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henrypijames
Reviews
Fatwa (2006)
The art of telling an incomplete story
In some aspects, this film resembles Crash (the 2006 Oscar winner, that is), both multi-threaded stories facilitating action and suspense to narrate the diversity and convergence of human nature. In other aspects however, Fatwa sets itself apart from the Paul Haggis masterpiece by deliberately keeping many ends loose and concentrate itself on the essentials only.
This minimalistic approach regarding what to tell and what not produces a quite distinctive taste. If Crash were a giant puzzle whose numerous pieces are put together one after another, resulting in a picture which, although just a window to the whole landscape, is in itself round and complete. Fatwa on the other hand would be more of a medium sized puzzle whose pieces are incomplete to start with from the beginning, but nonetheless are being put together despite of the shortage. As the pieces fall into place, however, the ones that have been left out become more and more irrelevant. In the end, a fragmented picture is presented which manages to show an astonishing whole view of the subject it is set to depict.
So, when you watch this film and get the feeling there are too many circumstances you don't understand, please relax and know it's the way it's supposed to be. Instead, pay more attention to what you do understand, and let not your deductions, but your emotional impressions lead you. In retrospect you may find out that the fuzziness of all those circumstances are not only intended, but actually symbolic and therefore essential to the statement of this film: Despiete the different circumstances surrounding us, we all still share the basic human nature. In fact, the complexity of the world is no more than the diverse and yet convergent manifestation of this shared human nature of ours.
The acting of this film is quite impressive. Due to the minimalistic story telling which leaves all characters practically without a personal history or background, it's definitely very difficult for the actors to display the depth of those characters. Considering that, they have all managed to get the job done rather well. Especially Angus Macfadyen shows a supreme performance.
Fatwa is most certainly a film worth watching. You may not get it at first, but eventually you will, I hope.
The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Redundant for those who have read the book
If you have neither read the book nor planned to read it any time soon, you shall find this movie perfectly entertaining. However, to all those of you who have already read the book, the movie may very likely appear simply boring.
Generally I prefer to watch a movie adaptation of a bestseller novel *after* reading the original story itself. Following this habit, I read the book in the last three days before I saw the movie tonight. Accompanied by a very fresh and detailed memory of the novel, I found myself yearning to fast-forward (not that I could) during the whole movie - until the very end.
The thing is, this movie offers no additional value to the readers of the book. The acting is average, quite unimpressive - neither in good nor in bad way. The camera work is plain as well, there's hardly any spectacular scene - not even the final one, which has certainly been designed to be moving but doesn't really fulfill that expectation. There is little special effect in this movie - which is nobody's fault because the story simply doesn't require much. In the end, nothing of this movie exceeds a reader's own imagination in any aspect.
On the negative side, the story has proved to be quite hard to compress for the screen. Even with a length of over two hours, the movie has cut off some significant parts of the original story and squeezed what's left even more remarkably, resulting in many small inconsistencies, logic holes and incredible speedups - specially regarding the development of human emotions over time (or rather no time, in the case of the movie), all of which not present in the book. I don't want to blame the screen writers for doing a bad job, I just think the story is simply hard to adapt in this way. Maybe if the movie had cut even more parts of the novel, it could have handle the remain more properly?
Bottom line, the story itself is definitely worth enjoying - as long as you don't take it as an religious insult, of course. Whether you choose the book or the movie is up to you, however the former makes the latter pretty much redundant.
PS: Sophie is definitely more attractive in my imagination. ;)