Audrey Tautou

Brace Yourselves! Holy Grail Is...

Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks in <i>The Da Vinci Code</i>.
Simon Mein
Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code.

What’s wrong with The Da Vinci Code can be summed up in one word: everything!  read more »

Brace Yourselves! Holy Grail Is...

What’s wrong with The Da Vinci Code can be summed up in one word: everything!Catholics scream “H  read more »

The Da Vinci Code: What's That on Her Neck?

I saw The DaVinci Code last night with a friend, a lapsed Catholic, after two other friends, also lapsed Catholics, raved about it. Even a lapsed Jew like me knows that this movie will be poison at the confession box. It's like the idea I discovered in college, that I didn't have to marry a Jew—an idea that did a number on my natal faith.

Again, I'd quarrel with anyone who says this film is antireligious. It's pro-religious. Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou (What's that on her neck?) both seek spiritual knowledge. They want to know who and where the Holy Grail is, and they find out in the transcendent ending. Hanks is a lapsed Catholic but he believes in God. So does Audrey Tautou. It's just that their God is the one that Joan Osborne sang about in the anti-Catholic hit of 8 years back or so: "What if God was one of us?" God is in all of us, we just have to figure out where he/she/it is. The movie's over when Hanks understands that his belief is in This-thing-that-is-larger-than-him-but-also-in-him that he prayed to when he was trying to survive as a little boy in the well, and when Audrey Tautou accepts the blasphemous idea that she's a descendant of Jesus.  read more »

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Four Hairdressers in Heat; Remembering Vincent Canby

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