National Treasure: Book of Secrets

National Treasure: Book of Secrets
a movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 4/10

If you go into National Treasure or the sequel National Treasure: Book of Secrets with the understanding that it is an action movie and the plot was never intended to make sense, you are likely to be averagely pleased with the experience. You’d never go into a toilet-level comedy expecting great dramatic acting or intelligent reactions from the characters— the idea is that the people in those movies are as butt-stupid as people can be while still standing upright. The National Treasure movies purport to be about really smart people who have treasure hunting adventures, but for the most part, they make bizarre leaps of logic and there is zero rationale for their behavior. The characters are smart because the writers said they were smart, not because we can see it.

I watched the sequel telling myself that it was going to be dumbed down for the average pre-teen to enjoy. There couldn’t be any real science in it. There couldn’t be any real philosophy. There couldn’t be real relationships. So there would be action and violence and mediocre efforts from actors who know that any good work will spoil the mood.

Even with that understanding, this was worse than I expected. The plot is ludicrous. It didn’t make sense and it makes smart people look like they have no loyalty or sense of fair play. The acting is actually worse than in the original. The conspiracy theory crud this is centered around is much weaker than the first movie. But the worst part is how the plot moves forward— there is a scene where an inscription is translated from French by random policemen on the street in Paris. They go from “the determined twins” to “resolute twins”. Because that exact word was chosen, the main character makes this leap to the HMS Resolute, from which desks for the Queen of England and the President of the United States were made. But I cannot name a single person who would have chosen “resolute” as a synonym for determined. I’m pretty sure if I asked a dozen people on the street, 11 of them couldn’t tell you what “resolute” means. It’s not common enough that a policeman’s translation would ever have come up with it.

I was also really disturbed by the movie showing a break-in and theft at Buckingham Palace being something that they’re not at all bothered to be doing, but breaking into the Oval Office is horrifying. The room the desk was in in Buckingham Palace was also an oval, but no one drew any sort of connection between them. It’s like they didn’t think England was a real sovereign country where that kind of behavior wouldn’t cause an international incident if they’d been caught. It was completely shocking, but not in an entertaining way.

There was one part of the movie I found really interesting, it’s when the main character talks about why he admires Abraham Lincoln, he said that before Lincoln, people said, “The United States are….” and after Lincoln they said, “The United States is….” He credits Lincoln with making us a single nation in everyone’s eyes. I really think that was an interesting discussion topic. Personally I think Lincoln was kind of horrible— he suspended the rights of all Americans because we were “at war”. He undermined Congress and the Supreme Court because they didn’t agree with him. His insistence on sudden emancipation destroyed the economies of a dozen states and the war reparations severely undermined the infrastructure and economic investment for those states. On one hand, we have an on-going atrocity that no one involved has any interest in stopping. On the other hand, war wasn’t the right answer. And certainly stripping everyone else of their rights in order to fight the war was hugely immoral. But the way we forgot to treat the losing states as part of our country after they lost did not help. It took another hundred years before we started enforcing legislation saying people who looked like former slaves were actually fully human. So it’s not like the Civil War really improved anything. If we’d skipped the war and spent the next 100 years fixing the Southern economies and changing how things worked, it would have been more effective and cheaper. So in my mind Lincoln was a fool and stirred up a ruckus for no real reason except he needed to be remembered.

I think I disliked this movie somewhat because it glorifies a President whose ego was already the size of Mount Rushmore.

I did not particularly like this movie, though it was somewhat amusing in parts. It can’t be any worse than a Will Farrell movie.

21

21
a docudrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Honestly, 21 is the kind of movie that I know I am going to love. It’s a movie about smart people who make good despite the way the world is slanted toward the extroverted morons. I believe that’s possibly fair in terms of “leveling the playing field” because anyone who needs to flap their mouth to air-cool their brain since it only runs in low gear probably needs for technical, loner-centric jobs to require 4+ hour marathon interviews lest they be stuck in reception their whole careers. But being one of those smart and introverted people who finds small talk pointless or even irritating, I find it difficult to get the right job through networking.

However, movies about smart people doing well in life tend to offend the masses who prefer homogeneity. I also like superhero movies and just about any kind of fish-out-of-water story. Most people think those are fairy tales for children.

That said, I thought 21 could have been a lot more interesting. I didn’t feel like the main character was someone who made the right life choices. Why does he want to be a doctor? Why if he wants to be a doctor does he need to go to Harvard Med? There are cheaper options. Why does he need a pretty blonde girlfriend? I’m sure there are a number of girls in Boston, probably even a number of girls at MIT— as far as I could tell, he was only interested in that girl because she was unobtainable. It seemed like he treated the people in his life badly through this endeavor— people who loved him and knew him and who would have been able to see the inherent problems before the drama hit.

