46 replies to this topic

[Miles Miservy]

I wonder why the Sheryl Crow title track was not utilized in other parts of the film's score.

Going back to TLD & LTK, we saw the introduction of (I don't know what you'd call them... alternate movie themes? = Pretenders, Patti LaBelle, etc.)

The song used during the title sequence is awesome (one of the better of David Arnold's). The other song (Surrender, by KD Lang), not so much.

[Binyamin]

Wasn't Crow brought in at the last minute, perhaps AFTER the score had been composed?

And I have to disagree with you M.... Surrender is a much better theme for a Bond film.

[talos7]

Now that you mention it, it does sound a bit like the Perry Mason theme I've always liked this song except for Crows vocals. They are thin, strained and flat. I would love so hear it done by Christina Aguilera or someone else with a more powerful voice

[iBond]

Now that you mention it, it does sound a bit like the Perry Mason theme

Hahaha yes!

[Mr_Wint]

The song used during the title sequence is awesome (one of the better of David Arnold's).

David Arnold was not involved with Sheryl Crow's song. Surrender was *his* title song for the movie. Hence, that's why the action theme and other themes from the score comes togheter in Surrender. I think it adds so much more when the title song is integrated into the film score and it was big mistake to not use Surrender. But it seems like they care more about the chart positions these days.

I felt that Crow's song was really crap back then, but now, after Madonna's DAD and Another Way To Die, it is pretty decent after all.

[Binyamin]

Which of the themes in the past two decades have charted even REMOTELY well? Seems like a very silly reason to cut an excellent song...

[Binyamin]

Which of the themes in the past two decades have charted even REMOTELY well? Seems like a very silly reason to cut an excellent song...

DIE ANOTHER DAY went #1 in the United States.

Really? When it was released I heard it on the radio a total of ONCE in the United States. Didn't realize it did that well.

[Miles Miservy]

Which of the themes in the past two decades have charted even REMOTELY well? Seems like a very silly reason to cut an excellent song...

DIE ANOTHER DAY went #1 in the United States.

Really? When it was released I heard it on the radio a total of ONCE in the United States. Didn't realize it did that well.

Die Another Day is the absolute WORST of all 007's title tracks; synthetic. over-produced, just plain CRAP. Honestly, of the Pierce Brosnan films, I think Bono & The Edge hit it out of the park w/Goldeneye and the other 3 just steadily declined.

[marktmurphy]

I think Crow's song is more interesting and original than Surrender. The Surrender tune works nicely in the incidental music, however.

I'd agree that TWINE was an even duller song than Surrender; I don't really blame the producers for letting Madonna do her own thing on the next one.
I did find it interesting that Another Way to Die features lightly in Arnold's Quantum of Solace score, though- the first time he's used someone else's theme song in his Bond score (if you don't count all the bits of Mr Barry he's used! ).
After all, it's not as if Mr Barry himself was too grand to incorporate someone else's theme song in his first Bond score!

[00 Brosnan]

I think Sheryl Crow's "Tomorrow Never Dies" is the best title song of the Brosnan era with Garbage's "The World is Not Enough" coming in second. Madonna's "Die Another Day" is by far the worst.

I feel as though "Surrender" is one of the best tracks in the entire series and it should have definitely been used as the title song.

[DaveBond21]

It was a similar situation with QOS, where Shirley Bassey’s No good about goodbye features more heavily than the title track, and doesn’t even appear in its own right.

[jaguar007]

Personally I think Surrender is the best song to come out of the Brosnan era, I really wish it had been the main theme.

[S K Y F A L L]

Does anyone know why some threads like this one are not in the Pierce Brosnan section? I'm just curious is all.

[seawolfnyy]

Surrender should have been the title song to TND, which is far better than the crap offering by Sheryl Crow. I still somewhat believe that it was moved at the last minute because the producers didn't want a gay singer to be the lead (right or wrong that's my opinion). TWINE is the second best from the Brosnan era, I think Shirley Manson does a fantastic job on the vocals. As for DAD, I believe it peaked at 8 in the US for whatever reason. I was also never a fan of Goldeneye. I would say the 3rd best from the Brsonan era was actually Mya's Everything or Nothing from the game. It was in the same vain as DAD, but done far better.

[marktmurphy]

Surrender should have been the title song to TND, which is far better than the crap offering by Sheryl Crow. I still somewhat believe that it was moved at the last minute because the producers didn't want a gay singer to be the lead (right or wrong that's my opinion).

Where did you get that idea from?!

[JimmyBond]

Does anyone know why some threads like this one are not in the Pierce Brosnan section? I'm just curious is all.

