By MIKE PEARSON
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
("The Da Vinci Code." Sony. DVD. 149 min. Rated PG-13. $29.96. Grade: B.)
Fans of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" already know how it ends. The suspense in Ron Howard's screen adaptation lies in how deftly he executes the twists and turns in the complex tale of religion, murder and faith.
Tom Hanks is Harvard symbolist Robert Langdon, who finds himself suspected of killing the curator of the Louvre. It seems the old man scrawled Langdon's name in blood before he died.
Before a police detective (Jean Reno) can arrest Langdon, the professor takes off with Sophie (Audrey Tautou), the curator's niece. They are following clues left by the dead man. Was he really the head of a secret society charged with guarding the location of the Holy Grail?
That's the main conceit here, as Langdon and Sophie race to find the coveted item before it falls into the hands of a deadly monk (Paul Bettany) and a Machiavellian bishop (Alfred Molina). A colleague of Robert's (Ian McKellen) joins in the chase. He is a Grail scholar with his own agenda.
Much controversy attended the book's publication because it makes its central villain is a member of the Catholic society, Opus Dei. The Vatican also criticized the main thesis of the story: That Jesus may have had a child with Mary Magdalene.
The filmmakers didn't flinch. They've remained faithful to the book..
Maybe even a little too faithful, since there's not much real suspense here. Howard's refusal to truncate the plot adds a good 20 minutes to the running time. The performances, while compelling, never take the material to a new level. The most arresting thing about this movie is the Parisian locales.
Watching "The Da Vinci Code," we're reminded that films don't always capture the rich texture of literature. They can work fine as popcorn entertainment, and still fall short of revelation.
("John Tucker Must Die." Fox. DVD. 90 min. Rated PG-13. $29.98. Grade: C.)
Poor John Tucker (Jesse Metcalfe). He's the guy every guy wants to be and every girl wants to get. He's captain of the high school basketball team, handsome and rich.
Just one problem: He's a player. When three girls he's dating simultaneously find out about his duplicity, they conspire to teach him a lesson he'll never forget. When straight-out humiliation doesn't work, they convince a fourth friend to date John, just for the fun of watching her dump him.
Welcome to the leaner, meaner world of teen-age comedy..
"John Tucker Must Die" is about getting even. It flirts with the darkness of "Heathers," yet mostly goes for a sort of surface satire that's heavy on slapstick, not substance.
To the extent that you can pretty much put your brain in neutral, it works. Metcalfe is the perfect John Tucker, a golden boy with a ready-made smile. Instead of hating him, his calculated boyishness wins us to his side. That's right: we like this villain.
At the very least we feel sorry for him, as we ingest the film's message that when you play with the heart, you play with fire. Naturally the girl chosen to dump John falls for him. You can see it coming from the next galaxy.
Metcalfe earned heart throb status playing the gardener on "Desperate Housewives." What attracted him to the title role in "John Tucker"?
"It was a chance to show that I don't take myself too seriously," he said during a recent phone chat. "It was easy for me to find common ground with the character, more so in my college years than high school. I drew from a lot of different places, including from Matthew Broderick in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off.'"
Who is "John Tucker" for?
"Definitely the core demographic is teen-age girls," he said. "I don't want to say it's not a chick flick, because it is. But if a guy gets roped into seeing it with his girlfriend or his wife, I don't think he's going to sit there bored."
Point taken.
"John Tucker" may not elevate the tone of teen movies to new heights, but neither does it leave you bored.
("An Inconvenient Truth." Paramount. DVD. 93 min. Rated PG. $29.99. In stores Nov. 21. Grade: A.)
Whatever you've heard about "An Inconvenient Truth" won't prepare you for the frightening arsenal of information it delivers about global warming.
Al Gore hosts this insightful documentary, which is less a political treatise _ there are a few pot shots taken, but not many _ than a call to arms.
Gore narrates a movie largely shot at lectures he has given around the globe about global warming. We learn about the melting polar ice caps and Greenland. We see the impact of warming on animal life as invasive species suddenly move into areas once too cold for them, and ice-bound animals such as polar bears begin to drown when the ice melts.
Is there an alarmist bent to "An Inconvenient Truth?" Absolutely, yet you can't help but feel that sound science underlies the horror. Do we realize that melting polar caps will raise sea level 20 feet, decimating coastal cities like Manhattan and San Francisco, not to mention a low land country like the Netherlands?
Not everything about the film is quite so strident. Gore's lectures are interspersed with part of his personal story, including the near death of a child and the loss of a bid for the presidency. He's a firebrand with a soft, human side. And the film ends with suggestions of how we can make a difference.
This movie should be shown to every middle school child in the world. After all, that's the generation of ecological stewards that's going to have to save us from ourselves.
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