But no, because the whole point is he’s not *Bond* as we know him yet. That’s why they withold the real Bond theme till the end but hint at it throughout in the score, and why they get in all those great jokes about the martinis and that stupid drink he makes up. He hasn’t fully embraced his Aston-Martin-driving-shaken-not-stirred-tuxedo-wearing slickness yet, and what better antithesis of Bond-hood can you think of than a Ford Contour? In a way, it’s a joke on Ford, pointing out how sucky they are. Just my take on it, though. I loved this movie in ways that really surprised me.
I agree with you, Court, it’s a top film! Also, in the building-site scene right at the beginning, Bond stumbles a lot more than you’d expect him to… again, because he’s still growing into himself. I liked that. I also loved them destroying the Venetian house near the end. And all the poker. Best Bond film for a long while, and a refreshing shake-up of the franchise. But yes, Chris Cornell’s song is shit.
Since you asked, I was very impressed with the movie but yes, that song did let it down (not least because I’ve always hated that Audioslave/Soundgarden sound and it doesn’t belong anywhere near a Bond film). I’ve listened to it a few times since seeing the movie and it’s grown on me a bit, I like the lyrics “Arm yourself because no one else here will save you. The odds will betray you.” In the novel Bond covets lady luck to great effect and perhaps this is some effort to reflect that.
I liked that David Arnold’s score teased around with elements of the Bond theme, but that it was never fully employed until right at the end. However, whilst David Arnold is a good custodian of the Bond music, he’s clearly not the composer/arranger John Barry is. Can you imagine Arnold writing a piece of music as effective as the original Bond theme?
Hmm…now, I’ve been a fan of Chris Cornell’s voice and songwriting for many years and I did rather like the Bond theme. Okay, incongruous it may be, and in an ideal world it would’ve been released on a new Cornell solo album (easily his best work was 99’s “Euphoria Morning”), but I wouldn’t feel right slating something just because it feels awkward in its locale. It’s not “bad”, only “wrong”.
David Arnold was a big improvement on his predescessor, Eric Serra, who scored “GoldenEye”. John Barry didn’t write the original Bond theme. He orchestrated it and worked it into many of the scores but the actual music was written by a guy called Monty Norman.
The scores always work better when the composer has a hand in writing the theme e.g. “Goldfinger”. David Arnold wrote a great tune called “Surrender” sung by k.d. Lang for “Tomorrow Never Dies” which is the source of most of the score but the producers found they could get Sheryl Crow at the last minute. “You Know My Name” isn’t on the official soundtrack for “Casino Royale” which suggests that Cornell got his entry in towards the end of the scoring process.
James, as far as I remember, the original Monty Norman melody was a song. John Barry stripped away the lyrics and wrote everything else that goes around the melody. The majority of the Bond sound appears to be John Barry’s work, as he created the context in which that particular sequence of notes work. He also had a hand in writing many of the most memorable Bond themes.
Neil, yes, I think it’s a question of context (and the fact I don’t get the aesthetic) rather than of quality. Plain bad was the Madonna theme for “Die Another Day.”
James, how many people wrote and recorded songs for “Tomorrow Never Dies?” There was the mediocre Sheryl Crow thing, k.d. Lang, and I know Pulp released a b-side called “Tomorrow Never Lies” which was originally intended for the movie.
I’m not sure about exactly how many people exactly submitted stuff. According to Wikipedia Pulp, Saint Etienne and Marc Almond were also in the running. I know that Moby’s version of the James Bond Theme came out at the same time and was included on the soundtrack. David Arnold collaborated with the Propellerheads on a great piece of score music called “Backseat Driver” (probably after the success of their amazing version of “OHMSS”) which plays during the scene with the BMW in the multi-story car park (sadly the sound FX drown out a lot of it). Apparently the producers became of aware of Arnold after he produced “Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project” and since Barry couldn’t agree with the studio over something (probably his fee), they hired Arnold.
Ahh, I never thought of the Ford Contour in that way… it makes sense, though it just makes it seems like Bond has shitty taste in rental cars.
I actually did really like the movie… however, I didn’t quite understand WHY they had to finish the poker game. Why couldn’t they apprehend Le Chiffre at the beginning of the game? I mean, he was already desparately short on $. Being short on $, owing millions to some warlord and being in MI6 custody should be enough to scare the desired information out of him. I’m complaining about this, because the poker part seemed to be the lamest “let’s make it cool to the kids by having them play poker” addition to an otherwise strong movie. And their poker playing wasn’t all that great.
