Hacker Cinema
The Bond
1918 · Film · short · 9 min
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
A propaganda film created by Charlie Chaplin at his own expense for the Liberty Load Committee to help sell U.S. Liberty Bonds during World War I. The story is a series of sketches humorously illustrating various bonds like the bond of friendship and of marriage and, most important, the Liberty Bond, to K.O. the Kaiser which Charlie does literally.
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35 comments on Hacker News
The thing about boring things is that if they're in your exciting story it might well be because they aren't boring. The actual British spy building next to the river Thames, Vauxhall Cross - looks exactly like the one in the Bond movies, but it's just an office building with higher than usual security. Bond can launch a speedboat to chase bad guys, but actual employees will be sat in a meeting moaning about the catering or the train delays.
Presumably the Arbitrary is just an ordinary contact ship, but Diziet is definitely not an "ordinary" member of contact. She's the one who recruited the guy in Use of Weapons, the one whose name is not actually Zakalwe.
Roger Moore is my favorite James Bond. And so is my 15-year-old son's. Yes, his behavior is old school and wouldn't be tolerated in modern times. So what, he doesn't appear in a movie set in modern times.
This "modernization" of characters is failing in most franchises because it alienates the old viewers without doing much for new ones. It creates Frankensteins that please nobody, typical "by committee" designs.
Instead of changing Bond, Amazon should be trying to create a new Bond that will capture the current generation's imagination like the old Bond did decades ago.
It's Bond. A certain resemblance is necessary. It doesn't suffice to add a few Martinis here, a PPK there, and end with a showdown against a super villain involving tech gadgets. The movie also needs sexism and humor, at least.
Seriously, reinventing Bond while modernizing it but keeping it a Bond movie is challenging. A challenge that people should accept.
Ah, had no idea it had a name!
My clearest memory of that was me as a kid watching a Bond-movie where a sportscar makes a screaching sound when driving down a sandy beach. I turned of the TV and don't think I ever saw a full Bond movie after that.
The list on the page you linked had one thing that isn't toally correct though:
>The very specific (but entirely unrealistic) echoing thud that is heard when all the lights are turned on in a large spacenote .
That sound is realistic if it is an old building with the heavy type of power relays or whatever they are called. They do make that sort of sound if the acoustics are right. They could be set up with timers so they don't start the lights at exactly the same moment to prevent overloading the fuses.
For that, I recommend reading the book House of Bush, House of Saud : The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties [0]. The short answer to your question is: money, oil and corruption. The Vice President's official salary was about 10% of his annual income (from the company he was CEO of) that he still received as VP.
The administration devoted a huge amount of effort into convincing the public (both domestic & foreign) that the House of Saud had nothing to do with 911 and that some other random bad guy just happened to be responsible for it all. Like one of those old Bond movies where the Head Villain looks the the henchling who failed directly in the eyes, then saying "this is what we do to failures, then turns and kills the guy standing next to him.
0 - https://www.amazon.com/House-Bush-Saud-Relationship-Dynasties-dp-1903933625/dp/1903933625/
This whole Nordstream case sounds feels like a James Bond style movie when a random news plays in the background while the protagonist is doing his business and then in two cutscenes we see cities burning.
Watching these movies is definitely fun, but living 1000km from a war zone is somewhat worrisome.
Anyways, I'll move finishing my bug-out-bag higher on my todo list.
I will grant some of what you've said, and so I will take a different tack.
I have not seen a Daniel Craig Bond film that didn't have noticably CGI elements bringing me out of the moment. Some of the old (especially Roger Moore) bond films had pretty dire effects where it is obviously a man in front of a video screen, but I don't remember finding them as immersion breaking at the time.
But, hard to say what is recency bias. I will say that Bourne stands out as having no such issues where CGI was obviously used... but maybe it was done better
Yeah, now we know that nothing in the article happens in the movie! Who wants a Bond movie without sex and deadly airborne diseases? Not me.
I had a conversation with an Israeli guy about smart grids and the iron dome while watching old Bond movies. Highly recommend Big Screen. Eye contact, hand gestures and the occasional air drawing go a long way to connect people.
I suppose I have to agree with you. "Movie Bond" is entertaining on its own, and deserves a fan base... especially for their scripted set action pieces. The actual espionage, intrigue, and interpersonal motivations are barely there though. It's just Bond fighting some incredibly implausible supervillain with some kind of stylish deformity... there's a girl involved, and Bond will usually have a go... rinse and repeat through a dozen movies. You know what? It's a formula that works, and I'm not going to be a hater.
