Movie, The Da Vinci Code Options

[ladygorb]

Adapted from Dan Brown's bestseller book, the story tells the investigation started by symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and a good looking cryptologist, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), around the murder of a Museum Louvre's curator.



In fact, the unfortunate murdered man was Sophie's grandfather, and the corpse was founded with a series of symbols and codes, like a pentagram and a Fibonacci number sequence. But police detective Fache (Jean Reno) will begin to chase Langdon, who escapes after receive a warning about the captain's real intentions. Sophie has with her a kind of key with dots and number 24 engraved on it, which opens to her and Langdon a big complex investigation, that involves a supposedly heretic theory: JesusChristh and Mary Magdalene were, in fact, a couple which give rise a daughter, named Sara. A millenarian sect called The Priory of Sion, has kept for centuries the secret of that matter. A masochist and kind of psychopath albino monk, Sibilas (Paul Bettany), an Opus Dei member, will chase Langdon and Shophie as well, in order to impede that they solve the mystery of Christ and Mary Magdalene, and also the real meaning and location of the Holy Grial.



A passionate British researcher (Sir Ian McKellen), will help Langdon in his quest, revealing them several symbolisms at Da Vinci's master work The Last Supper, traveling to mythical places in the UK, like The Church Temple, where is believed that a group of Templars Knights are buried, and Sir Isaac Newton's tomb at Westminster Abbey, where are located some of the main keys to solve the Holy Grial's mystery.




'Da Vinci Code' Protests Widespread
`The Da Vinci Code' provokes widespread protests before Cannes premiere

CANNES, France, May. 16, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(AP)



(AP) Anger over "The Da Vinci Code," premiering Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, escalated Tuesday as Christian groups from South Korea, Thailand, Greece and India planned boycotts, a hunger strike and attempts to block or shorten screenings.

The plot of the movie, adapted by Ron Howard from Dan Brown's worldwide best seller, makes the case that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children with her.

In India, the government Tuesday put a temporary hold on the movie's release because of complaints.

In South Korea, which has 13 million Protestants and 4.6 million Roman Catholics, a court ruled Tuesday that a Christian group's request for an injunction to block screenings lacked merit.

"As it is clear that the novel and movie are all fiction ... there is no probability that the movie can make viewers mistakenly believe the contents of the movie are facts," chief judge Song Jin-hyun said in his ruling.

The Christian Council of Korea, an umbrella group of 63 South Korean Protestant denominations, said it respected the ruling but would lead a boycott of the movie, which it said defiles the sanctity of Jesus Christ and distorts facts.

In Thailand, Christian groups demanded that government censors cut the film's final 15 minutes, fix subtitles that are supposedly disrespectful to Jesus and screen messages before and after the movie saying the content is fictional.

"If they are going to screen this, we asked that they cut out the conclusion of the movie that Jesus still has heirs alive today," said spokesman Manoch Jangmook, of the Evangelical Fellowship of Thailand.

The censor board has not yet replied to the request. The movie is scheduled to start running Thursday in Thai theaters.

In mostly Hindu India, which is also home to 18 million Roman Catholics, Joseph Dias, head of the Catholic Secular Forum, began a hunger strike in downtown Bombay and said other people were joining him.

"We want the movie to be banned," he said.

The film had been set for release in India on Friday and had already been cleared by the national censor board. But Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi said he put a temporary hold on the movie after receiving more than 200 complaints.

"We are a secular country. On any sensitive issue, we should take action after we examine every aspect," Dasmunshi told reporters.

In Athens, Greece, some 200 religious protesters, waving crucifixes and Greek flags, demonstrated Tuesday in protest of the film. The protesters _ including Orthodox monks and nuns _ later marched peacefully to parliament.

"All religions merit respect, so why don't they show respect in this case instead of attacking all that we hold sacred?" said Athanasios Papageorgiou, president of St. John the Theologian group in Peania, east of Athens.

"I've read the book. It's despicable," he added. "The Muslims for one cartoon burnt anything, so what should we do?"

Greece's powerful Orthodox Church has blasted the "ridiculous content" of the movie but stopped short of calling for its boycott.

Philippine censors approved an adult rating for the movie but stopped short of rating it "X" because "it does not constitute a clear, express or direct attack on the Catholic church or religion" and does not libel or defame any person.

The movie-review panel's chairwoman, Marissa Laguardia, told The Associated Press that the movie would be a "test of faith" for many people in the predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines.

