AJB live commentary on OCTOPUSSY
Higgins
GermanyPosts: 16,619MI6 Agent
Time for another group-viewing, this time, it‘s
OCTOPUSSY
London Summertime: 20:00
Paris Summertime: 21:00
New York local time 15:00
LA local time 12:00
PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT WE ARE ALL STARTING 10 MINUTES LATER !
The 19:00 deadline is set so that everybody has enough time to find their DVDs/Blu Rays, boot their players and get done with the menus and pause right before the gunbarrel sequence.
WE ARE STARTING PRECISELY AT 19:10
- Please make sure that everybody has their BluRay/DVD/VCR ready and start the player latest 19:00 GMT to get done with all the dodgy menus.
- PAUSE YOUR PLAYER RIGHT BEFORE THE GUNBARREL
- HIT PLAY PRECISELY AT 19:10.
I‘ll post some timecodes during the thread just in case that somebody has messed it up
OCTOPUSSY
London Summertime: 20:00
Paris Summertime: 21:00
New York local time 15:00
LA local time 12:00
PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT WE ARE ALL STARTING 10 MINUTES LATER !
The 19:00 deadline is set so that everybody has enough time to find their DVDs/Blu Rays, boot their players and get done with the menus and pause right before the gunbarrel sequence.
WE ARE STARTING PRECISELY AT 19:10
- Please make sure that everybody has their BluRay/DVD/VCR ready and start the player latest 19:00 GMT to get done with all the dodgy menus.
- PAUSE YOUR PLAYER RIGHT BEFORE THE GUNBARREL
- HIT PLAY PRECISELY AT 19:10.
I‘ll post some timecodes during the thread just in case that somebody has messed it up
President of the 'Misty Eyes Club'.
Dalton - the weak and weepy Bond!
Dalton - the weak and weepy Bond!
Comments
at my earlier time. - I'll see You all in Havanah! -{
Or in the Malvinas, or Buenos Aires, as the case may be... before setting off, and back in time, to a 'Boys' Own' Raj...
Ha! Yes
Or perhaps Flashman's Raj!
{[] {[]
See you then tomorrow.
I also have a secret love for OP. To me the first half is the archetypical Cubby Bond - the locations in India are just amazing!
Unfortunately in the second half - as soon as the train leaves the station, the movie gets much "smaller" while the action is still decent.
Barbel may get an itchy banning finger for this: Barry's main action theme is not only being v ery repetitive - it annoys me sometimes
Dalton - the weak and weepy Bond!
There won’t be time to go into much detail while watching, so some points about the music here:
It was clear that there wouldn’t be a song called “Octopussy” (although later kd lang said that she would have liked to get her teeth into “Octopussy”
The OST was released at the time, then on CD in 1997 with extra dialogue tracks but no extra music. The remastered 2003 version dropped the dialogue tracks but still no extra music. A cue called “Gobinda Attacks” (misprinted on both CD releases as “Gorbinda Attacks”) was used several times in the film as Higgins said above (so I won’t be mentioning it during the viewing), and is on the OST in a medley with “009 Gets The Knife”.
Another misprint- “The Chase Bomb Theme” was misprinted on the 2003 release as “The Chase Bond Theme”.
Don‘t worry, the idiot will be here soon.
As for the music, I remember that the Soundtrack was out way before the german premiere and I was preparing and listening to it on and on.
But I failed to fall in love with the music like I‘ve done with FYEO previously,
Dalton - the weak and weepy Bond!
Yeah it is strangely not as pleasing as his others. It's still good (because it's Barry) but not one to love. Even the action theme isn't quite as fun as the AVTAK action theme etc. Plus the recording is weirdly echoey, do you know what I mean?
Even the title song is probably his limpest: it feels the least Bond-y somehow.
It does have maybe the only bit of music (beyond actual themes) that I can think of Barry recycling for another Bond film though: the melody as Bond spies on the Russian helicopter arriving at the palace from his window ledge gets reworked for the parachuting Double-Os as they land on Gibraltar in Daylights.
I've always kind of wondered if they called it that as a sort of reply to Bowie's Ashes to Ashes.
