The Da Vinci Code

[Kal]

We here more than anybody know how often reviews are wrong... so its good for me that people who are curious about it go without listening to some idiots subjective opinion. However, they are right in this one!

[The Perineum Falcon]

We here more than anybody know how often reviews are wrong... so its good for me that people who are curious about it go without listening to some idiots subjective opinion. However, they are right in this one!

It seems to always work for the wrong films though.
Oftentimes, the films we end up loving, that receive negative reviews, are the very ones those people avoid because of those very critics. However, if it's a film like this one, that already has an incredible following (that's apparently growing day by day, i guess), then they won't pay any attention to what anyone says.
So, it's not really people waking up to how wrong bad reviews can be, they're just too stubborn to listen.

[modage]

i knew better (after the hideous reviews anyway) but yeah, i saw this anyway.  i like tom hanks and amelie and i thought it had LOOKed good.  but it wasnt very good.  it wasnt horrible but it certainly wasnt very good.  it was like National Treasure but without fun.

[children with angels]

Not to beat up on something that's already lying in a pool of its own broken bloody flesh from every other critic out there, but I don't think anyone here has acknowledged QUITE how arse-clenchingly awful this film actually is.

I just saw it last night, and I can honestly say I haven't seen a worse film in the cinema for a long, long time. I consider myself pretty easily pleased - I'll always find something to enjoy in most films, and this really left me struggling.

First, it had the worst overuse of flashbacks of any film ever: the epitome was when they decided they needed a brief flashback that told us HOW THEY GOT FROM A PLANE TO A CAR. The tone was totally wrong: should've been a rollercoaster, was instead a donkey ride - they should have realised that the story works best as a SLIGHTLY upmarket Indiana Jones. The performances were woefully poe-faced, except perhaps for McKellen who camped it up almost appropriately. All the ghostly past-in-the-present-day effects were just unbelievably silly, making it feel - as A Matter of Chance mentioned - very like some budget TV documentary.

In fact, the thing that maybe riled me most was how like a TV show it looked and felt altogether: from the very first scenes - diving in in the middle of intensity, fast-moving character intros and level-plane drama throughout - it felt like an episode of 24, and the way it obsessed over technology and dived into the mechanics of objects, and quickly worked infinite clues out, was just so goddamn CSI. The scenes too: short and shot pretty much always in close up and medium close up - it was so uncinematic, so clumsy, so... SHIT.

And I'm done. Not to beat up on something that's already lying in a pool of its own broken bloody flesh from every other critic out there.

[Gold Trumpet]

I'm going to eat my words from another thread, but I enjoyed this movie. Worst, I even appreciated parts of it.

There is a bias to me though with this film. I love the subject of the Knights Templar. Ever since I read Focault's Pendulum years ago I could never get enough of the subject. The Da Vinci Code only prodded my interest in them again. Watching this film happily go back and forth with conspiracy ideas was a perfect and happy holiday for me. The great scenery of Paris and France only sealed the deal after the subject. All knowing fans of French Cinema know that at the doorstop of every potential bad French film is the likely chance great scenery will make the film still worth the experience.

Of course, I paid little attention to the film story-wise besides the Templar quips. I knew only silliness and bad melodrama existed at the heart of Audrey Tatou's character's story, but why bother ruining a good ride through France. I will commend the film for Ron Howard's larger sense of film-making. In earlier films like The Paper and Apollo 13 the subjects were ripe to be filmed in one tonal level. Trying to catch the frenzy of the news room with constant camera fast tracking in The Paper and over reliance on hand held in Apollo 13 to capture a barren claustrophobia. Apollo 13 was justified filmmaking because of the subject, but The Paper was limited filmmaking understanding. The filmmaking never was able to flesh the story out besides pressing the buttons "calm" and "tense" in its dial up of emotions. It was a good study of how to film a newspaper room in its very specific moment of "rush"

But, Ron Howard surprised me with The Da Vinci Code. Because of how redudant the film is to chase sequences, the filmmaking could have been monotonous. He switches well between all the sequences. The first chase sequence, by far the longest, doesn't over use the act of steering past oncoming traffic overbearingly. It tightly focuses on two risky car movements and then ends the sequence. The focus of the car chase sequences then begins to diminish and Howard plays with graphic realism more so than he has before. He uses it sparingly (I only counted two scenes) but they were at the right moments. He tinkers with computer animation to interact with character drama but is never overabundant.The historical sequences also play to a good shade of color tinting that hide obvious CGI stains.

