The Da Vinci Code (2006) + Top Gun (1986)

It just drags on and on and on.  “The Da Vinci Code” is an exposition-heavy “thriller” that really will surprise you with its levelness of badness.  We follow yet still another couple on the run from villains who can’t shoot straight and cops slightly less incompetent than the graduates of “Police Academy.”  They run, he explains things, they run, he explains more things.  Every “twist” is obvious 20 minutes before it happens, characters narrate things that we can see for ourselves, and the villain is exactly who you expect he’ll be.  And I’m not using “he” in the gender neutral sense—if you think the one woman in this whole movie is the heavy you’re a cokehead.

I almost started to enjoy myself when the dialogue veered into Ed Wood territory but “Da Vinci” could only maintain that level of absurdity for a couple of minutes.  Every puzzle the hero (Tom Hanks) solves is of such mind-boggling complexity and erudition that we can’t possibly join him in its solution.  He might as well just be saying “reverse the polarity!” every 15 minutes.

Most of this would be forgivable, even laudable, if “The Da Vinci Code” had been filmed correctly, i.e., as giddy pulp nonsense.  Instead, the movie is so ridiculously serious, apparently unaware of the level of sophistication inherent in billion-copy-selling paperbacks written by guys with only two syllables in their names.  I mean, for the love of God, the villain gives one of his henchmen something to drink, and it’s poisoned, and did it occur to no one in the production of this film that something so trite should be played for laughs?  Every performance is uninspired, save Paul Bettany’s murderous albino monk, who seems to have broken in from the parallel universe where “Da Vinci” is treated more like “National Treasure.”

The movie crystallizes the stance of “Church-as-lying-woman-oppressor” pretty well—which 9 out of 10 “-ism” movie critics will relish explaining to you in smug detail—but for all its yakkity-yak about “Sacred Feminine” its one female character (Audrey Tautou) is always having to be rescued by our dashing white boy hero.  “Da Vinci” also portrays agnosticism/skepticism as a colossal lack of imagination:  because most men have wives and children, well, Jesus must have obviously had them too.  It’s only normal!  When people say this, all I can hear is the stunned ejaculations of junior high friends telling me “how can you live without cable?!”  As for Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ wife (a possibility handled much more perceptively in “The Last Temptation of Christ”), we all know the Catholics would never, ever have you do anything even close to venerating a female figure reproductively attached to Jesus, especially not one named Mary.

Saying that Jesus bore a royal bloodline may be romantic and call to mind knights and damsels, but it is also a reactionary step, when we all know Jesus was a liberal (I know because a bumper sticker told me so).  Jesus was a king (of sorts), but—unlike virtually every religious figure before him—he democratized religion by NOT having an heir, because monarchy is stupid, and by throwing open salvation to all peoples, not just the Israelites.  And, you know, maybe he didn’t want a wife and an heir because he didn’t want to divide his loyalties between his family and the crucifix.  Considerate, really.

This lack of imagination is not surprising, considering the movie is the work of the vanilla-bland and regularly unimaginative duo of director Ronnie Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman.  They brought us the snoozer “Cinderella Man” and the conventionally intriguing “A Beautiful Mind.”  To “Da Vinci” they bring lumpy, inert gloss; there is neither humor nor irony nor do they orchestrate any good action sequences.  At best they bring some of novelist Dan Brown’s ideas to the screen cinematically, as grainy flashbacks (admittedly kind of cool), but they are content to have Tom Hanks and Ian McKellan lecture us most of the time.  Yet Opie and Akiva have more Oscars for writing and directing than Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Spike Lee, Brian De Palma, Terry Malick, David Mamet, and Wong Kar-Wai combined.  Maybe Opie needs to go to Emmet’s Fix-It shop to fix Emmet.

At least I got to see the long trailer for “Miami Vice.”  It is looking more and more like the play is gonna call for them to get down.

And now, for no reason, a review of TOP GUN. 

