u/FuckingFuuuuck

Let’s all mourn and yearn together a little. What are some things you don’t do anymore or can’t do one day because of chronic illness that you used to do before it all began or planned to do or in general just would do with your life if you were at least as healthy as the average person?

I’ll go first:

- drive, and enjoy driving
- travel (by highway, by train, by plane, I’d travel far and wide and see the world)
- eat more of the foods I love and enjoy that trigger me
- enjoy alcohol more heftily like I used to
- enjoy cigars still
- use and enjoy weed still
- go to the mall and spend the whole day shopping there (with money I’d actually have cuz I’d actually work)
- going hiking! Spending more time way out in the outdoors for the day
- I guess just going out in general.. to restaurants, to bars, to bookstores, to local farms, to arcades, to parks.. I really miss just driving a half-hour to an hour to go do something with the day in the days before I had to be at least near if not on/in my couch and bed all day
- visiting people and it not being mega awkward and a downer

Rewatched Casino Royale for the first time in a few years. Great James Bond film, very arguably the best, and I would probably say it is. Even people who don’t like or give a fuck about James Bond know Casino Royale is a fucking great FILM. Not just a great James Bond film.

And man, it really is. Finally, a James Bond that fucking bleeds. That gets his hands dirty and busts his knuckles open on people and, spoiler alert, gets his heart broken. Like fuck, James Bond getting his heart broken, how crazy is that? The real, human James Bond, not some archetype of masculine perfection breezily coasting through everything without a scratch on him under the thick layer of plot armor. No gadgets carrying him through the mission, no cars loaded up with missiles that go underwater. Just a guy who’s good at violence and bad - catastrophically bad - at knowing what to do with feeling something.

The intense poker game standoffs between him and Mads Mikkelson are more intensely dreadful than most horror movies manage to pull off being in their entire runtime, and it’s literally just guys playing cards. Cards! Two men with darkness in them, at the table, refusing to back down.

And the ending, that shit guts me. I won’t lie, like, the first time I saw that shit I had some glassiness to my eyes.

A rare franchise reboot that actually knew what the fucking job was - maybe the best example of that. Not another fucking superhero James Bond. A WOUNDED James Bond, a James Bond with wounds that harden him over into the superhero version we know him as for the next 20 years of his life. It’s a tragedy as much as it is an action flick, and I respect the hell out of the ballsiness.

Is it a perfect movie? No, the pacing kinda drags here and there in the earlier half, it takes a while to get going and for the first act you’re sitting there like ‘it’s alright but I was hoping for better.’ But by the middle, damn does better come. And then some. It’s not a movie that’s so amazing it’ll blow your mind or anything but, a truly solidly great film. For a ‘James Bond flick’, that’s kinda crazy.

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, I recommend you go watch it again soon, I enjoyed that rewatch a lot. Hit me a whole new way than the last time I saw it. Always does. 8/10.