The movie definitely gave us a more internal version of Fache. It made me wonder if they were trying to tap into Javert/Valjean associations (without going to the trouble of actually developing the characters).

i am not sure what more to add to the reviews that are already out there. i watched the movie. i actually got caught up in the story of the thing as leigh teabing (ian mckellen) and his manservant remy (jean-ives berteloot) did their double-crossing. there was some real acting. it didn’t seem like tom hanks got caught up in his acting until the moment of debate w/ sir teabing when sophie had to step in to separate the two sparring experts. it was the most invested his character seemed all evening.

i have to agree that princess sophie being the one surviving heir of Christ is a stretch… although it was perhaps intended to recall the original girl child borne by the magdalene (and it gives landgon a nice revisionist line, “or until the heir decides to reveal HERself.”)
i think i’m missing the sacred feminine in this movie, though. almodovar pulls it off better (in “all about my mother”)…
if i have to say something about the visuals in this movie; they weren’t. there were some cheap tricks like the ghostly attendants at sir isaac newton’s funeral (”pirates of the caribbean”-esque), and one sequence of gazes exchanged between the paintings in the louvre itself that was quite effective. but the whole thing could have been filmed rather than offering a pedantic play-by-play (mostly of words, but even when incorporating blows of physical violence).

i’ve summarized my frustration w/ dan brown’s book for a friend before seeing the theater version as follows, and i think it still holds;

it is like watching a poor magician attempt card tricks. i love detective novels, murder mysteries, art, its history, religion and the same… but there is no mystery left in this movie except how leigh teabing finds out the text scrawled by the departed sauniere (find robert langdon) before the rest of us do. how else would the teacher instruct bishop aringarosa to reveal a ‘confession’ from the murderer to bezu fache? this was one added complication to the plot (if i remember correctly, making captain fache face his own crisis of faith in the transition from book to movie) that didn’t make sense.

It doesn’t really add much to have the documents or the people (other than the grandmother) there, so they stretch credibility for no good reason.

No doubt Thomas Friedman is now the Priory Grand Master. I mean, The Lexus and the Olive Tree? The Lexus symbol is clearly an inverted “V” or chalice, so it’s spreading the story of the true Holy Grail, and the Olive Tree–well, olive trees grow in Palestine and they represent the continuance of Christ’s seed. And you only thought the book was about globalization.

Actually, there are bad questions (mostly asked by NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman), but not in the case of this movie, which makes me wonder — and Otter carefully avoided this question in the blog — why would anyone protest this movie? After all, horror movies like The Omen have just as many (and worse) mis-representations of Catholicism as Da Vinci Code (and the movie version of the Code conveniently puts all the criticisms of the Catholic Church in the mouth of a psychopath.) Protesting this movie for its characterization of corrupt Catholics is like protesting Mission Impossible 3 for its characterization of corrupt spies. While there are many reasons to protest both movies, and these reasons apply even more strongly to X-Men 3, they are entirely aesthetic ones.

Meanwhile, for the math geek dwelling deep within all of us, I have a question. After two thousand years, would there really be only one descendent of Jesus? (I realize that in the story Opus Dei has been killing them off, but still… mathematically speaking, how likely is this?) And wouldn’t she be North-East African and not so ghostly pale? (I mean no offence to pale people.) So, considering Brown’s ethnocentric unwillingnes to explore any connection to the horn of Africa, the most important question for us to ponder here (and keep in mind that there are no bad questions except for Thomas Friedman’s), is this: what would Bob Marley think about the Da Vinci Code? And how would he have solved it were he, instead of Robert Langdon, asked to do so?

By the way, I saw an article recently that described Tatou as “barely surpassing 5-foot-3.” As if that’s ridiculously short! Grrr. Gamines of the world, attack!

I will hang on for the sake of Ian McKellen, and then go watch “Amelie” afterwards to reintroduce a gamine Adrey Tautou. And to think about garden gnomes rather than reductionist interpretations of religion, art, and mystery!

Otherwise, your comments agree with several other reviews that I’ve read, all of which regret the fact that the directors were 1, so fundamentalist in their use of Dan Brown’s book as script for another medium, and 2, less than gamine themselves.

ooh, I got to use “gamine” twice!