'Best of TBH Politoons'
Baron Dave Romm
The DaVinci Code
By Baron Dave Romm
Quick Review: It's okay, and worth seeing, but you don't need to hurry.
Like the book, The DaVinci Code isn't a particularly good murder mystery but keeps you interested. It's a thriller, with two threads that intertwine. Director Ron Howard reveled in a large budget, which is too bad. A slightly sparser movie would have been better, maybe. Too much moving camera and not enough of the neat hologram-like effects which do an excellent job with visual exposition.
The basic plot of the movie is, well, unimportant. In the first few minutes, the set-up is revealed: The Curator of the Lourve museum is murdered in the Grand Gallery, one of four people killed to reveal a secret. The murderer is an albino Monk named Silas (Paul Bettany) who then contacts his superior at Opus Dei Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) with the information. Enter Symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and policewoman Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) who is also the murdered man's granddaughter. The Paris policeman assigned to head the case, Captain Fache (Jean Reno) is a member of Opus Dei. Langdon and Neveu have to run around following the trail from the clues the murdered curator left them while keeping away from the police.
The action and the exposition are structured very well, and there's enough going on to keep you interested until the next history-overturning lecture. One of the main plot points is that there are vast political forces who need to maintain the status quo. Those vast political forces, including the Christian Church, simply claim that they are building on historical facts. And therein lies the real-life controversy.
Opus Dei is a real organization, and very powerful within the Catholic Church. The Opus Dei web site, a good overview from an outsider and the Wikipedia entry. While I don't know if Opus Dei trains albino killer monks, their history is even screwier than the movie gets around to. The self-flagellation and use of the cilice is real. Start with the web site links, above, and do some searching. I'll let others go into greater detail. 9/11 demonstrated that the conviction of misplaced faith is as strong or stronger than the conviction of faith. Which is which? The DaVinci Code doesn't answer the question, but does frame the issue and asks some hard questions that as yet don't have a satisfying answer.
If Opus Dei wants to whine about their treatment in the movie, they should also take up the cause of the Jews over The Passion of the Christ. The DaVinci Code's historical facts are, to my knowledge, on firm ground: Constantine not being baptized until his deathbed, the Knights Templar, the Albigensian Crusade, etc. Historically, you can probably ignore the stuff about The Priory of Sion without hurting the basic thread. I was vastly amused at how the movie shoots down the major objections to the book. As the characters say at various times, telling the real history does NOT take away from your religious beliefs or from the example of Jesus. Indeed, says the movie, setting the record straight is what he would have wanted. Please keep in mind that it's fiction, and the first word you see on the screen is "Imagine" (part of the logo for Imagine Entertainment).
Meanwhile, symbolism is handled very well. Robert Landgon is a Symbologist, a PhD, and knows his stuff. It's a complicated, visual, subject that is presented carefully and concisely. You do get a sense that paintingsand sculpture and even architecture have more than utilitarian purposes. Director Howard handles this aspect of the book extremely well, even as he takes shortcuts to pare a lot of exposition into a 149 minute action-packed thriller.
The controversy, that Jesus had children and that the Christian church has been trying to kill them for nearly 2,000 years: How true is it? Author Dan Brown claims that the historical basis of his fiction is real. Some claim otherwise: that he is inflating controversies to making generalizations. Some dismiss him with a wave, insisting he is completely wrong. On the other hand, most of his critics don't make a lot of sense, and many of them are unquestionably either wrong or clearly working their own spin. I don't know. My personal feeling, after reading a fair amount and following the subject for 25 years, is that most of it has a factual basis. Maybe not all of it, and maybe not quite in the same way as laid out in the movie, but I strongly suspect that The DaVinci Code is closer to what really happened than two millennia of heavily edited religious and political strong-arming. Now, the truth can come out: I have faith. I think we owe it to our great spiritual leaders to tell their true story. If Brown's version of the history is true, even a little, every follower of Jesus should want to know His story.
Of course Yehoshua (aka Jesus) had kids, probably many. He was a 30 year-old devout Jew. You weren't a complete man until you had a wife and kids. It would be notable if he didn't have a family; that the stories don't mention them is circumstantial evidence that he did. What the Christians don't want you to hear, even more than this, is that Yehoshua was just one of many descendants of Kind David who have a legitimate claim to the thrown of Israel. The New Testament slips this in by mentioning the lineage of Joseph, Yehoshua's father. In the Christian explanation, there is a Virgin Birth. Joseph doesn't not contribute to the bloodline. And yet, Joseph's bloodline is important enough for the Gospels. A bit of a mystery, now resolved (sort of).
