A lot of these open questions about events in the main body of the film can be answered with a bit of imagination. I'm satisfied with our all-original ajb007 backstory of Blofeld's eye and how it got into his prison cell, I don't think what we've come up with contradicts anything onscreen and I will be remembering it next time I watch the film.
Other questions, like how the British could bomb an island in foreign waters are similar: we already see Tanner saying "I've got Russia and Japan on the phone, sir, what should I tell them?". Well, when the camera cuts back to what's Bond doing, Tanner is telling them something and that's settled. We don't see it because Tanners a boring character and nobody cares what's Tanner doing right now.
Even the question of how M keeps his job after this latest fine mess: maybe he never does tell the PM he was the idiot who created the virus in the first place, he accidentally forgot to include that detail in his report.
For me now the one outstanding question is:
why does Madeleine continue to live in that house in Norway and especially why is Mathilde apparently living there? Explanation for Madeleine's seemingly odd behaviour depends on her childhood trauma (as seen in the very first scene of the film, so its literally fundamental to how the plot unfolds). We see for ourselves exactly why she is motivated to protect her own child from a similar experience. Bringing that child to the exact same place is 180degreees contradictory to that motivation, the precise opposite of what she should be doing, a perverse decision.
Perhaps Mathilde normally lives with her mum in London, they don't usually even go to this house in Norway (though it seems awful clean and wellstocked), Maybe its a onetime visit, as Madeleine just fled London in a panic after the incident in Blofeld's prison. But even then, why go back to that one place of all places? She even just met Safin again for the first time in decades, she knows he knows where that house is! literally any other place on the planet would be a safer place to hide her child.
'Shirr, do you think that Blofeld's contact with Spectre might be arranged via a fake eye, smuggled into his cell under the nose of security guards, somehow allowing him to communicate via it, despite him posing all the while as a deranged gibbering lunatic, which also somehow gives him a pretext for having a psychiatrist, which allows her to keep tabs on him for his sworn enemy - or should that be Swann enemy - Safrin?'
The movie's 100% Hitchcock. All the themes are Hitchcock: The mother figure, nihilism, voyeurism, weird sex stuff, violence against women, the "Hitchcock blonde," fear of arrest and incarceration, guilt both appropriate and inappropriate.
Hitchcock made a dozen or so great or near great films; those other guys were a D-list pulp novelist and a guy who wrote episodes for a Twilight Zone rip-off.
Film is a visual medium and nobody was so great a visual story teller as Hitchcock. Those other guys were irrelevant.
That's a bit much. Bloch was celebrated for more beyond his novel that Hitchcock adapted. And Stefano's "Twilight Zone" rip-off (The Outer Limits) attracted lots of top-shelf 20th-century genre talent. You don't need to tear someone down to build up the other.
Yeah, it was such a weird, over-the-top comment I wasn't even sure how to answer it. Bloch was one of the most celebrated genre writers of his day, having written for print, TV, and film, and he's still influential on horror writers today, including for a friend of mine who, among other things, has written the novelizations of quite a few popular films in addition to his own various horror novels. Stefano wrote prolifically for TV and film, and while The Outer Limits was no doubt created owing to the popularity of The Twilight Zone, neither program was the first anthology series to deal with the supernatural or science fiction. Anthology shows were common in the Golden Age of Television, and shows like Tales of Tomorrow predated both series while One Step Beyond debuted at the same time as The Twilight Zone. To discount their contributions and assume the director of a movie was responsible for everything is just bizarre.
And here we have the ultimate consequence of celebrating people like Bloch and Stefano. Soon there are no standards, there is no hierarchy of greatness. Hitchcock gets reduced to the level of a couple of hack writers and van Gogh gets reduced to "rubbish."
wow, I thought we could have a nice conversation for a few posts if we changed the topic to Hitchcock films, I never couldve guessed...
auteurship: is it really a thing, or is filmmaking a collaborative art as @Gassy Man stated above? I once read a booklength essay by Pauline Kael on that very topic.
You're positing that Starry Night would be a great painting without any paint? That's an interesting philosophical question to consider - could Van Gogh have manifested his genius to impose itself onto a blank canvas, collectively activating the viewers gaze to imagine Starry Night into existence?
