Are you planning on seeing the film? Why or why not?

Just goes to show you how very suggestible our society is. And, kind of makes you wonder if that wasn't the intent of it to begin with. I guess here, the pen is mightier than the sword! I hope people realize that this type of story could be re-written using the specifics of any religion, even their own.

I'll probably see it at some time, but have no real desire to see it at the theater. Don't all throw stones at me, but I'm not really a big Tom Hanks fan and the movie seems too mainstream and blockbusterish for me. If I want to see a movie like it, I'd probably be more tempted to see Philip Seymour Hoffman in MI3.

I'm sure Da Vinchi will open big; but I wonder how the reviews will go. Some say it's overrated. Guess time will tell. I'd be interested to see what people think of the movie and if it was able to sway their belief about Christianity enough to want to argue the "facts" or if they totally saw it as just an interesting "make believe" story.

As for the story, I am in the camp that believes that it could be possible. I feel that anything is possible!
I wasn't there, I don't know what is true, but you know the phrase "the lady doth protest too much"? The church is making more of a scene by flipping out. If they just let it roll of their backs, then they would appear a lot more in control.

Please, if you want to talk about people being suggestible, um, society has been following a book written by men as the word of God for centuries!

The fact that Christianity has been followed for centuries goes to show it "isn't" suggestiblility.

Suggestiblility simply isn't that people believe in a god or aliens or whatever as part of their life. It is how they come to believe or question it. If they have been taught all their life or grew up believing a certain way that's faith, tradition, etc. not suggestiblity.

But if one (ficticious, mind you) movie, book, or person can change the way you feel about a religion (in 2 hours) you've learned about all your life, then that is suggestiblity. That's being "easily" influenced by suggestion.

I find it strange that Ron Howard himself said he didn't feel the need to put a disclaimer on the film about it not being based on facts, because he assumes everyone should know the stuff is made up.

As for the movie I am not a Tom Hanks fan and can't remember the last movie I saw him in...maybe Castaway-anyway I did not feel he was the right actor to play Langdon.
Will I see it? I won't go the the theatre to see it but will probably rent it when Netflix gets it.

I have never understood was all the fuss was about...probably never will!

Pat

Tom Hanks would not have been my choice for the movie but he is an excellent actor and I'm sure will give a good performance. I also have confidence in Ron Howard to do a great job with the movie. I haven't decided whether to see the movie in the theater or to wait for Netflix -- may depend on the reviews.

Pat

Pick any controversial subject, you'll get attention, as I'm sure Mel Gibson can attest. Controversial+new idea=big $ !

I won't touch/debate it with a 10' pole!

Still, I look at it is fun and intriguing, an adventure with intellectual debates laced throughout. Isn't that a good film is supposed to be? What I don't understand is, why all this fuss? The novel was out long before the movie so why is this a new issue all of a sudden?

Moongirl, I agree that the sacred feminine was deliberately done away with, but that process started long before Christ, didn't it?

The novel was out long before the movie so why is this a new issue all of a sudden?

I think those that read it much later had a different view of it which was colored by all the fuss about it and the fact that as a hardback it was on the NYT's top 10 for 2 years.

And, of course the fact that the authors of Holy Blood-Holy Grail sued Brown for stealing their 'ideas' upped the controversary.

Pat

Moongirl, were you not the one who campaigned here frequently against "the Passion of the Christ" as you worried that it might offend Jews? Now you are endorsing a film that is offensive to millions of Roman Catholics and Christians in general. Interesting.

Am I going to see the movie? I honestly don't know. I thought the book was not very well-written and that it did ride on the coattails of the original Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Like friedag, my expectations aren't all that high. I might see it but I won't go out of my way to do so.

As for the whole fuss about the content of the book and of the movie? Yes, the premise is possible. However, the book is a work of fiction. I figure that if someone doesn't like the content of the movie, then they shouldn't see it. Vote with your pocketbook.

