Withering Glance: Sean who? Make a date with Daniel as 007

Rick Nelson and Claude Peck dispense unasked-for advice about clothing, etiquette, culture, relationships, grooming and more.

CP: Like every third American, you had a date with James Bond last weekend. How'd that go for you? Think you'll see him again?

RN: Mr. Bond and I are going to have a long but regrettably one-sided relationship. You?

CP: I loved "Skyfall." Here, I fear, we are duty-bound to avoid giving away the plot. But what about the man?

RN: I have two words for you: Sean who?

CP: Connery was good, Craig's better. "Skyfall" seems to focus less on the Bond girl and more on the Bond man, in all his aging, corporeal realness -- Bond puffy-eyed from boozing, Bond doing pull-ups, Bond on the treadmill, Bond removing shrapnel from his own chest with a pocketknife, shaving, swimming. I could go on.

RN: I'm fairly convinced that costume designer Jany Temime's best decision was pulling Bond off Bond Street and into Tom Ford. I'm wondering what miracle fabrics were invoked in those spray-on suits to keep poor Daniel Craig breathing.

RN: Let's just say that 44 has never looked so good. I'm guessing that Mr. Craig's training regimen would flatten a mere mortal.

CP: Someone wrote in yesterday to complain that the movie overdoes the role of M. Me, I could watch Judi Dench, in her tailored woolens, get in and out of gleaming black sedans on rainy London streets all afternoon.

RN: Same here. The way La Dench takes down a supercilious bureaucrat with the single flicker of an eye is Oscar-worthy. Your view on Javier Bardem's turn as the villainous Raoul Silva?

CP: You want sexy Bardem, see "Before Night Falls." You want a nemesis both physically and mentally disfigured, see him in "Skyfall." Shouldn't it bother us that this simpering psycho is also the franchise's first gay bad guy?

RN: Naw. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, a k a No. 1 -- he was the bald baddie in a bunch of Bond flicks, including "From Russia With Love" and "For Your Eyes Only" -- came off as sorta gay, or at least bi-curious, given his maniacal attachment to his white Turkish Angora cat. Mike Myers hilariously spoofed his prissy ways -- and the cat -- in the "Austin Powers" series, as Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth, respectively.

RN: Only cray-cray. Back to our Daniel. How about that quote in the New York Times, from some Sony bigwig, who said, "From the inception of Bond until now, most men fantasize about being him, and most women fantasize about dating him."

CP: Hmm. I'm gonna go with the vice versa.