Sir Ian McKellan was on the Today Show this morning with the rest of the cast of The Da Vinci Code, plus director Ron Howard, and when the interviewer asked what the cast would have thought about it if the movie had carried a "This is just fiction" title card, McKellan immediately responded that he thought the Bible shoulc carry such a notice.
Perhaps sensing he had gone too far, he then tried to explain and then backpeddal and ultimately made a mess of things.
YEE-HAW!!! That magisterial mag of movie magic, Variety, has done the dishes on The Da Vinci Code and dished the pic a turkey-sized pan!
Here are some blurbs SONY probably won’t be using from their review:
"A stodgy, grim thing"–Variety
"Perhaps the best thing the project’s critics could have hoped for"–Variety
"Exceedingly literal-minded"–Variety
"Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have conspired to drain any sense of fun out of the melodrama"–Variety
"An oppressively talky film"–Variety
"It is impossible to believe that, had the novel never existed, such a script would ever have been considered by a Hollywood studio"–Variety
"The irony in the film’s inadequacy is that the novel was widely found to be so cinematic"–Variety
"What went down easily on the page becomes laborious onscreen"–Variety
"High-minded lurid material sucked dry by a desperately solemn approach"–Variety
"A palpable lack of chemistry between Hanks and Tautou"–Variety
"Howard . . . makes them both look stiff, pasty and inexpressive"–Variety
"A film so overloaded with plot that there’s no room for anything else, from emotion to stylistic grace notes"–Variety
"Hans Zimmer’s ever-present score is dramatic to the point of over-insistence"–Variety
"Missed opportunities"–Variety
"The final dramatic revelations . . . come off as particularly flat"–Variety
If I were Ron Howard and the folks at SONY, I’d be nervous right now.
Why?
Because we just witnessed the underperformance of Mission Impossible III, which is a summer-release movie that is build on a popular, pre-existing franchise. If that’s a signal for what the rest of the summer holds (and it goes along with the trend of underperforming blockbusters that we’ve been having the last few years) then it may speak ill for The Da Vinci Code movie.
Also, there as been a chorus of cardinals at the Vatican dissing the film. Sure, controversy sells, but there is such a thing as too much controversy.
Also, the studio has been WAY cagey with advance screenings–which is a sign of lack of confidence in a film since holding more screenings and having them earlier would let more negative word about a film get out there. (It’s not like this is Episode III, where Lucas was trying to keep spoilers from getting out. Everyone already knows what the spoilers for The Da Vinci Code are.)
And then there’s this Barbara Nicolosi comment over at Amy’s, which one reader helpfully pointed out down yonder:
The buzz on the streets here in Hollywood is that the film is embarrassingly bad. The studio has stirctly limied the MPAA screening – usually about 500-800 people – to only 100 people. No one is getting in to advance screenings which has everybody saying things like, "The only time studios act this way is when they have a Class A Dud on their hands."
The script is a dud. The ultra-weird transitions from people running from long-winded seminars on ecclesiastical history to murderous Opus Dei assassins to Biblical period flashbacks of Jesus and Mary Magdalen looking tenderly at each other made me laugh at loud.
Sony knows they will only have devastating word of mouth on this one. So they have to get everybody in the first weekend.
On her own blog, Barbara says that
RON HOWARD SURE LOOKS NERVOUS.
Sounds like it’s with good reason.
There are few things I’d like more going into Memorial Day Weekend (a traditional blockbuster time) than a flameout at the box office for The Da Vinci Code.
The movie version of The Da Vinci Code is scheduled to be released this Friday and, though I’m not at all happy about it, I’ll need to go see the thing for professional reasons. (I expect that I may come out of the theater so mad I could spit.)
One of the questions I have about the movie is whether the filmmakers will have done anything to ameliorate the anti-Christian elements in the book. For a while, some have been hopeful that they would do so–perhaps even changing central elements of the book in the way that Hollywood films often do.
But if a (non-committal) review carried in The Telegraph is accurate, not only does the film closely follow the book but it may actually be worse than the book:
Although the movie closely follows the book’s storyline, Howard delivers something Dan Brown doesn’t – dramatic recreations of events relating to the book’s central inflammatory theory that for 2,000 years the Catholic Church has been covering up the fact that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered a daughter, whose bloodline has survived into present-day Europe.
As well as scenes of the Inquisition and of women being tortured, burned and drowned, Howard shows Mary Magdalene fleeing the Holy Land for France and giving birth there.
GET THE STORY.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)
WOO-HOO!!!
Back in 1966 there was a TV show that lasted only a season (30 episodes, back then) called The Time Tunnel.
It was about two guys who worked for a secret government time travel project who get lost in time and spend each week jumping from one time period to another.
I was too young to see (or at least to remember) the series when it was first on, but it replayed irregularly on Saturday afternoons on local channels in the 1970s, and I got to see a number of episodes.
