Movie Night: Angels & Demons

With a handful of nights apart on the horizon, the wife and I are off to the movies for Date Night tonight with Angels & Demons on the marquee.

Partially inspired by watching The Da Vinci Code on History TV last weekend and partially inspired by it being the movie showing at the tiny theatre that we now love here in Kimberley, we've both read the book and want to see how it translates to the big screen.

Hopefully, it comes off better than Da Vinci.

While I'm well aware of the old adage that "the book is always better than the movie," the first film adaptation of a Dan Brown novel stumbled on the screen to me and not just because I had issue with Tom Hanks' hair.

Paul Bettany, an actor I really like, as Silas the Albino assassin just didn't work for me. I mean, this the guy who played a down-on-his-luck tennis player in Wimbledon and the eloquent Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight's Tale, neither of which inspired fear of any kind.

And apparently if the film calls for a French cop, Jean Reno has a clause in his contract that universally makes the job his. While I could use that kind of clause in a writing contract in the future, selecting Leon The Professional for the role of Bezu Fache just seemed too easy.

Now, there is the distinct possibility that Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgard could fall into the same fate as the aforementioned Da Vinci duo, but I won't know that until tomorrow.

What I do know is that I enjoyed the paperback version of Angels & Demons more than I liked The Da Vinci Code, so that is a strong starting point.

Other than that, we'll just have to wait and see.