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Casino Royale · This Film is Lit

0:04
Speaker A: This film is lit, the podcast where we finally settle the score on one simple question. Is the book really better than the movie? I'm Brian and I have a film degree, so I watch the movie but don't read the book.
0:15
Speaker B: And I'm Katie. I have an english degree so I do things the right way and read the book before we watch the movie.
0:22
Speaker A: So prepare to be wowed by our expertise and charm as we dissect all of your favorite film adaptations and decide if the silver screen or the written word did it better. So turn it up, settle in, and get ready for spoilers because this film is lit. Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles. It's Casino Royale. This film is lit. Hello and welcome back to this film is lit, the podcast where we talk about movies that are based on books. Today we're talking about Casino Royale, the 2006 version patron request. We'll talk about that later. We have every single one of our segments and so much to talk about, so we'll get right into it. If you have not read or watched Casino Royale, here's a brief summary in let me sum up, let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
1:33
Speaker B: This is a summary of the 2006 film sourced from Wikipedia. Mi six operative James Bond earns his license to kill and promotion to double o agent status by assassinating the traitress Dryden in and his contact in Prague. In Uganda, Mister White introduces Stephen Obano, a high ranking member of the Lord's resistance army, to Le Shifra, an albanian private banker to terrorists. Obano entrusts Le Shifra with 100 million to invest, using his knowledge of upcoming terrorist attack on aerospace manufacturer Skyfleet, L'Shifra shorts the company's stock in Madagascar. Bond blows up an embassy while capturing and then killing a bomb maker named Molaka. Mi six chief M admonishes Bond for causing an international incident and ignoring her orders to take Malacca alive. Information on Malacca's phone leads Bond to the Bahamas and a corrupt greek official, Alex Demetrios, who had hired Melaka at Le Chiffre's request to bomb Skyfleet's prototype airliner. After winning Demetrios vintage Aston Martin in a poker game and seducing his wife, Solange, Bond pursues Demetrios to Miami. Bond fends off an attack by Demetrios and kills him at the airport. Bond chases down the new bomber Demetrios has hired and thwarts the destruction of the Skyfleet airliner. With the Skyfleet stock secure, Lichefra loses Obanos money. Surmising that somebody talked about the terrorist plot, Le Chiffre tortures Solange to death to recoup his client's money. Le Chiffre organizes a Texas hold'em tournament at the casino Royale in Montenegro. Mi six enters Bond, the agency's best poker player in the tournament, believing a defeat will force Le Chiffre to seek asylum with the british government. In exchange for information on his clients, Bond is paired with Vesper Lind, a british treasury agent overseeing the 10 million buy in. They meet their contact, Renee Mathis in Montenegro. Obano, furious that his money is missing, threatens lite Shefra, but allows him to continue playing to win back the money. Obano and his bodyguard attack Bond, who kills them both. Bond loses his 10 million stake after Lichefra is tipped off about his own tell, and Vesper refuses to authorize an additional 5 million for Bond to continue. Fellow player Felix Leiter, a CIA agent, stakes Bond to the money in exchange for letting his agency take Lichefra into custody. Lichifra's lover, Valenka, poisons Bond's martini, but Vesper rescues him. Bond returns to the game and wins the tournament. Leshiefra kidnaps Vesper to trap Bond and takes them to an abandoned ship. He tortures Bond to reveal the password to the bank account holding the winnings, but Bond resists. Mister White bursts in and kills the shifra, but spares Bond and Vesper. Bond awakens in a hospital and recovers with Vesper at his side. He has Mathis apprehended. Believing that he had tipped off Lichefra about his tell, Bond falls in love with Vesper and resigns from Mi six. The couple sails to Venice. When M reveals that his winnings were never transferred to the british treasury, Bond realizes that Vesper has betrayed him. He tails her to a handoff of the money, where gunmen spot him and take her captive inside a venetian palace undergoing restoration. Bond shoots the building's flotation devices, causing it to gradually sink into the Grand Canal. As he picks off the shooters. Vesper is imprisoned in an elevator and Bond dives into the canal to rescue her. Vesper locks herself in to prevent Bond from saving her and drowns. Bond attempts to resuscitate her but fails and Mister White escapes with the money. M informs Bond, who has returned to service, that the organization behind Lichefra threatened to kill Vesper's lover unless she became a double agent. When Bond denounces Vesper as a traitoress, em reasons that she likely made a deal with White by trading the winnings for Bond's life. Realizing Vesper left her phone to help him, Bond checks the contacts and locates Mister White at an estate in Lake Como. He shoots white in the leg and introduces himself. The name's Bond, James Bond.
5:57
Speaker A: There you go. That's a summary. If you have not read or watched the film, we have a guess who this week, so let's get to it. Who are you? No one of consequence. I must know. Get used to disappointment. Hey, even I don't know which ones these are until I read them. Cause I just have page numbers in the notes. Five foot eight, weight 18 stone. Complexion very pale, clean shaven. Hair red brown, unbrose, whatever that means. Eyes very dark with whites showing all around. Iris small, rather feminine. Mouth false teeth of expensive quality. Ears small with large lobes indicating some jewish blood. Hands small, well tended hirsute feet small racially subject is probably a mixture of mediterranean with prussian or polish strains. Dresses well and meticulously, generally in dark double breasted suits. Smokes incessantly corp caporals using a denicotinizing holder.
7:07
Speaker B: Did you say large ear lobes?
7:10
Speaker A: I believe I said large ears. Small ear lobes maybe? Let me find the page again. Here it was. Ears small with large lobes indicating some jewish blood according to the.
7:24
Speaker B: That's a new one for me. I've never heard that.
7:27
Speaker A: This is that 1960s, fifties? I don't know what year this book was published. I don't remember.
7:33
Speaker B: Fifties, I think.
7:34
Speaker A: Yeah, 53. So.
7:39
Speaker B: That was a lot of information.
7:41
Speaker A: This is also when I explain, once we say who this is and I explain what this description is, it'll make more sense.
7:48
Speaker B: I mean, it does sound like it could come either from a dossier or a. It's like James Bond doing a spy thing and sizing up all of the relevant information about somebody. I'm gonna say this is L. Shifra.
8:05
Speaker A: It is L. Shifra and you're exactly correct. This is from the dossier that Bond gets on Le Chiffre. I stopped reading right before. Well, that's a reveal for later for one of your questions, so I won't get to that. But it would have given it away. Alright, next one. She has black hair, blue eyes and splendid, uh, protuberances back and front. And then second part. That's the first one from one character. And then second one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Her hair was very black. She wore it cut square and low on the nape of the neck, framing her face to below the clear and beautiful line of her jaw. Although it was heavy and moved with the movements of her head, she did not constantly pat it back into place but let it alone. Her eyes were wide apart and deep blue and they gazed candidly back at bond with a touch of ironical disinterest which, to his annoyance, he find he found he would like to shatter roughly. Her skin was lightly sun tanned and bore no trace of makeup except on her mouth, which was wide and sensual. Her bare arms and hands had a quality of repose and the general impression of restraint in her appearance and movements was carried even to her fingernails, which were unpainted and cut short. Round her neck she wore a plain gold chain of wide, flat links and on the fourth finger of the right hand a broad topaz ring. Her medium length dress was of gray soix sauvage with a square cut bodice lasciviously tight across her fine breasts. The skirt was closely pleated and flowered down from a narrow but not a thin waist. Yeah, a narrow but not thin waist.
9:49
Speaker B: Very important.
9:50
Speaker A: She wore a three inch hand stitched black belt. A hand stitched black sabretash. Sabretash. I don't know what that word is. Rested on the chair beside her together with a wide cartwheel hat of gold straw, its crown encircled by a thin black velvet ribbon which tied at the back in a short bow. Her shoes were square toed of plain black leather.
10:12
Speaker B: Okay, so many things I can say about that.
10:17
Speaker A: Yeah.
10:20
Speaker B: Bond knows way more about women's clothing than I would have thought.
10:24
Speaker A: Yes, Bond's a spy. He knows a lot about a lot of things.
10:28
Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
10:29
Speaker A: He like observes. That's like his whole job.
10:31
Speaker B: Yeah, I'm gonna say that. That's Vesper.
10:34
Speaker A: That is Vesper. The first description I read was from Mathis relating who the person was that was coming to join Bond. And the second is Bond seeing her.
10:45
Speaker B: For the first time and taking in all the details of her wardrobe.
10:49
Speaker A: All the details of her wardrobe? Yes, absolutely.
10:53
Speaker B: I feel like they were not too far off with Eva green.
10:57
Speaker A: No. Yeah, that description is fairly close.
10:59
Speaker B: Yeah.
11:00
Speaker A: He was about 35. He was tall with a thin bony frame and his lightweight tan colored suit of hung loosely from his shoulders like the clothes of Frank Sinatra. His movements and speech were slow but one had the feeling that there was plenty of speed and strength in him and that he would be a tough and cruel fighter. As he sat hunched over the table he seemed to have some of the jackknife quality of a falcon. There was this impression alone in his face, in the sharpness of his chin and cheekbones and the wide, wry mouth. His gray eyes had a feline slant which was increased by his habit of screwing them up against the smoke of the chesterfields which he tapped out of the back, out of the pack in a chain. The permanent wrinkles, which this habit had etched at the corners gave the impression that he smiled more with his eyes than with his mouth. A mop of straw colored hair lent his face a boyish look, which closer examination contradicted.
11:55
Speaker B: Okay, so that doesn't really sound like anybody we saw in the movie, but I feel tipped off by. We know he's in the poker game.
12:10
Speaker A: Mm. Interesting. Yeah.
12:12
Speaker B: And also the comparison to Frank Sinatra.
12:16
Speaker A: Okay.
12:17
Speaker B: Makes me feel like this might be an american character, so I'm gonna guess it's what's his name, the american CIA guy?
12:26
Speaker A: Felix Leiter. And you would be correct.
12:28
Speaker B: I am on fire.
12:29
Speaker A: Now, to be fair, he is gambling when Bond sees him, but he is not part of the game in the book. In the movie, he is in the book. In the book. He's not part of the game in the book, but he is gambling at the casino. And that's the table part. Like when Bond first sees him. But, yes, that is him. The main difference. Yeah, Felix Leiter shows up in a lot of the stories. He's like the CIA guy that Bond.
12:53
Speaker B: Always say, wasn't he at least mentioned?
12:56
Speaker A: He's mentioned in Thunderball, and he shows up in a lot of other movies. And he's always a white guy with blonde hair because that is what he is in the books. He's played by Jeffrey Wright in the movie and great actor. But, yeah, I think he continues throughout the series. I'm sure Felix Leiter might, maybe dies at some point. I've only seen the first two or first three of the Daniel Craig series. I didn't watch the most recent three. I think there's six now. There's either five or six now. And I've seen the first three.
13:23
Speaker B: I didn't think there were so many of his.
13:25
Speaker A: Yeah, I've seen the first three are the casino Royale, Quantum, Solace and Skyfall. And I've seen all three of those. But then there's also Spectre and no time to die. And there might be one other one. There's at least those other two, and I've never seen those two, so I don't know. But that was Felix Leiter. And then finally, his gray blue eyes looked calmly back with a hint of ironical inquiry. And the short lock of black hair which would never stay in place. Slowly subsided to form a thick comma above his right eyebrow with the thin vertical scar down his right cheek. The general effect was fairly piratical. Great word. Not much of hoagie Carmichael there. He thought, sorry, just end on the piratical. I thought there was more. That's the end of it. Um, gray blue eyes. A short lock of black hair never stayed in place. A thick comma formed a thick comma above his right eyebrow. And he has a thin vertical scar down his right cheek. Okay, that's fairly piratical.
14:31
Speaker B: So.
14:33
Speaker A: Which. I've never heard that word, but I love it.
14:35
Speaker B: I'm gonna try to reason this one. I know from in our prequel episode, when you talk about how people were upset about Daniel Craig being blonde, because Bond is always tall, dark, and handsome.
14:57
Speaker A: Yes. Famously, all of the actors who played him before have brown or dark hair.
15:03
Speaker B: So maybe this is Bond looking at himself in the mirror. I'm not really sure. Cause I feel like I can see the page numbers that you have written down here. So I feel like it's too late in the book to be Mathis because we've already met him. Yeah, but I don't know who else it would be.
15:31
Speaker A: I'll just spoil the tension. You nailed it. It was a trick question. It's Bond. It's him looking at himself in the mirror.
15:36
Speaker B: I didn't know he had a face scar.
15:38
Speaker A: I didn't either, actually, until I read that passage, which is the main reason I wanted to read it. Cause I had no idea he had a scar on his cheek, like, canonically in the books. Because you don't. He does. Not in any of the movies. I don't think. Like, I'm pretty sure.
15:52
Speaker B: Yeah.
15:52
Speaker A: So, yeah, I thought it was interesting, but, yeah, that is Bond looking at himself in the mirror.
15:55
Speaker B: So he's a scene where a character looks at himself in the mirror and describes himself.
16:01
Speaker A: Yeah, I love that he's getting ready to go. Like, he's, like, getting dressed to go.
16:06
Speaker B: So fan Fico. I love it and hate it.
16:09
Speaker A: I have more on that scene later because there's a. Right after that is another one of my favorite moments in the book that I think is great. But we'll get to that in just a second. But, yeah, that is Bond looking at himself. So there you go. All right. That was it for guess who? But Katie has so many questions. Let's get into them. And was that in the book?
16:27
Speaker B: Gaston, may I have my book, please?
16:29
Speaker A: How can you read this? There's no pictures.
16:32
Speaker B: Well, some people use their imagination. First off, I really. I just want to say that you really skated over me going four for four in the last segment.
16:40
Speaker A: I'm so sorry.
16:41
Speaker B: I know.
16:41
Speaker A: I guess I did them right. Yes, you did get them all right. I'm so sorry.
16:43
Speaker B: I'm better at this than James Bond.
16:47
Speaker A: It's true.
16:48
Speaker B: Okay, so first question. So this movie has, like, a cold open where we see Bond out dispatching a traitor, like a mole or somebody. Yeah. I wasn't 100% sure what the deal was with that. That was kind of what I figured. I was like, I think it doesn't matter.
17:08
Speaker A: He's just a double agent or.
17:10
Speaker B: Right. But we find out within the scene that James Bond is not, at this time, a zero zero agent. I don't know what the level below that is. Maybe a single o agent. No, there isn't one.
17:23
Speaker A: From my understanding, at least.
17:25
Speaker B: I'm going to pretend it's a single o agent. But we find out that he's not aoo agent. And then as the credits roll, we see that he gains his double o status through this. And I'm wondering if the book is also about, like, him becoming aoo agent or his first outing as aoo age.