What is more interesting is your allergic reaction to the notion of source material or collaborators and belief the existence and value of one somehow diminishes work of the other? At no point did I say Van Gogh was rubbish, I simply pointed out the reality that Starry Night would not exist if Van Gogh did not have paint - 🎨 ergo a pretty rubbish ""painting". Equally Hitchcock would have made no great films without the work of others nor the Rolling Stones written many hits without bathing in the work of artists you would no doubt dismiss as hacks.
I'm not sure I understand the violence of your reaction. You're not a copyright lawyer are you?!
"Starry Night would not exist if Van Gogh did not have paint - 🎨 ergo a pretty rubbish ""painting". Equally Hitchcock would have made no great films without the work of others."
And here we have the post-modernist mindset at its best (or worst, rather). The guy who sold van Gogh his paints is equally responsible as van Gogh for Starry Night because no paint then no painting, and Bloch (who wasn't even involved in the making of the movie Psycho) and Stefano are equally responsible with Hitchcock for Psycho because no writers then no movie. This line of "reasoning" ignores that there were others that van Gogh could've bought his paint from and there were other writers and sources Hitchcock could've used for his movies.
The flip side of this "everybody deserves credit" for something great is that nobody takes the blame for something bad. See, for example, the Elizabeth Holmes trial (my boyfriend made me do it!).
Asp9mmOver the Hills and Far Away.Posts: 7,541MI6 Agent
This is why I use my own blood and only paint self portraits. No one is going to take the credit for my art 🤨
Film is a collaborative enterprise--even great directors made their best films by working with talented people, whether they were cinematographers, actors, writers, etc. A great movie is never a one-man show, though it usually requires a great director to give it unity. And it's impossible to make a great film without a good script. Hitchcock relied on scriptwriters to write all of his greatest films and he knew better than to choose hacks. That's why he chose to collaborate with John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Thornton Wilder, and--on a lesser level--Stefano and Bloch. One of the worst effects of auteurism was giving almost sole attention to directors, who were treated as novelists writing on celluloid, while nearly dismissing the immense contributions of scriptwriters and cinematographers. Hitchcock himself has been written about ad nauseam, andgiving attention to his collaborators is a breath of fresh air.
To take this back on topic, the Bond films themselves are definitely not auteurist works, because they're producer-centered. Cubby Brocolli was the unifying force on the classic Bonds (along with Saltzman), though the recurring contributions by Richard Maibaum also shaped the series. The Bond films were bigger than any directror, though certain directors like Peter Hunt gave their contributions a distinct style. And even today the producers call the shots and avoid selecting directors who would challenge them. Mendes was more of a middlebrow director than an auteur; Fukunaga, while coming closer to that label, still had to answer to his producers and his star (who was also a producer).
Coulda, woulda, shoulda...didn't though. The sadistic diminishment of Bloch and Stefano doesn't seem cogent even if you believe Hitchcock a vacuum sealed auteur...and a facetious comment about Van Gogh relating to an act of mythical commerce versus the embellishment and reworking of an existing work which is what was actually being talked about for Psycho can surely be engaged with in the spirit it was written?
Of course we all recognise this is not new territory:
"The fingerprints of such intertextual influences, as well as the wholesale borrowings from Bloch, ensure that Psycho, brilliant achievement as it is, is not the product of a vacuum-sealed auteur at work....if one accepts the account Rebello quotes at some length, including the idea that “a person is never more defenseless than when taking a shower,” then it is clear Hitchcock owed much more to the original than has been commonly allowed. Obviously smarting from the way reviewers dismissed his novel when the film was released, as did later critics, Bloch allegedly still objected decades later to the “inference . . . that [Hitchcock] introduced all the things that seemed to make the film work—killing the heroine early in the story, killing her off in the shower, taxidermy—when, of course, they’re all in the book” (Rebello 170). Peter Conrad’s Hitchcock Murders (2000) sprinkles a dozen fairly respectful references to “Bloch’s Psycho" in his idiosyncratic approach to the films."
Now do Saul Bass. Or Anthony Perkins. Or Bernard Hermann. Great movies are lightning in a bottle - and Hitchock himself failed to capture it a time or two - and if you see someone laying the entirety of a film's success at the feet of one person, you're looking at a liar or a grifter.
Also I think the bionic eye he uses to communicate should be called an eye-phone.
indeed now I'm thinking of Maxwell Smart for the first time!
does Blofeld pop this eye out of his socket and hold it in his hand when he wants to make a call? no wonder his captors mistook him for a loony!
actually I have been wondering, is it just audio? Is he also using it as a remote camera in that Cuba scene?