My theory (if I can present it here without tipping the boat even further), is that the bloodlines go back further than King David, to the Egyptian Pharaohs. The builders of Solomon's Temple were clearly influenced by the Egyptian engineering, and it's not much of a stretch to say that the Hebrews who had left Egypt still had family ties. I like theories that explain things, and much of history makes a lot more sense when you apply Occam's Razor rather than rely on miracles.
Discussing religion is always entering The Chapel Perilous, descending into The Abyss. Once you encounter such a vast set of realities, you wind up either rejecting them completely or becoming absorbed in them. You can always go deeper, but whether deeper researches actually mean anything causes pain. For the DaVinci Code, many prominent religious historians are bringing out the big guns. Lots of people are nitpicking and bringing out the cap pistols. What is signal and what is noise? Their argument is that The DaVinci Code gets religious history wrong. Well, Brown isn't as geeky about it as many theologians, but what he says is basically correct, and where he skims over larger swatches of history doesn't hurt his main argument.
Another one of my theories: Power trumps religion. Political power is the mover of religious thought, not the other way around. Constantine and the Council of Nicea is the example in The DaVinci Code, but hardly the first and hardly the only. We're seeing it now with the 9-Commandment Christians in the Bush administration force-feeding lies to a gullible religious "core". Completely ignoring the commandment against Bearing False Witness, the Republicans are insisting that they have the right to lie because G_d is on their side. If the extreme Christian worldview is correct, everyone in the Bush administration is going to Hell. That's not my province; I can only hope that they are tried for their secular crimes and put in front of a firing squad for being traitors.
One example: The Albigensian Crusade, where the Catholic Church committed genocide against the Cathars. The Cathars were a devout sect of Christianity, growing within the Church. Politics trumps religion, and a god-fearing legitimate religion was wiped out to steal their land... and to eliminate the last of the Merovingian descendants of kings. Aside from the character The Merovingian in The Matrix, most people haven't heard of them. The Crusade worked. But did the descendants of kings escape? And were the Merovingians themselves descendants of the kings of Israel who fled the Roman occupation of their land? I don't know for sure, though I think something of the story is likely, but it also smacks of another repression: Herod killing the first born of all Jews. When news of the birth of a king came to him, Herod slaughtered the innocents. He failed (though we never hear about Joseph much after this). History repeats itself; politics trumps religion.
Dan Brown brilliantly slips by the manipulation of politics by religion and goes right to the heart of the matter: Suppression of women. This is, I suspect, one of the major reasons the book is such a best seller. It taps into real sexual politics which continue to be unresolved to everyone's satisfaction. Religion, ostensibly around to provide individual guidance and bring people closer to a higher power, is too often used as cudgel to put people down. Judaism was well ahead of women's rights for its time, but its time was four thousand years ago. Better than Christianity or Islam, but that's not saying much. Because of religion, girls are forced to burn to death because they're not wearing the right clothes and forced to bear the child of rape and incest. Brown shifted the Holy Blood, Holy Grail discussion from revising the history presented in the New Testament to a damning portrayal of the suppression of women for political reasons. If The DaVinci Code has any lasting legacy, it will be to reframe feminism into a theological discussion.
While the backstory is faithful to the book, I can't help but compare the "origins" of Robert and Sophie to those of Batman and Harry Potter. Hey, gotta sell tickets.
Downside: The acting is rarely more than adequate (only Ian McKellen chews the scenery well), the camera movement annoying, the editing too tight. A few times, important plot points get lost in the pacing. You really need to read the book to understand the movie. Upside: Dialog is crisp and moves the story along. The action doesn't get in the way of the larger story, and vice-versa. The special effects are spare and several times add a great deal of visual information to a complicated explanation of symbols. While The DaVinci Code itself doesn't have a sequel, the character may appear in later movies as sort of an intellectual Indiana Jones. Indeed, I preferred the first book with Robert Landgon, Angels and Demons, and hope they make that into a movie. The larger story is interesting and told briefly but well.
I may change my mind after mulling it over for a while, but at the moment, on the Shockwave scale of 9 to 23 with 23 top, I'd give The DaVinci Code about an 19.
Still, to cleanse my cinematic palate, I need to see Monty Python's Life of Brian again...
Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia who produces Shockwave Radio Theater, writes in a Live Journal demi-blog, plays with a very weird CD collection and an ever growing list of political links. Dave Romm reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E. To receive the show as podcasts go to Shockwave Radio Theater Podcast or paste the following string in your podcast software: http://www.romm.org/podcast and if that doesn't work try the link from Podcastalley.com's listing. All podcasts also on the Shockwave Radio audio page.
