Over at Rottentomatoes.com the reviews for the DaVinci Code are coming in and it is as I feared.
Ron Howard takes the bestselling novel and turns it into dull vanilla. I have come to expect nothing less of the man. I haven’t read the novel but I was kind of hoping to get caught up in the excitement by seeing the movie. Looks like Howard took all the fun out of it.
Howard must be the king of taking no risks and turning good subject matter into play-it-safe films worthy of Lifetime television.
Cinderella Man- Heard it was good but didn’t see it. Was just too typical a film. Nothing we haven’t seen before. Would have been a good one to take grandma to.
A Beautiful Mind- Saw this one. Predicatable. Boring. No chances taken. Not sure who voted this one to get Best Picture. Maybe the senior citizen academy members?
The Grinch- Again, how can you take someone like Jim Carrey and make him boring? Put him in a Ron Howard movie.
Apollo 13- I’ll take The Right Stuff over this thing any day. We all knew the story. Could you at least add something to it and create a mood of suspense? I guess not.
Backdraft- More exciting subject matter turn into forgetable melodrama. Does anyone even remember the story line? Sure had some nice fire effects huh? Suspenseful nail-biting? Sorry, just more vanilla flavored yawns.
Howard is the blandest of the bland and has been almost since the start of his directorial career. (I guess Night Shift had some personality to it.) He’s a skilled moviemaker, knows how to place the camera and get good performances from the actors, but he always seems to drain all the quirks or edge out of the material he handles. He’s like the modern equivalent of one of those faceless MGM contract directors of the '30s – a modern-day Robert Z. Leonard.
On the other hand, some of his projects as a producer (rather than a director) have taken more risks; while Howard didn’t create “Arrested Development,” it was his idea to do it in that fragmented, mock-reality style.
Makes you wonder what he would have done to Homer’s script
Ron Howard is a director who personifies the descriptor “adequate.” He’s almost compulsive about keeping his movies safe and unchallenging.
His movies are marginally watchable as long as he doesn’t attempt to achieve significance (real or pretend), in which case his total lack of unique vision becomes painfully apparent (e.g. A Beautiful Mind). He makes Big Macs, not films. There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily; a lot of people enjoy Big Macs. As long as he isn’t trying to convince anyone that his Big Mac is veal carpaccio, he’s entirely, well, adequate.
He’s basically Chris Columbus with better craft.
Well, I haven’t forgiven him for what he did to The Grinch. But beyond that, I’m not sure I know what films he has made.
I have to disagree with many cases here. I didn’t see Grinch (although, from what I’ve seen and heard, I wouldn’t have liked it), but I realy did like Apollo 13 and Cinderella Man, which were not safe, predictable, and adequate. I really did like Splash, which was very original (and, yeah, I’m familiar with other mermaid movies – that’s not what I mean). Howard’s had his failures, but overall, I like his stuff a lot more than many other directors’.
gonna have to see the Da Vinci Code before I pass judgment on it.
No, we all didn’t know the story. I was two years old when that happened.
Firefighter setting fires to protest (and kill those responsible for) closing too many firehouses.
I agree about his output in general, but I thought Apollo 13 was excellent. And he did put all of his weight behind Arrested Development, as noted, which was not vanilla at all.
Howard’s movies are visually polished, but lacking elsewhere. The scripts he picks are often flat and lifeless. His films are virtually nuance-free. He doesn’t leave anything for his audiences to figure out for themselves.
One moment that really crystallized this for me was a scene in A Beautiful Mind in which John Nash is taken into some secret government room and shown a film of a nuclear test blast while the Ed Harris character explains what it is. Did he really think Nash wasn’t aware of nuclear explosions? I think he just took his audience for such fools that he need to lecture us about this. I never did make it more than halfway through that film. It was so lifeless.
Agree totally, and what is funny is when one of his movies tanks, or is not a huge critical and commercial success (Edtv, Cinderalla Man), he blames others, like the media, as if he can’t fathom why one of his films wouldn’t be a hit.
Although I agree with the general assesment of Howard as a bland director, I thought A Beautiful Mind was noteworthy as one of the few films that showed how real a schizophrenic’s hallucinations are.
Wow. I must have very pedestrian tastes because I really liked “A Beautiful Mind”. It even prompted me to read the book (which was drier than the Sahara, btw, but still fascinating).
Didn’t he do Parenthood with Steve Martin? That was a good film.
Can’t agree with this one in the least. Apollo 13 was an excellent film.
And “Willow” which is freakin billant!
It’s a good primer for LOTR.
Not only was Apollo 13 fantastic, but so was…
Willow
It didn’t do well at the box office, but this was an awesome medieval fantasy film!
Damn you Push You Down!
PS. I am the greatest Swordsman that ever lived!
This was most obvious to me during the last ten minutes of Ransom, which up to then had been a pretty good film.
I think Apollo 13 was a masterpiece. I remember seeing it in a packed theater and two hours into the movie you couldn’t hear a pin drop. The audience was totally enthralled even though most of them knew how it ended.