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...also the 27th top worldwide grosser in film history, so here comes Angels: same star, director, producer (Brian Grazer) and scripter (abetted this time by David Koepp). Also the same approach: it's a movie, so we'd better feign movement. The back-history in which Langdon is an expert requires Hanks to speak dialogue with its own footnotes, so Howard camouflages the static nature of enterprise by having his star spout arcana while rushing from church to church. In fact, virtually all the actors have to talk the talk while they walk the walk. When they take a breather...
...They're all very watchable, which helps compensate for the necessary cipher at the center. Not that Hanks is bad; there's just no person for him to play. Given that it's the only role the actor has returned to in his live-action film work (he's repeated as the voice of Woody in Pixar's Toy Story franchise), it's a shame that Langdon doesn't play to his strengths: the fretful and impatience that rise to heroism. Here he's a simple conduit for information, the docent on our tour of Roman churches...
...Then again, just because the Vatican has laid hands on Angels & Demons doesn't mean some people don't detect an unholy conspiracy. In the Christian Film and Television Commission's biweekly Movieguide, Ted Baehr wonders, "How much of the box office of Angels & Demons will end up in the Democrat campaigns? If it makes money, it could...
...footage with romantic strains from Liszt, Mahler, Brahms, Fauré. Anchoring the piece are Davies' fond and acid recollections of his home town - what he, in his drawling, very un-Liverpudlian narrative voice, calls "a valediction and an epitaph." Out on DVD this week from Strand Releasing, this film essay is a grand work, immensely funny and pained and deeply felt. Get the movie, and watch it on a double feature with Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. You'll have two unforgettable trips through municipal memory...
...sense, Davies escaped his youth; in another, he keeps returning. And his imaginative understanding of it hits the viewer, even one who's never visited or cared about Liverpool, with the shock of recognition. Among the many snatches of poetry and pop songs in the film are these lines from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." Through his artistry and honesty, Davies makes his childhood, his Liverpool, universal. His place is ours...