An awful, awful movie, yet at times a beautiful one as well.  The bit with the co-pilot colliding with his canopy after being ejected is as beautiful as it is utterly impossible.  It’s shot almost entirely in silhouette, with a sky streaked with high contrast orange sunlight in the background, a color much beloved by the film’s director.  That man is that wizard of shallow, empty gloss, master hack (Hackmaster?  Whatever) Tony Scott, kid brother of Ridley Scott, who is himself often straddling the line between hack and artist.  Where “Top Gun” succeeds is in exciting aerial footage of take-offs, landings, and dogfights, as fighter jets speed across forbidding landscapes and endless oceans.  Don’t let the Pauline Kaels of the world fool you:  there’s no shame in appreciating the architectural grace and functional beauty of an F14, even if you find the use to which it is put loathsome.

Scott succeeds in making these complex maneuvers largely comprehensible.  Sun light streams across canopies as squinty pilots frantically search the heavens for their adversaries, and toward the end there’s an especially breathtaking shot of an F14 literally swarmed by enemy fighters.  “Top Gun’s” aerial ballets, when they don’t use real Navy jets, are largely practical effects, which, if done well, are almost always more convincing than computer effects.  At least if you’re part of my generation.  The good parts of “Top Gun” deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as “The Right Stuff,” although the rest of the movie is a solid 15 or 20 IQ points lower.

Leave it to Tony Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer to take something as inherently dramatic as flying a $30 million death machine and then shift most of their focus to a stupid love story and a snotty pilot with lame daddy issues who needs to “let go of the past” and “learn to believe in himself” and “write platitudes in quotation marks.”  It’s the same stuff that’s been recycled for the billionth time into the “Harry Potter” films, although without nearly as much tact.  “Top Gun” is from the pens of Jack Epps, Jr. and Jim Cash, whose IMDb credits (“Anaconda,” “The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas”) do not contain a single film that one suspects they had a deep, burning, soul-defining urge to write (although “Dick Tracy” is a fine Hollywood-style clothesline for its visual style).  Our hero goes up into the air, then comes back down and everyone talks about what he did in the air, then they go back up into the air, et cetera.  Some movies feel like journeys; “Top Gun” feels like it goes nowhere.

Perhaps what’s so irritating about Bruckheimer movies is that he’s obviously a smart guy but he thinks we’re very dumb.  He doesn’t seem to think we can sit through an actual movie about fighter jets, which is all anyone remembers or likes about “Top Gun” anyway.  That, and young Tom Cruise does display a whole lot of raw energy.  About the only other actor worth mentioning is the great, perpetually angry character actor James Tolkan, of “Back to the Future” “slacker!” fame, doing what he does best.

And, of course, “Top Gun” is overflowing with all manner of homoeroticism, which has haunted poor Tom to this day, even culminating in his best film, “Eyes Wide Shut,” in which he is accused of being gay by absolute strangers and never given an opportunity to prove his manhood.  “Top Gun” is wall-to-wall pretty boys, covered in sweat, standing half-naked in locker rooms, yelling at each other with their faces inches apart, and exchanging “threatening” looks that are much closer to “come hither stares.”  The only major female role is real-life lesbian Kelly McGillis (“Witness”) and she woos Cruise by dressing like a man and answering to the name “Charlie.”  From the officer yelling out “I want some butts!” to the way Tom Skerrit seems to talk in an enamored, sleepy way every time Tom is around,  I don’t cite the unbelievable amount of gayness, unintentional or otherwise, as one of the film’s weaknesses.  In fact, it—and all the flying—was about the only thing that made “Top Gun” watchable last night.

But when you’re eight-years-old none of this seems to matter.  You can tune out everything besides the airplanes flying after each other and still have a grand old time.  A friend of mine pointed that the real-life Top Gun academy no longer exists.  He also pointed out that it the time between the creation of the Top Gun school and the “Top Gun” movie (1969 – 1986) is briefer than the time between the “Top Gun” movie and the present day (1986 – 2006).  Freaky.