Da Vinci Code

"The Da Vinci Code" failed to hit movie theaters in India as scheduled Friday, as its distributor and the censor board discussed tagging the film with an additional disclaimer to warn it is a work of fiction. Vikramjit Roy, a spokesman for the distributor, Sony Pictures India, said his company had accepted the Indian censor board's decision to allow only adults to watch the movie.

China's official Catholic Church urged its followers to boycott "The Da Vinci Code" on Thursday. The city council in the Philippine capital banned the movie. The Indian censor board cleared the movie without any cuts, but required a disclaimer and insisted that it be shown to adults only. The film, based on the bestselling Dan Brown novel, wasn't expected to generate a wide backlash in Asia, where Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are the dominant faiths.

LIKE THE MEGA-BESTSELLER on which it is based, the film "The Da Vinci Code" is full of word puzzles and ciphers. So we'll couch our reaction to the film, which some Christians are boycotting as a sacrilege, in an anagram of our own: ISOLATE MY VINO. Properly deconstructed, our puzzle stands for this proposition: Director Ron Howard's film, which opens today, is likely to be an anticlimax for both devotees and detractors of Dan Brown's novel.

Hoots of derision. Snickers at a key climactic moment. And early negative reviews. None of it was a deterrent to Andres Steffens, who waited in line at 7 a.m. Wednesday outside the Grand Palais at the Cannes Film Festival to buy advance tickets for "The Da Vinci Code."

At the heart of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" is the Priory of Sion, an organization set up to vigilantly protect "one of the most powerful secrets ever kept." Once Brown's thriller became one of the fastest-selling books of all time, a similar organization -- call it the Priory of Hollywood -- was set up to protect what's as valuable to the movie business as any secret: a property that had the potential for enormous box-office receipts.

An Opus Dei priest is blogging about the "The Da Vinci Code." A cardinal is hinting at lawsuits. Another church official praises the flamboyant plot as a great thriller. Still others worry that generations of Catholics could be ruined by it. Here at the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church, a debate is raging over how to confront the phenomenon that is "The Da Vinci Code," the blockbuster novel that may become a blockbuster movie after its premiere tonight at the Cannes Film Festival.

OSCAR-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman was "startled" when he heard that Vatican cardinals were condemning his next picture, the hotly anticipated film version of "The Da Vinci Code." "Then I was concerned," he muses, "and then I realized that the Vatican doesn't like condoms either, and a lot of people buy those." If the 43-year-old scribe sounds insouciant, he has reason to be. At least 50 million people have read the novel, and awareness of the Ron Howard film, opening in the U.S.

LAST summer, 20,000 more people visited St. Sulpice Church than the summer before. With its northern tower shrouded in scaffolding, the French Baroque church is one of the least inviting houses of worship in the City of Light, so I recently went there to find out the reason for the dramatic increase in visitors. Although the church has an artistic prize -- Eugene Delacroix's "St. Michael Vanquishing the Devil" -- no one seemed interested in seeing it when I visited.

WHEN "The Da Vinci Code" opens Friday in the U.S., one of the first places moviegoers will see is the Louvre, where the story starts. Director Ron Howard was allowed to film in the museum, so moviegoers will see the real thing: architect I.M. Pei's Pyramid, the 1,450-foot Grande Galerie and the Salle des Etats where Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" hangs.