Agree, I think the same thing happened when Disney acquired Fox film studios. Disney is notorious for low pay and alot of the fox execs/creatives were extremely worried after the acquisition, same thing going on with with Amazon/MGM.
I know amazon paid a fortune for Tolkien's Silmarillion TV rights and we haven't seen a single thing about that situation. My big worry is amazon screws around with the Bond franchise and ruins it, it seems to be doing extremely well with top directors and large blockbuster returns.
>The Bond franchise alone probably is worth half of what this deal is gonna cost.
Probably not. MGM doesn't "own" Bond in the same way that Disney owns Star Wars. There are complicating factors to the Bond movies that reduce the brand's value to MGM and any new prospective owner.
You’ve just answered your own question. A huge catalog of classics as well as franchises that can be developed into new shows and movies.
The Bond franchise alone probably is worth half of what this deal is gonna cost.
The biggest IP is Bond and the Broccoli family own 50% of it and have creative control over the movies (and whether or not it can be a tv series).
I imagine that's the complication, you buy MGM but don't really have full control over the crown jewel so to speak.
This is where "get woke go broke" rule kicks in hard. I've watched the last 10 or so Bond movies in cinemas, but I will stop doing it if they choose to desecrate it like that and I'm not the only one.
That's more excuse than argument, to me.
I think that's basically an admission to packaging and marketing a new franchise under the Bond brand.
Anyway, all the Bond movies were campy or felt B-movie-ish to some extent. Each actor did it in a different way, but they all did it. And don't forget that Moonraker exists. Which I love, but come on.
The self-parody wasn't always explicit or obvious, but it was always blatantly there. Running on alligators, breaking the 4th wall, an eyebrow wax as a (racist by today's standards) disguise.
It was always there.
On the flip side, bikes might have a different feel to them if they were the transportation of choice of action heroes. Action stars don't do cool things, they make things cool.
I imagine Aston Martin sales will bump up after the next Bond film gets released. What if Bond got around town in a Bianchi?
> Paypal's crappiness is probably a leading reason 'Satoshi' invented Bitcoin.
The leading candidate for Satoshi is international murdering drug- and arms-dealing, racist, real-life Bond-villain Paul "Solotshi" Calder Le Roux. He of course created E4M and Truecrypt. [1,2] And he likely did so to avoid money laundering rules.
And hey he just told a judge he was looking to get into the Bitcoin business!
“The scope and severity of Mr. Le Roux’s criminal conduct is nothing short of breathtaking. I have before me a man who has engaged in conduct in keeping with the villain in a James Bond movie,” Judge Abrahms said.
"I plan to start a business selling and hosting bitcoin miners." [3]
You love to see it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-international-drug-dealer-maybe/
[3] https://news.bitcoin.com/satoshi-nakamoto-paul-le-roux-start-bitcoin-mining-business/
At first glance, this reads like the sort of horrible thing only a fictional megalomaniac villain would do, say, in a Bond movie.
Stonecipher
Always have an eye on the exit if your new exec sounds like he belongs in the next Bond movie.
The other comprehension gap is that, thanks to Moore's law, these methods can be deployed at scale. Everyone is now a target, 24/7. In the good old days of XXth century and Bond movies, it took a highly paid analyst to target someone personally. Which economically limited the intrusion to a tiny sliver of the population.
> spin-offs and cinematic universes.
I suspect it is about this. TV shows, spin-off movies based on Felix...
But I think that would tarnish the brand. Bond has always been about long-awaited epic movies, not yearly re-hashes of the same stuff.
I've been a hobby photographer for over 40 years. I've also sold my work.
This past weekend I watched the latest James Bond movie. When I was a kid, I used to love those. Not only was Bond invincible and always cool, but he also traveled to the most exotic places.
Watching the movie yesterday? Meh. Not so much. It occurred to me that with all of the photo sharing going on social media, it takes a lot more than a movie star in a panoramic shot to impress me. In fact, lately when I watch movies, I'm guessing the locations they were shot -- simply because I've seen so many other images of the same place.
I feel that images as a way to say something about yourself, like "Hey, I was here!" probably don't work like they used to. I have some friends that will dump 80 pictures of their day at the beach. Wow. Nobody has a day at the beach that is that memorable.
Images as a way to show your feeling at the time? I don't think they're ever going out of style. I'll take 100-200 shots, then find 1 or 2. Then I'll spend some time in post production making the image match the feeling I had looking at the scene. This may or may not be realistic. I find that I rarely can achieve this effect by pushing pre-canned image processing buttons.
