天使与魔鬼 Angels And Demons 英语影评

　　 "Angels & Demons," which draws a sharp historical distinction between the Illuminati (bad) and the Catholic church's Preferiti (good), may leave you feeling like a member of the Stupefiti -- utterly benumbed by info overload, yet willing to sit there and watch the action unfold. And unfold. And unfold.

　　 Before and after everything else -- the pentagram's meaning, the lofty pyramid's significance, the mysterious watermark in English, the arcane hints from Galileo and Bernini -- Ron Howard's movie version of the Dan Brown novel is an action thriller, although the action far outweighs the thrills. Symbology may be a special stroke for certain folks, but anyone can understand a threat to blow up the Vatican with a pulsating blob of antimatter. It doesn't even matter that it's anti; just think terrorist plus nuclear device and you've mastered all the arcana that counts.

　　 Though the movie, unlike the book, is set after the events of "The Da Vinci Code," rest assured that Tom Hanks's Robert Langdon isn't being followed around once again by Audrey Tautou, who seemed painfully at a loss for things to do. This time Langdon is followed around the Vatican and Rome by an Israeli actress, Ayelet Zurer, who plays the Italian scientist Vittoria Vetra; she's seldom at a loss, though the production gains little more from her presence than physicist pulchritude. (A real physicist told me that some of her colleagues had been hoping the movie, which depicts superheated events at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, would enhance public understanding of their work. Lots of luck.)

　　 "Angels & Demons" was adapted by David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman. In its form, as well as some of its substance, the film bears an eerie resemblance to "Seven," the David Fincher thriller with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, chasing from the ghastly remains of one torture victim to another. By objective measure, this one adds up to four-sevenths of that one, given that four prominent members of the college of cardinals have disappeared during a conclave to elect a new pope. To find them, and, not incidentally, to do something about all that nasty antimatter, Langdon must find the ancient lair of the Illuminati by following a trail that is maddeningly elusive and abundantly photogenic. (Salvatore Totino, who did the elegant cinematography, and Allan Cameron, the production designer, should have gotten co-star billing.)

　　 Among the movie's many revelations is the fact -- I'm taking the factuality on faith -- that the Vatican library's most treasured manuscripts are stored in sealed chambers under a partial vacuum. At certain points during the screening I attended, when the action was interrupted by major eruptions of information, a sealed chamber under partial vacuum might have described the screening room. With a running time of 138 minutes, "Angels & Demons" is a serious slog. Still, it's an odd kind of a slog that manages to keep you partially engaged, even at its most esoteric or absurd, despite an endlessly excitable choir and Hans Zimmer's pitiless score. Tom Hanks is a companionable presence, as always, and he gets to run and jump much more often than he did in "The Da Vinci Code." Stellan Skarsgrd is the Swiss Guard's stern big cheese, Ewan McGregor is the quick-witted Camerlengo and Armin Mueller-Stahl's gimlet-eyed cardinal exudes villainy with every whispered syllable.

　　 'Management'
"Management," a debut feature by Stephen Belber, is a sentimental -- and modestly enjoyable -- fantasy of mutual need. Jennifer Aniston is Sue, an ostensibly sophisticated woman who stops at a motel in Kingman, Ariz.; she's a sales rep for a company, based in Maryland, that sells bad art to businesses around the country. Steve Zahn is Mike, a sort of harmless God's fool who works as the night manager of the motel -- it's owned by his aging parents -- and falls in love with Sue from the moment she walks in the door. In the real world, or somewhere like it, Mike's subsequent sexual overtures would put his guest in mind of Norman Bates and send her hurtling out the door. In the world of this little film, she's sufficiently charmed that she welcomes him -- warily -- into her life, and continues to do so even after he becomes a bicoastal stalker.

　　 As a specialist in space cadets, Mr. Zahn could have played this role with his eyes shut, but he keeps them wide open and fixed on Sue. With her sharp tongue and ironic style, Ms. Aniston could have riffed on her character's worldliness, but the script makes Sue a loner, much like the inexplicably isolated women often played by Sandra Bullock, so the actress must throttle back. "Management" -- that's how Mike refers to himself when he knocks on Sue's door -- is one of those slender fables that have nowhere to go after the first half-hour or so but keep going anyway, in this case into such picaresque absurdities as Mike's employment in a Chinese restaurant (where the tables are turned and he's the waiter who must sleep in the cellar), his skydiving lessons and his brief fling at being a Buddhist monk.

　　 Woody Harrelson has a small, sour role as Jango, an ex-rocker turned organic-yogurt magnate. James Liao has more fun than you'd expect in the eventually preposterous role of Al, the too-hip son of the Chinese restaurant's owners. Fred Ward is Mike's father, a withdrawn Vietnam vet, and Margo Martindale -- she played the poignantly gauche American tourist in "Paris, je t'aime" -- is Mike's mother, who says of Sue at one point, "She's logical, in an emotionally annihilating way." The line is too elaborate for the character, but then the plot is too sprawling for the structure. That's often the way with debut films: so many notions, so little time.