The Da Vinci Code

[Awanka]

This was a lukewarm potboiler thriller of a movie, and now that I've seen it, I can say that the book must be just as uncreative and corny. It's no surprise why the book was such a best-seller of course, what with all the morons I see every time I go to Barnes and Nobles. I can just imagine all the religious hillbillies and christians who watch mtv with their jaws hanging out in awe from the stupendous "surprise" in this movie. Haven't I seen this before? I believe I have, it was called the Preacher comics. Nothing inspired or original here I'm afraid folks, unless you're missing half your brain.

The puzzle-solving aspect of this movie was super-corny as well. I don't want to spoil anything, but there's this hundreds of years old puzzle-box the heroes obtain early in the movie which needs a five letter word as the input code. When they finally come up with the answer it's so retarded, it couldn't have been any more stupid if the answer was "Regis" from Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Thumbs down for this half-baked effort at patching together conspiracy theories.

[Hateyou]

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/milli...inci-code.html

[Attman_Eci]

Originally Posted by Hateyou

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/milli...inci-code.html

Yeah, STFU. It should be here on the movie board anyway.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. Read the book before which was also good and I'm no avid reader. Book was more in-depth and interesting and gave a better background to all of this theory shit.

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Attman_Eci

shit.

I agree completely.

[Hateyou]

Originally Posted by Attman_Eci

Yeah, STFU. It should be here on the movie board anyway.

How about you stfu. I wasn't snide about it, I was just linking it so any one interested in the discussion already going on could read it. Dipshit.

[tanjo]

Originally Posted by Awanka

This was a lukewarm potboiler thriller of a movie, and now that I've seen it, I can say that the book must be just as uncreative and corny.

Amazing reasoning you have here. Your hostile reaction without having read the book sure does separate you from all those slack-jawed hillbillies you were talking about. I don't understand the negative reaction the book gets from so many people. I guess it's because it's so popular or something and people don't understand why. Really, the thing is like candy or popcorn for anyone interested in history, art, and religion with all the references. And as an English major who reads all the time, I'm not literarily shallow. The book is good for what it is.

[Coren]

Originally Posted by tanjo

Really, the thing is like candy or popcorn for anyone interested in history, art, and religion with all the references. And as an English major who reads all the time, I'm not literarily shallow. The book is good for what it is.

Well, as mentioned in the other thread hehe...anyone interested in history, art, and religion wouldn't take long to realize just how badly "The Da Vinci Code" gets all 3 wrong. Over and over again. =)

(Dan Brown lied really when he said "All references to art yadda yadda is all true).

[Awanka]

Originally Posted by tanjo

Amazing reasoning you have here. Your hostile reaction without having read the book sure does separate you from all those slack-jawed hillbillies you were talking about. I don't understand the negative reaction the book gets from so many people. I guess it's because it's so popular or something and people don't understand why. Really, the thing is like candy or popcorn for anyone interested in history, art, and religion with all the references. And as an English major who reads all the time, I'm not literarily shallow. The book is good for what it is.

Don't dis hillbillies friend, we carry double-barreled shotguns. That's the one good thing that did come out of this movie, it has cured me of my compulsion to read the book. I now know it's a waste of time, and I thank Ron Howard for saving me a number of hours of my life, but not for anything else.

[tanjo]

Originally Posted by Coren

Well, as mentioned in the other thread hehe...anyone interested in history, art, and religion wouldn't take long to realize just how badly "The Da Vinci Code" gets all 3 wrong. Over and over again. =)

Well duh. Anyone looking to The Da Vinci code for some kind of revelation is misguided. A lot of the "facts" are results of misinterpretations or skewing. However, some of it is interesting and it's fun wondering how much of it is possible. Is Uriel slicing Jesus's throat, Mary getting ready to clench John's head, and Jesus praying to and being blessed by John in the original version of Madonna of the Rocks? As far as I've seen and read, that interpretation of the painting first appeared in The Da Vinci code. If you look at the painting, it's possible. There are a lot of little things like that in the book that are just interesting ways to look at things. I'm not ready to defend the book for the entire thread or anything, but all these negative reactions are just stupid. Go read a real book and stop trying to sound smart for disliking the fuckin Da Vinci Code.