What about the Matera scene? That attack is so intricately planned and covered so much of a town with rather unusual geography I've been wondering if he can get GoogleMaps through that eye-phone
And here we have the post-modernist mindset at its best (or worst, rather). The guy who sold van Gogh his paints is equally responsible as van Gogh for Starry Night because no paint then no painting, and Bloch (who wasn't even involved in the making of the movie Psycho) and Stefano are equally responsible with Hitchcock for Psycho because no writers then no movie. This line of "reasoning" ignores that there were others that van Gogh could've bought his paint from and there were other writers and sources Hitchcock could've used for his movies.
@Gala Brand could you define "PostModern" and how it relates to this argument? thats another one of these words where it seems to mean whatever the user wants it to. Back during my first round of postsecondary in the 80s, it was the bane of every students existence, and often when used by anyone except the prof just seemed to be a synonym for "Cool".
I think the actual analogy for Van Gogh's paint is not Hitchcock's employees/collaborators, but the raw celluloid. Van Gogh turns paint into art singlehanded because he's the only one working on the painting. A better comparison would be someone like Rembrandt, who had a studio full of apprentices working on his paintings alongside him. But I dont think Rembrandt's apprentices had the kind of specialised responsibilities Hermann, Bass, Bloch, Perkins et al were contributing.
Rather than visual art, a better analogy for filmmaking might be a rock band where all the members contribute musical ideas to a hit recording but only one gets the songwriting credit.
"actually I have been wondering, is it just audio? Is he also using it as a remote camera in that Cuba scene?"
It's a camera; there's a bunch of footage from it that Q cycles through. And in the Cuba scene he says "I spy with my little eye" as Bond makes eye contact with it.
Postmodernism: The idea that there is no objectively definable right or wrong and that people cannot even perceive reality; in fact, there may not even be such a thing as reality and all actions and inactions are ultimately meaningless.
Regarding your rock band analogy, the difference is that the band is all contributing simultaneously, which isn't true in a movie.
The better analogy is the recording studio where all the musicians record individually and then the producer puts the tracks together, tweaking the sounds, and maybe deleting some tracks altogether to create a final work.
Query: Is the Beatles greatness due to George Martin? It seems he played a much larger role in their music than Bloch and Stefano did in Psycho.
actually I have been wondering, is it just audio? Is he also using it as a remote camera in that Cuba scene?"
HalfMonk HalfHitman said:
It's a camera; there's a bunch of footage from it that Q cycles through. And in the Cuba scene he says "I spy with my little eye" as Bond makes eye contact with it.
thanks! I only saw the movie once so far, and we've argued and theorised so much for the last six weeks I'm starting to confuse what I really saw with what each of us claims "really" happened. That'll be solved once the dvd comes out. Speaking of what "really" happened...
Postmodernism: The idea that there is no objectively definable right or wrong and that people cannot even perceive reality; in fact, there may not even be such a thing as reality and all actions and inactions are ultimately meaningless.
Regarding your rock band analogy, the difference is that the band is all contributing simultaneously, which isn't true in a movie.
The better analogy is the recording studio where all the musicians record individually and then the producer puts the tracks together, tweaking the sounds, and maybe deleting some tracks altogether to create a final work.
Query: Is the Beatles greatness due to George Martin? It seems he played a much larger role in their music than Bloch and Stefano did in Psycho.
thanks Gala. Thats not quite how I remember the definition (sounds more like Nihilism), but certainly more succinct than I could have done and explains your argument better. If this thread needs further digression we can always debate Postmodernism.
Martin was definitely the Fifth Beatle, a lot of what I'm enjoying on those records is his contribution, but the songwriting was even more important, and George and Ringo contributed more key musical hooks than are usually given credit for. Let it Be or their BBC recordings show what they sounded like without Martin. I was actually thinking of Pink Floyd, who are notorious for their songwriting credit disputes and one former member who claims he was The Genius responsible for everything. I've seen both Gilmour and Waters in concert a couple times, and they are each maybe one quarter of a collective genius.
Hitchcock we gotta remember was a self-promoter and public persona unlike any other director, he'd do those trailers where he spoke directly to the audience and played a kind of stereotypical version of himself. And he was messing us when he did that, often clowning around and misdirecting as t what the movie would actually be. Hitchcock's deliberately crafted larger than life persona and self-promotion must confuse the issue of who did what.
