Er... bad day, Nik?
Here's Screendaily, and it's more of the same. I've gutted the spoilers for the four people on the planet who haven't read the book, including me. (I lasted 85 pages.)
The Da Vinci Code
Mike Goodridge in Cannes 17 May 2006
Dir: Ron Howard. US. 2006. 152 mins.
If Dan Brown's soaraway bestseller The Da Vinci Code was clumsily written but a page-turning guilty pleasure, Ron Howard's film version is well-made but chronically devoid of the guilty pleasures it needs to make it succeed as first-rate popcorn entertainment. Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have remained rigidly faithful to the chronology and events of the book, but make ponderous work of the delicious conspiracy theories and treasure hunt which are the phenomenon's raison d'etre.
The problem is that the preposterous particulars of Brown's one-night chase across French and English monuments become markedly silly when depicted with such sombre portentousness as Howard adopts here. Rejecting the exhilerating adventure pacing of other treasure hunt hokum like Raiders Of The Lost Ark and National Treasure, the film-makers attempt to overlay the pulpy material with a thick coating of dramatic solemnity more evocative of adult fare like The Ninth Gate or Eyes Wide Shut.
The murky, often turgid result will be disappointing to many fans of Brown's wildly successful book and its many imitators, but that cannot stop this juggernaut from becoming one of the year's biggest blockbusters when it rides into the world's theatres this weekend after its world premiere as the Cannes opening night film today. Not even Sony Pictures could have predicted the excitement, anticipation and column inches that The Da Vinci Code is generating. Indeed no film would ever be able to meet these expectations or this hype.
The closest thing to a model is probably Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone which set about bringing another venerated book to the screen with global box office results of over $950m in 2001. The Da Vinci Code will probably fail to reach those dizzy numbers but its initial impact will be seismic as the enormous want-to-see is indulged by millions, both fans of the book and those who want to know what all the fuss is about. Its descent from those heavenly heights will be rapid and steep due to lukewarm reviews and so-so word-of-mouth, but by then Sony will no doubt have raked in a holy grail's worth of box office gold.
Howard and cinematographer Salvatore Totino opt for an almost gloomy pallette of night-time shades and colours in their visual treatment, setting the tone for their drama in the darkly-lit opening sequences.
Their actors likewise play it grimly straight, Tom Hanks making for a solid, unexciting Dr Robert Langdon and Audrey Tautou a distinctly flat and ill-humoured Sophie Neveu. Not that the crowded, didactic screenplay allows them much to work with. They spend most of the time discussing the vagaries of history, she questioning, he explaining....
....Thank heavens for Ian McKellen, whose Sir Leigh Teabing enters the plot halfway through. Injecting the film with its only humour as the wry conspiracy theorist with whom the fugitives seek refuge, McKellen gleefully hams it up as he describes in pompous educational detail the "true" secret of the Grail - the facts that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, that they had a child and that a royal bloodline exists to this day.
McKellen brings a much-needed vigour to the film, seriously flagging at this point, which lasts through the subsequent sequences in London. The spark has been extinguished, however, by the time the film gets to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland where the final revelations are revealed with unintentionally comic gravity.
As if afraid to reshape any of the source narrative, the film weighs in at a lengthy 152 minutes but even at that length, its twists and turns are far too numerous for a film to encompass without compromising on character development and narrative momentum. Howard relies on Hans Zimmer's omnipresent score to keep the drama intense and a multitude of flashbacks, often cumbersome and unnecessary, many over-loaded with CGI, to give the story coherence.
The production's use of real locations from the Grande Galerie of the Louvre to Chateau de Villette outside Paris to various exteriors in London benefits the film enormously and will no doubt contribute to the growing tourist industry surrounding Dan Brown's creation.
The Da Vinci Code
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The book itself was overrated trash. No narrative style whatsoever and flattest characters in the universe. I was appalled that this mediocrity sold so extraordinarily well but then considering other such atrocious successes like the Harry Potter books, I shouldn't have been that surprised.
Add to that, Tom Hanks (America's most overrated actor), Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman and how could the film NOT be even worse? I'll wait till this one gets to cable so I can get sufficiently high while watching it.
Add to that, Tom Hanks (America's most overrated actor), Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman and how could the film NOT be even worse? I'll wait till this one gets to cable so I can get sufficiently high while watching it.
