Kidding!

Rob and I saw “The Da Vinci Code” in a packed matinee in La Jolla yesterday afternoon, and, well, it was pretty boring and pretty ridiculous and not very thrilling, and it was obvious. After about a half-hour, or maybe it was three hours, whatever would be a third of the way in, I said to Rob, [SPOILER ALERT!] “She’s the grail.” And then we had to wait another day or so before Landgon had his epiphany and tells Sophie. Lordy. Anyway, Ian McKellen is awesome, of course, and Audrey Tautou was lovely and appealing. (Somehow, I never saw “Amelie,” so this was my first Tautou, as it were.) Paul Bettany, as always, was brilliant. And freaky creepy. Tom Hanks was Tom Hanks, ya know, Everyman. I did like a lot of Ron Howard’s special effecty flourishes. The plot is pretty well-known by now, but after seeing it all put together I understood why the fundies, Catholic and Protestant, are obsessed with it: For the last few weeks, the religious kids at UCSD have had banners and tables and piles of leaflets and pamphlets all devoted to how the book isn’t true, because I guess the fact that it’s a novel doesn’t make that patently obvious. I also get why any Christian with an ability to think for him/herself is pretty amused by it. I was thinking about that for a couple hours last night, and then this morning, after seeing that the movie had made a gazillion dollars, I read the great Times piece–I love real-deal anthro journalism–on the phenom…which I have hypocritically posted after the jump.
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