Of course, if St. Etienne did the theme song, it would have been my favorite movie ever.
I thought the lamest “let’s get the kids to like it” bit was all the parkour at the beginning, but at least it was entertaining. I had similar concerns about the pointless poker bits.
Oh, and since Liam’s blog ate my original post, yes, Monty Norman’s song dos contain he Bond theme, but not as we know it, so it’s fair to say it’s a John Barry creation, much like the original Ron Grainer Who theme is nothing like the famous one Julia Derbyshire created (although it would fit th Pertwee era like a crushed velvet glove).
And while not the only thing wrong with the new film, Cornell’s “song’ is certainly the worst thing. Ugh.
I just didn’t feel that the poker made any sense from a plot perspective. I guess they could’ve just worked a little harder on the pretense on why the game was being played in the first place. That said, the things that happened between the actual poker playing were cool (the poisoning, etc.) so in a sense, the sequence was worthwhile.
Sorry Neil, the Chris Cornell song was just bad – decent singing ruined with an 80’s bland feel guitar mood.
The parkour was decent, because it didn’t work as well as James being smart. The window dodge was a rip-off from a french film.
The Poker did work for me, but then I play it and understand how hard it is to be truly good.
Noone’s mentioned the love interest – perhaps because it was done well – how do you hurt a man into being Bond-ish with women.
Yeah, I loved that Bond wasn’t as agile or quick as his quarry throughout the parkour and maintained his pursuit only by being more creative! I don’t think that the poker scenes (Baccarat Chemin de Fer in the novel) can have been easy to film and maybe Campbell didn’t do a good enough job of making sure that his audience knew what was going on but it felt suspenseful. I think it’s precisely these sorts of pretentious occaisions and tenuous excuses for rivalry that have made the Bond films so distinctive. Because of Bond’s ability to provoke he usually exposes his enemy’s roots or their agenda whilst at the same time being dressed suitably for the occaision (a Bond villain also gives themselves away through their suspect fashion sense or dodgy taste in some other area). The interesting thing about Bond’s attitude towards women is that he was almost there before Vespa.
The bit I did like about the parkour was when the fella dives through the window, and Bond, all no nonsense like, just bundles through the wall. “None of that fancy French poncery for me!”
You know, if this had been a film about Sean Bean’s Goldeneye character, and the silly poker plot wasn’t in there, I may have liked it more.
I actually thought the poker was kind of poor, for a number of reasons.
1. There didn’t seem to be enough raising. Most of them were basically “calling stations.” Maybe it was a way of focusing the story, but only Bond and La Chiffre raised, and only when something was about to “happen.”
2. I don’t recall the exact cards, but I thought the last hand was played poorly (and unbelievably) all the way around. There were like, four or five players at the showdown. The board was full of straights and flush draws and I believe a pair. The first two guys seemed awfully pleased with themselves for hitting pretty low hands on that board, something like two pair (including the board pair), and a low part of the straight (i.e. his pocket cards made up the bottom cards of the straight). I remembered them smirking when they turned over as if they expected to take the pot with those hands. Le Chiffre I thought had a full house or 4 of a kind or something like that. Bond had a straight flush, which I believe he made on the river; that’s a pretty dumb play hanging in there, waiting for ONE card out of the entire deck to hit. I mean, I guess that teaches us that Bond is lucky, but a good poker player? I can accept Bond being lucky, but there was that line in the movie about Bond being the best poker player in MI6 or something.
I meant it was good for a film, because at least it showed the right order of hands, and people had a sense of what’s going on. Rounders being another good example.
I really enjoyed “Rounders”, especially John Malkovich’s dodgy Russian accent. Everyone’s going to hate me for saying this but I thought the poker games in “Lock, Stock…” were really well filmed. Rehash, Speaking as someone who knows very little about the game, I found all three movies’ poker scenes exciting so maybe they only work if you’re not familiar with it?
James Bond movies have never been grounded in reality so maybe it’s a testiment to the re-booted franchise that we’re being harsher on the specifics rather than the entire plot! K, you’ve just never gotten over Roger Moore retiring, have you?