Does the content insult the Christian religion? Probably. But then again, which religion has NOT been "insulted" in the past few years? Someone here mentioned The Passion of Christ as possibly insulting to the Jews. We know what happened when those Danish cartoons were published.....

Besides, isn't this whole thing part and parcel of being in a democracy (and not a theocracy) where freedom of speech is actually followed and not just given lip service? As Voltaire put it, "I may not agree with what you say, but to your death I will defend your right to say it".

(kind of funny sidenote - as I write this I am listening to the Stephen Schwartz musical "Children of Eden")

On to more important things! The news from Cannes is in! And it's not too good. The critics were less than thrilled. They said they didn't like Tom Hanks, he was miscast, and thus had little chemistry with Audrey Tatou... and apparently there was an extremely serious scene and the audience was laughing, and there was zero applause during the credits.

A CODE THAT TAKES LONGER TO WATCH THAN READ

By A.O. Scott

CANNES, France, May 17 — It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media. Recent history — "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of Narnia" — suggests that such controversy, especially if religion is involved, can be very good business. "The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation. The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia — it only feels that way — but part of Columbia Pictures' ingenious marketing strategy has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute. Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's pre-nuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised. Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?

Luckily, I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci Code" is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. (Curiously enough, Mr. Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.) To their credit, the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can only live on the page. To be fair, though, Mr. Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," hisses Audrey Tautou to Paul Bettany (who play a less than enormous, short-haired albino). "He burns them!" Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da Vinci Code" is, above all, a murder mystery. And as such, once it gets going, Mr. Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Mr. Goldsman have deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists and introducing others that keep the action moving along. Hans Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop-romantic with some liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise be talky and inert. The movie does, however, take a while to accelerate, popping the clutch and leaving rubber on the road as it tries to establish who is who, what they're doing and why.

Briefly stated: an old man (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is killed after hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a hooded assailant. Meanwhile, Robert Langdon (Mr. Hanks), a professor of religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French policemen who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his department has cut back on its shaving cream budget.

Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu, a police cryptologist and also — Bezu Fache! — the murder victim's granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets, which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of Western Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) is at this very moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile, the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cell phone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.

A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It skids through the nighttime streets of Paris and eventually to London the next morning, by way of a Roman castle and a chateau in the French countryside. Along the way, the film pauses to admire various knick-knacks and art works, and to flash back, in desaturated color, to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters (Langdon falls down a well; Sophie's parents are killed in a car accident; Silas stabs his abusive father). There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.

Through it all, Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Mr. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism, and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue. In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

But thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code" a jolt of mischievous life. He plays a wealthy and eccentric British scholar named Leigh Teabing. (I will give Mr. Brown this much: he's good at names. If I ever have twins or French poodles, I'm calling them Bezu and Teabing for sure.) Hobbling around on two canes, growling at his manservant, Remy (Jean-Yves Berteloot), Teabing is twinkly and avuncular one moment, barking mad the next. Sir Ian, rattling on about Italian paintings and medieval statues, seems to be having the time of his life, and his high spirits serve as something of a rebuke to the filmmakers, who should be having and providing a lot more fun.

Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a Tintin comic, is a marvelously absurd creature, and Sir Ian, in the best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this — a more acute sense of its own ridiculousness — would have given "The Da Vinci Code" some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting Euro-thriller.

But of course, movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Christ or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema, such matters are best left to Monty Python. In any case, Mr. Howard and Mr. Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Mr. Brown's book with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull sententiousness. So I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.

I really am tired of the whole "this hurts ....." rationale whenever something like this comes up.

Moongirl, were you listending to the whole recording or just the highlights album of Children of Eden? I was able to see it in Washington DC at Ford's theater and absolutely loved it.

I confess, I've now watched a couple of those the-truth-about-DaVinci shows and enjoyed them greatly. They always bring in just a little more history than I knew before, to further explain the context of the claims, and you know I love my history.

