I just don't understand your dislike for Craig. FRWL is my favorite Bond movie as well and I am a huge Dalton fan - Craig just took it one step closer to Fleming then Dalton did. He does not have dark hair, but his face is similar to how I always envisioned Bond when reading the book.
Craig's look is what I envision when I'm reading about a thug in a bond book, not Bond. He just looks hideous to me, a cross between Jack Palance and Taylor Negron, or a 'lost an acid fight' version of Tim Roth. When so much rests on a character's universal appeal to both men & women, it seems strange to cast somebody who is so far out from the norm.
Craig/Bond as short & stocky seems very weird to me as well, but then again, I'm the same height as the previous Bonds, 6'2", and I have dark hair parted on the left, so I sorta expect Bond to look like a super-enhanced reflection, something I can buy with Connery, Dalton and Brosnan.
But those are just cosmetic aspects. Huge when it comes to Bond, but I admit, cosmetic. In terms of the portrayal ... a lot of my objection has to do with Bond being written as an immature hothead (my usual thing is 'this is bond as Maverick in top gun, but worse because he is way too old to be believable as this immature kid'), when I see Bond as being more emotionally stable by the end of his teens (a view I've stated before is in part caused by reading the Pearson 'bio of 007' which I consider pretty near to being a canonical extension of Fleming/Maibaum.) The lengthy dialog scene on the train is downright weird to me, because Bond shouldn't ever talk that much IMO. It was clever and all that, but ... wrong. They should have saved his big dialog for the 'nature of evil' passage from the book that they omitted from the film (although apparently it was in some drafts.)
I'll grant he does the sexuality aspect better than Dalton, but even there he has what for me is a major flub when picking up Solange. There is a moment when she is evaluating his offer when he looks flustered, or nervous, or ... I dunno, the way I looked when I asked a girl out for the first time. It had the 'take pity on me' thing I associate with a 50something William Shatner trying to talk Lisa Hartman into a date on a TJ HOOKER episode, a really painful quality that is totally at odds with everything else in the way the Bond 'character' is shown in CR, or anywhere else that I can recall.
All they needed to do was cut it, or just hold on the girl's face, so you can blame the makers for the shot, but hey, I blame them for the script too, so that's fine.
I'd really love to see new Bond movies with the enthusiasm that you and others have ... I haven't really experienced that since Dalton, since Brosnan never got good material from Eon, but hey, with QOS I'm about as game and enthusiastic as I'm likely to be until they switch actors again. If the next one is a conventional bond, Craig will look even more inappropriate to my eyes, so I'll do what I expected to do already, just go back to watching dvds of the ones I do like.
