or the holidays. You can start here: http://www.listsofbests.com/list/56 Let me know what you like.

It’s a stripped down, ‘de-cheesed’ (at least for Bond) origin story—James Bond’s first mission. I really enjoyed the move away from the more cartoonish elements of the last three, and must, sadly, demote Pierce to ‘third best Bond’ as Daniel Craig really nails the right mix of dangerous and vulnerable (chaotic-good for the nerds), and he’s pretty funny as well. I’ve always thought it would be interesting to take Bond back to the sixties, because it is largely the style of that decade that makes the originals so great. It’s tough to out-dapper Sean Connery when people don’t even wear hats anymore. But Casino Royale does feature plenty of old school Bond moments, as well as fresh elements: expensive suit paired with submachine gun, the original Aston Martin, a chase sequence stylishly mixed with free running. There are, of course, the requisite and blatant product placements, and the pretending (pretend ending) is as overly long as it is overly obvious. But all in all, it’s easily the best Bond since Connery left the role. Go see it now while everyone else in Happy Feet (yikes).