Thanks to everyone who has sent me music to play on the air. --////
Update From Colby
Katherine Harris
Hi,
It turns out Katherine's
$2,800 dinner with corrupt contractor Mitchell Wade
was not her first with him. Plus, according to her ex-campaign manager Ed Rollins, her story about the $32,000 campaign contribution she took from Wade keeps changing. Even the director of the restaurant she and Wade dined at says she is lying.
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Jan Frel: Why Are Gore and Kerry Polling Worse Than Bush? (AlterNet.org)
The big names in the Democratic Party have even lower numbers than Bush -- is that because everyone's ignoring the crisis in our politics?
Sen. Hillary Clinton: 'I Wanted to Be Sure That Young People Work Hard' (beliefnet.com)
Everyday when I meet with people around our state I hear about jobs being outsourced to China or India. And these are not jobs of factory workers, these are jobs of engineers and jobs of radiologists. You can go to a hospital here on Long Island as I did last year and you can see the electronic Internet connection that allows an X-ray taken on Long Island to be read by a radiologist in India.
Molly Ivins: Bush's Wreckage
It would be interesting to see an election in which Bush is not a factor and the whole fight is over what Tom DeLay and the K Street Project have made of the Congress. If ever a gang of corrupt jerks deserved to be held accountable, this one does.
Marian Wright Edelman: Resetting Our Nation's Moral Compass (beliefnet.com; from May 15, 2005)
The world can be a better place if this year's graduates learn the simple values of hard work and of putting yourself second.
Damon Romine: As the homophobia turns (advocate.com)
When GLAAD and CBS joined forces to run a public service announcement about tolerance alongside a teen coming-out story line on "As the World Turns," the haters turned up the heat.
Robert Urban: Are Gays and Lesbians the True X-Men?
As mutants (genetically gifted human beings), X-Men are society's newest and most persecuted minority group. The ordeal of these fictional homo superior outcasts, surrounded and outnumbered by a world full of lesser, hostile homo-sapiens is a most powerful metaphor for the factual reality of homosexuals living among heterosexuals.
Hubert's Poetry Corner
LICKIN' IT
IS ORAL PHILATERY REALLY PHILATERY?
Oh, Oh, Canada
Avery Ant
The Monsters That Tucked Me In
Reader Suggestion
Great Link
Here's a nice link to an
Eva Cassidy performance of Wonderful World on
youtube
. No doubt, many of your readers will enjoy it.
Purple Gene Reviews
'The Da Vinci Code'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Overcast all day, rain all night.
Added 2 new flags - American Samoa 
and Cameroon 
Woman With An Opinion
Natalie Maines
The Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines apologized for disrespecting resident Bush during a London concert in 2003. But now, she's taking it back. "I don't feel that way anymore," she told Time magazine for its issue hitting newsstands Monday. "I don't feel he is owed any respect whatsoever."
As war in Iraq loomed, Maines told the London audience: "Just so you know, we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas."
For band member Martie Maguire, the controversy was a blessing in disguise.
"I'd rather have a small following of really cool people who get it, who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith," Maguire said. "We don't want those kinds of fans. They limit what you can do."
Natalie Maines
Man With An Opinion
Elton John
British pop star Elton John launched an expletive-laden tirade against the press in Cannes late on Saturday while presenting an award to a young actor during the annual film festival.
At a ceremony held by luxury jeweller Chopard, everything seemed to be going smoothly enough as John presented the Chopard Trophy to young Canadian actor Kevin Zegers, who co-starred in the film "Transamerica" with Felicity Huffman.
As photographers called out during his address, he added: "If you saw 'Transamerica' ... I'm talking ... you fuckwit, fucking photographers you should be shot, you should be all shot. Thank you."
Elton John
New HQ Could Face Demolition
Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam's new headquarters could face demolition because of the city's plans to build a dump. "We hadn't even finished unpacking and moving into our new space when we heard about the city's waste management site," spokeswoman Nicole Vandenberg said Saturday in an e-mail to The Associated Press from Cleveland, where the band was on tour. "We were surprised and saddened by the news on many levels."
Now, area residents - many of whom have worked for years to spruce up the area - are hoping their high-profile neighbors will help fight the plan.
Vandenberg did not comment on whether the band would take a side in the fight. She said the band moved into the warehouse in December and learned of the plans in late January. Pearl Jam expects to spend most of this year touring in support of their new self-titled album.