"Those groups, like the conservatives who want it banned, maybe they can tell their friends, discourage their friends from watching it," she said. "But it has to be shown. Otherwise we will be the only country that will not show this film. Thirty-six countries have already reviewed this film and they have not banned it. So are we just out of the Stone Age?"

The National Council of Churches in Singapore, which also had requested a ban, planned lectures to refute aspects of the film and the book on which it is based. The censorship board gave the movie an NC16 rating, barring viewers under 16, arguing that "only a mature audience will be able to discern and differentiate between fact and fiction."

Also, while not planning a protest or boycott, members of the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation expressed unhappiness with the film's heavy, a monk-assassin, being an albino, as described in the book.

Michael McGowan, an albino who heads the organization, said "The Da Vinci Code" will be the 68th movie since 1960 to feature an evil albino.

The "Da Vinci" character "is just the latest in a long string," McGowan said. "The problem is there has been no balance. There are no realistic, sympathetic or heroic characters with albinism that you can find in movies or popular culture."

He said the group aims to use the movie's popularity to raise awareness about the realities of albinism. People with albinism have little or no pigmentation in their skin, eyes and hair.



Christians brace for 'Da Vinci Code' film

Book, movie raise questions on Bible, Christ, Mary Magdalene

By Carrie A. Moore
Deseret Morning News
Christians in general, and Catholics in particular, are bracing for round two.
Lou Ann Heller, Deseret Morning NewsInset: An image of "The Last Supper" is displayed for visitors at the Da Vinci Code Museum in Tokyo, in anticipation of the film's release. Is the Bible a carefully crafted Christian conspiracy or sacred scripture? Was Jesus the Messiah or a mere mortal? Was Mary Magdalene simply a disciple of Christ, or his secret spouse?
Those are a few of the questions to be revisited in popular culture again next week as Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou bring Dan Brown's best-selling novel, "The Da Vinci Code," to life on the big screen. As one of the biggest fictional blockbusters of all time, the book has sold nearly 50 million copies since its release in 2003.
It has also spawned dozens of "decoding" books by a wide spectrum of Christians, aimed at providing factual answers to the myriad questions it raises by claiming the status of fiction based on "fact."
The hype surrounding the movie's release may seem a bit overblown, yet the story line has raised enough concern that several Catholic cardinals and a coalition of Catholic groups have called for an outright boycott of the film. The story says the early Christian church "created" the divinity of Jesus postmortem and hid the secret of Christ's marriage to Mary Magdalene and their offspring from the world for two millennia — all while downgrading the status of women in the church.
As the book began to gain blockbuster status, thousands of Utahns joined millions of Americans in water-cooler discussion about the book's premise, and speculated over which of the details about ancient secret societies and early Christian conspiracies were fact vs. fiction. Public forums drawing hundreds of participants were held at a variety of local venues, including Brigham Young University and the Salt Lake Theological Seminary.
Catholic priests and bishops were routinely questioned, and the local Catholic diocese continues to field numerous calls, according to spokeswoman Monica Howa-Johnson.
"We've been getting calls on this for months and months — people calling randomly, inquiring about the nature of the book, some to rage about and others to complain that we need to do something. We're getting a whole gamut" of inquiry, with calls going "sometimes to a secretary at the front desk, and sometimes targeting other people.
"Since the book has been out, we have been dealing with it. Being the head of the Catholic Church in Utah, people will call to vent or get more information."
With round two in the offing, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has put together an hourlong documentary and detailed rebuttal of many of the book's claims, which is available at www.jesusdecoded.com/introduction.php. The film is being distributed to NBC-TV affiliates nationwide with the hope they will air it next weekend. A spokeswoman for KSL-TV said the station has no plans to air the documentary, and the local diocese has nothing specific planned to discuss or deal with the questions the film is expected to raise anew, Howa-Johnson said.
Before the national Web site featuring explanatory material was recently made available, the diocese was left to "basically explain that it's a work of fiction, even though the author says as much," Howa-Johnson said.
Though Utah Catholics are still waiting for the installation of a new bishop since the departure of Bishop George Niederauer earlier this year to become the new Archbishop of San Francisco, the archbishop isn't waiting for the film's release to speak out. He's posted a five-page, single-spaced response to questions raised by the book at www.sfarchdiocese.org/ablwritingsindex.html, which concludes that Hollywood "doesn't know very much about Catholicism, doesn't like what it thinks it knows, doesn't want to learn any more and can't leave Catholic faith, practice and imagery alone."
