The DaVinci Dodo

It is a surprisingly quirky experience when you realize five minutes into a movie, that you've actually read the blockbuster book that inspired the movie, and not just that, you've actually posted an article just a few moons ago proclaiming at the top of your voice that you havent read the book. In that post I even made the claim that the church and the religious groups and what not that are planning to ban the movie's screening are a bunch of droogs who have nothing better to do.

To those people I render a heartfelt apology. You people were right, you knew something that I did not. And now that I have sat through two and a half hours of symbols and cryptexes and geometric duality objects and glass pyramids that act as tombs I know why you people wanted this movie to be banned. You, the kind hearted religious zealots, did not want us, the non-believing mass of movie-going humanity, to sit through this celluloid masterpiece created by Ron Howard and Tom Hanks and that brilliant screenwriter Goldsman that would rival a dodo in its ability to send you into a dumb stupor.

And now I even feel sorry for the pope for whom a private screening was organized. I can picture him snoring all by himself with his bag of holy popcorn and holy pepsi, slowly tipping off his slumbering hands, locked up in his private one sitter movie hall in the Vatican, ten minutes into the movie. Just as the guy sitting next to me or the two couples sitting behind me or the three girls sitting right in front of me or that huge bunch of chinese sitting to my left did.

Since I had little trust in my rapidly failing memory, I asked my friend sitting next to me who was swearing by Dan Brown's literary genius right through the evening, whether the book was really a cult potboiler. Only on receiving a resounding answer in the affirmative, did I realize the brilliance of Avika Goldman, the screenwriter. Goldman and Howard in a spark of absolute Einsteinerque genius had succeeded in stripping Brown's potboiler of all its suspense or tautness or fast pacedness. To say that the movie crawls would be the understatement of the decade. It doesnt just crawl it drags its fucking boring ass all over Europe till you want to bang your head in despair and scream FOR GOD'S SAKE STOP, PLEASE STOP. SOMEBODY BREAK THE DAMN PROJECTOR PLEASE.

Forget Tom Hanks' miserable hair, forget that banshee faced, thin, shrivelled Paul Bettany (Silas) who for some unexplicable reason spends the bulk of his screen time muttering in an Evil Dead like scary voice May the father forgive me, forget Sir Ian McKellan's SRK-style over the top jamming and hamming (the scene at the end where he starts frothing at the mouth and starts stuttering and screaming and over-acting his ass all over uncle sam land as hes shoved into a cop car would do a KKKKiran muttering SRK proud), even forget those dog-chasing-its-own-tail chase sequences that keep on appearing at a frequency of one every five minutes, what really killed me were those history lessons that both Hanks and Mckellan under Howard's masterful non-direction decided to shove up my ass faster than I can say Pop goes the weasle.

But to every great tale there is a catharsis, and believe it or not even Howard and Hanks' dodo has one too. If you've been having sleepless nights due to whatever reason and even the strongest sleep pills have had no effect on you, then go see the Da Vinci Dodo. Howard and Hanks promises to make you sleep like a cuddly baby for two and a half hours.