Hacker Cinema
Quantum of Solace
2008 · Film · 106 min
Part of James Bond Collection
Directed by Marc Forster
Betrayed by Vesper, the woman he loved, 007 fights the urge to make his latest mission personal. Pursuing his determination to uncover the truth, Bond and M interrogate Mr. White, who reveals that the organization that blackmailed Vesper is far more complex and dangerous than anyone had imagined.
3 negative10 neutralfrom 13 commenters
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13 comments on Hacker News
What a loser. I probably align more with him than you politically, but I don't go around berating internship candidates about it, it's no way for an adult to behave whatever your politics.
Whenever I have shitty experience like that I always think of the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, there's some part where somebody doesn't deliver and the bad guy loses out, and upon being told he lost something valuable, he says "not as valuable as knowing who to trust". Like you say, it was a bad experience but actually the best possible information you could have gotten.
I used to fly over to the US a couple of times a year for family holidays (from the UK) and almost always went on a 747, the difference in comfort was massive.
We often flew with a small little airline called 'Travel City Direct' who have since been merged into Virgin Atlantic. They leased two 747's from a charter company, one of them was all dolled up in their own livery, the other was just white and a looked super ropey on the outside...but inside it was still night and day a better experience than anything else.
We were fortunate enough to be in the 'bubble' on that one so had a great upstairs view - it was still only economy, but felt more like premium.
I later found out that the blank white plane we flew on so many times ended its days as the white 747 you used to see at Dunsfold - where Top Gear is filmed. Yep, that 747. The one they modified and used in the 007 film Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace to be the Skyfleet S570.
Here's a list I stole from Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-films-have-the-lowest-average-shot-length-ASL
ASL 1.55 - Doomsday (2008) : 4052 shots over 105 minutes
ASL 1.72 - Transporter 3 (2008) : 3360 shots over 96 minutes
ASL 1.73 - Domino (2005) : 4046 shots over 116 minutes
ASL 1.83 - Quantum of Solace (2008) : 3198 shots over 98 minutes
ASL 1.84 - Crank: High Voltage (2009) : 2718 shots over 84 minutes
ASL 1.92 - Transporter 2 (2005) : 2524 shots over 81 minutes
ASL 2.01 - Band of Ninja (1967) : 3424 shots over 114 minutes
ASL 2.01 - Moulin Rouge! (2001) : 3594 shots over 120 minutes
ASL 2.03 - Gamer (2009) : 2502 shots over 84 minutes
ASL 2.03 - The 6th Day (2000) : 3418 shots over 116 minutes
ASL 2.08 - Hot Fuzz (2007) : 3304 shots over 115 minutes
ASL 2.10 - Dark City (1998) : 2982 shots over 104 minutes
ASL 2.15 - Armageddon (1998) : 4025 shots over 145 minutes
ASL 2.17 - The Transporter (2002) : 2420 shots over 87 minutes
ASL 2.17 - The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) : 2910 shots over 105 minutes
They left off the attempted coup d'état of Bolivia by the Quantum organisation to seize control of their water supply in the 22nd Bond Movie, Quantum of Solace (2008).
Arguably this 'event' drew more public attention to the potential of Future Wars over Water than the rest of the list combined.
How did you feel about Skyfall? I'm not a big Bond (or even action movie) fan and I didn't like Quantum of Solace, but Skyfall is one of my favorite films just on cinematography alone. I certainly don't find it to be just a random action movie (or if it is, I need to find which action movies are that visually stunning!)
When was James bond perfect? He gets caught, betrayed, tortured, outsmarted in many movies before Casino Royale. He is deeply flawed as well.
I actually think James Bond doesn't work in a realistic setting. It just becomes a random action movie like what we've seen during the Craig's Era.
I just finished a full rewtch of the 25 movies and it's crazy how enjoyable the "old" ones were compared to the reboot. I remember my wife telling me during Quantum of Solace "I guess now it's more Jason Bourne than James Bond".
In terms of economic plausibility I'd have to go with Dominic Green from Quantum of Solace. He was essentially trying to take control of Bolivia's water supply for economic/political capital. This is the sort of thing that banks and governments are _already_ doing.
I'm not sure if this is a situation where art imitates life or where life imitates art, but either way it was a Bond film that had a bad guy so plausible that it barely seems outrageous and my commentary has me pondering Marx's base and superstructure.
The ESO "hotel" at Paranal is itself a gorgeous building:
http://www.archello.com/en/project/eso-hotel-cerro-paranal-chile
It was used in the James Bond movie "Quantum of Solace".
