Seriously, the Da Vinci Code is fiction. Everyone got that?
In his latest column, Dave tackles an important subject that deals with such fundamental questions about what it means to be an American. What price is freedom worth? How much liberty should be sacrificed for security? And is it appropriate for the federal government to have a databse of billions of individual American phone calls?
No, wait, I'm sorry. In his latest column, Dave is discussing something more important: the Da Vinci Code. Isn't it just like a Bush apologist to change gears and focus on a topic of little consequence whenever the administration is faced with bad news. So the administration lied about not gathering data on domestic calls placed in the United States, who cares? A new movie's come out claiming that Jesus married Mary Magdalene (oops, did I jsut spoil it? nah, EVERYONE's read the book) and fathered a secret bloodline, and that simply raises Dave's hackles!
Sigh. There should've been an eleventh commandment in the Old Testament: Thou Shalt Never Have a Representation of Jesus Christ in the Popular Media. Ever. Because all that's going to do is piss off the same group of people, gathering under the crowd of racism.
These are the same groups that formed world-wide boycots when Monty Python's "Life of Brian" was released in 1980. It appeared that the Pythons angered their messiah so much by suggesting he wanted the cheesemakers to inherit the earth, that the only option they had left was to picket movie theaters and have some theater-lacking county councils in England ban it in its entirety. These were the same groups that derided Martin Scorsese's, who is a devout Catholic, "Last Temptation of Christ" as being "pornograhpic" and hurled molotov cocktails into a Parisian theater in which the film was being shown. I guess the demonstrating efforts by Christians had evolved from simple picketing in 1980 to home-made explosives by 1988.
Now its 2006, and the same group of people are pissed, attempting to prevent people from seeing a film adaptation of a book that, as I stated earlier, EVERYONE has read. Seriously, folks- what's the big freaking deal? A total ban in Greece was sought by the Greek Orthodox church, but was overruled by the Greek Supreme Court on freedom of speech grounds. A Christian group in India was nearly successful in pushing it's ban in India, until the Indian government sought a disclaimer at the beginning of the film by its producers. Which begs the question: why does a piece of fiction need a goddamn disclaimer?
The da Vinci Code is a goddamn story, and not too terribly a good one, clever one, or original one. (See the plagarism suit leveled at Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown.) I'm afraid that the only people who take Brown's mish-mash of historical half-truths and religious lore, added with a splash of modern airplane paper-back thriller style of writing, as truth are the same folks who wonder why the U.S. government continues to keep the Ark of the Covenant locked away in a spacious warehouse. Shouldn't we unleash its awesome power on al Qaida?
But Dave takes issue with the disclaimer Brown inserted at the beginning of the book, in which Brown states that "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." For those of you who have read this novel, which would be EVERYONE, you'd realize that the characters visit such locations as The Lourve, Saint-Sulpice, Temple Church, King's College, and Westminister Abbey. It would make sense to be as historically and detailed accurate as possible. What the disclaimer doesn't say, however, is that the conspiracy in the novel is accurate.
Dave ends his column by saying, "It's often said that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals. We're about to see if anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of moviegoers." I wonder how Dave views the anti-Semitism that is so prevalent throughout Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ."
In the end, Dave may not have to worry too much about the insiduous effects of "The Da Vinci Code." Given the cool reception the film received on its opening night at Cannes, including open laughter at one of the film's pivotal scenes, it appears plausible that the film may fail, not because of the Christian-planned boy-cotts, but simply because it's a bad movie.
No, wait, I'm sorry. In his latest column, Dave is discussing something more important: the Da Vinci Code. Isn't it just like a Bush apologist to change gears and focus on a topic of little consequence whenever the administration is faced with bad news. So the administration lied about not gathering data on domestic calls placed in the United States, who cares? A new movie's come out claiming that Jesus married Mary Magdalene (oops, did I jsut spoil it? nah, EVERYONE's read the book) and fathered a secret bloodline, and that simply raises Dave's hackles!
Sigh. There should've been an eleventh commandment in the Old Testament: Thou Shalt Never Have a Representation of Jesus Christ in the Popular Media. Ever. Because all that's going to do is piss off the same group of people, gathering under the crowd of racism.
These are the same groups that formed world-wide boycots when Monty Python's "Life of Brian" was released in 1980. It appeared that the Pythons angered their messiah so much by suggesting he wanted the cheesemakers to inherit the earth, that the only option they had left was to picket movie theaters and have some theater-lacking county councils in England ban it in its entirety. These were the same groups that derided Martin Scorsese's, who is a devout Catholic, "Last Temptation of Christ" as being "pornograhpic" and hurled molotov cocktails into a Parisian theater in which the film was being shown. I guess the demonstrating efforts by Christians had evolved from simple picketing in 1980 to home-made explosives by 1988.
Now its 2006, and the same group of people are pissed, attempting to prevent people from seeing a film adaptation of a book that, as I stated earlier, EVERYONE has read. Seriously, folks- what's the big freaking deal? A total ban in Greece was sought by the Greek Orthodox church, but was overruled by the Greek Supreme Court on freedom of speech grounds. A Christian group in India was nearly successful in pushing it's ban in India, until the Indian government sought a disclaimer at the beginning of the film by its producers. Which begs the question: why does a piece of fiction need a goddamn disclaimer?
The da Vinci Code is a goddamn story, and not too terribly a good one, clever one, or original one. (See the plagarism suit leveled at Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown.) I'm afraid that the only people who take Brown's mish-mash of historical half-truths and religious lore, added with a splash of modern airplane paper-back thriller style of writing, as truth are the same folks who wonder why the U.S. government continues to keep the Ark of the Covenant locked away in a spacious warehouse. Shouldn't we unleash its awesome power on al Qaida?
But Dave takes issue with the disclaimer Brown inserted at the beginning of the book, in which Brown states that "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." For those of you who have read this novel, which would be EVERYONE, you'd realize that the characters visit such locations as The Lourve, Saint-Sulpice, Temple Church, King's College, and Westminister Abbey. It would make sense to be as historically and detailed accurate as possible. What the disclaimer doesn't say, however, is that the conspiracy in the novel is accurate.
Dave ends his column by saying, "It's often said that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals. We're about to see if anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of moviegoers." I wonder how Dave views the anti-Semitism that is so prevalent throughout Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ."
In the end, Dave may not have to worry too much about the insiduous effects of "The Da Vinci Code." Given the cool reception the film received on its opening night at Cannes, including open laughter at one of the film's pivotal scenes, it appears plausible that the film may fail, not because of the Christian-planned boy-cotts, but simply because it's a bad movie.
posted by true_slicky at 6:03 PM
2 Comments:
Good grief! Dave is only about three years late with this columm -- the historical inaccuracies in the book have been amply documented in a plethora of books and websites. I am surprised, however, that a free market acolate like Dave would not be content with having the invisible hand of the marketplace settle the fate of books (and movies) of fictional fiction.
Thanks for pointing out that there is no such thing as a "free" market and the "invisible hand" is only to encourage the rich get richer due to deregulation and banning of prducts that affront their tired sensibilities!
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