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.)
The “dramatic representation” of the false, 1970s’ Wiccan/Feminist lie that the Church burnt “millions of women” as witches to try and end “woman-centered religion” is, to my mind, a disaster.
One thing I did and that others might do is write letters to local papers, citing the latest scholarly evidence (that the numbers were more like 50,000, that not all were women, that many were killed in Protestant countries, that midwives actually had a GREATER chance of not being executed, that none of the women were charged with being pagans, that it was usually other women, not the Church, that accused the women, that it was usually civil, not religious courts that condemned them to death,and that this occurred when capital punishment was far more common than now).
But it will not do any good. This is one of the most pernicious falsehoods. Can you imagine them making a movie based on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (the 19th century anti-Semitic Russian forgery still believed in the Middle East) and doing a “representation” of Jews supposedly killing Christian babies to make matzos out of their blood?
The Christian Enquiry Centre is distributing 270,000 specially designed cards today to every cinema screening the Hollywood version of the Dan Brown bestseller when it is released next week.
The cards feature 10 claims made in the book. Cinema goers are asked to judge whether they are fact or fiction by scratching the appropriate box.
If they are only being distributed at the special advanced sceening, which is by invitation, how biased can you get?
That’s like asking the Pope if he’s Catholic.
At least Tom Hanks came out with some statements that somewhat took the edge off of things (in my opinion at least.) But I don’t know if CNA’s story captured well everything he said or not. Of course, he probably doesn’t understand or care about the world of spiritual warfare, so he probably doesn’t know what the fuss is all about.
No believe in demons, no believe that more is going on behind the scenes.
Regardless, I still think his statements were more helpful than harmful, though I suspect people are going to disagree with me on that.
My sister-in-law was reading the book. Out of curiosity, I read the first chapter.
And I’ve concluded that Dan Brown cannot write. He tells rather than shows, and his dialogue is inane. The chapters are so short, it reads like a children’s book rather than an adult novel.
The book’s success is definitely a case of it being more controversial than creative.
And what’s almost more depressing than the heretical content of the book is the fact that Brown is considered a legitimate author and I wouldn’t get published for anything.
I keep reading about the Da Vinci Code being a “blessing in disguise” because it gives us the opportunity to evangelize. The opportunity to evangelize is making the best out of a bad situation. The Da Vinci Code is a cross to bear, not a blessing.
One passing thought.
I expect our culture to misrepresent us, to discredit us.
It happened to the early Church.
It happened to Jesus.
It doesn’t surprise me too much.
Amy, my oldest daughter says the same thing. She attempted to read DVC and said it was just so dull, and the writing so slovenly, that there was no use going on. And BTW does anyone else look at the name “Teabing” and read it “Teabag”? I do it every time.
So the moviemakers have decided to gin up the sex’n’violence aspects of the story and give us graphic representations of same. Big shocker, there 🙁 I’m beginning to think we should look into this fatwa business after all…
Yes, I also want to say “Teabag”, and the book simply screams for a National Lampoon-style parody.
NatLamp’s “Doon” (a parody of Frank Herbert’s “Dune”) was hilarious.
Would that be fun to write, or what?
I think we should airdrop Tom Hanks and Ron Howard over Tehran with some of those Danish cartoons tattooed to their butts.
Perhaps the movie is worse than the book, but the book was so bad, it sure doesn’t give it a whole lot of room to get worse!
One suggestion, if I may. I understand your needing to see it for professional reasons…but maybe you can keep in mind that the success of a movie is judged in how many folks see it in its opening weeks– perhaps you could postpone seeing it until that time frame is passed; I know you wouldn’t want to be counted among the box office statistics, contributing to its being a “blockbuster” and all that.
If you’ll allow me a plug….My blog links to a couple of articles in The Spectator and one in the Telegraph that might be relevant. Interestingly Opus Dei see the film as a chance for folk to know what they do.
http://inhocsigno.blogspot.com/2006/05/davinci-code-lemonade-from-lemons.html
DVC is released in the UK this Friday.
I agree with Amy. The book is so BAD! The dialogue is awful, the characterization nonexistent,it’s nothing but endless “telling” etc. etc. etc. And yet an entire room full of “Language Arts” teachers in my school district went on and on about what a great read it was!
I am a regular visitor to Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel’s “Da Vinci Hoax” blog. Recently they posted a report from Barbara Nicolosi on DVC, part of which read:
“The buzz on the streets here in Hollywood is that the film is embarrassingly bad. The studio has strictly limited 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'”.