This thread would be truly fascinating for someone who happened to be a fan of The Beatles, Hitchcock, or obviously James Bond. Like me. Having a ball reading these.
Now we all know that in this Blofeld is meant to be Bond's half brother of sorts, okay not literally but Bond was brought into the family after his parents' death, as mentioned in Fleming's YOLT and for others who want more detail on this, I suggest you read the late John Pearson's fine 'bio' James Bond: An Authorised Biography which in the main reads as canon.
Now, all this is a big deal. But what do we hear about this? Nothing. Not really when Bond and Blofeld meet up in Spectre. And even less in their brief meeting in NTTD. No reference to Bond's surrogate father, Blofeld's actual Dad, or their shared past beyond 'Cuckoo!'
Does that matter? Many don't like this new aspect of Blofeld anyway and many on this will be saying, 'Naps, I can't think of anything worse than Bond and Blofeld bitching about who got the bigger Christmas present, who got the Terry's Neopolitan chocolates while the other got an Action Man...'
I'm inclined to agree. The thing is, it's just odd to introduce something like this and have neither character make any reference to it again. You wouldn't get that in any other series, I feel. If you're going to go there, go there. Don't just have it as a kind of mention.... They could have a follow up scene set in close relation to where Blofeld killed his Dad... or is that nodded at when he meets Madeline Swann in her snowy Austrian clinic? Maybe it is. Spectre is one of the few Bond films with a definite sense of time, starting at the Day of the Dead ceremony, so it might be snowy in Austria that time of year.
It just seems an example of something the makers just throw in to the mix, and as with so much other stuff, it's almost written in short hand, we are meant to fill in the details or overlook them as we please. It's like we're given stuff to process without a huge amount of context.
Comments
A lot of these open questions about events in the main body of the film can be answered with a bit of imagination. I'm satisfied with our all-original ajb007 backstory of Blofeld's eye and how it got into his prison cell, I don't think what we've come up with contradicts anything onscreen and I will be remembering it next time I watch the film.
Other questions, like how the British could bomb an island in foreign waters are similar: we already see Tanner saying "I've got Russia and Japan on the phone, sir, what should I tell them?". Well, when the camera cuts back to what's Bond doing, Tanner is telling them something and that's settled. We don't see it because Tanners a boring character and nobody cares what's Tanner doing right now.
Even the question of how M keeps his job after this latest fine mess: maybe he never does tell the PM he was the idiot who created the virus in the first place, he accidentally forgot to include that detail in his report.
For me now the one outstanding question is:
why does Madeleine continue to live in that house in Norway and especially why is Mathilde apparently living there? Explanation for Madeleine's seemingly odd behaviour depends on her childhood trauma (as seen in the very first scene of the film, so its literally fundamental to how the plot unfolds). We see for ourselves exactly why she is motivated to protect her own child from a similar experience. Bringing that child to the exact same place is 180degreees contradictory to that motivation, the precise opposite of what she should be doing, a perverse decision.
Perhaps Mathilde normally lives with her mum in London, they don't usually even go to this house in Norway (though it seems awful clean and wellstocked), Maybe its a onetime visit, as Madeleine just fled London in a panic after the incident in Blofeld's prison. But even then, why go back to that one place of all places? She even just met Safin again for the first time in decades, she knows he knows where that house is! literally any other place on the planet would be a safer place to hide her child.
'Shirr, do you think that Blofeld's contact with Spectre might be arranged via a fake eye, smuggled into his cell under the nose of security guards, somehow allowing him to communicate via it, despite him posing all the while as a deranged gibbering lunatic, which also somehow gives him a pretext for having a psychiatrist, which allows her to keep tabs on him for his sworn enemy - or should that be Swann enemy - Safrin?'
'Oh do shut up you senile old goat.'
Roger Moore 1927-2017
To quote Roger Moore's last line as 007: "Oooh ..." 😮
The movie's 100% Hitchcock. All the themes are Hitchcock: The mother figure, nihilism, voyeurism, weird sex stuff, violence against women, the "Hitchcock blonde," fear of arrest and incarceration, guilt both appropriate and inappropriate.
Hitchcock made a dozen or so great or near great films; those other guys were a D-list pulp novelist and a guy who wrote episodes for a Twilight Zone rip-off.
