This Christmas break, enhanced by the divine convenience of landing on a Monday and Tuesday, was one of gifts, new media and giving. The most novel gift, given me by my girlfriend’s grandmother, was one of those remote control helicopters. Too small and light for any obviously useful purpose like strapping a camera to it as was my first impulse, one is resigned to simply enjoy flying it. I have been doing just this activity, and as I do I continue to be more amazed at the simplicity of such enjoyment.
I watched three movies over the course of the last weekend. I’ll be discussing all of them here over the next few days. The first to the plate was National Treasure: Another Bad Movie with Nicholas Cage.
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Having watched the original National Treasure only a few weeks before and initially dismissing it as a “poor man’s Di Vinci Code”, for some reason I went in with high hopes for the sequel. I left amazed that a movie with such a budget for special effects spent so little of it on the writing and screenplay. If I watch Transformers and the new National Treasure in the same weekend and find Transformers easier to believe, something is wrong. Now I know that the movie is fiction and based on manufactured stories of treasures and clues and hidden…things, but that basis is not the source of my complaint. The movie asks the readers to believe that a geek can hack, in no perceivable time, the most secure IT infrastructures in both the US and the UK, as well as believe that in England they have no cops patrolling the streets. The enormous amount of damage done to public property during the car chases and break-ins goes unpunished for the hero, nothing more than a rogue historian. The notion that this historian can singlehandedly gain access to, much less kidnap, the president of the United States is laughable. However, all these plot problems aside, in a world where people want to believe in conspiracies and base the believability on the special effects budget and speed of the car chases rather than the evidence and arguments, this movie is bound to be a hit.
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