City of Angels

Rating:
Summary: Dumbed Down Version of Wings of Desire
Review: I don't know if this should be called a "remake" or just a crass, dumbed down, Americanized version of the Classic 1987 German film "Wings of Desire", directed by Wim Wenders.

This movie lacks everything that made "Wings of Desire" a classic and an international hit; depth, intelligence, great cinematography, imaginative, thought-provoking and powerful, yet understated acting.

Against my better judgement, I saw this movie out of curiosity, depsite the scathing reviews, because I was so impressed by Wings... Even as a stand alone, without comparing it to the vastly superior Wenders film, this movie is typical Hollywood at it's worst, a contrived story, weakly written and acted, and even though not a happy ending, it cheaply and lamely attempts to tug at ones heart strings with sappy ending.

I wouldn't recommend "Wings of Desire" to anyone who liked "City of Angels". The Wenders film would not be appreciated by anyone who enjoyed this waste of time and money. This was a movie for the masses, and a very bad one at that.

Rating:
Summary: Dissapointment
Review: I think this movie failed.It is about an angel who wears black and stares at the ocean,then falls literally head over heels for a normal girl.He decides to become a fallen angel,to do that he throws himself off a building.It could have been a much better movie than it was.

Rating:
Summary: Life, death, love and hope
Review: "I would rather have had one breath of her hair, one kiss of her mouth, one touch of her hand, than an eternity without it. One."

That is Seth's (Nicholas Cage) answer when asked if he regretted giving up his existence as an immortal angel for a brief lifetime as a mortal human. Seth is an angel who has an insatiable curiosity about the human experience. He encounters Dr. Maggie Rice (Meg Ryan) as she struggles to save the life of the man Seth is about to escort "Home". When she appears to stare him right in the eye and declares "You can't have him!" Seth is shocked and in amazement tries to find out who this person is. The more Seth learns about Maggie the deeper he falls in love.

This isn't an "Angel" movie although it does touch on life and death, God and the Heareafter... It's a love story. A love that is pure and innocent, a love that builds between two people who see the inner beauty of each other and are willing to sacrifice it all for each other.

Rating:
Summary: ***sob***
Review: I love this movie. I cried like a baby for the first time in forever when I saw it in the theater, and I've cried every time I've seen it since. It's a classic. It's made like they used to make movies. The acting is amazing, the whole movie is just a thing of beauty. It's a love story from the old school of filmmaking.

Nicholas Cage is an angel, and like all angels he's invisible, dresses in black and hangs around high places and the city library. Meg Ryan is a doctor, and she's completely stressed out.

Rating:
Summary: Truly awful
Review: European art house classic reduced to cheesy Hollywood with (even worse) Nicholas Cage. Or, to put it another way, beauty meets the beast and gets a savaging.

Rating:
Summary: the world itself compels us to despise the world
Review: Not really a "date film" unless you have a date with lifelong celibacy, this chintzy remake of the lovely Wings of Desire plays like a bitter Gnostic parody of the original, in which the bumbling servant of an incompetent demiurge (played by Nicholas Cage with a kind of monosyllabic breathlessness,) gives up eternal life and the music of the sunset in order to participate in one of the most annoying sex scenes ever committed to film. After the indulgence (tacky in itself, but particularly grating when compared to the original film's treatment of the same event,) the occasion of his fall (the improbable Meg Ryan, as a heart surgeon with a peculiarly pointless straw-fiancee,) wastes no time in getting herself mowed down by a lumber truck. Our ex-angel then tries to convince himself that it was all worth it, as the audience is bombarded with evidence to the contrary.

Creepily mechanistic plot devices and schlocky dialogue further contribute to the pain-- and it's an awful lot of pain to go through just to confirm the same sad half-truths about the tragedy of human embodiment. Watch it with the one you love, just before you break the news of your decision to enter religious orders.

Rating:
Summary: City of Angels Review
Review: Excellent!!! It reminds you of the small things we take for granted.

Rating:
Summary: Longingly Romantic and Human
Review: Nicolas Cage gives a wonderful performance as Seth, an Angel who falls in love and begins to long for the ability to express that love. Seth is an Angel who helps the dead cross over and in some respects this film resembles the 1930's film "Death Takes a Holiday" with Frederick March and Evelyn Veneble.

