Movies I Did Watch

I went to the evening showing of National Treasure 2 today. Like the first one, it was a perfectly good silly film. I think that we see more of these is a good thing. I don't want to see films that never give what's going on in them a second thought, but a lot of genre films especially get bogged down in explaining themselves or apologizing for themselves. Enough of that and I wonder why someone who actually likes the genre would bother.

So National Treasure is about a historian/treasure hunter who, this time, is out to clear his grandfather's name after that grandfather is implicated in the conspiracy to kill Lincoln. The ads here focused around a Book of Secrets, making it seem like that was the treasure. In this case it was the City of Gold and the book is just a plot point. Like the first movie, our heroes break into national historic sites and in this one they kidnap the President.

It's fun. It's not deep; it's goofy. The characters are cartoons running from anecdote to trivia point. Nick Cage's love interest from last film is back, but she's less of a focus. His geek friend and his parents take much larger roles, which I thought was a good choice. These movies turn into sappy romances very easily. Cage and his designated gal reconcile as the movie rolls along, but it's safely in subplot territory. You're not going to learn anything from it, but it's not wasted time either if you can accept it for what it is.

The Goofy (as in the dog) short at the front is something else. If I knew about that going in, I might have waited for the DVD. The whole thing amounts to a slapstick love letter to home entertainment systems. The laughs are predictable. I don't know; I guess I just hate the old Disney characters. It added nothing to the experience except runtime. Worse, it reminded me of the awful Disney live action movies of a few decades ago that always opened with an animated short and went downhill from there.

Then I got home and watched V for Vendetta. It's great. It's a romantic treatment of revolutionary violence in the face of fascism. It's fairly easy to see what the screenwriters were referencing aside from the 1980s comic book too. The Dear Leader is a right-wing Christian that successfully soft-pedaled his beliefs until a national disaster gave him the chance to clamp down and make his Fourth Reich.

V is a terrorist. I guess I don't know what to think about that. The movie casts him as the heroic martyr for the cause of freedom and I kind of buy into it, but V is really, really messed-up. The movie doesn't really examine this at all. V becomes the designated hero, and his worst deed gets ratified by his victim. You can feel really good about him killing the bad guys, but should you? I guess the justice system is obviously corrupt, but I wish they found a way to have him at least imprison them until a good system was in place.

It's the same dilemma from superhero movies. Is vigilantism ok? In the real world, not really. The best you can say is that it's the system of extreme last resort and it usually gets way out of control very fast. The KKK were vigilantes and terrorists. So were Hitler's SA. Those are the brownshirts that got killed off in exchange for Hitler getting the support of the military and business. I guess I'm ok with it in a clear superhero context because that's obviously a fantasy. V is meant to be mostly realistic so I have to take it in a more real world way.

That aside, V is a wonderful, evocative movie. If you can get past the issues around vigilante terrorism, it's got a lot to like. The fights are well done, giving V enough superhumanity to sell his schemes but not enough to take him completely out of the real world until the very end. I didn't quite buy at the climax when the military loses touch with its political controllers and decides, with no previous indication, that it's not going to open fire on non-violent protesters when every flashback in the movie had them and the police doing just that without hesitation.