The Da Vinci Bomb: Cannes Film Festival Premier a Joke

We'll see if this gets the same news coverage as everything else Da Vinci does:

CANNES, France - "The Da Vinci Code" drew lukewarm praise, shrugs of indifference, some jeering laughter and a few derisive jabs Tuesday from arguably the world's toughest movie crowd: critics at the Cannes Film Festival. [source]

But it's not just Cannes, practically everyone who has previewed the movie agrees it stinks (Variety, Associated Press, Reuters). I'm going to waste a little more of my time on this sad tale and catalogue some of the juiciest quotes dismantling the movie. In reading through them, I get the sense that no reviewer wants to be remembered as that one person who actually thought the film was good - because it just is not:

"a stodgy, grim thing"

"conspired to drain any sense of fun out of the melodrama, leaving expectant audiences with an oppressively talky film that isn't exactly dull, but comes as close to it as one could ... result[ing in] perhaps the best thing the project's critics could have hoped for."

" it is impossible to believe that, had the novel never existed, such a script would ever have been considered by a Hollywood studio."

"It's esoteric, heady stuff, made compelling only by the fact that what it's proposing undermines the fundamental tenants of Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism"

"What one is left with is high-minded lurid material sucked dry by a desperately solemn approach. "

"It's a film so overloaded with plot that there's no room for anything else, from emotion to stylistic grace notes." [source]

"I didn't like it very much. I thought it was almost as bad as the book. Tom Hanks was a zombie, thank goodness for Ian McKellen. It was overplayed, there was too much music and it was much too grandiose."

"Several whistles instead of applause were all that greeted the end of Ron Howard's 125-million-dollar film, and worse than that, the 2,000-strong audience even burst out laughing at the movie's key moment."

"Thus book's detractors will no doubt be comforted to hear that when Hanks reveals who is supposedly the last surviving descendant of Jesus, the Cannes audience couldn't hold back their laughter."

"I kept thinking of the Energizer Bunny, because it kept going and going and going, and not in a good way," said James Rocchi, a film critic for CBS 5 television in San Francisco and the online outlet Cinematical. "Ron Howard makes handsome films. He doesn't make bad ones, but he doesn't make great ones."

"One especially melodramatic line uttered by Hanks drew prolonged laughter and some catcalls, and the audience continued to titter for much of the film's remainder." [source]

"Nothing really works. It's not suspenseful. It's not romantic. It's certainly not fun," said Stephen Schaefer of the Boston Herald."

"It seems like you're in there forever. And you're conscious of how hard everybody's working to try to make sense of something that basically perhaps is unfilmable." [source]

A good film could have fooled people into swallowing the Da Vinci lies, but happily enough, it appears to be a bad film, and nothing ugly can convince people to accept what is at heart a tangle of ugly lies in the first place.

Where does this leave the opening weekend? I think the movie will still have a strong showing, just on the number of presale tickets. However, we can now guess that most of those people will come out of their theater feeling fairly ticked off and let down and - dare we suggest it - a little taken in. Well ... good. They should feel that way. Now, let's all take a deep breath and forget this silliness - there are far more important things to talk about.

(admittedly, I must fight the temptation to gloat over this media bubble burst...)

Remember, you can still vote in this week's AP poll: Are you going to see the Da Vinci Code movie?