Spoilers in the full entry. You’ve been warned.

Names in movies and books have a hard time sticking in my head. Big names, like Keyser Soze, will stay. Names with some referential significance, such as Miles Vorkosigan, will also stay provided I’m aware of the reference. Any smaller than that and the name becomes only a minor – almost trivial – part of the symbolic representation of the character in my mind. I vastly prefer to enjoy movies as a gestalt experience, and a few phonemes just don’t make the cut when my mind cleans house afterward.

An old friend recommended the movie to me a few days ago, and mentioned that Daniel Craig got the role of Bond in Casino Royale in large part due to his performance in Layer Cake. So, as I watched, I mentally dubbed Craig’s Layer Cake character “ur-Bond.”

Between the Double-Oh prejudice and the limited general significance I attach to names, I was perfectly blindsided when XXXX turns around at the end of Layer Cake and thumbed his nose at my nomenclatural ignorance. Beautiful.