17:53
Speaker A: So it isn't. I mean, in the same way, the movie's not about him becoming Aoo, but that cold openness in the book. We don't see him becoming Aoo in the book, but he is freshly aoo in this story. Like, he just became AoO agent in the book. The difference being, in the film, we actually see that happen. He talks about who. There's, like, a brief section where he mentions, like, we hear him thinking about the two people he killed to become Aoo. But one of them was, like, a spy in Japan, and then the other one was someone in Europe or something. So he is freshly aoo in both. But the cold open just actually shows it to us, which I prefer. I think that's better in the movie. I like seeing it. I think it's fun. And I really. Because I really love during that cold open, the little twists that. Because you kind of realize what's happening, where the guy's like, you're not aoo. I know you're not aoo. You don't have the kills for it or whatever. Cause I've looked at the files. Cause this guy, like, works for mi six or whatever, and he's like, if em really worried, was really worried about me, she'd have sent aoo. And you don't have the kills. And he's like. And then we see the flashback to him killing the first guy. And you're like, oh, shit, I think that's great. I think it's a really cool.
19:01
Speaker B: That's what he's about to.
19:02
Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's great.
19:04
Speaker B: I have a question then. That's not in this, so maybe you can answer it. Do the two O's stand for the two kills?
19:12
Speaker A: I actually have no idea about that. I don't know what it stands for. But that is all of that. It designates, from what the book says, is that double O's are just. You. You will. You have killed people for the service, essentially. Like, actively killed people. You're a hitman, essentially, right.
19:27
Speaker B: Well, if anybody knows.
19:28
Speaker A: Not a hitman. You do other things, but you're willing to kill people for the service, basically.
19:32
Speaker B: If anybody knows if the double O means that you've had two successful kills and that's how you get that. Well, I guess that is how you get.
19:39
Speaker A: That is how you get. But if the zero zero represents the two kills, or if it's just a coincidence that the number is zero zero one.
19:46
Speaker B: If anybody knows that, I would like to know the answer to that question, and I shan't look it up myself. I want someone to tell me.
19:53
Speaker A: I'm sure somebody will know. Yeah, I'm not gonna look it up.
19:57
Speaker B: Also, in this cold open, there's a moment where the guy, he gets his gun out of his desk and he goes to shoot Bond. But surprise, Bond knew about the gun and he's already unloaded it. And he holds up the magazine, the mag or whatever. Is there a similar scene in the book where he's already unloaded somebody's gun when they try to shoot him?
20:21
Speaker A: So that's not in this book. Doesn't happen in this book, but I would have to imagine that that happens at some point, in some part in one of the bond books. I don't know, but it does not happen in this bond book, so. No.
20:34
Speaker B: So moving forward, we eventually meet our main villain, the Shifra, played via.
20:45
Speaker A: I can't remember that guy's name. Mads Mikkelsen.
20:47
Speaker B: Yeah.
20:47
Speaker A: Yes. Hannibal Lecter himself, among many other things. But, yeah, Mads Mikkelsen. This is my first time I saw him when I saw this movie, when it came out, and I remember thinking he was awesome. Like, just.
20:58
Speaker B: Yeah, he's a very interesting villain. And he has. He has a lot of interesting quirks.
21:06
Speaker A: Yeah.
21:07
Speaker B: One of which is character details. Yeah, character details. One of which is that we see him throughout the film using, like, an asthma inhaler. And I was wondering if in the book, does the villain also have asthma? And I wrote down representation. Win. Question mark.
21:26
Speaker A: So L'Chifra does actually use an inhaler. In the book, however, it is a nasal inhaler. It's one of the ones you put in your nose, and it's not like the mouth one. And in the book, it specifically says that it has benzedrine in it, which is an amphetamine that was commonly used.
21:45
Speaker B: I love that.
21:45
Speaker A: Yeah. Commonly used to treat nasal congestion back in the day. But it was also an amphetamine, so it was highly addictive, and tons of people got addicted to it. And so he is likely addicted to it. But in the book, he also makes a big show of using it specifically while he's gambling to, like, mess with people. He, like, does this big thing where he sniffs it really obnoxiously at the table to kind of gross people out and throw them off their game. But there's no implication that he has asthma in the book or anything like that. Or in the movie. I don't know. They don't ever say what it is or why. It's just some sort of inhaler. It could also be, like, drugs that he's in. We don't know. Or it could be related to his eye thing or whatever what you're about to ask about. But, yeah, we have no idea what it is. But he does have an inhaler that does come from the book.
22:31
Speaker B: Okay. All right. So, yeah. So my next question then, his other, like, even more of a defining character characteristic than the other thing is that he has a scar going right across his eye.
22:45
Speaker A: Yeah. And like, a grayed out eye.
22:47
Speaker B: Yeah.
22:47
Speaker A: We assume he's blind in it. We don't know, I guess. But.
22:50
Speaker B: Well, and we see fairly early on that he will occasionally. I wrote down cry blood.
22:58
Speaker A: That's what they say.
22:59
Speaker B: Not really accurate.
23:00
Speaker A: That's what they say. From his steering from the tear duct. Because of whatever. Yeah.
23:05
Speaker B: So does the villain in the book have an eye scar, and does he also cry blood?
23:13
Speaker A: So, no, none of that's from the book. I read his description. They do not mention. Oh, the line I stopped short of in his description was the inhaler thing, by the way. They mentioned that he uses an inhaler, and I left that out because I thought it would make it way too obvious. But no, the I scar is not from the book. And to me, I had this better in the movie. I think it makes for a pretty cool, striking villain, like, especially the weeping blood thing, I don't know. I think it's one of those things that it's not. To me, he doesn't feel like that. And I could. I'm happy to get pushback, but the sort of, like, eye scar stuff he has in this doesn't feel as, like. Like it preys on, like, necessarily. It doesn't feel as problematic as sometimes, like, making villains like, quote unquote disfigured normally feels to me like something about his character and the particular thing he has. I don't know. I think it just works for him as a villain without me. And again, I'm happy to hear pushback against this. I don't, like, find it problematic in the same way. Well, like, when we talked about with perfect blue, for example, that character, his facial difference, I thought was kind of like, eh, maybe like, took away from the messaging a little bit. And maybe part of that is because this movie is kind of just pulpy and fun and isn't really saying a lot generally, in my opinion. I don't think there's a whole lot going on thematically in this movie. There's things. But, like, in general, it's not like, all that much going on. It's more of just like a fun adventure movie, like mystery thriller or whatever. But, yeah, I like it. And so I had that in better.
24:45
Speaker B: In the movie because, yeah, it does feel very. And I say this as someone who's on their second Bond film now, it feels very bondy.
24:55
Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
24:56
Speaker B: Like the eye scar. Like, I mean, it's the thing that feels like an update on the, like, eyepatch villain.
25:02
Speaker A: It's absolutely the thing that it's a classic Bond villain thing because it's the same thing that, like, Austin Powers and stuff, like, makes fun of, like, it's just a thing. Bond villains with, like, eye scars or. Or whatever, which is one of the reasons that I think and actually is kind of disappointing that Bond doesn't have the scars because I think I've read that kind of Le Shuffre was supposed to be, especially in this book, he's presented as kind of like the opposite of Bond. He's like Bond but a bad guy, basically.
25:29
Speaker B: Yeah.
25:30
Speaker A: And so because Bond having that facial scar, which is funny because he doesn't in this book or Le Chiffre doesn't have the scar in the book, so it doesn't really work. But I think it would have been interesting for Bond to have the scar in the movie because there are kind of reflections of each other in terms of, like, their passions and, like, they're, like, they're into gambling and they're very smart, and they're, like, kind of cold, calculating people. And Bill Shaffer just uses it for, you know, monetary benefit and to help terrorists or whatever. And Bond is, you know, works for mi six different kind of terrorism, which actually, this book kind of addresses in a way that's really fascinating that we'll get to at the end. Bond gets really philosophical at the end of this book in a way that is, I was not expecting.
26:10
Speaker B: In a way that perhaps makes you think Ian Fleming was getting a little bit of his trauma out.
26:17
Speaker A: Yeah. Or just like, it eludes working through some stuff. It alludes to the thing that. That one review said that I think Ian Fleming is. What was that scathing indictment that he's.
26:29
Speaker B: Which one?
26:30
Speaker A: More literary or more. I don't remember what.
26:34
Speaker B: Like, it was like, more literary than he lets on.
26:36
Speaker A: Yeah, or something like that. And there are some moments at the end of this where this book is mostly, like, dumb, misogynistic garbage that's just, like, I say, dumb. It's not dumb, but it's very intelligently written. But it's very, like. There's not a lot going on philosophically, thematically, whatever. It's a spy book about a guy who goes and plays poker. And, you know, it's not all that. You know, it's very much the plot is what's happening. There's not a whole lot else going on for the most part. But at the end, bond is just, like, waxing philosophical about the nature of evil and heroes and villains, and it's like, it's really. We'll get to it. We'll get to it. Cause I wanna read some bits from it. Cause I just was not expecting it.
27:17
Speaker B: Oh. So the first big action set piece of this movie is Bond chasing a guy through there. It's somewhere in Madagascar, or. No, Madagascar. Yeah. So they're in Madagascar and he's chasing this guy through, like, a construction site and then an embassy, and he ends up blowing the whole thing up and causes an international incident.
27:39
Speaker A: Yes.
27:40
Speaker B: But my question is about, after all of that, when M confronts him about this, and she's like, I knew it was too soon to promote you to Double O status. And Bond says, I understand double os have a very short life expectancy, so your mistake will be short lived. And I was wondering if that line came from the book.
28:03
Speaker A: Not in the book. Great line, though. It's very good. I will say it is alluded to. I don't know if the short life expectancy isn't mentioned in this book, but it kind of reminded me of another thing that is mentioned in this book. At one point, Vesper tells Bond that she was very excited to come on this mission because Double O's. And we'll talk more about Vesper here shortly. But Double O's are seen as the celebrities, like the super cool people within this british intelligence, because they're like, they're the, you know, they're the field agent murdering spy people. They're like, they're the classic, quintessential secret agent. And so everybody within, like, mi six kind of like, they have this, like, aura around them or whatever. But. But that line is not in the book.
28:49
Speaker B: Okay.
28:50
Speaker A: What?
28:53
Speaker B: I don't believe that that would be the case in reality. I don't buy that.
28:59
Speaker A: That what?
29:01
Speaker B: Cause you wrote down here at one point, Vesper says that the double os are like heroes to the people who work.
29:06
Speaker A: That's literally what she says.
29:07
Speaker B: Yes, I believe you that it is in this book. Yeah, I don't believe that that would be true in reality.
29:14
Speaker A: Maybe heroes wouldn't be the right word, but I could believe that within the agency that the people who are field agents, who are going out and doing the actual on the ground spying and stuff, would be kind of highly regarded and held up, kind of hero worshipped within governmental intelligence agencies. I could believe that maybe. I mean, I don't know, maybe not, but I could believe that. That seems.
29:44
Speaker B: The thing that this is reminding me of is we've been watching 30 Rock, and this makes me think of how the actors think of themselves and how they think they're perceived by the writers.
29:59
Speaker A: But I don't think Ian Fleming was a field agent. He just worked in intelligence. So I don't think this is him writing that about himself. In fact, if anything, he. I think he would be the vesper in this situation. He would be like, fair enough. I think he would be like the office worker who's, like, jealous of. I could be wrong, but I don't think Ian Fleming was out, like, murdering people. I don't think. I don't know, but I don't think.
30:23
Speaker B: That that's like, I do enough digging.
30:24
Speaker A: I would have to read more. But I don't think the accepted history of Ian Fleming is that he was, was like, aoo agent. I think it was like he worked in intelligence, and so he knew some of this stuff. And so, like, I think he would be writing that more from his perspective of, like, I saw these double o's as, like, the coolest of the cool people would be how I would interpret it.
30:43
Speaker B: And that's fair, and maybe that's accurate. Just like, the way that you wrote this down here made me think, like, oh, this is like, a cool kid talking about how cool everybody thought they were in high school, when actually everybody could not stand them and, like, hated their guts.
31:00
Speaker A: Sure. Sure, it does, kind of. I get where you're coming from. I could be wrong. I would actually be stunned to find out if Ian Fleming was, in fact, a, like, aoo who was, like, field agent murdering people. I don't know, but I don't think that's the case.
31:17
Speaker B: Okay, so moving forward, we see Bond join a poker game while he is in the Bahamas.
31:29
Speaker A: The Bahamas? Yeah. Cause he runs off to go do some investigation after he. Yeah.
31:33
Speaker B: And he traces this guy text message to the Bahamas, and then he joins a poker game with the same guy, and he ends up winning this man's Aston Martin. And, like, I felt like I knew somewhere in my brain that an Aston Martin was, like, a bond thing.
31:55
Speaker A: Yeah, we talked about it in the Thunderball episode, I think.
31:58
Speaker B: So. I wanted to know if, similarly, he won an Aston Martin in a poker.
32:03
Speaker A: Game in the book, so, no, he does not. And actually, Bond does not drive an Aston Martin in this book. He does drive one in other books that I read, or I read that he drives it in other books, because I believe both in this and Thunderball, the two I've read, neither of those he drives in Aston Martin. But in this book, he has a Bentley that is painted battleship Gray is what it's described in the book, and there's a section where it talks about it. His only personal hobby is his car, and he drives it with, quote, sensual pleasure. End quote.
32:38
Speaker B: Yeah, I don't like that. Yeah, he's a car guy, but I'm not wrong. Addison Martin is like. That's like a bond. That's like the bond car.
32:47
Speaker A: It is the bond car that most people identify with. He drives other things throughout the different movies and books. Like I said, this one, it's a Bentley. Sometimes it's a Porsche. I think sometimes, I think even has a BMW. Could be wrong about that one. But generally speaking, I think the car he most often drives is an Aston Martin. And even in some of the early books, I want to say, like, maybe doctor. No. Or Goldfinger. He has an Aston Martin, which is one of the Ian Fleming bond ones, but, yeah, not in this one.
33:15
Speaker B: So he figures out what that guy's up to and he has to get to the airport.
33:24
Speaker A: He follows him to Miami.
33:25
Speaker B: Yeah, he follows him to Miami and then there's gonna be a bomb.
33:31
Speaker A: They're gonna blow up an airplane.
33:32
Speaker B: Yeah, they're gonna blow up an airplane. The world's largest airplane.
33:36
Speaker A: Yeah. Skyfleet is a company that is unveiling their brand new prototype airliner. The world's largest airliner. And it's coming out to, like, be showcased and they're gonna blow it up to tank the stock so that Le Chiffre can make a bunch of money.
33:49
Speaker B: Okay.
33:50
Speaker A: Yeah.
33:51
Speaker B: But they fail because James Bond. Because James Bond, in his tussle with the bomber takes the bomb off of the truck that he put it on.
34:04
Speaker A: A fuel truck at the plane.
34:05
Speaker B: Driving a fuel truck at the plane. And he detaches the bomb from the truck and then attaches it to the guy's belt loop on the back of his pants. Is there a scene in the book where Bond attaches a bomb to a.
34:19
Speaker A: Guy'S pants unbeknownst to the bomber? No. And this specific moment is better in the movie for me because I think it's a lot of fun. This whole scene, I think, is really great. But I also think this is a great moment to get into how the movie adds a bunch of stuff to get us into the Le Chiffre mission. Probably the main difference. And I'll talk more about this later. I was actually surprised by how similar the book and the movie were. The biggest difference is that the book's plot is basically the second half of the movie. Roughly all of the stuff until they get to the casino royale basically is not in the book.
