TMC
2013-03-03 02:01:39 UTC
http://xandermarkham.blogspot.com/2012/10/james-bond-world-is-not-enough-die-another-day.html
Lee Tamahori is the worst human being to ever be involved with the
Bond series. Kevin McClory may pip him, since his persistent legal
action was the last nail in Ian Fleming's coffin, but he got a
producer credit on Thunderball without actually working on the movie,
so I'm not counting him. Tamahori, though, was involved with every
terrible decision that went into the Die Another Day debacle.
What he must have done to convince the Broccolis to hire him beggars
belief, and not just because he was arrested four years later for
offering oral sex to an undercover policeman while dressed in drag.
The man clearly had zero knowledge of the series or respect for what
made it work. For one thing, the intensely idiotic 'codename theory',
postulating that every Bond until that point had been playing a
different character under an assumed 'Bond' name, originates from him.
Never mind that it was debunked by the interviewer in THE SAME
CONVERSATION as Tamahori proposed it, the idea has lingered like a bad
smell around the series ever since, tediously repeated over and over
by people who might have seen one or two Bonds and want to feel clever
and controversial. No. Bond continuity is messy, but it's patently
obvious that everyone until Daniel Craig's reboot was playing the same
man, often made clear through references to previous adventures or,
most commonly, the loss of Tracy Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret
Service. Even the most cursory observer can only arrive at the
conclusion that Tamahori's theory is guff. Even this movie's recall of
gadgets from the classic movies and Brosnan's immediate familiarity
with them, suggests it doesn't even make sense within the director's
own work.
Tamahori's love of CGI and push for its inclusion in a series
acclaimed for the authenticity of its stunts further demonstrates his
tragic misunderstanding of what has made Bond tick over the preceding
forty years. In promotional interviews, the director boasted about a
CG-created scene so realistic no-one would be able to tell it apart
from the live action. This boast was similar to one made by the
Wachowski brothers (as they were then) a year later for The Matrix
Reloaded, and even with a much bigger budget and more advanced
technology, they couldn't pull it off. Needless to say, the scene
Tamahori was referring to has gone down in Bond lore as one of the
series worst - and yes, that includes the double-taking pigeon in
Moonraker - not only for the sub-video game standard of the CGI work
in question, but the staggering idiocy of expecting audiences to buy
into Bondkite kite-surfing a tsunami. In the outstanding recent
documentary Everything Or Nothing, even Pierce Brosnan cracks up at
the stupidity of what he was asked to do. The addition of a bullet to
the gunbarrel sequence isn't quite as bad - better than not having one
at all, EH SKYFALL - but is a needless, meaningless addition which
doesn't make the slightest bit of sense in any context.
It's not entirely fair to put all the blame on Tamahori, despite his
being culpable for most of the worst crimes - urgh, all that slow-
motion! Writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, inexplicably still on EON
staff, deserve to take a significant chunk of the blame for a
screenplay overflowing with painful dialogue, loathsome characters,
'virtual reality' (oh, Moneypenny...), and a superweapon imported
wholesale from Diamonds Are Forever. What's worse is that the story
can be loosely interpreted as a bastardisation of Fleming's Moonraker
novel, in which a foreign villain poses as a British national hero and
intends to use a space-based weapon to redraw the political landscape.
http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000075/flat/211375529?p=1
Lee Tamahori is the worst human being to ever be involved with the
Bond series. Kevin McClory may pip him, since his persistent legal
action was the last nail in Ian Fleming's coffin, but he got a
producer credit on Thunderball without actually working on the movie,
so I'm not counting him. Tamahori, though, was involved with every
terrible decision that went into the Die Another Day debacle.
What he must have done to convince the Broccolis to hire him beggars
belief, and not just because he was arrested four years later for
offering oral sex to an undercover policeman while dressed in drag.
The man clearly had zero knowledge of the series or respect for what
made it work. For one thing, the intensely idiotic 'codename theory',
postulating that every Bond until that point had been playing a
different character under an assumed 'Bond' name, originates from him.
Never mind that it was debunked by the interviewer in THE SAME
CONVERSATION as Tamahori proposed it, the idea has lingered like a bad
smell around the series ever since, tediously repeated over and over
by people who might have seen one or two Bonds and want to feel clever
and controversial. No. Bond continuity is messy, but it's patently
obvious that everyone until Daniel Craig's reboot was playing the same
man, often made clear through references to previous adventures or,
most commonly, the loss of Tracy Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret
Service. Even the most cursory observer can only arrive at the
conclusion that Tamahori's theory is guff. Even this movie's recall of
gadgets from the classic movies and Brosnan's immediate familiarity
with them, suggests it doesn't even make sense within the director's
own work.
Tamahori's love of CGI and push for its inclusion in a series
acclaimed for the authenticity of its stunts further demonstrates his
tragic misunderstanding of what has made Bond tick over the preceding
forty years. In promotional interviews, the director boasted about a
CG-created scene so realistic no-one would be able to tell it apart
from the live action. This boast was similar to one made by the
Wachowski brothers (as they were then) a year later for The Matrix
Reloaded, and even with a much bigger budget and more advanced
technology, they couldn't pull it off. Needless to say, the scene
Tamahori was referring to has gone down in Bond lore as one of the
series worst - and yes, that includes the double-taking pigeon in
Moonraker - not only for the sub-video game standard of the CGI work
in question, but the staggering idiocy of expecting audiences to buy
into Bondkite kite-surfing a tsunami. In the outstanding recent
documentary Everything Or Nothing, even Pierce Brosnan cracks up at
the stupidity of what he was asked to do. The addition of a bullet to
the gunbarrel sequence isn't quite as bad - better than not having one
at all, EH SKYFALL - but is a needless, meaningless addition which
doesn't make the slightest bit of sense in any context.
It's not entirely fair to put all the blame on Tamahori, despite his
being culpable for most of the worst crimes - urgh, all that slow-
motion! Writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, inexplicably still on EON
staff, deserve to take a significant chunk of the blame for a
screenplay overflowing with painful dialogue, loathsome characters,
'virtual reality' (oh, Moneypenny...), and a superweapon imported
wholesale from Diamonds Are Forever. What's worse is that the story
can be loosely interpreted as a bastardisation of Fleming's Moonraker
novel, in which a foreign villain poses as a British national hero and
intends to use a space-based weapon to redraw the political landscape.
http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000075/flat/211375529?p=1