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Lazenby says it was he who insisted on it.
With all due respect I take a lot of what Laz says with a pinch of salt.
What do we think about the next Bond (post DC I mean)? After Dalts, Brozza and Dan have all just done a standard turn and one handed shoot would we like to see a return of the Laz knee drop or Rog two hander for the next guy just to mix it up a little while still keeping things classic. How about a hat?
Hat would look oddly dated but departure from the rigid one-handed shots would be nice. Some markedly different pose or the use of the second hand would probably be welcome.
At the moment, though, I'm just waiting for a proper, traditional gunbarrel at the beginning that isn't messed up like SP's.
I've long since given up on that. I'll settle for a half decent pose these days. Let's say as a tribute to Rog the next guy goes with two hands and then the guy after goes knee drop? Obviously the hat these days looks ludicrous but by the time we get round to Bond actor number 8 perhaps they will be fashionable again like all these Hoxton twats wandering round with their WG Grace beards?
Also not that I want to see it back now but it would have been a nice touch to have 'Albert R Broccoli's EON Productions Presents' across the dots a la DN for the 50th. But of course nothing could be allowed to get in the way of auteur Mendes's first shot could it.
The one where he looks like Road Runner?
Dalts' pose was a little bit more athletic, he seemed to stop mid-walk as to fire a surprise shot. Great walk and pose I'd say.
Sad, considering the gunbarrel ranks with the Star Wars opening crawl and theme and the Rocky championship belt and fanfare as the great film openings in cinema history. They have a way of setting the audience up with immediate excitement for what's to come.
Count me for the Dalton pose as tops; I dig the confident crouch, he means business and it fits his characterization. Like Laz as well. Moore's second is so glacially slow it wouldn't take anybody by surprise.
I must confess I thought this gunbarrel debate was getting kind of tedious.
But now I see that you can be creative with it and bring the gunbarrel in new places. And I'm convinced now that Turner should be the next James Bond.
It's almost like they've spent too much time trying to spice it up and add some more flair to it, when literally all that needs to be done is slapping it where it belongs. Nothing added, nothing removed, no segue into text, just a classic gunbarrel.
I don't own the ultimate edition DVDs/BDs, but from what I've read, that was probably a mistake by Lowry Digital, the company that handled the new transfers for those editions. The restoration process for this and most other Bond films was done in an automatized way, allowing those problems to slip by undetected.
I too wonder about the blue dots. Perhaps I'm being naive here, but I always thought that was due to some sort of deterioration of the gunbarrel footage they had to reuse from LALD, instead of any deliberate choice.
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I wanted to say one more thing on the subject of the gunbarrel music: in all fairness, it must be said the one-off composers had a better chance of making an impression with their gunbarrel music, precisely because they were one-offs. John Barry scored eleven films! Every composer is both defined and limited by their own musical style, and he was no exception. I wonder what George Martin, Marvin Hamlisch and Bill Conti would've done with another film to score. Would they have followed the new musical trends of the day, or would they have stuck to the same sound as before? It's an interesting question.
Barry clearly changed his overall sound from the 60s to the 80s, though, going from a jazz sound to a symphonic one. The scores, and their respective gunbarrel music, reflect this transition, with The Man with the Golden Gun being the first one to have a more orchestral sound to it, Moonraker being the next step and Octopussy being the culmination.
From the 80s onward, I find Barry was considerably less interested in experimenting with timbres and finding new, distinctive sounds to use, such as that of the cimbalom, the finger cymbals or the synthesizers. Something he said to his agent Richard Kraft, when he was involved with The Incredibles, sheds some light on this matter: he was supposed to write some exciting action music, but he came up with slow, emotional pieces as he often used to in those days. Kraft asked him where was the action music, and he said "he could write that in his sleep, that the real nut to crack was capturing the midlife angst of the superhero dad." It's as if his chief interest was in trying to find even more profound ways of expressing emotions, but without searching for a new sound; just through his compositional style.
Me, too. I must say, had the icon image never been tampered with during the Craig era we probably wouldn't have nearly as many threads devoted to the topic, unless we're just discussing the arrangement of the music each time.
As for the AVTAK zoomed in image, I believe it was some mis-framing. The earlier DVD transfers as well as the old VHS versions all had better framing in the sequence.
I do wonder if Binder possibly cranked the contrast on the graphic for this one, though.
It looks much richer and the background is whiter as opposed to pinkish or an eggshell color. AVTAK has one of my favorite GB's.
Octopussy is the best showcase of Roger as Bond and nobody comes close to playing the larger-than-life take on the character as good as here. As much as Connery is my favorite, the film is littered with moments that I feel only Moore could've sold. Getting stabbed in the chest and having a wad of cash he won from Kamal Khan save his life, the moment with the stuffed sheep's head, sliding down the stair railing while taking out guards and the following reaction when he sees that knob, the whole bit where he learns about the bomb and the following chase where he shreds the car tires driving over the road spikes and takes off after the train is absolutely ridiculous but Moore sells the whole thing perfectly. Even the ending with the clown outfit is tense and very dramatic but I only see Moore pulling the scene off.
After watching the earlier film recently, I realized that some recurring characters were introduced in it, including Gogol & Frederick Gray. Since Hargreaves was there too, it stands to reason that he was promoted to M after Messervy retires, even though he was never explicitly identified as Hargreaves.
Yes, I realize his last name doesn't start with M (unlike Messervy, Mansfield, Mawdsley & Mallory), and that poses a small problem with my theory.
I feel the same way about Marc Lawrence being the same character in DAF/TMWTGG.
One could even conclude that Lenkin (Peter Porteous) was demoted from Orlov's jewellery forger in OP to lowly gasworks attendant in Bratislav in TLD as punishment. Beats Siberia.
But it goes back to the viewer, sure, for how they best enjoy the films.
The rest of the actors gunbarrel performances are all poor imo. Simmon's hop is dumb. Connery looks like he's in danger of falling over. Moore's second one was too slow and cumbersome and when he does shoot you get the sense he might have crapped himself (not sure why they use that one in all the publicity stuff like the EON doc when his first was infinitely better imo). Craig has gotten better each time but he just doesn't seem to be able to get it right, he finally managed a decent pose in SP but he'd already screwed it up by swinging his arms to the point where he showing off his gun during the walk.
In terms of design I like the early Connery ones better than the shimmery later Binder ones. The Brosnan era design was a perfect update. SP had a great design, a sort of stark/clean minimalist take on the original, but they had to screw it up with the blood because everyone involved just seems incapable of not messing it up somehow.
While the gunbarrel debate is going on I have a controversial opinion: the CGI bullet was fine as a one off. It was a stupid, gimmicky addition but it was an instantly attention grabbing surprise that perfectly set the tone for DAD (very stupid but so ridiculous and OTT that it's fun in its own way). Shouldn't ever happen again but for DAD, I think it works and fits the early 2000s extreeemeeee vibe. The perfect dumb, guilty pleasure gunbarrel for a dumb, guilty pleasure film.
My hope is that it's been so long since a proper old school gunbarrel (almost 20 years and if you're very traditionalist and say TWINE doesn't count because of the change in music arrangement, it'd be even longer) that it'd be sort of a novelty in itself, and that EON won't bother with any gimmicks for the next one because a normal gunbarrel woul actually be the fresher option at this point.