May 18, 2006

• Speaking of The DaVinci Code movie.....and somewhere, someone is....I must confess to being pleased to read how utterly dreadful it apparently is, evaluated strictly as cinematic entertainment.  It was screened at the Cannes Film Festival and was DOA.  For the most part, the reviewers hated it:

  Mike Goodridge, Screen Daily: 
  "Ron Howard's film version is well made but chronically devoid of
  the guilty pleasures it needs to make it succeed as first-rate
  popcorn entertainment. Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have
  remained rigidly faithful to the chronology and events of the book,
  but make ponderous work of the delicious conspiracy theories and
  treasure hunt which are the phenomenon's raison d'etre."
  

  Todd McCarthy, Variety: "A pulpy page-turner
  in its original incarnation as a huge international bestseller has
  become a stodgy, grim thing in the exceedingly literal-minded film
  version of The Da Vinci Code."

  Stephen Schaefer, The Boston Herald:  "Nothing really works. It's
  not suspenseful. It's not romantic. It's certainly not fun."

  James Rocchi, CBS 5 television, San Francisco: "I kept
  thinking of the Energizer Bunny, because it kept going and going
  and going, and not in a good way."

  Joe Utichi, filmfocus.co.uk: "Action set
  pieces, themselves fairly pedestrian, become counterpoints to
  endless exposition scenes and no amount of sweeping camera moves
  can cover what is essentially a filmed lecture."

  Baz Bamigboye, London's Daily Mail: "It's a movie about whether
  the greatest story ever told is true or not, and it's not the
  greatest movie ever screened, is it?"

  Unidentified critic leaving the media screening: "Too long. And
  boring. If you want to see a movie about the Holy Grail, see
  Indiana Jones."

  To be fair, there were at least a couple of positive reviews:

  Igor Soukmanov, Unistar Radio in Belarus: "Maybe the
  next day I'll forget about it. But today for two hours it was good
  entertainment … As a Hollywood movie, it's a very nice
  picture."  (Alright, "positive" might be overstating it a bit.)

  Roger Friedman, Fox News: "For most of its
  overlong 2½ hours, the film is enticing. And surprising in
  that it's not Tom Hanks - solid as usual - or French film star
  Audrey Tautou who make the movie tick. It's Sir Ian McKellen,
  who appears about a quarter to halfway through the proceedings and
  very sublimely scores himself an Academy Award nomination."

  According to this article:

  Critics duly queued for more than an hour to get into a film
  that, as everyone grumbled, was obviously too long at 148 minutes.
  Cannes critics are a notoriously severe audience with little time
  for anything past the 100-minute mark. Even so, the sprinkling of
  titters that added sparkle to the second half of the film was more
  openly derisory than usual.

  The crunch moment came, however, when Tom Hanks, as the earnest
  professor of symbology Robert Langdon, uttered an especially
  melodramatic line. At that point, 900 weary critics laughed as one.
  After a couple of hours of leap-frogging plot there had to be some
  moment of relief.

  When, finally, the camera swept back to Hanks, gazing through
  the glass roof of the Louvre's foyer to where he had deduced - how
  is uncertain, but never mind - that Mary Magdalene's sarcophagus
  now lay, there was the deathly sound of no one clapping. A few
  people whistled - a sign of derision in Europe - but, in truth,
  The Da Vinci Code was not actually bad enough for anyone to
  enjoy tearing strips off it. Like Hanks, whose face seemed to be
  pursed in perplexity throughout the film, it just took itself way
  too seriously. If the novel was popcorn, Howard's film was a badly
  overcooked goose.

  Ouch. 

  • 9:39 am
  • 3 Comments