News You Can Bruise for 2009 September 1 (entry 0)

(2) Tue Sep 01 2009 21:49 Demix: As noted elsewhere on this server, Sumana and I watched the 1960s Casino Royale, a film that first entered my consciousness in 1997 when Need to Know reviewed Austin Powers as "good in parts, but ultimately suggests that Mike [Myers]'s never seen Casino Royale - or maybe seen it *far too many times*".

After seeing it I'm gonna go with "*far too many times*". Casino Royale is a tremendous mess, a Bond parody made by someone who'd rather be making a canonical Bond film. It needs to be remade by someone with the guts to make it a real parody, and it turns out Mike Myers was that person.

But what a crazy original. After being bombarded by this movie I was trying to make sense of it and I realized--all those directors, all those writers, all those different plotlines that never quite mesh, all those big-name actors who never interact with each other. It's as if someone took a bunch of beloved preexisting material and tried to remix it into a single movie. We need a demix to split the movie back into the originals that never were. My favorite would be the hour-long battle of the nerds--Peter Sellers versus Woody Allen!

The other great connection I'm glad I found is to the DS9 episode Our Man Bashir, which it turns out is not just riffing on the canon Bond movies--it's riffing on Casino Royale. Michael Dorn plays Duchamps just like Orson Welles' Le Chiffre, and of course there's the nefarious Dr. Noah in his Nehru jacket. (Note that the DS9 Noah's plot involves killing everyone under a certain height.)

Oh, one more thing Sumana pointed out to me. There's lots of stuff that mocks other James Bond movies, but at one point there's a scene that parodies a scene from the novel Casino Royale (the chair with no bottom). Sumana knew about it because the scene is played straight in the Daniel Craig adaptation. But at the time you'd have had to have read the novel. Do you know of other examples of this sort of thing? (A visual parody of something that had never been played straight in a visual medium.)

Comments:

Posted by Zack at Wed Sep 02 2009 00:25

I had been under the impression that the TNG episode The Royale was also riffing on Casino Royale (perhaps the original Ian Fleming novel rather than the movie) but Memory Alpha doesn't seem to think so.