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The DaVinci Code

I'm not sure if there's supposed to be a space between Da and Vinci or not...

So, yesterday I watched The DaVinci Code movie, based on the book by that guy... I can't remember his name and I'm too tired to go look. Today, I watched its sequel. So, here's a bit of a review if you can call it that. Just of the movies, aside from the tiniest bit of curiosity, I have very little inclination to read the book.

A bit of premise: there's this group of people called the priory of zion (or is it scion?); they're kind of like an offshoot of the knights templar, and their job is to guard the secret that Mary Magdelene is actually Jesus Christ's wife and that, at the time of Jesus' death, she was pregnant. Furthermore, they're said to be guarding the location of her tomb and the whereabouts of her descendants--the descendants of Jesus Christ. The Roman Catholic Church doesn't want this information revealed because its assertion that Jesus is God is the source of its power, so through the centuries it has been hunting down the priory of zion and trying to destroy it so that the secret doesn't get out.

Here's my take. The movie was kind of boring. It was as if someone had tried to make a thrilling mystery drama from an historical debate. At the end of the movie, I felt kind of blah... and thinking, "What was all the fuss about?" because, aside from solving the murder of a museum curator who happened to also be the grand master of the priory of zion, the stakes were pretty humdrum. At least to me. The thing that kind of gets me, though, is that the historical debate was pretty much cut right out. There's one scene where Professor Robert Langdon meets an old colleague, who's obsessed with the priory of zion and the mythology surrounding it, and believes that Mary Magdalene's tomb is out there somewhere, as well as her descendants. At this point, Langdon plays the skeptic and kind of argues with the other guy for a bit, but never really brings up any valid or noticeable points. His colleague, whose name I forget, just repeats the mythology a couple of times and points out Mary Magdalene in DaVinci's painting of the Last Supper and that's enough to convince Langdon. And he's supposed to be a professor of history? There's no fact checking, there's no peer review, there's not even any research. He just wholeheartedly accepts it based on his colleague's say-so and the presence of a woman in a DaVinci painting. From that point on, Langdon wholeheartedly believes in all of it. So, the movie loses a bit of credibility, right there.

Aside from that, the movie was just another Indiana Jones style adventure. It was all about hunting for clues in painting and ancient rhyming riddles, trying to find a mythical artifact or location, all the while being pursued by a relentless assassin. Except, instead of the fate of the world, or even a whole lot of money being in the balance, it's the possibility that a myth might gain credibility and undermine the power of the Roman Church. Like I said, Ho-Hum.

As far as I'm concerned, the Catholic Church's power has already been undermined. It no longer holds a political monopoly, it's been centuries since it has. At the end of the movie, its discovered that the tomb has been moved to an unknown location, so it's impossible to empirically prove the myth. But even if it had been possible to prove, it wouldn't shake the faith of the people who believe in the Church. Most people wouldn't change their minds. A few, here and there, yes but not enough to make a difference. So as a story telling movie, it was a total flop.

I got the impression that the makers of the story, both the film version and the book, really wanted to make a documentary but didn't have any facts to support their theories, just conjecture. So, they made it a fiction instead, and invented the facts.

At the end of the film, Langdon concludes that it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe something. Or something like, it doesn't matter what you put your faith in, as long as you have faith. That's such a touchy-feely, let's all feel good about ourselves and not have any problems conclusion.

The second movie--Angels and Demons--was slightly more interesting and more thrilling. It was an Indiana Jones style adventure through Rome to find the perpetrators who kidnapped and threatened to murder the four leading Cardinals, one of whom is about to be elected to replace the Pope, who was murdered by the same people. Oh yeah, and if they don't solve the mystery before midnight, a bomb is going to obliterate all of Rome. There wasn't so much historical debate in this one, at least nothing significant. It was just an adventure movie, nothing more. The fake gunshots that kept going off, throughout the movie to make the audience jump really annoyed me though.

Sleepless...

So I got home from work today and hung around, had a shower, breakfast, all my regular morning rituals and then I went to bed and fell almost instantly asleep.

