Kids of the Suantum of Quolace (and Thanks for All the Fish)

[davidn]

I've got two videos of interest today. The first of them is something that e_to_the_ipi linked me to, a proposed theme song to the upcoming nonsensically-titled Bond film "Quantum of Solace" by Joe Cornish, who for the sake of simplicity I will just describe as a British comedian. It lampshades the madness of the name as well as the differences between this millennium's Bond and the ones that came before it. (I have to say that I don't remember really disliking the new-style Bond when I saw it, and that it was a lot more like a Bond film than the preview made it out to be, but somehow I do miss the ridiculousness - you don't go to a Bond film to see fist fighting, it should be about bald-headed villains with cats launching world-threatening satellites from their undersea volcano).

I was very surprised to find out that the title, keeping with the last one and differing from the last few films before that, does come from an Ian Fleming work - he wrote a short story called "Quantum of Solace" that tangentially featured Bond. According to Wikipedia, "the tale has Bond attending a boring dinner party at the Government House in Nassau with a group of socialites he can't stand", which I can't imagine making things particularly enthralling.

And I was going to take a break from music posts for a while, but this morning I saw Helloween's video for "Kids of the Century" for the first time, and I didn't think that it was possible for them to go any further off the wall than I'd seen them before, but this one beats the lot. There's no way I can describe it here, but watch out for:

• Forks
• Flamingos
• Guitars (flying)
• Eggs (fried)
• Fish (sometimes electric)
• The deployment of all five of the above, together with Michael Kiske's disembodied head, in a psychedelic DDR-background-like montage
• A frankly terrifying double-mouth edit
• The men dressed like the Ninth Doctor with fried eggs over their eyes
• Michael Kiske jamming forks into his face
• Then realizing his microphone's turned into one later on

If you have any idea what it's trying to say, you're doing better than me.

Comments

[lordrosemount.livejournal.com]

Actually it's a remarkable story, and in my view a tremendously fitting title for a Bond film, as I wrote about back in January:

http://lordrosemount.livejournal.com/145418.html

[davidn]

So that's the answer! The odd thing is that I'm sure I read that post when you originally put it up, but somehow then suffered a zero quantum of recall.

I assume, then, that they're going to work that theme in somewhere, even though from what I've read of the Bond books (You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty's Secret Service, if I remember correctly) the only things they share with the films are the titles, and the country of setting if you're lucky.

[lordrosemount.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think the idea is to focus on Bond's feelings of betrayal by Vesper Lynd in the previous film, which leads him to some kind of mini-breakdown. I'm not sure how his apparent sense of guilt for what happened to her exactly fits into the concept, which would imply the death of all such feelings, but then maybe that's exactly the problem - he can't 'get away' from her, because she's dead, and there's no way for him to resolve his feelings satisfactorily.

If I'd been writing the screenplay, I'd definitely have inserted a scene of someone counselling Bond by re-telling a potted version of the Philip Masters story, so as to introduce the concept explicitly and keep the hardcore fans happy. It'll be very interesting to see whether they do that.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

I do wish Adam and Joe would come back. They have to catch up on parodying the new Star Wars movies, if nothing else.

The Helloween video looks like something they'd do if they had a bigger budget...

[davidn]

If that video had a budget of more than about £4.98 I'd be really surprised.