Breaking The Da Vinci Code

Despite all of the incredibly negative buzz the movie has been getting, I think everyone should see The Da Vinci Code. Not because it's a good movie (which is debatable), but because of all the ridiculous shit that it postulates.

I suppose the same could be said of Dan Brown's book on which the movie is based. All of the theories about the "Holy Grail" are interesting, but, ultimately, ridiculous. Some simple homework blows most of the theories out of the water:

-the "Holy Grail" is never mentioned in The Bible. Its first known mention is in the late 12th century, in fictional works about the Arthurian legend. And in those, it's an actual cup;

-the "Mary Magdalene" supposedly depicted in Da Vinci's The Last Supper is actually John the Apostle;

-the Priory of Sion was not an ancient organization that protected the Grail, but a debunked hoax by a couple of Frenchmen;

-the "rose line" (which allegedly leads you to the Grail) that runs through the Church at Saint-Suplice and the gold markers that denote the Prime Meridian that once ran through Paris are not along the same line of longitude;

-while it's not mentioned and is an unintentional side-effect of the book, I sure I.M. Pei, who built the glass pyramids in front of The Louvre, would be offended by the implication that he helped conceal the hiding place of the Grail;

-and, for any of these theories to be true, you have to able to prove that anything in The Bible actually happened. (Good luck with that one.)

Oh yeah, we were talking about a movie, weren't we? (This post was starting to turn into this post, which started out about a movie, and went somewhere else entirely.)

The movie is about what you'd expect, except about nine hours longer. (Your watch will say you've only been there for two and a half hours, but it sure does seem longer.) Most of the running time comes from the fact there is at least an hour's worth of expositional dialogue explaining the whole conspiracy. The screenplay for this thing must have been 500 pages long. In fact, before you go, read Brown's book first (which you could probably read in less time than watching the movie), so that you understand all of the theories, and you can sleep through all the talky parts. The movie will just fly by that way.