35:00
Speaker B: Okay.
35:00
Speaker A: The book basically starts with Bond going to the casino to play the game. We get a little bit of flashback to him getting the mission briefing about Le Chiffre and why he's going there and, like, why Le Chiffre is like, needs to win money at this poke or at this casino. But we don't see any of the events that lead up to it. And Bond is not a part of any of the events that lead up to it. It's all other things that have happened. So I really enjoyed that. The movie fleshes that narrative out in a way that I thought was really satisfying. Also gives you a lot of opportunities for cool action scenes before the actual main plot of the book. And it also shows us exactly why Le Chiffre needs a lot of money or why he needs to win a bunch of money at this poker tournament. He puts on this poker tournament in the movie so that he can win all this money because he short sold a bunch of stock for this airline. And then when the airline prototype plane didn't blow up, the short obviously didn't go through. So he lost, like, a ton of money. So he owes a bunch of money to specifically this african, like, warlord guy, but other people, too. He just. He's a banker for the world's terrorists is what they call him.
36:02
Speaker B: Right.
36:02
Speaker A: And so he owes a bunch of money to all these different people, so he has to win a bunch of money back. And it's the same thing in the book. Except in the book, the reason he needs to win all this money is that he invested. It's actually kind of funny. They just talk about why he lost Orlando, why he needs to win all this money. Is that. Cause the same thing, he's a banker for all the world's terrorists or whatever.
36:20
Speaker B: But a job with some risk.
36:22
Speaker A: Yeah, but in the book, he invested in. He bought, like, a bunch of brothels in France, like, the year before they outlawed prostitution in France. And so he lost, like, millions of dollars, or tens of thousands of dollars. I don't know how much. But he lost all of his money in the book because he bought a bunch of brothels right before prostitution got outlawed.
36:46
Speaker B: Hysterical.
36:47
Speaker A: Yeah, but again, that's only just, like, mentioned. That's like part of the dossier or whatever. Basically that bond gets. But so, again, I like adding all this stuff and this particular scene, I think it's a lot of fun. Including that reveal of the bomb being pinned to that guy's belt.
37:00
Speaker B: All right, so, as you kind of said, following this, we get into, like, the story proper.
37:07
Speaker A: Yeah. This is where we actually get to the books.
37:09
Speaker B: The story of the casino Royale.
37:12
Speaker A: Yeah.
37:12
Speaker B: And we meet our bond girl, Vesper Lynn. And in the movie, she is like an accountant.
37:23
Speaker A: She says, yeah, she works for the treasury.
37:24
Speaker B: She works for the treasury. And she is there to fund his buy in into the big poker.
37:31
Speaker A: To oversee the money.
37:32
Speaker B: Yes, basically. Is that what she does in the book?
37:36
Speaker A: No. So in the book, she works under somebody called s, similar to m. They just have a single initial. And s is the head of the russian counterintelligence wing of Mi Six. And Mathis specifically describes her as being a wireless expert in radio. So basically, she's there to help him communicate back with and manages communication and stuff, basically. I think. So she's not there with the treasury. And also, I think. But I think similarly, in the book, she's not like, or in the. Yeah, in the book, she's not like a field agent or anything like that. I think she normally, like, works in the office or whatever, and so this is like her first time out in the field, but, yeah, she's not. She doesn't work for the treasury. She is in intelligence, which I think she's. I think the illusion is that she's, like, kind of an intelligence in the movie, too. Like, it's. She works for the treasury, but, like, the intelligence part of the. I don't know. I think there's an implication that while she maybe works for the treasury and she has that business card, I think it's maybe more complicated than that and is not, like, just as simple as, like, she's an accountant, obviously.
38:45
Speaker B: She's got, like, the clearance to go be in the field with Bond.
38:49
Speaker A: Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, I think there's something else going on there that maybe the movie just doesn't get into and just kind of leaves untold, but, yeah, a little bit different in terms of what her role is, but.
39:00
Speaker B: So her and bond, immediately, they're having, like a tete a tete.
39:06
Speaker A: All they do.
39:07
Speaker B: Battle of wits, if you will. And then when they arrive to the hotel, Vesper gets on the elevator and she hits him with a great line. She turns around and says, take the next one. There isn't enough room for me and your ego. That line from the book, that line.
39:26
Speaker A: Is not in the book. And more importantly, the vesper of the book is fairly underdeveloped and not nearly the equal to bond that she is in the film. Movie Vesper can dish it out. And book Vesper is kind of just like a lady who is the love here. Yeah. It's not that she has no personality, but comparing it to later, which I guess wasn't Ian Fleming, but comparing it to Thunderball, which I guess, or it was Ian Fleming, but it was all, whatever.
39:55
Speaker B: There was a lot of writers on that.
39:56
Speaker A: Comparing it to Thunderball, I actually thought the bond girl in that one, I can't remember. Domino, I think, was actually really kind of compellingly written and had a lot of layers to her and was kind of like an interesting character in that book. In this one, Vesper's not, not. She's just like. She has very little to say or do through most of the book. If she really only does anything, kind of at the very end she gets a little more interesting. But even then, it's all stuff that's, like, secret from Bond. We'll get to it, but like, yeah, she's way more interesting and compelling of a character in the film than she is in the book. And there's a lot of more of that kind of stuff in the movie that I really like where she dishes it back to Bond.
40:35
Speaker B: Okay, so this probably could have been a lost in adaptation question because I'm not sure I followed what happened here. So initially Bond and Vesper go into this with, like secret identities, like a cover story because they talk about the whole. They talk about it in the car and, like, in the hotel lobby. But then it doesn't seem to matter.
40:57
Speaker A: When Bond gets in, he signs for his package by just signing James Bond or whatever.
41:01
Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And then the sheaf knows who he is. So what was going on with that?
41:09
Speaker A: Yeah, so that same thing does happen in the book. At least. I'm fairly certain I went back and reread that section and I'm fairly certain the exact same thing happens. But it was a little hard to understand in the book for me, exactly what I was supposed to get from it. But when Bond arrives at the hotel, in the book he just signs the hotel register as James Bond. And then he remarks right after that that when he signed in as Bond that he didn't like em or nobody from the agency contacted him about not using a cover or whatever. So he seems to think that they didn't care about it. And I assume it's for the same reason that the movie says. Because the movie says right after he does that, he signs in as Bond and she gives him a look like, what? You just blew our cover. Immediately he says, le Chiffre knows who I am. He's like, le Chif is so well connected that there's no reason to use a cover. He knows who we are. He knows why we're here. The fact that he hasn't killed us yet means he wants to play against me or whatever. So essentially he's just. He's not using the COVID because he knows it doesn't matter because it's pointless because Le Chiff is so connected to everybody and that he knows who Bond is. So he could lie and put a fake name down. But there's no point.
42:19
Speaker B: Are you really a spy at that point, though?
42:22
Speaker A: Well, in this particular instance, yeah. And actually throughout all of Bond's stuff, that's kind of how Bond operates. My memory is he just. He very often just doesn't use cover because he just is James Bond and he. That's how he does it.
42:34
Speaker B: Like, to me. That's not a spy.
42:37
Speaker A: Yeah, but it's a very different style of spy. But, yeah, yeah, he does use cover sometimes, but in this particular instance, because he. He's fine with it because he, Le Chiffre wants to win his money, basically. He's fine with him coming because he thinks. Le Chiffre thinks he can beat Bond in this game and take his money. So he doesn't care.
42:59
Speaker B: Okay. All right. So we get to the poker game and one of the things that we see Bond do is order a drink. And he gives the whole recipe for what he wants. It is his martini, but he gives a specific way that he wants it. And then after he orders it, a bunch of people at the table are also like, I want one of those. Because he's a trendsetter, an influencer, if you will. Does that happen in the book?
43:32
Speaker A: So a bunch of people don't order the drink after him, but he does order that exact drink at the gambling table. And the recipe is exactly the same. Three measures of Gordon, one of vodka, half a measure of kinnalillet, whatever that is, shake it very well until it's ice cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. In the book, Leiter does remark, gosh, that's certainly a drink, but nobody else orders one. I do want to read a little bit of Bond's drinking philosophy because I thought it was fascinating. After he orders that drink, the barman, certainly, monsieur, blah blah blah. Leiter says, gosh, that's certainly a drink. Bon laughed. When I'm concentrating, he explained, I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad, which I think is a great line.
44:28
Speaker B: It is extra funny to me, going from thunderball to this one, because in thunderball there was the whole thing about how he needed to stop drinking and stop smoking.
44:40
Speaker A: Well, that's because at that point there had been seven or eight in the books or whatever. And people like, God, he drinks and smokes a lot. And so Fleming was like, all right, let's kind of talk about it.
44:49
Speaker B: Let's send them to a weird health retreat. So they play their poker and they take a break. And we see the guy from the.
45:03
Speaker A: Obano, the African, the guy from Lord.
45:05
Speaker B: Zhang, the warlord guy come to threaten Le Chiffre and his girlfriend for losing his money. And then as they're leaving Le Chiffre's hotel room, they spot bond and vesper and come after them, resulting in another big action, set piece. Fight down a stairwell and then bond ends up having to strangle this guy to death in front of Vesper. And it really freaks her out. She's not handling it particularly.
45:37
Speaker A: Not into it. No.
45:39
Speaker B: Does any of that happen in the book?
45:42
Speaker A: No. So Vesper isn't really party to any major violence in the book. And to be fair, there actually isn't. There's very little in the way of action or killing in the book at all. I believe the only scene where Bond does any sort of fighting is a scene where Le Chiffre. There's a scene during one of the gambling moments where one of Lachish's bodyguards comes up behind Bond and. And puts a gun in his back while he's gambling because Le Chiff, basically, he's about to win against Le Chiffre and the guy comes up behind him around this crowded poker table and sticks a gun in his back and basically whispers to him, you're going to fold or I'll shoot you and kill you. And Bond has to figure out what to do. And he launches his chair backwards and, like, breaks the guy's arm and, like, knocks the gun out of his hand. But it, like, destroys the chair and it causes this huge commotion and it. And it's able. He's able to, like, disrupt this assassination attempt and then, like. But everybody's like, what's your problem? Because, like, nobody knows that he had a gun on him.
46:52
Speaker B: Yeah.
46:53
Speaker A: So it seems like he just, like, flies backwards out of his chair and his chair, like, breaks and everything and everybody's like, what's going on? But other than that, there's, like, very. That's, like the only action, quote unquote, scene in the whole book. And it's not really even that much of an action scene. It's mostly attention scene and then, like, one quick moment of action. So, no, there's not, like, basically no fighting or anything like that in this particular scene, the whole thing with the other people coming to get the money from Le Chiff like, none of that happens.
47:23
Speaker B: And so what happens with Vesper in the movie is that bond comes into their hotel room and she's in the shower with her dress still on. Which we talked about.
47:32
Speaker A: Yes, we talked about it in the prequel. In the prequel, they had originally written that scene for her to be, like, in her underwear in the shower. And Daniel Craig apparently was like, no, she should still be wearing her dress.
47:41
Speaker B: And he was absolutely right.
47:43
Speaker A: Yes.
47:44
Speaker B: And I liked that scene up until. So he gets in the shower with her and is like comforting her and she says something about having blood on her hand.
47:57
Speaker A: Yeah. She's like, the blood is still on.
47:59
Speaker B: Yeah, the blood is staining my hands or something. And Bond's response to this is to suck on her fingers.
48:08
Speaker A: Yeah.
48:09
Speaker B: And I just don't know if that would make me feel any better.
48:16
Speaker A: No, I agree.
48:16
Speaker B: If I were in that situation, I agree.
48:19
Speaker A: I always thought him sucking on her fingers was kind of weird. I still think it's a sweet scene and it works really well and is a good scene for their relationship and.
48:27
Speaker B: Like, like, overall it was a good scene.
48:30
Speaker A: It's a good scene.
48:31
Speaker B: But the finger sucking was pretty, pretty weird in my opinion.
48:35
Speaker A: I don't necessarily disagree. I have always felt that way.
48:38
Speaker B: That really kind of took me out of the moment.
48:41
Speaker A: Yeah, that's fair.
48:43
Speaker B: So Bond initially loses. He loses his 10 million that he bought into the game with because in.
48:53
Speaker A: The film, because somebody has tipped le chiffre off to the fact that he has a tell. And so Bond think he's got him, thinks he has them pegged and knows his tell, but somebody tips him off. So he's able to use the tell against Bond. Yes.
49:06
Speaker B: His towel against Bond. So Bond loses the 10 million and Vesper does not want to greenlight another 5 million for him to stay in the game.
49:15
Speaker A: Yeah, you can buy back in.
49:17
Speaker B: Yeah. But Bond is pretty bad about that. But then he bumps into Felix Leiter, the CIA agent who we don't know.
49:27
Speaker A: Until this moment is a CIA agent. We know nothing about him. A guy playing in the poker game.
49:33
Speaker B: But basically the CIA agent is like, hey, you're better than me. You actually have a chance of winning. So here's this money, courtesy of the red, white and blue for you to continue playing. Does that happen in the book?
49:51
Speaker A: Pretty much, yeah, actually. So the same thing happens in the book. Bond loses and is, is out of money at one point loses it all to le Chiffre. It starts similarly in the book where he starts getting the upper hand for a bit and then ultimately loses it all as he's kind of not sure what he's going to do. He's leaving the casino and somebody gives him a letter, somebody from the hotel or something gives them an envelope and the envelope is stuffed full of money and it has a note that says martial aid with compliments of the USA. And at this point, so in the book, the difference is that he knows who Leiter is. They've already talked. He knows he's a CIA agent. In the book they're like, Leiter's just there kind of like also watching and being a part of it. But Bond's aware he's there in the movie. Bond has no idea that he's there or whatever all around. This is better in the movie to me. One, I really like Vesper denying him the additional money in the movie. I like that she's like, you're an impulsive asshole who you're cut off, man. Well. But also. And then ultimately we find out that her reason is actually duplicitous and not bad. Her reason is that she wants Le Chiffre to win, essentially, so she doesn't want to give Bond more money. But even if you don't know that, it makes sense within that moment, like, before the twist is revealed. It makes sense within that moment that she doesn't want to give him more money. And that's not an element of the book at all. And then, two, I really like that in the movie, Bond snaps and is going to go just kill Shifra. It seems like he grabs a steak knife and is, like, following him down the stairs. And that's when we're introduced to Leiter. Leiter grabs him and is like, I'm a friend from Langley, or something like that. And Bond realizes he's in the CIA, and then we get that whole exchange. So, yeah, the nuts and bolts of it are the same. The CIA gives him money and is like, here, play more so you can beat this guy because we want to take him out, too. But I think the movie just adds to it in a lot of different ways that are really smart and make a lot of sense and make it more dramatic and also just does a lot of cool character work. I like what it does for Vesper and Bond's relationship with her denying him the money. I like what it does with Bond with him snapping because we know he's impulsive and he's so early in his career. He's just kind of, like.
52:06
Speaker B: He's kind of a hothead.
52:07
Speaker A: Yeah, he's a hothead and is just gonna go kill this guy in the middle of a casino or whatever. Yeah, I like all of that so much more.
