Transplanted Buckeye

was this car.

One week later, and I've allowed the bitter aftertaste of seeing the DaVinci Code to dwell in my mouth. Here are some more thoughts.

Watching this movie was like being in a classroom with 20 people scratching the chalkboard with their fingernails. It got on my nerves.

Tom Hanks is a good actor, and I think he did the best he could with the script he was given. Ron Howard makes nice looking movies, and this movie was nice looking, but that's about it.

One of the problems with the film is that it made such an effort to not offend certain groups that it dulled the storyline down. Instead of the Roman Catholic Church actively supressing the true teaching of Jesus, it was a conspiracy of a few Catholics. "Not all of them are like that, just a few."

Even though it was total bunk, it was more thrilling in the book to make the conspiracy something larger than it was in the movie. Let me be clear, I think Dan Brown's assessment of the history of the church has serious problems. He doesn't know how the canon was developed. He portrayed that terribly in the book. But the dulling down of the conspiracy made the movie worse than it had to be. It was totally unbelievable.

Another problem for me was that in the book there was obvious chemistry between Langdon and Sophie. In the movie, none. Poorly executed.

The bright side was that the kids could see how far fetched and flawed the Davinci Code theories were, mostly because the plot was so ridiculous. That made our post movie discussion much easier.