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Variety's review:
By TODD MCCARTHY
A pulpy page-turner in its original incarnation as a huge international bestseller has become a stodgy, grim thing in the exceedingly literal-minded film version of "The Da Vinci Code." Tackling head-on novelist Dan Brown's controversy-stirring thriller hinging on a subversively revisionist view of Jesus Christ's life, director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have conspired to drain any sense of fun out of the melodrama, leaving expectant audiences with an oppressively talky film that isn't exactly dull but comes as close to it as one could imagine with such provocative material; result is perhaps the best thing the project's critics could have hoped for. Enormous public anticipation worldwide will result in explosive B.O. at the start in near-simultaneous release in most international territories, beginning May 17 in some countries -- day-and-date with official Cannes opening night preem -- and May 19 in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Sitting through all the verbose explanations and speculations about symbols, codes, secret cults, religious history and covert messages in art, it is impossible to believe that, had the novel never existed, such a script would ever have been considered by a Hollywood studio. It's esoteric, heady stuff, made compelling only by the fact that what it's proposing undermines the fundamental tenants of Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, and, by extension, Western Civilization for the past 2,000 years.
The irony in the film's inadequacy is that the novel was widely found to be so cinematic. Although pretty dismal as prose, the tome fairly rips along courtesy of a strong story hook, very short chapters that seem like movie scenes, constant movement by the principal characters in a series of conveyances, periodic eruptions of violent action and a compressed 24-hour time frame.
The appearance of its easy adaptability may have been deceptive, however, as what went down easily on the page becomes laborious onscreen, even with the huge visual plus of fabulous French and English locations, fine actors and the ability to scrutinize works of Da Vinci in detail.
What one is left with is high-minded lurid material sucked dry by a desperately solemn approach. Some nifty scene-setting, with strong images amplifying a Paris lecture delivered by Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) intercut with the Louvre murder of curator Sauniere by albino monk Silas (Paul Bettany), spurs hope that Howard might be on track to find a visual way to communicate the book's content.
But from the first one-on-one scene between Robert and French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou, occasionally hard to understand), in which she convinces him that cop Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) intends to hold him for the murder, the temperature level drops, and continues to do so as the pair goes on the run to stay one step ahead of Fache while using their complementary specialties to decipher the meaning of the cryptic messages Sauniere scrawled on his body in his own blood before he died.
Part of the quick deflation is due to a palpable lack of chemistry between Hanks and Tautou, an odd thing in itself given their genial accessibility in many previous roles. Howard, normally a generous director of actors, makes them both look stiff, pasty and inexpressive here in material that provides them little opportunity to express basic human nature; unlike in the book, they are never allowed to even suggest their fatigue after a full night and day of non-stop running, nor to say anything that doesn't relate directly to narrative forward movement. It's a film so overloaded with plot that there's no room for anything else, from emotion to stylistic grace notes.
The pursuit of a man and a woman barely known to one another was a favorite premise of Alfred Hitchcock, and one need only think of the mileage the director got out of such a set-up in films from "The 39 Steps" to "North by Northwest" to realize some of the missed opportunities here.
Temporary relief comes, an hour in, with the arrival of Ian McKellen as Sir Leigh Teabing, an immensely wealthy Holy Grail fanatic to whom it falls to explain, in unavoidably fascinating monologues, the alternate history the story advances. It is Teabing's thesis that the early Church, beginning with the Emperor Constantine, suppressed the feminine aspects of religion both stemming from pagan times as well as from the prominent role in spreading the faith he insists was played by Mary Magdalene, a role underlined by a close look at Da Vinci's celebrated "The Last Supper."
More than that, however, Teabing insists that Mary Magdalene, far from having been a prostitute, was actually Jesus' wife and that they had a daughter whose bloodline has persisted. McKellen seems to relish every moment and line, which can scarcely be said of the other thesps.
Given the widespread readership the book has enjoyed and the howls of protest from Christian entities beginning with the Vatican, it is hardly spoiling things to point out that the baddies here are members of the strict Catholic sect Opus Dei, including Silas and Alfred Molina's Bishop Aringarosa, defenders of doctrine determined to eliminate the threat to the established order posed by the so-called Priory of Sion, an organization secretly holding the "knowledge" that could cripple the church.
Even after the action moves from France to England, there's still a long way to go, and the final dramatic revelations, however mind-boggling from a content p.o.v., come off as particularly flat.