I didn’t know all the crazy running-around-the-building site stuff was called parkour, but I actually really appreciated that aspect of the film. It was nice that they didn’t just go for the “okay, how can we get the biggest explosion possible?” way of making a film. Instead of crashing a helicoptor into a building or something, they just made it about two bodies flinging themselves all over the place (and, it must be said that they were two quite attractive bodies at that). It certainly didn’t seem a rubbish move to me, instead it seemed unique and interesting. And again, it tied in nicely with the emphasis that Bond was not fully “Bond” yet – surely a later Bond would have pulled out some gadget to help him make some of those leaps. :-)
I’m not sure I can imagine what kind of trauma would turn Daniel Craig into Roger Moore, no. ;)
Actually, my favourite Bond is From Russia With Love, that does all the grounding in reality this new one tried to do, but also has that essential Bond-ness that this one lacked. This was a fine action movie, but a Bond movie? Not for me.
In related news, Nintendo are negotiating with various corporate entities to resurrect Goldeneye on Wii! Huzzah!
Well, for those wondering, Chris Cornell was the singer with Soundgarden for about ten years til 1996, who formed out of a project entitled Temple of the Dog (themselves formed from the remnants of Green River and Mother Love Bone, the latter’s dead junkie singer being the subject of a couple of the songs). In 2002, he joined the remains of Rage Against The Machine (after the departure of humourless angry-man Zach de la Rocha) to release the first Audioslave album.
My personal theory as to why Cornell made the Bond soundtrack was someone saw Michael Mann’s really rather excellent Miami Vice movie, replete with Audioslave soundtrack, and made the mistake of thinking it appropriate to get Bond “down” in a similar style (luckily not seeing fit to bedeck Daniel Craig with a mullet of Farrell-esque quality).
As for Parkour…it looks really cool when it’s well filmed, but there’s something a bit desparate about the amateur free runners doing backflips outside a Folkestone supermarket and threatening to jump on people’s cars. Less double-0 than ASBO…
Loved the film, was pleasantly surprised by Daniel Craig being great as Bond, liked the edginess and the real-looking stunts and the lesser reliance on gadgetry. Theme music sucked in a big way, as did the opening sequence behind it. Glad however that I’m not a secret agent. Turning up to a poker match and having to ask if the facey cards are good may not have gone down well.
For the first 30 minutes of the movie, he drove what was essentially a Ford Contour. That’s a problem.
But no, because the whole point is he’s not *Bond* as we know him yet. That’s why they withold the real Bond theme till the end but hint at it throughout in the score, and why they get in all those great jokes about the martinis and that stupid drink he makes up. He hasn’t fully embraced his Aston-Martin-driving-shaken-not-stirred-tuxedo-wearing slickness yet, and what better antithesis of Bond-hood can you think of than a Ford Contour? In a way, it’s a joke on Ford, pointing out how sucky they are. Just my take on it, though. I loved this movie in ways that really surprised me.
I agree with you, Court, it’s a top film! Also, in the building-site scene right at the beginning, Bond stumbles a lot more than you’d expect him to… again, because he’s still growing into himself. I liked that. I also loved them destroying the Venetian house near the end. And all the poker. Best Bond film for a long while, and a refreshing shake-up of the franchise. But yes, Chris Cornell’s song is shit.
Since you asked, I was very impressed with the movie but yes, that song did let it down (not least because I’ve always hated that Audioslave/Soundgarden sound and it doesn’t belong anywhere near a Bond film). I’ve listened to it a few times since seeing the movie and it’s grown on me a bit, I like the lyrics “Arm yourself because no one else here will save you. The odds will betray you.” In the novel Bond covets lady luck to great effect and perhaps this is some effort to reflect that.
I liked that David Arnold’s score teased around with elements of the Bond theme, but that it was never fully employed until right at the end. However, whilst David Arnold is a good custodian of the Bond music, he’s clearly not the composer/arranger John Barry is. Can you imagine Arnold writing a piece of music as effective as the original Bond theme?
Hmm…now, I’ve been a fan of Chris Cornell’s voice and songwriting for many years and I did rather like the Bond theme. Okay, incongruous it may be, and in an ideal world it would’ve been released on a new Cornell solo album (easily his best work was 99’s “Euphoria Morning”), but I wouldn’t feel right slating something just because it feels awkward in its locale. It’s not “bad”, only “wrong”.
David Arnold was a big improvement on his predescessor, Eric Serra, who scored “GoldenEye”. John Barry didn’t write the original Bond theme. He orchestrated it and worked it into many of the scores but the actual music was written by a guy called Monty Norman.