Film is a visual medium and nobody was so great a visual story teller as Hitchcock. Those other guys were irrelevant.
That's a bit much. Bloch was celebrated for more beyond his novel that Hitchcock adapted. And Stefano's "Twilight Zone" rip-off (The Outer Limits) attracted lots of top-shelf 20th-century genre talent. You don't need to tear someone down to build up the other.
Yeah, it was such a weird, over-the-top comment I wasn't even sure how to answer it. Bloch was one of the most celebrated genre writers of his day, having written for print, TV, and film, and he's still influential on horror writers today, including for a friend of mine who, among other things, has written the novelizations of quite a few popular films in addition to his own various horror novels. Stefano wrote prolifically for TV and film, and while The Outer Limits was no doubt created owing to the popularity of The Twilight Zone, neither program was the first anthology series to deal with the supernatural or science fiction. Anthology shows were common in the Golden Age of Television, and shows like Tales of Tomorrow predated both series while One Step Beyond debuted at the same time as The Twilight Zone. To discount their contributions and assume the director of a movie was responsible for everything is just bizarre.
Crediting Bloch and Stefano at all for the greatness of Psycho is like crediting the guy van Gogh bought his paint from for Starry Night.
pretty rubbish painting without any paint.
And here we have the ultimate consequence of celebrating people like Bloch and Stefano. Soon there are no standards, there is no hierarchy of greatness. Hitchcock gets reduced to the level of a couple of hack writers and van Gogh gets reduced to "rubbish."
wow, I thought we could have a nice conversation for a few posts if we changed the topic to Hitchcock films, I never couldve guessed...
auteurship: is it really a thing, or is filmmaking a collaborative art as @Gassy Man stated above? I once read a booklength essay by Pauline Kael on that very topic.
You're positing that Starry Night would be a great painting without any paint? That's an interesting philosophical question to consider - could Van Gogh have manifested his genius to impose itself onto a blank canvas, collectively activating the viewers gaze to imagine Starry Night into existence?
What is more interesting is your allergic reaction to the notion of source material or collaborators and belief the existence and value of one somehow diminishes work of the other? At no point did I say Van Gogh was rubbish, I simply pointed out the reality that Starry Night would not exist if Van Gogh did not have paint - 🎨 ergo a pretty rubbish ""painting". Equally Hitchcock would have made no great films without the work of others nor the Rolling Stones written many hits without bathing in the work of artists you would no doubt dismiss as hacks.
I'm not sure I understand the violence of your reaction. You're not a copyright lawyer are you?!
I would like to congratulate the forum on our usual high standards of conversation. The NTTD thread is now about Hitchcock and van Gogh! 🧐
"Starry Night would not exist if Van Gogh did not have paint - 🎨 ergo a pretty rubbish ""painting". Equally Hitchcock would have made no great films without the work of others."
And here we have the post-modernist mindset at its best (or worst, rather). The guy who sold van Gogh his paints is equally responsible as van Gogh for Starry Night because no paint then no painting, and Bloch (who wasn't even involved in the making of the movie Psycho) and Stefano are equally responsible with Hitchcock for Psycho because no writers then no movie. This line of "reasoning" ignores that there were others that van Gogh could've bought his paint from and there were other writers and sources Hitchcock could've used for his movies.
The flip side of this "everybody deserves credit" for something great is that nobody takes the blame for something bad. See, for example, the Elizabeth Holmes trial (my boyfriend made me do it!).
This is why I use my own blood and only paint self portraits. No one is going to take the credit for my art 🤨
Film is a collaborative enterprise--even great directors made their best films by working with talented people, whether they were cinematographers, actors, writers, etc. A great movie is never a one-man show, though it usually requires a great director to give it unity. And it's impossible to make a great film without a good script. Hitchcock relied on scriptwriters to write all of his greatest films and he knew better than to choose hacks. That's why he chose to collaborate with John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Thornton Wilder, and--on a lesser level--Stefano and Bloch. One of the worst effects of auteurism was giving almost sole attention to directors, who were treated as novelists writing on celluloid, while nearly dismissing the immense contributions of scriptwriters and cinematographers. Hitchcock himself has been written about ad nauseam, and giving attention to his collaborators is a breath of fresh air.
