Word: jesus
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...says it is adopting socialism as a model for the 21st century. Even vendors are capitalizing on the influx of political tourists. They sell Chavez paraphernalia on the streets of Caracas, ranging from hats to talking Chavez dolls. One poster even shows the leader riding a horse next to Jesus Christ...
...Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code brims with mysteries: Did Jesus have a girlfriend? And did they have a daughter, whose descendants live today? Is the Priory of Sion an ancient covenant whose Grand Masters, including Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton, have sworn to protect this royal blood line? Is Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic sect Brown paints in such lurid colors, really that awful? Can a fictional thriller that is nothing more or less than (as one Biblical scholar called it) "a great plane read" be taken seriously as an ecclesiastical exposé? (My short answers...
...discover the meaning and whereabouts of the Holy Grail, a central artifact in Christian mythology. We eventually learn that, unawares, our hero and heroine have attracted the attention of rival gangs of learned loonies, latest in a millennial line of combatants over the central tenet of Christianity: Was Jesus human or divine...
...exec in robes. McKellen, a pro's pro, lends suavity and power to the Leigh Teabing role (a character Brown named for two of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail). Yet when he delivers the film's dead-serious climactic line - "You're the last living descendant of Jesus Christ" - it got a derisory laugh from the Cannes crowd...
...movie goes further. Beneath the chases and crashes, the chalices and cilices, it denies Jesus' divinity. As Teabing (perhaps not the most trustworthy authority) says in the movie, "The Greatest Story Ever Told is a lie!" And further still: the film challenges the belligerence that too often adheres to religious believers, the wars and atrocities perpetrated in His name. "Who is God, who is man?" asks Sophie. "How many have been murdered over this question?" I'm not taking sides on that issue. But for a mainstream, $125 million summer movie to raise it, let alone suggest a negative answer...