Dixon Carter Lee
Headliner
- Joined
- Nov 22, 1999
- Posts
- 48,681
Saw "Die Another Day", and was impressed. Say what you want about the Bond movies, but they've kept their integrity, and are not coasting on the past. Gone is SMERCH and SPECTRE. The villains now are Media Tycoons and North Korean nationalists. Bond gets the shit beat out of him. His relationship with M is deep. The plots are more complicated than "Mission Impossible". Think how eay it would have have been to just go along blowing shit up. Kudos to the producers for demanding good scripts.
But kudos mostly for the production values, and attention to detail. As absurd as Bond gets (surfing down the tidal wave caused by a calving glacier!) you buy it all because in the background a real world is created. Example: Bond has to meet an old contact in Cuba. The scene could easily have been just shot in an office, but, no, Bond has to first walk through a sweat shop with Cuban women slaving away on sewing machines while a man reads the party newspaper over a microphone -- and none of it had anything to do with the plot, it was only atmosphere. That was an expensive shot, with a lot of set dressing, extras, and research going into it, and it took up about three seconds of screen time. But, and this is what's so impressive, it cemented Bond in a specific time and place that exist in the real (read: "Exotic") world. Do that, put Bond in front of an actual reality, and you are then free to give him an invisible car and make that seem plausible. I appreciate that in a time when Hollywood could give two shits about such subtle nuance in their dramas, much less their action pics.
It's an impressive franchise, well produced, and worth nine bucks. Go see it. Right now. Or I'll have them make another Steven Segal movie.
But kudos mostly for the production values, and attention to detail. As absurd as Bond gets (surfing down the tidal wave caused by a calving glacier!) you buy it all because in the background a real world is created. Example: Bond has to meet an old contact in Cuba. The scene could easily have been just shot in an office, but, no, Bond has to first walk through a sweat shop with Cuban women slaving away on sewing machines while a man reads the party newspaper over a microphone -- and none of it had anything to do with the plot, it was only atmosphere. That was an expensive shot, with a lot of set dressing, extras, and research going into it, and it took up about three seconds of screen time. But, and this is what's so impressive, it cemented Bond in a specific time and place that exist in the real (read: "Exotic") world. Do that, put Bond in front of an actual reality, and you are then free to give him an invisible car and make that seem plausible. I appreciate that in a time when Hollywood could give two shits about such subtle nuance in their dramas, much less their action pics.
It's an impressive franchise, well produced, and worth nine bucks. Go see it. Right now. Or I'll have them make another Steven Segal movie.
