Mrs. Betty Bowers is the First to Review "The Da Vinci Code"

money means nothing

Yes. Money means nothing. Some of the great movies have not done well at the box office. DaVinci Code is in the same genre as "The Omen" claptrap. It comments on Religion but really knows nothing about it.

this is one of the worst films i have ever seen

You don't go to the movies much. do you?

Failure denotes that a movie isn't bought by the public and looses money. As I stated before, I do not infer that because it made money it is any better than what the critics say. On the other hand, there are likely movies the critics rave about that one doesn't like. It's all subjective. There are hundreds of films that are worse than DVC. We've had lists on this forum each year.

Again, the list from Sight and Sound Magazine of what the critics and directors polled as the top ten films of all time which also includes the top ten directors of all time:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten

That doesn't jibe up with the box office winners. Adjusted for inflation, "Gone With the Wind," "Titanic" and "Star Wars" are on that list.

I'm not surprised at the movie's foreign success. First of all, there was a novel by Jules Verne about some of the treasure hunting that has been going on in the region around Rennes-le-chateau for centuries. Verne transplanted his plot to Africa, but used the names of natural features (mountains and streams) from the area, which is known as the Razes, among other titles.

Then, there was a popular Spanish novel about solving a crime through clues left in painted pictures.

Finally, there were two novels about the priest who restored the church at Rennes-le-chateau, whose name, Beranger Sauniere, Mr. and Mrs. Brown used in their novel, but gave it to the Louvre director and Sophie's adoptive grandfather. This was made into a movie for French television.

Of course, there are the real mysteries in the region involving Blanche of Castile, mother of French king and Saint Louis; the Cathars; the Templars and their imported German smelters, as well as the modern speculation of where Abbe Sauniere got the money to restore the church.

You're probably on target there, plainoldme. "Alexander," the unevenly directed version of an epic piece of history, did terrible box office here but because Europeans are more interested in history did a lot better over there. However, it lost a great deal of money overall. DVC involves history also even if the central premise seems prepostrous. It is satire and takes a potshot at the accuracy of the Bible. Well, duh, that's not hard to do.

But why doesn't it take a potshot at the New York and Georgia decisions?

I don't think history is the issue but, rather, treasure hunting.

As Jean Markale wrote in his 1998 book about the church at Rennes-le-Chateau, that while we can verify that some famous people and/or groups of people had something to do with the region, what has grown up around the town is a series of legends about treasure that follow one of the classic international mythic patterns: someone hides a treasure under layers of riddles; along comes another person who is in no way connected with the person who hid the treasure and/or their legitimate heirs who unravels the secret of the treasure through a combination of luck and shrewd puzzle solving ability but who doesn't actually benefit from the discovery.

The interesting thing is Markale destroyed all the tall tales about the priest who restored the Church, Abbe Saurniere, whose name Mr. and Mrs. Brown used. Markale decided that the only thing the priest cared about was Mary MAgdalene, the ending the BRowns gave their book.

So, did the Browns read Markale's book in its original language? It wasn't translated until 2004.

Anyway, as far as inaccuracies in the Bible are concerned, they're old news.

Have you been watching the PBS series on the origins of art? Fascinating.

And so I did. I had to go on a working trip to Paris and after seeing some of the locations depicted in the book, I picked it up at the airport on the way home and read it. I found it to be light entertainment and it was fun that I could fill in the Parisian background. Can't understand though that there are crowds of people who take it as the gospel (apparently the same kind of people who take the gospel as literal truth).

Upon my return I got the DVD that was newly released in our local video shop and even though I was prepared for the film to be different from the book I was still disappointed. Perhaps because I already knew the outcome, the suspense was totally missing and I could not detect any chemistry of any kind between Tautou and Hanks. I think Hanks was miscast or misdirected in this role. McKellen was great. However, he did not not resemble the portly Teabing from the book, but rather more a Gandalf on extasy. Furthermore, the film explains too many obvious things yet leaves out some badly needed mystery and wonder.

Like a great many of my friends, I went to the film only because I am an Audrey Tatou fan. She looked beautiful with her long hair, but, the part was a bit thin. Thought the scene and the end, with Audrey wrapped in a silly looking plaid blanket, talking about how those strange, zombie-like people were going to tell her about her family was more than a tad ridiculous.

My problem with the film, as opposed to the book, was that Ron Howard never seems to have gotten the playful, satyric asect of the story. The movie is a straight retelling of the scavenger hunt story, a kind of cliff-hanger (no cliffs for those who've read the book), a run-of-the-mill melodrama. The book, read carefully, is really quite funny, a sendup of that type of suspense story. A comedy would have worked better for film purposes. And, of course, it's badly miscast. No criticism of either Hanks or Tatou, but these are not their roles.

I read the first two and the last two pages of the book but couldn't stomach the hamhanded writing.

BTW, I know all the jokes. The use of the village priest's name for the Sorbonne curator, etc.

The writing is, indeed, ham-fisted. A textbook example of how not to compose your sentences. But the story itself, including most of the "inside joke" details, is quite hilarious if read with the proper attitude.

I don't think the inside jokes etc could compensate for the atrocious writing and the addled headed hypothesis on which the plot is bases. It was a very bad book.

It is not meant as great literature, but it served quite nicely to kill the time at the airport and on the plane.

Another film that has something of a similar atmosphere (as in religious mystery), but that was based on a much better book is The Discovery of Heaven (2001). Unfortunately, here too, the film was not as engrossing as the book, although it makes a valiant attempt.

Finally saw this movie. Thought it was pretty good! Certainly entertaining, but somewhat predictable.

This was an extremely poorly made movie.

And I don't mean that it was poor "given the amount of hype and money and expectation."

Compared to ANY standard, this movie is pure crap.

Besides being poorly made, the worst thing about it is the slippery way that they turned an anti-Christian book into a pro-Christian movie.

I did not read the book because I had been justifiably warned that it was poorly written: I did read the first two and the last two pages and knew there was no way that I could plough through it. However, when you put together all the names used and the manner in which they were used and then if you spend a bit of time trying to discover the original holder of said names, you find yourself laughing. The name of the slain adoptive grandfather/Louvre curator was the name of the parish priest, etc., etc. It's not that the book is anti-Christian, it just laughs at treasure hunters.

I found the original book to be quite enthralling, to be honest. Brown's writing style is bad, and gimmicky, to be sure...but the way that the plot developed definitely appealed to the treasure hunter in me, and the way that bits of history and intrigue were mixed in were a nice spice.

If you read anything else by Dan Brown, I think his bad writing style stands out even more.

Reading just the beginning and the ending is a bad way to get an impression of the book, I think -- because I think even the most die hard fans of the book have to admit that the very ending was a dreadful letdown. He did a good job building up to the climax and then just ran out of material and went limp, so to speak.

But yeah, the original book was pretty anti-Christian...I think it really made a mockery of the church, and Langdon was spear-heading this with factual tidbits. This is why the book was so controversial.

If you only watched the movie, you might be wondering...what the heck is so controversial about this? It's because, in the movie, they reversed it. They made other characters make remarks about the non-validity of the church, and Langdon was always there to take a stand in defense of the church.

Obviously the church saw the book as a major threat and made sure to "set things right" by taking control of the production of this movie.