The Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs (Part One)

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Just above these words you’ll find the music video for “Another Way to Die” by Alicia Keys and Jack White. It’s the theme from the new James Bond movie, which is not called Another Way to Die but rather Quantum of Solace. Apparently Jack White couldn’t come up with a rhyme for solace (“Let’s see…'I need a quantum of solace, so don’t call me Wallace'? No...”), so instead the song title blurs in with such recent Bond themes as “Tomorrow Never Dies” and “Die Another Day.” The Screengrab joins with London’s Sunday Times in asking the musical question, “Can nobody do it better?”

In pondering why so many Bond themes have come up short in recent years, the Times asked series composer David Arnold (who has scored the last five 007 pictures) what makes a classic Bond theme. “Arnold contends that any aspiring Bond-song writer needs both to honour the canon — and its sonic staples of brass and strings — and to throw away the rulebook, which he concedes can be a tricky task. ‘I don’t think you can completely escape the history of these songs,’ he says. ‘Not only have many of them become standards, they have been around as part of the British musical landscape for more than 40 years. It’s something to embrace, rather than dismiss, but in doing that you immediately draw comparisons with the greats.’ As for the brass-and-strings trademarks, he argues that ‘those elements are one of the things the public feel defines the sound of a Bond song’.”

So what are the classic Bond themes? I have researched the matter extensively (that is, I have been sitting here on my ass watching YouTube clips for an hour or so), and I’ve come up with my own list of the top seven…or 007, if you will. (Or even if you won’t.) Feel free to argue in the comments.

007. Thunderball (Johnny Cash version)

OK, this one’s a cheat. Johnny Cash recorded this title track for the fourth Bond adventure, but it was rejected in favor of the Tom Jones version. I can’t argue that Cash’s Thunderball fits in with the James Bond universe, but I’d rather listen to it than the Jones cut anyday. This is not the only time a Bond theme has been rejected, by the way – Alice Cooper originally recorded The Man with the Golden Gun (which you can find on the 1973 Muscle of Love album) and Blondie’s For Your Eyes Only appears on 1982’s The Hunter.

006. A View to a Kill

Actually, I was hoping to make a case for a-ha’s theme from The Living Daylights here. I had completely forgotten a-ha had recorded a James Bond theme, and I thought it would make me look cooler to pick one of the more obscure choices. But then, unfortunately, I listened to it again and couldn’t pull the trigger. Both Daylights and Duran Duran’s View to a Kill theme are hopeless ‘80s relics, but this one has a little more oomph. (Hey look, I’m not a music critic here. “Oomph” is about the most technical term in my arsenal.)

005. Nobody Does It Better

Some truly grotesque love ballads have attached themselves to the Bond series. Just imagine if the producers had the balls to commission a song titled “Octopussy” from Prince instead of Rita Coolidge’s “All-Time High,” which shouldn’t be theme to anything except maybe your dentist’s waiting room. And I’m confident that “Moonraker” is nobody’s wedding song. Carly Simon’s theme from The Spy Who Loved Me has a sexy femme fatale allure that sets it apart from the others, and it’s certainly the one Bond theme that has taken on a life of its own (probably because it doesn’t share a title with the movie, although “the spy who loved me” appears in the lyrics).

Part Two

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Two - Special QT Edition)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

SMOKIN’ ACES (2006), Not Directed By Guy Ritchie (or Quentin Tarantino)

