Daniel Craig working on his stance.

The ultimate proof that movies these days are rotten: Quantum of Solace is breaking records at the box office. It’s not the public’s fault; people want to see something move onscreen and they’ll take what they can get. Right now Q of S is the only game in town.

It’s not absolutely terrible, Q of S, but you forget it as you cross the lobby to the theater exit. That’s par for the course with James Bond films, you might say; nobody really remembers Bond films with Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton or Roger Moore. It’s embarrassing to be still clinging to the vivid cultural recollection of the great Connery/ Bond films of the 1960s. But then Casino Royale and Daniel Craig cruelly raised our hopes again. He’s fantastic, we all agree, even with those ears. He spends almost all of Q of S looking as if he were hewn from the living rock. It’s hypnotic, and thank God for it, because the rest of the film’s pretty much a wash-out.

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Here’s a friendly warning for you: don’t count on the movies to get you through the holidays, any more than they got you through the Wall Street seizures or this gut-wrencher of an election. As bad as the movies have been recently, that’s how bad they’re going to be right through to 2009. Maybe even a tad worse, if that’s possible. Just to give you an idea, the title of one of them, a big fat one with stars and a major budget and everything, is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Just chew on that a minute while I check the polls. (Oh jeez, it’s tightening up, Obama’s only up by 5.4 nationally, 7 in Pennsylvania, 4 in Virginia. I swear, if we lose this one…!)

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