Celebrating 50 Years of James Bond on Blu-ray - Page 19

I'm not sure I understand you. I don't think the Lowry company (or whatever they are called now) has ever done a "film restoration" i.e. restoring actual film elements in the photochemical realm. They either scan film and twiddle knobs or they are given a digital master and twiddle knobs.

Just finished watching The Spy Who Loved Me and I am so disappointed at the poor quality of the transfer. It sadly looks no better than the dvd.

What are you talking about? It's a newer transfer than any previous DVD and looks MUCH better. The best thing about it is that all that EE that was present on the DVD's is gone.
http://caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleiche/comparison.php?art=part&x=440&y=347&action=1&image=3&cID=1306&cap1=14875&cap2=15177&lossless=#vergleich
http://caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleiche/comparison.php?art=part&x=440&y=347&action=1&image=3&cID=1306&cap1=14875&cap2=15177&lossless=#vergleich

local walmart already got rid of there standee and all the discs... if you missed it, to bad

I watched You Only Live Twice after TSWLM and the picture quality was much improved. OHMSS was also a better transfer in my opinion. On my set up TSWLM was a let down, even the audio was not well done. Live and Let Die on the other hand was a good transfer. I thought both audio and video were well done.

Hmm, not the most impressive mouse-overs I've seen for a DVD Blu-Ray comparison. A few of the shots are negligeable difference. Spy Who Loved Me is almost the reason I bought the whole collection, so I hope it looks better when I get to watching it with my kids.

Have you actually watched any of it yet gomezfan69? Any good?

Thanks,

Is it April Fool's already?

You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Diamonds Are Forever, and The Spy Who Loved Me look brand-spankin'-fresh-off-the-scanner new.

how come I can not find you only live twice here locally?

It's wonderful to have these older transfers available on Blu-ray - it is a pity, however, that apparently the colorist on You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever was completely schizo and inept. There are shots in each where the color is absolutely correct, but the majority of the color in the three films is a sorry brown ugly mess. It's funny to hear the bellyaching about Night of the Living Dead's new tint, but inept color transfers of these get a complete pass simply because no one has a clue as to what the color should look like and flat-pancake brown skin tones is not it.

On my 120" screen I was disappointed with TSWLM. I think they could have done a better job on the transfer. And for the record this is my favourite Bond movie. It was the first one I saw in the theaters. So I suppose I had high expectations. Yes, I am happy that all are out on Blu.

My understanding is that the Best Buy exclusives aren't releasing until Oct 23.

I have to agree! License To Kill was ahead of it's time. Tim Dalton showed the psychotic side of Bond very well and now so is Daniel Craig. And Dalton had the roughness. And he was dominant with women in the threatening sense. And the villain was amazing. In fact for License, they drew heavily from the novel Casino Royale to show that Bond and the villain were mirror images of each other. Shame Dalton only did two.

I like your thinking. I was gutted when Dalton was not in Goldeneye which was written for him. Pierce Brosnan tried to please the audience too much and made Bond too likeable which is not how Ian Fleming wanted him.

Die Another Day is a perfect example of how the series nose dived. I walked out of the cinema angry after DAD. So much for the fools blaming Dalton when his two films made back more than 5 times there budget. And the promotion of the Dalton Bonds especially License was attrocious.

Dalton did the series proud and I am glad more people are discovering the films. Broccoli made the right choice in casting him and never wanted Dalton to go.
Edited by WarrenD - 10/15/12 at 6:21am

If you hadn't been told this by someone on an internet forum, would you have been able to tell on your own? Discs like Dr. No and From Russia with Love have an extraordinary amount of detail. Are you upset at the principle of the thing, or at the actual visible results?

I guess all the edge ringing and erratic colors on You Only Live Twice didn't bother you?

?

adjusted it's only 104 million...
box office mojo doesn't mention the international markets for The Lving Daylights.

Brosnan's films earned way more, not to mention Craig's.
And I checked randomly From Russia WIth Love, in todays dollars it made 214 million.

With regards to which actor is the "best" James Bond, or for that sake which movie is "better" than the others, there is no true answer. Everybody has their favorite for various reasons. Whether it's the actor that they grew up with who played James Bond, or the first movie that they saw in the canon series. I have read the books, and like all film adaptations of written work, I do not hold any direct associations between them. It is impossible to have a film match up with any written work in the same manner. The written media is completely different from the film media. No matter what, it is impossible to have a film adaptation be a perfect version of a written work. This is just due to the inherent differences between the two of them. (With written work, it generally relies on the readers emotions and interpretations of what is written to get the "point" across. With a film, you have to include the aural score, the sets, the actors, etc. to get the "point" across).

I have never been one to try and say that a certain Bond film is better than another one due to how close to the book the film is, nor have I ever thought that one actor was better than another one as James Bond due to how closely they represented the Bond presented in the novels. I go to watch a Bond movie because I want to see a Bond movie. If I really wanted to read a James Bond book, I would go to my bookshelf and pull one down and read it. Pretty much from the get go with Dr. No, the film version of James Bond has been represented differently than the book version which is perfectly acceptable to me. The novel versions of the James Bond books would, honestly, be nowhere near as enjoyable as the movies have been. Each of the six actors in the Bond films has really brought their own "qualities" to the films that were appropriate for the time. Of course Sean Connery is typically thought of as the "best" James Bond because he was the first. For the older members of the forum here, they were likely the first James Bond actor they saw, so they have judged all other actors based upon him. This can be either intentionally or unintentionally. It's a quirk of the human psyche.

