The Da Vinci Code
This is the one with Audrey Tatou as the platonic love interest. Ron Howard’s brand of blandness and safe. To think I once though this was a great thriller, I was very young and naïve. Remember, this is like Bond for Dunning-Kruger sufferers.
The history stuff is just laughable, you can drive a dump truck through the fails. It’s a good competence filter though. I even live in a country that rebranded the Templars because they were so useful, a medieval Wagner group. And yet, Opus Dei searches Paris, but not Tomar. The Constantine stuff is peppered with enough truth to annoy anyone.
And the big reveal with all the Da Vinci pictures is a bunch of logic leaps. Newton being hated by the church for the Principia is just laughable, the guy that wasted so much of his life in theological studies.
As for the film itself, it’s so bland it’s OK. The cast’s breadth is incredible, it almost makes it worth it. It’s only comparable to something like Harry Potter. Many serious actors collecting paychecks.
What the actual fuck in the Professor’s motivation, what can he possibly do with 20 millions that he can’t with his vast estate? To pay off the valet? He’s already rich, he can pay that from his bank account. It’s so confusing, the “villain” is true in his heart, but since he’s not a protagonist, he’s a “bad hombre”.
Some casting fails: Paul Bettany playing a Spanish dude (Mexican? Latin American? Inconclusive). At least Alfred Molina is Spain-adjacent.
Even so, even if Jesus Christ had kids, who gives a shit? Christianity itself preaches equality between God, and suddenly His progeny is special! What’s this, Islam?
If the Catholic Church survives paedophile rings amidst their clergyman, they can survive anything. The Pope could shoot someone on Saint Peter’s Square and nothing would happen.
The big Opus Dei opponents are the secular Freemasons, or communists, or anarchists, not another obscurantist sect of men in robes. Men will only be free when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.