a Monday May 22, 2006 arts.michigandaily.com artspage@michigandaily.com ATe Simpan~aig 10 I By Imran Syed Daily Arts Writer If you've had your head in the world lately, you'll know that Dan Brown's book "The Da Vinci Code" is, pretends to be or is accused of being a lot of things. But while it may be heret- The Da ical (and certainly is a Vinci Code work of fiction), for all At the Showcase its calculated puzzles and and Quality 16 conniving villains, it's no Caamba literary marvel, simply a tight, fast-paced thriller. This is the one thing Academy Award-win- ning director Ron Howard's ("A Beautiful Mind") new film version is not. So dark the con of man indeed. Howard's adaptation is a classic under- achievement. Here we have beach reading dressed up as a literary epic, lightening- quick narratives bogged down by winding explanations and needlessly elaborate flash- backs, and a fantastically lurid plot mechani- cally and unconvincingly blunted. But while it does fail on many levels, Howard's film is ultimately successful in doing the one thing any summer blockbuster worth its weight in ticket stubs had better do: entertain. Not a moment elapses without tension and every scene goes by engulfed in suspense. A modern-day scavenger hunt of consider- able historical consequence, "The Da Vinci Code" centers on the approximately real- time adventures of Robert Langdon (two- time Academy Award-winner Tom Hanks) and Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou, "Ame- lie"). Langdon is a Harvard "symbologist" who is in Paris to give a lecture on, well, symbols, when he is abruptly intercepted by the French police in connection with a mur- der at the Louvre. Seemingly trapped in the consequence of a crime he had nothing to do with, Langdon is assisted by Neveu, a cryp- tologist with the French police who harbors seemingly endless secrets. As Langdon and Neveau race through the "Seriously Sophie, stop copying me." B REAING D'CDE' WATERED-DOWN STORYLINE AND PASSIVE PLOT MAR ENTERTAINING BLOCKBUSTER character he played and not allowing him- self to be forced into a role already molded. Given that Langdon was a living, breathing character well before the film ever began production, perhaps Hanks wasn't the best choice in the first place, but there's no deny- ing that Goldsman's uninspired, constricting writing failed him. The other characters, played by a superb cast, seem similarly tied down. Tautou is likable, but fails to shine or command. Her relationship with Hanks is all-too artificial, forced to absorb lines like "I've got to get to a library, fast!" As Bishop Aringarosa and Captain Fache, respectively, Alfred Molina and Jean Reno are both strong, but still noth- ing more than storyboard cutouts, rattling off Goldsman's consistently banal and often inconsequential dialogue. But McKellen and Paul Bettany ("Fire- wall") are somehow spared. McKellen uses his special combination of British snobbery and wisdom to create a character at once funny yet introspective, heroic yet cowardly. Perhaps it should be no surprise that he rose above mediocre writing so easily, having been the force that kept Peter Jackson's often-lagging narrative in "The Lord of the Rings" witty and believable. Bettany - who plays Silas, a murderous monk and needless to say, the most bizarre character in the film - gives his role a hint of supreme tragedy, making Silas a vic- tim of the schemes of bigger men, rather than simply a homicidal lunatic. Dan Brown's novel is a social phenom- enon that has brought up questions about the fine line between righteous questioning and heresy and factually based fiction and fact. Howard's film, though it is an entertaining, middle-of-the-road blockbuster, is pressured to shy away from that controversy and often does so by recklessly hacking at the source material rather than carefully trimming around it. It's far from a failure but a disap- pointment all around, bogged down by the urge of everyone involved not to alienate any- one. This is the fate of mainstream films that raise even hints of controversy: the unfortu- nate clash of creativity and reality. 