Weeks 8-9: Close but no banana

( Story of the season thus far: You lose two, you win five, you lose two more.... )

Just don't make me watch "Polar Express"

Tom Hanks has been pegged to play the lead role in Sony's upcoming film The Da Vinci Code, the adaptation of author Dan Brown's best-selling thriller, Newsweek has learned. Director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer, the duo who helped make Hanks a star with their 1984 comedy Splash and rehired him 11 years later for Apollo 13, cast Hanks as the globe-trotting scholar Robert Langdon, a decision based partially on the cerebral (riddle-solving, code-cracking) nature of the action in "Da Vinci."

I still insist that the best thing Ron Howard's ever touched has been "Arrested Development." Watching it back to back with "Simpsons" reveals just how good "AD" is and how mediocre "Simpsons" has become. ("Simpsons" season premiere moved me to chuckle a few times, but that's it. Not bad, but not at all good. Certainly not as bad as the Martin Sheen episode, but then, that'd take effort.)

ETA: Transcript of my convo with beeform:

Me: "There's going to be a Da Vinci Code movie. Guess who's directing."
Bee: "Dunno."
Me: "Ron Howard. Guess who's the lead."
Bee: "Tom Hanks?"
Me: *stunned silence* "How did you guess that?"
Bee: "You just had this depressed look on your face."

And that equals Tom Hanks. I question not the Bee's wisdom.