Hey, I'm back

Well, I haven't used this in about... four months, but whatever. I saw a couple of excellent movies recently that I feel the need to write about.

The Departed (****)

The Departed is a movie about organized crime, a subject that Martin Scorsese has made movies about before, but The Departed has a distinctly different feel to it than any of his other films, though its every bit as good. It is apparently loosely based on a Hong Kong cop drama from a few years back called Infernal Affairs. The central characters are two men who are each moles in their respective organizations: one a police detective feeding information to the mob, the other an undercover cop who has infiltrated the mafia. But the man who steals the spotlight is Jack Nichelson as the head of the mob organization. At times he's hilarous, at other times he's stone cold scary. It's a great performance that could become as referenced as his Joker performance in the original Batman.

Unlike Raging Bull, which jumps from a number of key points in Jake Lamotta's career and then holds there, allowing scenes with long conversations between characters to play out, The Departed has a much more fluid and dynamic feel to it that really works for the film. Scenes are often very quick and we jump back and forth very quickly from the police to the mob and back again. Trying it all together is a great soundtrack in which the same music is often allowed to play over the course of several distinctly different scenes. The effect keeps the tension driving and provides a glue to connect for very frantically paced scenes. In a way, it actually reminded me of the way the anime series Fooly Cooly used its soundtrack provided by the band The Pillows. The Departed is a different sort of Martin Scorsese movie, but a great one.

Casino Royale (***1/2)

Die Another Day sucked. I feel the need to express that up front. The James Bond series has always had some level of absurdity to it, but by Die Another Day it had reached a tipping point where it felt to absurd, even for Bond (somewhere around the point where he managed to outrun a heat ray from space in his Aston Martin, which could also turn invisible). Apparently realizing this, the filmmakers behind Casino Royale wisely took the film on a different tangent. In a way, Casino Royale is the Batman Begins for the Bond franchise. A lot of the ridiculous fluff has been stripped away, allowing for the focus to be left on the core elements of the series, and of the Bond character itself.

Casino Royale wastes no time distancing itself from previous Bond movies, even forgoing the famous "blood dripping down the gun barrel" opening briefly to make room for a gritty, black and white flashback sequence where Bond kills two people in a fairly merciless faschion. The scene establishes a darker, more sinister side of Bond that hadn't existed in recent films. I haven't read the original Ian Fleming novel, but I'm told that the film stays resonably true to the story, with many of changes being necessary ones for purposes of updating the setting from the early cold war, to post 9/11. The middle act of the movie revolves entirely around the high-stakes poker game (baccaract in the book) that Bond enters into to counter Le Chiffre, who is using the money to pay a terrorist organization that he has been bankrolling. This section could be brutally boring, but the filmmakers do an excellent job of adding just enough intrigue outside of the game itself to keep the tension moving without being a complete distraction.

The new Bond girl is Vesper Lind, played by Eva Green. Vesper is much smarter and more independant than the average Bond girl, something they actually tried with Halle Berry's character Jinx in Die Another Day and failed miserably by comparison. Vesper is also unique among women in Bond movies for several other reasons, firstly that Bond seems to have genuine feelings for her beyond her being another girl of the evening, and the other reasons involve plot points that I won't give away.

Casino Royale is a great action film that keeps things exciting while focusing on its characters rather than prop gadgets and special effects. It establishes Danial Craig as an excellent new Bond, who is every bit as witty as previous iterations, while adding an aura of edgyness and intimidation that hasn't existed for a long time. After Die Another Day, I wasn't sure if I wanted to see another Bond movie again, after Casino Royale, I wish the next Bond was out already.