I have just been browsing Stagger's excellent and hilarious blog Cold Goat Eyes [life in Taiwan and other things] and I've just found an article in which he gives his views on Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code.

True to form, he doesn't shirk from controversy:

Taken from: http://coldgoateyes.blogspot.com/

There was a time, not so long ago, that the popularity of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was so pervasive that it seemed every commuter on London's tube system was reading a copy. This kind of vast omniprescence has always repelled me, and I suspect there is a part of me that is a raving snob, because any novel enjoyed by the great stinking unwashed masses must surely hold no intellectual or artistic value whatsoever. Last week a friend lent me a copy of this book and, for reasons of which I am not fully certain, I read it.
It is, of course, absolute trash. Nothing in this book did anything to abolish my prejudice and I cannot, for the life of me, imagine why this piece of literary junk-food has attracted the kind of praise and adoration that has been heaped upon it by otherwise respectable authors and reviewers alike. Full of banal, trite cliches and cheap description, it tells the pulp story of a symbologist and a quest for the 'Holy Grail', which (in a revalation that is neither original nor particularly meaningful) is not some kind of chalice at all, but a bloodline that can be traced from Jesus Christ and his wife (Mary Magdalene), through the French aristocracy and the Meringovians to a present day Family living in Scotland.
While I applaud anything that upsets the institution of the church, this book is just horrible. A psuedo-intellectual chase thriller written in the same vein as Stephen King horror novels, Brown repeatedly uses italics for no apparent reason, introduces convoluted plot devices that stick out like a sore thumb and, time after time, employs the same expressions and phrases (I actually lost count of the times character x 'gunned' the car).
And now, god help us, some ****ing idiot made a movie based on it. This movie will be utter crap, I promise you. How can it not? First, it is a movie of the book. Second, it is directed by sycophantic 'johnboy' Ron Howard, ubergeek, and third, it stars Tom 'forest gump' Hanks as the protagonist. How can this movie be ANYTHING other than complete garbage?

But, I am going to see it when it opens. Why? Well, just because I want to see how diluted the Hollywood message will be for the American cinema audience. In the novel, to give it credit, the Christian church is lambasted on a number of fronts for being a mysogonistic, lying, murderous bunch of criminals who would stop at nothing to protect the 'truth' (that is, the truth that Jesus Christ was not the divine son of god, but just a charismatic leader who liked chicks).
I am interested to see Hollywood interpretation.