Category: Blog Post

The Da Vinci Code, 2006. Directed by Ron Howard, written by another embarrassing Academy Award winner, Akiva Goldsman. Starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Paul Bettany, Alfred Molina, Jurgen Prochnow, Jean Reno and Etienne Chicot.

If there’s one thing I never would have guessed, it’s that Ron Howard had such a preposterous sense of humor. The Da Vinci Code is quite literally the funniest movie of the year, a comedy in the grand tradition of Cecil B. DeMille’s laugh riot The Ten Commandments. See it at your own risk: you’ll be doubled over with laughter as I was, beaten senseless by a never ending stream of jokes, hilarious performances, and a musical score that just never lets up. Amazing!

The story is as goofy and convoluted as anything Monty Python has conjured up. Professor Langdon (Tom Hanks), a Professor at Harvard’s famed Department of Symbology is in gay Paree lecturing on–what else?–symbols. Earlier in the day, a fellow educator he was supposed to meet for drinks is shot and killed in the Louvre. The assailant, a grey-eyed albino monk–a telling nod to the albino killer in that 70s classic Foul Play–manages to get into this unsecured little museum and shoot this poor, aged curator. In his dying moments, bleeding from a wound in his gut, this curator, a very old man, manages to walk clear across the Louvre, hide a giant key behind a picture, head over to the Mona Lisa and deface her with a clue written in ink that glows under a flashlight. Then, he shuffles back to another section to write more notes with this fabulous pen of his (don’t all curators have one?), undress, draw a circle that surrounds his soon-to-be-dead body and a star on his chest, both in his own blood. Then he’s able to lay down in a pose similar to the Vitruvian Man and finally die.

Langdon is brought to the museum by police Captain Fache (Jean Reno, so bellicose you can almost see steam screaming out his ears), who has been tipped off by a priest, and is trying to nail the professor for this murder. Along comes Sophie (Audrey Tautou, as earnest as Bambi’s mother), who is herself a cryptologist with a secret–the dead man is her grandfather! Mon dieu! Director Ron Howard, with his usual light touch, gets Sophie and Langdon out of the clutches of the evil Detective Frenchie, using a cell phone, a beeping transmitter thrown into the back of a trash truck, and the general incompetence of the French police force–this time a loving wink to the great Pink Panther films of the past.

Glorious filmmaking, this! While Sophie and Langdon race around the Louvre discovering the invisible ink clues, we’re given such comic gems as–

Sophie: “This is an anagram!”
Langdon: (With a scowl) “An anagram is right!”

Whooee! Did I mention the backstory? I didn’t! Langdon, for his part, fell down a well as a child and now can’t stand to be in elevators, airplanes, the back seats of cars, or locked tight in an armored truck. That is, until Sophie rubs his head, and then years of anxiety melt away. Sophie, on her end, lost her entire family in a car accident, when the folks inadvertently plowed into a semi, thus proving that foreign vehicles don’t have the crisp turning power of their American counterparts, at least as the ads portray them. Sophie and her grandfather lost touch over the years, but you find that she’s been carefully trained to dance and sing and solve puzzles–all of which will be of great use in the next 24 hours!

Next, we see that this is all a part of a conspiracy mounted by the dyspeptic souls in the Opus Dei, a secret group that spends its time shooting pool in the Vatican and wearing sour faces. One of these wicked priests is played with suppressed gusto by the great Alfred Molina, who is the puppet master for Paul Bettany’s wonderfully sadomasochistic albino monk. This homicidal padre whips himself, flares his nostrils, grits his teeth whenever he’s got someone under the knife, and bleeds all over himself from chains he’s got ground into his flesh. John Cleese couldn’t have played him better.

Oh, the plot just keeps getting better, as this maniac chases after our heroes (not before killing a nun by whacking her upside the head–I think Dan Brown has some issues). Eventually, our heroes find their way to the castle of Sir Leigh Teabing (Sir Ian McKellen), another symbologist who also happens to belong to the Knights Templar, some group of nuts whose job it is to watch over the corpse of Mary Magdalene, the wife of Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ.