Was it really necessary to ressurect this thread after a year of inactivity to ask that?

[S K Y F A L L]

Does anyone know why some threads like this one are not in the Pierce Brosnan section? I'm just curious is all.

Was it really necessary to ressurect this thread after a year of inactivity to ask that?

YUP.

[Odd Jobbies]

I wonder why the Sheryl Crow title track was not utilized in other parts of the film's score.

Going back to TLD & LTK, we saw the introduction of (I don't know what you'd call them... alternate movie themes? = Pretenders, Patti LaBelle, etc.)

The song used during the title sequence is awesome (one of the better of David Arnold's). The other song (Surrender, by KD Lang), not so much.

When it was first released i didn't care much for Crow's song, far preferring KD Lang's.

However, i've about-turned in the years since and i now think Crow's is one of the best in the series!

It's highly original in it's melancholy, hitting the perfect note for the character of Bond. In fact it suits Fleming's Bond more than any other theme in the series (Ok, it's up there with LALD, but slightly edging out FRWL in terms of their 'Fleming-ness').

The composition and melody of the versus are better than the chorus - the verse lyrics being really superb, simple writing (simple in their delivery, not their conception).

If only the film's title had remained Tomorrow Never LIES, instead of the typo'd DIES, it would've been far cleverer and more poignant a sentiment for the song and the movie (so long as it didn't mean keeping Pulp's poor effort Tomorrow Never Lies as the theme instead).

While i'm ranting away here, anyone other than Teri Hatcher would've been an improvement, marring a movie that otherwise gets better with age. She was directed well in the party scene introduction to her character - a little cold and bitter - no batting eyelashes or exaggerated pouting etc. But sadly her acting chops just weren't quite up to the more serious scenes.

To compound this problem, and set the scene for a 'perfect storm', Pierce has his strengths, but can tend to come across a little cheesy when he is allowed to really go for the melodrama (whereas he's superb at irony and pathos, as with Dr Kauffman and Alec Travellian).

The offending scene is the bedroom scene, more in keeping with US aspirational soap opera about spoilt rich people than a Bond movie. So take Hatcher's tv soap opera-esque acting chops which are well suited to an episode of Dynasty and put that with Brosnan's weakness for melodrama (which also wouldn't be out of place in Dynasty) and it's a recipe for cringe worthy cheesorama.

Less cheese, more restraint in the script and direction might've helped, as these factors too seemed to think it was Mills'n Boon, not Bond, and perhaps this key central scene of the fist act might not of tanked so badly into embarrassing melodrama.

Oh, Poor Brossa. He had the great Goldeneye to lull him into imagining that his Bond movies may be among the best of all time. How he was let down and suffered horribly in the broad, "done a script course in Hollywood 3 act structure..." writers, no, hacks, he was left to after the brave and innovative GE from Bruce Feirstein. And in the subsequent efforts, never more painfully visible was the copycat framework upon which the story and character were thinly painted than in the 3rd act of these three Brossa movies....

In the final reels of TND, TWINE & DAD the drama is sacrificed wholesale for the action and explosions. I know this is the basic format of Bond/action movies, but what separates the good from the bad is when some balance is struck between character, story and action.

In FRWL, GF, LALD, GE and CR, we still feel it's about the choices Bond makes, as influenced by the story so far and the character the actor has built, rather than a stock-footage action set-piece in which Bond become a puppet that the script & director shove from one beat to the next, like painting-by-numbers; "...This is where Bond always does this, and that's where Bond always does that....".

It's mainly a script issue - there's only so much a director can do to rescue a script lacking in intimacy (or basically 'moments') with your lead character. It certainly can't be blamed on the acting chops of the lead, since one of the best final reels of an action movie is Predator, and that's not down to Arnies acting skills... The finale is Dutch's finale, not a mechanical Predator: The Movie finale.... It's clever!!!

It's about a script that build's a character and ultimately uses what we've learnt about the character to motivate the final reel and his victory. It's in these eureka moments when Bond takes control, rather than being the action's puppet that the Bond Theme cue's in and not simply when the shooting/explosions begin.

A great recent example of this issue is The Amazing Spider-Man.... In the finale he becomes a puppet catapulted around by the script trying to be bigger than the character and sadly it succeeds. Like the Bond theme, the spidey theme should've kicked in when he paused, then took a run up and did the swinging from crane to crane sequence. But instead we got escalating action-music instead of cool Spidey music. So Spidey was never really Spidey.

