Yesterday I saw Casino Royale. I’ll write a little review of it at some point, but suffice it to say that I enjoyed it.
While watching the movie, I got to thinking about how Bond films hold up a little mirror to our culture. They feature themes and trends which reflect whatever our culture is excited about at a given time. Also, Bond villains (and their nefarious schemes) often illustrate our current global bugbears.
In Casino Royale, for example, the opening chase sequence relies heavily on the French urban gymnastics known as parkour. Later, of course, there’s an important game of chance. In the original novel, they play Baccarat. In the film, they play Texas Hold’em–a very popular card game if I can judge by the amount of television coverage it receives.
As for villains, one of the bad guys is a Ugandan ‘freedom fighter’, complete with child soldiers. Certainly a common face of evil in 2006.
It would be fun to build an index of Bond films based on these cultural trends. Useless, but fun.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I had a similar thought when watching the film. I found it particularly interesting how important a role CCTV cameras played, considering their proliferation, especially in England.
Although it did seem to me that everyone in the film carried magic mobiles.
Indeedy. At the height of the war on drugs, we suddenly weren’t fighting SPECTRE or the Soviets; it was Franz Sanchez, Latin American drug dealer.
Hey… maybe this is a candidate for its own microformat…