Ladykillers, costing an estimated $60 million to produce and market; and earning just under $40 million domestic and $37 million foreign, wasn't exactly a hit.
Posted on 05/23/2006 9:42:06 AM PDT by Caleb1411
Lost in all the brouhaha about "The Da Vinci Code" is a simple observation that seems to have gotten lost with all the protests and condemnations and threats of boycotts.
It's just not very good.
I'm a latecomer to this whole kerfuffle. Blissfully oblivious to the controversy, I didn't even know what the book was about until a couple of weeks ago, when I picked it up to kill some time on a long airplane flight. I wasn't more than 20 pages into Dan Brown's thriller when I realized what a woofer it was going to be.
Readable? You betcha. I cranked through almost the whole thing on a flight to San Francisco and back again. Reading "The Da Vinci Code" is like eating popcorn: You keep reaching into the bowl, hardly aware of what you're doing, and suddenly, you're through.
But good? Hardly. With 105 chapters — each about the length of a potty break — and sentence structures not too far removed from "See Dick run," the book seems to be written at about a sixth-grade readability level. The plot advances in a series of enough improbable "a-ha!" moments to burn through a couple of grosses of light bulbs. And the galloping, thinly strung conspiracy theory makes your typical Kennedy assassination theorist look scholarly by comparison.
To call the thing a piffle is to insult piffles.
The film breathlessly packs the book's 450 pages into about 2½ hours. Tom Hanks is a much more skeptical protagonist than you'll find in the book, and the cinematic version soft-pedals the whole church-as-thug idea, assigning most of the malevolent deeds to a rogue, beanie-bedecked "shadow council" of clerics instead of Mother Church herself. Still, the movie is, if anything, more laughably strung together than the book.
Does it offend? The book irked plenty of people — just take a peek on the Internet. And protests broke out around the world before the first frame of the film was shown to the public.
But as a practicing Catholic, I find the idea of corrupt churchmen and Holy Grails far less troubling than the insinuation that any person with any cartilage whatsoever in their spiritual spine would find "The Da Vinci Code" the least bit threatening to their faith.
Faith is the acceptance of things we can't see, after all, and the idea that someone would suddenly believe that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married just because "Da Vinci" actor Ian McKellen said so suggests a faith that probably wasn't all that strong to begin with.
But linking art and faith is a tricky thing. If you believe in the power of "The Passion of the Christ" to kindle passions in the hearts of the reverent, then I suppose you also have to believe in the power of "The Da Vinci Code" to make the faithful falter.
Art has a unique power to open eyes, to foster conversation and critical thinking, and it's no secret that that provocative power represents a threat to organizations that rely on unquestioning obedience to authority.
Which, I suppose, puts me in the position of defending "The Da Vinci Code." And I don't really want to do that: I mean, I was so embarrassed to be reading the book in public that I peeled off the dust jacket so I could pretend to be perusing, say, Proust.
I'd just feel a lot better if the art that provoked us was as rigorous and well made and profound as the questions it tries to ask. Neither the best-selling novel nor the movie rises to anywhere near that level. They're just pop-culture schlock.
Is Dan Brown responsible? Well, no. He's a novelist, not a prophet. He just wrote the book — it's the millions who bought "The Da Vinci Code" who turned it into the kind of a best-seller that would inevitably be spun off as a movie. With its bite-sized portions and its pretensions to intellectualism, it's the perfect, easy-to-settle-for menu item in our fast-food nation.
And so, maybe it's not a crisis of faith we should be worried about. Maybe it's a crisis of taste.
Russell Crowe is vastly overrated!
But, yeah, I guess he's a little Opi-esque. I like Rob Reiner and some others more. I'm not sure if I'd even recognize Opi's stuff.
What's Unix?
I'm betting Over the Hedge, whose cuteness and wit give it kid and parent appeal, will start to make serious inroads in Da Vinci Drone box office dominance.
And the hero Dan Brown created is an idiot. For instance, this "expert" was surprised to learn that Leonardo used mirror writing in his notebooks. This is something any junior-high kid assigned a bio of LdV knows.
I agree. I don't buy a novel
to raise my image in someone
else's view.
I enjoyed both Da Vinci Code
and Angels and Demons as
sleuth type novels. I especially
like following the maps and clues.
Great lit? Hardly, NTL still
good reads. But then...color
me oddball...I reread all the
J.K.Rowling Potter books, twice!
Hey, you don't have to be a genius to write a bestseller. The idiot market is as vast and profitable now as it ever was. The trick is writing a book that makes the idiots feel smart.
I read the book and loved it. I saw the movie and it was disappointing. The book is a fantastic read, an execellent page turner. I think the problem with the movie is Ron Howard. The movie lacked any sense of passion, mystery or excitement. It failed miserably to capture what Dan Brown wrote.
Forgetting the huge fan base that the book has, which is because it plays to the gnosticism of so many millions of American "Christians" and Jews. Not to mention the "New Agers" for whom the Catholic Church is their bete noir. The intelligensia knows that it is slock, but even for them it serves the purpose of making Christianity seem ridiculous and feeds their delusion that radical Islam cannot possibly be a real threat.
In Minnesota it is half of an Uff Da!
In Minnesota it is half of an Uff Da!
The Terminal was a Spielberg flick.
Now that's just scary.
Still, you won't find this novel anywhere but the 'fiction' section. Except maybe on the sale table later on down the road...
I found the book to be an enjoyable, if somewhat predictable, read. Will have to get back to you regarding my opinion of the movie. Haven't seen it yet, but I will most likely do so this weekend. There are very few movies that are better than the books on which they are based, IMHO, so I go in with properly adjusted expectations.
Ladykillers, costing an estimated $60 million to produce and market; and earning just under $40 million domestic and $37 million foreign, wasn't exactly a hit.
"The Da Vinci Code" is Hollywood's response to "TPOTC". Hollywood always has to have the last Word.
BUMP
What you call the idiot market might also be known as the entertainment market. But you can please feel free to look down your nose at the 45 million of us who bought/read the book and feel superior if you like. Opinions are like [you know what fills this space]. We all have them.
Like Star Wars this thing has a huge fan base. The difference is that the fans are much older and will not be repeat viewers.
Are all opinions "equals"? Mein Kampf sold a lot of copies.
Gad! Your name is certainly apt...I bought that stinker of a movie.
How did Hanks and Travolta each have a two-three punch of hits, only to have that kind of vaporize?
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