Bond Tuesdays: CASINO ROYALE (2006)

CASINO ROYALE Released Nov 17, 2006

Directed by Martin Campbell, Written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. Cast: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Judi Dench, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright. Running Time 2hrs 24mins!

Rumors persist that Daniel Craig was cast as Bond because the Pierce Brosnan films had flopped. Not true. The Brosnan films were all money makers. The reality is that Brosnan was asking for a lot of money and the producers were considering a needed reboot of the series.

James Bond embarks on his first mission as an ‘00’ agent— the rare member of the British Secret Service who have a ‘license to kill’. His target is the international villain Le Chiffre, which is french for I should put some cream on that.

After Connery’s departure the series changed in tone to near parody becoming overloaded with gadgets and sight gags- how many times have we seen a wedding party surprised when Bond crashes in via parachute, jet ski or power boat only to dash off after some witty quip? The series first reboot was 1987’s THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS when Timothy Dalton took on the role and there was an effort to get back to the source material, the pulpy novels of Ian Fleming and the entire cast except for Q was recast. After Dalton came Pierce Brosnan who started out with a bit of Dalton’s menace but soon slid back towards Roger Moore’s flippant silliness. A rebooted reboot was in order so they opted to start fresh again.

For the first time in the series history the opening before the credits sequence is in black and white, showing us James Bond making his first brutal kill as a secret agent— and announcing to the world that this isn’t the James Bond you’ve grown accustomed to, this is Ian Fleming’s assassin brought to the screen for the first time.

CASINO ROYALE was the first James Bond novel written by Ian Fleming. A failed attempt to bring it to the screen in 1967 as a “non official” film starring David Niven, Woody Allen and Orson Welles was a box office disaster. The book itself is the slowest of the Fleming novels, with literally dozens of pages devoted to a game of baccarat at a Casino against the book’s primary villain— that’s a tough thing to turn into a film.

For the film the producers opted to dumb down the game to Texas Hold ‘Em.

Daniel Craig shocked the world as the first Blonde Bond and he’s terrific in the role. Not classically handsome, he’s got a ruggedness to him and he’s in the shape that you would hope a 00 agent would be in. Returning as his boss “M” is Dame Judi Dench— which throws continuity into the wind since she was M for Pierce Brosnan but she’s the best M we’ve ever seen so I’m all for her return.

This is a James Bond film for folks who like more serious spy drama— even the luxurious locales have a somewhat more sinister aspect to them. The movie’s opening scene, done in black and white, is probably the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a literal adaption of Fleming’s novels.

Craig is great, the best Bond since Connery and I wonder if even Connery in his prime could stand up to Craig’s intensely fit James Bond.

• Bond Theme: You Know My Name by Chris Cornell is brassy and hard and fits nicely.

• Bond Villain: Creepy.

• Bond Girls: Eva Green is Vesper Lynd, who is perhaps the most important female character in the entire Fleming canon.

• GRADE: A - Bond is back—Craig gives Connery a run for his money and he’ll return in QUANTUM OF SOLACE.

HELP! WACOM CINTIQ TABLET no SYNC Go To Sleep -- FIXED-- by Me??!

Wow talk about mind blown check this out;

On Tuesday night I had a council meeting I had to get to at 7pm , so I was going to work until 630 but suddenly around 6pm my Wacom Cintiq got a little buggy. I’m running a Wacom Cintiq 13WX on a 2019 iMac Retina 4K with Catalina as the OS. My normally smooth ink line was blotchy— as if I was drawing with a leaky fountain pen. That’s not helpful. I checked a few common things, even looked at brush settings and nothing seemed to work.

I went into System Preferences to calibrate the tablet and lo and behold while the driver was installed it was saying there was no tablet connected. From there I went to DISPLAYS and that confirmed there was no tablet because it should have been listed as another monitor.

Shutting down for the night I figured I’d spend the next morning figuring it out. There’s nothing as fun as climbing under the desk and checking and rechecking wiring. I even did a SMC reset which is when you shut down your Mac, unplug the power cord, press and hold the start button for five seconds and then reconnect and start it up again— this is supposed to rejuice all your USB ports.

Nadda.

I did an internet search to see what I could find, Mac Forums gave me a bunch of suggestions but nothing worked, then I searched for the phrase above and what was the first hit? Well some bloke named Andy Fish wrote a blog post in October 2012 which said the following;

How to get your Mac to recognize your Wacom Cintiq and stop driving you crazy.

All right this was driving me crazy-- I spent a day and a half on the internet trying to find an answer to this and couldn't-- now that I figured it out here's the solution-- and it's actually so easy that's why it was hard to figure out.

