DVC smackdown x 2

On Thursday film critic A. O. Scott of the local broadsheet took aim at, as he put it, "Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence," and he gets off a few good ones, which I reproduce here for your amusement. Since director Howard is merely a hack and not an outright disgrace, Mr. Scott's best lines concern neither him nor Tom Hanks's hair ("long, and so is the movie"), but the source material. The screenwriters, he says,

have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.

Later he notes that said albino – neither enormous nor long-haired on the screen – "may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone" (I wouldn't be so sure about that, actually ...). The best line does concern our cast, however:

Through it all Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped.

Also weighing in on this celluloid marvel is the American public, as canvassed by The Onion. Here's Matt Medsker, Dramaturge:

I've been waiting my whole life to hear, 'Oh, no, Jesus ditn't!' shouted in a movie theater. Perhaps now that dream may come true.

So say we all.

P.S. For more about DB's inimitable (Deo volente, he said into his cellphone) prose stylings, check out the posts collected here (scroll down).