The darkly burnished stylings cinematographer Salvatore Totino brought to Howard's previous two films, "The Missing" and "Cinderella Man," prove rather less seductive in the largely nocturnal realms of "The Da Vinci Code." Hans Zimmer's ever-present score is dramatic to the point of over-insistence at times.
By TODD MCCARTHY
A pulpy page-turner in its original incarnation as a huge international bestseller has become a stodgy, grim thing in the exceedingly literal-minded film version of "The Da Vinci Code." Tackling head-on novelist Dan Brown's controversy-stirring thriller hinging on a subversively revisionist view of Jesus Christ's life, director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have conspired to drain any sense of fun out of the melodrama, leaving expectant audiences with an oppressively talky film that isn't exactly dull but comes as close to it as one could imagine with such provocative material; result is perhaps the best thing the project's critics could have hoped for. Enormous public anticipation worldwide will result in explosive B.O. at the start in near-simultaneous release in most international territories, beginning May 17 in some countries -- day-and-date with official Cannes opening night preem -- and May 19 in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Sitting through all the verbose explanations and speculations about symbols, codes, secret cults, religious history and covert messages in art, it is impossible to believe that, had the novel never existed, such a script would ever have been considered by a Hollywood studio. It's esoteric, heady stuff, made compelling only by the fact that what it's proposing undermines the fundamental tenants of Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, and, by extension, Western Civilization for the past 2,000 years.
The irony in the film's inadequacy is that the novel was widely found to be so cinematic. Although pretty dismal as prose, the tome fairly rips along courtesy of a strong story hook, very short chapters that seem like movie scenes, constant movement by the principal characters in a series of conveyances, periodic eruptions of violent action and a compressed 24-hour time frame.
The appearance of its easy adaptability may have been deceptive, however, as what went down easily on the page becomes laborious onscreen, even with the huge visual plus of fabulous French and English locations, fine actors and the ability to scrutinize works of Da Vinci in detail.
What one is left with is high-minded lurid material sucked dry by a desperately solemn approach. Some nifty scene-setting, with strong images amplifying a Paris lecture delivered by Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) intercut with the Louvre murder of curator Sauniere by albino monk Silas (Paul Bettany), spurs hope that Howard might be on track to find a visual way to communicate the book's content.
But from the first one-on-one scene between Robert and French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou, occasionally hard to understand), in which she convinces him that cop Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) intends to hold him for the murder, the temperature level drops, and continues to do so as the pair goes on the run to stay one step ahead of Fache while using their complementary specialties to decipher the meaning of the cryptic messages Sauniere scrawled on his body in his own blood before he died.
Part of the quick deflation is due to a palpable lack of chemistry between Hanks and Tautou, an odd thing in itself given their genial accessibility in many previous roles. Howard, normally a generous director of actors, makes them both look stiff, pasty and inexpressive here in material that provides them little opportunity to express basic human nature; unlike in the book, they are never allowed to even suggest their fatigue after a full night and day of non-stop running, nor to say anything that doesn't relate directly to narrative forward movement. It's a film so overloaded with plot that there's no room for anything else, from emotion to stylistic grace notes.
The pursuit of a man and a woman barely known to one another was a favorite premise of Alfred Hitchcock, and one need only think of the mileage the director got out of such a set-up in films from "The 39 Steps" to "North by Northwest" to realize some of the missed opportunities here.
Temporary relief comes, an hour in, with the arrival of Ian McKellen as Sir Leigh Teabing, an immensely wealthy Holy Grail fanatic to whom it falls to explain, in unavoidably fascinating monologues, the alternate history the story advances. It is Teabing's thesis that the early Church, beginning with the Emperor Constantine, suppressed the feminine aspects of religion both stemming from pagan times as well as from the prominent role in spreading the faith he insists was played by Mary Magdalene, a role underlined by a close look at Da Vinci's celebrated "The Last Supper."
More than that, however, Teabing insists that Mary Magdalene, far from having been a prostitute, was actually Jesus' wife and that they had a daughter whose bloodline has persisted. McKellen seems to relish every moment and line, which can scarcely be said of the other thesps.
Given the widespread readership the book has enjoyed and the howls of protest from Christian entities beginning with the Vatican, it is hardly spoiling things to point out that the baddies here are members of the strict Catholic sect Opus Dei, including Silas and Alfred Molina's Bishop Aringarosa, defenders of doctrine determined to eliminate the threat to the established order posed by the so-called Priory of Sion, an organization secretly holding the "knowledge" that could cripple the church.