The message is telling you that there is No Sync between your computer and your tablet-- so it goes to sleep.  No matter what else you think-- its purely your connection OR its the DVI/VGA switch on the side of the power unit.

1. Un plug EVERYTHING-- and I mean EVERYTHING-- trust me-- I half assed it multiple times and it didn't work until I redid EVERYTHING. 

2. TURN OFF both the tablet and the computer while everything is detached.

3.  CAREFULLY re-assemble your connection-- with special attention to the tightness of the connection joints.

4. Turn ON your computer-- let it completely load.

5. Turn ON your tablet-- it should reflect your desktop or at least not go to sleep.  Now you can go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES>DISPLAYS>DETECT DISPLAYS and set it up the way you want it.

NOTE:  If you go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES>DISPLAYS>DETECT DISPLAYS and you aren't able to click on GATHER DISPLAYS or DETECT DISPLAYS that means there is something faulty with your connection.

AND IF THAT DOESN'T WORK;

6. Throw the DVI/VGA switch and the tablet should come to life.

Trust me, I hear ya.  "I did that and it doesn't work."  Nope.   Do it the right way, making sure everything is connected and it WILL work.

My favorite part of the whole post was that last line— because even now, even though I was the guy that wrote this first post, I still was going to try to cut corners to get this to work and it only worked when I followed the instructions to the letter.

So basically spent a whole morning trying to find an answer I already had! That my friends is the primary reason I write this blog in the first place.

Convention Report Jet City Tacoma Washington, Part I: The Beginning of the End

Here’s a look back at one of my favorite shows…

We fly a lot— not as much as some people I know but more than your regular Joe, or even your Special Joe. Because of that we get to experience a lot of different airlines. Show promoters foot the bill for the tickets so they have the final say as to which airline we’re flying although they'll usually ask— after this year I'm not going to be as humble about it with my usual “whatever is easiest for you” -- I’m just going to say Jet Blue.

The last five trips we had we flew Jet Blue to San Diego, Jet Blue to New York, Alaska Air to Portland Oregon, United to Chicago and this trip was Tacoma Washington via Delta.

Jet Blue all the way. They aren’t perfect, but you also don’t feel like you’re sandwiched in like you do with the other carriers. To be fair Alaska Airlines was pretty nice too— but maybe by design the only downside was that the plane was freezing (and I like it cold but this was frigid).

All right so back to Tacoma and our last convention of the year— we caught a Delta Flight out of Boston at five thirty on a Friday night— traffic was pretty rough getting into Logan and the airport was absolutely packed. We decided to get there earlier than needed to grab a late lunch but the only sit down restaurant in the Delta Terminal was something called “Legal Experiments” or something like that, and offshoot of Legal Seafood. It smelled like something had died weeks earlier and I was shocked that people were actually waiting in line to get in. Here’s a tip folks, when you’re going to eat Seafood smell is the number one test.

We opted to grab a turkey sandwich and a salad from the cafe— it was actually pretty fresh so no complaints there.

We boarded the hell flight to Tacoma after a slight weather delay in Seattle, but we should have just gotten back in our car and drove home.

More Next week.

BOND, JAMES BOND. The (then) New James Bond

I’ll admit it when they first announced Daniel Craig as James Bond I was pretty indifferent. I’d stopped watching the Bond movies halfway through the Pierce Bronsan years because they were steadily worse and worse.

A blonde James Bond?

But Craig has the physique and the face of someone who you’d send on impossible missions— and his first outing, CASINO ROYALE, hadn’t been properly adapted into the official Bond film library— so I got ready for it and saw it a few weeks after its release.

Next week.

MONSTER ZERO (1965)

Recently re-watched this one-- you've got a lot of choices with this one-- you can watch it English Dubbed (which I always try to avoid), you can watch it in Japanese with English Subtitles and you can watch it in Japanese with English Subtitles but Nick Adams speaks English all the way through.

Nick Adams is an astronaut with the Japanese version of Nasa so it's natural he becomes pretty much Earth's Chief Ambassador when a group of Aliens come a calling with a request to "borrow" Godzilla and Rodan to take care of the problem they're having with Ghidorah, whom they refer to as Monster X-- because that's how they roll. Kimi Muzino is an alien spy chick and she's great in everything she's in, so is Adams and Akira Takarada and its directed by Ishiro Honda who had been with Godzilla since the first one and was a director the likes of Akira Kurosawa not only liked but looked up to his talents-- so that's saying this guy ain't no bum.

This one is pure goofy fun, and I dig it a lot.

Grade: A My hero zero!

Original Art Score and Some Random Things...