Did I let that out? That’s one of the big secrets of The Da Vinci Code, the one that has the church down my block seeing red. Ron Howard sends this thing up wonderfully, with Sir Teabag jousting verbally with a baffled Langdon, whose own character slowly begins to resemble Scooby-Doo’s square Fred Jones, or perhaps a Hardy Boy with long, flowing locks. Anyway, Sir Teabag has this computerized big-screen version of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper”, which proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Jesus was wed to Magdalene and sired a child, the descendants of which are, in reality, the Holy Grail. You can see this because the guy to the left of The Christ (to use Mel Gibson’s vernacular) is not a guy, but a woman, Magdalene, who also, when shifted electronically to Jesus’ other side, looks as if she’s whispering secrets in his ear.

If this sounds like something the bearded crackpot shouts from the dusty streets of Life of Brian Jerusalem, you’re right. Such is the genius of Akiva Goldsman’s screenplay–only he could have topped the sheer madcap humor of his Oscar-winning Beautiful Mind. Eventually this tomfoolery will lead to someone from the present day being a Christ descendant, which can be proven by doing a DNA test, apparently from the shards of Christ’s body we have laying around.

By the way, this is only about the halfway point of the film. Suffice it to say, the film grows even more bat-shit crazy, as all good comedies must. It doesn’t quite close with the Python’s habit of abrupt endings, and it gets a bit long in the tooth, but eventually everything works out and someone is discovered to be Jesus’ Great-Great-Great-Great (and etc.) Grandchild. There’s more silly gadgets and gimcracks, some of which were designed by the great Leonardo of Vinci, others by the obviously bored Templars. All the while this past history is recounted, Ron Howard takes us back to the time of Constantine and his hippie dancers from “Hair”, bewigged fat people stumbling into London churches to celebrate the death of Isaac Newton, and witch hunts which just make you want to yell out “She turned me into a newt!”

Finally, in one wonderfully delirious moment, in a church filled with glowering gargoyles, another ‘surprise’ evil bastard (you can tell from the snarls, but I’ll let you figure it out) points a gun at our heroes and declares “I’m glad this bullshit is over!” Aren’t we all. Of course, the bullshit is far from over, as a swarm of pigeons will upset his plans, and our heroes will race, yet again, through another foreign capital, eluding evil butlers, albino monks, glowering Opus Dei priests, bumbling French cops and squinting modern-day Templars who seem to enjoy plaid.

Ron Howard clearly pulled out all the stops in making this a comic masterpiece to surpass It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Like all classic satires, this one does a mighty fine job of skewering the church, new agers, long-haired adventurous Harvard professors, and those feisty Opusmen and Templars. These are not easy targets, especially since most of us don’t even know who they are, unless of course we’re trapped at a coffee shop with some wide-eyed kook who insists upon bringing you up to date on the latest Christian conspiracy. But I digress–The Da Vinci Code deserves a place in the annals as one of our finest comedies, a perfect double feature with either of the Python flicks and a some great recreational drug.

Drawing Restraint 9, 2006. Starring Matthew Barney, Bjork, Rumi Tsuda, Shigeru Akahori, Sosui Oshima, and the crew of the Nisshin Maru.

Now playing exclusively at The Lagoon.

Again I’m bowled over: Matt Barney, the Idaho-cum-Gotham artist, got it though his head that you could stage a comedy upon, of all things, a Japanese whaling ship. In Drawing Restraint 9 you have perhaps one of the most controversial occupations on earth, and Barney proceeds to drag his spouse, Bjork, and himself on board along with hundreds of gallons of liquid petroleum jelly that hardens to make a big, greasy pile of nothing. All the while, he and Bjork do some crazy tea-drinking (oh, and what kind of tea it is!), and then cut their own legs off and become a whale-like thing in what I think is more liquid petroleum jelly.