Sorry i'm diverting slightly from my issue with poor final reels, but at least i ending back almost on topic with music

Edited by Odd Jobbies, 26 August 2012 - 12:37 PM.

[marktmurphy]

When it was first released i didn't care much for Crow's song, far preferring KD Lang's.

However, i've about-turned in the years since and i now think Crow's is one of the best in the series!

It's highly original in it's melancholy, hitting the perfect note for the character of Bond. In fact it suits Fleming's Bond more than any other theme in the series (Ok, it's up there with LALD, but slightly edging out FRWL in terms of their 'Fleming-ness').

It's certainly fresher and more original than Surrender. Surrender's fun, but it's just another Bond song pasiche, really.

[Miles Miservy]

I wonder why the Sheryl Crow title track was not utilized in other parts of the film's score.

Going back to TLD & LTK, we saw the introduction of (I don't know what you'd call them... alternate movie themes? = Pretenders, Patti LaBelle, etc.)

The song used during the title sequence is awesome (one of the better of David Arnold's). The other song (Surrender, by KD Lang), not so much.

When it was first released i didn't care much for Crow's song, far preferring KD Lang's.

However, i've about-turned in the years since and i now think Crow's is one of the best in the series!

It's highly original in it's melancholy, hitting the perfect note for the character of Bond. In fact it suits Fleming's Bond more than any other theme in the series (Ok, it's up there with LALD, but slightly edging out FRWL in terms of their 'Fleming-ness').

The composition and melody of the versus are better than the chorus - the verse lyrics being really superb, simple writing (simple in their delivery, not their conception).

If only the film's title had remained Tomorrow Never LIES, instead of the typo'd DIES, it would've been far cleverer and more poignant a sentiment for the song and the movie (so long as it didn't mean keeping Pulp's poor effort Tomorrow Never Lies as the theme instead).

While i'm ranting away here, anyone other than Teri Hatcher would've been an improvement, marring a movie that otherwise gets better with age. She was directed well in the party scene introduction to her character - a little cold and bitter - no batting eyelashes or exaggerated pouting etc. But sadly her acting chops just weren't quite up to the more serious scenes.

To compound this problem, and set the scene for a 'perfect storm', Pierce has his strengths, but can tend to come across a little cheesy when he is allowed to really go for the melodrama (whereas he's superb at irony and pathos, as with Dr Kauffman and Alec Travellian).

The offending scene is the bedroom scene, more in keeping with US aspirational soap opera about spoilt rich people than a Bond movie. So take Hatcher's tv soap opera-esque acting chops which are well suited to an episode of Dynasty and put that with Brosnan's weakness for melodrama (which also wouldn't be out of place in Dynasty) and it's a recipe for cringe worthy cheesorama.

Less cheese, more restraint in the script and direction might've helped, as these factors too seemed to think it was Mills'n Boon, not Bond, and perhaps this key central scene of the fist act might not of tanked so badly into embarrassing melodrama.

Oh, Poor Brossa. He had the great Goldeneye to lull him into imagining that his Bond movies may be among the best of all time. How he was let down and suffered horribly in the broad, "done a script course in Hollywood 3 act structure..." writers, no, hacks, he was left to after the brave and innovative GE from Bruce Feirstein. And in the subsequent efforts, never more painfully visible was the copycat framework upon which the story and character were thinly painted than in the 3rd act of these three Brossa movies....

In the final reels of TND, TWINE & DAD the drama is sacrificed wholesale for the action and explosions. I know this is the basic format of Bond/action movies, but what separates the good from the bad is when some balance is struck between character, story and action.

In FRWL, GF, LALD, GE and CR, we still feel it's about the choices Bond makes, as influenced by the story so far and the character the actor has built, rather than a stock-footage action set-piece in which Bond become a puppet that the script & director shove from one beat to the next, like painting-by-numbers; "...This is where Bond always does this, and that's where Bond always does that....".

It's mainly a script issue - there's only so much a director can do to rescue a script lacking in intimacy (or basically 'moments') with your lead character. It certainly can't be blamed on the acting chops of the lead, since one of the best final reels of an action movie is Predator, and that's not down to Arnies acting skills... The finale is Dutch's finale, not a mechanical Predator: The Movie finale.... It's clever!!!

It's about a script that build's a character and ultimately uses what we've learnt about the character to motivate the final reel and his victory. It's in these eureka moments when Bond takes control, rather than being the action's puppet that the Bond Theme cue's in and not simply when the shooting/explosions begin.