52:15
Speaker B: Before I go move on to my next question, I also just want to say for the record that L. Shifra has a really obvious tell in the movie.
52:25
Speaker A: It's ridiculous.
52:25
Speaker B: Yeah, like, kind of ridiculous. Because I don't believe that he would have such an obvious tell. Like, he wouldn't be any good at high stakes poker games.
52:35
Speaker A: No, it's the same thing with the actual poker in the movie. The poker in the movie is so ridiculous and cartoony and over the top that if you know anything about poker, it's like, this is insane. Like everybody has the best hand on every. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, oh, it's like a flush and a. And two full houses and a royal flush. Like all on the same hand or whatever. It's just like literally never happens. But it's, you know, the same kind of thing. Whereas, like, the guy having a tell where he, like, flinches and scratches his eye whenever he's bluffing, it's like, come on.
53:05
Speaker B: Like, if I can tell that that's your tell.
53:08
Speaker A: Yeah. You have a terrible tell. Yeah.
53:12
Speaker B: So the game continues. Bond has bought back in with his CIA money and he orders another martini. But dun dun dun, lshefra's girlfriend has poisoned it. So he drinks his poisoned martini and he immediately realizes that it's poisoned and goes to try to take care of it, but he can't. He's like doing a thing.
53:40
Speaker A: He's using the. He has a. What's the.
53:43
Speaker B: A little mini. What is that thing called a shock thing?
53:49
Speaker A: Defibrillator. He has a defibrillator.
53:51
Speaker B: He has a little defibrillator.
53:52
Speaker A: In his car.
53:53
Speaker B: In his car. And so he's like talking to mi six on the phone and they're like talking him through how to use this, but he passes out before he can do it. And then Vesper, because the wire's disconnected. And, like, Vesper shows up and reconnects the wire and saves him. Is any of that from the book?
54:09
Speaker A: So none of that's in the book, but I do think that essentially that kind of scene is there, which is the scene I described earlier where the guy with the gun threatens to kill him during the game in order to let Le Chiffre wins. I think it's basically the same kind of scene where somebody working for Le Chiffre tries to kill Bond and Bond is able to thwart it and come back to the game. Basically it's the exact same thing, a different version of it. And I like that scene in the movie. I think it's interesting. I have a note about it later that we'll talk about that specific scene, but no, not in the book.
54:42
Speaker B: Okay, so then Bond goes back to the poker game. He ends up winning.
54:47
Speaker A: Yep. He wins.
54:47
Speaker B: He wins the whole thing, the entire pot. And le Chiffre is big mad about it. So he has Vesper kidnapped and Bond gives chase, obviously. But then as he's speeding down the road. He has to veer off the road because they've left Vesper tied up in the middle of the road. Did they leave her tied up in the middle of the road in order to trap him? Because I thought that was very clever.
55:13
Speaker A: No. So this is better in the movie for me, this almost plays out identical for the most part. This scene's basically movie. Nailed it. He wins the poker. It's not poker in the book. We'll get to that. He wins the card game in the book, and then him and Vesper are having dinner afterwards. And then she goes. She gets a message from Mathis and goes out to talk to him and she gets kidnapped. And Bond sees her getting kidnapped and gives chase in his car. It's all like exactly the same. And he's chasing him down these dark highways. But in the book, instead of leaving Vesper in the middle of the road to cause Bond to crash, they deploy a spike strip out of the back of their car. Vesper's in the car and they deploy a spike strip out of the back of the car and bond runs over it and crashes. And basically the same thing happens. They pick him up and take him. So, yeah, almost identical, except, yeah. I actually prefer having Vesper leaving her in the middle of the road. Cause also it could kind of solve two problems if he does hit her. Like, it kind of solves two issues at the same time for them, in a way. Yeah. So, yeah. Although it's a little confusing. I guess they. I guess. I guess they don't care if she agreed to it or not. Well, we'll get through because she's in on all of this, kind of.
56:26
Speaker B: She's kind of in on it. But.
56:28
Speaker A: But I think the idea is that maybe she's not necessarily. She's also a pawn in all of this. She's double agent.
56:34
Speaker B: Like, pretty expendable, I think.
56:35
Speaker A: And so, like, I'm sure that. Yeah, she. I don't think it was her idea to get left in the middle of the road so that bond would swerve off the road and crash. I think they kind of made that choice for her even though she was ostensibly kind of working with them.
56:48
Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I do love a deploying spike strip.
56:53
Speaker A: Yes.
56:54
Speaker B: And so I think that is very.
56:55
Speaker A: Spy, I will say. I think the other reason they changed it in the movie is to get away from that stuff.
57:00
Speaker B: Right. That is very tropey.
57:01
Speaker A: That's very classic. Bond's been doing so much of that for years and years and years. And this new version of Bond. They wanted to do, wanted to be a feel a little less cartoony and ridiculous.
57:13
Speaker B: So they're captured now, and le chiffre strips Bond down completely nude, which we also mentioned in the prequel. There was a review or something that talked about how he was stripped down.
57:30
Speaker A: Yes, there was a review that talked about how this movie is kind of a deconstruction of Bond in the way that it subverts a lot of the classic Bond tropes by putting Bond in a lot of the situations that the women would tend to be in, which is the scene where he sexily comes out of the ocean. That's classic Bond girl moment. There's a very famous scene of Halle Berry coming out of the ocean almost identically, but also other people, Ursula, something from one of the first ones. It's a recurring trope of beautiful women coming out of the ocean. So doing it with Bond and then in this instance, having Bond be stripped down and tortured is often a thing that happens to the bond woman or whatever. So the movie is kind of playing with some of the tropes of bond stuff and subverting it by having it happen to Bond or be Bond in that place.
58:15
Speaker B: Right. So it stripped down, tied up. Leshiefra tortures him, and Bond laughs and taunts him. Is any of that from the book?
58:25
Speaker A: So this scene is damn near identical to the book. And I was wildly surprised because I 100% thought this whole scene was going to be a movie edition. I have seen this movie before, reading this book, which I read for the first time for the podcast. I've seen this movie half dozen times, probably since it came out. I saw it in theaters when it came out, and I probably seen it, I don't know, probably even more closer to like ten or twelve times since then, if I had to guess. I've seen it quite a few times because it's, I think, easily my favorite Bond movie. And so I was, like, convinced when I was coming into reading this, I was like, this isn't gonna be in the book. This is gonna be a movie. It just didn't, I don't know, for.
59:02
Speaker B: Some reason, especially after that specific review, seemed to think that it was also a movie invention.
59:09
Speaker A: That's fair. That's fair. But no, it's almost identical. They cut the bottom out of a wicker chair and they have Bond sit in it butt ass naked and tie him to the chair. And then Lachief just abuses Bond's balls for a while. Like, that is exactly what happened to in the book. He, like, specifically comments on the most effective way to torture a man is by, like, taking away his manhood or something like that. I don't know if the movie goes into that at all or not, but so basically identical. I do have some specific notes about this scene that I think are better in the movie. One being that in the book he uses a carpet beater made out of cane, like a. You know, those like. Yeah, that they used to use to, like, beat rugs with or whatever back in the day. He uses one of those to, like, smack him in the balls with or whatever. Whereas in the movie he has, like, a rope, a giant rope with a big knot at the end. And for some reason, that rope thing is way worse to me. I don't know. That scene has always just made my stomach hurt watching it, but that. And then the other thing that the movie adds that is not in the book is bond taunting him. And I'm kind of mixed on this. I really enjoy and think it's very, like, funny in the movie when he's, like, taunting him and he's laughing at him and he's like, no, to the right. Everybody's gonna know you died scratching my face.
1:00:31
Speaker B: It feels very in character for this character.
1:00:34
Speaker A: And it's kind of funny in the moment because you're not expecting it. And it's like, oh, my God. You know, it's just like this weird, ridiculous moment of, you know, how. How absurd this man is that he's getting, you know, tortured and he's, like, making jokes or whatever. So I kind of like it more in the movie. But there's also this element in the book that I think is really interesting and that the movie scene actually kind of directly contradicts is that in the book he's, like, really focused. We're in his head during this whole scene and he's just really focused on staying conscious. And he actually makes a very specific point of specifically not laughing or not being hysterical because he knows there's this element, he said, while he's being tortured, he's going through what he knows about torture and how to combat it and stuff like that. And one of the things he thinks about is these people he knows that he's worked with who were tortured during the war or something said that there's this phase of your torture where you get punch drunk, where you start becoming hysterical and it almost becomes pleasurable. And he makes a big point in the book of making sure that you don't show that punch drunkenness, like, show that you've gotten to the point where it becomes not torture anymore, which is kind of what happens in the movie where he's, like, laughing and he's like, oh, no. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because in the book, he says once you get to that point, the torturers will either kill you because they know you're past the point of no return or they will just stop torturing you until you recover enough of your senses and then they will start torturing you again. So even if you get to the point where you've reached this level of insane pain where your brain kind of stops working and it almost becomes pleasurable, he says you have to somehow manage to not visually display that to the torturers. I don't know. I thought it was really interesting in the book the way they were talking about that. And the movie scene kind of contradicts that with what happens. So, I don't know, six, one, half dozen the other. But I do like the movie scene a lot. But it is almost identical, all in all. And I was very surprised by that.
1:02:51
Speaker B: So one thing that Le chiffre says during the scene, he says, your friend Mathis was my friend Mathis. So is Mathis a traitor in the book?
1:03:05
Speaker A: No, and he isn't in the movie either. Although we don't know that in this one.
1:03:08
Speaker B: Right.
1:03:09
Speaker A: It's left an open question at the end of this one. Like, literally one of the last things they talk, like when he's on the phone with m, she's like, well, this means once they figure out Vesper is a traitor, they're like, well, this clears Mathis. And Bond goes, no, it just proves that she was a traitor. It doesn't necessarily prove that Mathis wasn't a traitor. But we will find out in the next movie that Mathis wasn't. He was. Yeah, he was.
1:03:31
Speaker B: So is le chiffre le. She was lying.
1:03:33
Speaker A: Yeah, he's lying to keep the COVID of Vesper, basically. So he just tells him Mathis so that he doesn't suspect Vesper.
1:03:39
Speaker B: Gotcha. Okay. But. So they managed to get out of this because the guy who I did not recognize at first, a guy from the very beginning of the movie, we had to stop the movie so I could ask you who the heck this was supposed to be. He shows up and Mister White. Mister White shows up and kills Le Chiff and presumably everybody else who's with him. But he leaves Bond and Vesper alive. And then Bond wakes up in the hospital and he and Vesper bone. Yeah.
1:04:14
Speaker A: They kindle their romance.
1:04:15
Speaker B: Yeah. They recover. They kindle their romance. Yes.
1:04:19
Speaker A: Weird italian villa hospital or whatever it is that's like on the adriatic sea or whatever. Not adriatic.
1:04:25
Speaker B: He sits outside in a fancy wheelchair like a victorian invalid.
1:04:30
Speaker A: Yeah. In the place where they filmed that scene from Star Wars Episode two.
1:04:34
Speaker B: Yes.
1:04:35
Speaker A: Where Podme and Anakin are like, sitting out by the ocean. Yeah.
1:04:40
Speaker B: She wears the lake dress.
1:04:42
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
1:04:42
Speaker B: Her costumes are the only reference point I have for those movies, but. So they kindle their romance and then Bond ends up resigning. He leaves mi six to be with Vesper. Does that happen in the book?
1:04:58
Speaker A: Yes. The exact same thing happens. He recovers in the hotel and then they are in the hospital while Vesper is there. Kind of. And then they. He meets up with Vesper and they go to go vacation, essentially. And he's going to. He plans to retire and he says he plans to marry Vesper. He's going to ask Vesper to marry him. So, yeah, basically, identically.
1:05:22
Speaker B: He really just fell in love with the co star.
1:05:24
Speaker A: Yeah.
1:05:25
Speaker B: Incredible.
1:05:26
Speaker A: Yep.
1:05:28
Speaker B: Is Vesper also a traitor in the book?
1:05:31
Speaker A: Yes. So, yes, this is the big reveal at the end of the book, but the way it all plays out is very different. And this kind of spoils a couple of your questions. I still want to get your next questions coming up. This does kind of spoil them. The book does not have the big climactic action scene in Venice and the money doesn't really play a factor in the way the end of this plays out. But the core motivation is the same Vespers boyfriend, who was also a spy, we find out in the book, ended up being kidnapped and tortured by russian intelligence or somebody, and they basically told Vesper, you have to flip and help us and if you do that, we'll let your boyfriend live or whatever. And this all plays out while Bond and Vesper are on vacation. So when I say this all plays out, the end of the movie where they're in Venice, all of that stuff basically plays out while they're staying at a seaside hotel. In the book, they basically go and spend, like a couple weeks at this little cottage on the ocean in the book, instead of sailing around the world together. During this time, when they're together, Bond can tell Vesper's being weird and distant and he sees her making weird phone calls at the hotel's phone and stuff, but he never figures out what she's up to, which is actually a thing I kind of had an issue with, is that Bond becomes, like, real dumb at the end of this book and I think maybe it's intentional? Is that, like, his judgment is clouded by the fact that he's, like, in love with her is kind of the idea, maybe, but he becomes real dumb.
1:06:59
Speaker B: Stupid in love.
1:06:59
Speaker A: Yeah, he becomes real dumb. At the end of this book, they see this guy following them around twice that Vesper's really nervous about. It's a guy with, like, a black eye patch. And Bond's like, I'm sure he's fine. Like, I'm like, bon, come on. What are we talking about here?
1:07:17
Speaker B: We all know men with eye patches are suspicious.
1:07:19
Speaker A: Yeah. Bond's like, it's probably nothing or whatever. And then one night after, they actually have some fights because Bon can tell she's being distant. And they grow apart for a while while they're here, and they fight a bunch for a couple days, but then eventually, after a couple days, they're able to resolve enough, and they have a night where they have a really nice evening together. They have dinner, and then they make love in their hotel, and then he leaves. They don't sleep in the same room. I guess this. Maybe it's an old thing. I don't know. They're, like, sleeping together. But every night, Bond goes back to his own hotel room and sleeps in it.
1:07:53
Speaker B: I mean, it was in the fifties. Maybe they had to have two hotel rooms for show, I guess.
1:07:58
Speaker A: But he goes and he sleeps in his own room every night. And this final night, they have this night nice together and make love, and then he goes to sleep in his own room, and Vesper kills herself while he's gone. And he wakes up the next morning to the hotel people being like, got a problem. And then the hotel people found a letter and give him a letter that she wrote, and he reads it, and it basically outlines everything that in the movie, we hear in the phone call with em about, like, the backstory with the boyfriend and all that stuff. She writes a letter telling him all this stuff, and in the book, she ends up choosing to kill herself because she knows that SMErsh, which is the name, which is a great name.
1:08:35
Speaker B: That's a terrible.
1:08:36
Speaker A: I know. Eventually we'll become Spectre. But SMeRshe, which is the organization in the book, and it's a combination of two russian words that basically means death to spies.
1:08:46
Speaker B: Okay?