That doesn't surprise Molly Dumas, spokeswoman for Juan Diego Catholic High School, who listened to the former bishop's interaction with students there during a question-and-answer session last year that included queries raised in the novel. "He just hates the book because everyone assumes it's gospel. And once it becomes a movie, then everyone believes it," she said.
While discussion about the book hasn't been part of the regular curriculum, "we didn't want to skirt the issue," she said, noting students have brought it to school and it's available in the school library. Students are definitely talking about the movie, and are being encouraged to be "critical thinkers," she said.
"We hope they look at the fact that this is fiction and use it as opportunity to explore their faith . . . For the most part, kids are wanting to know about the relationship between Jesus and Mary — was he married or not? We're telling them we don't know that, but you have to look at the culture of the time."
Other local Christian leaders are taking varied approaches to the film, many of them simply ignoring it. But several churches are sponsoring discussions and at least one public forum is planned.
The Right Rev. Carolyn Tanner Irish, bishop of Utah's Episcopal Diocese, said she read the book "as a novel. I don't understand it to be any authoritative part of church history. Some people dislike and are suspicious of the church, and it probably feeds more suspicion. Frankly, people enjoy a conspiracy theory. It's amazing how they feed the whole cultural thing that's going on right now more than anything truthful."
While she said the book was a "good read," she doesn't plan to see the movie, and is surprised by the story line's staying power.
Ron Huggins, professor of early Christian history at the Salt Lake Theological Seminary, is offering a four-session class to discuss the historical claims made in the book. Christian scholars across the spectrum have refuted the book's claims, he said, though recent discussion he dubbed "PBS lite religion" among some liberal Christian scholars about the Gnostic gospels has helped fuel the book's claims, he said.
"You have this group of talking heads that show up on documentaries and PBS stuff and claim the Gnostic gospels are as early or significant as the canonical ones," in the New Testament. "It's not so much that they are rewriting Christian history," as some critics have claimed. "They're looking at it from a different perspective. When a traditional Christian looks at the Bible and its claims, they see it as what the historical Jesus was like."
Some scholars put extra-biblical texts, like the recently touted Gospel of Judas, on par with scripture, he said, and see "spirituality more as the aspiration of the human spirit. They see those claims in the New Testament that don't seem true and maybe the claims of Gnostics are not true either, but they argue they should be given equal footing." Most such texts claim Jesus was mortal, rather than divine. "Da Vinci" author Brown used translations of some parts of the Gnostic texts — which supposedly contain "gnosis" or secret knowledge kept from the church at large — as the basis for assertions of conspiracy and coverup.
Huggins believes the publication of the Gospel of Judas just weeks before Easter and the upcoming "Code" film "was quite intentional," citing other Christian authors who have speculated as much.
Unlike some who have railed against both the Gnostic gospels and the upcoming film, he believes both may encourage people to "look a little harder" at early Christian history "and maybe actually read some of the Gnostic texts and some of the less sensational things about them."
Many may do just that, according to a recent poll of 1,200 adults commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention. Reported this week by Baptist Press, it showed 44 percent "were more likely to seek the truth by studying the Bible" as a result of the book, while 23 percent of Americans had read the novel and 43 percent are familiar with its content.
Among those who had read the book, "more than 60 percent believed that the Bible is closer to the truth, while only 10 percent" believed the novel is more truthful.

[ladygorb]

Wow!!! Did this movie cause a lot of commotion or what?!!!!

I enjoyed the movie, it was interesting and entertaining, it made me think and question and wonder and say a lot of what if's ...

People need to believe ... so people will believe as they wish. All movies and all books are stories written by man ... and man is creative and imaginative ... so man will decide his own truth.

[Zach]

I enjoyed it as well!

[www.yourforum.gr]

I an told by almost anybody that watched thsi movie... "avoid it...just a Hollywood film with nothing special, plus it is a huge disappointment compared to the original book"... is it true ?

[ladygorb]

The book as usual is much much much better. The movie was good, and of course its a Hollywood film - most are! I myself am not a movie snob, I will watch pretty much anything ... it all usually has something entertaining to share and if it doesn't its always fun to make fun of later. This movie was still fun, and for people that don't like to read the story was easy to follow.

[NickTheGreek]

i managed to watch this yesterday at home and i just do nto agree with what i was told : it is not such a bad movie, but i believe people had so raised expectations due to the fuss about the book. It is worse than the book but it makes sense and no serious glitches in the scenario appear, despite the fact that this has to be shorter for a film time length

[nikolina]

nice movie!!!