Clive Davis is discouraged from seeing Casino Royale, the new new Bond, by of this review by Cosmo Landesman. He shouldn’t be. Landesman fails to grasp even the basics of the (not particularly complicated) plot and then complains that what he thinks is going on is “absurd”. It’s worse than that: understanding what is actually going on is crucial to the most important and disturbing scene in the movie. He implies that the film is racist because at one point Bond appears to kill lots of black soldiers. He doesn’t, but even if he had the whole point of James Bond is that he kills lots of people—usually white ones in jump suits standing at the top of stainless steel stairwells with machine guns—that’s his job. He says Bond “charges around like the Terminator”. The Terminator doesn’t “charge around”; it’s his plodding relentlessness that’s scary. Landesman does make one or two insightful observations about the film, the comparisons with Ursula Andress and Gollum are well chosen, but the article reads like one of those reviews written before the fact. Ignore it, Clive.