Pearl Jam
Celebrate Eurovision Victory
Finns
Finns poured into the streets Sunday to fete their monster victory in the Eurovision Song Contest and the president congratulated latex-masked hard rockers Lordi for breaking the country's losing streak.
After 40 years of trying and eight last-place finishes, Finland finally won the melody contest late Saturday in Athens with the band's unconventional piece "Hard Rock Hallelujah."
Fears that Lordi would give Finland a bad name gave way to celebration as hundreds of people cheered in the streets of Helsinki, waving Finnish flags and singing the Lordi song. Cars honked their horns and sped through the wet city streets.
Finns
Seeking Canadian Citizenship
Robert Goulet
The rich baritone and magnetic stage presence of Robert Goulet have garnered him fame, wealth and international stardom but after a lifetime of accolades one prize still eludes him - Canadian citizenship.
The square-jawed singer says he longs for official recognition of his ties to the Great White North, where he spent his formative years honing the deep voice and matinee idol swagger that first took Broadway by storm some 40 years ago.
Although often claimed by Canadians as their own, Robert Gerard Goulet was actually born in Lawrence, Mass., roughly 45 kilometres north of Boston.
He moved to the Edmonton area at age 13 after the death of his Quebecois father, spending six years in Alberta and then moving to Toronto for seven years, during which time he hosted a weekly variety CBC-TV show in the mid 1950s. The first Goulet came from France in 1645, he states matter-of-factly.
Robert Goulet
Widen Reach of Tours
Big-Screen Concerts
National CineMedia, a digital distributor of concerts for movie theaters, has nailed down nonexclusive content agreements with two leaders in the concert business, Live Nation and Network Live.
The latter is a joint venture among AOL, XM Satellite Radio and promoter AEG Live, which means that, ultimately, NCM has the two largest promoters in the world committed to bringing it concerts.
NCM, owned by Regal Entertainment Group, AMC Entertainment and Cinemark USA, delivers music content to 11,000 screens in 78 markets through its Big Screen Concerts division. "NCM is the leader in their market," Faisel Durrani, president of marketing for Live Nation, says. "They will get us the greatest reach from the outset."
Big-Screen Concerts
Novel Hits Stores in Japan
Saddam Hussein
Japanese readers looking for a slightly different tale can now curl up with "Get Out of Here, Curse You" -- a novel by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
The book, believed to have been written on the eve of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and titled "Devil's Dance" in its Japanese translation, hit stores around the nation Friday.
The original manuscript was smuggled out of Iraq by one of Saddam Hussein's daughters, Raghad, and a copy given to Japanese journalist and translator Itsuko Hirata.
Saddam Hussein
Signs Found in Alaska
Prehistoric Birds
Scientists found fossilized depressions and footprints in Alaska's Denali National Park and Preserve in what is believed to be the first evidence of prehistoric wading birds probing for food, a geologist said on Friday.
The tracks and the feeding marks found in rocks formed from freshwater sediments were 65 million to 70 million years old, said Phil Brease, a geologist at Denali National Park.
Denali National Park is an emerging hotbed of fossil findings. A team of geologists also discovered a fossilized footprint of a three-toed, meat-eating dinosaur known as a theropod.
Prehistoric Birds
Up for Sale on EBay
Civil War-Era Fort
A Civil War-era fort is for sale on eBay. Fort Montgomery, built in 1844, was manned during the war but never saw any action.
"This is the first time it's been formally for sale," said Victor Podd of Boca Raton, Fla., whose family has owned the fort for 23 years.
The limestone fort sits on a Lake Champlain island in northern New York and is connected to the mainland by a 700-foot causeway. The full package offered on the auction Web site includes 6,900 feet of lake frontage and 279 acres on the adjacent mainland.
Civil War-Era Fort
Friends Repay Joker
Prank
A practical joker got a taste of revenge when friends turned part of his apartment into a human-sized hamster cage, complete with shredded newspaper bedding, a six-foot exercise wheel and a giant water bottle.
"It was a lot of work, but it was one of those cases where you do it because you have to," said Keith Jewell, a longtime friend and neighbor who engineered Monday's hamster-cage prank on Luke Trerice.
Trerice, 28, had it coming: In 2004, he enlisted others to help him encase another friend's apartment and most of his belongings in aluminum foil.
Prank
Reported in Germany
Bear
A bear has been reported in Germany for the first time since 1835, police at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps said, following the discovery of seven sheep carcasses.
The animal crossed into Germany from Austria, where about 30 bears live, and was spotted near the border on Thursday after destroying a beehive.
The German section of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature said that the last wild bear seen in Germany was one killed in 1835 in western Bavaria.
Bear
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