[Gamblour.]

This movie sucked, I'm so sick of shitty movies. This, X3, Marie Antoinette and Southland Tales are getting bad reviews, and yet Clerks 2 gets an 8 minute standing ovation?

children with angels is right, the flashbacks are terribly used and redundant. And why the fuck does Ron Howard feel the need to visualize every thought a character has when they're "decrypting" something. In A Beautiful Mind and this, he has to highlight the descrambling going on, it's so fucking stupid. He thinks the audience is so stupid. Go back to narrating, Ron. This movie is so obviously bad I can't even bother talking about it.

[Gold Trumpet]

There is little mystery that I hold the critic Stanley Kauffmann up on a pedestal. For the last few years I've aligned my opinion to stand up only against his. He was really the only critic I read. Sometimes I went back to Roger Ebert but not often. Now I've forced myself to read as many critics as possible. I've found I agree more with other critics, but I always go back to Stanley Kauffmann to truly challenge my opinion because he looks at every film in the broadest sense. He is, as the NY Times recently said, "the closest to the complete critic." The auteur theory has galvanized critics and audience alike to give luster to the director, while Kauffmann keeps the balance in line.

His review of The Da Vinci Code is (again) the very best review of an overly popular film. Nobody is as understanding of placement for a film as Kauffmann and his review is the most entertaining and insightful for this film. I hold firm to my opinion, but Kauffmann again makes me think I didn't think enough about this movie. I've had doubts lately about him, but this review proves to me he's still the very best critic going at the great age of 90.

Divining Divinity
Stanley Kauffmann

The film medium has just been given a tremendous salute--negative but tremendous. Only when the film version of The Da Vinci Code loomed did Christian protests swell around the world. Consider that Dan Brown's novel has sold (according to some reports) sixty million copies and is still rushing along. Figure conservatively that each copy has been read by two people. Thus a sizeable chunk of the world's population has read the book. And what was the outcry from vigilant Christian groups about this fact? Relatively faint. Books have been published about Brown's book, numberless articles written, but no Christian leader had suggested, as did one recently in India, that Christians fast unto death to protest the novel. Only the film brought such a drastic plea. 

The theater, too, in a comparable instance, has not evoked an ecclesiastical storm. Last year the National Theater in London produced Howard Brenton's play Paul, about the apostle, in which there appeared Mary Magdalene as Jesus's wife and several apostles who try to convince Paul of Jesus's mortality, death, and burial in Syria. These are some of the matters in the Da Vinci film that enrage many Christians, but as for the Brenton play, although there were letters of protest before it opened, its run was undisturbed.

Hail, then, wry though the hailing be, to the immediacy and the ubiquity of film. Those of the faithful who feel that Brown's work attacks and offends their faith clearly recognize that film floods into a viewer's system of responses much more engulfingly than a book can. In a film, most of the work of transmutation from words to effect has already been done for the viewer.

This is a century-old truth, and when the adapted novel is a good one, it raises some unanswerable questions. For example, to those who questioned the very filming of A Passage to India because in considerable measure it displaced Forster with David Lean, the only sane response was "Stay home and re-read the book." With many a novel, however, the film version is superior--Alain Tavernier's The Clockmaker is one such. With Brown, the difference in quality is certainly in favor of the film. I couldn't read the book (all those one-sentence paragraphs, as if the author were out of breath), but I sat through the film. Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen helped as Brown could not.

How faithful Akiva Goldsman's screenplay is to the book I leave to Brownians. Undoubtedly many viewers will spend their time at the film comparing it with the book, favorably or not. I am free of this bondage. I can report that the screenplay is at the start far from lucid in setting forth characters and relationships and intents. And after the film has been barreling along for two hours of its 148-minute journey, it seems to have lost the ability to finish. Three or four times in the last half-hour, I thought the film was over, only to be jarred by more of it. 

The story focuses on Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology at Harvard. Langdon is lecturing in Paris when a man is murdered at the Louvre, and he is called in to help explain some symbols on the body. Also brought in is a police cryptographer--a pretty young woman, of course--to collaborate. (Has there ever been a cryptographer on the Paris police force?) In collaboration with a police inspector and later in contest with him, the pair follow clues and have adventures in the territory of religious history. The central question is whether the story of Jesus was accurately reported in the Gospels.

Although the murder takes place in the vicinity of the Mona Lisa (which is featured on the paperback edition of the novel), the story has much more to do with The Last Supper. What is never touched in the film is the fact that if Da Vinci included a code in this painting, he must have believed in the ideas conveyed by that code. This, for good reason, is never asserted. 