Now that Madonna keeps Guy Ritchie's cajones in a vault at the Bank of London (although here's knockin' wood for RockNRola) and Quentin Tarantino's gasbaggery has flared-up to chronic levels (I mean, good Lord, Death Proof would have been about ten minutes long if some brave editor had dared to cut every scrap of verbal diarrhea...but fingers crossed for Inglorious Bastards), there aren't too many directors cranking out simple gun-slingin' all-star demolition derbies like Smokin' Aces anymore. The formula is relatively simple: combine a dozen or so intersecting/doublecrossing thieves/assassins/lawmen/etc. with a simple Maguffin and a zillion rounds of ammunition and overheat, then sit back and see who survives. Like KFC chicken, it's not good for you and you'll probably regret it later (especially if you stick around for Aces' terrible one-twist-too-many ending), but Joe Carnahan’s loving and/or shameless transfer of Lock, Dogs & Two Smokin’ Snatches to a Lake Tahoe casino serves as a more-or-less satisfying delivery system for a whole bunch of tasty, testosterone-flavored empty calories with better-than-necessary performances from a cast including Ray Liotta, Matthew Fox, Ryan Reynolds, Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Nestor Carbonell, Common, a luminescent Alicia Keys and about a hundred other people, including a way-too-serious performance by Jeremy Piven as the sleazy informant everybody else in the movie wants to save and/or kill.

THE LIMEY (1999), Also Not Directed by Quentin Tarantino

One of the strengths – and weaknesses – of Steven Soderbergh as a director is that he's extremely competent, and at times even brilliant, without having anything that approaches a distinctive style. A jack-of-all-genres and master of none, he produces one good movie after another, none of which seem to have any isolatable quality at which you can point and say "ah, there we have it – the Soderbergh trademark". Even when his films are visually distinctive and structurally inventive, they seem not so much expressions of Soderbergh's own filmmaking style as they do intense evocations of the work of other directors. It's not that Soderbergh is a chameleon, or worse yet, a copy-cat; no one, especially me, would accuse his films of being derivative. It's just that he often seems like he's inadvertently channeling someone else when he creates his very engaging films. Case in point: this terrific, energetic neo-noir is one of Soderbergh's best films, and one of the best crime movies of its era. But The Limey bears many of the hallmarks of another very successful filmmaker. The clever chronology, the complex structure of the storytelling, the brilliant use of two-shots, the mastery of integrating popular music with on-screen action, and the resuscitation of '70s icons like Terence Stamp, Lesley Ann Warren and Peter Fonda to deliver powerhouse performances are all indicative of the work of Quentin Tarantino (who, at the time, had been idle for several years, lending credence to the notion that The Limey could be a project of his). The film's use of period objects (including footage from 1960s Terence Stamp movies to represent younger versions of his character here), pop-cultural obsessions (Luis Guzman's t-shirts bearing the images of controversial political figures), and even the characters (most especially Nicky Katt as a foul-mouthed, junk-obsessed hitman) all collude to make this seem like a lost Tarantino flick – but it's all Soderbergh, all the time, if for no other reason than in the The Limey, unlike a typical Tarantino movie, the director is master of his gimmicks and not the other way around.

RESERVOIR DOGS (1992), Not Directed by Ringo Lam

It's a fine, fine line between 'homage' and 'rip-off'. That line is trod to a greater or lesser degree by a lot of the movies on this list, and whenever someone remakes or adapts a film by another director, no matter how careful they are to pay tribute to their inspiration, someone's not going to get the message. (For a prime example of this, consider how much heat Martin Scorsese took for The Departed, even though he not only openly acknowledged the influence of Infernal Affairs, but credited its writer on screen.) The line gets a little more smudged when the director is an inveterate film buff who makes no secret of sampling bits and pieces of his favorite flicks in everything he does, and whose notion of a tribute is very similar to many people's notion of a wholesale theft, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. So similar is the film to Ringo Lam's 1987 Hong Kong gangster exercise City On Fire – they share a major plot point, similar styles and costumes, bits of dialogue, and even two scenes in their entirety – that it pretty much completely eradicates that line between tribute and remake. For Tarantino's part, he cites City On Fire as a favorite, but denies that his first major success as a director rips it off; at least one vocal opponent, filmmaker Mike White, did an entire short called Who Do You Think You're Fooling? comparing the two movies frame for frame and excoriating Tarantino for not giving Lam proper credit. To many, Reservoir Dogs is one of the best and most original independent films ever made, a movie that literally changed the face of moviemaking in its time; to others, it's just the best movie that Ringo Lam already made.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab : alicia keys

The Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs (Part One)

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Two - Special QT Edition)