Word: vinci
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...editors: Re: “Long, Hot Summer Flicks,” arts, May 4. “The Da Vinci Code” was premiered in Cannes, France on Wednesday. We have been treated to delightful stories of Christians planning boycotts, disruptions of screenings, and even hunger strikes. Right now, there is a protest being staged in Boston Commons over it. Apparently the protesters are taking offense to the 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...
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...
...bravery? 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...