My guide to the secrets of the Da Vinci Cod

Thank god for Ian McKellen. Now, I realize I tend to say that on a fairly regular basis, sometimes apropos of nothing in particular, but this time I'm quite devout in my praise, given that he was more or less the only redeeming factor in the two-and-a-half hour earnestness-fest that is the film version of The Da Vinci Code. There's something wrong when it only takes you only slightly longer to read the book than to watch the movie.

That being said, for all the arguments back and forth over the film's offensiveness, it was really just ... well, inofensive. The film has less of an edge to it than a $5 kitchen knife from Wal-Mart. This is the great slap in the face to Christians and Christianity? Puh-leaze. If this is what's going to single-handedly erode faith and belief in North America, then someone please explain to me how Trey Parker and Matt Stone have thus far avoided being drawn and quartered.

Tom Hanks was so wrong in this role. I should say, unlike many people, I have nothing against Tom Hanks -- as far as Hollywood actors go, he's pretty good, and he has a really endearing goofiness that I like. But he's waayyyyy too earnest in pretty much everything he does, and that just doesn't work here. For one thing, Robert Langdon is supposed to be one of the top scholars in his field, a Harvard prof (which really, for anything populist like Dan Brown novels or Hollywood films, is simply a cipher for really really smart -- he'd have automatically been a more interesting character for me if he was from Duke, or Berkeley, or, say, Memorial University of Newfoundland) presumably at the top of his game. Perhaps I speak as someone who spends too much time around curmudgeonly profs, but he really needed to be at least a little arrogant, to radiate the sense of being an intellectual heavyweight. He sounded more like he was an undergrad who had committed the Coles Notes of the Apochrypha to memory.

Again, thank god for Sir Ian. I sometimes wonder what must go through his head when he's filming these Hollywood blockbusters -- does he ever look around and think "I can so act circles around these dimwits!" He's the only one that looked like he was having any fun at all, gleefully cackling and frothing and generally chewing the scenery. It reminded me a bit of Alan Rickman in Robin Hood -- another case of a film taking itself way too seriously, and a great British actor being the one redeeming feature.

I did learn some things from tonight's screening however, and they are as followed:

1. Courtesy of the women sitting behind us, I now know a new word: "codey" -- adjective, pertaining to or referring to the qualities of The Da Vinci Code. To wit: as far as Dan Brown's other novels go, Angels and Demons is very codey, whereas Digital Fortress? Not so codey.

2. Smart cars drive faster in reverse than police cars do driving forward.

3. Bigshot symbology professors from Harvard, who study a vast range of history and religious cultures, are not required to learn French.

4. Kiefer Sutherland may be the new prince of scruffy, but Jean Reno is still king.

5. Eccentric British history buffs living in mansions cluttered with all sorts of arcana have digital presentations making PowerPoint look like chalk and a slate ready to go at the slightest need (such as desperate fugitives showing up at your place in the middle of the night needing a grand unification theory of conspiratorial history).