Movies!

I saw two movies this weekend, but I'm only writing a review for one of them. A local theater specializes in obscure and older movies and was playing the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That was the most fun I've had at a movie since the Lord of the Rings trilogy night. 99% of the audience already knew the movie forwards and backwards, there was cheering and shouts of "We love you Master Splinter!" Someone started humming Darth Vader's theme music when Shredder made his dramatic entrance, and Chief Sterns was immediately compared to Chief Wiggam from the Simpsons - half of the audience shouted a nasally "Nyaa" every time he was on screen. It's a classic that still holds its own - which is more than I can say for its sequels.

But on to the other movie I saw: The Davinci Code
This movie was somewhat of a disappointment in numerous respects. On several occasions, people have recommended the book to me, but I never got around to reading it. After the awful Omega Code movie I was leery of anything that involved both the Bible and secret codes. I warn you now, this review is pretty much entirely a spoiler - normally I would hold back for the sake of those who might want to see this movie, but in my opinion, no one should need to waste their time in such a way. The story, according to the author's laughable re-write of history is basically this:
Jesus married Mary Magdelene and fathered children - this somehow indicates that he was not God's son, but just a really charasmatic mortal. The holy grail is not actually a cup, but a symbolic reference for Mary Magdelene herself - the cup (her womb) didn't catch Jesus' blood, it caught his blood-line. In 300 or so AD, Constantine - a consumate pagan until his death, organized a rally of "Christian" scolars to sit down and have a rap session to hammer out the details of this new ficticious Christianity religion thing. At that point they were sterilizing the gospels of anything that would make Jesus look like a mortal, and throwing out the gospels they couldn't clean up (including one written by Mary Magdelene herself! lol). After this, they covered their tracks and just went on pretending that Christianity had always been that way. But the catholic church had to erase Jesus' heirs from history, because somehow all of their power and influence was based on the premise that Jesus was immortal and somehow having children makes him mortal. The Knighs Templar was apparently a secret society with the hidden agenda of protecting Jesus' living descendants against the extremist Catholics (that's practically a contradiction in terms.) So flash forward a couple of thousand years, and the battle of Templar vs. Catholic rages on. Caught up in this are Robert - a symbologist that specializes in obscure interpretations of common symbols and Sophie - a cop, and the unknowing descendant of Jesus. The movie unfolds somewhat like National Treasure as one clue is followed to the next, however it was not nearly as intriguing or mysterious. The obviousness of the plot killed most of the suspense for me - I was able to guess what was going to happen next with accuracy that surprised even me. Even the double-crosses were badly botched. There was one sequence in particular that made me laugh out loud at is ineptitude. The butler that just double-crossed the heroes has a conversation with a man who is purposly obscured from the camera and does not speak - the butler even makes reference to the fact that his identiy is supposed to be a secret - the exposition couldn't have been more obvious if the actor had faced the audience directly and spoke. Now, it was pretty obvious to me who the mystery man was just by deductive reasoning, but the scene switches to something that is pretty much unrelated for a few minutes then jumps back and the mystery man's identity is revealed. It was a complete waste of intrigue. When you use intrigue on an audience, you have to give them a reason to want to know the secret. This was just bad film making. Anyway, our heroes jet-set across europe and at the end discover that Sophie is one of the last living descendants of Jesus (they use Christ like it was his last name, lol). According to the author, revealing this fact to the world will utterly destroy the catholic church, which is, evidently, the sole source of racisism, classism, oppression, hunger, war, the author's bad childhood, and pretty much everything in the general category of evil. So now Sophie has to make the decision to go public, she makes a cutesy little visual gag where she tries to walk on water and then says she's going to go try the water and wine trick. As an epilogue, Robert follows the exact same clues that led him elsewhere earlier in the story, but this time they lead him to a pyramid inside the police station where the remains of Mary Magdelene a.k.a. the holy grail are now enterred. He kneels respectfully to pray to the corpse.

Firstly the core of the underlying story - that Jesus married Mary Magdelene and fathered children is a very old, very un-biblical theme. There has never been any evidence to support it, nor much of an effort to directly disprove it because it's absurd. The idea that this, if true, necessitates that Jesus was mortal is a stretch for even the most atheistic philosopher. The author clearly needed this to be true in order to construct the antagonist's (the Catholic Church) motivation, however it is also clearly motivated by some personal vendetta the writer has - there is no logic behind it. The un-biblical part of this was explained away by the council called by Constantine to sit down and do an ISO-ish re-write of the Christianity standard. For the rest of this review, I'll call it ISO 001.1. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the Catholic Church. I think the Catholic Church has done more harm to Christianity than any other person, entity, or assembly that has ever existed - their doctrine is largely fabricated by men with secular motivations, they openly contradict the Bible in public favoring idol worship and papal dispensation over the scripture. I'm personally sick and tired of Catholicism being regarded as the authoritative organization in Christianity. As far as I'm concerned, they ceased being Christian as soon as they began referring to priests as "father." They have even gone so far as offering to sell passage into heaven for money all in the name of Christianity. It is not difficult to understand why people like Dan Brown (the author) would become resentful and vindictive, or why so many would flock to believe what he says when this bastion of Christianity is so clearly full of deceit. And again, I want to clear up that I am not defending Dan Brown, merely attempting to lay open his motivations in order to explain why this movie was so bad.

Story-wise, it was poorly paced, badly conceived and executed. The plot was basically a badly performed and less interesting version of National Treasure. It is obvious that the director was counting on the noterity of the name to sell tickets, and not any inherent quality of the movie. Many of the characters had a 3D introduction followed by a distinctly 2D role. I've seen a lot of book-to-movie adaptations and they usually do a much better job with this - either the charcater is shallow and mostly unimportant or he is part of the main plot, not a little of both.

Special effects were basically confined to ghostly overlays as Robert explained or thought through something - his imaginations would appear on screen as translucent objects. Some of the camera work was very good, proving sweeping and often interesting views of the exotic backdrops.

Tom Hanks' acting was somewhat below par on this one. It seemed like he was trying to stretch the boundaries of his repitore and he ended up looking a little rough around the edges in terms of delivering a believable performance. Ian McKellen on the other hand, was on top of his game. Jean Reno also gave a very good performance, for what the director allowed him to do.

Philosophically this film is complete and utter heretical and blasphemous crap. It is obvious that the author is a bitter ex-member of catholicism and this was born of some personal vendetta.

I would recommend against wasting time or money on this.