I'd like to have a word with the General Manager of the Hilton at the Dulles Airport. Maybe he could explain to me the logic behind closing the hotel lounge at 10 PM on a Saturday night. It's a nice lounge - big comfy chairs, lots of room, two or three strategically placed TVs. As a relatively frequent traveler, I find there is little more comforting after a long day of travel than planting yourself in hotel lounge with a cold beer, some criminally salty bar snacks, and whatever happens to be on ESPN, secure in the knowledge that your freshly made bed is only a short elevator ride away. Sadly that simple pleasure is unavailable in the otherwise fine Dulles Hilton.

The result is that one must try to recreate the experience through use of the mini-bar and the less than crisp display of the 12-year-old 25-inch TV. I can state unequivocally that lying back on a hotel bed with a lukewarm Michelob Light and a bag of peanut M&Ms is not comforting. It makes one feel as though one is in a roadside Motel 6 in the middle of long and arduous road trip through the outer reaches of civilization, not at a decent hotel in the midst of a major suburban metropolis.

So one looks for a pay-per-view movie as a distraction - something relatively inoffensive, something to hold the attention but not make any sorts of demands on the viewer. Something with explosions would be a bonus. One elects to watch Die Another Day.

From the standpoint of the filmmaker's craft, it would be reasonable to argue that this is the best Bond film ever. The special effects are not at all cheesy looking, the pace is frenetic, the stunts are expert, and the chicks are hot. In contrast to many to the early Bond films, it looks like a real movie.

Brosnan is a good Bond (I think second to Connery). Halle Berry pretty much mails in her performance, but she looks good in her bikini. There's probably no point in mentioning that the plot is the same as every other plot in every other Bond film, so I won't.

But so what? As an action movie it has nothing on any of the hundreds of other action movies that will be released this year. When Bond started it was state of the art action. Think about how much he action movie genre has evolved in the last 40-some years, through Indiana Jones, The Terminator, The Matrix. A standard issue action film just doesn't stand out anymore.

What's worse, it lacks any charm, camp, or fun. That's why TNN, "The First Network for Men," can get away with running old Connery/Bond films seemingly non-stop; because the giddy, silly, sexist, cartoonish world has a certain timeless magnetism. Without that, Bond is little more than direct-to-cable fare with a big budget.

Still, if their target market is guys lying in hotel beds with a rancid beer and some overpriced candy, they have hit the mark perfectly.

(I just realized that a PR flack could read this review and quote thusly "...best Bond ever...hit the mark perfectly." - David Mazzotta, blogcritics.org. Lucky for me, PR flacks are too ethical to do something like that.)

People have long wondered how to make Bond relevant for the 80s/90s/00s/etc. Well, people like me who think about stupid stuff a lot do anyway. But the answer is, don't bother. Instead of trying to update Bond, just make the old ones again. Now, I'm not talking about remakes (although the one remade Bond film, Never Say Never Again, was pretty good) or parodies. I mean make new movies to be just like the old ones. Kind of like what how they did Down With Love. Just make new films in a purely retro way. And be sure to include all the clichéd misogyny and inept villains from the originals.

It would be tough to do this without descending (ascending?) into Austin Powers-eque satire, but if you could pull it off I'm convinced there would be an audience. After a review I wrote of the book Casino Royale got linked up at Boing-Boing a reader responded: