Word: codee
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...McKellen does another fine job in what has become his second career: infusing a bluff, wily menace into blockbusters in need of some perking up. (By Monday, given his appearances in X3 and The Da Vinci Code, this eminent Shakespearean is likely to become the movie actor seen by the most paying customers in a single weekend...
...fact that the plot claims that Jesus married Mary Magdelene and had kids. I am a Roman Catholic. I was an alter boy. I play the organ regularly for church services. I go to mass every Sunday. And I find nothing offensive about “The Da Vinci Code.” I remember being engrossed when I read the book, staying up late into the night, repeatedly telling myself “Just one more chapter; just ten more pages.” I plan on seeing the film, and I plan on enjoying it. Why can?...
They are not, however, intrinsically visual or dramatic. To make a real movie out of The Da Vinci Code, rather than an audio CD or a "special illustrated edition" (which have been done), requires a rethinking of the book. Or at least a thinking. Instead, director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman pounded out a faithful synopsis and filmed it. The result is a work that is politically brave, for a mainstream movie, and artistically stodgy...
Everybody butDan Brownknows that The Da Vinci Code is not a great book; at best it's a great read. But for all the novel's thriller tropes, its chases among chalices and cilices, the publishing phenomenon of the decade is a very bookish book. The games Brown plays are essentially literary: anagrams and hexagrams, fun with the Fibonacci Sequence. Those riddles are best savored by readers with a long night or a long flight ahead of them...
...Filming and financing what, if the story is taken seriously, is a corrosive challenge to Christianity. But having made the bold decision to film the novel, Howard hasn't the energy to slap the thing to life. He's like a guide on one of the countless Da Vinci Code tours of Paris or London, doing it by rote, letting the film hobble to its climax with still more exposition. Good movies are show-and-tell; this one is all-tell, no-show...