October
20
Quantum of Solace: Smart Bond
I confess that I had a great time at Quantum of Solace last night. Sure it's glitzy and glam and jammed with heart-stopping violent action. But it's also arty and elegant and beautiful. One of the main sequences is a lyrical homage to Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, set during a performance of Tosca.
It's both a James Bond movie and a Marc Forster movie. It moves the standard Bond-with-gun opener to the end, the Bond song honors are done by Jack White and Alicia Keyes, and the standard Bond crew is gone. The key crew members on this one were all Team Forster, except the composer John Barry David Arnold. But even there, the score pulls back on too much use of the classic Bond theme.
There are six Vesper martinis instead of the usual one, which isn't specifically "shaken not stirred." There is no "Bond, James Bond." Will audiences miss this? Or is this just the kind of modernization that the series requires to stay vital?
Craig is as strong and dangerous and fearless and rebellious as ever--and in this case, grieving and vengeful as he chases down the man who killed his beloved Vesper Lynd. (It is unusual for a Bond film to function as a sequel.) In this case, the Bond villain played by The Diving Bell and the Butterfly star Mathieu Amalric is bone-chilling-- without relying on any of the usual tics.
The movie already had a major press launch in London, who love their own Gemma Arterton as a modern Brit Bond Girl. Here's a sampling of early reviews.
Here's the trailer:
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Sorry, Anne, But John Barry hasn't worked on a Bond film since "The Living Daylights" ('way back in '87). The current house-composer is David Arnold who started with the Brosnan "Tomorrow Never Dies."
And as far as the James Bond Theme, the credits say that it was written by Monty Norman (back for "Dr. No"). To say anything else (except praising Barry's enormous skills in "arranging" it) snaps Norman's lawyers to attention.
Posted by: Yojimbo | October 20, 2008 at 02:01 PM
There seems to be an awful lot of comment about the fact that some of the standard elements are missing from Quantum of Solace, but that was very much the case with Casino Royale too.
It isn't the fist time that Bond hasn't uttered the words "Bond, James Bond" either - it was missing from the Connery movies Thunderball (along with the martinis) and You Only Live Twice.
Roger Moore generally preferred Champagne - he drinks martini 3 times in his entire career as Bond and never says "shaken, not stirred", allegedly to distance himself from Sean Connery, although it is spoken by other characters.
It's actually not until Pierce Brosnan took over that it became so formulaic.
Posted by: David Leigh | October 21, 2008 at 07:16 AM
Director Marc Forster won’t be back.
"They offered me the next one, but at this point the pressure is so intense — it's a year of not having a life. And I don't know if I want to do that again. It's literally not having a life, and I mean that, it's not exaggerated. I feel like life is short, you have to find a balance."
http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/10/21/marc-forster-can-only-handle-one-bond-at-a-time/
Posted by: Eli | October 21, 2008 at 12:39 PM
There’s an preview of Quantum of Solace in Baltimore at the Landmark Theater on November 12th (before the movie comes out). It’s a charity event to benefit Johns Hopkins. Go to www.baltimore.org/bond for the details and to get tickets.
Posted by: Ilyse Landsman | October 22, 2008 at 08:07 AM
Glad to read that you enjoyed QUANTUM OF SOLACE. Craig's Bond, in CASINO, had the appropriate coldness lacking in some other representations of the literary character (Roger Moore...I'm looking at you), but his Bond lacked the craftiness. He was a blunt instrument, where in the books he was a scalpel. As for Bond films as sequel, Blofeld murders Bond's wife in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (with my second favorite Bond and which features my favorite Bond moment) and Bond does take revenge a decade later in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY in a scene that really only makes sense in a post-OHMSS world.
Speaking of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, I have always liked the original -- with Peter Lorre -- a little better than the Doris Day/Jimmy Stewart version. Both are brilliant, but the marriage of the protagonist couple seems more equal in the first. They are peers, a "marriage of true minds" if you will, and the wife has not given up her career for the marriage. Besides, it's the wife who enacts vengeance in the end of the original -- fulfilling her promise at the beginning of the movie that she would get the guy the next time they were in a shooting match. Love it.
Posted by: Christian Lindke | October 22, 2008 at 04:30 PM