The crew of the Nisshin Maru does its level best to keep a straight face, at one point resorting to downing a barrel of sake to keep from falling over in tears. They also eat some gelatin that comes in the shape of the Vaseline sculpture and ignore both an on-board clown and a Japanese girl who spits out ball bearings (with quite a dollop of saliva, I might add). Children play with whale barf. Bjork gets to ease her generous bottom into a giant metal tub with lemons, while Barney, looking thin as whip and in his Levi’s, gets his hair cut by a drunken barber while he sleeps. Laurel and Hardy couldn’t have made better slapstick!

Drawing Restraint 9 is not for the faint of heart, not because of the gore–which is as funny and innocent as the Black Knight scene in the Holy Grail–but because that type of condition would lead one to fall into a deep sleep during this rather long film. It’s funny, don’t get me wrong, but funny in a sort-of pseudo intellectual style. More The Magic Christian and less RV.

For those of you interested in an experts opinion on this movie, the Walker’s going to have a free screening of Matthew Barney: No Restraint next Thursday. Undoubtedly, there will be some wonderful footage from the film and comparisons between this work and the works of other comedians.

To wit: the Heights Theatre is giving everyone another opportunity to check out Christopher R. Mihm’s local B-Movie homage Monster of Phantom Lake. This time, the film will be even better than it was back in early March, only because we’re going to have the great early summer weather that these frightfests deserve. I use ‘fright’ loosely: Monster is a barrel of fun but hardly scary, which is just as it should be. And it is well served by stopping next door at the DQ for a malted with your bobby-sock sporting girlfriend or your duck-tailed boyfriend, if you’ve got either… or if you can convince your spouse to don that get-up, which I can’t, and we’re still arguing about that.

Ahem. Once again, I lament the fact that our theaters are filled with Poseidon and Mission Impossible and the forthcoming Da Vinci Code but not this little gem. If there’s anyplace that should feature The Monster of Phantom Lake, it’s one of our endangered drive-in theaters, where you could groove to “A-Rockin’, A-Rollin’, All the Way A-Ramblin’”, which sounds pleasingly as if it were being broadcast from the local AM station between sounds of thunder.

Check it out tonight only at The Heights. Or, you could purchase this thing on DVD and project it onto your garage one warm summer evening, and let the kids fall sleep in their backyard tents and dream of bug-eyed lake monsters.

My original review is here, and contains adult language (the review, not the film, which is good for all ages).

Le Proces (The Trial), 1962. Written and directed by Orson Welles. Starring Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli, Madeleine Robinson, Anoldo Foa and Billy Kearns as the inspectors, Suzanne Flon, Carl Studer, the lovely character actor (and Welles stalwart) Akim Tamiroff, the madman William Chappell, and Orson Welles himself, as the magistrate.

Where did I find myself when I first saw The Trial? Frankly, I can’t remember, except to say that I was in some dilapidated movie house, and I think that there was even the sound of water dripping from behind the screen, it was that bad. Lots of steel beams and dust, I remember that much. You know I’m mad for Welles, how could I refuse? In fact, I barely remember who told me about this show, it seemed as if it was given to me in a whisper, in a cat-nap, by a young girl who frightened me.

But this was Orson Welles, a The Trial is a minor film of his, a disaster according to some. Dry and sexless and ‘classic’–it would, if all went well, move me like his films always do, intellectually, leaving me amazed at what he could do with a camera. I had difficulty finding the place, it was showing in the basement of some run down train station. I couldn’t find it now if I wanted to.

An attractive woman tore my ticket in half, at the same time pursing her lips as if that act was either quite pleasurable or a difficulty, I’m not sure. She was dressed in black and white and her hair was black, her skin a perfect white, so that she appears, in my memory, as if in monochrome. Her eyebrows were sharp curves over heavily made up eyes, eyes that were also gray, and she never smiled, but grinned as if in on a little secret. She escaped later to run the projector, and I could see her shadow in the glass of the projection booth. I swear she watched me the whole time.

