The Da Vinci Code (2006 movie)

I went to see The Da Vinci Code with my parents on the weekend, despite loathing the book. Well, honestly, I don't loathe it the way I've loathed other books; I just think that the author is lazy and that the prose is horrific. I wouldn't be so irked about the whole Grail conspiracy theory had Dan Brown not included a disclaimer in the front saying that things were indeed truthful and had his theory of the sacred feminine not been so rage-inducing.

That said, I was actually rather entertained by the movie, largely because Ron Howard is a much better movie-maker than Dan Brown is a writer. It's too bad the movie sticks so closely to the book (and yes, this may be the first and last time you will ever hear me say this), because the visuals of the movie are lovely. There's the opening sequence in which a man is being pursued through the Louvre, and the camera lingers on all the famous paintings for just a little.

There are the flashbacks to the Crusades and assorted other things in a muted sepia, knights in armor, cathedrals, marble effigies and etc.

Audrey Tautou is beautiful, despite having nothing to do.

So... yes, I like it as a movie in that it is beautiful to look at and a solid piece of filmmaking, with a wonderfully fun performance by Ian McKlellan.

Sadly, said solid piece of filmmaking is saddled with the book, which is, frankly, ridiculous. First, I nearly snickered through the entire opening, because the thought of a man shot through the gut having enough time to plant clues throughout the museum as he was bleeding his life out was ludicrous. The director tries to make things work, but honestly, there's only so much you can do when the villain of the piece is a fanatic, masochistic albino dressed in monk's robes who routinely flagellates himself while muttering in Latin.

Albino.

Yeah.

Just typing that makes me snicker. Also, I somehow doubt that Dan Brown realized how ludicrous said fanatic, masochistic albino in medieval monk's robes looks talking on a cell phone, even if the conversation is in Latin (or Italian? I can't tell).

And the entire explanation of the conspiracy still makes me want to laugh because it's so nonsensical. Thankfully, the script cuts a lot of the blathering that goes on in the book about the sacred feminine and blah blah blah, and there's less taking the conspiracy at face value.

So... pretty movie with much talent involved, and despite the many attempts to circumvent the awful, awful prose of the book (I mean... Mary Sue awful), still gets bogged down by the plot.

Levitt, Steven, and Stephen Dubner - Freakonomics

(subtitle: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)

Um, it's probably rather shallow of me to admit that this book has been catching my eye for a while because I like the sound of "freakonomics" and I very much like the image of an apple with the interior of an orange.

Anyhow, thankfully, it turned out to be quite an entertaining read, if you like pop science type things. Levitt is apparently a very young and very inventive economist who likes applying the tools of economics to data points and trends in apparently unrelated things. Dubner has written an article (or more) on Levitt in the New Yorker. I rather wish that both authors or the editor had decided against excerpts of Dubner's articles in front of various sections of the book though. They're entirely too magazine-style and filled with hyperbole; also, it just smacks of unnecessary self-promotion. I'm already reading their book.

Despite the somewhat facile chapter introductions ("How are sumo wrestlers and Chicago schoolteachers alike?"), the book is actually a very interesting look at statistics and the different ways you can slice and dice numbers. Levitt comes to some fairly controversial conclusions, the most famous probably being that legalizing abortion helps cut down on the crime rate. As he says, morality is the study of how the world should be, while economics is the study of how the world is.

That said, Levitt doesn't use his conclusions to argue for or against any policies; he merely shows if they work or not with regard to a certain factor. For the abortion question, he does note that a fetus would have to be worth x amount of non-fetus human lives to justify using abortion as a tool for crime prevention, and that abortion's influence on crime is really a side benefit that probably shouldn't be the main goal.

I like the way Levitt thinks, and I like the way he and Dubnet explain how he gets to all his conclusions, startling though they may be. He uses statistics to see if he can detect an increase in teachers cheating after the "No Child Left Behind" act, explains the difference in how real estate agents sell other people's houses vs. how they sell their own, and uses very concrete, applicable examples to illustrate economic principles like side benefits and asymmetry of information and how they affect people daily.

I'm not sure if I agree with all his conclusions, given that I have very little background in this, but he did seem to be very thorough in explaining how he came to his conclusions, and he didn't just look at a single set of data in any case. He actually ended up thinking of even more ways to try to prove or disprove his hypotheses than I did.

Very educational in terms of thought process, very interesting, and most of all, a very fun and interesting read.

Links:
- rilina's review