THERE ARE TWO types of Christians: Those who will let us dance and those who won't. Admittedly, much of my theology comes from "Footloose."
So, while some ministers planned protests outside theaters showing "The Da Vinci Code," senior pastor Ken Baugh of Coast Hills Community Church in Orange County appeared on the "Today" show to encourage people to investigate the movie's claims themselves. When I found out he was considering giving congregants tickets and Starbucks gift cards so they could bring a non-church-going friend to discuss the film, I immediately thought: free nonfat venti chai.
Not only was Baugh willing to see the movie with me on Friday, he mailed me one of the 352 free iPod Shuffles he packed with his eight-part sermon about the inaccuracies in Dan Brown's bestselling book. It was the yuppie version of missionaries bribing their way into Africa.
At the Edwards Aliso Viejo Stadium 20, Baugh and I got huge sodas and buckets of popcorn and scored two of the few remaining seats at the 3:30 p.m. show. In case you ever happen to be in a similar situation, you should know that Baugh is a bit of a talker during a movie. He leaned over not just to correct historical inaccuracies but to tell me that Ian McKellen was a good actor, that the poison put into a flask was "some bad whiskey" and that he'd like to walk around Paris and take digital photos.
When we got to Starbucks after the movie, I learned that even though I'm a Jewish atheist, Baugh and I didn't think all that differently. We both found the movie slow, Hanks miscast and Audrey Tautou hard to understand. Baugh found the cinematography "great," while I thought the grainy, black-and-white flashbacks were a little overused by Ron Howard, and eventually Baugh agreed. "He does need to get a little more creative with that," Baugh said.
Our conversation was far more interesting than the movie. This was undoubtedly because we were hopped up on giant Cokes and venti caffeinated beverages. We easily could have spent the hour in a raving ontological debate about Robin Williams' movie "RV."
It took Baugh only a few minutes to convince me that Brown's conspiracy theory was bunk because I was already disinclined to believe someone who tried to impress me by having a professor of "symbology" riddle out the tricky Fibonacci sequence. And who also tried to convince me that the Holy Grail was a vagina. (I'd dispelled that one by the end of high school.)
