WCBE 90.5 FM: "Casino Royale," "Fast Food Nation," "Happy Feet"

WCBE#293-FINAL
It’s Movie Time: "Casino Royale," "Fast Food Nation," "Happy Feet"
Co-hosts, writers & producers: John DeSando & Clay Lowe
Air Time: Friday, 3:01 pm and 8:01 pm, November 17, 2006
Streaming live on the web at http://www.wcbe.org .

Clay

"Casino Royale" unveils Daniel Craig as the blonde bomb James Bond . . .

John

“Fast Food Nation" is not fast enough to derail the fattening of America . . .

Clay

"Happy Feet" will have you tapping your feet to the penguins' cool tunes . . .

HIT MUSIC, THEN UP THEN UNDER FOR:

Richelle Antczak McCuen

"It's Movie Time" in Columbus with John DeSando and Clay Lowe. .

MUSIC BRIEFLY UP THEN SLOWLY DOWN AND OUT

John: I'm John DeSando

Clay: And I'm Clay Lowe

John ("Casino Royale" 129 words)

what was James Bond like at the beginning of his career?

The new Casino Royale depicts a younger, tensile 007 (Daniel Craig) with darting intelligence and hard body, doing what the mature Bond does mostly but with less success: He awkwardly pursues an arch villain who bleeds in one eye, and he dangerously falls in love with a complicated babe, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green).

The cell phones and lap tops update Bond while Craig makes him a believable candidate for the 00 license to kill because he’s very bright and physically agile. Yet Craig shows corners of emotion and vulnerability foreign to the more elegant and remote Sean Connery.

The casinos of Montenegro and the canals of Venice are inviting, but at 144 minutes Casino Royale is too long.

Clay ("Casino Royale" 125 words)

Folks, all of the scenery in this "Casino Royale" is beautiful, including the hard loving, hard charging bodies.

Taking his cues from his last Zorro pic (that began with Zorro leaping from roof top to roof top), director
Martin Campbell carries on his good guy-bad guy high flying tradition with Bond duking it on the i-beams high above a waterfront construction site.

As cool and cold blooded as his crystal blue eyes, Craig's James Bond is as tough-guy flashy as the handfuls of diamonds he keeps finding in his pockets.

Featuring an international cast more diverse than Bush's Iraqi coalition, you know things are going to turn out well for this new Bond, but be forewarned, and some of the violence against Bond is painfully tortuous.

John ("Fast Food Nation" 127 words)

Fast Food Nation is a languorous, episodic fiction about the horrors of abominable abattoirs and mistreated Mexicans. It is too underplayed for America’s deathly dance with contaminated fast food; the money shot at the film’s end is too late showing suffering animals and their arterial cascades in the slaughterhouse.

Richard Linklater, who directed the romantic Sunrise/Sunset duo, just doesn’t take his subject here seriously enough. Bruce Willis’s cattle supplier gives the laissez-faire attitude of the whole film when he claims about the feces-tainted burgers, "We all have to eat a little '____' from time to time."

Read Upton Sinclair’s 1906 muckraking novel, “The Jungle” if you want to see how fiction changes things.

Clay

Good choice!

John

Eat a Slider if you want to know why it's so difficult to say "No" in a fat food nation.

Clay ("Happy Feet" 132 words)

Well, John, there's not much fat in the new animated feature "Happy Feet."

That's because (O Dear) the penguins gathered together under those icy cold cliffs of Antarctica have had to finally conclude that they're facing a famine.  You know, like, someone’s been eating their fish.

Drawing upon the Biblical imagery of the Israelites in search of their Promised Land, with a heavy dose of gospel-like music thrown in on the side, the Patriarchal penguin fathers admonish their flock to watch and wait and sing and pray.

Well, maybe it's not quite that heavy handed, because things do lighten up when the young penguin called "Mumble" (he can’t sing) IS able to DANCE his way into their hearts because he discovers what it is that’s happened to all of their little fishies.

But enough of hard bodies, bloody burgers, and deep sea fish fries, John, because it's grading time.

HIT DRUMS

John

Holy Happy Hoofers, Hooray!

"Casino Royale" earns a “B” for BOOSTING BOND once more with love . . .

Clay

"Casino Royale" gets a "B" because all Bond's look the same under the sheets . . .

John

"Fast Food Nation" earns a “C” because a little CACA in your burger just CAN’T hurt enough  . . .

Clay

"Happy Feet" gets a "B" because when you've seen one animated penguin, you've seen them all . . .

DRUMS OUT

John

Clay, when we saw penguins from our ditch in New Zealand, they weren’t dancing---or maybe they were, and maybe Ivan’s martinis kept us from seeing them clearly.
I'm outta here.

Clay

John, after you and Ivan had finished your martinis and went roamin' off, I stayed behind and was able to soberly see those yellow-eyed penguins quite clearly.

I’m outta here too.

See you at the movies, folks.

HIT CLOSING THEME THEN UNDER FOR

Richelle:

The Award-Winning "It's Movie Time" with John DeSando and Clay Lowe is written and produced by John DeSando and Clay Lowe in conjunction with
90.5 FM, WCBE in Columbus, Ohio.

MUSIC UP, THEN DOWN AND OUT

Copyright by John DeSando & Clay Lowe, 2006