Angels, Demons, Dan Brown and the Vatican: Oh, My!

Angels, Demons, Dan Brown and the Vatican: Oh, My!

I honestly don’t know what to think about Tom Hanks’ new conspiracy flick, “Angels and Demons,” a prequel witten prior to his earlier blockbuster, “The DaVinci Code.”

I’m not crazy about Hanks to start with, although I must be admit he’s a talented actor. As for director Ron Howard, I still can’t get past the image of Opie of years ago but he seems to know how to direct movies. He was cuter as a kid but losing his hair seems to have sharpened his directorial expertise.

I didn’t want to go see “Angels and Demons” mainly because it was awarded a mere 2 stars by most expert critics and 3 stars is my criterion to lay out bucks to go to the local movie house instead of waiting for the DVD. However, I listened to the wife for a change who had reminded me that “Benjamin Button” had earned 3 stars, wasn’t all that special, and which was entirely too long.

So, we went to view ”Angels” on a semi-big screen. At 135 minutes, it too was much too long but I was glad I did. I think.

Granted, like “Button” and “DaVinci,” “Angels” is largely a fantasy thriller although, as with “The DaVinci Code,” author Brown swore it was factual which causes one to wonder what he considers fact as opposed to fiction.

Had F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the 1921 short story on which “Button” was based, had read the screenplay and heard any suggestions that the film was based on fact, both he and Zelda would have retched, and then would have quaffed a few more martinis.

In “DaVinci,” Brown fabricated a plot postulated on age-old and long-discounted conspiratorial slanders against the Catholic Church, such as Jesus Christ being a family guy who wed Mary Magdalen. He invented obtuse anagrams and silliness about the Priory of Sion, which dates to the 1950’s, not to the 1600’s: http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id43.html. Brown also cites the ancient Knights Templar and the relatively new Catholic organization, Opus Dei, (est. 1928), as conspiratorialists and vicious murderers.

The author brings to mind the truism that even paranoiacs have enemies. If true, Brown has tons of enemies, all somehow associated with Catholicism.

In “Angels” he ranges even farther afield from reason with some anti-matter nonsense and an attempt to vaporize the Vatican with an anti-matter experiment run amok, which may have been wishful thinking on Brown’s part.

You see, many hundreds of years back the Church was supposed to have slaughtered a bunch of Illuminati in order to suppress scientific advancement, . . .
(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com)