The scores always work better when the composer has a hand in writing the theme e.g. “Goldfinger”. David Arnold wrote a great tune called “Surrender” sung by k.d. Lang for “Tomorrow Never Dies” which is the source of most of the score but the producers found they could get Sheryl Crow at the last minute. “You Know My Name” isn’t on the official soundtrack for “Casino Royale” which suggests that Cornell got his entry in towards the end of the scoring process.
James, as far as I remember, the original Monty Norman melody was a song. John Barry stripped away the lyrics and wrote everything else that goes around the melody. The majority of the Bond sound appears to be John Barry’s work, as he created the context in which that particular sequence of notes work. He also had a hand in writing many of the most memorable Bond themes.
Neil, yes, I think it’s a question of context (and the fact I don’t get the aesthetic) rather than of quality. Plain bad was the Madonna theme for “Die Another Day.”
James, how many people wrote and recorded songs for “Tomorrow Never Dies?” There was the mediocre Sheryl Crow thing, k.d. Lang, and I know Pulp released a b-side called “Tomorrow Never Lies” which was originally intended for the movie.
I’m not sure about exactly how many people exactly submitted stuff. According to Wikipedia Pulp, Saint Etienne and Marc Almond were also in the running. I know that Moby’s version of the James Bond Theme came out at the same time and was included on the soundtrack. David Arnold collaborated with the Propellerheads on a great piece of score music called “Backseat Driver” (probably after the success of their amazing version of “OHMSS”) which plays during the scene with the BMW in the multi-story car park (sadly the sound FX drown out a lot of it). Apparently the producers became of aware of Arnold after he produced “Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project” and since Barry couldn’t agree with the studio over something (probably his fee), they hired Arnold.
All this is fascinating – but who is Chris Cornell?
Ahh, I never thought of the Ford Contour in that way… it makes sense, though it just makes it seems like Bond has shitty taste in rental cars.
I actually did really like the movie… however, I didn’t quite understand WHY they had to finish the poker game. Why couldn’t they apprehend Le Chiffre at the beginning of the game? I mean, he was already desparately short on $. Being short on $, owing millions to some warlord and being in MI6 custody should be enough to scare the desired information out of him. I’m complaining about this, because the poker part seemed to be the lamest “let’s make it cool to the kids by having them play poker” addition to an otherwise strong movie. And their poker playing wasn’t all that great.
Of course, if St. Etienne did the theme song, it would have been my favorite movie ever.
I thought the lamest “let’s get the kids to like it” bit was all the parkour at the beginning, but at least it was entertaining. I had similar concerns about the pointless poker bits.
Oh, and since Liam’s blog ate my original post, yes, Monty Norman’s song dos contain he Bond theme, but not as we know it, so it’s fair to say it’s a John Barry creation, much like the original Ron Grainer Who theme is nothing like the famous one Julia Derbyshire created (although it would fit th Pertwee era like a crushed velvet glove).
And while not the only thing wrong with the new film, Cornell’s “song’ is certainly the worst thing. Ugh.
I still can’t decide whether I think parkour is cool or rubbish.
I’m not sure what it says that the Bond producers decided it was cool roughly five years after the BBC did.
So no one thinks that the poker games were in any way important?
James:
I just didn’t feel that the poker made any sense from a plot perspective. I guess they could’ve just worked a little harder on the pretense on why the game was being played in the first place. That said, the things that happened between the actual poker playing were cool (the poisoning, etc.) so in a sense, the sequence was worthwhile.
Yes, Chris Cornell blows.
Sorry Neil, the Chris Cornell song was just bad – decent singing ruined with an 80’s bland feel guitar mood.
The parkour was decent, because it didn’t work as well as James being smart. The window dodge was a rip-off from a french film.
The Poker did work for me, but then I play it and understand how hard it is to be truly good.
Noone’s mentioned the love interest – perhaps because it was done well – how do you hurt a man into being Bond-ish with women.
Yeah, I loved that Bond wasn’t as agile or quick as his quarry throughout the parkour and maintained his pursuit only by being more creative! I don’t think that the poker scenes (Baccarat Chemin de Fer in the novel) can have been easy to film and maybe Campbell didn’t do a good enough job of making sure that his audience knew what was going on but it felt suspenseful. I think it’s precisely these sorts of pretentious occaisions and tenuous excuses for rivalry that have made the Bond films so distinctive. Because of Bond’s ability to provoke he usually exposes his enemy’s roots or their agenda whilst at the same time being dressed suitably for the occaision (a Bond villain also gives themselves away through their suspect fashion sense or dodgy taste in some other area). The interesting thing about Bond’s attitude towards women is that he was almost there before Vespa.
