May 20, 2006

  • Movies I've seen recently...

    Haute Tension (2003)  C+

    Well this is a violent film. Lots of gore and blood. A splatter-horror fest through and through. "Haute Tension" ("High Tension") has that suspenseful terror situation working for it. A lot of the time you got the main heroine hiding from the killer, and it's pretty much the "will she get caught, or won't she?" The flaw that comes from that situation would be that someone will probably go "now, why the hell is she doing that?" Needless to say, just remind yourself of what movie genre this film is before holding too much judgement on some scenes. The one thing you should indeed judge the movie, is the last 15 minutes that will either make you curse the whole thing or be pleasantly surprised. Personally, I thought the ending was inspired, but opens up a lot of problems with the rest of the movie.

    The Da Vinci Code (2006)  C+

    Symbols, codes, conspiracies, faith, logic, history, and puzzles are at the heart of "The Da Vinci Code." From scene to scene, we are treated to a series of clues that leads the characters to the next clue, that leads them to the next clue, and so forth. The deeper they get to the whole puzzle, the more background information is revealed to further the story along. The problem I found here is that not every clue was really explained in the movie, which doesn't really give us satisfaction on what the answers are, or motivation to really follow along. Once they do slow down the pace enough to properly explain some puzzles, the movie gets a lot more interesting.

    The main characters played by Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, and Ian McKellen; as well as Paul Bettany, stand out rather well on film. Particularly Ian McKellan's Sir Leigh Teabing, who was a delight to watch on screen. It's a shame that while some characters like Bishop Aringarosa, Captain Fache, and even Remy Jean played signficant roles in the story, there weren't as much effort spent on their characters for us to care too much about them. In fact several of the secondary character's motivations and backgrounds aren't
    really explained that well, so what happens is that we get encounters
    with said characters that ends up giving us more questions than are
    actually answered.

    While the screenplay by Akiva Goldsman was serviceable to a book that is rather difficult to translate into a two and a half hours film, the result feels somewhat "hollow" to the adventure of the story. The direction by Ron Howard was also just serviceable to the movie, but I did enjoy the nice visual touch that was done to the puzzles and clues, for us to properly understand what the characters are talking about. I feel that overall, the movie could have stood out on it's own worth as opposed to just a film adapted from the popular book. Unfortunately, it merely serves as simply a companion piece to the book by Dan Brown. I did enjoy it well enough though, and it proved to be a rather good diversion.