1:08:47
Speaker A: Is what that stands for. And it's a. It's a russian agency that kills, like, spies, basically. So in the movie or in the book, she kills herself because she knows SMersh, which is the book's version. In the movie, the organization is called Quantum, which we don't even know about yet. In this movie. That's where Quantum of solace comes in. And then eventually, I believe Quantum might become Spectre. I didn't get that far. I don't know. But she knows that that organization will not stop until they kill her and that this will also get Bond killed. So she kills herself so that she can save Bond, essentially, is her reasoning. And I think it's basically the same in the movie as well. Like, when she chooses to die in the movie.
1:09:29
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:09:30
Speaker A: It's essentially because, one, she betrayed him and she feels very guilty about that. But also, this organization is after her, and. And they'll keep coming after her regardless. So we'll get into some more of this here in a little bit. But that's roughly the same thing. She is a traitor. It's basically all the same. It's just kind of the specifics play out a little bit differently. And I'll talk about. Which I preferred here. I prefer the movie's version, but we'll get to it.
1:09:56
Speaker B: Okay. So kind of back to the movie and how this all goes down. So Vesper is Shedden takes the money, and she's gonna, like, hand it over to these people. She's got a big suitcase full of money, I assume.
1:10:13
Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. She withdraws a bunch of money from the bank. Yeah.
1:10:16
Speaker B: And Bond follows her, and he sees her with this guy who does not have an eye patch, but he has a pair of glasses where one of the lenses is blacked out.
1:10:26
Speaker A: That was one of my movie nailed it notes, and I'll just mention it here. That's the same guy. It's meant to be the same character. It's her contact who in the book is, like, following her around not to get money because at this point, the money is not like in the book. The bond has already given the money to. The government has the money already. So Vesper has no access to it in the book, but they're just there watching Vesper to kill her eventually. But point is. Nailed it. Because same character. He said he has an eye patch in the book, but he has the cool sunglasses in the movie. And he has the same name. We actually see the phone. We see a cell phone at one point. And the text that she got was from a guy named Gettler, which is the character's name in the book. So it's the same guy.
1:11:10
Speaker B: Okay. But so Bond sees this exchange starting to happen, and then they see him. So they grab Vesper, and they're like, he's like, I'll kill her. And Bond says, allow me. And I wanted to know if that exchange was from the book.
1:11:26
Speaker A: It's not in the book again, because none of this really happens the same way. But I definitely think is a good exchange in the film because it really shows us the kind of guy Bond is. Particularly now that this whole thing with Vesper has happened, because this whole Vesper thing really messes him up. This movie is a tragedy in the best way because Bond starts as this weird, hot headed killer who just doesn't care about anything and then falls in love with Vesper and is going to give all that life up and then has it all immediately ripped away from him in the worst way possible. And, yeah, that moment of snapping, he's just like, allow me, and then he turns purely into business. Bond is. I like it.
1:12:06
Speaker B: Does Bond sink an entire building into the Venice canals?
1:12:10
Speaker A: No. Yeah. None of this is in the book, as I mentioned, but it's absolutely better in the movie because this is a great set piece. This is what I talked about in the prequel episodes, like the largest set or whatever they ever built for a Bond movie. This whole sinking building thing with all the water and all that stuff, the.
1:12:26
Speaker B: Man just causes chaos everywhere he goes.
1:12:28
Speaker A: I think it's a brilliant set piece. I don't think it's particularly realistic, but it's a really cool idea for a final set of. Because it's based on some real things. Venice is sinking and parts of it are sinking. And so shooting out the airbags that are holding up the building and causing the building to sink is really cool. Again, I don't think it would really play out that way, but it's a cool scene.
1:12:52
Speaker B: Does Vesper drown herself in an elevator cage?
1:12:55
Speaker A: No, as I mentioned earlier, she kills herself in a. I don't want to get into specifics, but she kills herself in a different way in the book. Alone in her bedroom, basically. But this specific scene in the movie, I remember finding that scene where she drowns in the film, so horribly affecting. When I saw this movie for the first time, I was, I don't know, 2018, I guess, when this movie came out, right?
1:13:16
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:13:16
Speaker A: Yeah. I would have been 18 when this movie came out. And I was, like, stunned at how upsetting I found that scene where she drowns. Because I just. I don't think I'd ever seen, like, a person drowning depicted like that in a movie or any, like, I don't know, like, ever. You know what I mean? Like, at that point in my life, and I was just like, jesus Christ. Like, I just remember seeing that, where she starts screaming and then just like, I was like, ugh. Yeah, I think it's a great scene and makes for a. And obviously, there's a lot of interesting symbolism there of her locking bond out from herself and her being literally in over her head in this whole. I don't know. I think it's a very clever way for this all to resolve that, I think, still has a lot of the thematic weight that the book stuff kind of does. The book's ending is way more melancholy. The way they kind of, like, fall out of love with each other and then back in. It's very weird. The end of the book, when they're in the hotel together, is, like, very weird because they go through, like, a rough patch where they don't like each other for a while, but then they kind of get back together and are happy, and then she kills herself. I don't know. It's just very melancholy and weird. But I do really like the movie kind of keeps the happiness and then just, like, this huge twist reveal and the very dramatic, traumatic ending, I think, works really well for kicking off Daniel Craig's bond. I don't know. I like it.
1:14:46
Speaker B: So after all of this happens, Bond is on the phone with em, debriefing, I suppose, and he says, the job's done. The bitch is dead. Is that line from the book?
1:15:00
Speaker A: Yeah, almost exactly. Bond calls into the head office and says, pass this on at once. 30. 30 was a double working for Redland. Yes. Damn it. I said was, the bitch is dead now. And that's literally the final line of the book. So charming. Yeah. Yep.
1:15:19
Speaker B: All right, so then I guess I will say so.
1:15:21
Speaker A: I think it's better in the movie because in the movie, it feels more like a defense mechanism. And in the books, it just feels like he's a shitty misogynist. Because throughout the book, and I have notes about this later throughout the book, the bond in this book is so clearly just a shitty misogynist. Like, that's just who he is. So him being like, the bitch is dead is, like, he would just say that. Like, that feels completely in line with who he is as a person. Whereas the bond in the movie, to me, feels like he's saying that, in a sense, to, like, distance himself from it and cut himself off from the emotional pain that he's feeling. You know what I mean?
1:16:01
Speaker B: Himself. He didn't care.
1:16:02
Speaker A: Yes, exactly. Whereas in book's version, I'm like, but that's actually just how you kind of feel about women. Like, so I don't. You know what I mean? So it's very much a better in the movie in that regard.
1:16:13
Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
1:16:14
Speaker A: Which is actually kind of clever that they could keep the exact same line but have it mean something.
1:16:18
Speaker B: Right. You changed the context a little, you changed the delivery, and now it means something different.
1:16:24
Speaker A: Completely different. Yeah.
1:16:26
Speaker B: All right, so I guess then I know the answer to my last question here, but does the book end as the movie does with our first. The first time we hear James Bond's iconic introduction?
1:16:43
Speaker A: So, no, and this is one of my absolute favorite things that the movie does. I could write an essay about this, but in the book we get bonded, James Bond, which is what you're talking about, his introduction, where somebody's like, and you are Bond, James Bond. We get that on page 41, actually, when he introduces himself to Felix Leiter, he says, Bond, James Bond. And so I don't know if you caught this, but throughout the movie they set up times where you think he's going to say that line, like, several times. There are at least two or three specific moments where introductions are made or people lob him a softball where you are just expecting him to say, Bond, James Bond. And he doesn't do it. He doesn't say it. I also mentioned in a prequel that they used the opening credits song from this movie, you know, my name, as the Les motif throughout the movie instead of the traditional Bond score. And I mentioned at the time that that was important and it wasn't just like an accident or whatever. Both of those decisions were very intentional. Remember also that I mentioned that and we talked about how people did not like the announcement of Daniel Craig as James Bond. They were not fans of this.
1:17:56
Speaker B: And the website still works.
1:17:58
Speaker A: Yes, yes. Danielcrague is not Bond or whatever.com dot. Also, remember as we talked about that, the studio and the writers and the people involved in making this film felt like the movies had gotten too formulaic and silly and they wanted to reset the series. So I think it's a brilliant decision to save the iconic line and the James Bond music for the final moment of this movie. Bond has gone through his defining moment in his life. He has been betrayed by and lost Vesper, single person that he loved and that he envisioned spending the rest of his life with. He was going to retire. He was going to sail around the world with Vesper. But this experience where she ends up betraying him and then dying kind of seals his fate into the service. He has no choice but to become Bond, James Bond. In that moment. And that's when we get the line. That's when we get the music sting. Because until that moment at the end of the movie, he's not really James Bond yet. Like, he calls himself James Bond and he is, you know, that's who he is. But, like, until that movie. Until that moment at the end of the movie, he's not really. That's it for. Was that in the book? But Katie does have a few more questions for lost and adaptation.
1:19:15
Speaker B: Just show me the way to get out of here and I'll be on my way. Wow. I was at last.
1:19:20
Speaker A: Yes. Yes. And I want to get unlust as soon as possible.
1:19:24
Speaker B: So fairly early in the movie, I believe, right after he gets to the resort at the Bahamas, we see him arrive at the hotel, and then another person arrives and assumes he's the valet and throws him his car keys. And he takes this guy and parks it, and then he, like, rams it backwards into the spot so that it hits the railing and then it falls and, like, hits the whole row of other cars. And I was just wondering because I kind of got that this was the movie showing us his ego was, like, what I felt like was going on there, but I didn't know if there was something else. Like if there was some other purpose that he had for doing that, that I was not catching or if he was just, like, just a hothead.
1:20:18
Speaker A: So it's not in the book, first off, and it is an ego thing. It's definitely characterization. It is the fact that he's a bit of a hothead. He's a bit impulsive, but also he realizes that he can use this as a distraction because if you notice right after he does that, he walks into the hotel and all the security people come running out to the parking lot and hear on the radio security to the parking lot or whatever. And when they go out, he then sneaks into the security office and is able to go through the security footage while they're out dealing with the parking lot thing. So it is his ego and impulsiveness and all that sort of stuff, but it's also a convenient way to cause a distraction so that he can look through the security footage. Okay, so it's both.
1:20:59
Speaker B: Another thing that I didn't understand was so, so Bond knows that he needs to go to the Bahamas because he sees the text on the guy in Madagascar's phone and he's able to, like.
1:21:14
Speaker A: Put a sim card in his computer.
1:21:16
Speaker B: Yeah, he puts the SIM card in the computer and he, like, traces it to the resort in the Bahamas where it came from. But I don't understand how he connected it specifically to that one. Guy with the hot wife.
1:21:28
Speaker A: Demetrios.
1:21:29
Speaker B: Yes.
1:21:30
Speaker A: Demetrios. Yeah.
1:21:30
Speaker B: Guy with hot wife.
1:21:31
Speaker A: Yes. Solange. Yeah. Very hot wife. Yeah. That dress is. She is, like, painted. That dress is, like, painted on her. Yeah. So what's going on? That's actually the same scene where we just talked about with the car scene. And it's ridiculous. The reason it's kind of silly and confusing is that it's ridiculous is that he was able to see what time that text was sent in the metadata or whatever. He could see when that text got sentence. And so he goes in and he flips through the dvd's or whatever, and he finds the dvd from the day that the text was sent. And then he scrubs through the footage and finds the exact time code of when the text message was sent. And it just so happens that the guy that got that text or sent the text or whatever, I can't remember if he got it or sent it. Whichever way. Demetrios, he was either receiving the text from the guy in Madagascar. I believe he was sending it to the guy in Madagascar. He apparently got or sent to that text at the exact moment he was stepping out of his car in front of the hotel on that security camera footage. So if you notice, when Bond is looking at the security footage, he dials to the exact moment that that text message took place. And while he's looking at the footage, he sees a guy get out of the car and look down at his phone at that exact moment and goes, aha. That's him.
1:23:03
Speaker B: That could have been any guy looking at his phone.
1:23:06
Speaker A: It's insane. It's insane. It makes no sense. But unless the idea is that he. I guess you could argue. Cause it seems like when he pinpoints that it was at this resort, that it's not like, so specifically where the guy, like, you think he just, like, basically knows it was in this resort.
1:23:23
Speaker B: Right. That was what I thought.
1:23:25
Speaker A: But the only thing that would make sense is that he knew specifically it was at this resort at the front door.
1:23:31
Speaker B: Right?
1:23:31
Speaker A: Like in that circle roundabout or whatever. Because that's the only way it makes any sense.
1:23:36
Speaker B: Wouldn't that be a twist if, like, this guy was not connected to anything? He's just some guy who happened to get a text message at that time.
1:23:46
Speaker A: Yeah, but that's the idea, is that he connects it because that guy looks at his phone at the same time when that text message occurred at this resort. It's stupid. It's a very convenient coincidence that he happened to have been in front of that camera when he got that. Like, because that guy could have been anywhere when he sent it. Like, at that time, he just luckily happened to be on. And Bond, it's maybe the biggest leap this movie asks you to make. Like, narratively in terms of, like, okay, that guy just happened to be in front of that camera because there's a million other cameras at the resort. But Bond looks at the front. I just. Unless I'm missing a detail of how they figure. Bond figured that out. It's a ridiculous coincidence that he happens to be in front of that camera at that exact moment when he gets that text or sends that text or whatever.
1:24:34
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:24:34
Speaker A: Stupid.
1:24:35
Speaker B: Okay, my final question. After Bond kills Obano and his muscle guy who's with him, his henchmen, and he kills both of them. And then he tells Mathis where the bodies are. And he's like, take care of these. And then we see later Bond is watching out the window as hotel security finds these bodies in the car, in the trunk of a car. And there's a guy there that immediately gets arrested. And this distracted me so much, I was like, did they just frame some guy for murdering these terrorists?
1:25:14
Speaker A: I thought the exact same thing.
1:25:15
Speaker B: Who's that guy?
1:25:17
Speaker A: I thought the exact same thing. So none of that's from the book, as I mentioned. I'm gonna assume that that's supposed to be like one of Le Shift's security or something. In the book, Le Chiffre has like two security guards with him at all times. I don't know if we see them in the movie at all. I can't recall.
1:25:32
Speaker B: Cause I don't think, like, that guy is not somebody we know or have seen before.
1:25:36
Speaker A: I think there's a chance that maybe there's like, a deleted scene they needed to round up. They needed to. They knew they needed to include the bodies getting taken care of in the final edit.
1:25:45
Speaker B: Yes.
1:25:46
Speaker A: But maybe they cut an earlier scene where we are introduced to, like, that guy being a security guard or something.
1:25:52
Speaker B: Or at least like an asshole or something like that.
1:25:55
Speaker A: Yeah. I have no idea. My. Again, my guess is because I think that, I swear, Mathis has a line of, like, several problem. He says something along like, oh, there's two birds with 1 st. Or several problems taking care of at once or something. Which to me implies that that guy was right.
1:26:14
Speaker B: There is some reason they wanted him to be friends.
1:26:16
Speaker A: I don't think he's just some random guy on vacation at a resort, I don't think.
1:26:21
Speaker B: Random vacationer at the casino Royale, I don't think.
1:26:24
Speaker A: But again, that's my guess, is that he's like one of Le Chiff's security zone.