Let us hope that the film is so absurd, that no one can take it seriously enough to be influenced by it’s message.
Jimmy, there must be times when an apologist’s life is not a happy one, ie when you have to expose yourself to anti-Catholic toxin in the line of duty.
MFG, that’s how I knew that my last master’s class in education was going to be awful. In the icebreaker, the theme was “what’s the best book you’ve recently read” and both the instructor and three other teachers were RAVING about it. Then again, when I did my pre-student teaching, there was a tenured social studies teacher who actually told the 8th graders that aliens may have influenced the pre-Colombian pyramids and that the Mayan people were around for a three hundred years before the Spaniards arrived.
Oh, drat – and here I first thought that you meant artistically it would be worse! (Let’s hope so, anyway!)
I agree that Dan Brown’s writing is *atrocious.* (And to think I once thought Freshman “he loves me not” poetry was the literary nadir.) I’ve actually been pitying Akiva G. for having to make a screenplay out of the thing – DVC simply has no plot (excepting, of course, whenever the Albino Monk of Doom shows up). It’s not surprising, then, that to fill out a “novel” that is essentially action, three chapters bad and unsubstantiated “history,” move to location #2, more endless chapters repeating previous information, stir and repeat ad nauseum – the screenwriter filled the movie up with random bits of popular vitrolific.
In good news, if you lay out Dan Brown’s points one by one, and then show his “scholarship” (resting mostly on Teabag…I mean Teabing, Dan Brown’s invisible friend who agreed with everything Dan Brown just wrote), students from 14-18 begin using their logical brains to poke holes in Brown’s absurdities.
I’m sure many are keeping up with the DVC/Hollywood news, but please don’t forget to take part in Othercott if you can – that is, seeing ANY other movie this particular weekend. “Poseidon” is a fairly fun action flick, and putting ridiculousness aside, “Just My Luck” was a charming romantic comedy (that actually sustained the central conceit and kept the romance wholly innocent!).
Jimmy,
If at all possible, try to delay your DVC viewing to Monday so it does not count toward the opening weekend box office.
And for anyone interested in the Othercott, see here
http://www.othercott.com/othercott.asp
Well, in spite of my hopes that the film had been directed as a back-handed farce (I was really tired that day, I had a cold, the dog ate my homework…) it seems that maybe the producers figured that if a little controversy is good, then a lot must be better!
Why lose an opportunity to give Christians a poke in the eye?
I do think, though, that many people, having seen these preposterous ideas illustrated before their eyes, might suddenly come to see that there is nothing to them.
Oh, well. At least my profession doesn’t call on me to be strapped in to Ron Howard’s “Heresy Appreciation Chair”.
Our prayers are with you, Jimmy, but bring an air-sickness bag anyway.
I have no respect for Brown, Tom Hanks and Ron Howard. Please pray for them. Their movie is nothing more than the philosophy of anti-christ: denying God in the flesh. Spiritually speaking, this smells of a satanic attack on Christianity, to counter the Passion of the Christ.
This from a May 7 entry on Barbara Nicolosi’s Church of the Masses blog:
“Having read the script, one of the things that I found particularly disgusting was the way in which screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (interpreting Dan Brown) continuously sets the Roman Catholic Church up against ‘true’ Christianity. We are led to believe that Jesus wanted Christianity to be something else completely – a goddess cult – but that the ‘Roman’ Catholic Church (why do so many non-Catholics always have to use that ‘Roman’ word like it is some kind of disease?) co-opted the regular-Joe guy, Jesus, and corrupted his merely ‘happy thoughts’ by making him God and creating a subversive political institution around him.
It is worth some serious discussion as to why the Catholic Church – among all Christendom – merits such hatred and persecution from the secular powers that be. Hmmmm… What do you all think?”
Yeah, it seems in boiling down Brown’s *plot* – such as it is – Goldsman has made it into a totally anti-Catholic diatribe. It’s interesting that I found this August 2005 NYT article by Sharon Waxman which is linked here in an International Herald Tribune reprint:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/05/news/davinci.php
(Hat tip to Brian Saint-Paul, editor of Crisis magazine, who quoted Calley in his May 2006 editorial, “The Assault on Jesus” for leading me to this Catholic League NYT ad that led me to this reprint.)
In it, DVC co-producer & former Sony chariman John Calley calls the film “‘conservatively anti-Catholic,’ as opposed to destructively so.” Anybody mind explaining to me what the difference is? The Catholic Church is made out to be a sham (& all of Christianity, by association) becasue she witheld/repressed the *truth* of the sacred feminine. That’s “conservative” anti-Catholicism & not destructive? I’d quibble with Calley’s definitions of those terms.