I’ve loved the work of Manix Abrera for many years— he and his family are also wonderful people. I was happy to score his take on the Japanese version of Batman and Robin— I’ll be picking it up at San Diego Comic Con.

For those of you asking how the new car is— it’s VERY fun— it might be my favorite car of all time, although it’s got stiff competition— I am a man who loves cars. This one is turbo charged and very fast. Perfect for early morning or early evening rides with the top down. We took it down to Litchfield Connecticut for a few days where we stayed at a charming castle and then we went into Mystic for lunch on the ocean.

In the Fall we’re going to take in some US Polo Matches in Newport- looking forward to that.

Its been a good Summer for Comic Books too- I picked up a slew of Detective Comics from 1939-1940 Recently.

This Detective Comics #31 might be the best cover in the entire 1000 issue run of Detective Comics, and it certainly tops the 1939 run. The only thing better would be if the cover date was October so its a perfect Halloween era cover.

We’ve taken to ½ walks or bike rides, I took my beloved Peugeot out and instantly blew the chain. I mistakenly thought I’d taken it in for service last year so I brought it to a great shop I know. I also looked at the other bikes while they ran up my estimate. Bikes are expensive now. I’m talking $3500 for a mid grade one- $12k for a really nice one. I’ll keep mine, thanks, but I vowed if I stick to this regular bike routine for the remainder of the year I’ll treat myself to a new bike next Spring.

Flying First Class-- is it worth it?...

I write a decent amount about flying here— I travel for a lot of shows— today I’m flying to Chicago for FanExpo which is possibly my favorite show of the year. In those travel logs you’ll often hear about the times I couldn’t take another second on the particular flight and the idea of a sudden mountain impact was preferable to one more minute of a screaming millennial, a fall down drunk and soon to be vomiting upper class society lady and rude and sometimes downright hostile flight attendants. Flying just ain’t what it used to be.

Until I upgraded to First Class.

It was as if I was a blind man and suddenly I could see.

Before I discovered the Private Lounges waiting at the gate wasn’t much fun either. People carrying on all their worldly possessions would flock to the boarding line creating a mass of confusion as to whether or not you were in line with your group. Now I had my own line. Flight attendants were now happy, no, DELIGHTED to see me as I boarded the plane, hurriedly getting me a beverage as I took my seat in 1A. The cup of coffee I asked for mid flight was served hot in a GLASS MUG with a little design in the cream floating at the top. The food I was served came on an actual plate and had silverware. First Class is somehow sedately quiet. I don’t need to mention that the seats and the legroom are infinitely better than what’s offered in the rest of the plane.

My favorite part? Well there are a lot of them if I’m being honest but probably #1 is being the first one on and the first one off the plane. I hate waiting more than anything in the world that doesn’t involve a dental drill.

I didn’t upgrade to First Class because I’m made of money, I upgraded because I’m not made of patience and spending countless hours in a miserable environment is not how I choose to spend my life.

I know what a lot of you are thinking; “It’s a waste of money.” and I answer to you emphatically;

No. No it’s not.

You know what is a waste of money? Carrying a credit card balance and paying a high interest rate. Look into finding a card with an introductory balance transfer and get that balance paid off PRONTO. Don’t let yourself get in over your head.

What else is a waste of money? How about buying coffee at StarBucks or even Dunkin Donuts for that matter— $3 a day for a Medium Coffee = $900 even if you “only” do it five times a week. When I had an actual job we were making Dunkin runs all the time, so sometimes THREE coffees in a day! Do as I did and buy a high end coffee grinder and coffee maker— there is nothing better than FRESH ground coffee and cost wise it’s like 20c a cup!

Plan out errands so you are keeping your gas tank fuller, eat out less and try some great recipes at home, choose something streaming instead of going to the movies, look at all the things you subscribe to and decide what can get cut— I have a good friend who pays $200 a month for his cable/satellite bill and he says he never watches TV!!

Phone plan $800 a year? Switch over to MINT MOBILE— I pay $15 a month for top notch service on my iPhone. I pay the whole year up front to keep the cost down and I save about $200 a year by doing so. Here’s the plan I use, you can click on the link and have plenty of time to decide before you join.

MINT MOBILE PLAN SIGN UP HERE

Speaking of iPhones, I am always 2-3 generations behind the latest phone— I won’t pay a nickel over $200 for a phone, and its not hard to do. I’ve followed this method of smart phone usage for 15 years without fail. Ditch the land line, do you keep it just for telemarketers?

My point being that you can SAVE money in a lot of places and now you’ll have disposable cash to actually do something that makes your life better, unless you enjoy being jammed back there with vomiting upper class ladies (that story someday soon).