Isn't this more or less the plot of the 2008 James Bond film "Quantum of Solace"?
> I have the feeling that Craig and Brosnan are just too much.
I know what you mean but I have to say I increasingly hated Brosnan's Bond movies and when he was captured, tortured and then went on in a ridiculous DC-Marvel-esque superhero tech-fight it was over for me - and "Casino Royale" was a MUCH welcome relief after that; really a "back to the roots" but set in a modern world, a modern James Bond with THE classic story. I really liked Daniel Craig's take on the character. Unfortunately then came "Quantum of Solace"; let's hope "Skyfall" will have a better story.
> We don't have to talk about Lazenby and Dalton. Moore and Connery were just perfect.
I could not agree with this more! I never cared much for the movies with Lazenby and Dalton; I hate to say it but they just looked silly.
Thousands overall maybe, but the number of mass market films is in the hundreds.
I, personally, have a familiar definition of "mass market film". I grew up in a small town with about nine total screens, usually one movie per screen and one screen per movie. Figure they turn over 4 screens per week for new releases. That's 208 movies per year. You'd need 3-4 more doublings to get it over 1000, so it's pretty clear that "hundreds" is the better order of magnitude.
I picked a year at random: 2008. The following movies were all released in 2008: The Dark Knight, Wall-E, Iron Man, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, In Bruges, Kung Fu Panda, Gran Torino, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and Quantum of Solace. Your average moviegoer will easily remember more than "one or two" of those (though not necessarily the same ones).
So the proportion goes from two in a thousand to maybe five in 250, or from 1 in 500 to 1 in 50.
> Terms like "artificating" and "juttering" are terms still best known among hardcore tech heads, not moviegoers, and frankly, that's because when most people watch movies, they aren't seeing those "problems."
I suppose they just have to ask my mother "Hey, what did you think of the first minutes of Quantum of Solace?"
The argument for 48fps is a simple one to make: With faster cuts and pans, photographing a scene 24 times a second only gets you so far.
24p was mostly an economical decision - made decades ago. Unlike, for example, digital audio, which is modeled after the maximum detail that the human ear can perceive, 24 fps was simply set at that limit because that's when people stopped noticing the flicker - in movies at that time.
I would say that any change as big as this will take a while for directors to get used to. I don't think it will get quite as ugly as 3D, though, and I'm not sure why people are trying to make this connection. A lot of digital content is already in in frame rates far beyond 24 fps, so we're getting more and more used to this every day. Finally, this new technology is just another tool - now it's up to the directors to use it in a way that entertains audiences.
> And here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.
Hmm. I went to the theatre (first time since a long time as the experience feels antiquated and overpriced) with friends to see Sherlock Holmes, and the opening scene perfectly exemplifies the point: for about ten second you see a shot of the cathedral of Strasbourg. Half of it consists of a CGI explosion. I live there, and to produce this shot, they locked this part of the city for one week.
Ten seconds. One week. A whole team plus equipment. To the other side of the world. Seriously.
When seeing the scene I found that downright shocking, especially given the 10€ hole burning my pocket.
By comparison it takes Turn10 Studios three days[0] locally to gather enough information on a track to subsequently work on for one year. That's a full-length, five kilometer track.
I know this is not the same, and various other things come into play, but I just can't help but have an alarm bell ringing when I see movie production costs. See for yourself (budget in $):
- 2001 and Star Wars: 10 million each - Independence Day: 75 million - Transformers: 150 million - Kill Bill 1+2: 50 million - Jurassic Park: 65 million - King Kong: 200 million - Blues Brothers: 30 million - Fast & Furious: 90 million - The Fellowship of the Ring: 100 million - Harry Potter: ~150 million each - Full Metal Jacket: 15 million - Jarhead: 72 million - Apocalypse Now: 30 million - Black Hawk Down: 90 million - Terminator: 6 million - The Matrix: 60 million - Terminator 2: 100 million - Casino Royale: 100 million - Quantum of Solace: 230 million - Sherlock Holmes: 125 million - The Godfather: 6.5 million
I know those $ do not mean the same across time, but still, you can see going from simple to double produces crap (CS vs QoS), or produces twice the length at arguably the same 'quality' (whatever that means) for a significantly smaller cost (LotR vs HP). I don't see either why F&F costs thrice as much as BB, and almost twice as much as KB.
Bottom line: MAFIAA, please produce non-crap and control your costs instead of blaming piracy.
[0] http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/underthehood4/