Dante's Inferno (2007)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

The acting in this movie is really good.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Having read the Inferno of Dante's works, it can become a bit stale with all of the adaptations and re-adaptations. The video game based on the works was okay but limited only to the horror/action genre that it had set itself up to be. I find this take on the classic to be NOT watered down, but a modern interpretation that a layman can view and perhaps be inspired to look more into it.All of the snobs that say that it's dumbed down apparently don't realize that very old classic literature--especially ones with heavy religious themes--don't click with everyone and can appear on the surface as holier-than-thou to a modern reader. With this film the basics of not only the horrors of Hell and Dante's enduring love for Beatrice (which would probably seem obsessive and maudlin for today's audience) are presented in a digestible way. I was already acquainted with the Circles of Hell even before watching this film, but making parallels and connections to what I knew and the "updated" version of it proved to be just as entertaining as if I came knowing little about the source material.

I was surprised to discover Michael Moore or Bill Maher wasn't involved with this "movie". An American leftist laundry list of axes to grind, with a distinct sparseness of democrats in Hell. Mao Zedong and Karl Marx didn't make an appearance in Hell, but Ronald Reagan is in the same room with Hitler? Perhaps we'll have to wait for these California spin doctors to butcher Paradiso for them to show all of their pet ideologue political figures.Cheap shots at religion, right-wing politicians, corporations and their lobbyists, Fox News, even SUVs. All the radical leftist talking points were too completely covered - while conspicuously omitting references to wrongdoing from the "other side of the aisle" - to not have been a conscious effort. The singular exception I noticed, in the hour and a half, is JFK has to have sex with Marilyn Monroe for eternity: The token inclusion in these propaganda pieces in a pathetic attempt at appearing non-partisan.

A group of young filmmakers with virtually no budget set out to make something clever and original -- and while there is a bit of originality and some skilled drawing in this slacker puppet show take on "Dante's Inferno," there is nothing especially clever. Dante's "Divine Comedy" was a brilliant piece of social commentary. This film is a vaguely moralistic student film with pretensions to High Art.I suspect those who loved this film were those readily amused by the sophomoric pokes at some icons of the political and/or religious right, and that those who hated it took offense at seeing their favored icons poked. Be that as it may, few of those pokes actually rose to the level of satire.The high point of the movie is a sudden outbreak of "Schoolhouse Rock" on the subject of lobbying and the "revolving door." It's really a shame that the entire film couldn't have been a musical. That would have stripped away a great deal of the annoying film school pretentiousness and added a far stronger element of fun.

I had been flipping through the channels and I saw a preview for this movie and I thought it looked very interesting so I watched it and fell in love with it. I went out and bought the modern version of the book. I loved the art work in the book and being an artist myself I decided to draw a few pieces based on the art in the book. I latter went back to watch the movie again and found that almost all of the sets (backgrounds) were almost identical to the artwork in the book and the banter between Dante and Virgil was about the same also (although the movie is MUCH more humorous) I think it's a great modern spin on the old classic.