Jenson71
Ghost writer
Bush is watching you
Posts: 810
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Post by Jenson71 on May 17, 2006 22:52:50 GMT
Audiences whistled at it (instead of clapping) at Cannes. And not yet a single positive review at rottentomatoes.com www.rottentomatoes.com/m/da_vinci_code/This seems to be another large dissappointment from Mr. Ron Howard.
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Post by Vercetti on May 17, 2006 22:55:39 GMT
The only thing I like about Opie's movies are the music.
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Post by Mike Sullivan on May 18, 2006 1:15:12 GMT
Opie. What the fuck have you done?
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RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
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Post by RNL on May 20, 2006 16:40:42 GMT
It's pretty lame. The only redeeming features are Ian McKellen and the final shot that drops all the way through the glass pyramid of the Louvre and down into the floor - sit right up the front and you'll get a brief sense of motion there, IMAX-style, which is fantastic when you're moving through impossible space. The rest is just oodles of bad dialogue and some cheesy visual effects. This is from CHUD.com... "In the opening scene of The Da Vinci Code, an old man is gutshot by Paul Bettany, who has been covered in pancake makeup. The film then cuts to a lecture delivered by Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of “religious symbology,” who is in France presenting what appears to be a version of the “What is This Picture” feature from Jack and Jill magazine (you know, the one where a super close-up of a weird shiny black object is revealed to be a button). As this lecture goes on the old man is dying offscreen, but not before he runs around the Louvre leaving anagrammatic messages written in the invisible ink pen he keeps on hand for any such occasion, as well as rehanging a giant framed painting he took off the wall while being chased by Bettany. Everything that follows in The Da Vinci Code is ludicrous, but nothing ever manages to top the image of this old man, bleeding profusely from his stomach, picking up and rehanging a huge painting. Except that perhaps the old man next strips naked, paints a pentagram on his own chest in his own blood and makes sure to die in a posture that will recall a Da Vinci drawing."
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Capo
Administrator
Posts: 7,847
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Post by Capo on May 20, 2006 17:01:14 GMT
My closest friend, who has read the book ("a good story, badly-written," he says), saw it last night, and said, without knowing how to pinpoint anything specific, it was a riveting piece of cinema. He wants to see it again this week, with me.
Watch this space, then...
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Post by Vercetti on May 20, 2006 17:27:51 GMT
Ebert said the same. In fact he said the book was badly written while the film was directed well, though I highly doubt it from Opie. I will see it eventually.
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Capo
Administrator
Posts: 7,847
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Post by Capo on Jun 7, 2006 19:59:04 GMT
Just got back from it. If critics had gone the other way, and praised this film unquestionably, I would have left the cinema pretty bewildered as regards hyperbolic fuss; at the same time, halfway through watching The Da Vinci Code I thought, "why all the negative vibes?" I've certainly seen worse films.
Yes, it is silly, and yes, its provocative plot should probably be taken with a pinch of salt, but this is nevertheless a brilliantly-paced and well-edited film which I thoroughly enjoyed, once I got settled in past its lousy one-liners and cheap car chases.
If the novel was (apparently) a great story poorly-written, then the film adaptation is perhaps one with lots of potential in the hands of the wrong director...the popularity of the novel made a cinematic treatment inevitable, and one which relied heavily on bankability. And thus Howard has little room for experimentation...though I highly doubt he'd have been capable of producing anything of lasting worth anyway. Why, I found myself asking many times, does he feel the need for detracting flashbacks and cut-aways, the most embarrassing of which comes as an explanatory foot-note, where Hanks and Tatou are revealed to have gotten out of a plane and escaped into a car while the plane was still in the process of taxiing to a stop, police cars in hot pursuit?
There are a few nods, whether intentional or not, to the contrivance of the film itself: Hanks, late on, telling Tatou it's down to what she believes is right--and thus, in the process, perhaps guarding itself against any possible Catholic attack.
With its fragmented opening, mountingly complicated plot, and a hero in well over his head, its structure draws up parallels with Schlesinger's mystery masterpiece Marathon Man (1976), though it must be said, while Howard's effort is by no means a terrible bit of storytelling, such comparison is unfavourable.
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