One more day until Casino Royale hits the theaters. Are you excited about it yet? Have you been following all of the Bond coverage and pretending that you're a superspy? I've personally had the Goldfinger theme song stuck in my head for days. At first, it made small errands (like going to the post office) fun and exciting. I'd pretend I was on a secret mission, and that the stamp on my letter contained a secret microdot that had to get to New York by Saturday. After that was another death-defying mission at the grocery store (plans for the enemy's HQ hidden in the canned vegetables). However, at this point I'm going a bit mental. Get out of my head, Shirley Bassey!

Hopefully my mental slippage won't be too obvious as we immerse ourselves in Part Two of the History of Bond Films. If you missed the first part, you can catch up quickly and be ready for Casino Royale by Friday. Make it your mission, in fact. "Gooollllldifing ... " er, sorry.

Onwards through the doors of MI6 and into Bond history we go -- just don't call me Moneypenny.

If Andy Garcia should have learned anything from being in The Godfather: Part III, he should have learned to eventually model his directorial debut on the mafia series' earlier installments instead of the one in which he starred. His choice for a debut even sounds like the plot of The Godfather: Part II, as it features a wealthy family broken apart in the late 1950s amidst the Cuban Revolution. Unfortunately Garcia's The Lost City is nothing like Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 Oscar-winner, and is everything like the awkward mess that is Coppola's disappointment of 1990.

The Lost City opens on a lone man playing the trumpet, quickly diverts to an assassination by two men, then cuts quickly again to a mambo performance. Thinking back, I'm still unsure of which characters those two assassins are, and who it is they kill. Could this be a problem with my short-term memory, or could it be a problem with poor filmmaking? All I know is that those first few minutes of unclear focus are a foreshadowing of the abrupt, cursory style with which the film continues to proceeds through story and history.