A Steaming Code of ...

Paris, France: It is a glorious summer's day; all are full of bon vivant and out of doors. At the cafes, mesdames and monsieurs sip cafe au lait and macchiato; while, by the boulangeries, crowds of petit children, on their way to the local academies, gather to see the bakers twist their bread in plaits, reef knots, rolling hitches, or sheepshanks. Gendarmes cycle merrily down the street upon concertinas merrily provided to them by the local authorities, waving bonjour to all they pass by; and poodles stop to sip champagne from the puddles in the ground.

It is exactly the sort of place where you would never expect to find the sanguinare opening of a worldwide drama so horrendous, so complex, and so bizarre, that it's ramifications will last down the centuries. Nothing has happened like that in the past, nothing will happen again like that in the future, and indeed, nothing like that is happening in the present. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure why I mentioned the place.

The film The Da Vinci Code is about a man who discovers the Holy Grail. But to cut a short story long, the film The Da Vinci Code is about a man who is implicated in a murder which turns out to be a message which turns out to be an anagram that leads to a whole series of other secrets that are part of a global web of intrigue spun by a conspiratorial organisation of pagan worshippers, all of which leads, in the end, to a discovery so momentuous that it's all over in a moment.

If I'm making the film sound boring, then I'm doing too good a job of describing it. This film was not just boring, it was boring squared, times infinity, plus one. It is a horribly pretentious piece of work; every major step in the plot is laden with false portent, burdened with absurd interpretations, and lumped with horrendous miscontextualisations. Not only is Ron Howard's direction horrifyingly literal; not only is the cinematography terribly cliched (like that of a bad BBC religious documentary, made on a much cheaper budget); but Tom Hanks' acting in the lead role is awfully awful. Maybe that was Hanks' point; maybe he delibarately acted like William Shatner on an off day as a way of taking the piss out of the film.

Whatever. In conclusion, The Da Vinci Code is a film to take your mother too (if you want to bore her to death). Every person can find one thing to enjoy in it (and some people can find everything to hate in it). It has thrills, spills, chills, horror and dread: (it is, in short, dreadfully dead.) I give this film five stars out of five. (One star for effort, the other four or the nice icecream I bought in the lobby.)

"But don't you see!" he gasped in the darkness of the crypt, grasping her lithe body in his two firm hands. "It's you! The Holy Grail is you!"
"I don't know anyone called Gail, and I don't see why she should be holey." she said angrily. Then, turning her face to his, she commanded: "Kiss me, hardly!"
So, being a decisive man, that is just what he did do. Five minutes later, he discovered that in the dark he had been making love to a coffin, but he soon made up for his mistake.