Ron Howard's new movie, Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks as symbologist super sleuth Robert Langdon, is a follow-up to their 2006 piece-of-shit movie The Da Vinci Code, which was based on Dan Brown's bestselling 2003 pice-of-shit novel of the same name. (Angels & Demons is actually based on an earlier novel that Brown published in 2000, which marked the first appearance of the Langdon character.) I couldn't quite follow the thread of The Da Vinci Code, but I think it had something to do with clues hidden in the Mona Lisa that Amélie is Jesus Christ's great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. (I think there was also something about how "the Holy Grail", legendary for being Jesus's favorite thing to drink from, was actually his pet name for Mary Magdalene, but that's so unbelievably filthy that I must have imagined it. We are, after all, talking about a movie made by Opie, starring Forrest Gump.) The new movie reportedly has to do with the return of the Illuminati, which (in Brown's conspiracy-fantasy mythology) was murderously wiped out by the Catholic church some three thousand years ago for being too scientific and artistic and progressive and all. As before, the new movie is being threatened with organized protests from Catholic groups who take offense at seeing their church portrayed as Murder, Inc. with funnier hats. Faced with these complaints, Howard has done what any serious religious history scholar would do: he's gone to the Huffington Post to deliver his Sermon on the Mount.

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First Dumbledore gets outed, and now this: New Line, the studio that brought off the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy but can't seem to get its act together on one measly movie version of The Hobbit, is putting its holiday eggs into one $180-million basket called The Golden Compass, a huge-scale fantasy film based on the first volume in novelist Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The studio that authorized Peter Jackson to go ahead and shoot all of Tolkien's vast saga in one mammoth shoot, to be piece-mealed out to theaters later on an annual basis, is playing it safer this time; though they stand ready to film the rest of Pullman's story if The Golden Compass is a hit, they're going to wait until the box-office returns are in before deciding whether to go ahead with the sequels. The movie is still a serious gamble. For one thing, it marks the solo directing debut of Chris Weitz, who had previously worked with his brother Paul, on comedies (American Pie, About a Boy) nowhere near as expensive and special-effects heavy. Depending on how the movie does, it seems certain to take Weitz's career to a different level, one direction or the other.

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