TinsHeadline Touches You

AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

johnnyboyz Code Unknown doesn't live up to the promise of its opening scene, an opening scene of which is a spectacularly composed and wonderfully executed continuous take of various people on a Parisian street intermingling, interacting and walking back and forth. People travel from one end of the street to the other, continuing their lives as we leave them and pick up another person walking back the other way; things leading onto other things and a disagreement which turns rather more ugly than anyone would like. The elegance and the effort put into the sequence places us right there on that street with all of those people, and it is a form of deep, unflinching immersement no other trick nor ploy other than and sense of filmmaking will ever produce.One of those persons walking is Jean (Hamidi); a youngster of whom doesn't get on with his father, the other individual at the other end of the street is Anne (Binoche), who's in binary opposition to Jean in terms of gender; age and ethnicity. She appears to be in a rush and is talking busily into a cell phone – something in contrast to Jean's wondering loner, built well and hulking; an early attempt at most probably pointing out how diverse life is and how everyone occupies the same intimate plain, or street, and yet are miles apart in their ability to communicate and interpret, epitomised when squabbling break out following an altercation. Such a hypothesis might very well be at the heart of Michael Haneke's Code Unknown, I'm not sure; that of communication and interpretation and how, in spite of the fact we're all human, just being able to get along is often beyond us. In this piece, Haneke doesn't strike us as a director who uses conventional means of execution to get across a sense of unfolding high-end drama.Take, for instance, the scene within which we are plunged into a couple enjoying time together in a swimming pool within the confines of their apartment's outdoor area – only, they fail to spot their toddler child crawling along the ledge thus staring at a thirty storey drop. After going through the motions, Haneke reveals that they were, in-fact, shooting a film within the film and none of it was real. In a re-dub session some time later, the two actor-characters begin to fall about into fits of laughter due to a joke as the unfolding drama plays out on a screen in-front of them, dominating the frame. It might be read into that this is Haneke's own cackling at what could be perceived as easy-drama and cheaper, easier ways of instilling frills into cinematic viewing; the sort of thins one might attribute to more mainstream, more "Hollywoodised", projects. Amusingly, Haneke uses a frame grab from the aforementioned pool scene for the film's poster in order to advertise his film. Another curious idea Haneke here applies is his cutting off of scenes and sentences half way through finishing; this sense of the never-ending, of the infinite and of the continuously progressive as each story literally happens in tandem feels desperately trying to push its way to the forefront of our attention. While the application of such an idea seems distinctive and creative on paper, it very quickly formulates into something just grating.In Code Unknown, he shoot couples having arguments in supermarkets before rekindling a couple of aisles later. The heated exchange begins to a background of alcohol, an ugly debate made better once they're out and away from the intoxicating products and sharing the company of shelves sporting products of a healthier sort following their arrival at a part of the shop selling diary drinks and shelves containing beverages generally inclined to be good for you. Another strand sees an actress shooting scenes for that aforementioned fake film in which she falls afoul of a serial killer with a very specific modus operandi, that is to say the locking of people in relatively large, but empty, mahogany drenched, centuries old rooms and watching them slowly die. This idea of ugliness, encapsulated by one man's nature, combining with beauty, elegance or high-culture in the form of his chosen locale within which to kill, seems to be a juxtaposition summing up the frantic and disjointed nature of the world and those within it; those of whom are more often than not at complete odds with one another, and yet are thrust into inhabiting this same plain as before.The film will carry along down this path, opening with a telling prelude featuring deaf children attempting to play charades with one another using only sign language – interpretation being the key verb. Here lies an example of people attempting to figure out what it is the other person is thinking; a struggling to comprehend the angle upon which they approach; the trying to see things from their point of view, before carrying on down a route of several strands depicting several sorts of people of varying ages and differing backgrounds. One cannot help but feel one is repeating one's self when one states that certain strands, stories and interactions between those therein are more interesting than others. In spite of being fully aware of the year of Code Unknown's production, the likes of everything made since, from Babel to Betty Fisher & Other Stories to the more recent Swedish film Involuntary, feels both a little bit better than Code Unknown and less top heavy. The more of these sorts of films one sees, the more impacting and more concise one feels their overall thematic needs to be in order for it to actually resonate. There are a number of examples, going back to 1993's Short Cuts, which pull off the gross influx of stories and characters that it decides to take on - this expansive; drawn-out and weighty approach to things working well here and there, but too often dragging Code Unknown down to the level of window dressing.

valis1949 Michael Haneke's cinematic works are always interesting, and his signature motif is usually the evocation of some form of Extreme Violence, however in CODE UNKNOWN, he conducts a rather labyrinthine exploration of the inherent 'rudeness of modernity'. The film is not so much a plot or narrative storyline, but more of a collection of compelling and interesting scenes woven around the side effects and consequences of bad behavior. One example is a scene in which a young man tosses an empty wrapper in the lap of a woman sitting on the sidewalk. He is clearly angry, but not with the woman. She just happens to be in his path, but in no way the focus of his anger. A confrontation ensues, and we witness the ramifications of this relatively random event. Haneke shows how events can rapidly spin out of control through one thoughtless act. The characters seem trapped in lives which are not wholly of their own making, and powerlessly intrude on the lives of others in very subtle ways. CODE UNKNOWN can be seen as a film which demonstrates 'The Butterfly Effect'. This metaphorical principle of Chaos Theory states that something as insignificant as the ripple of a butterfly's wings could exert far-reaching effects on subsequent events. CODE UNKNOWN is a film which is thought provoking, as well as haunting and mesmeric.

