Posted on 05/21/2006 5:18:45 AM PDT by Aquinasfan
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- "The Da Vinci Code" banked an estimated $29 million at the box office on its first day in theaters, an industry official said Saturday, positioning the film to turn in the strongest opening weekend for any movie this year.
(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...
Oops forgot to add, but who wants to see just a half a movie?
Yup.
Second, I did not pan Dan Brown as a writer. It's obvious that he writes very well - enough to sell millions of books worldwide. Is he the best writer of suspense novels or historical fiction in the last 100 years, probably not. Does he include real historical facts in his book? Of course he does. But He does not seem to be the kind of writer who is driven to fact check each and every detail. By its very construct a historical fiction book must be placed firmly within the boundaries of real time and space. If Dan Brown wrote The DeVinci Code without historical elements he'd have to title it something other than the DeVinci Code. Unless the creator of the code was Vinny DeVinci, a housepainter from Trenton, New Jersy.
Thirdly, I did not accuse Dan Brown of stealing plagerising another's writer's story plot. It is a well structured story, with enough twists and turns make for a real summer page turner. Fourly, my comments about some folks being Dan Brownite's was not a put-down of the author. Instead it was a comment of the intense devotion some readers toward Dan's Brown's fictional story.
Wow, that's pretty bad. Hopefully it'll sink rapidly, but 1 in 5 Americans have read the stupid book.
I don't think anyone is saying it won't be a big hit. Just that it won't have any shelf life. It's more like PEARL HARBOR than PASSION OF THE CHRIST, the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, HARRY POTTER films, or STAR WARS franchise films. It's a movie sold on hype with no substance underneath it. It'll do huge business for a week or two, then fade as people realize the emporer has no clothes. But those two weeks will be enough to make it a profitable, big hit.
It'll be eclipsed by the end of summer by two or three summer blockbusters and all but forgotten next year. If it's remembered at all, it'll be in the same vein as PEARL HARBOR, e.g., people expressing amazement that hype alone could push a movie that high in box office.
Also, regarding DA VINCI's three day gross, remember that inflation pushes hit films higher and higher each year. That's why so many of the top box office films of all time are from the past few years. Taking inflation into account changes things considerably. That's why it's failure to match the debut of PASSION OF THE CHRIST is so telling, and I agree with those here who have said that was a disappointment to those pushing the film.
Here's a passage from BoxOfficeGuru regarding THE DA VINCI CODE that makes a lot of sense:
#####The road ahead will not be easy. The Memorial Day holiday weekend will certainly help give Da Vinci a solid second weekend. However, with so many fans of the book rushing theaters immediately to see the film, it may have already burned through much of its total audience. Code dipped 6% on Saturday from its opening Friday which is not too surprising given the upfront demand and media hysteria. But it does not necessarily indicate that the fan base is growing. Word-of-mouth will now be the main factor affecting future sales. The Yahoo Movies average grade from over 13,000 users is a not-so-impressive B-....####
So while DA VINCI is clearly a solid hit, it's shelf life will likely not be anywhere in the league of PASSION OF THE CHRIST or a STAR WARS franchise flick. Remember that Yahoo Movies grades are from movie fans, and a B- is pretty bad from an audience pre-inclined to like the movie. In short, we won't be looking back at THE DA VINCI CODE in future years in admiration of a beloved classic film. It'll just be reminder of the power of hype.
Psssssst: It's a novel
Pass it on.....
(8^)
Hmmm, what a novel ideerr!
TYPO ALERT: it's should be its! :-)
Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had offspring.
The Catholic Church has suppressed these facts because the bloodline represents a threat to the Church.
Evidence for the bloodline can be found in various "clues," like DaVinci's "Last Supper."
And you are every bit as important to the Father and Jesus and any church goer...
reminds me of a poem by Emily Dickinson where she writes:
"Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.
............
God preaches,—a noted clergyman,—
And the sermon is never long;
So instead of getting to heaven at last,
I ’m going all along
We have a WINNER...!!!
It is to the Church's credit that it got out in front of this bit of libel. A lot of the book's readers, perhaps the majority believe that the background details are real and that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married.
Back in the 1960s there was a fictional stage play called "The Deputy" which portrayed Pope Pius XII as a Nazi sympathizer and complicit in the Holocaust. The Church didn't have much to say about that bit of fiction and the libel against Pius morphed into "truth" spawning a whole "Nazi Pope" industry. This may be the best way to head off another runaway train.
A codex is simply a set of directions which is obscured by coding and has to be interpreted, sometimes in a scroll , book or carved inscription. The coding is done as a security measure.Archeologists opften run in to these codexes and there are many.
LOL
By now,I've been called about every name in the book - I thought personal attacks were verboten on FR, but I guess not. Seems to be a lot of frothing
;o)
hope springs eternal
Me? I haven't read it or followed it. Not worth my time. I hear the book is lousy, 'worse than the Left-Behind series,' and they laughed at the movie. Why bother to read about it?
We're all related to Christ, aren't we? His family....
Doesn't Hankes alone get $40M per film?
I have concluded that all of your studying has made you think that gnosticism is the truth. You are wrong.
Jesus had died, the clerics now said, to rid the world of Adam's sin. But women, with their tie to sexual reproduction, were a problem, a reminder that the good work would not be done until Christ's return. Bishops barred women from the ordained ministry and accused them of spreading sin. "On account of [you] ... " the prolific third-century author Tertullian wrote, addressing women, "even the son of God had to die."
It was only a matter of time before the Magdalene also came under attack. The moment arrived on an autumn Sunday in the year 591, in a sermon preached at the heart of the Catholic Church. Taking the pulpit at the Basilica San Clemente in Rome, Pope Gregory the Great offered a startling conclusion about the Magdalene: she had been a whore. Before she came to Christ, Gregory explained, Mary's sins were manifold: she had "coveted with Earthly eyes" and "displayed her hair to set off her face." Most scandalously, she had "used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts." Looking out at his audience, a somber mass of monks, Gregory gave Mary a new identity that would shape her image for fourteen hundred years. "It is clear, brothers," he declared: she was a prostitute.
But it was not clear at all. Gregory's remarkable assertion was based on the idea that Mary was the unnamed "sinful woman" who anoints Jesus' feet in the seventh chapter of Luke—a conflation many contemporary scholars dismiss. Even if she were the sinful woman, there is no evidence in any Gospels that her sins were those of the flesh—in the first century, a woman could be considered "sinful" for talking to men other than her husband or going to the marketplace alone. Gregory created the prostitute, as if from thin air.
The pope made his new Mary a reformed whore because he knew that the faithful needed a story of penance that was at once alluring and inspiring. The early Middle Ages were a time of tremendous social tumult—war and disease roiled nations and sent destitute women into the streets. Gregory's church needed a character from Jesus' circle who provided an answer to this misery, who proved that the path of Christ was an escape from the pressures of the sinful world. The mysterious Magdalene of the Resurrection story was peripheral enough to be reinvented. Finally, the church fathers were able to put the inconvenient woman to good use.
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