Posted on 05/17/2006 3:23:47 PM PDT by fgoodwin
'Da Vinci Code' Misses the Mark for Critics
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/film_cannes_da_vinci_code
By DAVID GERMAIN, AP Movie Writer Wed May 17, 8:58 AM ET
"The Da Vinci Code" drew lukewarm praise, shrugs of indifference, some jeering laughter and a few derisive jabs Tuesday from arguably the world's toughest movie crowd: critics at the Cannes Film Festival.
The year's most anticipated movie, "The Da Vinci Code" was a generally faithful adaptation of Dan Brown's monster best seller, spinning a murder thriller that stems from a cover-up of secrets about Christianity's roots.
While readers worldwide devoured the novel, reaction from Cannes critics ranged from mild endorsement of its potboiler suspense to groans of ridicule over its heavy melodrama.
"It's a movie about whether the greatest story ever told is true or not, and it's not the greatest movie ever screened, is it?" said Baz Bamigboye, a film columnist for London's Daily Mail. "As a thriller, well," he continued, shrugging.
"Maybe the next day I'll forget about it," said Igor Soukmanov of Unistar Radio in Belarus. "But today for two hours it was good entertainment. ... As a Hollywood movie, it's a very nice picture."
Critics got their first look at "The Da Vinci Code" a day before its world premiere at Cannes on Wednesday, when it also debuts at theaters in France and some other countries. The film opens worldwide over the following two days, including the United States on Friday.
Directed by Ron Howard, the movie stars Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou as strangers hurled together on a frantic quest for the Holy Grail after a series of murders is committed.
The filmmakers add some twists and variations here and there, but the general thrust of the novel remains intact, including its theory that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child, which has prompted denouncements from many Christians.
The Cannes audience clearly grew restless as the movie dragged on to two and a half hours and spun a long sequence of anticlimactic revelations.
"I kept thinking of the Energizer Bunny, because it kept going and going and going, and not in a good way," said James Rocchi, a film critic for CBS 5 television in San Francisco and the online outlet Cinematical. "Ron Howard makes handsome films. He doesn't make bad ones, but he doesn't make great ones."
One especially melodramatic line uttered by Hanks drew prolonged laughter and some catcalls, and the audience continued to titter for much of the film's remainder.
Some people walked out during the movie's closing minutes, though there were fewer departures than many Cannes movies provoke among harsh critics. When the credits rolled, there were a few whistles and hisses, and there was none of the scattered applause even bad movies sometimes receive at Cannes.
Critics singled out co-star Ian McKellen, playing a wry Grail enthusiast who joins the search, as the movie's highlight, injecting hearty humor and delivering the most nuanced performance. Paul Bettany added a seething mix of tragic pathos and destructive zealousness as a monk assassin who carries out the slayings.
Bamigboye said all the actors were solid, but enthusiastically added, "I've got to tell you, Ian McKellen steals it. He slices all the crap away."
So it is okay for "critics" to be critical of this film but not for Christians to be critical of it?
I'm glad they thought it was just so, so because every movie they thought was great, sucked pond scum!
"IT'S NOT NEARLY DEAD OR PARTLY DEAD BUT MOST DECIDEDLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY DEAD!" (Imaginary marquee review of DVC)
http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/2006/05/dvc_reviews.html#comments
DVC Reviews
Rotten Tomatoes keeps score - it's at 0% now, with 8 reviews in.
MegaCritics also collates reviews. There cumulative is higher at this point because they include a rave from the NYPost
I have one more post on this I will try to pull together this afternoon, and then...aside from anything startling or interesting, I hoping that will be my last word.
Richard Corliss at TIME:
McKellen, a pros 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 films dead-serious climactic line Youre the last living descendant of Jesus Christ it got a derisory laugh from the Cannes crowd.
Just what youd expect, some would say, from a smug bunch of infidels. Well, despite my cataloguing of the movies faults, Im not among the smirkers. In that blizzard of whats-in-the-movie publicity, there was speculation that the filmmakers might shy from the Opus Dei subplot, or at least from naming the group. One wag suggested that, given the character played by the child actor Ronny Howard on The Andy Griffith Show, he might re-dub it Opie Dei. But no, he charged ahead, calling it by name and depicting the society in exactly as harsh a light as the book does. Expect protests.
The 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? Im not taking sides on that issue. But for a mainstream, $125 million summer movie to raise it, let alone suggest a negative answer, in a cultural environment already politicized and polarized by religious debate, takes big steel balls. I didnt know Opie had em.
So maybe theres one more Da Vinci Code movie mystery yet to be unraveled. Will the mass movie audience take to a thriller that appears to attack the fundamental beliefs of what, our leaders keep telling us, is an actively Christian country? If Howards movie marches through that storm, it will become a phenomenon as impressive as the books gigantic sales: the first secular-humanist hit.
But how can it be secular humanist if it's all about the sacred feminine?
Update: I called it!!!!
From a May 12 entry on this blog:
I also have a prediction, based on what I sort of know about the screenplay and the clips I've seen: the Langdon character is going to function as the witty skeptic in all of this - he is going to be far less on board with the "theories" in this film than the character in the book. He even has a moment near the end in which, based on an experience he had as a child, in which he muses that "Well, Jesus could be God, huh?" and then of course, we're back to "Who knows? No one knows! Pick a story! Any story!"
