I love movies. I love film: two very different entities. Ironic that my first blog about movies comes after seeing one I never planned on seeing. I love A Dog Day Afternoon. I love Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I love The Blues Brothers. These I consider films. Throw in a Taxi Driver, an Annie Hall, a Harold and Maude. These films I consider to be classics, because they capture the spirit of the times in which they were made, the methods of film making employed when producing them are stellar, timely, and they are completely relevent when viewed today. Then there are movies: Animal House, Star Wars, Fargo, Dead Poets Society; all classic movies. What’s the difference? I think films are craft, and movies are entertainment. I say all this to qualify my comments about the Da Vinci code. It’s like taking a girl home and going through your records on the floor; you want her to know where your coming from; you want to show her how cool you are. The Da vinci Code was the Harry Potter of crime thrillers. People ate that shit for breakfast when the book came out, it ruled the best seller lists and the collective mind-state. Three out of five people on the subway going into Manhattan were reading the Da Vinci Code. I did not read it for this reason: mass hysteria terrifies me, I’m ”cooler than that” I can’t read the same book the world is reading if I want to keep up my iconoclastic airs. It took me years to finally dig Vonnegut and Bukowski because my whole college was up on that shit like a wild pony stuck on a forlorn fence. I didn’t listen to Kid A for two years after it dropped because folks were brushing their teeth and flossing with Radio Head. I did read Davinci’s predecessor Angles and Demons quite accidentally in my first L.A. appartment because roomate number four left it next to his bong on the coffee table. I thought it thoroughly entertaining.
So I went and watched The Da Vinci Code; it came in the mail, so I watched it. The book was a hit; the movie was panned beyond belief, right up there with Water World and Ghost Dad. Why? It’s a little long, but when you throw it up against the other studio pictures of it’s genre, other movies as it were, it’s fine. It’s good. I love Tom Hanks, Ian McKellen is always lovely, I’ve still got a crush on Audrey Tautou from Amelie and her pretty war movie. It’s a mystery, they run around, people die and they figure it out. Why was it panned? Were the expectaions too high after the book? I finished up the last two Lord of the Rings books before I saw those movies and I was a bit disappointed, but that’s fucking Tolkien. How could you make a “Tolkien movie” without disappointing someone? I think The Davinci Code was panned because it openly questions the fact that Jesus is the son of god. The religious right control the media. Do they worry about books? Do they really worry about books? I don’t think so. There was a small evangelical christian uprising about Harry Potter, about the witches and witchcraft, but they didn’t crush the book. Movies in today’s society reach millions upon millions of people. TDC suggest that Jesus was mortal, he was decreed the son of god by the church; they needed a figurehead, so three hundred years after he died they decided he would be big j Jesus. If I was Rupert Murdoch, I’d have a problem this movie. The entire Western world, our system of beliefs is based on god being Jesus’ dad. It’s how Rupert sells papers, the fear of god. It’s the basis of our moral code, our laws. The constitution afforded us separation of church and state, but come on! it’s on our money! In God We Trust. The United States of America is based on big G God.
Reading this it’s clear that I went after too many ideas. It would take me writing a book to explain all of this…maybe I should write a book! So I post this knowing that my arguments are incomplete, but I assert that I will continue to study this matter. The End.
