You gotta love Anthony Lane. The man is a comic genius. Check out his review of the The Da Vinci Code — both the film and the book — a review so deliciously scathing that I had to read it twice. And laughed at the same jokes each time.
How timid — how undefended in their powers of reason — must people be in order to yield to such preening? Are they reading “The Da Vinci Code” because everybody on the subway is doing the same, and, if so, why, when they reach their stop, do they not realize their mistake and leave it on the seat, to be gathered up by the next sucker? Despite repeated attempts, I have never managed to crawl past page 100. As I sat down to watch “The Da Vinci Code,” therefore, I was in the lonely, if enviable, position of not actually knowing what happens.
Oh, goodness.
I've tried to start The Da Vinci Code, too, but can't make it past the first couple pages. They're awful. Kris read it and pronounced it rubbish. It's a shame that poorly-written stuff like this makes a gajillion dollars while better-written stuff languishes unread.
Alas.
What else does Lane have to say? Well, let's see:
Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, except at Columbia Pictures, where the power lunches won’t even be half-started. The Catholic Church has nothing to fear from this film. It is not just tripe. It is self-evident, spirit-lowering tripe that could not conceivably cause a single member of the flock to turn aside from the faith. Meanwhile, art historians can sleep easy once more, while fans of the book, which has finally been exposed for the pompous fraud that it is, will be shaken from their trance. In fact, the sole beneficiaries of the entire fiasco will be members of Opus Dei, some of whom practice mortification of the flesh. From now on, such penance will be simple—no lashings, no spiked cuff around the thigh. Just the price of a movie ticket, and two and a half hours of pain.
The Da Vinci Code: 23% at Rotten Tomatoes (11% from big-name critics) — that's worse than RV or The Shaggy Dog.
Anyone surprised?
On this day at foldedspace.org
2007 — Concert Review: The Black Angels at The Doug Fir In which I rave about The Black Angels, a band that can produce a wall of sound.
2001 — Tintin is Dying In which The Best Cat Ever hasn't long to live, and that breaks my heart.
I don't buy that the book, or the movie, are as terrible as people want to say. Clearly anyone who thinks the book is particularly bad hasn't read nearly enough of the ridiculous books on the best seller lists, the vapid "chick lit," so-called thrillers and other rubbish that one is forced to consider when trapped in an airport bookstore or a corner drug store in the midwest.
I read the book before it was "a thing" and thought it was just fine. Not earth-shattering, certainly, but it passed the time and touched on several nutjob theories of the sort that you might have seen featured on In Search Of....
Does the Catholic church have anything to fear from this work of fiction? No. And it's ridiculous that they would think they did. Are God-fearing Christians going to turn from their faith because of this stitched-together fantasy? Puh-lease. I don't buy it.
Of the regular bloggers I follow who have had any manner of nasty things to say about the book or the movie, very few of them have made any arguments against either that didn't boil down to typical elitist fanboy behavior (ala "Templars are cool and this movie screws them up!" or "Anyone interested in this subject matter should just read Holy Blood, Holy Grail instead.") I even saw one woman complaining about the age difference between the Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou as evidence that Hollywood sucks and can't cast a woman Hanks' age to star opposite him, or another guy who complained that the way the movie shows different pieces of the puzzle lighting up as Hanks' character mentally concentrates on them "lamely" robbed movie viewers of the chance to "figure out" the puzzle for themselves.
Blah blah blah, guess you struck a nerve with me on this one. :) Chris and I actually went to see the movie last night and I was thinking about how all of the criticism I'd been seeing just seemed over-blown and needless. Hell, even the National Organization for Albinism is up in arms because the creepy bad-guy is an albino. There is no way in hell this movie is as awful (or as offensive to humanity) as The Shaggy Dog or RV or Slither or Poseidon or Saw II...