Culture Surfing

HELP ME, JESUS: Tom Hanks (center) watches his credibility fall in Angels & Demons.

GENRE: Scavenger hunt disguised as a Hollywood thriller

THE PITCH: In Rome, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and young physicist Vittoria Vetra (Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer) race the clock during a papal election, a hostage crisis, and the countdown until a stolen speck of antimatter could wipe out Vatican City.

MONEY SHOTS: A tracking shot inside the Large Hadron Collider echoes one of those zippy through-the-engine shots from The Fast and the Furious. To escape a death trap, Langdon tips a huge bookcase against a shatterproof glass wall like Indiana Jones, with amusingly anticlimactic results. A big scene near the finish involves St. Peter’s Square, a sci-fi explosion, and an unintentionally humorous parachute mishap.

BEST LINE: “Ah, Professor Langdon. What a relief — the symbologist is here,” sneers the Swiss Guard commander (Stellan Skarsgård).

Continue reading “Hollywood Product: Angels & Demons“

(Photo © 2009 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.)

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TOM FOOLERY: Go forth and multiply, Dan Brown.

Did you hear the world stop yesterday, when, for a moment, the moon and the sun were both eclipsed by a giant ray of angels singing “Hallelujah!”, but remixed to sound something akin to Madonna’s “Ray Of Light?”

If you didn’t, then you obviously missed the announcement of what will, in fact, save the sinking ship that is the publishing industry:

Ladies and gentlemen, Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code (you know, the book about Jesus gettin’ it on with Tom Hanks, or something, I don’t know I never read it) finally finished his new novel.

From GalleyCat:

After years of delay and anticipation, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group will release Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” this September with an initial print run of five million copies.
(Emphasis added. Russ note: Folks, that’s a LOT of books. Starving children in Africa will each be able to have their very own first edition first printing.)

The new novel is a follow-up to the “The Da Vinci Code,” the bestselling adventure that sold 81 million copies worldwide.

The novel, which will be available for purchase at your local airport bookstore, grocery store and probably McDonalds on Sept. 15, will likely continue in Brown’s legacy of “speculative thriller” by focusing on the year 2012, “the much ballyhooed Mayan date for the end of the world.”

Already on Twitter, the topic of conversation among publishing industry types is what sort of bookstore tidal wave will be unleashed around the magic 9/15 publication date for the book your uncle won’t be able to stop bothering you to read. As of right now, one of the only authors brave enough to take Brown’s release date on with her own work is Joyce Carol Oates.

That’s a cage match I’d pay good money to see. (My money’d be on Oates. I hear she’s feisty.)

(Photo by Simon Mein/Columbia Pictures)

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