It reminds me of my first trip to the Grand Canyon. My wife and I got out of the car and looked. Wow! Big! Really big! So I took some pictures.
Just then a bus pulls up. Scores of other people get out, all with cameras. Big! It's really big! Many more pictures were taken.
I realized that this was total bullshit. If we go home now, we'll just have yet another picture like 7 million other pictures. It means nothing. So we went hiking down below the rim. (We hiked an hour or two down. It was twice that time coming back up.) It was during this hike that I actually had a personal experience of the Grand Canyon. We met the new superintendent, we chatted with other travelers, we noticed how that once you started interacting with the canyon, it left a completely different experience than just looking at a 2D image.
Technology is giving us a lot of little ways to pretend we're "starring in our own reality show", but most of that is just pretend.
Markering, social engineering. Hot or not, learn from it!
Everyone in the marketing business should learn how it's done from such premieres (other examples are Bond, Hobbit, Harry Potter).
I think those strategies would not work with a completely new title. Here you have a series that spans over 2-3 generations and through marketing you can create this illusion that this is an incredible cultural phenomenon, and that everyone is waiting, and that it's a part of the saga, and that without watching it you cannot call yourself a member of the polite society, or a middle class.
Look closely at what kind of arguments are used in the marketing messages. "This episode fits to the style of the other films". Now do reverse engineering on that statement - they took focus groups, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, ask people questions: "what are you most afraid of with the new episode", they say: "that it will spoil the style and mood of the previous movies". Now take 2-3 most repetitive statements and construct the smart message that will cover these problems. This is how it's done.
Another element is that the screenplay is written in such a way, that this episode has to be both - relating to the previous episodes and satisfy the fans, but also has to have a self containing story, that will be understood by those unfamiliar to the series. From the marketing point of view the Star Wars fans are not really the target group, they will go to see it no matter what. The real challenge is to broaden the fan base, attract those uninterested. Make the girlfriends go together with the boyfriends, and parents together with the children. Big bucks rule.
I particularly like the way they insert the information into the news reels. Of course the TV stations are being paid for it and the message is well tailored, but goes seamlessly well with other pieces of news. Very few movies are honored like that.
On a technical level - I think Episode I in 1999 was the last one shot on 35mm film. But actors spent most of the time in the blue box, so the editing deserves applause. Episodes II and III were shot on video making the composition with the CGI much much easier. But this time they went back to shooting on film, natural scenery and models. Interesting development. It's also interesting how they are able to release it on all different formats, 2d, 3d, IMAX etc. all at once (like games on different consoles).
I'm slightly critical from the point of view cinematographic art, but I'm admiring it as a global social engineering masterpiece and a business enterprise.
Not sure if it's just the scripts the new bond films are much more "realistic" and gritty than the more fun and lighthearted older Bonds including those that Pierce played in.
That said however Craig seem to have a much better emotional range than Brosnan, or at least he's a better type cast for the "new" bond.
Brosnan kinda made that cocky can't do anything wrong thong melting bond work. But he would probably not being able to play the new bond judging by his quite poor performances in any of the serious dramas he ever had a role in.
Well, not to put a fine point on it, but Assange was already known as a bit of a dick.
I think the issue was, what was considered rape in Sweden was basically just being a misogynistic douche in other countries.
However, he would have known this well before going into the country, it's not like they created a new law just for him.
I doubt the US is so subtle as to use pirates. People seem to have these grand conspiracies about how the government is like a ninja...it's not.
They will simply send the police around and arrest him. Seriously, why are they going to bother with cloak and daggers for? This isn't a Bond movie. They will simply arrest him, and charge him with espionage charges since...err..that's sort of what he did?
Clearly you've never watched a single Bond movie. The only thing a villain enjoys more than committing a crime, is revealing the intricate plan by which he will get away with it.
Thanks for that link, I guess the days of cutting the brake fluid lines are gone, these days a modern wise guy would just connect up a device to tell the brakes to stop working when the conditions were right (high speed, up coming curve/cliff etc.) I expect to see this in the next Bond film.
There's small problem on how browsers respond, when we change the hash#parameter in the URL and hit ENTER in the sites where DOM is manipulated using AJAX depending on hash-value, like in this site. It doesn't get updated until we hit ENTER for second time in Chrome, reload in Firefox.