Really? Well if you check around the 1 min 58 sec mark here I think you’ll find there was an attempt at it :v
Loved that!
There are a few brief cues in the movie which, if they'd been included in an extended OST, would have added more variety to the album. For example, I like the cue when M and Bond part company at Checkpoint Charlie.
The 'Gobinda Attacks' action cue works better in the context of the film than for isolated listening, imho, and the romantic cues have a stately grace to them which matches the opulence of the film and continues the symphonic style used in the MR score.
A number of key scenes in OP necessitate generic uses of in-world, or diegetic, music (such as the circus scenes, the percussion of the safari hunt - or the music to which the girls dance when masquerading as courtesans before beginning their raid on Kamal's palace). When compared with some of the other Bonds that Barry scored, this requirement for diegetic music is higher in OP and may have limited his opportunity to write more of the extra-diegetic cues for which we love him?
Octopussy would rank as one of my three least favourite Barry scores, but I think that shows just how good his scores were because Octopussy is actually a soundtrack album that I find myself listening to quite frequently. More frequently than most Bond scores, in fact. And now that I think about it, its quite hard to say why. It's certainly not Barry at his most dynamic, but then I tend to like a lot of the more low-key, background type cues on Barry soundtracks of the later period - such as Bond Look Alike on this album, and The Sniper Was a Woman on The Living Daylights. And I think the Octopussy OST album has a lot of that sort of moody, atmospheric Barry scoring that I just enjoy having on in the background when I do things like washing dishes
My dad really liked 'All Time High' and I remember him playing it a lot when I was a kid (before I ever started actively listening to James Bond themes and scores), so maybe also this score, especially in the romantic sections, brings back a certain amount of childhood nostalgia.
-Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
Well, that's a lot more discussion of the score than we usually have in these viewings! And for this of all scores.
The romantic stuff is nice, and like a couple of Barry's songs it actually works better in the film than as a song (I think Golden Gun is very much like that). I think, like the films themselves, this score is a bit of a companion piece to AVTAK (he uses a similar setup of an original action theme, theme song for romantic bits, a growing ominous sinister theme towards the end of the film- plus his 80s version of the Bond theme of course), and of the two I do tend to prefer AVTAK. I just prefer the melodies in that one and he makes the whole thing feel really dangerous and serious, which is quite impressive considering what's on screen!
Would you say there's more in this one? I've not really thought about that before- I can't think of there being a lot in this one. Apparently a lot of the circus music was just licensed library music- not by Barry. I feel like Diamonds may have more diegetic, or perhaps even OHMSS. If you're counting Vijay's snake charming music that's not fair!
As we won't have the time tonight, I thought that I'd go a bit into details about the significant 2 Seiko watches.
Bond's main watch and it can be seen on his wrist many times, was a G757-5020.
Many moons ago, I was the first to peoperly identify the watch and later create a pic of a totally unworn watch:
This shot can be found on any google search and Jamesbondlifestyle are the only ones who had permit by me using that image.
When OP was in the cinemas, LCD watches where becoming more and more unpopular. Quartz was still hype, but watches had to have proper dials and hands.
So EON/Seiko's choice for the OP Bond watch was not a good one and not many of those have been sold.
Back in the day, I was trying to find one at my local jewellers in Stuttgart, nobody had one.
Later on, I have been quite fortunate to amass a significant collection of them and the G757-5020 always has a soft spot in my heart.
It's very difficult to find totally perfect items, because
1. the bezel is made out of PU - plastic!.
It is so soft that you get it scratched within minutes that you put the watch on your wrist.
2. The black highlights on the bracelet and buckle are simply black paint!
Any contact of the bracelet/buckle with another surface leaves unrepairable traces and the black paint simply flakes off!
Seiko issued a similar watch which is wrongly labeled to be the "James Bond Seiko" or "Octopussy Seiko" - the Silverwave G757-5000:
Differences to the real Bond-Seiko are:
1. The bezel logo says SILVERWAVE while SPORTS 100 would be correct
2. The LCD layout is a bit different while the functions are the same
3. I have never seen a Silverwave on a proper metal strap - so I assume, that it came on a rubber strap from the factory.