1:26:28
Speaker B: Okay.
1:26:29
Speaker A: All right. That was it for Katie's question. It's time to find out now all the stuff that I thought was better in the book you like to read.
1:26:39
Speaker B: Oh, yes, I love to read.
1:26:41
Speaker A: What do you like to read?
1:26:45
Speaker B: Everything.
1:26:46
Speaker A: One of the little details in the book that I liked is right at the beginning when I think Bond's at the casino Royale, he's at some hotel or something, and he goes around his room and he has all these little intruder alarm things that he sets up that I thought were interesting. He puts a hair in the drawer by his nightstand. He does all these little things to see if anybody broke in. And I thought that was kind of fun, like little spy stuff. There's a line where after he does all that, he then sits down and it says that he lights his 70th cigarette of the day.
1:27:20
Speaker B: What time is it?
1:27:21
Speaker A: It's like at night, but, yeah, that's not better. No, it's insane. Again, this is where it comes from. It's like the third page of the book, and it's just like from moment one of the James Bond series, he smokes just which everybody, like I say, everybody. Lots of people back then, right?
1:27:37
Speaker B: Lots of people. A lot.
1:27:39
Speaker A: Yeah.
1:27:40
Speaker B: But why cigarettes come, like, what, 25 to a pack?
1:27:43
Speaker A: Yeah. That's.
1:27:44
Speaker B: That's insane.
1:27:45
Speaker A: Yeah. He's on, like three pack a day kind of habit. Yeah. Utterly absurd. Yeah. Also, I commented during the Thunderball episode that I was not expecting and really enjoyed the. Some of the non linear storytelling elements of that. I don't know if you recall that, like, they kind of bounced back and forth. Things are revealed and then they're explained in the chapter after or whatever. And this book actually doesn't really do that, but it kind of does it a little bit here in the very beginning, after the first couple chapters, it follows a pretty straight linear narrative, but during the beginning, we start with Bond at the casino, and then he remembers his briefing, and we flash back and get the briefing and stuff like that, and kind of the setup for the mission. And then we bowden back to the mission. So it kind of goes out of order a little bit. Again, not nearly as much as Thunderball did, which I thought was actually really interesting and kind of clever about Thunderball.
1:28:41
Speaker B: But maybe that makes it seem like something that Fleming maybe like nurtured more a part of the series as it went on.
1:28:49
Speaker A: And again, I've only read the two, so I don't know if the other. Have no idea if the other books, you know where that goes in the other ones. But there's a little tiny bit of it at the beginning of this one and then quite a bit of it in thunderball. So I don't know. There's a chapter called two Men in straw hats in this book which none of this makes it into the movie that I thought was kind of interesting. There's a point where when Bond first meets Vesper, when she shows up, they actually meet at a bar. Mathis brings her to a bar. And now three of them are having a drink at this bar kind of talking about the mission. And then as they leave the bar, like a bomb goes off out on the street. Well, bond leaves and Mathis and Vesper are still in there. And then there's an explosion outside. And that's also a little bit nonlinear. Then we go back and, like, the bomb goes off and the window shatter and Bond, or Mathis and Vesper are like, what the hell? And then we cut outside and we go back in time and we follow Bond. And what happened with all the explosion and everything? And what happened is there's these two belarusian guys. I can't remember where they're from, but there's these two guys and they're like standing down the street. And bond, like, notices them and they're holding two cameras cases and one of them is red and one of them is blue. And he thinks they're very strange, but he's like keeping an eye on them. And he starts walking towards them. And as he's walking towards them, one of them turns and then, like, goes to start throwing one of the, like the red case at him. And as that happens, they all just explode. Like, they just explode. And Bond luckily is able to get, like, he's kind of like behind a tree and ends up. He gets, like knocked on the ground, but he's not like seriously injured. I. And this eventually gets explained that it was these two people who were hired to kill Bond. And the plot was that they, they were hired, they were like hired hitmen, basically. And they were given these two camera cases, a red one and a blue one. And they were told that the blue case was a smoke bomb and that the red case was the bomb and that they would should throw the red bomb at bond and then set that one off and then trigger the blue one and use the smoke bomb to like, get away or whatever.
1:31:00
Speaker B: Right.
1:31:00
Speaker A: But in reality, they were both just bombs.
1:31:07
Speaker B: So somebody took these guys out and.
1:31:09
Speaker A: Yes. Well, basically what they did. Well, and that's the thing, is that in the plant, the person who gave them the bombs told them, throw the red one and then trigger the. When you hit the trigger, it will blow up the red bomb and then the smoke bomb will activate and then you guys can get away. But these guys thought it would be a better idea to activate the smoke bomb first and then throw the red bomb from the smoke so that they would be like, hidden. But what they didn't realize is that the blue one was also a bomb. So when they activated the blue one, they just blew themselves up. Up and they weren't able to actually throw the bomb at Bond, which is actually that now they remember that's why Bond wasn't killed is because. Yeah. So anyways, it's kind of this interesting little side plot. It doesn't really go anywhere. It doesn't matter. I think they were hired by Le Chiffer or whatever, but none of that makes its way into the movie. But I thought it was kind of interesting. Bond's feelings on gambling are kind of interesting. In the book, we kind of get, like his thoughts on gambling. He says he has like, this system that he uses for betting in roulette, which I was, when he was explained. He has like this progressive betting system that he uses in roulette that allows him to win. I was like, I don't think that's a thing. You can't game roulette. It's like a purely chance game. And Bond actually goes on to confirm that later. He even says it's funny because he said he uses a system, but then later he's like, basically explains that he knows roulette and all these games, depending on what they are, are essentially complete chants, but that he still studies, like, what numbers have been coming up. And he uses these systems to determine his. And the line specifically that I thought was interesting about it was that it says, quote, Bond didn't defend the practice. The practice of, like, using like, systems and stuff to try to game roulette. Bond didn't defend the practice. He simply maintained that the more effort and ingenuity you put into the practice, the more you took out. So he has this, like, kind of idea about gambling of like, he knows that it's chance and that, like, the stuff he's doing doesn't really mean any, like, wouldn't really make him win more, but that the fact that he's very purposeful about how he bets ultimately still leads him to win more. I don't know. It was kind of interesting. Like, basically the idea being like even though this thing you're doing, like, doesn't actually kind of like the law of attraction or whatever or something like that where even if you don't believe in the idea of, like, manifesting, like, oh, if I really like, there's not like a magic force that when you manifest makes the things you want appear in your life. But being very intentional about the things you want will lead to you achieving the things you want. Kind of. Right, I guess is kind of the idea that the books. I don't know. I thought it was kind of interesting. I don't really want to get into it too much. But another thing is, before the big showdown with Le Chiffre, before their big gambling game bond spends an hour laying in bed. I'm going through every possible outcome of events of that night. He thinks about, like, what if I lose? And then what happened? Like, he tries to go through, like, he sits there and tries to, like, physically or, I guess not physically, mentally. Imagine all of the different scenarios that could play out so that he, like, has a plan for everything. And it's just this interesting idea of the him, like, seeing that in the movie, he just, like, lays and basically meditates and, like, just thinks about, like, all the different ways things could play out for like an hour. And then he gets up and he goes and he does it. I just thought it was kind of interesting. So this is the thing I was talking about earlier. After the scene where we get the description of Bond where he's looking at himself in the mirror we actually get a classic suit up scene that actually, I feel like is kind of instrumental in inspiring a lot of later suit up superhero or other kinds of, like, action movie kind of stuff that I thought was really interesting. Bond filled a flat, light gunmetal box with 50 of the moorland cigarettes with the triple gold band. He slipped the case into his hip pocket and snapped his black oxidized Ronson to see if it needed fuel. After pocketing the thin sheaf of ten mil notes, he opened a drawer and took out a light chamois leather holster and slipped it over his left shoulder so that it hung about three inches below his arm. He then took from under his shirt, his shirts. In another drawer, a very flat 25 Beretta automatic with a skeleton grip extracted the clip and the single round in the barrel and whipped the action to and fro several times. Finally pulling the trigger. Trigger on the empty chamber, he charged the weapon again, loaded it, put up the safety catch, and dropped it into the shallow pouch of the shoulder holster. He looked carefully around the room to see if anything had been forgotten and slipped his single breasted dinner jacket coat over his heavy silk evening shirt. He felt cool and comfortable. He verified in the mirror that there was absolutely no sign of the flat gun under his left arm, gave a final pull at his narrow tie and walked out of the door and locked it. But that's like the classic, like Bond, like getting his gun and getting his lighter. I don't know, that just reminded me of. I could envision that scene in the movie or in a Bond movie. I thought it was kind of interesting. Vesper explains where her name came from in the book, which there's a joke in the movie where Bond jokes about her parents parents giving her a weird name or whatever. But basically I think she says she was conceived on a stormy night and vespers some sort of weird name for a storm or something like that. But that's also the moment in the book where Bond tells her that he wants to use her name for a drink, which she agrees to if she can try the drink first. After Bond wins in the book he hides the check that he gets with the winnings and he needs to hide it somewhere while he's got to go do some other stuff. So he actually goes and we don't know where he hides it. We find out later. In the moment we just know he goes into the hallway and does something with the door. But we find out he basically, he went out into the hallway, he unscrewed the number plate on the front of his hotel door and folded up the check really flat and then put it behind the number plate and rescrewed the number plate back on. And then we find out later Le Chiffre's men like ransacked the entire hotel room and could not find the check anywhere. It's cause he had hid it under the number plate in his door, which I thought was fun.
1:37:25
Speaker B: It wasn't in the room.
1:37:26
Speaker A: Yeah, I thought that was really clever. I thought that was like a fun little spy thing. During the torture scene there's an incredible line that I absolutely love where as he's being tortured Bond thinks to himself, well, if he had to die anyway, he might as well try it the hard way. Which is such a fucking funny line. I love that line. I think. So we talked about how the torture scene and all of that play out very similarly. And it is almost identical, including how Le Shiffer dies. I will say I think a lot of that scene is better in the movie until the part where Mister White comes in. And that part is better in the book, in my opinion, because the way it plays out in the book is that Bond is sitting in the chair facing away from the door. And so all he can see is Le Chiffre. And he hears the door open and he hears somebody come in and he's, he doesn't know. He can't see anything. So, but he just sees Le Chiffre's reaction and Le Chiffre like looks terrified and starts like pleading with this person who Bond has no idea who it is. It's a really compelling scene because you're like no idea what's going on. And Leshifra's like, uh, um. And the dude, uh, eventually the dude does say he's with smersh or whatever. I. And he asks Lachifra to basically, like, confess like that he, like, I don't know, lost all their money or whatever. And Le Shiffer just keeps pleading with him. And then he shoots him in the, in the forehead. And Bond just watches him die. And then the guy comes in and he's wearing a mask so he can't actually see him, but he comes in and he looks at Bond and he's like, I'm not here to kill you or whatever. You're not. You're. I wasn't basically says, like, they didn't tell me to kill you, so I can't kill you or whatever. But he does carve a, he takes a knife out and carves a symbol into Bond's hand. He says it looks like an m, but we find out later that it basically, it's like some russian letters that basically mean spy essentially. And he essentially brands Bond as a spy so that, like, as a, like SMErSh is going to kill you because death to all spies. You're a spy will get you eventually kind of thing. Like, even though he doesn't kill him in that moment, which I thought was really cool and creepy and weird, I understand why that specific moment isn't in the movie because of Mister White and other stuff. But I really like the way that whole scene plays out in the book. And then this is the thing I was talking about kind of getting to the end here. The bond kind of questioning everything about his job and good and evil and all that. Bond gets really philosophical and I want to read some of it. He's in the hospital and he's talking to Leshefra here and he kind of realized, or not Le Chiffre, he's talking to Mathis here because Mathis comes to visit him in hospital. He's kind of realizes the simple concept of hero and villains isn't as simple as he thought it was. And that like he knew Bond knew he was in the right for everybody that he killed. But he also thinks about how the hero Lachifra kind of views himself as the hero for trying to kill Bond or whatever. So I just want to read some here. And this is him. He's reminiscing about the two people he killed for his double o job. For those two jobs I was awarded aoo number in the service. Felt pretty clever and got a reputation for being good and tough. Aoo number in our service means you've had to kill a chap in cold blood in the course of some job. Now he looked up again at Mathis. That's all very fine. The hero kills two villains. But then the hero le Chiffre starts to kill the villain bond. And the villain Bond knows he isn't a villain at all. And you see the other side of the metal, the villains and heroes get all mixed up. Of course, he added, as Mathis started to expostulate, patriotism comes along and makes it seem fairly alright. But this country, right or wrong business is getting a little out of date. Today we are fighting communism. Okay. If I've been Ali, if I'd been alive 50 years ago, the brand of conservatism we have today would have damn near been called communism then and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts. That's like kind of a pretty, like.
1:41:37
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:41:37
Speaker A: You know, like, wow, he's actually. Yeah. What's that?
1:41:40
Speaker B: Isn't that called like the Overton window?
1:41:43
Speaker A: Well, yeah, kind of, yeah. That specific thing about, like, what was conservative 50 years ago. Yeah, the shifting of the Overton window. But just that kind of realization, I don't know, it's just not something you really expect from bun. I thought that was kind of interesting.
1:41:54
Speaker B: Not at all.
1:41:55
Speaker A: Yeah. And then he goes on to more about like, evil and stuff like that, which I thought was really interesting. All right, take our friend Le Chiffre. It's simple enough to say he was an evil man. At least it's simple enough for me because he did evil things to me. If he was here now, I wouldn't hesitate to kill him. But out of personal revenge. And not, I'm afraid, for some high moral reason, over the sake of our country. He looked up at Mathis to see how bored he was getting with these introspective refinements of what? To Mathis, this was simply a question of duty. Mathis smiled back at him. Continue, continue. My dear friend. It is interesting for me to see this new bond. Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the center of them. When one gets there, the result is unrewarding. But the process is instructive and entertaining. Continue. Develop your arguments. There may be something I can use to my own chief the next time I want to get out of an unplugged job. He grinned maliciously. Bond ignored him. Now, in order to tell the difference between good and evil, we have to manufacture two images representing the extremes, representing the deepest black and the purest white. And we call them God and the devil. But in doing so we have cheated a bit. God is a clear image. We can see every hair on his beard. But the devil, what does he look like? Bond looked triumphantly at Mathis. Mathis laughed. Ironically, a woman. It's all very fine, said Bond, but I've been thinking about these things and I'm wondering whose side I ought to be on the I'm getting very sorry for the devil and his disciples, such as the good le Chiffre. The devil had a rotten time and I always liked to be on the side of the underdog. We don't give the poor chap a chance. There's a good book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no evil book about evil and how to be bad. The devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil peoples, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good or our own intuition. So continue. I'm almost done, I promise. But I just think it's like my favorite part of the book. So, continued Bond, warming to his argument. Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all of by his evil existence, which, foolishly, I have helped to destroy. He was creating a norm of badness by which and by which alone an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged in our short knowledge of him to see and estimate his wickedness. And we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men. Like really, like kind of gets in there about like what does it mean to be a good man?
