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The Awfulness of The Da Vinci Codehttp://www.americanheritage.com/entertainment/articles/web/20060519-movies-da-vinci-code-catholic-dan-brown-religion-tom-hanks.shtml http://tinyurl.com/zsuuc Posted Friday May 19, 2006 12:30 PM EDT In art as in life there is nothing so powerful as a bad idea whose time has come. Every decade or so a craze comes out of nowhere that inexplicably grabs hold of a portion of the public’s imagination, whips it into a frenzy, and then dissipates, leaving future generations wondering what the fuss was all about. The first such craze of the twenty-first century is, as you can’t have avoided hearing, a silly novel by a writer named Dan Brown called The Da...

Friday, May 26, 2006 A Death Threat from Reuters (Bumped) See below for important updates... Early yesterday morning at about 3:00 am on the West Coast, someone in Sweden Britain connected to the Internet and browsed over to this article at the Guardian by Inayat Bunglawala, media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain: This code could open doors. Bunglawala’s piece (about the Da Vinci Code) is in the section of the Guardian site where readers can comment, and someone posted a link to LGF as a rebuttal to Bunglawala. Our Swedish British visitor clicked that link, leading him/her/it to...

About six months ago, on seeing a gorgeous illustrated edition of The Da Vinci Code published by Bantam Press, I finally succumbed to the mania and joined the 40 million others who had already forked out for the hardback version. And yes, I too found the book unputdownable: it was fast paced, contained some fine puzzles and was genuinely interesting. The book has been much criticised, however, for its alternative rendering of the life of Jesus, with one US Christian leader describing its portrayal as "candy-coated poison". A core idea at the centre of Dan Brown's book is that Jesus...

"X Men 3: The Last Stand" took in almost $45 million on Friday and landed in the history books. It is now the second highest opener of all time, right behind "Star Wars: Attack of the Sith." Insiders are predicting that the Brett Ratner directed third episode in the X Men trilogy could do as much as $150 million over the four day Memorial Day weekend. Word of mouth and "tracking" are so strong that "X Men 3," with no real rivals, should shatter all kinds of records by time the numbers are in officially on Tuesday. Meantime, audiences may...

A reader of the Window wrote asking me to explain why I found The Da Vinci Code anti-Catholic. That's a fair question, since as she pointed out, I didn't supply any examples.Anyone doubting my word can consult the film's co-producer, John Calley. He told The New York Times (9/7/2005) that the movie was "conservatively anti-Catholic" but not "destructively so."   I wonder if Mr. Calley sought any expert opinions on what would be destructive to the Church, or if he considered himself qualified to make that call. Why did he reject the request for a disclaimer at the beginning of...

THE CRITICS HATED “The Da Vinci Code,” and many churches boycotted it — but audiences flocked to see it. Maybe that tells us that the Lord works in mysterious ways. For sure it tells us a lot about who we are, and where we came from. As of Monday, the Web site rottentomatoes.com had tabulated 160 reviews of “Code”; 78 percent of the critics rated the film “rotten.” And yet the film took in a reported $224 million worldwide over the weekend, the second-biggest weekend of all time. So what gives? To put it bluntly, for all its flaws, “Code”...

I've been thinking a lot lately, perhaps it's no surprise, on the public face of Opus Dei, much of it no doubt the result of The Da Vinci Code. The more I think about it, the more I am inclined to say that The Da Vinci Code is a blessing in disguise not only for Opus Dei, but also for Christians worldwide – and in the end, for society. There is no doubt that the movie is a blasphemous caricature of Christianity, but the result of the film (and book) is that it is causing people to question and delve...

If you knew that someone was about to drive off a cliff, wouldn't you warn that person about the danger? Wouldn't that be the loving thing to do? When Jesus calls His disciples to be salt and light, he was calling for Christians to do two things: 1. Warn people about their sins. 2. Show people that the answer to their sin problem is to establish a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through faith and discipleship. The warning about sin is not to condemn people for their sins; that is something only God can do. The warning about sin is...

Am I the ONLY one completely BORED to death by all this talk about The Da Vinci Code? I mean for weeks all media have been flooded with more info than I would ever want about The Da Vinci Code. When I went to IMDB to look up something about a movie (OTHER than The Da Vinci Code), their damn ad banner would pop up and cover my screen and could be removed only with difficulty. Then there were endless talk shows about this "controversy." Worst of all, the History channel got taken over by programs about the Da Vinci...

DOES JESUS have a secret line of descendants who are living today? It's an oddly appealing idea. We tend to think of ancestry in terms of bloodlines, in which some individuals are descended from famous ancestors and others are not. And the idea echoes deeper religious themes of individuals and groups favored by God. But this is one idea in "The Da Vinci Code," which opens today in theaters worldwide, that just won't wash. Jesus couldn't have just a few descendants living today. If anyone alive today is descended from Jesus, then so are most of the people on the...