For me, I had seen the occasional James Bond film while growing up, but I never really had a "personal" Bond until I started watching the movies my freshman year of college. (I was born in 1980 so for me, my "Bond" would have likely been Timothy Dalton as Roger Moore was basically done by the time I was old enough to really follow anything). I saw my first James Bond movie the first night of college in 1998 when the college I went to had their freshman orientation night and played "Tomorrow Never Dies" on a big screen in the college green for all the freshman. I have MANY great memories of that night which I can't describe here ( , ) so Pierce Brosnan is the actor that I can call "My James Bond." Goldeneye is one of my favorite movies due to the fact that it was the first Bond movie after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and because of the videogame for the N64 that me and my friends played religiously during my freshman year. That freshman year, a guy down the hall from my dorm room had all of the Bond movies in a VHS collection and I spent an entire weekend watching all of them. I loved each and every movie. Some were better than others (Diamonds Are Forever didn't sit well for me as Connery looked a bit too old for the role and Blofeld was far too different from his portrayal in the other movies, Moonraker was just way too cheesy for me to enjoy and the special effects were pretty danged bad, and View To A Kill was just painful to watch as Roger Moore looked more like a grandfather than James Bond), but each movie still appealed to me.

When DVD came out and was the new fad, I was psyched when all the movies came out on DVD. I just had a computer to watch the movies on (on a 21" Monitor), but I remember buying the first set, and then the second set when it came out. I didn't get into Blu-Ray movies until around 2008 when I got a PS3 and had the custom built speaker set-up and 42" HDTV in my house. (Still have the TV and speakers now, and the speakers mean so much to me as I built them from scratch with the help of my roommate and the sound is amazing from them). When I heard about this "Bond 50" set coming out, I pre-ordered it immediately. I am VERY happy with having all 22 films on Blu-Ray and in my possession. When my little nephew is old enough to watch these, I am going to enjoy watching them with him and getting him into the series. Are some of the movies of lesser quality than others? Yes. That's pretty obvious. But are all of the movies better than what I saw when I first watched them on VHS? Oh hell yeah.

I guess I'm in a position of "ignorance is bliss" in that I don't have a huge screen to watch these on and notice the flaws in the transfers. Unless I'm specifically looking for a flaw, I can't notice any. It's very nice being in that situation, but I can understand the displeasure from those who have massive screens and expensive home theater setups. It's akin to when I was introduced to first class travel on airplanes at my last job. I had only flown a few times in my life and was content with coach on domestic flights. At my previous job, I had to travel out to various places in Europe many times each year. When doing so, they set me up in first class for my international trips. Now that I know what first class travel is like, I will never be able to fly coach anywhere. The difference is just too great. Ignorance truly is bliss and is nothing to be chastised for.

One of the things that kind of bothers me about Blu-Ray reviews and forums such as these is that the displeasure with a lot of the films that are out there aren't really all that noticeable or bothersome on "normal" setups. By "normal", I mean the type of setup that the "common man" will have in their living room in their house or apartment. Not the 80"+ televisions or projector screens with $6,000 receivers and $10,000 plus speaker setups in massive home theater rooms that a great number of people have. I really only read and participate in these forums because I like to discuss film and hear people's opinions about them. It also allows me to see if a particular release is indeed horrific even at the scales that I view movies on.

I have to say that the transfers in these Bond movies look great to me. But again, that's because I have a limited setup to view these on. So I guess that is a plus for me.

That was some thesis!

I'm astonished people are picking at The Spy Who Loved Me - which actually has a beautiful, unmolested transfer. Alright, a bit soft, but no doubt that's just part of the film. I'm thankful there's at least one film in this set that's actually presented as-is rather than suffering the might of the Lowry's patented Scrub-O-Matic.
Edited by DJ Mike TJG - 10/16/12 at 2:26am

Hehe. What can I say? I learned how to type really fast (~126 wpm) so when typing out thoughts on a message board the text just seems to come out really quickly.

When Dalton was playing Bond the budgets for the film were over $30 million. When Brosnan played Bond the production budget was $100 million per film plus they spent a fortune on top for the marketing.

But for a film to break even it needs to take back 3 times it's budget and hence that Dalton's films were proportionally more profitable. And the film studio from Brosnan onwards changed the release dates to the fall. They knew that the takings would be far less in the summer with all the other blockbusters vying for attention in the crowded market.

The morons at MGM threw License To Kill out to go up against Batman which was a mega movie.

Also bear in mind that ticket prices when Brosnan or Craig played Bond were much higher. Also the Brosnan films were released in new territories for the first time like Russia, Poland and other Eastern European countries giving the box office a huge boost.

But take Die Another Day. On paper, it looks like a huge box office success. In today's money $543,639,638. But the budget including marketing was around $200 million. It did not break even until the DVD came out.

The Connery and Moore films also had less competition at the box office hence the bigger takings. Especially when Connery was Bond. They had no competition and were the leaders in the market.
Edited by WarrenD - 10/16/12 at 9:28am

I second that. What I hated about the Brosnan era was how over hyped it was. And Dalton was made the target to make Brosnan look good. But times have changed.


I don't know about you DVDMike, but I think Clive Owen would make a good Bond. He looks like a Connery/Dalton.

Daylights did very well bringing in at the time around $192 million in 1987 money. It was also the first Bond film which saw much fiercer competition at the box office. Cubby Broccoli talks about it in his book When The Snow Melts. He loved Dalton and speaks highly of him for how he changed the perception of the character and constructed him by Ian Fleming's literary version.