And then it was only three hours later and I couldn't sleep at all. How frustrating. It would be fantastic if I didn't have to work tonight. So after trying to fight it for a while, I got up, had something to eat, checked my emails and all that and read my book, Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman. And then I went back to bed only to lie awake for two hours... finally I took half a sleeping pill and now I'm drinking tea and waiting for it to hit me. Nothing yet.

An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L'Engle

As with most books by Madeleine L'Engle, this one is exceptionally well written. The story is well thought-through and its characters, at least its main characters, are well written and memorable.

So, for a quick summary of the plot: Polly is spending some time with her grandparents. Her friend, Zachary happens to be living in nearby Hartford and drives down in his fancy car to spend some time with her. Clearly, Zachary is in love with Polly. She's not quite sure if she feels the same way about him yet. Meanwhile, family friend Bishop Nason Colubra has discovered a time gate that allows access to three thousand years in the past.

This is where I get really annoyed with the story. Okay, a time gate; I generally like stories like that. But this one is really weird. Well, the time gate itself isn't so weird as the reaction of the people around it.

Bishop Colubra has been going through the time gate for quite some time, long enough to teach English to a few of the natives living in pre-columbus America, but he hasn't told anyone about it because he knows they won't believe him. But after Polly goes through the time gate by mistake, Bishop Colubra and Polly decide to tell the others--Colubra's sister, Louise, a medical doctor; and Polly's grandparents, the Doctors Murry.

They get a series of reactions that would have been comical if they hadn't been written so ridiculously. First, Polly's grandfather: his first reaction is disbelief. He thinks they are just pulling his leg, making a joke. When it becomes clear that they aren't telling a joke, he stubbornly refuses to believe them. Eventually, he is presented with enough evidence to convince him and he changes his mind, albeit reluctantly. Later he admits that he was more upset that the time gate opened on his property and someone else discovered it than he was disbelieving. Okay, my problem with this is that Dr. Murry is an astrophysicist or something like that, he traveled to a distant solar system in A Wrinkle in Time by going through a time gate--except in that book it was called a tesseract. So it seems completely crazy for him to not believe that one could possibly open up on his property. As for his being upset about someone else discovering it--well, he wasn't looking for one, he hardly ever left his house, he just sat around gloating that he knew more about physics than Bishop Colubra. Furthermore, in all the previous books in this series featuring Dr. Murry, he is a very humble gentleman, one who wouldn't be upset that someone else made a discovery in his field, one who would be happy for Bishop Colubra making this discovery. And he would be eager to explore it, find out where it goes, why it's there and how it works. Instead, in this book, he doesn't believe in it, and then he's afraid of it and makes Polly a prisoner in his house so that she won't explore it. That just seems a little ridiculous to me. Especially considering that it's a huge break from the character I was introduced to in earlier books.

Polly's grandmother is also a scientist. She studies micro-organisms or something. In fact, she's so smart, she does her experiments in her mind (could this be an early sign of senility?). When she finally gets convinced that the time gate does exist, she wants to bury all evidence of it, put it out of her mind, and forget about it, hoping that it will somehow go away as a result. And she forbids Polly going anywhere near it.

These are the same two characters who, in previous books, sent their own children through time: In Many Waters their twin children Sandy and Denys are sent through time to the prehistorical past as a result of a mistake in one of their parents' experiments. In A Wrinkle in Time, their children, Meg and Charles Wallace and one of their classmates travels through a tesseract to rescue their father, trapped in a distant solar system. In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Charles Wallace goes back in time and changes the past in order to resolve a problem in the present. So why on earth do they suddenly have a problem with tampering with a time gate?

Bishop Colubra's sister, Louise's reaction I can somewhat understand. She is a doctor and a scientist but she doesn't have the experience with space and time travel that the Drs. Murry have. Nevertheless, she is quite mean about her disbelief.

In fact, all three of these skeptics treat Bishop Colubra like a child after he tells them about the time gate. They disregard all his opinions and input into any discussion on any subject and constantly pooh-pooh him. They constantly put down his driving and his trustworthiness. So it's kind of funny that, when he isn't around, they praise his faith and knowledge of theology and scripture.

So, as you can see, I was pretty annoyed by this book. And besides, it was way too long.