The bit I did like about the parkour was when the fella dives through the window, and Bond, all no nonsense like, just bundles through the wall. “None of that fancy French poncery for me!”
You know, if this had been a film about Sean Bean’s Goldeneye character, and the silly poker plot wasn’t in there, I may have liked it more.
Paul:
I actually thought the poker was kind of poor, for a number of reasons.
1. There didn’t seem to be enough raising. Most of them were basically “calling stations.” Maybe it was a way of focusing the story, but only Bond and La Chiffre raised, and only when something was about to “happen.”
2. I don’t recall the exact cards, but I thought the last hand was played poorly (and unbelievably) all the way around. There were like, four or five players at the showdown. The board was full of straights and flush draws and I believe a pair. The first two guys seemed awfully pleased with themselves for hitting pretty low hands on that board, something like two pair (including the board pair), and a low part of the straight (i.e. his pocket cards made up the bottom cards of the straight). I remembered them smirking when they turned over as if they expected to take the pot with those hands. Le Chiffre I thought had a full house or 4 of a kind or something like that. Bond had a straight flush, which I believe he made on the river; that’s a pretty dumb play hanging in there, waiting for ONE card out of the entire deck to hit. I mean, I guess that teaches us that Bond is lucky, but a good poker player? I can accept Bond being lucky, but there was that line in the movie about Bond being the best poker player in MI6 or something.
I meant it was good for a film, because at least it showed the right order of hands, and people had a sense of what’s going on. Rounders being another good example.
I really enjoyed “Rounders”, especially John Malkovich’s dodgy Russian accent. Everyone’s going to hate me for saying this but I thought the poker games in “Lock, Stock…” were really well filmed. Rehash, Speaking as someone who knows very little about the game, I found all three movies’ poker scenes exciting so maybe they only work if you’re not familiar with it?
James Bond movies have never been grounded in reality so maybe it’s a testiment to the re-booted franchise that we’re being harsher on the specifics rather than the entire plot! K, you’ve just never gotten over Roger Moore retiring, have you?
I didn’t know all the crazy running-around-the-building site stuff was called parkour, but I actually really appreciated that aspect of the film. It was nice that they didn’t just go for the “okay, how can we get the biggest explosion possible?” way of making a film. Instead of crashing a helicoptor into a building or something, they just made it about two bodies flinging themselves all over the place (and, it must be said that they were two quite attractive bodies at that). It certainly didn’t seem a rubbish move to me, instead it seemed unique and interesting. And again, it tied in nicely with the emphasis that Bond was not fully “Bond” yet – surely a later Bond would have pulled out some gadget to help him make some of those leaps. :-)
I’m not sure I can imagine what kind of trauma would turn Daniel Craig into Roger Moore, no. ;)
Actually, my favourite Bond is From Russia With Love, that does all the grounding in reality this new one tried to do, but also has that essential Bond-ness that this one lacked. This was a fine action movie, but a Bond movie? Not for me.
In related news, Nintendo are negotiating with various corporate entities to resurrect Goldeneye on Wii! Huzzah!
Well, for those wondering, Chris Cornell was the singer with Soundgarden for about ten years til 1996, who formed out of a project entitled Temple of the Dog (themselves formed from the remnants of Green River and Mother Love Bone, the latter’s dead junkie singer being the subject of a couple of the songs). In 2002, he joined the remains of Rage Against The Machine (after the departure of humourless angry-man Zach de la Rocha) to release the first Audioslave album.
My personal theory as to why Cornell made the Bond soundtrack was someone saw Michael Mann’s really rather excellent Miami Vice movie, replete with Audioslave soundtrack, and made the mistake of thinking it appropriate to get Bond “down” in a similar style (luckily not seeing fit to bedeck Daniel Craig with a mullet of Farrell-esque quality).
As for Parkour…it looks really cool when it’s well filmed, but there’s something a bit desparate about the amateur free runners doing backflips outside a Folkestone supermarket and threatening to jump on people’s cars. Less double-0 than ASBO…
Loved the film, was pleasantly surprised by Daniel Craig being great as Bond, liked the edginess and the real-looking stunts and the lesser reliance on gadgetry. Theme music sucked in a big way, as did the opening sequence behind it. Glad however that I’m not a secret agent. Turning up to a poker match and having to ask if the facey cards are good may not have gone down well.