Leaving my (old) job and the DaVinci Code

So a couple things of "interest" happened in my otherwise pretty mundane life today. For reasons that I won't be particularly explicit about here, (this is the Internet for Christ sakes) I recently, i.e. about three months ago, broke my contract with the cram school I worked at and went to work for another. However, in order to sort of fulfill the letter if not the spirit of my contract, I still taught one class at my previous school. I.e. the girlfriend Ken and Jerry class. Mostly it was because it was a class that I enjoyed a lot. However, due to a lot of unpleasantness, if you really want to know this you can e-mail me, I can provide you with many details that probably aren't all that interesting to people who don't know me. Anyway that's all finished now very suddenly. I taught them today but my boss at my school talked to my boss at my old school, and now I'm not going back next week. I'm really going to miss some of the kids there, but at the same time, I hate the school so much that I'm also relieved that I won't be going back.

Today I also saw the Da Vinci Code. What struck me most about this highly anticipated movie was that it was a lot like a movie that came out a while ago, National Treasure. However unlike the movie National Treasure, the Da Vinci Code was supposed to have some sort of intellectual content that was controversial. Most of my problem is that I am a grumpy person. The grumpy negative person in me says, "Woo, so Jesus had a wife. Big fucking deal." This isn't really fair because for reasons that I can't remember I was once interested and even read some of the Apocrypha that they talk about as well as the Gnostic texts that they talk about in the movie, so the concept was not entirely new to me.

There were a couple things that I found very interesting about the movie though although I'm guessing they probably aren't really intentional. The movie's premise and possibly the book's premise, although I haven't read it, seems to be that the characters want to reveal the hidden female side of the church and the Christian faith. However, I would hardly characterize this film as one that empowers women. In fact, for a movie that is supposedly about revealing the hidden female truth, it is a pretty male-centric movie. Despite the fact that Mary Magdelene is supposedly the heir to the Christian faith, she relies on and is protected by a bunch of male knights. And it is the male knights that the film focuses on. All of the female characters in the film, which is actually a grand total of one really, are actually symbols for the truth, passively containing the truth or some secret blood which wait for the male researcher or knight or whatever to uncover it. Honestly, I thought the whole God-female thing was more interestingly and originally covered in Kevin Smith's Dogma.

This may also be controversial, but what are the odds that the last descendant, which in and of itself is kind of unlikely, of Jesus Christ would be French? And also not Jewish? It seemed like the movie was also sort of getting around the whole inconvenient part of Jesus. Jesus was a man sure, but he was also a Middle Eastern possibly Arabic Jewish man. And let's be honest with ourselves. If Jesus took a plane in American right now, he'd be "randomly searched" about 15 times on his way to the gate. Instead, Jesus's descendant in the movie is Amelie. Somehow to me this seems a little off.