Something to watch tonight: Monday 2 October

Casino Royale is streaming on Prime Video

At the begin­ning of last year Amazon, the retail Borg, spent US$8.5b to buy the assets of MGM which include the James Bond and Rocky franchises.

Since then they have been bid­ing their time, wait­ing for exist­ing stream­ing arrange­ments expire before bring­ing the entire Bond cata­logue to Prime Video this week.

I can’t say wheth­er that will become Bond’s per­man­ent online home. The titles move around a lot, and there’s usu­ally some delib­er­ate scarcity cre­ated in the build up to a new Bond being released, but see­ing as there’s noth­ing on the hori­zon Prime Video might be the best place to go to get your 007 fix for a while.

Everyone has their favour­ite Bond film and mine is Daniel Craig’s first out­ing – Casino Royale from 2006. It was the rein­ven­tion that the fran­chise needed after some lacklustre Pierce Brosnan pic­tures that were expens­ive but not con­fid­ant if that makes sense.

The char­ac­ter deserved to be taken ser­i­ously and Craig – with the help of screen­writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis – got to do just that.

From my ori­gin­al review at the time:

Why is this Bond so essen­tial? Because, for the first time in the movies he is a truly three dimen­sion­al char­ac­ter. In Casino Royale we see Bond him­self try­ing on ele­ments of his per­sona: the clothes, the drinks, the cheesy lines – Bond learn­ing to be Bond. We get some illu­min­at­ing back-story which helps Craig deliv­er a nuanced and sens­it­ive per­form­ance – Bond as orphaned, bul­lied, schol­ar­ship pub­lic school boy, devel­op­ing the hard emo­tion­al shell and the mas­ochism that serves him so well in a job with zero life-expectancy. Craig is bril­liant and he’s wel­come back any time. I can’t wait.

Craig, Purvis, Wade and Haggis gave Craig’s Bond an arc – an affect­ing begin­ning, middle and end – and brought it home beau­ti­fully with No Time to Die in 2021.

The spe­cial 4K box set of the five Craig movies is still avail­able and they are all great ways to show off a big TV and a good sound system.

I don’t often recom­mend you go and read anoth­er writer but this art­icle by Priscilla Page is a great argu­ment for the suc­cess of the Craig era and why fol­low­ing it is going to be so difficult.