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by tanjo

I don't understand the negative reaction the book gets from so many people. I guess it's because it's so popular or something and people don't understand why. Really, the thing is like candy or popcorn for anyone interested in history, art, and religion with all the references. And as an English major who reads all the time, I'm not literarily shallow. The book is good for what it is.

I read it long before realizing how popular it was, or rather how many copies it sold. Other than my fanatical devotion to Neil Gaiman, whom I believe to be one of the truly great writers and one of the best to ever put word to page, most of what I read is either thrillers, sci-fi, or fantasy of some sort. I like Robert Ludlum, Michael Connelly, and various others who certainly aren't going to be remembered as literary giants in another hundred years. Fluff doesn't bother me.

Apologies in advance for the length of this, but I think Dan Brown himself can make my point for me a lot better than I ever could on my own. If only the board had a [spoiler] tag I could put this in to cut down on the length... :P

Langdon turned to face his sea of eager students. "Who can tell me what this number is?"

A long-legged math major in back raised his hand. "That's the number PHI." He pronounced it fee.

"Nice job, Stettner," Langdon said. "Everyone, meet PHI."

"Not to be confused with PI," Stettner added, grinning. "As we mathematicians like to say: PHI is one H of a lot cooler than PI!"

Langdon laughed, but nobody else seemed to get the joke.

Stettner slumped.

"This number PHI," Langdon continued, "one-point-six-one-eight, is a very important number in art. Who can tell me why?"

Stettner tried to redeem himself. "Because it's so pretty?"

Everyone laughed.

"Actually," Langdon said, "Stettner's right again. PHI is generally considered the most beautiful number in the universe."

The laughter abruptly stopped, and Stettner gloated.

As Langdon loaded his slide projector, he explained that the number PHI was derived from the Fibonacci sequence—a progression famous not only because the sum of adjacent terms equaled the next term, but because the quotients of adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618—PHI!

Despite PHI's seemingly mystical mathematical origins, Langdon explained, the truly mind-boggling aspect of PHI was its role as a fundamental building block in nature. Plants, animals, and even human beings all possessed dimensional properties that adhered with eerie exactitude to the ratio of PHI to 1.

"PHI's ubiquity in nature," Langdon said, killing the lights, "clearly exceeds coincidence, and so the ancients assumed the number PHI must have been preordained by the Creator of the universe. Early scientists heralded one-point-six-one-eight as the Divine Proportion."

"Hold on," said a young woman in the front row. "I'm a bio major and I've never seen this Divine Proportion in nature."

"No?" Langdon grinned. "Ever study the relationship between females and males in a honeybee community?"

"Sure. The female bees always outnumber the male bees."

"Correct. And did you know that if you divide the number of female bees by the number of male bees in any beehive in the world, you always get the same number?"

"You do?"

"Yup. PHI."

The girl gaped. "NO WAY!"

"Way!" Langdon fired back, smiling as he projected a slide of a spiral seashell. "Recognize this?"

"It's a nautilus," the bio major said. "A cephalopod mollusk that pumps gas into its chambered shell to adjust its buoyancy."

"Correct. And can you guess what the ratio is of each spiral's diameter to the next?"

The girl looked uncertain as she eyed the concentric arcs of the nautilus spiral.

Langdon nodded. "PHI. The Divine Proportion. One-point-six-one-eight to one."

The girl looked amazed.

Langdon advanced to the next slide—a close-up of a sunflower's seed head. "Sunflower seeds grow in opposing spirals. Can you guess the ratio of each rotation's diameter to the next?"

"PHI?" everyone said.

"Bingo." Langdon began racing through slides now—spiraled pinecone petals, leaf arrangement on plant stalks, insect segmentation—all displaying astonishing obedience to the Divine Proportion.

"This is amazing!" someone cried out.

"Yeah," someone else said, "but what does it have to do with art?"

"Aha!" Langdon said. "Glad you asked." He pulled up another slide—a pale yellow parchment displaying Leonardo da Vinci's famous male nude—The Vitruvian Man—named for Marcus Vitruvius, the brilliant Roman architect who praised the Divine Proportion in his text De Architectura.

"Nobody understood better than Da Vinci the divine structure of the human body. Da Vinci actually exhumed corpses to measure the exact proportions of human bone structure. He was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal PHI."

Everyone in class gave him a dubious look.

"Don't believe me?" Langdon challenged. "Next time you're in the shower, take a tape measure."

A couple of football players snickered.

"Not just you insecure jocks," Langdon prompted. "All of you. Guys and girls. Try it. Measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor. Then divide that by the distance from your belly button to the floor. Guess what number you get."

"Not PHI!" one of the jocks blurted out in disbelief.

"Yes, PHI," Langdon replied. "One-point-six-one-eight. Want another example? Measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertips, and then divide it by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips. PHI again. Another? Hip to floor divided by knee to floor. PHI again. Finger joints. Toes. Spinal divisions. PHI. PHI. PHI. My friends, each of you is a walking tribute to the Divine Proportion."

Even in the darkness, Langdon could see they were all astounded. He felt a familiar warmth inside. This is why he taught.

I'm not sure what you call that, but it makes "fluff" look like Shakespeare.

[tanjo]

Meh. I don't know. I don't think it's that bad. He's really bad with dialog. It's really uninteresting and unentertaining. But I care too much about PHI to give a shit. He picked the perfect subjects for his writing style in my opinion--there's too many references to amazing art, history, and, in this case, mathematics for me to notice his crappy writing too much. His writing style is not the reason I think the book is fun to read.

[Coren]

Originally Posted by tanjo

Well duh. Anyone looking to The Da Vinci code for some kind of revelation is misguided. A lot of the "facts" are results of misinterpretations or skewing. However, some of it is interesting and it's fun wondering how much of it is possible.

Well, I think Dan Brown's description of the "Madonna" painting (Which he altered the name on IIRC so that the "So dark the con of man" anagram would work) is stretching it, I can see how that could be a matter of interpretation.

It's instances like claiming that the glass pyramid has 666 panes on it (It's actually 673 panes), and the painting that Sophie uses as a shield, the book describes as being short enough for Sophie to look over, when in fact it's 6 1/2 feet tall (And too heavy to lift), etc, that undermine the claim at the front of the book that all his descriptions are accurate.

[FanBuss]

Also the fact that it's written like a high-school drama story tend to undermine it's credibility.

[Hateyou]

I've never read anything from this book until Vorph posted it.

That looks pretty bad. It looks like an aspiring writer from High School wrote it, or a rough draft for a movie script or something. I mean it was easy to read, it's just so...bland? Duno the word I'm looking for, I'm no literature expert. I just know that's not something I'd want to read.

[Castigator]

Originally Posted by Hateyou

I've never read anything from this book until Vorph posted it.

That looks pretty bad. It looks like an aspiring writer from High School wrote it, or a rough draft for a movie script or something. I mean it was easy to read, it's just so...bland? Duno the word I'm looking for, I'm no literature expert. I just know that's not something I'd want to read.

Well, I'm not a literary expert either, but the appeal of the book (if you want to call it that) is that Dan Brown has written it in very short, almost self-containing chapters.
The chapters are 10 pages long or so... and in just about every single chapter Dan Brown will solve a previous mystery, introduces the reader to a new little secret or riddle or mystery and ends on a cliffhanger of some sort.

It might not be noble prize stuff, but it's a good enough way to get Generation Videogames & ADD to read a book, hopping from one little cool to the next without worrying too much about the overall plot.

That is also one of the reasons why a Da Vinci Code Movie was likely to fail without major adaption IMO, because Dan Brown didn't really try come up with a good overall plot. Rather, it seems that he tried to patch together some plot that would let him include as many little secret & mysterious things as he needed for every one of his little chapters.

A more faithful screen adaptation of this book would likely have been a bunch of 10 to 15 minute episodes, each ending starting with "what-happend-last-time" and ending with a cliffhanger. That way, the bad overall plot would be less obvious (as in the book) and the "strenghts" that appealed to the millions of readers of the DaVinci Code might have been more obvious.