Troublesome. The Trial is–was, no, still is–troublesome. Shot in wasted cities, no, shot in Paris, in an abandoned train station and in Turkey–I knew it’s story, it was the same as all the rest. Fat old Welles, barely able to get financing, all the etc. of any late project. I was ready for the menace of an impersonal government, the accused trying desperately to get to the bottom of his so-called crime. Kafkaesque, perhaps even a bit Orwellian. But as it is quickly revealed, the picture is mired in… what? It’s not Freudian, I think… No, The Trial is not so easily reduced into a horror show of the past, a damning look at a long-ago beaurocricy. That would be easy to digest. But it’s about women. It’s sexuality. You don’t know this right away, but slowly, slowly, the terror creeps up on you, as it does on Josef K.

In Josef’s apartment:

INSPECTOR 1: What’s this thing?
JOSEF: That’s my pornograph… er, my phonograph.
INSPECTOR 2: What’s this?
JOSEF: What’s what?
INSPECTOR 2: A circular line with four holes.
INSPECTOR 1: (Writing) Circular…
INSPECTOR 2: It’s not really circular, it’s more ovular.
JOSEF: Don’t write that down, for heaven’s sake!
INSPECTOR 1: Ovular. Why not?
JOSEF: (sarcastically) Ovular?
INSPECTOR 1: We can’t not write it down just because you say we shouldn’t.
JOSEF: Ovular isn’t even a word.
INSPECTOR 2: You deny there’s an ovular shape concealed under this rug?
INSPECTOR 1: He denies everything.

Ovular. Ovular. What was it about ‘ovular’ that kept after me as I watched The Trial? And when Jeanne Moreau walks in, smoking, tired from a night of servicing men, and she lounges on the bed and her garter belt peeks out at us, it slowly dawns on you that this movie is not about Josef K. fighting with the state. Josef K. is wrestling with is his own sexuality.

Nothing like that has any meaning in my life, I told myself, sinking down into my seat, which seemed more than willing to swallow me with a creaky groan. Turning, I saw there was no one in the cinema, just myself and the monochrome woman, staring out at me from her porthole, smoking, gesturning ever so slightly for me to turn and watch the film.

HILDA: Look at my stockings. I’ll come back soon and then I’ll go with you wherever you want and you can do with me whatever you want.

The Trial whispers its dialogue, whispers its allegations. Hilda shows off her stockings and then is carried away by a leather-clad thug who also works for the state. And while Hilda is a prize peach, while your heart thumps with anticipation, there is a palpable sense of dread. Josef cannot do anything other than barely kiss these women. I remind myself that Anthony Perkins was a gay man, that perhaps Welles found in Perkins the perfect actor to play this role, and all his films are somewhat autobiographical.

But I know this is not true. Someone is pointing an accusing finger at me.

Impotent men hide in shadows, fearful of Josef and the women who pursue him. Detectives who bothered him are later stripped to the waist, mouths taped, beaten and submissive. Why is it that the court archivist is the beautiful Paola Mori seen only briefly, enough to whet one’s appetite, but streaking your heart with fear?

LENI: Will you spend the night with me?
JOSEF: Your eggs are burning.

Her eggs are burning, indeed.

Dirty pictures spring out of the massive tomes in courtrooms, while Leni, the aide to the magistrate, with a sexy deformity of webbed fingers, tries to seduce our hero on a stack of legal documents. Josef is rarely pursued by the state, which seems fairly impotent in the face of these daunting females. Later, Josef tries to get assistance from William Chappell’s insane painter, and is pursued by a terrifying gaggle of young girls.

As The Trial arrives at its climax, the women have vanished, like all dream women do. I don’t recall leaving the theater, don’t recall coming home, but I do recall seeing the monochrome woman again, in the lobby, smoking her cigarette and grinning at me. I wanted to talk with her and I wanted to flee. I fled. Later, feverishly, I read Kafka’s Trial, hoping to find something of what I’d seen in the book. But it was not there. Not that I could see.