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.
I enjoyed the book for the pure entertainment of it. That being said, the movie was flat out bad. It held none of the same entertainment value that the book had (which is always the case).
Like hunting for clams on the beach with a shotgun.
What the heck is a "kerfuffle"?
You must have missed "The Terminal." Obviously most everyone else did.
Which apparently never included a newspaper.
Mr. Papatola, where ever you are, you owe me a new keyboard.
I heard they are already casting the sequel.
"IT STINKS!" They don't show re-runs of "The Critic" often enough!
Doesn't shed a good light on the level of their intellect, does it?
I doubt that public criticism had much to do with it. Whether or not WE think the Da Vinci Code is stupid fluff and shouldn't be taken seriously, hundreds of thousands of people do take it seriously. It's sold more than 40 million copies in hardcover and I can tell you from experience in my classes that it is taken very, very seriously by tons of college students, especially female college students. This movie was a blockbuster waiting to happen, as the Left Behind books might also have been had they received the hype, production values and talent behind the Da Vinci movie. True, the book sucks. It was still very popular-- nobody should be surprised that a movie based on it is very popular as well.
You had me slapping my knees, I was laughing so hard.
Still, you made if further through Angels and Demons that did I! :p
Actually, I did see The Terminal. Mrs. Douglas stank in that. Reeked. There was no chemistry there. None.
A big commotion.
Which would be indefensible since he writes for the newspaper.
Fear and loathing in FreeRepublicville.
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