The Flying Cardinal Punch

Hello all!

I finally had some free time, so I wanted to talk about what is my favorite example of deceptive advertising. It’s from the movie of Angels and Demons. For those of you who don’t know, the process of making a trailer for a film is usually done by a specific agency that does it for a ton of movies. The studios will send them the whole movie, and they choose bits and pieces out to make something that attracts moviegoers. They often will reveal the plot or include scenes that are deleted to make it more interesting. So all in all, you expect a sort of commercialism from them that diverges greatly from artistry.

That leads to what is the greatest example. I call it greatest not because it’s the most misleading (though it is greatly so), but because it’s the most entertaining example I’ve ever seen. My friend, Andy, and I still talk about it to this day.

So here’s a link to the trailer, the interesting part is at 1:44. What I’m talking about is at 1:47 precisely. It looks like a cardinal is taking a candelabra, jumping and performing the infamous ‘flying cardinal punch.’

Now, we had both read the book because we had gone through middle school and high school when the Da Vinci Code was so popular, and we got onto Angels and Demons too. This did not happen in the book! There was no amazing Kung Fu from 90-year-old men (the actor is much younger, however everyone who works in the Vatican must be ancient), though there was the Hassassin (who gets removed from the movie anyway) who did some crazy stuff. So when we went to see the movie, we kept our eyes peeled for the scene. It must be spicy, at least that’s how we reasoned.

Turns out it was just the dude tripping, though the context of that is slightly interesting. The antagonist (as-of-yet unrevealed to be the helper Langdon has) has pointed at the Cardinal in question and yelled ‘illuminatus.’ Apparently, to get someone shot in the Vatican, all you have to do is yell that. 

Anyway, they had made the trailer by completing gutting the context. Color me disappointed. There are few films that do geriatric martial arts right, and it left a sour taste in my mouth.

Have a nice Tuesday,

Ben