Word: howard
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...possibly detected my own ploy: to engage in a bit of backtracking mystification and prolong the suspense about the Howard Da Vinci Code. But enough already. What did I think about the movie...
...Howard and Goldsman have efficiently touched all the bases. But they haven't found a way to replicate the book's page-turning urgency. The games Brown plays - anagrams, the Fibonacci sequence, the art-history gamesmanship, the delving into Gnostic gospel lore, all the clues and miscues in his devious treasure hunt - are best savored by readers with a long night or a long flight ahead of them. They're not intrinsically visual or movie-dramatic, however many car chases the Howard version cranks...
...There might be a way to infuse cinematic juice into the tale, and Howard has a couple of jolting images: of Silas whacking a nun, and of the car crash that killed Sophie's parents and brother. He also manages an exemplarily creepy exchange between Tautou and Bettany, which for a moment raises the stakes to the level of personal affront. But these signs of violent life are rare. The flashbacks to the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages (shot in desaturated color) look both expensive and perfunctory - words that sum up the film...
...among the smirkers. In that blizzard of what's-in-the-movie publicity, there was speculation that the filmmakers might shy from the Opus Dei subplot, or at least from naming the group. One wag suggested that, given the character played by the child actor Ronny Howard on The Andy Griffith Show, he might re-dub it Opie Dei. But no, he charged ahead, calling it by name and depicting the society in exactly as harsh a light as the book does. Expect protests...
...maybe there's one more Da Vinci Code movie mystery yet to be unraveled. Will the mass movie audience take to a thriller that appears to attack the fundamental beliefs of what, our leaders keep telling us, is an actively Christian country? If Howard's movie marches through that storm, it will become a phenomenon as impressive as the book's gigantic sales: the first secular-humanist...