Letters to the Editor
Jen27
Published Letters: 8 Editor's Choice: 4
-
Not Exactly Spine-Tingling
[Read the article: "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As a firm left-winger, I found Goldberg's article to be somewhat empty in it's immediacy. The phrases that stood out for me were not the dogmatics from the speakers but the numbers of followers: "A few hundred people" and "a few dozen members" seemed to be the norm. While I know the "Left Behind" series is a best seller, not all conservative Christians are calling for overhaul of the government. In fact, I don't see anything in this article to suggest that even most of them are. This seems to be a small fanatical group that is enjoying their 15 minutes in the sun. Rather than launching a full-scale attack against a Christian theocracy that is not really a threat, we should focus our attention on the issues that are threatened by the Christian right combined with other groups--abortion, gay marriage, public school education. By rallying against a phantom power, we come off as powerless.
-
Da Vinci: A Review
[Read the article: "The Da Vinci Code"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Let me begin by saying that I don’t find The Da Vinci Code to be anti-Catholic, in the same way that I didn’t find Passion of the Christ to be anti-Semitic. It’s a story. In fact, I think the movie went out of its way to avoid the wrath of the Church, straying from the book in several ways. Teabing not only exonerates the Church by saying that the people trying to destroy the Priory are not condoned by it, but goes on to say that this sect isn’t even mainstream Opus Dei; he implies that this is a fringe group working on its own. Also, when Sophie faces the murderous monk Silas, she spits in his face: “Your God doesn’t condone murder.” The only question that may shake Catholics up is central to the movie: Would discovering historical proof of Christ’s humanness destroy faith or renew it? And frankly, that is a question that I assume most Christians must have thought about way before Dan Brown took pen to paper.
As for the movie itself, frankly, I don’t think it should have been made. I can’t imagine being Ron Howard and facing the difficult task of turning a book read by almost 100 million people into a movie that people may want to see. The movie is being compared to the Harry Potter flicks, and the comparison is a good one, in that both movies add nothing to the books themselves. However, Harry Potter movies are in the end for kids, a population that buys into seeing stories they love played out in a visual way, even if they know every single detail. Adults, on the other hand, find this boring and trite, and that is what The Da Vinci Code is. (I will add that the kids who play Harry, Ron, and Hermione are a thousand times more charming than Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon. The man walks through the role as if he still can’t quite believe he signed on for this mess.)
The certain qualities that elevated Brown’s book from B-level action page-turner to literary best-seller are completely lost on the movie. Hank’s Langdon expresses none of the love for symbology that drives the book, and the characters’ multi-layered backgrounds are relegated to a few grainy flashbacks. Sophie is supposed to be a brilliant cryptographer, yet in the movie, she does not break a single one of the puzzles her grandfather had left before his death. Her entire character boils down to a whiny, clumsy French girl hanging onto Langdon’s sleeve while he saves the day. Even their romance was cut from the movie (probably in the interest of time—it takes 2 ½ hours for them to solve 3 codes as it is!).
And then there is poor Mary Magdalene herself. The beauty of the book is how her story unfolds—through small details, with a little exposition by Teabing. But the movie cannot afford such subtleties. Teabing and Langdon’s revelation of Mary Magdalene as the holy grail does not play out in the movie as a grand spectacle of shock—more as a late-night infomercial, with Hanks and McKellen breaking in on each other’s monologues like people selling 3-minute egg cookers (“No, surely not, it can’t be!” “But it is, Tom! Just look at that painting!”).
This is not to say there aren’t bright spots in the movie. Paul Bettany is practically unrecognizable as Silas, showing constant but not-over-the-top agony and piety on his face at the same time. McKellen is certainly believable as the movie’s teacher-cum-villain.
In the end, a good story is a good story, and I’m sure some will find this movie a fun popcorn flick. But I knew that the movie had irrevocably failed in the last scene. I confess to having read The Da Vinci Code not once but twice (those searching for beach reading sometimes fall to desperate measures). And even during the second reading, when I knew what was coming, I got goose bumps in the last pages when Langdon falls to his knees to worship at Magdalene’s tomb. But in the movie, despite Hank’s posturing and the dramatic music swelling in the background, I was thinking, “Man, the parking lot is going to be jammed.”