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About Jon
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Let’s go to the movies! I love the movie experience, study what happens on the screen and am writing about it to help you with your movie going decisions. Hopefully something in the blogging of a film’s big elements – screenwriting, cinematography, directing, acting, visual effects, sound, and editing (and sometimes automobiles) – will help movie fans discern where their entertainment dollars should go. I’ve been blogging about movies on 99x.com since April 2008 and have been listening to 99x since moving to Atlanta in 1996. I’ve worked on the Olympics and short films that have appeared at Sundance and other film festivals in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. I have a Master’s degree in film from Florida State University and regard film school as one of the best experiences of my life.
I currently live in Atlanta with my wife and two labs; love baseball, music, family and friends, good food, and of course movies. Just to blog down thoughts from an eyewitness perspective I avoid reading other movie blogs or reviews on a new release until I’ve posted my own. All references to box office results or cast and crew are culled from boxofficeguru.com, boxofficemojo.com, or IMDB.com. Wikipedia is not used in the writing of this blog. Follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/jonlamoreaux for additional movie updates.
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Jon's Movie Blog
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Aug
28
Written by:
Jon Lamoreaux
8/28/2009 11:03 AM
 There is no controversy that I can see. And The Vatican should be thanking director Ron Howard and author Dan Brown for creating such an intriguing and beguiling look at Rome and Vatican City. I never thought I’d say this, but where can I buy tickets for a tour of The Vatican?
Like The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown chooses art and religion to hide and then solve his own puzzles, hoping you’ll join in – using symbols and codes deciphered in the back of journals written by the likes of Galileo, and in buried clues behind famous statues in ancient chapels, hidden like Easter eggs – before time runs out and that secret society none of us knew existed kills all the Popes. I say all the Popes because this story involves a massive anti-matter fuel cell devised by scientists, and approved by the Church as a means of alternative fuel, that when in the wrong hands provides for a pretty simple but effective ticking clock. Or as Hitchcock would say, “the bomb is a MacGuffin—the thing the characters care about but that the audience could care less about.”
Ron Howard whose best film is Apollo 13, in my opinion, with Frost/Nixon and Cinderella Man close behind, does a decent job crafting together Dan Brown’s book of the same name. Recasting Tom Hanks as the symbologist Robert Langdon, commissioned by The Vatican to help decipher threats they’ve received—letters, notes, video messages—from a long ago defunct but making their comeback group of shunned Catholics called the Illuminati, not to be confused with the mythological group of masterminds that some think forge world events and are planning the New World Order. Not them. Langdon, anyway, deciphers the messages right away, and his “translation” is the basis for sending us on another scavenger hunt. The tension created by the bomb, and the fact Cardinals in the Conclave (private meeting) have gathered to pick the next Pope, puts pressure on our heroes to find the bomb before it’s too late. With enough curious activity by Vatican players to open the suspicion up to anyone.
I say heroes because the beautiful Ayelet Zurer (Munich) joins Langdon as the scientist Vittoria—I didn’t think they could improve upon Audrey Tautou but they did. With ease. I remember seeing Munich and first setting eyes on Zurer as Eric Bana’s wife in that film, thinking, seriously, she’s the most beautiful woman to appear on screen in decades. Zurer’s character seems stronger, and smarter than Tautou’s, not to knock cute Amelie. But this is a job for a woman, not a little girl. And Zurer does the job well. Besides, The DaVinci Code left a certain amount of controversy on Tautou’s character from that film and in trying to avoid the ill-pleasant words of disapproving Christians (and critics) Howard probably chose to avoid her presence. That she doesn’t exist in this Dan Brown book is important too not to mention Angels and Demons came before The DaVinci Code. Duh.
Ron Howard has done enough films to really know his stuff. Granted, much of what he does is broad audience kind of entertainment, done for a wide audience, and always somewhat safe though of late with these Dan Brown books he keeps receiving condemnation. You can’t deny that his films, like Brown’s books, are entertaining. They’re made to be fun. You’re not going to get Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, or Stanley Kubrick out of Ron Howard. Nor will you get John Ford though he’ll try his best. Likewise, you’re certainly not going to get Philip Roth or F. Scott Fitzgerald out of Dan Brown, either. So the two are a perfect pair. Howard though has done enough films to really know when to lay it on thick, when to let up. And even if Hanks’ hair is better in this film, Howard allows enough of its odd style to stay in the film so as not to disrupt the continuity of character already laid out from The DaVinci Code. It’s something Howard should be thankful of, like Moe’s haircut with the Three Stooges, or like the mullet or the afro, these are cuts of distinction. Maybe a mistake on the hairstylist’s part for DaVinci Code, but now it’s iconic. Just as Sherlock Holmes had his deerstalker hat, Langdon has his weird haircut. Not something Brown wrote, but that Hanks probably had a hand in bringing, unintentionally.
Hair aside, Howard pieces it all together, musical score and all in one astonishingly moving scene done with such grace and daft execution that I thought Howard was having a breakthrough. Like Wolverine, this film touches on the elements of fire, water, earth, and air…and in the most climactic moment these elements, maybe still fresh in the subconscious after horrifying events related to said elements have occurred, do something to the psyche to help bring about a cathartic experience. Like the purging of built up emotions, like the forgiveness of sin with a few Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers, Howard lets action culminate with a death defying stunt in Vatican City that would leave Columbo asking, “how does he do that?” To which the culprit, thinking Columbo was stupid, would allow himself or herself to deteriorate under a false sense of security and be compelled to confess. To which I’ll say Angels and Demons, while not all that compelling, I confess, is at times thrilling. And who in their right mind would think The Vatican and Popes and Cardinals and all that’s associated with such religious things could be so gripping?
At the very least, Angels and Demons is better than DaVinci Code. I give it two Our Fathers and a half Hail Mary.
Rated PG-13 with some Vatican violence and what could be considered disturbing images. 135 minutes. Also starring Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgard, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and the great TV character actor Gino Conforti from Three’s Company, That Girl, and tons of other 70’s TV.
Screenplay by David Koepp (Spiderman, Panic Room, Mission Impossible, War of the Worlds) and Akiva Goldsman (I Am Legend, The DaVinci Code, Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, I, Robot, A Time to Kill, Batman Forever).
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