To take this back on topic, the Bond films themselves are definitely not auteurist works, because they're producer-centered. Cubby Brocolli was the unifying force on the classic Bonds (along with Saltzman), though the recurring contributions by Richard Maibaum also shaped the series. The Bond films were bigger than any directror, though certain directors like Peter Hunt gave their contributions a distinct style. And even today the producers call the shots and avoid selecting directors who would challenge them. Mendes was more of a middlebrow director than an auteur; Fukunaga, while coming closer to that label, still had to answer to his producers and his star (who was also a producer).
Coulda, woulda, shoulda...didn't though. The sadistic diminishment of Bloch and Stefano doesn't seem cogent even if you believe Hitchcock a vacuum sealed auteur...and a facetious comment about Van Gogh relating to an act of mythical commerce versus the embellishment and reworking of an existing work which is what was actually being talked about for Psycho can surely be engaged with in the spirit it was written?
Of course we all recognise this is not new territory:
"The fingerprints of such intertextual influences, as well as the wholesale borrowings from Bloch, ensure that Psycho, brilliant achievement as it is, is not the product of a vacuum-sealed auteur at work....if one accepts the account Rebello quotes at some length, including the idea that “a person is never more defenseless than when taking a shower,” then it is clear Hitchcock owed much more to the original than has been commonly allowed. Obviously smarting from the way reviewers dismissed his novel when the film was released, as did later critics, Bloch allegedly still objected decades later to the “inference . . . that [Hitchcock] introduced all the things that seemed to make the film work—killing the heroine early in the story, killing her off in the shower, taxidermy—when, of course, they’re all in the book” (Rebello 170). Peter Conrad’s Hitchcock Murders (2000) sprinkles a dozen fairly respectful references to “Bloch’s Psycho" in his idiosyncratic approach to the films."
I use my own poo for mine. Unfortunately they searched my padded cell and confiscated my bionic eye.
Also I think the bionic eye he uses to communicate should be called an eye-phone.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Best joke in ages!
Outstanding!
Now do Saul Bass. Or Anthony Perkins. Or Bernard Hermann. Great movies are lightning in a bottle - and Hitchock himself failed to capture it a time or two - and if you see someone laying the entirety of a film's success at the feet of one person, you're looking at a liar or a grifter.
Jellyfish said:
Also I think the bionic eye he uses to communicate should be called an eye-phone.
indeed now I'm thinking of Maxwell Smart for the first time!
does Blofeld pop this eye out of his socket and hold it in his hand when he wants to make a call? no wonder his captors mistook him for a loony!
actually I have been wondering, is it just audio? Is he also using it as a remote camera in that Cuba scene?
What about the Matera scene? That attack is so intricately planned and covered so much of a town with rather unusual geography I've been wondering if he can get GoogleMaps through that eye-phone
gala brand said:
And here we have the post-modernist mindset at its best (or worst, rather). The guy who sold van Gogh his paints is equally responsible as van Gogh for Starry Night because no paint then no painting, and Bloch (who wasn't even involved in the making of the movie Psycho) and Stefano are equally responsible with Hitchcock for Psycho because no writers then no movie. This line of "reasoning" ignores that there were others that van Gogh could've bought his paint from and there were other writers and sources Hitchcock could've used for his movies.
@Gala Brand could you define "PostModern" and how it relates to this argument? thats another one of these words where it seems to mean whatever the user wants it to. Back during my first round of postsecondary in the 80s, it was the bane of every students existence, and often when used by anyone except the prof just seemed to be a synonym for "Cool".
I think the actual analogy for Van Gogh's paint is not Hitchcock's employees/collaborators, but the raw celluloid. Van Gogh turns paint into art singlehanded because he's the only one working on the painting. A better comparison would be someone like Rembrandt, who had a studio full of apprentices working on his paintings alongside him. But I dont think Rembrandt's apprentices had the kind of specialised responsibilities Hermann, Bass, Bloch, Perkins et al were contributing.
Rather than visual art, a better analogy for filmmaking might be a rock band where all the members contribute musical ideas to a hit recording but only one gets the songwriting credit.
"actually I have been wondering, is it just audio? Is he also using it as a remote camera in that Cuba scene?"
It's a camera; there's a bunch of footage from it that Q cycles through. And in the Cuba scene he says "I spy with my little eye" as Bond makes eye contact with it.
Postmodernism: The idea that there is no objectively definable right or wrong and that people cannot even perceive reality; in fact, there may not even be such a thing as reality and all actions and inactions are ultimately meaningless.
