AJB live commentary on QUANTUM OF SOLACE
Higgins
GermanyPosts: 16,619MI6 Agent
Time for another group-viewing, this time, it‘s
QUARANTINE OF SOLACE
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 where usually the gunbarrel would begin.
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 WHERE IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS JAMES BOND THE GUNBARREL REALLY SHOULD BE
- HIT PLAY PRECISELY AT 19:10.
I‘ll post some timecodes during the thread just in case that somebody has messed it up
QUARANTINE OF SOLACE
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 where usually the gunbarrel would begin.
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 WHERE IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS JAMES BOND THE GUNBARREL REALLY SHOULD BE
- 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
Quite right! The gunbarrel should absolutely, definitely be there!!
Dalton - the weak and weepy Bond!
Still, there is something in QoS that will present some one off fun....
Must remember to have paracetamol handy too....
Someone once said "a Bond film is judged by its villain" and there's truth in that. Dominic is one of the, if not the, least imposing and interesting villains ever.
(b) Weak villain plot
I mean, Eon guys, water? You ran out of Fleming ideas like gold, diamonds, Fabergé eggs, and settled on water?
How about something like
Bond: You sent for me, M?
M: Ah, sit down, 007. Tell me, have you heard of Dominic Cummi.... er, I mean, Dominic Greene?
Bond: The total wan... er, I mean, international platinum tycoon? But of course.
M: It's our belief that he's been smuggling his platinum around the world, perhaps concealed in his fleet of unusually silver-toned private jets. He and his mistress, Sacrificia Cleavage, will be boarding one tonight and I think you should- etc etc
Too easy? Too obvious? Well it beats water!
(c) Weak song
In fact, weak is a compliment. It would be happy to crawl out of "absysmal" and reach the rank of "weak".
"Weak" is something along the lines of "Writing's On The Wall". This doesn't even reach "forgettable", like "Dirty Love" (most will have forgotten that one) or "pales in comparison" like Sheryl Crow's TND did to kd lang's "Surrender" and this thing does to just about everything.
In over 50 years of listening to Bond songs (yeah, ok, I know) I've genuinely never been so disappointed with one. Including DAD. Including NSNA.
That's an excellent screen name
I mean, we all have seen the movie now and we know what happens and what should happen. So we can sit back and simply enjoy the view.
Barbel can use some earmuffs when the titles are played and good thing is, that it‘s much shorter, so soon it‘s over
It‘s certainly not on the bottom of the barrel on my list
As for smuggling Platinum on private planes - not such a good idea.
Pt is f*cking heavy and only half as expensive as gold.
Dalton - the weak and weepy Bond!
Gymkata, please feel free.
Thank you. Partially it's from the Shakespeare thread. https://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/47380/ajb-presents-william-shakespeares-james-bond-in/
I mean, you are making a totally polished hipster style movie and are using type fonts right out of a Spaghetti Western?
Dalton - the weak and weepy Bond!
I like Greene as a villain. He's sleazy and arrogant and the sort of villain one might have found in a Fleming short story. I think that, like LeChiffre, he's not really meant to be the 'Mr Big' figure.
Quantum's Bolivian plan fits with the more 'realistic' take adopted for Craig's tenure at this point: it feels like it could have been one in a number of concurrent operations by a global, SPECTRE-style criminal organisation.
I've moved from hating the song, when the film first came out, to accepting what it's trying to do by way of 'deconstructing' Bond. To me, it splinters from the aesthetic of Lulu's 'The Man With The Golden Gun' and somehow ends up suiting Marc Forster's approach. Admittedly, I prefer listening to the song while watching the official music video (Alicia Keys gifs, anyone?) but, @Barbel, to compare 'Dirty Love' favourably with this is a real blow to the solar plexus!
I'm sure we're on safer ground if we can agree that Arnold does a great job by bringing his own themes to the score which link QOS to CR as its sequel and by providing some cool new 'spy'/Bondian cues. And given the radical (for Bond) editing style of the film's action scenes, Arnold had a job on his hands to score the action: he pulls it off admirably.
For me, the key questions are:
is Forster being too iconoclastic with Bond film conventions, making 'a Marc Forster film' to an extent which risks disappointing Bond audiences? (The editing style comes into that question, but the question relates to other elements, too.)
how far did the strike by The Writers' Guild of America compromise the film in its finished form? Given that Forster was aiming for a more challenging style of story-telling anyway, the way the strike hit the production may compound some of the film's arguably confusing or less effective plot turns and screenplay moments.
