I’m going to take a Treasure Bath!

For all its contrived clue-solving and annoying coincidences and tiresome car chases, and even Nicolas Cage‘s mourning face, NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS is a lot of fun.

Cuxocoatl

Maybe producer Jerry Bruckheimer had something to do with the fact we can hardly take a breath before the next relentless action sequence derived from chalky historical jargon disguised as clues to something only the inventor of Sudoku can understand.

Sequel to the less-fun NATIONAL TREASURE, this film finds Benjamin Franklin Gates (Cage) mourning-face-deep in another treasure hunt, this time for a Mayan City of Gold. Pointless outlining the roundabout manner in which the Mayan City becomes his goal, suffice to say the clues involve McGuffin piled on McGuffin piled on Abe Lincoln’s assassination with Ed Harris on top like a cherry.

Harris is villain Wilkinson, who also seeks the City for his own reasons. It is a thankless role, for he imbues the obvious “villain” with many layers. His motivations are not evil, though his actions are, and there is always doubt on how far he is willing to go for his “noble” cause. It is a subtlely shaded character that all villainous actors can learn from.

All the principal cast return, Jon Voight as Ben’s dad, Justin Bartha as Riley (given a little more to do this time round than just whine), Diane Kruger as Ben’s girl (whose stage direction was simply “whine louder than Justin Bartha”) and Helen Mirren (three times older than Diane Kruger and twice as sexy) as Voight’s estranged wife, for feisty comedic arguing. Even Harvey Keitel returns, to mill aimlessly on a professional basis.

Written by The Wibberlys (which sound like a couple of furry things from another planet) and once again directed by Jon Turteltaub, BOOK OF SECRETS takes our intrepid adventurers to Paris (where – so it says in the Foreign Director’s Handbook – the Eiffel Tower must be in every shot), to London’s Buckingham Palace, to the White House and into the Oval Office itself, to the revelation that “Mount Rushmore is a coverup…”

Nic Cage gets his Gom Jabbar moment when he puts his hand blindly into a rock orifice; the cast gets to tramp around blindly in labyrinthine passageways, but the coolest sequence by far is a Mayan death trap – a gigantic, tottering square slab that they must all balance, using each other’s weight as counterbalances.

The Book of Secrets is supposedly a Presidential tome – a captain’s log, if you will – of all the nation’s secrets tabulated by presidents for presidents, covering Area 51, the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, etc. Movie plays it like a gag (with Bruce Greenwood as Pres) but we all know there really are secrets that only one president may pass onto the next, maybe not in an all-encompassing book, but surely in documentation which, if exposed, would lead to impeachment, jail, or being slapped to death with a cabbage.

When Candy Crowley of CNN asked newly-inaugurated President Obama in 2009 whether he had seen anything in his new job that had “given him pause,” he simply shot that gleaming smile at her and refused to comment. Why? Because he saw the real world analog of that Book of Secrets.

Yet the biggest mystery remains: What exactly is Harvey Keitel doing in this movie?

END

Precious Little.

NATIONAL TREASURE is an old-fashioned treasure hunt, amped with modern technological idiocy, salted with a snide dig at the political laziness of the American people coupled with a sly j’accuse at their insuperably asinine government.

Clueless

Treasure hunter Benjamin Franklin Gates (a characteristically mourning-faced Nicolas Cage, as the descendant of the descendant twice-removed of whatever) must steal the original Declaration of Independence before an unethical colleague (Sean Bean, whose Bad Guy coterie all wear black for convenience) steals it first. Both are after a hidden map on its back, leading to a treasure unimaginable, involving the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, and Harvey Keitel as some kind of “cleaner” (oh, like that’s believable!).

Insipid Diane Kruger and ineffectual Justin Bartha are along for the joyless ride, with Jon Voight trying not so hard to convince us he didn’t do this for the pay.

Director Jon Turteltaub, old hand at vapid cinema (PHENOMENON, 1996; WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING, 1995), finds a moment of crystallization – when Gates quotes what he describes as the defining tenet of the Declaration: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such government, and provide new guards for their future security.”

Considering this movie was released in 2004, when W was busy rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, it seems obvious this message was addressed to the American populace, who somehow still couldn’t throw off that despot’s yoke.

But Gates fails to take into account the twisted methodology written into the American Constitution that makes it almost impossible to actually perform what was so idealistically envisioned by this country’s founders.

Firstly, ideological tenets cannot stand against a tyrannical government that refuses to acknowledge them; that is, how do you overthrow a government intent on staying in power by any means possible, legal or otherwise? Paraphrasing Lord Acton, John Roche warns: “It is not so much power that corrupts, as the prospect of losing power.” (Our Undemocratic Constitution, Sanford Levinson.)

“Indeed more than one representative and senator has accompanied retirement from Congress with comments about their own frustration at the difficulty of actually getting anything done with regard to the issues that motivated them to run for public office in the first place.” (ibid.)

It is simultaneously at this point in the film that it loses all integrity – for after Gates recites this King’s English (not one word lifted from anything other than the dictionary we all subscribe to, but admittedly phrased in a vernacular lost on this inbred iPod generation of gameslayers), Riley (Bartha) responds with “I have no idea what you just said.”

Gates even meditates after the recitation, “People don’t talk like that anymore.” Why? Because “people” are Riley. They need the OBVIOUS spelled out, which Gates proceeds to do – in lay-moron terms for the audience’s benefit – the audience being made up of more Rileys.