A great recent example of this issue is The Amazing Spider-Man.... In the finale he becomes a puppet catapulted around by the script trying to be bigger than the character and sadly it succeeds. Like the Bond theme, the spidey theme should've kicked in when he paused, then took a run up and did the swinging from crane to crane sequence. But instead we got escalating action-music instead of cool Spidey music. So Spidey was never really Spidey.

Sorry i'm diverting slightly from my issue with poor final reels, but at least i ending back almost on topic with music

Interesting way that you put that. I felt also that Terri Hatcher was just trying WAY too hard (...like she wanted to be as memorable a woman in Bond's past as Tracy). After seeing TND for the 1st time, my initial thought for the placement of her character into the film was derived directly from OO6's line from the presvious film,

"..or do you find forgiveness in the arms of so many willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect?"

I think the fact that Michelle Yeoh had underplayed her part so beautifully, only made Terri Hatcher struggle even more with her own character. When the 4 of them were in the room together, at the party, it was Wai Lin, and not Paris Carver that exuded beauty & confidence. I don't think a lot of people got upset when Paris came into frame, at the hotel, strangled on the bed.

[S K Y F A L L]

I think 'Tomorrow Never Lies" would have sounded more like the sequel to Liar Liar then a Bond film. Dies is more adult.
Surrender is a great song but I don't think it would be better as the theme song, I have high hopes that Skyfall will have its own ending credits song.

[Publius]

"Martinis, girls, and a gun" has to be the worst Bond song lyric prior to "shoot 'em up bang bang".

[JimmyBond]

Really? I love that lyric. I find the whole of Crowe's song to be deliciously retro. It stands as my favorite Bond song from the Brosnan era.

[DR76]

TND was probably one of the most generic Bond movies I have ever seen. No wonder I have little respect for it.

[SecretAgentFan]

Really? I love that lyric. I find the whole of Crowe's song to be deliciously retro. It stands as my favorite Bond song from the Brosnan era.

Same here.

[Binyamin]

TND was probably one of the most generic Bond movies I have ever seen. No wonder I have little respect for it.

But you have to remember, it was 1997. It was the peak of the "Everything's Awesome Nineties." Bill Clinton was in the White House enjoying cigars and interns, 9/11 was still four years off, the Spice Girls were on the radio. The iPod didn't EXIST yet.

So, yes, TND was just a fun, explosive Bond movie. But it reflected the times, and it was ENTERTAINING.

Bond movies are time capsules. They capture the mood and attitudes of each decade. In twenty years, we will watch Quantum of Solance and say "Why so serious?" The U.S. and U.K. were involved in wars. The economy was tanking. Et cetera, ad naseum.

There is room for both a TND and QoS. If you step back and view Tomorrow Never Dies as a fun 90's romp, it still has some flavor.

[thecasinoroyale]

'Tomorrow Never Dies' is my favourite Bond film - it's generic, but the great point Binyamin sticks for me, it as a very 1990's Bond film.

Brosnan looked good in the role, very comfortable and eminted his best image of James Bond. It was current with the times, had a good cast and was a basic Bond story which worked. Great action sequences (a bit noisy at the end, but again, it's the 90's, and a new 007).

I admit I don't mind Crow's song, but it is pretty dreary and I do prefer 'Surrender', even if it is a template Bond-theme song...but that's what we want, don't we?

Not as bad as everyone sometimes feels I think, one of the under-rated ones.

[DaveBond21]

TND was probably one of the most generic Bond movies I have ever seen. No wonder I have little respect for it.

But you have to remember, it was 1997. It was the peak of the "Everything's Awesome Nineties." Bill Clinton was in the White House enjoying cigars and interns, 9/11 was still four years off, the Spice Girls were on the radio. The iPod didn't EXIST yet.

So, yes, TND was just a fun, explosive Bond movie. But it reflected the times, and it was ENTERTAINING.

Bond movies are time capsules. They capture the mood and attitudes of each decade. In twenty years, we will watch Quantum of Solance and say "Why so serious?" The U.S. and U.K. were involved in wars. The economy was tanking. Et cetera, ad naseum.

There is room for both a TND and QoS. If you step back and view Tomorrow Never Dies as a fun 90's romp, it still has some flavor.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, Binyamin. Good post.

[DR76]

'Tomorrow Never Dies' is my favourite Bond film - it's generic, but the great point Binyamin sticks for me, it as a very 1990's Bond film.

I wasn't really interested in TND being a "90s" film. I just wanted to enjoy it. And I didn't.

[Spyraker]

I feel as though "Surrender" is one of the best tracks in the entire series and it should have definitely been used as the title song.

Me too. Great 'Bond' track. Shirley who? Ha.