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Thanks ;)
Better than DAD and some better than TND. None of the Bourne or MI films beat TWINE or GE imo.
And you said they were making Brosnans films look old hat. Bourne wasn't even out and Mission Impossible is just as OTT, so you were wrong there.
Mission Impossible came out the year after Goldeneye, and was NOT a better or more exciting film anyway, the second one came out in between TWINE & DAD and was just a little more realistic than DAD...
Bourne started the same year as DAD, but then just about anything was better than DAD anyway.
But back on point, I always feel there is a danger when squaring movies off against one another, whehter it be TWINE aginst Bourne or even other Bond films. Films should really be judged on their creditals alone and stacking them against one another seems like a rather arbitrary process.
And that's the Bond of the movies; the Bond of the Fleming books never was shown to be working at cross purposes to his government/organization.
Couldn't put it any fairer than that, although I disagree about the Submarine finale - which I personally felt lacked any real "punch".
That's not the same as not supporting his country... just sayin'.
Jason Bourne wants nothing more than to get out; James Bond "never left".
What about when his parachute opened and it was a flag of... oh, wrong movie, never mind.
- "Who's that?
- "The next girl."
"No more foreplay"
"You first...you second."
"The thought had occurred to me." - Sexist Bond...YES! Fleming to a T.
"I gave him the limp."
- "Only three men, I know use such a gun...I believe I killed two of them."
- Lucky me.
Come ooooon, that's f***ing brilliant!
I think you have to remember that all of these movies belong to the time in which they were made. People will turn more of a blind eye to Roger because that was the 70's and that's what Bond was back then. In the same way you can't really compare 90's Bond to 00's Bond...both very different things.
You have to remember Brozza had all the 'Best Bond Ever' press in his day. It's just when something as ground shakingly classic as CR comes along, it's hard not to see what came before as infinitely inferior.
Brosnan was the definitive 90's Bond. That was the style they were going for then and he did a damn good job. If you made CR with Brosnan in the role it would have to have been a very different movie.
=D>
I think we're seeing the Bourne 'legacy' (as it were) being played out in the Bond movies still. The issues that arise in SF are very Bourne-esque. We have agents being trained up and cast adrift when they start to malfunction (Silva) and a lot more of the control-room antics that I associate with Bourne.
Bond himself though is quite a long way from Bourne. Although Bond's superiors in SF are shown to be incompetent and arguably morally compromised, Bond sticks by them. He is shown to be the ultimate unthinking loyalist who does not challenge authority even when the cause that he is fighting for is morally conflicted. In SF neither does he show any of the sympathy for others that Bourne shows. Bond is a professional killer who has ceased to show an emotional response to what he does. This is a marked shift from CR and QoS and is an indication that he is becoming hardened and less and less sentimental about his work.
However, although Bond and Bourne are very different, I think that taken on a purely cinematic level (direction, acting, scripts, production design, music) the original 3 Bourne movies are superior on almost every front to anything EON has produced in a very long time.
I would agree with you between 1995 and 2002 but since 2006 I think Bond has been artistically top knotch especially acting and direction.
Can you realy watch the Shanghai neon scenes or Bonds entrance to the casino and not say the recent films aren't artistically superior to the opposition?
I find GE notoriously flat. Theres no depth to it. Its as shallow as a puddle.
I think CR and QoS and visually pretty good too. I personally just think that as a coherent trilogy they top the Craig era. That's just my personal view. I rate Craig but he's never going to beat Sean, Rog or Tim in my rankings, so there's always a limit to how much I'm probably going to enjoy his films.
I'm afraid I'm also one of those miserabilists who just doesn't 'get' SF. I can see that the film looks good but for my personal tastes I prefer the look and feel of the Bourne films. I'm not a fan of Gassner's production designs at all. I think the fact that I knew the neon scenes were shot in the studio reduced the impact for me. Also the exterior of those buildings was shot just next to the Broadgate office development in London, which also took me out of the movie. That's not Deakin's fault obviously. I do wish they'd done more location shooting in Shanghai though. SF just feels studio bound to me. Again though, that's probably because I followed production too closely and also knew that a lot of the China Sea and Scotland locations were shot elsewhere.
I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to cinematography. Script, cast, production design and music are all more important to me. Sometimes if a film looks 'too' glossy I find it distracting. Occassionally I'm blown away by the camera work - Tarkovsky's Stalker is one of my top ten favourite films - but it has to be subserviant to the story the film is telling. I often feel that Hollywood films look incredible but are utter rubbish. I feel a bit like that about SF. Okay, it looks good, but I don't like the film, so what does it matter?
Agree with you on that!
OHMSS and CR aside...what would you call a 'deep' Bond film?
Strangely that impresses me more. To find out that they achieved such good shots and they wern't even in Shanghai at times increases my appreciation of the people behind the camera.
Compare that with GE where you could tell it was Leavesden industrial estate trying to be Russia.
Any of the films where there is human drama.
Spy is mainly flash, bang, wallops but the Anya's revenge on Bond after kills her lover adds another dimension to the film. Anyone where the characters are abit more rounded and you can invest in them abit more.
GE is very linear. Goes to Monte Carlo, goes to Russia, goes to Cuba.
In movies like the Bond series, human drama is sometimes where you find it- that is, it's generally not put in your face. I found the "we're both orphans" line to be surprisingly moving, and having to fight someone to the death that you counted as a friend a decade back is a hell of a thing in my book.
I think it's unfair to compare with GE - you're setting the bar too low! ;)
I agree though that generally the production values have definitely moved up a notch or two in the Craig era. I find Gassner unoriginal but his sets are serviceable. I didn't like Lamont's work much either up until CR, which I thought looked pretty good.
The look of Skyfall lodge bugs me. To me it doesn't look very Scottish. It looks like a bit like the Adams Family house or a stereotypical spooky old mansion. I had thought that SF was going to make fantastic use of the Scottish landscape, but what we got was dreary. I think the original plan was to use a real and rather beautiful baronial manor house on the coast but they ditched it quite late in the day. I compare SF with The Queen, in which the Scottish landscape became almost a character in the film. For Helen Mirren's Liz II, Balmoral and its estates were a place a refuge and the sweeping shots of the deer hunt are stunning. I had pictured Silva's men making their assault across similarly alluring hills and moorland but got nothing like that. Obviously Skyfall is no sanctuary for Bond but I had hoped for more in the way of visual lushness. I found the final sequences pretty weak to be honest, good cinematography or not.
So being double crossed by a former friend isn't human drama? Surely that's a lot more deep than XXX trying to avenge her murdered lover, then simply changing her mind because Bond is too charming?
Even though he apparently loves the serious films and hates it when Bond becomes a "cartoon character", the only OTT films @actonsteve seems not to like are Brosnans.
Poor old Brozza. It's not his fault he starred in such gut-wrenchingly awful trash.
Ahhhh I see...it's one of those is it?