We couldn’t help ourselves. Watching “Angels & Demons,” we started thinking about all those great American artists who have rendered the ordinary in such luminous light, we never look at reality quite the same again.

We refer to the likes of Norman Rockwell, Ansel Adams, Steven Spielberg and Andy Warhol, whose representations of a kids’ basketball game, the Yosemites, suburbia, or tomato soup cans have forever changed our perspectives on those seemingly commonplace subjects.

So why were we drifting into such lofty reveries when we were supposed to be enjoying Ron Howard’s ecclesiastical thriller?

Because Howard -- consciously or subconsciously -- clearly aspires to being part of this school of endeavor: to render the ordinary, well, extraordinary.

He, too, wants to make us see the familiar in a special light. And secondly...