Figures of Speech Served Fresh

Quote:  “Our salvation depends on Forrest Gump.”  Dana Stevens, Slate’s movie critic.

Figure of Speech:  meiosis (my-O-sis), the shrinking figure.

The paranoid, pretentious, tedious, wildly inaccurate “Da Vinci Code” movie seems to live down to the pretentious, tedious, inaccurate book.

It’s a great gimmick, though.  Jesus was just a regular guy, see — a fact that the Catholic Church has been covering up for centuries.  Tom Hanks and his bad haircut find clues all over the place, including the work of the misnamed “Da Vinci” (Leonardo in real life; no relation to DiCaprio.)

Dana Stevens sums it all up in a meiosis (“shrink”), a figure that re-labels persons or things to belittle them.  The movie wants us to believe that only Tom Hanks’s character can reveal the truth.  But she doesn’t call him by the character’s name, or even by “Tom Hanks”; instead she uses his  goofiest part to heighten the incongruity of an actor granting us our salvation.

Snappy Answer:  “Cool!”