Immediately, this supposed dunderhead Riley, goes into a detailed description of the security measures that surround the hardcopy Declaration, complete with the smash-cutting visuals that this short attention span audience seems to need in order to comprehend words with over two syllables. Riley knows all the angles – except the weakest link in the security chain – the Preservation Room – because we need The Hero, Gates, to do that transparent ‘splaining for the benefit of the audience once again.

The movie quickly degenerates to car chases, foot chases, unbelievably tenuous clues and arbitrary shooting. Factoring for inflation, all this trouble was probably for a treasure that was worth – oh, about $2.67.

During the heist, to rationalize his “honest theft” of the document, Gates toasts, “Here’s to the men who did what was considered wrong in order to do what they knew was right.”

It’s scary what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney might make of that statement.

END

“Hi, we’re here for the Shrikes On Bikes event.”

Too much style IS a bad thing.

Despite the consensus that Cameron Diaz wantonly proffering her backside like a baboon in estrus makes for good cinema, my existence would be incalculably enhanced if I never witness this repulsive rectal display cloaked in ostensible good-natured humor ever again in my short span on this earth.

CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE is so plastic, it hurt my teeth. There is a plot somewhere, but they forgot to film it. There is a movie somewhere amidst all the explosions and over-lighting and inane dialogue, but everyone forgot to act in it.

Soft-porn Poffy

Which boat did I miss? Why are these puerile, cardboard doxies regarded as screen goddesses?; heroines for an arse-tattooed generation of over-fed, class-less, prepubescent, poorly-educated future streetwalkers? The just-plain-ugly Lucy Liu, the matron-plump, lisping, graceless Drew Barrymore and the flat-plastic Cameron Diaz, who’s idiot-grinning and asinine booty-shaking every ten minutes reaches stratospheric ludicrousness unequaled by the worst Ed Wood or Godzilla movie. None of these tarts is in the least appealing to me as a procreative heterosexual male.The Hammer dance? And all that imbecilic giggling? Only minimum-wage flunkies slaving over fast-food counters and born-again christians exhibit such a surfeit of fake sincerity. Either stop all that laughing and hugging on the couch – or continue along this pornographic thread that you yourselves have instigated – and give us a payoff. But at PG-13, as long as there are no swear words, simply insert as much lewd innuendo as possible and slide it past the feeble-minded censorship board.

Over-riding my desire to slap these three emasculating shrikes was the yearning to cudgel every half-wit who greenlit, funded, created and marketed this monstrous cinematic trash which, due to its distribution budget, has ingrained itself deeper into the world culture than the name of penicillin’s discoverer. (Alexander Fleming, on the off-chance you can tear your eyes from Diaz’s baboon rectum on display yet again.)

The unsophisticates may opine: “But it’s all in fun – it’s entertainment!” Well, so is overdosing on heroin, which is what this film’s barf-inducing action sequences resemble. The opening scene, in which the Angels run a truck carrying a helicopter off a bridge and then climb into the helicopter and fire its ignition and fly off (all within a 100-foot drop to a river) is enough to discern that this movie is definitively purely for the plastic popcorn and cardboard hot dog brigade (i.e. the swell of the bell-curve of movie-going audiences who have no discernment – for cuisine or film-making). And the Great Unwashed rise up in indignation, unwilling to be classified as bovine enough to be deceived into paying to be exploited – yet – how else did a movie aiming for low intelligence ever manage to make the amount of money it extracted from the viewing public?

The paradox: Director McG’s target demographic (4 to 7 year olds with an attention span no greater than 12 seconds exactly – the longest interval of time which ever elapses in this movie without an over-tweaked explosion, unrealistic wire stunt, CGI-drenched “action” sequence, irrelevant slomo passage, or gratuitous soft-porn allusion) will never have the perception to fathom the musical and visual cultural references which the movie is bloated with: The Sound Of Music, KC & The Sunshine Band, The Pink Panther, Flashdance, the Cape Fear remake, etc. Almost every sequence becomes a wink to the audience, as McG gets swallowed by his own anus by trying way too hard to impress upon his viewers that he’s in on these gags as well. His groveling as a sycophant far outweighs his talents as a film-maker.

Did anyone else notice the 20 million watts of obvious stage lighting on all characters all the time especially when they’re out in the sunlight and they don’t need it? Are we to consider that these hounds are so freakin’ beautiful that we wouldn’t want to miss one inch of their bootylicious backsides or frontsides in realistic shadow?

And speaking of bootylicious frontsides, the ab-crunched, testosterone-drenched Demi Moore appears in the movie solely to display her nakedness to Ashton Kutcher’s jealous mates in a socially-acceptable forum. Lord knows, she’ll never actually deign to ever visit a beach to do so – if you think these Hollywood starlets get their all-over tans by gadding about in natural sunshine, you must also believe that any film with over seven explosions in its 30-second trailer is a movie worth seeing.

John Cleese is the film’s only saving grace (along with Bruce Willis’ 30-second cameo), but Cleese’s screentime is diluted by his interaction with the mannequin Matt LeBlanc. LeBlanc should be thanking his goat-headed gods that he actually got the opportunity to even stand alongside the icon Cleese, let alone share screentime with him. The downside to appearing alongside Cleese was, of course, that it proved beyond a doubt that Matt LeBlanc isn’t really an actor. Or funny. Or ever has been. And should probably be put out of his misery like the hoss that he is.

A lot of sugar went into making this sour ipecac seem sweet. If I could just purloin one god-given opportunity to wrap my fingers around their collective throats, I’d illustrate the proper method to execute a FULL THROTTLE.

END
Orig: Dec 2004