The Da Vinci Code

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A competently put together film (as you’d expect from Ron Howard), with adequate performances (as you’d expect from Tom Hanks). Not exactly an acting masterclass, except in adequately ambling through a mediocre film. My fellow viewers reckoned that the dialogue was hideously creaky (though I didn’t notice so much). The story is very daft, but… I quite enjoyed the whole experience.

Really it’s a pretty faithful adaptation of a book which had lots of interesting ideas, and a brilliant hook of a story, and was told in barely adequate prose (with hideously creaky dialogue).

As it is so faithful, and also because it condenses a novel-sized story into a 2 hour film, the film really lays bare the shortcomings of the plot. It is such blatent tosh when one sees it being played out with real live people on the big screen, and apparently with a straight face. The story is revealed for what it is: a crossword-puzzler’s secret wank fantasy, where the future of Western Civilization hinges on the hero’s ability to do anagrams. It just doesn’t hold up very well. Continue reading →

Charlie Brooker is a poetic genius

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I just rediscovered Screen Burn, the column Charlie Brooker writes for The Guardian. (You may have seen the book of the same name, which is a collection of some of the early columns.)

He reviews television, sortof, through a haze of poetic vitriol. Anyway, I just pissed away a glorious 45 minutes catching up on Charlie Brooker’s unique and side-wrenchingly funny mind bile. A sample:

Terrible thing, anticipation. For instance, if I locked you in a room and calmly informed you through a hatch in the door that I planned to return in an unspecified period of time and beat you insensible with a car jack, chances are you wouldn’t enjoy the intervening hours very much, even if I’d left you a couple of magazines and some battenberg cake.
Screen Burn, Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, 15 April 2006

I love the bit about the battenberg cake.

If you’re not convinced, try a quick column or two for yourself. You’ll like it, I promise.
If you like it and need a stronger fix, why not try TVGoHome, his original irregular series of faux Radio Times pages? It’s a brilliantly creative satirical stab in the face of contemporary TV, which even now is being minded by desperate TV execs for new programme ideas. It’s available from all good book shops, in case you don’t like reading things on the Internet.

And the moral of this story is?

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…Americans are nutters?
…Never piss off a man who knows how to weld?
…The A Team should have carried a ‘don’t try this at home’ disclaimer?
…You can build an armoured car by welding plate steel to a truck?
…Americans are gun-wielding nutters?
…If you go on a destructive rampage in an armoured truck, sooner or later somebody is going to get hurt?

http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=143648

Synopsis: nasty factory owners try to buy up land, but one man refuses to sell. Said man gets sued and generally hassled. Wreaks revenge Hannibal Smith style with armoured/converted truck thing covered in plate steal, which he built in his garage. (In unpleasantly-non-A-Team twist, he dies at the end. So even if you have a problem, and if no-one else can help, and even if you can find him, you won’t be able to hire: Marvin Heemeyer (deceased), of Grunbee, Colorado.)