The thing is, Ron Howard & his production team know exactly what they’ve created. Makes little difference, frankly, if their motivation was money or heresy & the little word dance they do on the chat shows won’t change that they know they’ve purposefully insulted 2+ billion Catholics.
Did anyone see Ron Howard on Leno? Wow. This guy’s really nervous about something. Could it be that he not only knows he’s made an anti-Catholic film but that it’s gonna stink up the cineplexes, too? Very interesting!
Dang, I thought I’d closed the itallics. Drat!
a verse to remember:
“It is enough for the disciple that he become like his teacher, for the slave that he become like his master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more those of his household!”
Hi all:
If you read Spanish, you can create your own Dan Brown type novella
It’s absolutely stomach muscle pulling laughter to read the excerpts. The book covers and fake squibs are also quite amusing
xavier
Personnally, everytime I buy a tv, stereo, ect. I think Sony will get a letter extolling the virtues
of their product followed by “However you may, as I do, The da Vinci Code movie. My new Panasonic works very well”.
Hit ’em in the wallet.
(I espect that I may come out of the theater so mad I could spit.)
I’ll be with you if not temporally, in spirit, for whatever support that’s worth. Onward, soldier! May the movie only provide you with more insights into its origins, and refutations.
Consider eating before you go in case you’re not able to afterward. Bring a mint in case you throw up.
It can be hard to stay level-headed and sane with the things that go on sometimes. When things get bad, I try to remember that God sometimes allows evils like this to happen, and He has His good reasons. It’s not up to me to question His reasons–which is really a load off when you think about it. Your wheels will spin too much, to no good effect. You do what’s required of you but accept what can’t or won’t change.
People can also consider doing some penance for this situation. It’s not just for Lent or even Fridays. It’s within our abilities to be instruments of bringing about more good to bad situations. It’s something you can do besides being mad and feeling helpless. Maybe stop by a Church and visit with Christ and tell him you’re so sorry for all of this. That’s something I thought of doing if I see the movie this summer. Circumstances with my spouse’s employment allow me to see many movies for free on VHS, so they wouldn’t get a dime from us, personally.
Xavier – loved the create-your-own-Dan-Brown-novel site but am stumped by the word “Caramueco”. It isn’t in my Harrap’s Concise Spanish dictionary and when I ran it through Google the only reference was…the Dan Brown do-it-yourself. OK, what’s it mean?
I did like “The Magic Box,” though. The one where the Big Secret is the percentage of cotton in Harry Potter’s cape.
Well give Opey a break..He is the director..not the writer. Protestants poo-pooed Mels movie and said it was too Catholic and for weeks held it up as an example of “Catholic” heresy. I supposed in 2 weeks they will mine what they want from Da Vinci Code to support their views of Jesuits armies and now Opus Dei mercenaries. In 3 weeks we will be called heretics and liars by any apostate catholic or church hater that has an ax to grind. In 6 weeks, The Gospel of Judas and Da Vinci code will be tied at the hip as examples that the Church has hid the real Gospel. Heck..History Channel or A/E in running Da Vinci revealed this week!!!!!!!!!!! I figure most people are not intrested in History or Truth!! Eventually this movie will fade away but become “the Truth” to those who hate us
If the Jesuits really are the ruthless assassins of Protestant Fundamentalist legend; could they not have arranged convenient accident that would have removed Dan Brown from this mortal coil.
Just wondering
How in the world can Dan Brown claim to be a Christian? Even Tom Hanks is said to be Orthodox. Molian is credited as Catholic on Wikipedia. Unbelievable.
Jimmy,
I will probably need to see the thing eventually too (I’m a teacher and I need to know what my students are watching/reading). But I’m definitely NOT going to boost their opening week numbers. I’d suggest that you hold off from seeing it too — esp. on opening night. Why give Hollywood more reasons to keep making movies like this? Let’s do our best to keep their opening week revenues down.
Jimmy,
Just saw this item at Foostie Muse: “Muslims join Da Vinci criticism”.
According to this BBC news article, in India, Muslims have joined Christians in boycotting and protesting “The Da Vinci Code” movie.
As with the abortion debate, one of our few groups of allies in the world are the followers of Islam.
Delance: Brown’s claim to be Christian makes more sense when you realize that part of his argument is that nobody can reliably say what Christianity actually entails (unless they’re Dan Brown, apparently…).