authorgarymcmahon

The revamped Bond dvd series has this much going for it: the transfers are even better than previous issues; & some interesting new finds in the updated extras.

Here's the beef: one extra raves about the digital restoration and how, in one Bond, the film crew are accidentally exposed in a mirror but that, thanks to digital miracles no more miraculous than copy-and-paste, digital practitioners can erase the mistake and show the picture as the film-makers intended. Yes and to find out if they did, buy the dvd, they tease. Stuff that. Dvd engineers who fancy themselves as co-directors are the new scourge of film preservation: they are just itching to get creative with people like Terence Young and Guy Hamilton. Maybe those old-fashioned, obvious day-for-night shots could be digitally darkened, a few stars added? The moment these digital dilatanttes talk about what the film-maker "intended" rather than what he actually shot, their presumptions come between the viewer and the director. I'd like to feed these digital dilattantes to a school of piranha fish, then feed the fish to a persian cat.

There's more: The menu design on the revamped Bond series is facile and, no, not tasteless, just flavourless - yes and the design is identical for all of them. It may evoke some of the banal Bond offerings of the '90s, but that's a quarter of the output. Compare it with the menu designs of the previous editions, customized to each title and in keeping with the period of the film. The menu and simple sound effects for DR NO, for instance, conjure the mood right on the button.

Another corporate banality to put you in the mood for not watching the film you just bought: To avoid those tedious modern distributor logos - that only paraphrase the logos that lead into the film tediously - and the aggravating copyright warning, followed by the disclaimer to the audio commentary, you can go to Scene Selection and start the film proper right away. Well, no, you can't, the new editions make sure that whatever scene you select, you are faced with the extra distributor logo, the warning, and the disclaimer before the scene appears.
All this leaves me shaken, not stirred. Makes me want to copy a pirate version just to get even. Who gave this dvd company a licence to overkill?
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Tryavna

I'm with you, and this recent phenomenon you mention is particularly irksome to me. Fortunately, it seems that, in the past two or three years, most DVD companies have stopped messing about with sound by creating fake stereo tracks for mono films -- or at least providing the original as an option if they do. And colorization is thankfully out of fashion, too. But someone really needs to stop this darkening of day-for-night photography. The recent release of John Ford's The Searchers was a particularly egregious example of this, and hopefully it has called more attention to this idiotic practice.

I reckon that Sony has to recoup its investment in MGM/UA somehow. (They bought the library primarily for the Bond films.) But this sort of fiddling is most definitely not the way to go.

Redstar

This seems a bit of a scam to me, every time a new "Bond" movie is released they re-issue all the old Bond movies in one new version or another. There must be a limit!