I LOVED IT!
But I could never count on seeing it from week to week because of the irregularly with which it played (around ball games or something, I suppose).
BUT NOW I CAN SEE THE WHOLE THING!
Yes, it’s coming out on DVD. In fact, the first half of the series is already out, and the second half will come out next month.
Unfortunately, some of the episodes I remember the best are in the second half (like the one where they went a million years in the future and mankind had evolved into a kind of bee-like society. . . .Creepy!), but it’s less than a month to wait.
YEE-HAW!
A boyhood ambition (seeing the whole series) is about to be fulfilled!
YEE-HAW!!!
A big, TEXAS-SIZED CHT to the readers who e-mailed the following story:
SCI FI Channel announced the development of Caprica, a spinoff prequel of its hit Battlestar Galactica, in presentations to advertisers in New York on April 26. Caprica would come from Galactica executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, writer Remi Aubuchon (24) and NBC Universal Television Studio.
Caprica would take place more than half a century before the events that play out in Battlestar Galactica. The people of the Twelve Colonies are at peace and living in a society not unlike our own, but where high technology has changed the lives of virtually everyone for the better.
But a startling breakthrough in robotics is about to occur, one that will bring to life the age-old dream of marrying artificial intelligence with a mechanical body to create the first living robot: a Cylon. Following the lives of two families, the Graystones and the Adamas (the family of William Adama, who will one day become the commander of the Battlestar Galactica), Caprica will weave together corporate intrigue, techno-action and sexual politics into television’s first science fiction family saga, the channel announced [SOURCE].
SWEET!
(Except for that sexual politics thing. Let’s hope that gets minimized quickly, the way it did in BSG.)
Incidentally, this may explain why the third season of BSG is being delayed by a few months–so they can get the new series up and running.
Tim J here.
You know… this is just a hair-brained possibility (or is it hare-brained?), and something that I guess is one of the inevitable cultural mutations of the DaVinci Code phenomenon, but it strikes me as plausible, and so though I have no evidence for it, I wanted to run it past y’all.
Heck, Dan Brown works without evidence all the time.
I watched one of the longer DVC trailers on TV this past weekend, and it struck me as oddly… innocuous. I mean, it depicted all these supposedly mind-wrenching, earth-shattering events, but it came off as rather… frothy – like one of those old Hollywood action serials, where you were supposed to get all worked up about the hero’s predicament, but all the time you knew it was really no big deal.
I haven’t seen the DVC film (and plan to go see Over The Hedge instead, on May 19th), but what I saw of the trailer left me with the impression that the acting is so over-the-top, and the direction so florrid that the film may come off about as plausible as The League of Extrordinary Gentlemen, and about as serious as Young Frankenstein.
I admit, it could be because I already think of the film’s raw material as ridiculous, and so I’m predisposed to laugh.
Except I wasn’t really expecting to laugh. I was expecting that a full-length DVC trailer would leave me irritated, concerned and maybe a little demoralized. It didn’t.
So, is it possible that little Opie Cunningham has directed the DaVinci Code as a farce? Might he have given the subject the cinematic treatment it truly warrants? Is he that good?
Part of me would like to think so, given that he grew up on the set of the Andy Griffith Show, singing hymns during breaks in shooting with Andy, Don Knotts and everybody. Wouldn’t it be great if he snapped up the DVC movie gig so he could give it the subtle lampooning it deserves?
Like I said, I have no evidence except for my own reaction to the trailer… I’m just sayin’, that’s all.
Grist for the continually grinding mill.
Christians may have just gotten an unexpected ally against Ron Howard’s latest monsterpiece, The Da Vinci Code.
Oh, sure. Lots of Christian groups have been picking at the book’s and film’s inaccuracies–but they’re focused on matters of fact rather than style.
They may have just gotten an ally who would love to see the film fail at the boxoffice and who couldn’t care less about the fact and will go after the film on grounds of style–even at the pettiest level.
So who is the mysterious ally willing to take on Hollywood?
Hollywood itself.
MEMO TO HOLLYWOOD:
A house divided itself cannot stand.
P.S. Burn, baby, burn!
American Papist has an interesting piece up about the upcoming A&E reality show "God or the Girl?", which focuses on young Catholic men discerning possible vocations to the priesthood.
Will this be a good, serious look at the question or will it be evil, Hollywood anti-Catholicism?
Well, we’re now well and truly into the gap between Galatica season 2 and season 3, so pretty much everybody who wants to see the season 2 finale has done so.
(If you haven’t, you can download it from iTunes and watch it in iTunes, even if you don’t have a video iPod.)
This gives me a chance to speculate on what we’re going to see in season 3.
One of my favorite things to do when watching or reading a story is to predict where it’s going and then seeing if I’m right or not.
So let’s see how I do with my predictions for BSG season 3. . . .