The last thing I want to do is preempt G’s post Debriefing. But, I was going to respond to this review of the movie and my long-windedness got a hold of me. So, I transfered my comments to a post over here.
We went to the drive-in down the road for the last time this weekend. That is, for the last time with E. When she was a new born, this was our date-night. We’d take her, hold her in our arms and bask in the glow of Starwars 3, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Wallace and Gromit, Corpse Bride, and I forget what else. We saw Tom Hanks’s latest and it was nice. Howard followed the Ecclesiastes principle: at times it moved quickly, at times slowly; at times it telegraphed into the next century (and that’s almost 100 years away), and at times it kept things so close to its chest that it seemed implausible (then again, most movies with more plot twists than a rasta hair do often seem implausible).
I, as opposed to T, did not read the book. When it came out I was in the midst of my dissertation. When I finished it, to reward myself, I read Foucault’s Pendulum, a true Knight’s Templar tour de force, and Pierre Klossowski’s The Baphomet, an historical novel on the Templar Order. And, I was simply Templar’d out.
T tells me that most “failures” of the movie are more due to failures in the book… as in telegraphing, with a bullhorn, who the Rector is. And a rather wooden Hanks as a professor. It is my experience that consipiracy theory professors, professors of art history who firmly believe that they are revolutionary thinkers, professors in touch with the feminine mystique (in the way he supposedly was), tend to be much more flamboyant and simply out-there, in a Kramer sort of way.
On the whole, though, I too thought it a decent movie. I’m glad I didn’t read the book, and I’m glad I saw the movie (if only to know, beyond a shadow of doubt, what the hype was all about)... even if this is the last drive-in movie I will see with my daughter until she’s old enough to sit through whatever animated shlock Disney tries to foist upon the viewing public. Or, maybe I’m glad that this was the movie that we watched with a fidgety 15 month old. It would’ve sucked had we not been able to give our full attention to Wallace and Gromit or Corpse Bride.
ON a related note, more banal observations from me, the fact that the book is written in the detective mode lends the “heretical/blasphemous” aspects of the book an air of truth. Part of the effect of detective fiction is that the reader is given a sense of ownership, they solve the mystery and come into knowledge at the same time as the main character.
(Boo, Hisss!) Sellout!
by JH—May 22, 09:48 AM
you mean because i called it nice or decent? rather than f-ing awful?
it was nice, nice and decent... as in, it was nicely shot and lit and the acting (except for the utter lack of chemistry between tom and audrey, and hanks as the most boring professor on the planet, except for the hair and the black haute couture) was good.
and again, the daftness of the movie, i chalk up to the daftness of the book. i think it could’ve been a good movie had they played with it more… tried to be even more blasphemous, made the stakes of the consipiracy higher (total world domination, or something like this), traveled the entire globe in search of the feminine goddess, confused the temporality and chronology of events so that past and present were more porous…
in fact, i would say that most of howard’s movies are nice and decent
(that said, i have not seen, nor do i wish to see a beautiful mind, precisely because i fear it will be a nice movie and i do pray that he won’t turn east of eden in a decent movie… it should remain a great movie).
by Jeremy—May 22, 10:08 AM
Beautiful Mind was a nice movie.
The boos were for seeing the movie alone. But then, I’m living in the brittlest of glass houses right now since I saw M:I3 this weekend. (It wasn’t my idea, but still.)
by JH—May 22, 10:30 AM
i heard, from a credible pop-culture source, that MI3, was quite good. MI2 was crap.
we also saw batman begins (on dvd) and it is my favorite batman
by Jeremy—May 22, 10:36 AM
The only thing good about it in my opinion was Phillip Seymour Hoffmann. A command performance, indeed. All else was forgetable.
by JH—May 22, 10:48 AM
I feel deprived. You mean all of this could have been at my blog?
I think we had a similar experience except I read the book. It wasn’t a great film, but wasn’t a bad film either.
BUT, I heard tonight that TDC was Howard’s top-first weekend box office gross ever. Not bad for getting beaten to death by the reviewers.
by Mark Elrod—May 22, 11:15 PM
Well, I hear that, unless you are posting on GKB, it is poor form to hijack someone else’s blog (not that we mind hijacking here at Hermits)...
And, it was just a ploy to see if I could get a comment from an HU prof… whom, I am sad to say, I did not take while there, despite assiduously following the awesome meter while there. :)
Oh, to be RH… not only do you get to be on Happy Days, an idyllic set from what I hear, you also get to make movies that millions will see precisely because they know that they will be nice and decent.
by Jeremy—May 23, 06:12 AM
A Beautiful Mind has Jennifer Connoly. Aaaah.
Da Vinci Code has Audrey Tatou. Aaaah.
Opie gets very good leading women.
Otherwise, as bad as the book was…
by greg—May 23, 06:16 AM
actually, i think that the no hijacking rule is just a ruse to try to get people to read one’s own blog rather than carry on the conversation, or yelling match, as the case maybe, under someone else’s auspices… it’s all about moving up in the cyber-eco-system
by Jeremy—May 23, 06:29 AM
People who care about hijacking worry too much about where a conversation goes. Control freaks.
by greg—May 23, 06:35 AM
It’s all about radical trust, my friends (well, that’s the buzzword, er, uh, buzz-phrase in the biblioblogosphere these days. . . yes, we librarian-blogger types actually coined and use the word “biblioblogosphere”).
by Laura—May 23, 08:13 PM
I just got back from seeing the movie with my youth ministry collegue (today, May 24). My reaction to the film is about the same as it was to the book: if you liked the book you will like film. There appeared to be more plot twists in the book than the film.
For me the best part of the film was the music!
Since I did not care for the book on any level – it was sophmorish writing in my view, the “history” was inexcusably ignorant on virtually every level.
I guess I am just being to hard on Brown, :-)
Shalom,
Stoned-Campbell Disciple
by Bobby Valentine—May 24, 02:31 PM
not at all, JRB has a nice take on the movie…
by Jeremy—May 24, 03:02 PM
Unlike most novelists, Brown can afford to have people be hard on him. My favorite line about him is Jon Stewart’s. It goes, “Replied Brown from behind a pile of money…”
by greg—May 24, 04:57 PM
We saw DVC this weekend, by the way. On the whole, it was OK. The albino was cool. Tom Hanks was not, especially since he can’t seem to remember what he wrote in his book and has to run to answer it. Access was granted to the sacred feminine and all that rot. I was a bit dismayed that Sophie Neveau was given even fewer chances to be brilliant in the movie than she purportedly is in the book—I suspect Opie thought Tatou looked more lovely when puzzled than when puzzling, so he allowed the script to take every bit of her power from her. I find this troubling about Opie’s movies. Women are strong, but they’re never quite strong enough: A Beautiful Mind, for example, breaks Jennifer Connoly and forces her out until Lithium takes over; that Western he made forced Cate Blanchett to be saved by Tommy Lee Jones… The movie really played up by the end Sophie Neveau’s lineage to Jesus, and because of it and probably because of sensitivity, Tatou and Hanks did NOT snog at the end like they were supposed to. No Jesusspit nor holy kiss for you Mr. Hanks! Nyah!
by greg—Jun 1, 03:53 PM
So that Stanley Kauffman review (linked at right) is halfhearted and lame.
by greg—Jun 14, 07:43 AM
tru, but i only posted it because i liked the line about audrey tautou
by Jeremy—Jun 14, 07:27 PM
fair enough. that’s as good a reason to link it as any. i was just disappointed ‘cause i think kauffman’s a a better reviewer than that.
by greg—Jun 14, 09:23 PM