1:44:33
Speaker B: I don't know.
1:44:33
Speaker A: I thought it was really compelling to. And then one of my other final notes here is that Mathis is departing words for Bond I thought were really great and I wanted to read those as he's. They have this whole conversation and as he's leaving. Oh, and this is actually the intro quote. Mathis opened the door and stopped on the threshold. Threshold. Surround. Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles. He laughed. But don't let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine. With a wave of his hand he shut the door. Hey. Shouted Bond. But the footsteps went quickly off down the passage. Don't let me be oh yeah don't let me down and become human we would lose such a wonderful machine which is kind of what the movie does. Like, he threatens to become human and then he gets pulled right back in and becomes Bond. James Bond. And another final little detail that I thought was really good in the book that doesn't really make an appearance in the movie is that before he. This is. That whole stuff I read was while he's in the hospital recovering and before he sets off with Vesper in that moment in the book, he's like doing like writing his reports on the Le Chiffre mission. And he's writing all of his reports about like, what happened. And he's like leaving out things. Cause there's elements of the story about like, what Vesper was doing and why that he doesn't really think add up, but he kind of like works his report around those. Cause he doesn't want her to like, look bad and lose her job. Like he's trying to be like, not. He assumes she like, was foolish or like made mistakes or whatever. And not that she's a double agent, but he has these suspicions of like, I don't know, she did some stuff that didn't really make sense. But I'm just gonna leave that out of the report because I don't want her to get in trouble or whatever. Which I thought was kind of a funny, like little like he knew, but he didn't. He didn't put it together. That was everything I had for better in the book. Let's go ahead and talk about all the stuff I thought was better in the movie. My life has taught me one lesson, Hugo, and not the one I thought it would. Happy endings only happen in the movies. I really like that this movie doesn't do Moneypenny or Q. I think just nixing them for this version of it, at least so far. Again, they may show up in later movies. I don't know. Was a good idea. Moneypenny does show up in this one. And I want to. This is a better in the movie because this line is not in the book. Just because I thought this line was wild. This is a line from the book of Bond thinking about Moneypenny, who is Em's secretary. Miss Moneypenny, who would have been desirable except for her eyes, which were cool, direct and quizzical, which to me sound appealing, like appealing things. But I understand why to bond, they are not.
1:47:17
Speaker B: Women be thinking.
1:47:18
Speaker A: Yes. Damn. Women be thinking, yeah. The entire chase scene in Madame Macascar with the bomb maker is incredible. None of that's in the book. Completely better than a movie. It's an incredible opening action scene that tells you exactly who Bond is. I love him driving the front loader through the construction site. Just like he's a bulldozer of a man. And he just. The moment where he catches the gun when the guy throws it at him and throws it back at him. And specifically a moment you had here, which is another, I think, just a great. It's a great character. Momentous. Immediately telling you who bond is.
1:47:49
Speaker B: I really loved the moment where he's chasing the guy through the construction site and there's like a partially finished drywall wall that still has, like an open section at the top. And this other guy, like, jumps up and jumps through it.
1:48:02
Speaker A: Yeah. Like very nimbly. Like parkours through the hole.
1:48:05
Speaker B: Goes through this little hole. And then bond just bursts through the drywall like the goddamn Kool aid man.
1:48:12
Speaker A: Yeah. And again, he is a bulldog. He is a blunt instrument. That is who this bond is, is some of the other bonds. And again, it's because he's not bond yet. Some of the other bonds, they're very like, cool, calm, collected operators. This bond is a blunt instrument that just. Yeah, just.
1:48:27
Speaker B: Yeah, he just bulldozes like that.
1:48:28
Speaker A: Exactly. And I just love how much you learned about his character from this. Just this action scene. Also, there's a really cool shot that I love where there's this moment where the guy jumps down. They're, like, going down from this building and we get a super low angle shot looking up the building, and bond is on one side of the shot, and the. The guy is chasing is on the other. And at the same moment, they both, like, jump down, and it's like this cool synchronized jump from this low. It's just a really cool shot. I like it a lot. After that all happens, he gets to the thing, he's talking to em and her. He breaks into her home or whatever, and he's, like, going through her stuff, and she walks in. And I love the line he has with her. He's like, I thought m was a randomly assigned call at her. I had no idea it stood for. Utter one more word and I'll have you killed. I like the implication that her name is, like, mary or something or whatever. I don't know. Because, again, everybody is just. M is clearly just an assigned call letter. But I like the implication of some larger lore there of it being her name. I really love the cut to. There's this very dramatic moment where he cuts to the Bahamas and we see him arrive and he gets off the plane. Very dramatic. And then we get the smash cut to him driving down the road, and we get, like, a music sting. And then his car comes revving into frame, and we're expecting, like, the badass. Like, you know, he drives nasty Martin, like he said, but it's a Ford Focus or something. It's some Ford. I think it's like a Ford. Literally like a Ford Focus. And again, he's not bond yet. He doesn't have this stuff he's got to become. And I just love. I just thought it was so funny at the airport scene, there's this incredible moment that I love so much. Wherever Bond realizes that the bomber guy is going after the fuel truck to drive it into the plane, and we get this dramatic, like, the camera, like, jump pushes in, like, four times. Each time we get, like, a string, like. And it, like. It, like, comically overdoes it. It jumps, cuts in, like, four times. It's so good. Again, I just love how over the top some of this stuff is. There's a little added wrinkle that the movie alludes to that the book, from my memory, doesn't, which is that part of Mi Six's plan is that by bankrupting Lachefra in the book, I think the implication is just like, he'll get killed by the spy people. They'll kill him, and then he'll be off the. He'll be out of the whatever. They'll get rid of him.
1:50:49
Speaker B: Not a problem.
1:50:49
Speaker A: Not a problem anymore. In the movie, it's implied that they're gonna bring him in and provide him protection in order for information, which makes way more sense. And maybe that was the idea in the book, but I don't remember that. So I also think that comes back in a great way at the end. Because when he's torturing Bond at the end, Bond is like, I'm not going to tell you anything. Like, you don't have the money, you're fucked. They're going to kill you. And he's like, no, because I can still just go turn myself into mi six. Like, even if I kill you, I'll just turn myself into mi six and I'll be protected. And he know, like, he undercuts bonds. Like in that moment completely, which I think is great. The bond. Let's talk about the bond. Vesper, meet cute. I have a question mark after. Cause it's. I guess it's kind of a meet cute. I remembered thinking this scene was really great the first time I saw it when I was 18. It is decidedly 2005 coded and has aged in a very try hard way that I don't think the rest of this film really has. I think the film overall has aged pretty well. But that scene in particular, it's the exact kind of quippy tete a tete writing that was very popular in this time period. That to me, reads a little cringe now. Not a lot like it's still a good scene. And I like they're dynamic, but it's.
1:52:04
Speaker B: Just a little overly bantery theory of the time.
1:52:07
Speaker A: Yeah, this is a little overly bantery. Luckily, in the film, Bond is not an openly raging sexist about Vesper working with him in the book, he is very upset that his second is a woman. When he finds out, when Mathis tells him, let's see if I can find the moment here. And then there was this pest of a girl. He sighed. Women were for recreation on a job. They got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around. One had to look out for them and take care of them.
1:52:41
Speaker B: That sounds like a you problem, buddy.
1:52:43
Speaker A: Bitch, said Bond. And then, remembering the munces, he said bitch again, more loudly, and walked out of the room. The Munces were people spying on him on like a radio from upstairs. So he's making sure they heard that he thought she was a bitch. This person, they don't know. That's why I'm saying the end line has complete. Because that's like the 20th page of the book. Before he has ever met Vesper, he's like, she's a bitch. I hate her. And so, like, the end line, I'm like, yeah, no, that you. That's how you felt the whole time until you were sleeping with her, and then you didn't feel that way about her, so, like, yeah.
1:53:11
Speaker B: And then you weren't sleeping with her anymore.
1:53:13
Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I love the line in the film. You've mentioned some of the other good ones, but one of my favorite is when they're, they're bantering in the car, driving to the hotel, and she's like, are we going have a problem, mister Bond? And he says, you're not my type. And she says, smart. And he goes, single. I thought that was good. I liked that. It was funny. I thought changing the game they're playing in the. I mentioned, alluded to this earlier, that they're not playing poker in the book. They're playing Texas hold'em in the movie. It's a good choice. Texas Hold'em was very popular at the time, and not a single person on the planet understands baccarat anymore, which is what they're playing in the book.
1:53:49
Speaker B: They're playing baccarat, which I presume probably popular.
1:53:53
Speaker A: Yes. In the 1950s.
1:53:55
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:53:56
Speaker A: And probably still played at some casinos and stuff, like high end casinos and whatever. But normal people don't play baccarat. Don't know how it works. The book actually does a really good job of explaining it. And I kind of know how to play baccarat now. It seems like an interesting game. It's kind of like blackjack a little bit. It's a similar in the sense that you get, like, two cards and you have to add them up to a certain number, and then the rules are different. But it's kind of like blackjack. Kind of. I really love the line where after he does his very meticulous order, the first drink order, the first time, after he loses and he gets out of the game, he goes up to the bar and asks for a vodka martini. And the bartender asks, shaken or stirred? And he says, do I look like I give a damn? Which I love that.
1:54:34
Speaker B: I also really liked that. I feel like I remember people being mad about that.
1:54:39
Speaker A: If they were, they're dumb, because unless it was in the trailer, maybe, and they didn't see the first part. Like, you didn't know the first part was gonna happen.
1:54:48
Speaker B: It might have been. I feel I just like. I feel like I remember seeing people complain about that moment because it's a very class.
1:54:55
Speaker A: Like the martini, shaken, not sturdy. Like a big. And so him being like, I don't give a damn is very much in the face.
1:55:00
Speaker B: People were already mad. People were already mad about it being James Bond.
1:55:04
Speaker A: But in the context of the movie, it's very, like, he meticulously orders the, like, a martini earlier and asks for it shaken on the rock. Like, he does the bond order. Like, from the. It's the most. It's the exact martini order from this book. So, like, it's stupid to be mad about it because in the context of the scene, he doesn't care because he's just lost. And he's like, I don't give a shit if you shake it or stir it or whatever. So, like, I could imagine people being annoyed if it would. That line was in the trailer, and they didn't have the context for it being like, what do they do? Even then? Yeah, I can't understand that because it's a get over it. Like, who cares? Even if it wasn't. Even if that was the only time in the book, I don't. Or in the movie where he ordered a martini, he said, I don't care that who cares to. That's fine. But I mean, like, again, contextually, it totally works. And it's not. Contextually, it's not remotely, like an affront to bond or whatever. Whatever people would have been mad about. You mentioned this earlier, the scene where he goes out and after he gets poisoned, he has to, like, get his heart restarted in his car. I really like this modern twist that I don't think any of the other bond movies have really done to my memory. I'm sure they have. But where he goes out and he was able to call mi six and be like, I'm dying of a poison. And he takes a blood sample, and they're able to see what it is. It feels very real, like the kind of thing. And they're like, okay. And they pull up the Wikipedia or whatever, and they're like, here's what you need to do. Do this, do that, and then you got to do this. And that felt really real to me. And how being a spy would kind of work in that kind of situation. I thought it made a lot of sense, and I liked it a lot. I like the little setup for kind of the tease with Vesper where after he wins, and they're sitting at the restaurant having dinner, and she has this necklace on, he goes, that's an algerian love knot, or whatever. And she's like. And they kind of brush over it pretty quickly. But it's from her boyfriend and that's why setting up the reveal.
1:57:01
Speaker B: Do we know if her boyfriend was.
1:57:03
Speaker A: Still alive through this in the movie? I don't know. In the book it's implied that he they killed him by the or she knows he will have been killed by the time all of this ends. But I don't know if even she knows for sure if he's alive or not. I don't think we know, but she does. So that's the other thing. In both the book and the movie, she actually does fall in love with Bond. Like despite this other guy that she was with. Like she's doing this all for this other guy. But then she does actually fall in love with Bond and kind of decide to be with him. She. But she still tries to go through with, at least in the movie, which I really like, she still tries to go through with doing the thing to save her old boyfriend or whatever. Regardless, I think we're meant to assume in the movie that if she could have pulled this all off she was in fact going to try to give this money to them and then run away with Bond. Still, I feel like is maybe what the plan was potentially. I don't know. I could be wrong about that. But I really like just in general. Oh, there's a line that's not in the movie that is in the book. That is awful. Bond thinks to himself about Vesper. I wanted her cold, arrogant body just insane thing to think at all. And just in general, Vesper and Bond's relationship in the movie is just way better. It's way more fleshed out and they basically don't talk until the hotel til he's recovering at the end. And they just don't really have much of a relationship. And even then it's very minimal and she's not much of a character. I like their relationship a lot more in the movie. Some of the bantery 2005 iness of it aside, I think some of the lines are really good. Like their exchange where he's like, I have no armor left. You've stripped it from me. Whatever is left of me is yours. I think there's some pretty nice stuff in there that reads pretty. I don't know, reads pretty well. Another misogynistic rant about Vesper that is not in the movie but is in the book that they cut. See if I can find it here. This is after she gets kidnapped. This was just what he had been afraid of those blithering women who thought they could do a man's work. Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men's work to the Mendez? And now for this to happen to him, just when the job had come off so beautifully for Vesper to fall for an old trick like that and get herself snatched and probably held to ransom like some bloody heroine in a strip cartoon. The silly bitch. Is this again? This is. Yeah. And I don't think that's ironic. I don't think that's, like, satirical. Cause that just seems to be how he feels about. I don't know. It's wild, but it's like. That's like, cartoon level massage. You know what I mean? Like, why don't just go to get in the kitchen and stick to your. It's to the point where it almost feels like it should be satirical. But then you remember it's 1950 and probably. And there's no counter to that. Like.
2:00:00
Speaker B: Right.
2:00:01
Speaker A: You know, she doesn't. Like. She isn't revealed to have been. I guess she's kind of revealed to have been more. Cause she's a double agent show. She is revealed to be more, like, capable. Capable than he thinks. But she still ends up killing herself and being, like, caught up in this bad plot. Like, she's never. I don't know. It still doesn't read to me. Like, he's wrong there. Like.
2:00:20
Speaker B: Well, no, because she's kind of. Like. She's kind of revealed to be more capable than he thinks she is. But then we end up on this, like, but was she really.
2:00:28
Speaker A: But she was still, like, being manipulated.
2:00:30
Speaker B: By these other men. Like, stupid bitch.
2:00:32
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know another line that is not in this. It's so bad. Some of the stuff. Like, again, some of the stuff is so bad. There's a line at the end. This is when he's in love with her at the hotel that Vesper. One of the reasons he likes her and is into her is that she's so reserved and there's something hiding under the surface of. And because she's so reserved, just gonna read this and let it. That she's so reserved that each time they have sex, the sex would have, quote, a tang of rape to it. End quote.
2:01:09
Speaker B: Charming.
2:01:11
Speaker A: Yep. Fucking king. And then finally get into a couple more good things that are in the movie. I like that when he shoots that one guy through the sunglasses with the nail gun that's fun. That was cool. I like that. And then I do like the added detail in the movie that Vesper. It's kind of revealed that Vesper asked them to spare bond in exchange for the money.