4 4 4 night, solving puzzles the dead man intend- ed them to find, the bizarre murder grows evermore mysterious. Aided by an old Eng- lishman named Sir Leigh Teabing (Sir Ian McKellen, "The Lord of the Rings"), the pair uncover an impossible plot, of which "the greatest coverup in human history" is only the beginning. The film succeeds in creating an air of indiscernible mystery and then of grand revelation, but it does so far more tediously than necessary. The biggest problem seems not to be Howard's often-confused direction or even Hanks's unexpectedly bland perfor- mance, but the utter incoherence of Akiva Goldsman's screenplay. Goldsman - who won an Oscar for "A Beautiful Mind" and also collaborated with Howard on last year's critically acclaimed "Cinderella Man" - appears mortally bound to Brown's words, never taking the initiative to make the film come alive, nor providing the actors the space to do so on their own. Never is this more true than for Lang- don. Hanks's many great performances have always been the result of him defining the I Super group Raconteurs under-achieve on latest A& i By Alexandra Jones Daily Arts Writer When it comes to the Raconteurs, don't believe the hype: Their debut, Bro- The ken Boy Soldiers, isR teu much more than a Jack White vanity Broken Boy project - its explor- Soldiers atory collection of XL styles and narratives shows off a lot more than its most famous member's talents. Guitarists/songwriters Jack White and Brendan Benson teamed up with fellow Detroiters - Greenhornes bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler. Lawrence's expansive bass bumps and Keeler's flawless grooves add a cohesive- ness that many White Stripes aficiona- dos might not know they're missing. But the ensemble's effortless cohesion serves mostly to showcase the continuum of styles. Benson and White push and pull between each other's strengths, coalescing thematic moods and sonic tropes. Although the Raconteurs have a ways to go before their music can grow beyond what's in Benson and White's respective toolkits, this songwriting relationship shows promise. Although it's by no means close in quality, their first release bears a striking parallel to the Beatles's pre-mas- terwork masterwork Revolver. The rela- tionship between the divergent styles of its primary songwriters act as the structural crux of the album - the product of the musical alchemy between the dark,brood- ing iconoclast and the sensitive songsmith brings out something more than either could do on his own. That said, its single - "Steady, As She Goes" - might not have been the best choice to convey that all-for-one feel that the band (White in particular) has stressed in interviews. But it's impossible to approach Broken Boy Soldiers without our knowledge of White and Benson's past songwriting acting as a benchmark for their performance. A great deal f the Raconteurs's appeal lies in their ability to intrigue listeners with their mercurial shifts in mood and texture. The tracks on Broken Boy Soldiers range from White's trademark cathartic crashes to Benson's Beatles-esque harmonies and delicate, muted keyboards that inject shots of energy between darker, aggressive tone and production. Rather than sounding dis- junct, this lineup highlights the contrasts that show up on this stylistic continuum. But all songs are credited "Benson/ White" (another Lennon/McCartney par- allel), and Benson's are some of the most intriguing tracks on Broken Boy Soldiers. The melancholy simplicity of "Together" and "Hands" parallel Paul McCartney's sweetly romantic contributions to Revolv- er; add horns and boost the tempo of "Yellow Sun" and the comparison goes one step further. The bright, smooth har- monies, one suspects, are also primarily Benson's doing, although White's anxious tone clusters still show up. The odd bit about this pairing is that White's hoarse, sometimes shrill singing voice doesn't exactly fade anonymously into the back- ground on tracks where Benson's charm- ing tenor takes the lead. One thing Benson, White, Lawrence and Keeler have in common, apart from their D-town origins, is the simple struc- tures in which they work - complex emotions conveyed in couplets over 4/4 time. They keep that simple structure and binary love-song theme, but one gets the feeling that they're dealing with more grown-up issues here. "Intimate Secre- tary" sneers at privilege ("I've got a girl and she likes to shop / The other footlooks like it won't drop"), and "Call It a Day" quietly acknowledges that some relation- ships are beyond saving. White's recent experimentation on Get Behind Me Satan has shown his poten- tial as a budding musical auteur, and the Raconteurs's melding of differing perso- nas works to show White's promise for future projects. But the album's closer, the diabolical-yet-seductive blues dirge "Blue Veins," doesn't show a compromise of vision or a reliance. on old tropes. White has already proven himself as one of the most dynamic, innovative songwriters of the last decade, but this new group has the ability make its own unique mark. The primary difficulty with Broken Boy Soldiers lies in the fact that, for all the years of preparatory jamming, the album doesn't sound like anything close to the best this , group could turn out. While the band is built around the idea of friends play- ing music together, the Raconteurs might benefit from a more formal vision of their sound and thematic concepts.But whatever they do next, Broken Boy Soldiers has set the bar pretty high.