Tonight, my girlfriend and I went to see "Casino Royale." Though it diverges from the traditional movie depiction of Bond (I've never read the original Flemming novels) I'd say it was probably one of the best Bond films ever. (It's more in the tough, gritty, more-realistic tradition of "From Russia with Love", before we decided we shouldn't demonize Communists anymore.)

I'll try not to give away much of the plot but there's a few aspects worth commenting on:

Bye-bye gadgets! And good riddance. I always loved the Bond gadgets, but we've grown tired of them -- especially since they now always seem to have well-known consumer brand names on them. There are a few neat things in this film (like an electronic defibrilator) but they're not presented in the same techno-whizzy, improbably-useful way as in the old films. Still, I shall miss Q.

A chase... on foot? I think the low point of recent Bond films has been the oh-so-contrived car chase scenes, involving even invisible cars (in Iceland, really now), or cars which can be controlled from brand-named cell phones. The on-foot chase/action scene in the start of the film features some of the best stunt work I've seen in a construction zone since Jackie Chan's "Mr. Nice Guy."

No "unnecessarily slow dipping mechanism"! ... to paraphase Dr. Evil. Likewise, the villains here are smart, not stupid, and don't leave Bond and a beautiful woman to die, unsupervised, in needlessly-complicated, unreliable killing devices.

Dench! (Did I say Dench?) As in Judy, who once again does an excellent job as Bond's tough-but-caring boss, M.

Advertising. One detraction was that I still noticed lots of product placement shots, which annoy me. But they weren't quite as blatantly awful as in many other recent films.

Music -- at least the theme music -- was also singularly unimpressive. Which is too bad because I'm usually a fairly big fan of whatever they put behind the opening credits of Bond movies. But this is also a minor quibble.

There are also lots of smart plot twists and turns, and scenes where you had to pay close attention. Craig Lewis's Bond cares more than he lets on (but you knew that already). I recommend it, and the girlfriend -- who didn't really want to see it -- also said she was very surprised at how good it was, and also recommends it "even if you're not a Bond fan."

Happy New Year, Everyone!