Ron Howard makes boring movies
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - 4 Comments
The former child star has done interesting work, but get him behind a camera . . .
Ron Howard wants you to know he’s dedicated his whole career to never offending anyone. When Angels & Demons (opening May 15), his sequel to The Da Vinci Code, got the expected accusations of anti-Catholicism, Howard took to the Huffington Post to write that the new film is just “an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome,” and that it “treats the Church with respect—even a degree of reverence—for its traditions and beliefs.” The way Howard blogs is the way he makes movies; he specializes in taking big budgets, stars and subjects and turning them all into respectful, reverent, and slightly dull movies. He’s almost made an art out of being bland; as he put it in 2006, “I’m the type of person that likes to please everyone.”
Based on comments like that, it would be easy to dismiss Howard as simply another Hollywood middlebrow. And yet the former child star has done some interesting work—just not as a director. As co-founder of the production company Imagine Entertainment, he has his name on some well-regarded television series like 24 and Sports Night. Most famously, he’s one of the producers of Arrested Development, which he also narrated, and will perform both of those functions on the upcoming Arrested Development movie. Apart from being able to spot good material, he has a genuine sense of humour about himself; last year he reprised his characters from The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days in the most famous pro-Obama ad of the election cycle. But put him behind a camera and, except for a few appealing comedies from early in his career (like Splash and Night Shift), he makes films that hit you over the head with pro-social messages, accompanied by heartwarming music, overwrought lighting effects, and lots of sentiment.
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The Second Coming of Dan Brown
By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 2 Comments
A new movie. A new book. Get ready for a new wave of ‘Da Vinci’ fever.
Dan Brown’s back, and in a big way. Six years after The Da Vinci Code took over the bestseller lists, and three years after the Hollywood adaptation became the second-highest-grossing movie of 2006, the film version of Brown’s other novel about Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon arrives in theatres on May 15. More exciting for Brown’s fans—not to mention for a publishing sector almost as hard hit economically as automakers—is the news his long-delayed third Langdon thriller is finally set for release. In September, five million hardcover copies of The Lost Symbol will go on sale, bearing a massive weight of expectation not only for Brown, but for an entire industry. No longer just the guy who popularized the notion that Jesus Christ had a family with Mary Magdalene, Brown is now cast as the Man Who Will Save Publishing. Talk about pressure: the mega-selling Code is a tough enough act to follow, but Brown’s chances of rescuing the book trade are no better than his chances of ruining it.Brown, 44, has been a fairly prolific writer since he switched careers from singer-songwriter in 1994, and The Lost Symbol has probably been ready for years. But neither Brown nor his publisher, Doubleday, had any compelling financial need to jump on their own bandwagon any sooner. Estimates of Brown’s earnings from The Da Vinci Code tend to swirl around the figure of $250 million. The book stayed on bestseller lists for nearly three years, often—in an even more remarkable publishing first—sharing Top-10 listing with its own illustrated version. The total number of copies in print is now a staggering 81 million.