Meg Ryan is Maggie, the doctor who is the object of Seth's affection. She somehow sences his prescence when trying to save one of her patients and he is touched and bewildered by her. Andre Braugher steals every scene he is in as Seth's fellow Angel and friend. They all hang out at the library and gather every morning at the beach to see the sunrise and hear the singing of heaven. Dennis Franz has a fine turn as a patient in Maggie's hospital who knows Seth is there because he to was once an Angel.

This provides Seth with a way to truly love Maggie if he can find the courage to leave heaven behind and just "fall". This is one of the most romantic movies of recent years and has a message about the wonderful things we all take for granted. More than that, it is a story about the importace of love, even one felt for only a moment, for it is that experience which makes us special among all creation.

I will not ruin the last portion of this film if you have not seen it but as we all know there is a price we pay for being human. This film is for anyone who has ever loved someone as Seth does, who would trade all eternity for just one breath of her hair. This is a truly memorable film you will watch over and over. A brief but tender moment as Seth and Maggie shop together at an outdoor vegetable market perfectly captures the first exitement of love and is my favorite scene. Movies like this are rarely made anymore and this is one to cherish. You will never forget the line, "When they ask me what I liked best...I'll say it was You"..........

Rating:
Summary: Top Movie for Me
Review: This is one of the movies that I will never stop seeing in my life.

Rating:
Summary: Okay remake of the splendid 'Wings of Desire'
Review: Looking at a couple of Internet sites where viewers can write comments on movies they've seen, by and large "City of Angels" was written about in almost sacred tones. The underlying theme seemed to be that, if you didn't see the film as something spiritually enlightening, then you missed the point. Alas, I seem to be one of those who failed to see the movie as something special.

It's a fairly good picture, and one that should prove to be a decent night's entertainment. It is a romance akin to "Ghost".

The plot twist is that Nicholas Cage plays a guardian angel who becomes infatuated by Ryan's character. When he finds out that it is possible for an angel to give up their immortality and become human, he does so.

For American audiences, this transformation probably seemed to be a very original idea. In fact, the movie is a remake of Wim Wenders' 1987 film, "Wings of Desire". This won numerous awards, particularly for its cinemaphotography. Parts of it were in black and white, others were in color. Some sequences had splashes of color added to the black and white.

Because of the almost sacred attitude towards "City of Angels", I'll try not to be too earthbound in pointing out what I think are weak points in it.

First of all, angels are 'in' these days. That's fine with me, but there are angels and then there are angels. The ones in this picture are dressed in ordinary clothes and wear black trench coats. This worked well in the German version, which was far more symbolic. Frankly, in the remake they look both ordinary and a bit ominous.

Both versions give the female lead a career which is in some way death defying. The German heroine was a circus acrobat, which fit perfectly. She was an outsider and had a love of flight. "City of Angels" changes her to a heart surgeon. I suppose this change was made to give the character more control over life and death. It seemed plausible that an eccentric circus performer would believe her new lover used to be an angel. It's hard to envision a well educated and science oriented doctor believing that there really are angels, much less that one could choose to become human just because of her. Perhaps what made this idea so hard for me to accept was that casting Ryan as a heart surgeon is as believable as seeing Leonardo DiCaprio playing one of the stars of the World Federation of Wrestling. Had it been Jodie Foster or Meryl Streep, perhaps I could have bought it. And it is, by the way, Ryan's first big role since "Sleepless In Seattle" five years ago..

Nicholas Cage does make a superlative angel. In the last few years, he has successfully become mainstream. If you look at his small, lesser known films, you see that his acting range is wide indeed. His immense talent causes us to overlook the fact that it's implausible that an angel would want to experience the pain and sorrow we mere mortals endure.

The film is nicely photographed. While Los Angeles is called 'The City of Angeles', I know from having lived there for a long time that it's an unlikely place for such a spiritual event to occur.

The end of the film is heart wrenching, yet inevitable. It is Cage's performance that gives it, as well as the rest of the film, such impact. I do not mean to diminish Ryan's capabilities. My opinion is that she was miscast.

Wim Wenders is one of Europe's most creative and distinguished directors. Ironically, Brad Silberling, the director of "City of Angeles", only notable film is "Casper". As in the friendly ghost.