Dalton - the weak and weepy Bond!
Look at the metal frame around the crystal and the "pods" where the buttons are mounted.
The Seiko TV Timer was commercially available in 2 variants:
T-001-5020
To use the TV function, you have to plug a Walkman-sized receiver onto the watch
And T-001-5000 (which presumably was only for the japanese market).
I call this the Sports variant because of the black bezel
Unfortunately, none of these 2 are really screen accurate.
The 2 Seiko TV Timers had a predecessor, a Prototype, called the SUWA SEIKOSHA Television watch.
I haven't seen a real pic of the watch, it is only shown on some newspaper articles when the prototype has been introduced.
Seiko was using 2 different plants for their production and still do:
Daini and Suwa - both factories have been competing for many years against each other and the Suwa Seikosha TV Timer obviously came from the Suwa plant.
Unfortunately, I never came across with a Suwa Seikosha TV timer, so something in my collection is not complete
Dalton - the weak and weepy Bond!
Annoyingly my Blu Ray (in the big 24 film collection box) skips and stutters. I should have done something about it but it's one of those those things you don't find out about until it's too late.
So true
In DAF, 'At The Whyte House' is diegetic music. 'Circus Circus' and 'Slumber Inc' are also diegetic, I suppose - though it's probably more true to say that these two tracks play in an indeterminate area between the diegetic and the extra-diegetic.
In TB the cues at Club Kiss Kiss bleed in and out of the diegetic and the extra-diegetic, suffusing Bond's subjective experience of his world with a mood defined by the music.
In OHMSS snatches of 'Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?', sung by Nina, are clearly diegetic... seasonal background music played during winter sports and festivities.
Plus you get the casino tracks in quite a few films (OHMSS included, often versions of the title song melody) which as you say are kind of both diegetic and extra-digetic: can Bond hear them playing or is it music playing over the film? It's not really clear!
Bond only hears his own theme tune in this movie (and in Licence To Kill I guess, but I doubt he was paying attention to the noise those bullets made!), but how often does he seem to hear the movie's title song? LALD springs to mind immediately; he seems to in the casino in OHMSS, TWINE, maybe DAF, in the boat at the end of FRWL he's listening to Matt Munro... any more?
'Bond Look Alike' is an interesting one. Its incorporation of Bond theme elements is possibly part of Barry's response to a brief to increase use of the Bond theme in OP for branding purposes as a preemptive strike against the unofficial NSNA. (Barry had made less, and more oblique, use of the Bond theme in MR.) Curiously, 'Bond Look Alike' also includes already some of Barry's 'Indian' touches, around the sexiness of Tina Hudson, even though the PTS setting is Latin America and Bianca is a Latin American girl. This is all the more curious when it's borne in mind that Maurice Binder eschewed Indian imagery for his credits sequence because he knew that the titles would be followed directly by a scene set in East Berlin.
You're right. OHMSS's 'Try' is in this category. Perhaps in the later Bond films which Barry scored, including OP, the demarcation between diegetic and extra-diegetic music is less often blurred.
It is funny that I remember first watching Octopussy properly and being able to hum along with the music straight away even though I didn't know it! Obviously it helps that the music we first hear as Bond is arriving in his Range Rover is a play on the Bond theme, but if you know John Barry you also know he's going to repeat that phrase straight away!
Bonkers. The more I think about what Binder didn't put in his title sequences the more I wonder what he was thinking of.
Why not a bit of Berlin wall stuff then? And what's wrong with foreshadowing the Indian location? Indian imagery would have been amazing to use. Or the egg, some Russian jewellery, something! As Kleiman has shown, these films are so rich how can you fail to think of stuff to put in them and end up with bland nothings like TLD or LTK?
Perhaps a dedicated thread may be of interest?
Sure. It is at least a relevant film to be discussing that subject under though as it's the only one where Bond actually hears his own theme tune!
'Mango Tree' we at least know for sure is diegetic because Bond sings it himself!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQLyIEejACY