Movie Critic Article: The Wrong Pussy

I am good!
I only saw one movie based on a Dan Brown novel!
It was Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code.
So, I don’t have to share in the many quibbles in internet forums about movies based on Dan Brown’s novels.
But I will try here to argue that the campaign to induct a new hero into pop culture is doomed.
The attempt at popularizing Robert Langdon* which became obvious after the success of the aforementioned movie is fraught with slightness in regards to the concept of heroism. 
Let me hasten to state that I believe heroism is still pertinent to cinematic interpretations despite its demise in literature.

Sean Connery

Robert Langdon has also been allocated an official website. You would be visiting a web site that belongs to a Harvard professor who in fact does not exist if the notion did not sound nonsensical to me! 
The idea of a James Bond parallel serialized out of Harvard university is definitely uninteresting as the traits, attributes, patterns and even props attached to such a personality are typically unpopular. 
A registrar of boredom or pedantic existential rantings would not be quite marketable.
To begin with,there is something very noticeable about Tom Hanks’ portrayal of this would-be movie hero Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code. Hanks portrayed Langdon as a worn-out disinterested (hero)! He must have been mislead into this by Brown’s characterization of his novel’s protagonist. Brown has followed a faulty path in introducing Langdon as a new entry in the list that includes James Bond, Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, etc. . Cinema heroes!

Dan Brown

We, viewers, are not accustomed to accept a person with stark descriptors of a medical condition as a hero! Fact!
For a hero is a hero! And also an anti-hero is at least an archetype and thus I treat him almost similarly! You don’t reveal their illnesses and expect people to admire them! When we saw Rambo we did not think of him as sick!
Robert Langdon is a professor! I am OK with that. Actually a professor who has to encounter villains looks like an interesting character to create; but the novelist, who apparently crafted his novels to become movies before they are well-seated as novels, decided on an unfortunate course; Langdon, from early on, is strait-jacketed in symptoms that do not become a hero! He is tired and agoraphobic! Which puts Dan Brown at variance with the literary norm of how a character should be presented to the reader. He also appears to have done little in ways of research by taking lightly certain symptoms such as agoraphobia and thus failing to acknowledge that it does not exist apart from other more incapacitating manifestations of illness. That an agoraphobic is more likely to have other disabling phobias. In fact, agoraphobia is diagnostic of panic disorder! So why was it necessary to highlight Langdon's psychological deficiencies? Would that not 'flatten' the character or make it nonabstracted? 
What kind of hero is that?
Phobias reduce all kinds of bold attempts such as.... acting heroically! A person who has phobias and yet is adored by the description of hero must be a rare breed or remain unheard of. What about panic attacks? A very probable situation! We end up having a person who actually should be exempt from any actions requiring any kind of courage, dexterity or exactness!

Phobic Prof.

Imagine James Bond stopping at the door of an elevator while pursuing a villain just because he is afraid to travel in a closed structure. Or Bond waiving the idea of a fruitful chase just because the villain can reach the roof of a twenty-story building where a helicopter is coming to clear him from Bond’s threat because Bond is afraid of heights!
Yet, there has got to be a new trend of replacing heroes by new hero-makers who want to draw attention to themselves by enforcing a new definition for hero or assigning a vague new meaning to the everlasting concept.

Ian Fleming on introducing James Bond, “ruthlessly edited everything that might distract or confuse the reader, everything that did not have a plot purpose.”All we know about Bond on inception was that he is suave, sophisticated and capable. Fleming copied the examples of real people he worked with him in real life when he was crafting his epic protagonist. It was seen to it by the author that Bond must be a curt and focused professional. Here is how Fleming puts it: "..I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull,uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument...when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, James Bond is the dullest name I ever heard." Bond wanted to remain alert most of the time. He smoked heavily and mixed liquors in scary proportions and even took stimulants. At one time he 'died' for a short while and then came to! Bond is totally stylized in dressing and propped up with gadgets, some of which are plain fantastic. I only remember the Mickey Mouse watch worn by Robert Langdon with a kind of pity! It is pretty hard to prop up a professor!

Sam Mendes’ rendition of the James Bond character in his latest successful movie SkyFall (2012, One billion dollar returns so far), saddens any fan of James Bond. The Oscar-winning director (American Beauty, The Road to Perdition) portrays Bond as an old burnt-out drunk, as the prototype of an eroded filmic formula of suspense and fantasy. Yet he borrowed the essence of this filmic formula in some spectacular scenes he made without rethinking a timeless, ageless Bond.
There is no future for newer Bond movies if too realistic movie-makers want to show him as an “overweight physical wreck of a man who has spent the last six months in an airport transit lounge tracking down a CIA whistleblower!”

Ian Fleming

The following fun piece is borrowed from a web site: 
"Specifically, how would Langdon fare in an imaginary — though geektastically awesome — fight involving Indiana Jones, James Bond and Sherlock Holmes? "I'd outsmart them," Hanks told MTV News while promoting the film in Rome. "I would utilize my knowledge of symbols in a way that would get them thinking I'm going to do something."

Doesn't sound terribly intimidating, or badass in the slightest, but Hanks reminds us what type of hero Langdon truly is. "He's not big on fistfights. Robert Langdon does not punch a guy out — he may run and try to do something. As a matter of fact, I believe he got punched out in the last movie. He got knocked cold. [Silas, the character played by] Paul Bettany sprung out of nowhere in a monk's robe and coldcocked Robert Langdon so much that it bonked his head against a bunch of library books and he was out, while the girl went and saved the day?"

A Langdon shirt

"You know what I would do? I would let Indiana Jones and James Bond duke it out first, so one guy is going to be taken care of just like that. Then Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones would go at it, and Sherlock Holmes would outsmart Indiana Jones. So it'd just be me and Sherlock Holmes, and we would sit there and play chess. The winner would walk away the living, breathing survivor."
Read More Here

• Daniel Craig looks Russian. Any metaphor here? Oh, he also remotely reminds me of the late Steve McQueen
• First Bond novel was Casino Royale.
• First Bond movie was Dr. No.
• The DaVinci Code grossed $758 million as of year 2009.
• Tom Hanks earned $25 million from The Da Vinci Code.

---------------

* "Robert Langdon is a fictional professor of religious iconology and symbology at Harvard University who appeared in the Dan Brown novels Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code.He is scheduled to be the lead character in an upcoming third novel entitled The Lost Symbol. Defined by Maureen Johnson" Read more from her Here


/