There were a number of points in the movie where I wanted to throw things at the screen because as an actual adult, I know you don’t practice security-through-obscurity and expect it to work. If he could have talked to his mother instead of dodging her, she’d have told him to get a safety deposit box just like I would.

The movie is told via flashback and that was unnecessary and completely blows the element of surprise.

Without the epilogue, I’d have really hated this movie. With the epilogue, I liked it. I doubt regular people will like it at all.

Summary of the Partially Experienced

Summary post to cover things I mentioned on the to-be-reviewed page but which later went away:

The new BBC Robin Hood, was one of those disasters, it had really really bad makeup (half the women were in period (no) makeup, the other half had eye-liner a la Cleopatra), there was a giant gaping plot hole because they couldn’t be bothered to explain why Robin didn’t kill the Sheriff. It was pretty and tolerably acted, so I got another disc and Robin still doesn’t kill the Sheriff nor does he explain why the helpful guy standing next to him couldn’t do it. Clearly the reason Robin doesn’t kill the Sheriff is because that actor has a better contract.

Dante’s Cove. Well, it did say “GLBT” in addition to paranormal. It didn’t say that the minimal plot they had was horror, nor did it say that it was explicit. It could have been tolerable, but I don’t watch horror and I prefer my on-screen sex scenes to have more justification than songs in musicals.

The Lost Room. Claims to be science fiction, is actually horror. I’m not sure why no one in the media can tell the difference. I never watch horror, but I would read sff exclusively if there were enough new books.

The 10th Kingdom— 20 minutes of content spread out over several discs filled with cheesy costumes, stupid acting, bad writing, pseudo-comedy, and it was really not worth watching. It’s set in New York, has a similar plot to Enchanted (which didn’t play up the NYC angle so much because they didn’t have 4 extra DVDs to fill) and had that guy from Night Court (the sleezy one) who wished for ass-kissing and got it. That was a big part of the first disc. It went back with me having scooted through it on fast forward, just cringing at the subtitles and what they indicated was going on. It was bad when it took 20 minutes. I can’t imagine sitting through 8 hours of it.

I also watched 2 Cadfaels on DVD because PBS hasn’t bothered to show them in 3 years. The Rose Rent was good. I enjoyed that and found the DVD’s subtitles were extremely helpful. I wish that TV programs would have canned subtitles available (and don’t tell me about Close Captioning, that’s input by stoned lemurs with hemorroids.) The Raven in the Foregate was awful— I have some expectation that Cadfael shows are going to be a little churchy, but Cadfael himself doesn’t seem so dogmatic as he did in this one. Raven was the first Cadfael that reminded me this is the same church that spreads hatred in our own time. The subtitles were done in balloon letters on Raven too, they were extremely intrusive and annoying.

As an additional note, I do not enjoy reviewing books. I prefer reading to movie watching, but writing the book reviews is hard. I know one person did all the creative work and unless it’s really egregiously awful, I’m not sure my opinion is valid. Books are a lot more about what you yourself bring to them in terms of imagination and baggage. There have been books I thought were glorious because I read them at exactly the right point in my life, but upon re-reading I wonder where the rest of the story went since I’d had such a richer experience the first time. I also have problems reviewing books because nothing I’ve been reading has really been awesome. But any sff reading is still better than non-genre reading (to me). I’m just disappointed because so many authors can’t be bothered to actually edit their work. It’s not just typos or common grammatical mistakes (which should be caught by a copyeditor) but tentacular prose that seems to go in all directions at once and doesn’t focus on what will tell the story. I’ve read books that were really well done from a technical standpoint like, Truman Capote’s Breakfast At Tiffany’s or Matthew Stover’s Blade of Tyshalle, but neither one had a really amazing story for the story’s sake. I want books to have that kind of attention, but be the happy-ending intellectually-driven story I want to read.

I don’t watch a DVD expecting it’s going to be both a great film and a great movie (Those are at cross-purposes in the industry.) but that’s exactly what I want from a book. I enjoyed the Southern Vampire series, for example, but someone should have actually crafted the books to highlight the story (and got rid of the boring dreck that is irrelevant, like how every book talks about pine pollen.) You can see this in my opinions about almost every series, I like the first book because the author gets the benefit of the doubt and I include all the directions it could go in my own imagination as if they were part of the book. In the second book, the author crosses off some opportunities which would be interesting and the quality is lower because of the contract pressures. In the third book, the author was clearly grinding it out in between stops on a book tour and wondering if she’s ever going to have clean socks again— so it’s usually about something boring and lame. If you ask me what’s wrong with the publishing industy, I think it’s because they want everything to be a series and the editing and polishing and detail work is spread out over three books when that much work was needed on the first one.