Entertainment Weekly's review:
A crucial change from the book is that Langdon has been made into a skeptic, a fellow who doesn't necessarily buy that official Christianity is a lie. This is a sop to the film's critics (i.e., the Catholic Church), but it feels cautious, anti-dramatic. Yes, a soupçon of research reveals that the Priory of Sion is a hoax invented in 1956, and surely it can't be proved that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were ever intimate (though Martin Luther believed so). But what we want from a film of The Da Vinci Code is the fervor of belief. It's there only in Ian McKellen's playful, crusty turn as Leigh Teabing, the scholar who hobbles around on twin canes, spouting happy rhetoric about the meaning of the Grail. As a novel, The Da Vinci Code has a resonance that lingers. It may be less history than hokum, but it's a searching product of the feminist era, when even many true believers have grown weary of the church as an instrument of moral reprimand and male dominion. The film is faithful enough, but it's hard to imagine it making many converts.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/movies/17cnd-code.html?hp&ex=1147924800&en=4275ff17e53f2bc7&ei=5094&partner=homepage
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/da_vinci_code/
http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/2006/05/template_for_a_.html#comments
http://www.jimmyakin.org/2006/05/thisll_be_good_.html
http://www.jimmyakin.org/2006/05/variety_slicks_.html
>>>>It's pretty bad!<<<<<<<<<<
God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.
Read the Amy Wellborn blog, Open Book today.
http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/
She has had a running commentary on it all day and it's pretty awful. FOX News just panned it. And check out Rotten Tomatoes.com. They have a 0 for 8 for today including Variety.
Barb Nicolosi predicted last Saturday that the Hollywood crowd smelled a bomb. The preview crowds were just kept too low and the thing looked set up for a "killer weekend" and then to die when it was killed by word of mouth in a week of so. The hard core will see it, I guess, but it is not too good. Maybe it will be Poseidon II?
F
Thank goodness for bad movies
They give critics a chance to shine:
(A.O. Scott in the NYtimes)
"The Da Vinci Code" is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. (Curiously enough, Mr. Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.) To their credit, the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition can only live on the page. To be fair, though, Mr. Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," hisses Audrey Tautou to Paul Bettany (who play a less than enormous, short-haired albino). "He burns them!"
(snip)
Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu, a police cryptologist and also Bezu Fache! the murder victim's granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets, which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of Western Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) is at this very moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile, the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cell phone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.
A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It skids through the nighttime streets of Paris and eventually to London the next morning, by way of a Roman castle and a chateau in the French countryside. Along the way, the film pauses to admire various knick-knacks and art works, and to flash back, in desaturated color, to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters (Langdon falls down a well; Sophie's parents are killed in a car accident; Silas stabs his abusive father). There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.
Through it all, Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Mr. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism, and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue. In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.
Posted by Amy Welborn | Permalink
That's pretty funny. I am waiting for Mark Steyn's review.
There are about 8 threads going on how bad this movie is. The reviews are not going to get any better.
Hit the refresh/reload button on your browser for as many automagically-created Dan Brown novels as you want.
It's great fun!
LOL - I was just thinking that!
LOL!
Very drole.
This is too addictive. What great fun!
Thanks,
F
"The Ardenti Shrub is a fascinating page-turner!"
The Independent
It's nearly the millennium. The Cabalists have kept the secret of Mary Magdalene for centuries. A beautiful pastry chef has stumbled upon their trail while solving a crossword puzzle. It's now a desparate race to Vatican City with the wealth of one of Europe's oldest families at stake.
"An exciting tale of intrigue! *****"
The Times
"... it's not very good -- long (2hr. 32min.) and mostly inert."
Click for Full Review
-- Richard Corliss, TIME MAGAZINE
Oh my! Rotten Tomatoes now has it at only 6% with 1 fresh and 15 rotten tomatoes. Poor Opie!
F
http://churchofthemasses.blogspot.com/
Barbara Nicolosi
She recounts the carnage all day but has this posted. It is sadly true. "...but for Wales?"
Evil and the banal.
9:02 AM | Comments (7) | Trackback
People are emailing me asking if I think that people will still throng to The Da Vinci Code even knowing that it is a boring mess. The answer is yes.
Banality is the mark of Satan's handiwork. He is incapable of contact with the beautiful. It is repugnant to him as are all of the hallmarks of the Divine.
It is necessary for the rejection of Christ in this generation, that they swarm to this movie knowing it is blasphemy AND banal. The crowds didn't scream for Barabbas because he was more charming and good than Christ!
As I have said from the beginning here, this movie is a mass, cultural rejection of Christ and the Church. It would not surprise me if during screenings, members of the audience started stripping off their clothes and having orgies!
P.S. "...but for WALES?"
My retort to this is akin to the line from the movie "Risky Business" with Tom Cruise and Rebecca Demornay in which he allows his father's Porsche to drift off the end of a pier. The repair guy asks the crowded room of clients,
"Okay. Who's the U-Boat Commander?"
What's really funny is that it misspells "desparate" every time :-).
I wonder if there's a version about people who sit up half the night waiting for a baby to do a Major Digestive Event ...
Bwhaaaa~!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.