Sep 18, 2009
A Rambling Exchange On Quantum of Solace and Sundry Theories of Bond and Bondness, Part 4
In November and December of 2008, Darren Franich and Eric Freeman engaged in a ridiculously long email exchange about virtually everything related to Quantum of Solace and the James Bond franchise as a whole. That conversation is now reproduced here.
This back-and-forth is part of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” series. To view all “Point-Hyperpoint” entries, visit this page. To read all “Point-Hyperpoint” posts on James Bond, please click here.
[18 Days pass]
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ERIC
Christmas Eve | 10:35 PM
I’m watching Die Another Day. It’s incredible, although I do think a lot of that is because Bond is good again.
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DARREN
Christmas Day | 12:26 AM
It’s true, there’s some nice reflective glow backward, especially since the Craig Bonds weren’t just better, but the precise opposite in every conceivable way. Like, imagine if they’d gone in an even slightly different direction and cast James McAvoy as a youthful Brosnan/Moore type of Bond — in that world, Die Another Day would look like Fellini’s imperial Rome, total decadence right before the final destruction.
I got my brother and his girlfriend the complete Bond DVDs for Christmas, so perhaps now I’ll roll back to Goldeneye and see if I was too hard on it.
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ERIC
Christmas Day | 12:34 AM
Yeah, I think I realized it right around the time Transracial Korean and Bond had their giant fencing duel for no reason. Or maybe it was when Halle Berry and Brosnan first meet and hold a conversation constituted entirely by sexual innuendo.
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DARREN
Christmas Day | 2:07 AM
What about when Berry and Brosnan apparently have sex covered in diamonds? Paul Verhoeven couldn’t make this up.
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ERIC
Christmas Day | 12:39 PM
Yeah, it was a fitting end to a day of crap. I also watched Tomb Raider and the second Pirates (and Burn After Reading, but that was actually good). God bless Jewish Christmas.
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DARREN
Boxing Day | 2:25 AM
We just watched For Your Eyes Only. Two observations.
First, this movie is basically a premake of Quantum of Solace. Consider: the main Bond girl is one kind of foreign girl playing another kind of half-breed foreign girl, both of them seeking Batman-style vengeance for the death of their murdered parents; there’s a lengthy car chase scene going down a windy road, during which cars occasionally flip down from one part of the road to another; the pre-credits sequence features Bond dispatching a villain from a previous movie; Bond ends up partnering with a semi-nice former villain with huge facial hair; and whenever non-British politicians are shown onscreen (Russians in For Your Eyes Only; Americans on Quantum of Solace) they’re invariably incredibly corrupt drunks.
Second, the Roger Moore Bonds feel a lot like lengthy vacations with nifty “adventure” opportunities. For Your Eyes Only is basically a portrayal of how awesome you would be if you were to ski in the Dolomites and swim in the Ionian Sea.
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ERIC
December 29 | 10:59 AM
The Moore point is exactly right, and it’s perfectly captured in his skiing. I imagine you know that he did his own stunts, and the look of them is that of a guy who is just good enough to be an awesome skier, but not good enough to be a stunt skier. So the scenes always look like a vacation that happened to be interrupted by dudes with guns.
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DARREN
December 29 | 12:50 PM
I didn’t know that Moore did his own stunts; that does explain quite a bit. For some reason, I’d always placed For Your Eyes Only in the early-Moore ‘70s pantheon, but when I found out that it was actually released in 1980, everything about it suddenly made sense. Like, there’s just enough about it that’s cheesy in an ‘80s way (the opening title sequence which is the only one to actually feature the Bond singer, all the underwater photography, figure skating) that all the weird ‘70s tropes (including the sub-Jaws shark scene and Moore himself) feel kind of sad. Throw in the totally random Soviet subplot — a bald Kruschev-looking guy appears twice and does nothing — and this movie really feels like the beginning of the Lost Years, villain-wise.
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ERIC
December 29 | 12:55 PM
The song in the title sequence of For Your Eyes Only is probably my least favorite of all the songs.
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DARREN
December 29 | 12:58 PM
I think my favorite themes are “You Only Live Twice,” “Licence to Kill,” and “The World is Not Enough,” although at times in my life I was happy with the Shirley Bassey trilogy of “Diamonds are Forever,” “Moonraker,” and “Goldfinger.”
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ERIC
December 29 | 1:29 PM
The one in Quantum of Solace was pretty blah, I thought. Alicia Keys’s voice is not good enough at loud volumes for a Bond theme, and it was pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a Jack White Bond theme.
