Da Vinci

Ladies and Gentlemen… the moment you’ve all been waiting for… Wait, who am I kidding? There might be a discrete handful of people who actually check my little corner of the blogosphere every once and a while to see what inordinate ramblings, musings, or otherwise poor attempts at lyrical composition I have spat out recently, but among those of you here there are few ladies, and there are certainly no gentlemen (yeah, that’s to you Sawyer.)

At some point in the not to distant future I’ll compose the diary-blog that addresses some of the major points of my life over the past couple weeks since I last posted. However, at this moment I’m compelled to cover an eminently more controversial, and interpersonally relevant subject. That of, course, would be the main news item over the weekend; The Da Vinci Code.

Despite the fact that I was warned over and over again by all the reviews that the movie was the cinematic equivalent of McDonalds when you want a real hamburger I thought I already knew exactly what the film was going to be like when I darkened the door of the Mann’s theater in Agora Hills last night. I was wrong. I expected more out of Ron Howard, famed director of “Apollo 13” and “A Beautiful Mind.” In fact, I expected to see a lot of the same effects and art direction that we saw in the latter. But, let’s not put this all on Ron Howard… break it down something like this:

Howard chose to stick with his usual editing duo of Dan Hanley and Mike Hill. For the cinematography, he turned to Salvatore Totino whom he had just worked with on “The Missing” and “Cinderella Man.” The cinematography wasn’t horrible in and of itself, but when it was combined with unmotivated cuts, it was very difficult to get an idea of the space in which the action was taking place. That could have very well been unavoidable in the Louvre due to the expansive floor space, but it continued throughout the movie, and was a constant headache.

Outside of some other technical flub ups, the main drawbacks in the movie are carry-overs from the novel. Tom Hanks, who continues to be one of my favorite actors due to his versatility, was anything but stellar in this film. The lines were over all unmotivated and just generally unbelievable. Unbelieveable? Did I really just say that? That’s a good summation of the film. It’s a pulp fiction novel that’s been turned into an uninspired pulp-laden movie. And while it is certainly not as good as the book, (par for the course with cinematic adaptations,) the movie, with all it’s flaws and lack of development, depth, or worthwhile content, is a wonderful portrayal of a book that’s sensational, unrealistic, and focused wholly on moving from plot point to plot point sacrificing any shred of potential character development.

It was good to see Audrey Tautou, the wonderfully talented French actress from Amelie, in a major Hollywood film, hopefully next time around she can find her way into a film with a little more depth. And Paul Bettany continues to impress. I do wish he had taken his character a little deeper and portrayed a little more of the pain of his past than being content to portray unbelievable monster his character became. Unbelievable; there that word is again, I just can’t get away from it. Oh well.

All in all, I think there is no doubt that the best film that opened last weekend was Over The Hedge