Well this is a real shame, is all I have to say. I haven't seen the film yet, but my gut guess is the big problem is Tom Hanks. Now let me preface I adore Tom. We all can say he is a fine, fine actor and totally adorable and charming. But I would think that for these two characters to have chemistry you need um, how to put it gently? Sexy actors. Actors with sex appeal. George Clooney or Hugh Jackman paired with Audrey Tatou would have chemistry based purely on the fact they they are good looking couple. But Tom Hanks? Cute and adorable, funny and sweet, but sexy? And top it off with the fact that those qualities we DO like about Tom - the sweet, adorable goofiness we've come to love - are NOT the traits of this character, so Tom's best qualities aren't even shining thru in this role. He works best when he plays "everyman" type of guys...guys who are ordinary but find themselves doing extraordinary things. But Robert Langdon is not your typical ordinary guy to begin with, he's very dynamic and magnetic and almost larger than life, and you need someone who can really pull that off.

Every so often a conspiracy theory novel comes along and people get all het up over it. Sometimes I think to myself, get real, folks, it's a story. It's pretend. Oh well. Ten or twenty years from now we'll all be excited about a different novel or movie.

Paula

I'll probably wait to see the movie on DVD or cable. I thought the book was interesting, but not particularly well written so I think I'll spend my movie dollar on X-Men next week. Even if it's not too good, there's still Hugh Jackman in his Wolverine suit! LOL

Chris, interestingly enough, I didn't. I felt that Langdon was a brilliant guy, handsome, maybe a little nerdy in a Gil Grissom sorta way. I pictured him exactly how Brown describes him - Harrison Ford in tweed. That's who I pictured in my mind as I read the book and I remember thinking, When they make this into a movie, it's too bad Harrison is already too old for this role.

It seems MSNBC's film critic, John Hartl, felt the same way, here's excerpts from his review:

No matter what you think of Brown's revelations about the true nature of Jesus and Mary's relationship, the book is a page-turner. It's the literary equivalent of the Kiefer Sutherland television series, "24," complete with a shameless cliffhanger strategically placed before each commercial, er, chapter.

Ron Howard's skittish movie version, written by his "A Beautiful Mind" screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, is so slavishly faithful to Brown's plot twists that it's tense with effort. A story that took 454 pages to tell simply cannot be telescoped into two and a half hours. The script is crammed with information, yet there's very little room for humor or breathing spaces or characterizations that are more than wafer-thin.

Brown imagined his hero, Robert Langdon, a Harvard historian and symbologist, as "Harrison Ford in Harris tweed." Indeed, the Ford of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," pursuing and protecting and believing in the Ark of the Covenant, would be perfectly cast as Langdon if he were about 10 years younger.

Instead, Howard picked Tom Hanks (star of Howard's "Splash" and "Apollo 13"), a sharp actor who seems all wrong for the role. Granted there's not much of a character to play, but Hanks can't help bringing a distancing sense of irony to the frequent discussions of art and religious history.

While Langdon is required to seriously present his account of the fate of the Holy Grail, you believe Hanks only when he claims that he's been dragged into "a world where people think this stuff is real." He doesn't seem to have a passion for his work.

He's also hard to buy as an action hero who teams up with a mystery woman, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), to solve the murder of her grandfather — who dies in a spectacular, symbol-driven manner in the Louvre in the opening scenes.

While they're busy solving riddles, uncovering a conspiracy and avoiding entanglements with the police, they're also on the run because Langdon is the prime murder suspect. This touch of "Les Misérables" (with Jean Reno playing Langdon's relentless pursuer) provides the story with most of its momentum. The pair keeps getting into scrapes, escaping, then getting double-crossed.

The supporting cast provides some relief from Hanks and the equally miscast Tautou, whose English is less than secure. Paul Bettany dominates his scenes as the serial-killer monk, Silas, who tortures himself and carries out murders ordered by the Mafia-like fundamentalist Catholic group, Opus Dei. Alfred Molina is equally scary as his ruthless boss, and Jürgen Prochnow is briefly effective as a bank official who appears to be on the fugitives' side.

