of over intellectualizing and humanizing..

Lemme start off with a good excuse why i havent posted a blog for so long.

1. I live a loser's life, which starts at 9 am and goes till 9pm on working days
2. On weekends im too busy blowing up the money earned from a loser's life in drinks.. so i cant even see the keyboard properly
3. Ive been corporatized.. my sense of humor, or watever which was there before, now doesnt even exist.. its just sales, TARPS, budgets, volumes and profits for me..

Anyways this entire charade comes to a stop for 2 hours alomost every week when around 200 people enter a dark room, stare at a wall and start laughing, crying sleeping and what not.. yeah im referring to the over glorified form of story telling which my grand dad used to do when i was a kid... in other words its the movies...

The stuff which i used to watch for 30 bucks and a bottle of lime juice and popcorn (worth 5 bucks) , now re-enashed by some smart alec marketing managers into a cinema experience which makes me pay 10 times the same amount and yet not complain... well thats another story...

My point being the movie i saw this weekend.. wat else, the movie which every1 in singapore and im sure the rest of the world went to see.. Casino Royale, with Mr Bond at center stage... my friend and I could somehow manage the 2nd row and watched the movie like a tennis match, anyways.. my objective here is not to give a review of the movie or explain why the villian chose to target Bond's balls in the torture scene...

Its about a new trend in the super hero genre.. humanize them and make money out of it... Sam Raimi had the guts to do it for Spiderman, Sony made a lot of money from it.. and hence decided to re apply to for all the future movies... However its not as easy as.. errm.. selling soap...

The new Bond movie follows the same formula.. make the hero fall in love, cry, sin and appear completely fragile... the women will cry for him, then men will think that they are not so bad after all .. and the producer will laugh his way to the bank...

But it appears completely weird for Bond.. lets be very honest here.. Ive read Ian Flemings bond books .. The character of James Bond is as one dimensional as Mithun Chakravarthy in the Oscar winning movie Goonda or Arnold Schwarzenegger in the emotional drama Conan the Barbarian... James Bond novels were over hyped Mills n Boon for men and desperate teenagers like me...

However this is where the difference lies... Open any Batman, Spiderman or XMen comic.. and you will see the depth of the character.. These characters have a scope to be looked at from a goofy side (ala the celluloid trash called Batman & Robin) or being made into a mature movie.. like Batman Begins or XMen 1 and 2...

You cannot over intellectualize on a character like Bond, because he is MEANT to be 1 dimensional.. Its like watchin a Rajni Kanth movie.. you go in there to see the 1 liners, the fancy gadgets, the girls, the pickup lines that u memorize and loads of style... A Bond movie is a timepass movie.. a goldmine for prestige brands (Omega, Aston Martin, Reid & Taylor) and a formula which brings in steady cash for the producers...

Moreover there is somethin about superheros which brings hope in all of us... It makes us believe people can be perfect, and do good to others... Its the quintessential victory of good over evil, which makes the listener feel better about him and the world around himself.. Humanizing that element definitely brings more realism into the story, but the creative director can only go that far...

I dont know if Casino Royale will succeed or not.. Reviewers have called it the best bond movie since Gold finger, well they do it for all the Bond movies.. so thats not a big deal.. But if it fails, it definitely will send a signal to the directors and producers in their ivory towers that some things are better left plain and simple and that over intellectualizing on simple things could only lead to trouble...

Anyways I wouldnt recommend the movie for guys, but girls; if ur boyfriend is sleeping with someone else, go watch this movie.. it shows that even Bond has a heart.. it might make u guys feel a bit better ....