Even after the action moves from France to England, there's still a long way to go, and the final dramatic revelations, however mind-boggling from a content p.o.v., come off as particularly flat.
The darkly burnished stylings cinematographer Salvatore Totino brought to Howard's previous two films, "The Missing" and "Cinderella Man," prove rather less seductive in the largely nocturnal realms of "The Da Vinci Code." Hans Zimmer's ever-present score is dramatic to the point of over-insistence at times.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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From Mike D'Angelo, who doesn't often see eye-to-eye with most critics... although sometimes he does.
Moaning, listless...
Actually, those are strictly my own suppositions about the mental state of the audience as The DaVinci Code monotonously unfolded, though there was no mistaking the howls of derisive laughter ringing through the Debussy at the one major (and I do mean major) departure from Brown's novel -- a revelation so dopey that Brown, at roughly the book's midpoint, actually goes out of his way to dispel the possibility. Otherwise, the film is pretty much what you'd expect: a streamlined, glossy hopscotch across the major plot points, plus one laborious (but still streamlined) theology lecture that comes complete with helpful History Channel flashbacks in bleached-out semi-monochrome. Hanks' Robert Langdon has been made into something of a skeptic, thereby allowing him to voice some of the common objections to Brown's theories about Christ's divinity and his relationship with Mary Madgalene -- a tactic unlikely to placate angry Christians, who began mobilizing the moment they heard the novel had been optioned. But the notion of anybody getting riled up about such a ponderous, unimaginative trifle is itself more offensive than any of the narrative's alleged scandals. With luck, this'll be the least interesting picture I'll see over the next couple of weeks. Just to be sure, though, I intend to skip out-of-competition screenings of X-Men: The Last One? Please?
Moaning, listless...
Actually, those are strictly my own suppositions about the mental state of the audience as The DaVinci Code monotonously unfolded, though there was no mistaking the howls of derisive laughter ringing through the Debussy at the one major (and I do mean major) departure from Brown's novel -- a revelation so dopey that Brown, at roughly the book's midpoint, actually goes out of his way to dispel the possibility. Otherwise, the film is pretty much what you'd expect: a streamlined, glossy hopscotch across the major plot points, plus one laborious (but still streamlined) theology lecture that comes complete with helpful History Channel flashbacks in bleached-out semi-monochrome. Hanks' Robert Langdon has been made into something of a skeptic, thereby allowing him to voice some of the common objections to Brown's theories about Christ's divinity and his relationship with Mary Madgalene -- a tactic unlikely to placate angry Christians, who began mobilizing the moment they heard the novel had been optioned. But the notion of anybody getting riled up about such a ponderous, unimaginative trifle is itself more offensive than any of the narrative's alleged scandals. With luck, this'll be the least interesting picture I'll see over the next couple of weeks. Just to be sure, though, I intend to skip out-of-competition screenings of X-Men: The Last One? Please?
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Sorry, no reviews yet. That should come verrrrry soon, in an hour or two. The critics are pounding them out in their hotel rooms as we speak.
But first, a little bit of PC:
Albinos Condemn 'Da Vinci' Assassin
May 16 3:56 PM US/Eastern
By DAVID GERMAIN
AP Movie Writer
The notion of Christ as a family man is not the only raw nerve "The Da Vinci Code" has touched. Albinos are bothered that one of their own has yet again been depicted as a villain.
Dan Brown's best seller begins its worldwide debut Wednesday with Tom Hanks as the cryptologist pursuing a 2,000-year-old mystery that could reveal Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and that the Vatican covered it up.
Among his co-stars is Paul Bettany, the British actor playing monk- assassin Silas, an albino with red eyes who carries out a series of bloody murders to secure the secret of the Holy Grail, a trove of lost Christian documents that could prove Jesus had wed.
Critics cite a long list of albinos cast as heavies by Hollywood: The dreadlocked twins in "The Matrix Reloaded," a powder-haired hit man in the Chevy Chase-Goldie Hawn crime romp "Foul Play," the pasty zombies in "The Omega Man," a sadistic killer in "Cold Mountain," even the wicked executioner in the fairy-tale comedy "The Princess Bride."
Michael McGowan, an albino who heads the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation, said "The Da Vinci Code" will be the 68th movie since 1960 to feature an evil albino.
"Silas is just the latest in a long string," McGowan said. "The problem is there has been no balance. There are no realistic, sympathetic or heroic characters with albinism that you can find in movies or popular culture."
