iCryptex.com – Welcome to the Cult of Apple
Having just see The DaVinci Code last night w/ the wifee, finding this site in my RSS crawl this morning made me laugh.
This may be the first novel I’ve read since.. well.. since Michael Moorecock’s Elric series, I think. That was easily 10+ years ago, and while I read quite a bit, it’s usually computer science texts. The Mrs. thinks I’m a bit crazy for that, but I find them interesting, where most people’s eyes would likely roll up into their heads before lapsing into a coma.
Having not read the book, I could only probe the wife (heh) for her impressions on how the movie stood up to it, but the criticims I’ve read about the movie’s condensed coverage of the theology and philosophy seem short-sighted. As it stands, the movie was nearly three hours long, and w/o focusing on the human story going on throughout the book, it’d be hard to make a film that didn’t end up feeling like a documentary. The other complaint I’ve heard was that the movie covered too many chapters w/in the opening 10-20 minutes, but it felt really well-done to me, and not at all rushed. I think the real problem is that America’s stupid: they just can’t keep up.
Along the same lines, there was one point at the end where I felt like I was being spoon-fed: w/o spoiling it for anyone, I’ll say that there was a point where the main character’s retracing some steps while the audience hears his thoughts narrated back to them. It came off feeling a little too dumbed-down for my taste, but again, much of America’s pretty stupid. The problem w/ the narration is it’s close proximity to the previous revelation of the information in question. You see, about 30 minutes earlier, the very same words were spoken, and they were quite impactful, and central to the story: I didn’t need them to be read to me again.
Then again, I’m not stupid.
5 Comments
Tony Schieffer
I read the book and found it pretty dull. But then, I have no real religious ideals to challenge, so I didn’t get the full impact.
The book comes off real preachy to me. I found that very annoying. He kept repeating the key theme over and over and over …
I didn’t find the problem solving all that interesting. But then, I thought the book “The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography” was a really great read.
Dork
Huh… wifee said that his writing style’s terrible, but the ideas and the actual story were interesting. The screenplay was decently paced, and as a movie, I thought it was decent.
Fir
You’re not… human?! ;)
Fir
btw, I remember reading another of Michael Moorcock’s series – Corum Jhaelen Irsei, which has ties into the Elric saga in small ways; his worlds seem to overlap a little, something about swiring through the fourth dimension and being able to cross between the worlds when they overlap. Something weird like that anyway. Anyway, those were a little lighter; I’ve found that certainly since I stopped Lin and WoW I went back to enjoying books again. That’s dropped a little now with a gamer gf (hot damn wooooooooooo) but still enjoying having started to pick books up again.
Dork
Ah yes — “The Eternal Champion” is what he called him, iirc. It was a notion of this hero who’s present in all times and places. I tried reading some of his other stories, but they didn’t grab me as much as the Elric series did.