You won't be disappointed!

Touches You

Powerful

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The Amanda Knox saga, on which this is based, is an incredibly compelling real-life thriller. It has all the elements--xenophobia, exotic location, pretty people, legal saber-rattling, murder most foul, the irrationality of the enraged populace, wrongful conviction and a compelling heroine who wins in the end. Now, how do you take THAT and make this incredibly dull, meandering film? I often criticize films that are "Hollywood-ed up," but here, they could have used some Hollywood attention to character development and pacing. The script is limp. The characters are laconic. Nothing much happens. The director has done better. The actors have done better. One day, someone will make a truly compelling film on this remarkable tale. This is not it.

Prolific filmmaker Michael Winterbottom takes meta-textual approach of the Amanda Knox murder saga in The Face of an Angel. An American student in Italy has been accused of murdering her English roommate with her Italian boyfriend which has caused a media frenzy. There is a lot of speculation based on circumstantial evidence gathered by incompetent police.Thomas (Daniel Brühl) a filmmaker on a downward spiral both professionally and in his personal life is sent to Siena, Italy to observe the trial as material for a true life crime thriller. He is aided by a Rome based American journalist Simone (Kate Beckinsale) who provides him with expert background information.Thomas also meets another international student who also works as a bartender, Melanie (Cara Delevingne) who shows him the sordid side of Siena. They go to parties, score drugs and he has visions fuelled by this messy, fuzzy life as well as his interest in Dante's The Divine Comedy.Whereas other tabloid journalists are just interested in sex and sleaze as a route to make money rather then finding out the truth of this murder case, Thomas wants to develop a script for a medieval morality play.The film starts off interestingly enough, Thomas is the stranger in town intending to do the victim justice rather than chase a meal ticket but the film gets less involving as the character of Thomas gets lost in Siena. Winterbottom might be too self righteous here about the media but the film still arouses curiosity.

This film tells the story of a film director who sleeps with one of the hottest women in the world while on a trip to Italy. After which he decides to get totally wasted on coke, marijuana and alcohol. Then he ditches one of the hottest women in the world for one of the other hottest women in the world who is half the age of the first one. Meanwhile he stumbles from party to party stoned and drunk, ignoring the other not so hot women characters that he encounters. He also has an annoying not so hot wife who pops up from time to time. He finally settles for the younger hot one but I imagine it not lasting too long. There is a side story about the murder of one super hot chick by another hot chick. Not all is lost though because Cara CAN act!

The movie failed utterly because it had nothing to do with either the events of the crime nor with the trial involving Amanda Kercher and Meredith Knox so viewers who are expecting any enlightenment about these events (and who wasn't) are left short-changed from the start. The characters are clumsy in their purpose to display some sort of point or message for the film so we are let down even more.I would blame this more on the script and directing than the actors but if the actors did a good job then it did not show in the way this story was presented.If I had to guess then I would say that it tried to tell us that the truth of the story was not the thing that people should be focused on but that a beautiful young girl who was loved and had a happy life was lost. Try watching it with this concept in mind and it makes all the poorly presented scenes a little more tolerable.I wonder if Thomas' pursuit of the truth to the murder (as he gets more directly involved with the solution to the case by trying to locate the knives) is what inspires the drug use and silly CGI scenes as a reflection that he was falling into the same unimportant issues that everyone else is. I think his longing for his daughter also parallels the loss that the Kercher family was feeling. Thomas' strife with other journalists may also be a sign that he did not like the opinions of other writers because they were focused on the case and the girl on trial but not on the girl who died ("Strange... when I think of Face of an Angel I always think of Elizabeth. But you all mean Jessica." - Thomas)After writing this review I watched a Q&A by Mark Salisbury with Michael Winterbottom (director) and Paul Viragh (writer) and right off the bat they confirmed what I struggled to believe was the message of the film. I'm sorry that they missed the mark so egregiously and that they used such a high-profile trial in a way that fails its potential as a who-dun-it.