Irrelevance Glorified

Today it is time for another installment of the ‘angry-bad‘ tag. Today’s lucky recipient is “National Treasure: Book of Secrets“. Invariably when I rant on things like this, people ask me why I continue to waste my time, why I choose to start watching movies that suck. Well, first of all, I just needed to kill some time while my laundry was going. Secondly, I was watching it off of Netflix streaming, so it’s not like this movie took up a slot in my queue; this movie did not displace the physical representation of a good movie traveling to my apartment. And finally…I liked the first movie. National Treasure was a decent ridiculous movie. There are certain types of movies that I am a sucker for. Heist movies, for example. I just love ‘em. Ocean’s Eleven…and Twelve and Thirteen for that matter. Italian Job. Many Guy Ritchie movies. Another type I love is stupid treasure movies, like, for example, National Treasure. Movies like this tap into a cultural nerve, of sorts. Over much of the world, we’ve traversed over the land, we’ve scanned the ground from the sky, we’ve spread our species out over any piece of arable land. One might think that there is nothing hugely fantastic left to find. There are no Great Pyramids out there that we just haven’t noticed. So it’s very compelling to create a narrative where great treasure has been hidden under our very noses. It’s what made The Da Vinci Code so popular. When done correctly, it can be quite entertaining. So read on, for spoilers, a dissection, a refusal to suspend disbelief….and possibly my longest post ever.
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So, I have a Netflix account, and my queue is currently populated with over 200 items (a little bit overcounting, though, since multi-disc television shows list as one item per disc). I often put movies in the queue that probably wouldn’t be considered all that great, some that get poor reviews, just because I haven’t seen them, and I want to take a flyer on them. For instance, Demolition Man is currently in the mail, approaching my apartment. I expect this movie to be horrible, but hopefully it will be entertaining.

Virtuosity is horrible. And it is not entertaining Continue Reading »