{"id":2022,"date":"2006-05-17T11:47:13","date_gmt":"2006-05-17T11:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html"},"modified":"2006-05-17T11:47:13","modified_gmt":"2006-05-17T11:47:13","slug":"dvc-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html","title":{"rendered":"DVC Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rotten Tomatoes keeps score – it’s at 0% now, with 5 reviews in.<\/a><\/p>\n

MegaCritics also collates reviews. There cumulative is higher at this point because they include a rave from the NYPost<\/a><\/p>\n

I have one more post on this I will try to pull together this afternoon, and then…aside from anything startling or interesting, I hoping that will be my last word. <\/p>\n

Richard Corliss at TIME:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

McKellen, a pro\u2019s pro, lends suavity and power to the Leigh Teabing role (a character Brown named for two of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail<\/em>). Yet when he delivers the film\u2019s dead-serious climactic line \u2014 \u201cYou\u2019re the last living descendant of Jesus Christ\u201d \u2014 it got a derisory laugh from the Cannes crowd. <\/p>\n

Just what you\u2019d expect, some would say, from a smug bunch of infidels. Well, despite my cataloguing of the movie\u2019s faults, I\u2019m not among the smirkers. In that blizzard of what\u2019s-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,<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n

The movie goes further. Beneath the chases and crashes, the chalices and cilices, it denies Jesus\u2019 divinity. As Teabing (perhaps not the most trustworthy authority) says in the movie, \u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told is a lie!\u201d And further still: the film challenges the belligerence that too often adheres to religious believers, the wars and atrocities perpetrated in His name. \u201cWho is God, who is man?\u201d asks Sophie. \u201cHow many have been murdered over this question?\u201d I\u2019m not taking sides on that issue. But for a mainstream, $125 million summer movie to raise it, let alone suggest a negative answer, in a cultural environment already politicized and polarized by religious debate, takes big steel balls. I didn\u2019t know Opie had \u2019em. <\/p>\n

So maybe there\u2019s one more Da Vinci Code<\/em> 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\u2019s movie marches through that storm, it will become a phenomenon as impressive as the book\u2019s gigantic sales: the first secular-humanist hit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But how can it be secular humanist if it’s all about the sacred feminine? <\/p>\n

Update: <\/strong>I called it!!!!<\/p>\n

From a May 12 entry on this blog:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

I also have a prediction, based on what I sort of know about the screenplay and the clips I’ve seen: the Langdon character is going to function as the witty skeptic in all of this – he is going to be far<\/em> less on board with the "theories" in this film than the character in the book. He even has a moment near the end in which, based on an experience he had as a child, in which he muses that "Well, Jesus could be God, huh?" and then of course, we’re back to "Who knows? No one knows! Pick a story! Any story!" <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Entertainment Weekly’s review:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

A crucial change from the book is that Langdon has been made into a skeptic<\/strong>, a fellow who doesn’t necessarily buy that official Christianity is a lie. This is a sop to the film’s critics (i.e., the Catholic Church), but it feels cautious, anti-dramatic. Yes, a soup\u00e7on of research reveals that the Priory of Sion is a hoax invented in 1956, and surely it can’t be proved that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were ever intimate (though Martin Luther believed so). But what we want from a film of The Da Vinci Code<\/em> is the fervor of belief. It’s there only in Ian McKellen’s playful, crusty turn as Leigh Teabing, the scholar who hobbles around on twin canes, spouting happy rhetoric about the meaning of the Grail. As a novel, The Da Vinci Code<\/em> has a resonance that lingers. It may be less history than hokum, but it’s a searching product of the feminist era, when even many true believers have grown weary of the church as an instrument of moral reprimand and male dominion. The film is faithful enough, but it’s hard to imagine it making many converts.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rotten Tomatoes keeps score – it’s at 0% now, with 5 reviews in. MegaCritics also collates reviews. There cumulative is higher at this point because they include a rave from the NYPost I have one more post on this I will try to pull together this afternoon, and then…aside from anything startling or interesting, I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nDVC Reviews - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"DVC Reviews - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Rotten Tomatoes keeps score – it’s at 0% now, with 5 reviews in. MegaCritics also collates reviews. There cumulative is higher at this point because they include a rave from the NYPost I have one more post on this I will try to pull together this afternoon, and then…aside from anything startling or interesting, I…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-05-17T11:47:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"DVC Reviews - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"DVC Reviews - Via Media","og_description":"Rotten Tomatoes keeps score – it’s at 0% now, with 5 reviews in. MegaCritics also collates reviews. There cumulative is higher at this point because they include a rave from the NYPost I have one more post on this I will try to pull together this afternoon, and then…aside from anything startling or interesting, I…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2006-05-17T11:47:13+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html","name":"DVC Reviews - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2006-05-17T11:47:13+00:00","dateModified":"2006-05-17T11:47:13+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/dvc-reviews.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"DVC Reviews"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}