Let's see, here's Tom Hanks...

... a brilliant actor with a brilliant mastery of his craft which he uses to specialize in mediocre vehicles that will gross huge amounts, enabling him to get up there on the throne to be linked with Steven Spielberg, yet another brilliant master of technical production values who ALSO limits his masterful craft to ideas that are mediocre enough to warrant HUGE grosses...

Two people whose talents are prodigious -- as long as they're in the warm and human, tell us what we already know but want to hear told to us in a different story.

So now it's Angels and Demons filming the SECOND blockbuster (after The Da Vinci Code) by Dan Brown, a super-best-selling author whose writing is so appalling as to instill wonder in readers who have read actual literature (to say nothing of those who had read his surprise-ending plots several decades ago in Baigent and Lee's books -- Holy Blood, Holy Grail, etc)

BUT -- in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, "Nonetheless..." the point I'd like to make is that the TV ads for the new movie talks about the secret society whose members were cruelly massacred by the Holy Roman Church centuries ago and now "they're back for revenge."

And each time we see him mouth those words, I think: "Yeah, so don't they deserve it? Cruelly massacred? Maybe the Church has it coming as the Pope's chickens come home to roost."

We're raised on movies about comebacks after being cruelly defeated -- Pearl harbor, Rocky, et al -- so it seems to me that "The Revenge of the Illuminati" should be popular a topic as "The Revenge of the Jedi" (renamed before release as "The Return of the Jedi" since Mr Lucas -- no slacker at mediocrity himself -- realized that Jedi would never seek revenge. Not part of their code.) Perhaps calling this "The Return of the Illuminati" might make it clear why so many people will be cheering for the Illuminati to throw down on the Vatican.

But then, where money is concerned, as William Blake put it centuries before moving pictures were invented: "Where there is a view to money, art can not exist but war only."

And motion pictures are an industry where, as John Osborne observed: "People who have a facility for making money seem to think that qualifies them to make creative decisions."

SO, we're all out here saying (even though we know the substandard script won't go that way:)

GO ILLUMINATI, GO!
Bishops, Cardinals, Priests and Popes --
look over your shoulders cuz payback time is here.


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