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News and Views
The Da Vinci Code film has grossed over $780 million worldwide since its release in May 2006. Will the Angels & Demons film do just as well? We're skeptical.
Meantime, The Da Vinci Code book has sold more than 40 million copies and topped bestseller lists around the world. It also ranks #3 on the USA Today list of bestsellers of the last 15 years--right after Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Robert C. Atkins' New Diet Revolution.
Vatican plots battle with Dan Brown over Da Vinci Code sequel
Richard Owen, correspondent for The Times of London reports:
It was described as a “phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions”, a “masonic plot” and a “pot pourri of lies”. Now a nervous Vatican is braced for the sequel to The Da Vinci Code and the return of its nemesis, Dan Brown.
Angels & Demons is the latest Brown thriller to be turned into a film, and already the Catholic Church is agonizing over how best to respond: to urge the faithful to boycott the film, or to ignore it? The Vatican and the Italian Catholic Church condemned The Da Vinci Code in its book and film version, but some church officials argued that the campaign against it merely boosted the public’s curiosity by giving it the “oxygen of publicity”.
The plot of Angels & Demons has all the ingredients to worry the cardinals: a sinister elite known as the Illuminati wants to destroy the Vatican using an antimatter bomb made with material stolen from the physics experiment at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland.
The film is to be released in Italy on May 13 and in Britain a day later, as Pope Benedict XVI finishes his tour of the Holy Land. A strong reaction is more likely because the anti-Da Vinci campaign was led by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, then Archbishop of Genoa and now the Vatican’s Secretary of State – and as such the Pope’s right-hand man. Gianni Gennari, a leading theologian and a columnist for Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops, called on Catholics to boycott Angels & Demons, accusing the film-makers of “exploiting the Church to swell takings at the box office”. He said the film was part of a plot to undermine the credibility of the Church.
Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, the head of the Vatican’s Prefecture for Economic Affairs, said that to dramatize the faults of the film would be a “publicity gift” to the film-makers. “We should not play these people at their own game,” he told La Stampa.... Father Marco Fibbi, spokesman for the Diocese of Rome, said: “Normally we read the script but this time it was not necessary; the name Dan Brown was enough.”
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5962971.ece
Tom Hanks already has his star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. As for the Oscars, he’s been there, done that. So what’s next? Pushing a big red button that makes things go bang. Possibly a rather big bang.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, is home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), through which physicists hope to better understand the origins of the universe by colliding opposing particle beams in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference and up to 570 feet deep under the Franco-Swiss border.
In Angels & Demons, CERN is also the site for the grisly murder of scientist Leonardo Vetra and the theft of the anti-matter to be used to blow up the Vatican.
But fictional concerns pale in comparison to CERN’s real headache: just nine days after the Collider had started to successfully circulate proton beams in its main ring in September 2008, there was a major equipment malfunction and it crashed. Repairs have been slow and costly: it will take scientists at least until September 2009, to get the LHC ready for its restart.
And the person "pushing the button" to do so will be none other than Tom Hanks.
It is nice to think that Hanks will generate some positive publicity for CERN’s new toy after all the problems associated with it--especially the huge price tag. It would also leave the scientists alone to go back to their studies of the Big Bang, uninterrupted by the Camerlengo, Robert Langdon, or any other angels and demons.
CERN, by the way, is also the source for the creation of a “big bang” in the world of technology. Its most renowned alumn, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the World Wide Web there in 1990.
Based loosely on a posting by Andrew Zimmerman Jones on About.com Guide to Physics, http://physics.about.com/b/2009/02/19/