2:01:33
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:01:34
Speaker A: Otherwise they would have just killed him and taken the money. But she's like, I'll give you the money if you won't kill Bond, basically. So. All right. I got a handful of things that the movie nailed, as I expected. Practically perfect in every way. Bond is the best gambler in the service, which is in both the book and the movie the Vesper drink and naming it after Vesper. The poker table that they're playing at is full of an interesting cast of characters in both the book and the movie. In the movie, we got Felix Leiter. We got just a bunch of interesting people around the table. In the book, there's a movie star lit a woman, I think movie star. There's some italian guy. He's just italian. And there's two members of the Dupont family, which I thought was kind of interesting, but there's a whole, along with him and Le Chiffre, there's these other interesting characters playing the super high stakes poker game. In the book, they eat in the movie. After he wins, they go to the restaurant and eat toast and caviar, which is the same thing they do in the book. Except in the book it's like 04:00 a.m. because they don't start playing poker till like midnight. Yeah, I guess this is the thing. This is like high roller poker. They literally didn't like. He gets ready to go down and start playing at like 11:00 p.m. and they play till like three or four in the morning. But after he wins, they go to this restaurant in the casino and they eat like scrambled eggs at four. Been drinking all night and playing poker and he's just like, I order scrambled eggs and bacon. But in the book they do eat a lot of toast and caviar throughout the course of the book. So I think them having toast and caviar in that movie scene makes sense. During that scene, they also have an exchange that is very much something that comes from the book where Bond says to Vesper, I think something is driving you and I think I'll never figure out what that is. Bond feels very much the same way about Vesper in the book, that there's something going on with her that he finds mysterious. And it's one of the reasons he's so intrigued by her is that she's not an open book. To him, the kidnapping of Vesper scene is basically identical. As it is in the book and the movie, Bond spends like a couple weeks healing at that hospital thing or whatever. I actually think Bond emerging from the ocean actually comes from the book, kind of. We talked about how that was one of the things that people pointed out, like, oh, this is kind of like subversion, but literally. I'll see if I can find it real quick. He goes swimming. This is while he's recovering at the little hotel they're staying on by the ocean. He goes swimming like in the morning. The mirror of the bay was unbroken, except where it seemed a fish had jumped under the water. He imagined the tranquil scene and wished that Vesper could just then come through the pines and be astonished to see him suddenly erupt from the empty seascape. So he's envisioning himself popping out of the water, doing the. You know what I mean? Yeah.
2:04:22
Speaker B: Kind of funny.
2:04:23
Speaker A: Yeah, I thought it was like, kind of interesting. Talked about the guy with the sunglasses with the single black lens being the same guy as the guy with the eyepatch. And then finally, Vesper leaves Bond some contacts so that bond can hunt down the members of SMERSH. Quantum. It's quantum in the movie, but smersh in the book. So there you go. All right, let's get to a handful of odds and ends before the final verdict.
2:04:55
Speaker B: When this movie started, I seriously considered writing down, does the book start out in black and white just to be obnoxious? Just a little obnoxious?
2:05:04
Speaker A: The whole thing does. Actually, the whole thing's in black and white in the book.
2:05:08
Speaker B: But then I was also. I was so caught off guard by the initial floating hearts in the opening credits, and I immediately understood that we were doing the cards. Yeah, yeah. But like, when it first starts out with, like, it looks like a Valentine's Day, like it's like pink and red and then hearts come floating out. I was like, what?
2:05:28
Speaker A: Yeah, I think those opening credits are great.
2:05:30
Speaker B: I really like the song and the credits.
2:05:33
Speaker A: I love that we talked about in the prequel. They've finally abandoned the silhouettes of naked women. 1st. 1st movie. I think Bond movie ever did not have that. And then the. I really like the people bursting into playing cards as he's like, killing them was really. I just thought it was a really cool open. It was really fun. Also, I didn't thought about it, but we talked about how the song they used, they use that song as the motif throughout the movie, and they don't use the Bond theme, but that song is called. And the recurring chorus that they use is, you know, my name, Bond James. It's like, oh, I see what you did there. I see what you did there. Yeah.
2:06:10
Speaker B: I was continually very impressed throughout this film that Daniel Craig did the stunts himself.
2:06:16
Speaker A: At least most of them. Yeah.
2:06:18
Speaker B: Especially in that, like, the chase scene through the construction site, and they're like, on the cranes and, like, he's, like, jumping and landing and rolling and I.
2:06:30
Speaker A: Don'T know if he did every single one of those, but he did a lot of them. Yeah, yeah. And almost killed himself a couple times. I forgot there was an insane Richard Branson cameo in this movie. That's, like, super short. Did you notice that?
2:06:42
Speaker B: I don't know if I know who that is.
2:06:43
Speaker A: Okay. He's a very famous billionaire.
2:06:45
Speaker B: Uh oh. Okay.
2:06:46
Speaker A: He. When they're going through the airport in Miami, he's following the bomb maker or the bomb guy who's gonna blow up the plane. And the bomb guy's, like, going through security and in the security line, like, one stall over, Richard Branson is, like, getting scanned. Richard Branson is the guy who owns, like, Virgin Airlines, Virgin Galactic, like the space, all those different. He's like the long haired australian. You would recognize him if you saw him. But anyways, he. He's a pretty. But it's so funny. He has, like, a tiny cameo in this movie.
2:07:16
Speaker B: I don't know any billionaires. I don't care about them.
2:07:19
Speaker A: No, that's fair. And I'm not saying. But he's just of the. Of the ones. He's one of the. He's. He's one of those guys that, like. You see quite a bit. That guy. You never seen that guy.
2:07:28
Speaker B: He looks like a nightmare.
2:07:29
Speaker A: Yeah. He's a billionaire. Of course. I don't. But like, he's. Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure that was him. At least towards a guy that looked just like Richard Branson.
2:07:36
Speaker B: I had this thought during the bond coming out of the ocean scene. Intellectually, I get Daniel Craig. I understand. I get it. Personally, I don't think he's particularly handsome.
2:07:54
Speaker A: Oh, no, I get what you're saying. Yeah. Especially in this. I think he's more handsome now as.
2:07:58
Speaker B: Freaking, far more handsome as Benoit Blanc.
2:08:02
Speaker A: Yeah. As Benoit Blanc. Than he is as bond in this. Yeah. No, absolutely. Which is part of the reason people did not like. They didn't think he was handsome enough. They thought he was too. Like, he looks like a rough english schoolboy and not like. But like a. But like a 40 year old english school. You know what I mean? He doesn't. He doesn't look like a handsome, like, suave guy.
2:08:22
Speaker B: No, very suave. Yeah, like, I get it. Yeah, I understand.
2:08:28
Speaker A: Yeah. He's not unattractive. He's just. Yeah, he's not.
2:08:30
Speaker B: Yeah, but he's not for me.
2:08:32
Speaker A: No, that's fair. Like I said. Yeah. I think he's infinitely more attractive now, in his fifties or whatever, sixties than he was in his thirties or forties or whatever.
2:08:39
Speaker B: This one, I really liked the moment when M. I think it's when they say that he, like, logged into her computer with, like, her password or whatever, and she's like, how the hell does he know these things? And I was like, I don't know. You wanted a really good spy. Like, why are you complaining? Yeah, he sounds like the best one.
2:09:02
Speaker A: Yeah. Like, he's just real good at his job.
2:09:04
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:09:05
Speaker A: Yeah.
2:09:07
Speaker B: A couple other thoughts. That purple dress that vesper wears.
2:09:13
Speaker A: The cleavage dress?
2:09:14
Speaker B: Yes, the cleavage dress. I had a going out top in college that looked like a lot like the top of that dressed nice. Not exactly like it. Cause it came from wet seal, but it was the same color, purple, and it had a similar, like, cut, which was a very in cut at the time. And it had, like, the sparkly strips along the edges.
2:09:37
Speaker A: Yeah.
2:09:39
Speaker B: That top would not fit me now. Also, Eva Green has absolutely no business having eyes that gigantic.
2:09:48
Speaker A: It's true.
2:09:50
Speaker B: What's going on there?
2:09:52
Speaker A: I don't know. I mean, I do know it's that people in movies cast women with gigantic eyeballs because they're emotive and people like it. And we were just talking about it with somebody not that long ago. It wasn't Anya Taylor Joy, but it was somebody else. It was a movie we just did on this podcast, I think.
2:10:15
Speaker B: What did we just do?
2:10:16
Speaker A: I don't remember. But it was something. It was something we literally just did. It was like the main actress in it. You felt you said the exact thing. I think you really literally wrote the exact same sentence. Or maybe it might have been a bonus episode. I truly can't remember. I don't know. We joked about earlier. I joked about the poker game being ridiculous. But I love that the way this all ends in the movie is that there's down to four people, and every single one of them goes all in on the same hand, and it just ends on one. Like, they. I'm glad they didn't draw it out, but it's just like every single person goes all in, and we wrap this all up on one hand, whereas that's, like, just not how that would work normally. I also love that the dealer explains that Bond won, like, four different ways for people that don't understand poker. He, like, very explicitly goes through each of the card combinations and is like this. And now and then he pulls Bond over, and he's like, ooh, a straight flush, four through eight, or whatever that is. The high set, mister Bond wins. James Bond is the champion of the. He says it, like, five different ways just so people know that he won. It's so funny to me.
2:11:29
Speaker B: There was nothing like watching a movie about a bunch of guys playing poker to really hammer home that you have no idea how to play poker. Because I know nothing about poker. I. And I, for one, was glad that the dealer explained it four different ways.
2:11:45
Speaker A: Well, you also would learn basically nothing about poker from watching this movie just because.
2:11:49
Speaker B: Correct.
2:11:49
Speaker A: It's like the most comically ridiculous poker that you could put in a movie. Basically.
2:11:56
Speaker B: My last note here was about how when they're in Venice and they're, like, on the boat in the canal, I really love that Vesper decided to dress on theme for a boat ride in Venice. She's got a little. Her little stripey shirt. She looks exactly like one of the guys who, the gondoliers?
2:12:19
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, I know.
2:12:22
Speaker B: I love dressing on theme. I would probably do the same thing.
2:12:26
Speaker A: Yep. My last note was that I can never not see it now is that anytime anybody does CPR in a movie, it's always so bad. And when he. After he. When Vesper drowns and he pulls her up on the roof and he's, like, trying to do CPR on her, the chest compressions, because you can't do it or else you would kill them or whatever. Like, you would. You would injure them severely. But the way they, like, move their arms to try to do. I don't know, I've just. If you've ever seen CPR actually done, like, on a dummy or whatever, it's just so. I can never not laugh at movie CPR. Cause it's always hilarious. Before we get to the final verdict, we wanted to remind you, you can do us a favor by heading over to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, threads, any of those places. We'd love to hear what you have to say about Casino Royale. Please drop those comments and leave those replies so that we can talk about them on the next prequel episode. You can also help us out by hanging over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our show, drop us a five star rating, write us a nice little review. We would really appreciate that. And if you really want to support us, head over to patreon.com dot. This film is lit. There you can get access to bonus content depending on what level you subscribe to us. We just watched the last duel. We will be recording that episode tomorrow and putting that out here in the next day or two. So if you want to hear what we have to say about Ridley Scott's the Last Duel spoilers we both really liked it. We'll be talking about that very soon and that will be our September bonus episode. And you get one of those bonus episodes every month at the $5 and up level. And if you support us at the $15 and up level, you can get access to patron requests where if there's something you would really like for us to talk about, you can support us at that level and request it. And this one. In fact, Casino Royale was a patron.
2:14:14
Speaker B: Request from Vic Apocalypse.
2:14:17
Speaker A: Very good. Thank you Vic apocalypse for your patron request. Katie, it's time for the final verdict.
2:14:24
Speaker B: No sentence, fast verdict after that's stupid.
2:14:31
Speaker A: I'm gonna keep this one relatively short. I was pretty surprised at how similar the film was to this book. The entire main plot of the film, including the big twist that Vesper was a double agent, all comes directly from the book. But the movie doesn't stop there. It does a fantastic job setting the pieces in motion that lead to the main conflict with Le Chiffre in a way that lets us get to know this new bond better while also letting us enjoy some of the series best action sequences. The parkour chase in Madagascar is one of my all time favorite foot chases. The cold open in black and white where we see Bond get his zero zero status is gritty and an instant statement that this is not the bond that weve been used to. They spend the necessary time on Bond and vespers relationship. That makes the twist at the end even more tragic. And speaking of that twist, the set piece in Venice is bombastic in the best way possible, while also including one of the most viscerally upsetting deaths that I think I've ever seen in a Bond movie. But the real masterstroke of this film is what I talked about earlier. This movie isn't about Bond, it's about becoming Bond. Over the film's two and a half hour runtime, we get to watch Daniel Craig become James Bond. All leading to that final scene where our patience is finally rewarded with one of the most iconic Bond James Bond deliveries of all time. I don't think this movie is necessarily saying anything super interesting or thematically compelling, but it is an absolute thrill ride. And I think it very easily stands as one of, if not the best, James Bond films. So I'm giving this one to the film. Katie, what's next?
2:16:07
Speaker B: Up next, we are diving headfirst into spooky season.
2:16:11
Speaker A: Spooky season.
2:16:13
Speaker B: And we're gonna be talking about Hitchcock thriller.
2:16:17
Speaker A: Yes.
2:16:18
Speaker B: 1940. Eight's. Rope.
2:16:20
Speaker A: Rope. I'm very excited to watch this. This is one of those movies that I've heard about a lot, being a person who went to film, took film classes, but I've never seen. And I want to because my Hitchcock. My Hitchcock. I have not watched enough Hitchcock movies, I guess I should say. I've seen you, you know, four or five of them, but not.
2:16:40
Speaker B: We've done a few.
2:16:41
Speaker A: Yeah. On the show, we did rear window and psycho.
2:16:45
Speaker B: Psycho. We did the birds.
2:16:47
Speaker A: The birds were a window. Psycho.
2:16:48
Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
2:16:49
Speaker A: And then I've seen north by Northwest and at least one other one, but that's about it. So I'm excited to see this. This is. We'll talk about it more, obviously, but this is what the one just is my quick pitch. This is the one that's famously supposed. Looks like it's all one shot, I believe.
2:17:03
Speaker B: Oh, I didn't know.
2:17:04
Speaker A: Or at least most. Maybe it's not all one shot, but this is the movie where there's, like, really, really long single takes, or at least the appearance of really, really long single takes. I could be wrong that the whole movie is, but there's. It has very, very famous single take shots in it.
2:17:17
Speaker B: So this is also first for us because this is not based on, like, a novel or a short story. It's a play. Yeah, I don't think I've read a play since college, and we've never covered an adaptation of a play on this show before, so we'll see how that goes.
2:17:32
Speaker A: We will see. That'll be very exciting. So come back in two weeks time to hear us talk about rope. But before that, come back in one week's time. Cause we'll be previewing rope and hearing what everybody had to say about Casino Royale. Until that time, guys, gals on binary pals, and everybody else, keep reading books, keep watching movies, and keep being awesome.