Regarding your rock band analogy, the difference is that the band is all contributing simultaneously, which isn't true in a movie.
The better analogy is the recording studio where all the musicians record individually and then the producer puts the tracks together, tweaking the sounds, and maybe deleting some tracks altogether to create a final work.
Query: Is the Beatles greatness due to George Martin? It seems he played a much larger role in their music than Bloch and Stefano did in Psycho.
I said:
actually I have been wondering, is it just audio? Is he also using it as a remote camera in that Cuba scene?"
HalfMonk HalfHitman said:
It's a camera; there's a bunch of footage from it that Q cycles through. And in the Cuba scene he says "I spy with my little eye" as Bond makes eye contact with it.
thanks! I only saw the movie once so far, and we've argued and theorised so much for the last six weeks I'm starting to confuse what I really saw with what each of us claims "really" happened. That'll be solved once the dvd comes out. Speaking of what "really" happened...
gala brand:
Postmodernism: The idea that there is no objectively definable right or wrong and that people cannot even perceive reality; in fact, there may not even be such a thing as reality and all actions and inactions are ultimately meaningless.
Regarding your rock band analogy, the difference is that the band is all contributing simultaneously, which isn't true in a movie.
The better analogy is the recording studio where all the musicians record individually and then the producer puts the tracks together, tweaking the sounds, and maybe deleting some tracks altogether to create a final work.
Query: Is the Beatles greatness due to George Martin? It seems he played a much larger role in their music than Bloch and Stefano did in Psycho.
thanks Gala. Thats not quite how I remember the definition (sounds more like Nihilism), but certainly more succinct than I could have done and explains your argument better. If this thread needs further digression we can always debate Postmodernism.
Martin was definitely the Fifth Beatle, a lot of what I'm enjoying on those records is his contribution, but the songwriting was even more important, and George and Ringo contributed more key musical hooks than are usually given credit for. Let it Be or their BBC recordings show what they sounded like without Martin. I was actually thinking of Pink Floyd, who are notorious for their songwriting credit disputes and one former member who claims he was The Genius responsible for everything. I've seen both Gilmour and Waters in concert a couple times, and they are each maybe one quarter of a collective genius.
Hitchcock we gotta remember was a self-promoter and public persona unlike any other director, he'd do those trailers where he spoke directly to the audience and played a kind of stereotypical version of himself. And he was messing us when he did that, often clowning around and misdirecting as t what the movie would actually be. Hitchcock's deliberately crafted larger than life persona and self-promotion must confuse the issue of who did what.
This thread would be truly fascinating for someone who happened to be a fan of The Beatles, Hitchcock, or obviously James Bond. Like me. Having a ball reading these.
Well here's another gripe.
Now we all know that in this Blofeld is meant to be Bond's half brother of sorts, okay not literally but Bond was brought into the family after his parents' death, as mentioned in Fleming's YOLT and for others who want more detail on this, I suggest you read the late John Pearson's fine 'bio' James Bond: An Authorised Biography which in the main reads as canon.
Now, all this is a big deal. But what do we hear about this? Nothing. Not really when Bond and Blofeld meet up in Spectre. And even less in their brief meeting in NTTD. No reference to Bond's surrogate father, Blofeld's actual Dad, or their shared past beyond 'Cuckoo!'
Does that matter? Many don't like this new aspect of Blofeld anyway and many on this will be saying, 'Naps, I can't think of anything worse than Bond and Blofeld bitching about who got the bigger Christmas present, who got the Terry's Neopolitan chocolates while the other got an Action Man...'
I'm inclined to agree. The thing is, it's just odd to introduce something like this and have neither character make any reference to it again. You wouldn't get that in any other series, I feel. If you're going to go there, go there. Don't just have it as a kind of mention.... They could have a follow up scene set in close relation to where Blofeld killed his Dad... or is that nodded at when he meets Madeline Swann in her snowy Austrian clinic? Maybe it is. Spectre is one of the few Bond films with a definite sense of time, starting at the Day of the Dead ceremony, so it might be snowy in Austria that time of year.
It just seems an example of something the makers just throw in to the mix, and as with so much other stuff, it's almost written in short hand, we are meant to fill in the details or overlook them as we please. It's like we're given stuff to process without a huge amount of context.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Post modernism is basically nihilism in an academic context.