tedg German art has its own fascinating charm, especially contemporary German film and most especially the Austrian subset. There's a desire for purity that creates clarity, often remarkably clear and well-machined films. The problem is that the filmmakers truly believe that this Cartesian purity brings one closer to the human condition, crisp beings that we are.So we get a shorter distance between us and the film. That's good. But there is an almost unbridgeable gap between the film and the world — any world — that matters. Herzog has figured a way around his national urge in this regard by pretty much just being nuts and making committed obsessive films about committed obsession. Tykwer escapes by becoming Polish. But Hanake is stuck.I really liked this as a film, as an artifact with craft. There's a lot of polish and refinement in what it is, how it is imagined, and the machining of the parts. It starts (and incidentally ends) with amazing panache: deaf children playing charades and unable to guess.It has some true performances, most particularly with the women around whom this revolves — including Binoche.It has some remarkable long scenes that are continuous takes, often tracking in complex ways. These are not interspersed; they are the thing itself, with many scenes of simple observation where nothing apparently happens. This allows us to really drill into the lives of these people — if they were anything like humans.The problem is in the construction. He has decided to follow an already well established structure of several casually interwoven lives. What he has uniquely done is weight every life — indeed every action in each life — as equally important. So adjusting a camera is as "important" as a shot of a farmer shooting his bulls because his youngest son has abandoned him, the last family member to do so.In wiser hands, this could have conveyed the angst of the ordinary, but it works the other way, selling the banality of the dramatic.For students of narrative folding, the chief man is a war photographer, and his photos anchor what we see in the film. His girl friend (Binoche) is an actress and we have folded in two films (a remake of "The Collector" and a fictional one that matches "real life") and a Shakespearean play about shrewish love. Wonderfully imagined, and structured, but in a mechanical universe.Vienna as an algorithm.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Graham Greene Code Unknown; Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000) is another of director Michael Haneke's deeply austere and emotionally rigid intellectual probes into the human condition; and the various psychological elements that cause problems, not only in our personal lives and relationships, but in a broader, sociological sense as well. At this point it is perhaps worth noting that the film's essay-like subtitle alludes to the style of the film, which involves a number of long, unbroken shot compositions (some longer than ten minutes) that often end abruptly, with no real sense of resolution.Presented as a series of loosely connected vignettes that focus on the idea of character interaction as opposed to narrative direction, Code Unknown is a difficult film to appreciate, at least at the level that many of us would probably approach it. One of the main focus points here is the idea of perception; how both we as an audience and the characters in the film perceive the action unfolding from the limited point of view that we've been given. Some good examples of this would include the lengthy and suitably tense scene early on in the story; in which a number of unconnected characters all come together through a seemingly mundane event that ends with a scuffle erupting between a white teenager and a young black man, resulting in both men - and the various onlookers - being arrested. Later, midway through a particularly disconcerting scene, a toddler playing on the balcony of a high-rise apartment slips, all the while watched with horror by his terrified parents who are powerless to do anything. Then finally, towards the end of the film, we watch in eager suspense as a young Arab boy harasses Juliette Binoche's character on a Parisian metro. Throughout the film and these sequences in particular we expect something spectacular and thrilling to happen but it never seems to arrive, until, of course, we realise that 'something' is happening.As with his most recent film, the highly acclaimed Hidden (2005), there are a number of interesting sequences in Code Unknown, which, on basis of description alone, could easily lead one to believe that they are about to watch a tense, Hollywood thriller. The film obviously couldn't be further removed from this ideal, however, with Haneke once again offering us a dour, colourless psychological study, in which characters crash into one another almost at random and cause a ripple effect that disrupts the order of everything that came before. Clearly, Code Unknown is unconcerned with thrilling the audience, at least, not in the typical sense; with the film never allowing the dramatic tension to build to anything beyond the confines of these various character vignettes that are strung together one by one in order to build up the story. This is a film that wants to enlighten with a raw depiction of everyday life; taking the viewer from moments of deadpan humour (albeit, incredibly low-key humour) to scenes that evoke a feeling of almost crippling desperation. Once again, these techniques are used to mislead the audience into thinking that the film is heading in a different, very "non-Haneke-like" direction, before switching track and confounding us all over again. If you give it some time to really get going, then the results can be oddly thrilling, and - in my opinion - probably more enjoyable and satisfying overall than anything else Haneke has directed.Still, the film does have that sense of screaming polemic that much of the director's previous work has occasionally descended into; with the loose ends and the experiments in cinematic formalism creating a cold and intellectual exercise that will naturally turn many potential viewers away. A real shame too, because regardless of these distancing intellectual experiments, the direction, photography and acting are superb throughout, and - like The 7th Continent (1994) and Funny Games (1997) - help to weave together a beguilingly tense tapestry of guilt, anger, misery and social despair.