I also have a similar site that manipulates DOM depending on hash value. If you are on instamovi.com/#bourne with bourne movies listed...and you change it to instamovi.com/#bond and hit ENTER, there's no change in the DOM. You have to hit ENTER again, then the movie listing changes to Bond movies.
Similar thing happens here on starlogs.net/#repo1 to starlogs.net/#repo2
Any idea how to fix this?
Indian govt, like any other, provides a lot of subsidy to the needed. They have some programs and funds to do this. However, most of the funds don't reach people who need them. Why - too many middlemen, corruption, etc. Through this program they are trying to cut the middlemen or at least hoping to. Most other forms of ids can be faked, these possible in Bond movies but difficult in India.
I friend of mine made some Macromedia Director interfaces for the Bond movies in the 90's. The more ridiculous he made it the more the director loved it. He was required on set to teach the actors what to do and to make last minute changes due to bugs/script changes.
He said it was quite boring but very well paid.
being an assertive jerk
Being a jerk is not a precondition to being an Alpha, it is just a low-brow way to play the mating game. While it works it is crude and unrefined. Kind of what Cutty Sark is to Glenmorangy. While it gets the job done it by no means covers the nuances of refinement, it is an amateur approach at best. If you want to look at an example of what a true Alpha looks like watch a Bond film with Connery. He exemplifies a none wife beater, wearing, Camaro driving Alpha. I mean if you truly break it down is the Camaro, woman beating guy, getting the kind of girl you really want. When one breaks it down past the instant chemical brain pop of hell yes, the answers is no.
Now you don't have to be as swave as Bond but there is something that Connery exhibits well, the kind of guy women want to be around, the kind of guy that is in control, and the kind of guy that can get things done. There is nothing wrong with being this guy, they are really happy people, they don't feel like it is a chore.
The thing to remember is the like beauty the air of being the Alpha is only the ice breaker, it may get you into a 2 month relationship but like all other things it fades, other mental processes take over, things like compatibility become more important, but yes a good deal of women will become dissatisfied if you become a whinny, needy boy (you is meant in general).
The harsh reality though, is that men are more disposable, there are winners and looser and the winner takes all in the mating game. But attractiveness for men is by no means a prerequisite for being a winner.
Games, especially MMO's and Social Gaming exploit their addictiveness to keep people paying them.
Certain TV shows exploit similar addictiveness. CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Trial by Jury . . . all still supplying ~24 new episodes a year during prime time slots. To put it roughly, 9 days worth of programming that is essentially identical. Then there's the more unique (to some degree) procedurals (IE NUMB3RS, Castle, etc. Incidentally, the only procedurals I like, I can't stand the CSI crap as my mind is violently raped by unscience almost every other episode I watch) that appear.
I personally did stop watching TV for a prolonged period, but for no elitist reason as I love TV . . . perhaps too much. However, I'm satisfied watching only the show, so I'm more a DVD person.
Movies, again, strike at this addictiveness with the 'unnecessary sequels' market. It's one thing when a movie plans multiple parts, a la the Borne trilogy. However, then there are the Bond series that maybe only hit a good movie every 3rd or 4th produced, but still take in millions. Then there are the totally unnecessary sequels that appear because the studios dangled hundreds of millions of dollars off an ACME sized mousetrap to bag a producer.
Books similarly can get into this trouble of unnecessary sequels. I believe Agatha Christie inadvertently suffered this problem as her publishers forbid her from killing off Poirot, it took her 40 years for the novel that killed him off to be published.
Ironically, the most addictive TV shows and books appear to be detective dramas. This is easily illustrated by the fact that Mystery/Crime novels is the biggest market in literature, and by the fact there are over 9 procedurals routinely running during prime time slots, year after year for almost a decade.
I enjoy the ridiculously fat pipe at my American university: 90mb/s down, 52mb/s up (actual, not theoretical) [1]. I can download that 4.6GB Bond movie in a little under nine minutes.
Yes, I realize the story is as much about penetration as it is raw speed. But really, once you have felt ~100mbits, it's just painful to hear people talking about 256k as 'Broadband'.
[1]http://www.speedtest.net/result/445903195.png
Sounds a bit like the plot of a Bond movie...a bad Bond movie, sure, but it would have more plot than the last one.
I wonder how they would be able to afford 300 staff for 600 programmers? I know they'd be cheap programmers, but still, add on an extra half a salary (of a chef or cleaner or whatever), plus food costs, making sure the boat doesn't sink etc...it seems like it would end up costing quite a lot.