Is "pretensive" anything like "prehensile"?
I have a particular interest in movies about the devil and demonology. I have a small video sub-library within my video library devoted to the subject, comprising 14 movies and 1 TV show (American Gothic). The Devil's Advocate and Angel Heart are both in it. To each his own, but, while I obviously enjoy them both, I prefer Angel Heart. Speaking for myself, I find the story, based on a novel by William Hjortsbergb to be deeper than a movie that resulted from a pitch meeting. (Interestingly, Hjortsberg also wrote the script for Ridley Scott's Legend, which is also in my collection because Tim Curry was transformed into the best physical depiction of Old Scratch that I have ever seen.) And I think that DeNiro NAILED Lucifer, I mean, Louis Cypher. Speaking as an amateur occult historian, Angel Heart's backstory of debutant witches showing off at high society parties in the 30s and 40s is spot on, giving this movie, for me, deeper verisimilitude than Devil's Advocate. I will say that the creepy, shifting bas-relief sculpture on Milton's wall in Advocate is 'way cool. And I get the point that, in Advocate, we get to see Satan using the process of seduction to tempt his victim. "Vanity! It IS my favorite sin!" But, in Heart, we enter the story in medias res: Johnny Favorite was seduced and damned years before the story begins. Johnny thinks he has found a way to cheat the Satan, by assuming another identity; but nobody cheats Satan. Johnny goes to hell. Keanu Reeves (forget his character's name) comes up with the solution of suicide, which is far less clever--actually, pretty ham-fisted--and overlooks the fact that suicide is a mortal sin and suicides go to hell, which delivers him into Milton's power, so Milton can bring him back and keep trying till Keanu at last fathers the Antichrist. Same result in both movies, but I prefer the path to the result in Angel Heart.
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