Shane Life

After a really fun Rook party on Friday night, Alli and I met my mom and dad and Ashley for the 10:00 showing of The Da Vinci Code. All of us except Ashley had read the book, so we were very anxious to see the movie and we crossed our fingers hoping that they wouldn’t ruin the bestseller like they did with The Firm.

For a long time, I have spoken out that I thought that Tom Hanks was an awful choice for Robert Langdon. Turns out that I was right all along. However, the movie succeeds IN SPITE of Hanks’ awful, uninspired acting. (I don’t know if I would even call it “acting”…he didn’t even seem like he was acting. He just seemed like he was reading his lines as Tom Hanks with ridiculous long hair.)

The rest of the cast is just about as perfect as it could have been. Ian McKellen (who is always money) was a perfect Sir Leigh Teabing. Audrey Tautou (who would not have been my first choice) was a fantastic Sophie Neveu. Jean Reno was awesome as Bezu Fache. Even Alfred Molina was good in his small roll as Bishop Aringossa. The person that impressed me most, however, was Paul Bettany. You rarely see him in such a dramatic role, but his portrayal of the albino monk Silas was so dead-on that it was almost haunting. When I had read the book, Silas seemed like a bigger, more hulking type of albino (I was thinking like George “The Animal” Steele without all the body hair). But, in the words of Randy Jackson, he worked it out and made it his own.

Fans of the book will not be disappointed because all of the major plot points exist in the movie, and not only that, they also don’t change the ending drastically, like they did with the aforementioned Tom Cruise debacle.

Overall, I was really happy, even if I couldn’t get over Tom Hanks. We’ll see if they decide to make Angels & Demons now. In my opinion (as well as many others), it is a superior book, despite its ridiculous ending.

As an aside about the “controversy” surrounding the movie…it looks like it didn’t really work too well for the Catholic Church to boycott the movie, since it had the 13th largest opening weekend in the United States EVER.