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Reviews
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
The Medium Kills the Message
This is really a well made film with good acting and strong images. I presume that it surpasses the novel it is based upon and rather doubt a remake will make any improvements.
The message was a little conservative and contradictory, though. The burning of the books was not about substantial censorship like in Nazi-Germany, but obviously the regime was against books as communication media. What is so untruthful about this film (as a film) is that it claims government would prohibit books (as books), while in general books are rather "killed" by film makers.
Then the story suggested that books have a certain subversive power and let people know deep truths and emotions, which the regime wants to conceal. It may be true that mass-media like TV or Internet contain more short-lived content than books do. But, this very film is proof that deep thoughts or feelings, in other words: high culture, is not something exclusive to books.
So why should Montag kill other people (the firemen) to save a book - just a book? (Even if it is as good a book as Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination?) Actually, Truffault himself must have burnt loads of books - and all best classics - just for this film!
The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer (1999)
True fiction!?
After seeing this film and reading that it is a documentary soap based on a 'real case', I asked myself what understanding we have of truth in visual or textual narratives. My first intuition was that in this film there are clichees put together in a stereotype way to tell a story with a conservative political message. Just the counterpiece of the more commonly told (and likewise simplistic) liberal story of the suppressed girl from the province, old fashioned and educated with narrow-minded moralist principles who moves to a urban environment and develops unimagined qualities, gets famous, discovers sex etc. Even if the story told in the "Hunt for the Unicorn-Killer" is "true" in the sense that the director was inspired by an incident with structurally the same facts - the way it is told, is absolutely incredible. Neither of the characters really wins any depth. The motives of the girl to stay with her friend who humiliates her and the motives for the friend to murder her out of jealoucy - even if the film insinuates that he never loved her stay obscure. The question why an explained pacifist kills her girl friend is answered in a too simplistic way, if the film suggests he was only having his ideas to make himself interesting and to seduce girls. I think it is also problematic to make a piece of fiction and pretend it to be real keeping the real names of persons and places. People might no longer distinguish between what was the case and what was just invented to make the plot more interesting. I think truth in narratives is more about cases being representative (even if they are invented) and told in a way sophisticated enough to come close to the complexities of real life. I rate it 1 out of 10.