Re the editing- I do understand what the intention was. IMHO they fail in that intention. The prime exhibit for that statement is the scene of Mitchell's sudden turn and Mr White's escape. A first-time viewer which we all were initially comes away with the definite impression that M has been shot.
Shots are fired, we see M fall out of the picture. During the choppy action a hazy out-of-focus figure runs through a door. On subsequent viewings the action can be pieced together, but why should that be necessary? If we're supposed to be in doubt about whether M has been hurt or is even dead, we see her completely unharmed a few minutes later. Pointless, and unclear storytelling.
The fonts weren't a problem, the film has bigger issues to concern us.
This was the first (and to date only) Bond film that I walked out of the cinema disappointed in. Over the years it has grown on me, and I can see it has good points- but for me those are outnumbered by the bad.
I think Eon saw this, too. With their next Bond film, they found another way to try.
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I felt quite strange walking out of the cinema - it was as if I was in denial, thinking to myself it can't be disappointing, it's the sequel to Casino Royale - it had to be good!
Guy Haines, as special advisor to the British PM, has the same role as Cummings.
As Bond might have asked, "Where do you think you're going?"
As Mr White might have added, "Lockdown isn't for everyone."
...and now I have to figure a way to work that into the Adventures of Sir James!
The struggle to control water is a real and serious threath, but it has little urgency to it. When the stakes are Bolivian farmers having to move to the slums of La Paz in a couple of years because of lack of water there is no sence of a ticking clock. This theme would be more at home in a Le Carre novel.
* I did say NEAR.
Dalton - the weak and weepy Bond!
I wonder whether the film-makers had half an eye on the home entertainment context of the 00s. A significant section of QOS's original cinema audience would have seen CR again, at home, on dvd, at some point since CR's own cinematic debut. After QOS, in turn, became available on dvd, viewers at home would be free to see the two movies back to back and explore the connectedness. (It was different in the 60s and 70s. Individual choice about which Bond films to see when - at what intervals, and in what order - didn't come along until the emergence and growth of home video, in the 80s/90s.)
Marc Forster may have wanted to be artsy. The producers and writers may have taken some inspiration from the trend for serialised long-form narrative, developing in American cable TV. But if the Bond film-makers were getting caught up in the idea of arcs, sequels and challenging story-telling, they were perhaps losing focus on the importance of the original cinematic experience for the notional casual viewer - and they were also somewhat scuppered by the Writers' Guild strike. I think you're right. Probably the majority of QOS's movie-going audience would have felt frustrated that the film doesn't conform with what was the general expectation of any Bond film being accessibly stand-alone.
I NEVER got the impression that M had been shot - and was surprised when people on here thought that she had been (on initial viewing)…and I like the editing, giving the impression of a frantic chase in which you don’t always know exactly what is happening, or will happen…and I love the theme too - so most of you are blind and tone deaf :v
QoS ranks as my second or third favourite film in the franchise so far -{
Yeah, I really like that editing style in the Bournes: it makes it exciting and gives you just enough to follow the action. But it’s just done not as well here, and occasionally it makes things hard to follow.
And they seem to have decided to cut it right to the bone. Does the script open straight into the car chase? Maybe it does, but I just don’t think it works. You can open in media res, but not literally in the middle of an action scene.
I saw on Twitter the other day that when you see him on the phone he’s saying “yes mommy, it’s awful hot here” in his language. No joke!
There are attempts to subvert the normal in this, but quite a lot of them are subversions which hurt the film.
I like Almaric in this: his weird eyes and snarling works well I think. And they just about make the fight work too because he’s got an axe and he goes absolutely crazy in a way Bond can’t predict.
I don’t think that’s right, no. They crashed a car into the lake but no one died.
Yeah I’m not certain about that: I think I read someone saying it recently.
I’ve always had the feeling that there was an idea that Bond would tip his car in order to make his gun flip into his hand. It feels like there’s something clever missing in that sequence.
Is it possible (and I'm being serious) that you blinked at that exact moment, when M falls to the right? Or looked down at your popcorn?
I used to rank the movies but it kept changing slightly every time I saw one, so I now categorise them as A, B, C or D.
QOS sits firmly in D along with GE, TWINE and DAD.