The adventurous pair contend throughout with an albino monk in murderous pursuit of those who are considered enemies of Christ by the religious eminences whom he serves. Involved, too, is a rich, elderly scholar, physically impaired, who knows Langdon and helps--for a while. It turns out, according to this story, after all the trails have been followed and codes unraveled, that Jesus had children and that the cryptologist is his linear descendant. (I can't really spoil the ending of a book that has had--is having--many millions of readers.)

Audrey Tautou is the cryptographer and in herself is the best refutation of the book's thesis. Pretty though she is, she is so flavorless, such a mere maker of faces, that it is hard to believe in her family tree. McKellen has a marvelous time as the old scholar, implying, as he goes plummily along, that it was worthwhile to do all the serious acting in his career because it brought him this well-paid frolic. Tom Hanks is Langdon. He continues to be a pleasant fellow to spend time with, which is not the same thing as giving a good performance. But the role as written would have hobbled Edwin Booth. Langdon has a lot of things to say and do, but we know little more about him at the long-delayed end than we did at the beginning. The director, Ron Howard, has worked with Hanks several times before, and they seem to get along with each other, comfortably but without distinction.

After all the shenanigans are over, what we are left with is neither the novel nor the film but the fact of the novel's oceanic success. (Cultural note: the Louvre is now offering its visitors, for rent or sale, an audio tour called "Step Inside the Da Vinci Code." So the Louvre has already stepped inside.) Social historians have doubtless been exploring the reasons that a book built on the non-divinity of Christ has swept the world. The attribution of common mortality to Jesus is not new--in fiction, at any rate. In the 1960s I read a novel, title forgotten, in which Jesus was gay. Part of Brown's explosive success may be because, despite the statistics about religious attendance, doubt is gnawing at millions. Or perhaps it is because, whetted for decades by the enlarged media, people thirst most of all for the inside story on anything. Exposé, even specious exposé, has become an obsession.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

I've never heard the phrase "So what you're saying is..." so many times in a movie before.

[hedwig]

I've never heard the phrase "So what you're saying is..." so many times in a movie before.

[Pubrick]

I've never heard the phrase "So what you're saying is..." so many times in a movie before.

i believe that was 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th line of every character in Dogma.

[grand theft sparrow]

Even so, I think Walrus is still right.

[MacGuffin]

So what you're saying is Dan Brown and Akiva Goldsman plagiarized from Pauly Shore and Kevin Smith.

[MacGuffin]

A fascinating theory wrapped in a conventional thriller structure. Having not read the book, I did find interest in the whole Jesus blood/story line, but felt comfortable with seeing this Cliff Notes version than picking it up. The script was very heavy on the exposition, as noted in the posts above. If it was just a standard thriller not based on a controversial best seller, it would be somewhat above average, but because of that case, I could surmise that this was just a weak adaptation.

[polkablues]

If it was just a standard thriller not based on a controversial best seller, it would be somewhat above average, but because of that case, I could surmise that this was just a weak adaptation.

Nope.  Solid adaptation of crap source material.

[MacGuffin]

Goldsman paid $4 million to re-enter Code
Source: Moviehole

According to Deadline Hollywood, shit is about to reign down on the multiplex again.

The second downpour will carry the title "The Da Vinci Code 2". Again, Akiva Goldsman will be standing in the thick of it.

The scribe of the first film – and the fuckin' awful "Batman & Robin", mind you - has reportedly signed a sumly deal ($4 million!) to write the sequel to the Ron Howard travesty.

According to the site, Goldsman has to get to work pretty fast on the sequel, because Sony wants the film ready for a 2008 release.

Considering all that Goldsman has to do is 'adapt' Dan Brown's book "Angels & Demons" into some sort of literary form – he doesn't have to dream up anything himself! – the amount he's being paid to do it is nonsensical. Looking at the guy's back catalogue, you gotta wonder why Sony felt the urge to fire a floor full of employees just so they could pay this guy to translate the book to script. Surely would've done it for 2 mill?

Haven't read "Angels & Demons", but from what I hear, it ain't half the book that "Da Vinci" is. It reportedly sees Robert Langdon involved in a conflict with an ancient group, the Illuminati, and the Catholic Church. It is credited with being the first novel to contain ambigrams.

Assumingly, Tom Hanks will be back to reprise his role as Langdon in the film version – unless, of course, the studio comes to their senses and hires Harrison Ford like they should've all along.