Karachi: Pakistan's Islamist parties will hold nationwide demonstrations against The Da Vinci Code later this week, to protest the film's "offensive" alternative take on the story of Jesus Christ, an opposition lawmaker said yesterday. The adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling novel, the story of a Vatican cover-up involving Christ and his supposed offspring, has recorded a $224 million global opening. "The film is offensive towards a holy figure dear to all religions," Liaquat Baloch, deputy secretary-general of Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, the main Islamist political alliance, said. Films or cartoons that hurt the sentiments of any religion in the name of culture...

CHANDIGARH: The Punjab government on Thursday banned the screening of controversial film Da Vinci Code across the state. Punjab's decision came a day after the government of predominantly Christian Nagaland banned sale of the novel and screening of the film based on it, saying the content was blasphemous. "The book is blasphemous. It has portrayed Christ and the Christian faith in a highly objectionable manner," Nagaland education minister Imkong Imchen said. However, Punjab government decided to ban its release in the state quoting "intelligence inputs", which predicted violence in case the movie was shown in the state. Though so far,...

At roughly the same time Christianity began to spread in the Roman world, another belief system was spreading almost as rapidly, a religious philosophy we call Gnosticism. Gnosticism takes its name from the Greek "gnosis," a word that means knowledge. But the Gnostics didn't have in mind ordinary human knowledge. They claimed to possess a deep, hidden knowledge - a knowledge denied to the rest of us ordinary human beings. The Gnostics believed in one ultimate god. But they believed that below that god there were a vast number of intermediate spiritual powers they referred to as archons, "rulers." Now...

Is The Da Vinci Code anti-Catholic? Is Madonna (the saucy aging pop-song stylist) risking the wrath of God by crucifying herself in concert? Did South Park go too far in their depiction of Christ in the episode parodying the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy? Is God losing any sleep over any of this? Answers: a) Of course it is. b) No, because God hasn’t paid much attention to Madonna’s career since “Vogue.” c) Guilty—but with an explanation. d) Doubtful. Then again, that raises the question: does God ever sleep? Answer: probably not, but He occasionally nods off in church, depending on...

A telltale moment in "The Da Vinci Code" points like a cryptogram to the real secret meaning behind the novel. The hero, Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor about to publish a nonfiction book claiming Mary Magdalene is the "real" Holy Grail, and the heroine, Sophie Neveu, who is "really" a direct descendent of Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene, are fleeing Paris because bulldog police captain Bezu Fache mistakenly believes Langdon murdered Louvre curator Jacques Sauniere. Sauniere, it turns out, headed a secret society that for centuries has preserved documents that prove Christ was solely a mortal man, that Christianity...

THE DA VINCI CODE - BLASPHEMY HITS THE BIG SCREEN By Don Feder Posted May 19, 2006 The Da Vinci Code -- which opened today -- might be subtitled "Religion for Morons" or "Gnosticism Meets The New Age." It's fantasy posing as reality. The Sony Pictures film is blasphemous, defames the Catholic Church, and promotes neo-pagan Goddess worship. I find it offensive, and I'm not even a Christian. Director Ron Howard (who specializes in visual candy) assures us that Opie's opus will be true to the novel - a pretentious, overwritten piece of trash that makes Bridget Jones's Diary look...

The authorities in the north-east Indian state of Nagaland have ordered an immediate ban on both the film and the novel of the Da Vinci Code. They have expressed "serious resentment" against Indian censors for allowing the film to be screened. The state government has issued an order to all cinemas not to show it. Nagaland is a predominantly Christian state, where over the last 150 years mostly tribal converts gave up their ancient faiths to accept Christianity. Prohibition The ban in Nagaland comes a week after India's Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) cleared The Da Vinci Code for...

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....

Some observers wonder why there’s been so much controversy regarding the movie version of THE DA VINCI CODE, but having finally seen the film I’m astonished that there’s so little. This very long (2 and a half hours) and very somber exercise amounts to a full-frontal assault on Christianity, explicitly suggesting that the world would be a better place of Christian faith collapsed, and blaming the church (the supposedly deluded faith in “one true god”) for racism, intolerance, sexism, brutality and fanaticism. In ideological terms, it’s a far more radical film than “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and even more...

For those, like myself, who somehow managed to make dinner party conversation over the past year without reading Dan Brown’s pulpy novel, The Da Vinci Code, following the film’s marketing edict to "seek the truth" proves a pretty laborious business. Forget something as thorny as truth, I’d have been happy just nailing down a clear plot line. It begins well enough with the murder of an elderly museum curator by a hooded albino monk (hard to get a more cracking start than one that includes a hooded albino monk). With his dying breath the old man manages to strip naked,...