Some of my favorites: “Diamonds Are Forever” (duh), “Goldfinger” (duh), “Live and Let Die” (retroactively aided by the GNR cover, which was one of my favorite songs when I was eight years old), “View to a Kill” (just perfect for a Bond movie with Christopher Walken and Grace Jones as villains), “Thunderball” (Tom Jones, and it is entirely nonsensical — what does it mean to “strike like thunderball”?), “The Living Daylights” (I actually think this song is really good on its own), “Goldeneye” (important to think of context — Turner sounds enough like Bassey that it basically announces a return to Bond goodness, plus it’s kind of hilarious that it was written by Bono and The Edge).
Least favorite: “Tomorrow Never Dies” (how did someone decide Sheryl Crow should do a Bond theme?), “Nobody Does It Better” (this should never have been associated with a Bond theme — there’s a reason it’s been coopted by commercials), Chris Cornell (I don’t even know what the song’s called, but it was easily the worst thing about Casino Royale).
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DARREN
December 30 | 3:26 PM
Chris Cornell’s song was “You Know My Name,” and it was utterly unmemorable, much like “Another Way To Die,” the theme from Quantum of Solace. This is going to get abstract, but I think that “Another Way to Die” is unmemorable in a good way — it scarcely even feels like a song, much less a Bond song, because there’s no hook, because it had the expected Jack White minimalism without the hoped-for Jack White maximalism (the way he can turn a guitar, a drum set, and a squeaky loud voice into a Greek chorus), and it was sung by Alicia Keys, who is neither past her prime (like Tina Turner) nor in her prime (like Shirley Bassey). Really, “Another Way to Die“ is Quantum of Solace in music form — it’s restrained, it’s quiet, it’s dark, it’s weird, and it’s so anti-itself that it trails off into ellipses.
I think I basically agree with you about the songs — honestly, I think it has to be rare for any kind of Moore/Connery rift to occur with the songs, because it’s always pretty obvious which are good and bad. However, I do have to point out that “The Man With the Golden Gun” is probably the coolest Bond song ever, and even more impressive because it’s from the Goldfinger/Thunderball/Moonraker school of concretely describing someone or something from inside the movie (unlike pretty much every song from Tomorrow Never Dies on, which are really just abstract riffs on Bondishness).
Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill” is so good that it basically makes the movie singularly worth watching, which I’m not sure is true of any other Bond theme. (Golden Gun doesn’t count, because it’s a wholly watchable train wreck — there’s a midget with a gun, lots of zonky ‘70s imagery, and, if memory serves, a mysterious island.) I can’t stand “We Have All the Time in the World,” the song from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but John Barry’s orchestral theme from the same movie is so badass that basically every line of Bond music since has imitated it.
Not to return to a constant predilection of mine, but I totally fucking love Madonna’s theme from Die Another Day. What’s key to its success is that it totally sounds like a Madonna song about Bond, not a Bond song which happens to be sung by Madonna. It’s weird to me that all of the singers starting with Tina Turner have been pretty big names (okay, Garbage was a little bit old; and Cornell is more of a rock cockroach than an actual artist), but when they record their song, they seem to forcefully amputate themselves from the song. Like, listen, I generally hate Sheryl Crow, but “Tomorrow Never Dies” is a downer because it sounds nothing at all like her best music — it sounds like she’s trying to imitate Shirley Bassey. It’s almost as if these artists get so caught up in their assignment — we must write a Bond Song.
Of course, it also helps that Madonna, in addition to being a consummate performer, is the knowing creator of one of the great cults of personality of the modern era. This might be another reason why, besides hers and Tina Turner’s, most of the modern Bond themes are so lame — it’s smart people trying to write good music, rather than music gods worshipping a movie god. I badly wish that Amy Winehouse could have pulled it together long enough to record her Bond song, because I’m sure she could have brought some genuine Bassey- (or at least Easton-) level gloss back to the themes.
This is a loose tangent, but what did you think about the opening credits sequence to Quantum of Solace? With all the sand, and the canyons, and other weird shit? I had no clue what it all meant — we’re miles from naked chicks painted in gold or swimming in silhouette — but in hindsight, it was actually pretty nifty.
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ERIC
December 30 | 6:42 PM
I actually mostly forget the credits to Quantum of Solace, but I am generally a fan of sand dunes.
The Die Another Day opening is fantastic for several reasons. First, you get the song exactly right— it’s a Madonna song made for a Bond movie — not a Bond song made by Madonna. The entirely thing fits the movie perfectly — everything is the product of an excess of money. It just sounds expensive.
The credits sequence is also suitably ludicrous. It’s all about scorpions, but only because the credits fill the narrative time during which Bond is tortured, ostensibly with scorpions, although you have to deduce that from the credits, because there are no scorpions in the pre-credits sequence. So it’s also fair to assume that scorpions will show up again at some point in the movie, except that they don’t, and it eventually becomes clear that they only put scorpions in the credits because someone decided scorpions were cool.
And isn’t that really the whole point?