Good ideas that read better than they film

Rating: 7/10 (1 August 2007)

This isn't to put down the fine cast and expression of sublime ideas that cause everyone to catch their breath the first time they hear them. It's just the nature of the ideas.
For those of you who were not swept up in The Da Vinci Code book, it was quite the page turner: An author and scholar specializing in cultural symbols, Dr. Langdon, visits Paris, France, to deliver a series of lectures. As he is finishing one of them, a police inspector (Fache) approaches him and insists Langdon accompany him to the Louvre.
We see all this evidence hidden in plain sightthank you, Leo, Giordano Bruno, and othersof the natural, normal, healthy, human, sexual, realistic Jesus (and Mary!there's definitely something about Mary) alternative to the asexual divinity myth of Christ contrived by sick, powerlusting men to foster mass psychosis. As I see more and more, I'm driven toward wanting to discover what the scholarship really tells us.
I.e. I stop really worrying or caring much about the fictional characters and what they're up to. This is the unfortunate curse for Dan Brown qua novelist, that he's presenting this earthshaking nonfiction that trivializes his fiction. He certainly isn't a bad novelist, nor of course is Ron Howard a bad director. It's simply that the suppression of facts in reality is far more interesting (to me) than the suppression of facts in a novel or movie. ...
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Brian Wright Copyright 2007