Enchanted

Enchanted
a fairy tale movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +0
Apparent Rating: 5/10

I kind of enjoyed Enchanted. Except I hated the supposedly good characters and was therefore bored enough to be doing something else while watching. Even with my hands busy and my brain distracted, I noticed enormous glaring plotholes. A huge part of the premise of the movie is that “fairy tales can come true” but the writing seems to indicate that fairy tales are idiotic and non-sensical.

In many ways, what made this movie worth watching is how the elements of fairy tales are satirized with a completely straight face. It definitely is a comedy, but only if you are well-versed in Disneyfied fairy tales. For example, the Princess sings a non-verbal melody and all the little woodland creatures come to help her. When the Princess is in New York City, all the little creatures come to help her because of the power of her voice. That is a dark magic, compulsion, and it’s illustrated by having cockroaches climb out of the tub drain and eat mildew. Most of the romantic fairy tale elements are shown in a slightly twisted kind of way. The writers were clearly poking fun at fantasy.

In that way it reminds me of the Amanda Bynes movie, Sydney White. Since Enchanted borrows from several fairy tales, it works as a parody of the genre quite well. (Sydney White was a modern remake of Snow White, without really drawing that connection for viewers.) In a number of scenes, Enchanted reminded me of the one Bollywood movie I watched (loathsome! unmentionably loathsome) because of the musical nature.

One caveat for the movie is its combined nature, the first segment is animated, then the animated Princess is exiled to real world New York City and shows up looking like a stoned idiot. The Princess is saved because the guy’s daughter believes in fairy tales and makes him help her. Normally when children are used as plot devices, it is about an unwanted pregnancy or a demonstration of the evil nature of the villain. So that was intriguing, but only in an intellectual way. The actress playing the daughter is not the next Dakota Fanning.

The whole movie is mediocre if you watch it straight up, if you watch it as a tongue-in-cheek satire of a genre, it’s rather amusing in an annoying way. But those aims work at cross-purposes. It is impossible to suspend disbelief while the movie is laughing at itself. It is impossible to tolerate the common plot elements from fairy tales as portrayed without it.

I think it could have been a decent fantasy drama. I think it could have been a decent comedy (though it would have seemed like a Shrek rip-off in many ways.) What it ended up being was mediocre.

M*A*S*H

M*A*S*H
a movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 8/10
Meets Expectations: +0
Apparent Rating: 8/10

I had never seen the movie version of M*A*S*H, just the series on TV. I was really surprised by how similar the tone of the show really was. In many ways, I liked the movie better, because there was a lot less filler.

Overall, the movie (shown on TV in 2.5 hours, but it did not seem savagely cut (look-up says 116 minutes, which jives with the minimal commercial feeling)) was like having the Cliff Notes version of 10 seasons of the show. I was impressed. Some of the things in the show which hadn’t made a lot of sense were clear here, things like why Houlihan was called “Hot Lips” and why they used that theme song (even just the instrumental version).

I think I might have given this an even higher rating if it had been better lit. It was often difficult to see expressions and to differentiate between characters who were often shown from the back or side and are all dressed alike. It would have been improved by subtitles as well, but those are not available on the DVD.

It was funny. It was well-acted and extremely well-written. The scenery was good (far better than in the show, really) and the direction was excellent. Double plus for content and presentation (aside from underlighting), which is astonishing for a nearly 40-year-old movie. This really is (or should be) a classic movie.

27 Dresses

27 Dresses
a romantic comedy movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 7/10

27 Dresses was one of the better romantic comedies I have seen in a while. (For overall romance, I preferred P.S. I Love You, but since it was about a widow, it lost something in the comedy arena.) What I liked best about the 27 Dresses is that it was not about the dresses or about the way this woman kept bending over backward to help everyone else. The movie was about how she kept going on the way things were until there was a breaking point.

The breaking point was very reasonable to me and her reactions, though excessive to anyone who hadn’t seen the whole list of woes lined up, were reasonable and non-vicious. But I really enjoyed how everyone around her looked at her reactions to events as if she were completely insane.

My favorite part is how one potential love interest was eliminated from the running. I have seen it several times in recent movies, and it is a popular mechanism— the trial kiss. I have no idea why I like that element as much as I do, but there you go.

Overall, this was exactly what I was expecting it to be, with a few bits and pieces that made it speak to me personally. I think it was an average-ish movie with a happy ending and I liked it disproportionately much. The movie is set in New York, but aside from people taking lots of cabs, it didn’t have to be. It could have been set anywhere. I believe, through my own prejudices, that if it had been set in Chicago or Des Moines or Denver or San Francisco or San Diego or Miami or Atlanta or Houston that it would have been a better movie with the same story. I probably would have marked it +2 without the New York.