People with albinism have little or no pigmentation in their skin, eyes and hair.
McGowan said his group asked "Da Vinci Code" director Ron Howard's production outfit, Imagine Entertainment, not to bleach Silas' hair or make his eyes red, but "that fell on deaf ears."
When offered the role, Bettany initially thought mainly of the makeup challenge, saying past attempts to lighten non-albino actors' pigmentation had not looked realistic.
Bettany said he looked at Silas not as an evil albino but as a man damaged by his harsh upbringing. In the book, Silas was an abused child who wound up on the streets, was scorned as an outcast, turned to violence and landed in prison.
"I thought, this man's a psychopath, and he's not a psychopath because he's an albino," Bettany said. "He's an amalgamation of everything that sort of happened to him in his life. How his father treated him and the things he saw his father do to his mother, and he happens to be preternaturally gifted at hurting people. ...
"I think it's no more a comment on albinos than it is on monks, and no more a comment on monks than it is on people who wear sandals," Bettany said.
Many readers found Silas a tragic character despite his misdeeds, viewing him more as a lost sheep than a villain.
McGowan said his group plans no boycotts or picketing. Instead, the group aims to use the movie's popularity to raise awareness about the realities of albinism. He said he enjoyed most of the book and plans to see the movie.
"We understand that millions read it and when they go to the movie, they're going to want to see the albino monk-assassin," McGowan said. "It's the cumulative effect of having one evil albino character after another that was disturbing to me."
But first, a little bit of PC:
Albinos Condemn 'Da Vinci' Assassin
May 16 3:56 PM US/Eastern
By DAVID GERMAIN
AP Movie Writer
The notion of Christ as a family man is not the only raw nerve "The Da Vinci Code" has touched. Albinos are bothered that one of their own has yet again been depicted as a villain.
Dan Brown's best seller begins its worldwide debut Wednesday with Tom Hanks as the cryptologist pursuing a 2,000-year-old mystery that could reveal Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and that the Vatican covered it up.
Among his co-stars is Paul Bettany, the British actor playing monk- assassin Silas, an albino with red eyes who carries out a series of bloody murders to secure the secret of the Holy Grail, a trove of lost Christian documents that could prove Jesus had wed.
Critics cite a long list of albinos cast as heavies by Hollywood: The dreadlocked twins in "The Matrix Reloaded," a powder-haired hit man in the Chevy Chase-Goldie Hawn crime romp "Foul Play," the pasty zombies in "The Omega Man," a sadistic killer in "Cold Mountain," even the wicked executioner in the fairy-tale comedy "The Princess Bride."
Michael McGowan, an albino who heads the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation, said "The Da Vinci Code" will be the 68th movie since 1960 to feature an evil albino.
"Silas is just the latest in a long string," McGowan said. "The problem is there has been no balance. There are no realistic, sympathetic or heroic characters with albinism that you can find in movies or popular culture."
People with albinism have little or no pigmentation in their skin, eyes and hair.
McGowan said his group asked "Da Vinci Code" director Ron Howard's production outfit, Imagine Entertainment, not to bleach Silas' hair or make his eyes red, but "that fell on deaf ears."
When offered the role, Bettany initially thought mainly of the makeup challenge, saying past attempts to lighten non-albino actors' pigmentation had not looked realistic.
Bettany said he looked at Silas not as an evil albino but as a man damaged by his harsh upbringing. In the book, Silas was an abused child who wound up on the streets, was scorned as an outcast, turned to violence and landed in prison.
"I thought, this man's a psychopath, and he's not a psychopath because he's an albino," Bettany said. "He's an amalgamation of everything that sort of happened to him in his life. How his father treated him and the things he saw his father do to his mother, and he happens to be preternaturally gifted at hurting people. ...
"I think it's no more a comment on albinos than it is on monks, and no more a comment on monks than it is on people who wear sandals," Bettany said.
Many readers found Silas a tragic character despite his misdeeds, viewing him more as a lost sheep than a villain.
McGowan said his group plans no boycotts or picketing. Instead, the group aims to use the movie's popularity to raise awareness about the realities of albinism. He said he enjoyed most of the book and plans to see the movie.
"We understand that millions read it and when they go to the movie, they're going to want to see the albino monk-assassin," McGowan said. "It's the cumulative effect of having one evil albino character after another that was disturbing to me."
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler