Darin is quite the busy little bee this week, so instead of our usual Date Night™ I went out by myself. We have done this a few times before — most memorably when it was NaNoWriMo and I wanted to write, so Darin took himself to see a movie he’d never convince me to go to, Team America: World Police. Afterward he came into the Santana Row Starbucks where I’d been writing and said, “You dodged a bullet.”

Well, I won’t go quite so far as to say he dodged a bullet on The Da Vinci Code, but he doesn’t need to go see it, either. It’s long — two and a half hours, even with Tom Hanks (whom I really like), is easily half an hour too much — it’s ponderous, and it’s pretty silly. I don’t really remember much of the book, other than thinking, “Wow, the guys who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail should totally sue.” (They did, and look how that turned out for them. I’m not a damn lawyer, people!) So whatever I have to say about this is completely based on the movie.

Upsides of the movie: actors actually getting to act smart. Downsides: the story doesn’t make any damn sense.

No, I’m not even talking about the Grand Conspiracy part of the story not making sense. I figure every movie has at least one gimme, and in the case of The Da Vinci Code it’s “There’s a really powerful conspiracy out to suppress the truth.” (I knew someone who couldn’t watch Face Off because, as she put it, “You can’t take someone’s face off.” Well, if you can’t give them that, there’s no point in watching the movie.) No, there’s one looming story question that bugged me during the movie, and it bugs me now.

In case you’re new to our planet and haven’t heard about it, The Da Vinci Code is the story of Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) as he uncovers the grand conspiracy by the Catholic Church to suppress the information that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and founded a dynasty. As the characters point out about twenty thousand times during the movie, the Church has been actively working to erase this information and all of the evidence for it for approximately two thousand years. We’re talking Crusades. We’re talking the Inquisition. We’re talking the Illuminati, okay?

So why is this story happening right now?

I have no idea what starts the killing spree/chase for the Grail on this day that Our Hero gets caught up in. If the movie has an explanation for why the Grand Master and the three Seneschals of the Priory of Sion have to be murdered right now I missed it. There’s something about how the Priory was going to reveal the Heir at the Millennium, but according to my watch that was six years ago and no Heir was revealed, so what’s the rush? In fact, once you think about it, the entire story doesn’t happen unless Robert Langdon is involved, which is kind of like, “Let’s build the train station here because this is where the train stops” instead of the other way around. Cleverly there’s so much going on that we don’t really have time to think about that, but please: it is to give the headache.

(My secondary plot problem is: how does Sophie know her grandfather’s been murdered, and how does she know to show up and save Langdon? No, one erased line of blood doesn’t cover it. But I can’t even begin to contemplate the plot problems with that part.)

Tom Hanks doesn’t have much to do except act smart (which he appears to do okay). Audrey Tautou looks confused and upset most of the time. Sir Ian McKellan, would you like béarnaise sauce with that scenery? Actually, he’s hilarious, and definitely the best thing in the movie. Jean Reno: extremely French. (And how about those French cops, eh? They’re made out to be the world’s stupidest cops, seriously. They bring their number one suspect to the crime scene to spur him into a confession? The entire force leaves to go chasing Langdon’s GPS tracker? Seriously? Bad cop, no pain au chocolat.)

It would have been a much better movie if it had been a mite faster and had more of the history along the way. The whole pursuit thing — not really that interesting.

In today’s NY Times review of the Da Vinci Code movie, reviewer AO Scott says of the complete lack of chemistry between stars Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou:

When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

Scott has a ton of hilarity in this review. Check it out.

(Sorry for the lack of meaty posting lately. There’s been a lot going on, none of which I want to write about at the moment. Darin and the kids are fine though.)

Note to Hollywood: it is possible to have bad publicity.

Darin hates gossip. He is so not interested in people’s private lives. My one-time ability to converse on the minutiae about people I’d never met made him crazy (alas, I have gotten busy with other things, like my own life, so I am no longer as on top of pointless things as I used to be). He not only doesn’t care, he actively avoids the subject, okay?

At the start of Mission: Impossible III there is an extended scene about the domestic happiness of Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, at an engagement party for him and his fiancée. Many, many shots of Tom beaming love at Michelle Monaghan, who plays his intended, Julia.

Darin leans over to me and says, “You know, he just seems totally gay now.”

Note to Mr. Cruise’s lawyers: Not that he is gay, of course. It is just that Mr. Cruise has had very, very bad personal publicity recently, which has led to, uh, rampant speculation about such things.

The movie itself is fine, for the kind of movie it is. Lots and lots of action; not so much plot. We saw it three days ago and while I remember individual scenes quite well, the entire thing holds together less well. There are incredible sequences at the Vatican, on a water bridge highway in Florida, in Singapore. And I’m sure if I sat down and thought about it I could reconstruct why all of these various things were happening. But seriously: don’t really wanna.

The ostensible plot is that Tom Cruise and Friends (his buds at the Impossible Mission Force, like Ving Rhames) want to get Uber-bad guy Philip Seymour Hoffman. One flaw of the movie is that while we’re often told that PSH is a seriously world-class bad dude, we don’t actually see him being a bad dude. (Except for the scene where he beats up Tom Cruise. And you know, sometimes you just feel like beating up Tom Cruise.) So they get PSH at Vatican, and then he manages to escape on that Florida highway. In revenge, PSH kidnaps Ms. Monaghan in order to force Cruise to do his evil bidding. Much action ensues.

If you want to see extremely intricate, well-choreographed action scenes — director JJ Abrams did a great job with those — this is a great movie for that. Plot and characterization? Not so much. Simon Pegg does have a very funny turn as an IMF technician who helps Tom Cruise with his mission.