June 2006
Time Out
THIS MONTH’S SELECTION OF MOVIES
The Da Vinci Code
USA 2006, US rated PG-13
If the enormous success of Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code is anything to go by, the film version, released in Germany this month, will be one of Hollywood’s biggest hits this year. Directed by Ron Howard, the movie features Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist called in to help French police decipher a riddle left at the scene of a murder in the Louvre museum. Langdon and French cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tatou) soon find themselves embroiled in an intriguing mystery involving the paintings of Da Vinci and an attempt by a covert religious organisation to cover up a secret that, if revealed, would overturn 2,000 years of accepted dogma.
Despite some violent scenes, the British Board of Film Classification judged it was the movie’s tension-building soundtrack, composed by Hans Zimmer, and gory sound effects that were too aggressive for a 12-rated film. In an effort to thwart undermining the film’s commercial prospects, Sony agreed to moderate the sound.
German Release Date May 18
United 93
USA 2006, US rated R
It is now almost five years since the September 11 attacks—and time, at least in the mind of filmmaker Paul Greengrass, to bring to light the events surrounding the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93. United 93 is an unflinching drama: it tells the story of the passengers and crew, their families on the ground and the flight controllers who watched as the flight became the fourth plane to be hijacked on that fateful day. The film reconstructs the plane’s journey and attempts to understand what must have been going through the minds of those involved. It looks at how, over the course of 90 minutes, a group of random strangers were transformed into a group of allies, brought together by a previously unimaginable situation. Though a certain amount of improvisation does take place in the film, as no perfect records of the hijacking are available, Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, The Bourne Supremacy) made the movie in full cooperation with relatives of those involved, and intends the movie to dignify the memory of those whose lives were sacrificed.
German Release Date June 1 <<<
