Product Placement...

I hadn't seen Casino Royale yet, unbelievably, but that got fixed last night.

No wonder the subsequent Daniel Craig movies get judged so harshly. I was always like "Why do people hate on Quantum of Solace or Spectre? These are perfectly adequate Bond flicks." And they are, by the standards of A View to a Kill or The World Is Not Enough.

Loved the blatantly subversive fan service of the camera lingering on a dripping Daniel Craig emerging from the ocean. Y'all can do that as often as you want, Eon Productions.

Since I was watching it on the small screen with a Tanq and tonic instead of on the big screen with a bucket of popcorn, I was probably more detached than I would normally be with such an action-oriented movie. This made it easy to note the crazy-heavy product placement by FoMoCo and Sony. Pretty much every electronic device, from computers to cell phones to cameras, that appeared on-screen was a Sony product.

And as for FoMoCo? Well, Bond drove a rental Ford Focus to the lah-ti-dah seaside resort. As he's pulling in, he passes an Explorer pulling out. A couple duffers pull up in a Range Rover (then owned by Ford), and mistake him for the help, dismissively tossing him the keys to their SUV and demanding he park it. He does so by putting it in reverse and plowing it ass-end-first into what appears to be the FoMoCo corner of the Detroit Auto Show:


Notice he backs it between a Lincoln (FoMoCo) and a Volvo (FoMoCo) into a Jaguar (FoMoCo) and through careful camera work, the only cars whose distinct brand identifiers are visible in the background immediately before and after are also Ford products (a silver Land Rover beforehand and a silver Lincoln Town Car after.)

Of course Bond is back in an Aston Martin in this movie, too, since Ford still owned them in '06.