Word: church
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...weeks, or nearly three years, and inspired parodies in both hard-core (The Da Vinci Load) and soft-core movies (The Da Vinci Coed). People picked it up and couldn't put it down, in part because it was a very bookish book: an elaborate web of church lore leading to the 2,000-year-old dish that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had been married and their God-woman offspring walked the earth today. To be faithful to the book, Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman had to lard the movie with giant extracts of religious arcana. Cinematically...
...years back, the Vatican, the seat of power for the Roman Catholic Church, had waxed apoplectic over The Da Vinci Code - both the Dan Brown book and Ron Howard's 2006 movie version. According to the director, the Holy See blocked his attempts to shoot scenes of Angels, another Brown novel, in the Roman churches where much of it is set. So Howard must have found L'Osservatore Romano's genial review an unexpected blessing, somewhere between a celebratory puff of white smoke and the mild penance of 10 Our Fathers and 10 Hail Marys. We also hear that...
...Also the same approach: it's a movie, so we'd better feign movement. The back-history in which Langdon is an expert requires Hanks to speak dialogue with its own footnotes, so Howard camouflages the static nature of enterprise by having his star spout arcana while rushing from church to church. In fact, virtually all the actors have to talk the talk while they walk the walk. When they take a breather and stand still, the camera skates 360s around them...
...chosen to lead the tour is a thornier question. The essentially reverent Angels, which portrays the Catholic hierarchy as the victim, not the perpetrator, of a grandly evil plot, was written before The Da Vinci Code. So in the order of publishing, it made sense that the church would initially allow Langdon to pursue his doctrinal theories. In the order of the movies, though, it beggars belief that Langdon, having exposed a truth the Vatican has suppressed for millennia, would be asked to consult on the kidnapped-Cardinals caper. Yet apparently L'Osservatore Romano doesn't hold a grudge. After...
...improve those relations. The ties had frayed earlier this year after Benedict lifted the excommunication of four ultra-traditionalist Bishops, including one who denies the widely accepted facts about what happened in Nazi Germany. The Pope, who has since said that the Bishop has no standing in the Church so long as he doesn't change his stance on the events of World War II, denounced any who deny the events of the Holocaust...