Ian McKellen, who turns up about an hour into the picture, playing Grail expert Sir Leigh Teabing, seems instantly at ease with the literary dialogue. Teabing had the best lines in the book, and McKellen savors them here. The movie is most alive when Langdon and Teabing are discussing their opposing viewpoints and getting quite hot under the collar about the validity of each other's version of Christian history.

Unfortunately, most of the other talking-heads scenes threaten to bring the movie to a halt, even when they're supplemented by abstract, color-drained illustrations of ancient Rome or witch burnings or other phantoms of the past. As the characters discuss conspiracies and anagrams and the hidden meanings in religious art, you wonder why they don't seem to realize they're on the run and they don't have a lot of time.

The phenomenal success of Brown's novel undoubtedly has much to do with recent Catholic scandals, discoveries like the gnostic gospels and widespread disgust that the church is covering up for criminal priests. The movie may seem even harder than the book on Opus Dei, perhaps because Silas' bloody behavior is so much more graphic on film. His murder of a devout nun is especially nasty.

Defending the film against Catholic critics, Howard has emphasized that the script is fiction, and Hanks has even distanced himself from the story by calling it "hooey." But the mixture of fact and fiction invites confusion, especially when Brown calls The Priory of Sion (which is crucial to the story) "a real organization" that was "founded in 1099." Biblical scholars have proven otherwise, and so did last month's "60 Minutes," which debunked it as a 1950s hoax.

Will the book repeat its success on film? Record-breakers in one medium don't always cross over to another. It doesn't necessarily mean anything that "The Da Vinci Code" topped the best-seller list for so long. After all, so did "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," which bombed as a film. And "The Bonfire of the Vanities," starring a miscast Tom Hanks.

I had pictured, when I read the novel, Langdon as looking like a young Harrison Ford. Hanks is too much of a teddy bear for that role.

As for the ending, I'm sorry to say that I read the book a couple of years ago and forget how it ended. Since I don't remember, I can't say if the movie ending is any different.

Rosefolly

A friend loaned me the book last month so that we could discuss it and I found it enjoyable.

Murder mysteries are not my usual fare, but this had three of my favorite places in it; Paris, specifically the Louvre, and London. Also, there have been Masons in my family for generations.

The writing itself was just okay, but the book was fast-paced and easy to read.

The "controversial" subject matter was already familiar to me, and I did not find it shocking or offensive to my religious beliefs. The story of Jesus and his message holds the same meaning for me whether or not he was married.

I saw members of Opus Dei on a TV segment saying their lives are quite ordinary and boring compared to their dramatic portrayal in The DaVinci Code.

I laughed out loud when I heard that Tom Hanks was in the movie, then spent time trying to figure out whether he would play the young investigator or the old curmudgeon. I would not have cast him in this, but he is a big box-office draw, so I suppose that explains it.

People who have seen TDVC say he does a good job and I'm glad to hear it.

One of the things that kept occurring as I read is that I was WISHING that Dan Brown had put in a fold-out copy of "The Last Supper" so that when Leigh Teabing is discussing it and its significance in the code, we could see what he's talking about. Howard does a great job of illustrating this. I also liked the way he overlaid the past and the present.

Hanks is okay. It is McKellen's movie. And maybe Reno's.

If anything, I liked how the screenplay tightened things up. I rememeber being frustrated when *I* figured out puzzles before these so-called experts did in the book. C'mon already!!

Could I have been spoiled by the symbol dense Lost? Anyone else look at the plaid at the end of the movie and wonder which clan it represented and if it had meaning?

I don't know how they could have made it work, but it didn't in my never humble opinion. I'm off to salve my disappointment with a pint of Cherry Garcia.

I felt this was one to see on a big screen, with the scope of Paris and the Louvre, which was impressive. As for the tartan towards the end: I have studied clan tartans and IMO it did not look authentic at all. I read it as a superficial detail related to Tautou's new-found family in Scotland. I noted it did ressemble a rainbow, vaguely.