It should come as no surprise that the number one box office film for three weeks running is National Treasure: Book of Secrets. As I indicated in my recent DVD review, the National Treasure franchise is a product designed to perform a function, which it does admirably to the tastes of the audience, otherwise it would have died after the first week, and not generated good word of mouth. Screenwriters should study the films. NT is a machine. It’s processed, uniform, homogenized. It’s not a movie Quentin Tarantino would like, much less Bela Tarr. But the most important thing to remember about it is that like its predecessor NT2 is a kid’s film, geared to people 10 years old or so. That the rest of the American audience goes with this flow is emblematic of a general retreat to all things childish, be it literature (which is more popular with adult readers than literary fiction), clothing styles, comfort food, or pets. National Treasure is the closet thing to anime that Americans will approve, with its busy story in which one thing leads to another bigger, better, louder thing on and on and on seemingly without resolution.

NT2 begins with a laborious flashback that remains unclear for the rest of the movie even as numerous characters attempt to explain it. In essence Ben Gates’s great grandfather was asked by Lincoln conspirators to decipher something, but catching on quickly tried to burn it. Instead of being heralded as a hero, he is in contemporary times accused of being a co-conspirator. Ben Gates’s goal is to “clear” his ancestor. To do this he must rob his own house, case the Paris version of the Statue of Liberty, rob Buckingham Palace, invade and rob the Oval Office, kidnap (temporarily) the President of the United States, and find a hidden artifact in the Library of Congress, all before ending up at Mount Rushmore, which turns out to be a physical “front” for the lost city of gold.

Before all this happens we are re-introduced to the characters and shown what happened to them in the intervening time frame between pictures. Ben and Abigail have broken up; Riley the sidekick has had his spoils from the last adventure (a sports car) repossessed; in addition, he is not accorded the esteem he feels is his due for his part in NT1, which he has recounted in a book. This is all false conflict so that, as in a TV series after a cliffhanging season ender that announces change (House, Without a Trace), things can go back to the way they were. In fact, you’ve probably forgotten that these characters were even in the first film. In addition, a new character is added, Ben’s mother (Helen Mirren), so that Ben’s dad (Jon Voight) can also have a joyous reconciliation amid danger. The whole movie is about reconciliation: Ben and his gal, mom and dad, villain and hero, sidekick and his lowly lot in life.

If the previous film cited Indiana Jones throughout, this one nods to the James Bond series. The landscape is international, car chases are common, the finale takes place in a huge ornate chamber, and Ben even hides a tuxedo under a scuba suit. The villain is not dastardly, however. In the previous film, the villain was an oddly human and complex figure. Here it is Ed Harris, whose southern accent comes and goes, who fuels the enterprise and then sits back to watch as Ben does all the work. Harris’s Mitch Wilkinson is harder but less interesting. In fact he is so irrelevant that he drops out of the picture for the longest time. Three of the lead actors have Oscars, but this is not the kind of film that requires thespian skills so much as the ability to understand the second unit director’s instructions.

The script, fashioned by numerous hands that include Cormac and Marianne Wibberley, Gregory Poirier, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Jim Kouf, Oren Aviv and Charles Segars, has some good moments, such as Ben’s riff on the use of the word “So” in tense marital discussions, and the dialogue in which Ben discovers that “Someone else is after the treasure,” to which Riley replies, “Of course someone else is after the treasure. It’s axiomatic of treasure hunting.” There is also a clever use of use of traffic camera for retaining a clue. And Bruce Greenwood, the Canadian actor who has already played JFK, is his usual agreeable self as a fantasy liberal president out to embody a message about believing anew in government by noble people.

The book in question is a diary passed down from president to president in which they reveal national secrets such as what really happened in Area 51 and who killed Kennedy. The movie goes so fast that it never occurs to you to wonder why a sitting President would need to know all these things. And wouldn’t the Queen have a bigger book? In any case, they don’t find one in Buckingham Palace. The real book of secrets, however, is the list of tropes that the screenwriters use or finagle to keep the film fresh while relying on tried and true tropes. It’s a national book of secrets that isn’t so secret.

I’ve spent the past three weeks brooding on death. I had an ailment that could have been any one of four things, and of course I feared the worst. I was afraid to tell anyone about my symptoms because my auditors would make me go to the doctor and I would then hear and know and have to face the dire truth.

Like Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters, my hypochondria seemed finally to be facing the reality of age and ill health. Instead of working at night, I was exhausted, as much mentally as physically. I would take to my couch, watch old, beloved movies such as Anatomy of a Murder and The Apartment, gaze about my room in despair and brood on the disposition of my possessions, and endured a cavalcade of memories, many long distant, of events, slights given and received, opportunities won or lost, now all as dust. Whilst walking around the city, I slipped into funks seeing mothers with their young children, wondering to myself Why?, Why bother with all the hard work and attention of rearing the young when they are simply going to go their own way, exist in a degraded society, and forget about you?

When I was finally exhausted both physically and mentally of this onslaught, I got up the courage to visit the doctor. This is itself a process that comprises a series of concentric rings, each one smaller yet at the same time made of multiple baby steps that elongate time. First you have to make the decision, which is a long wrestle. Then you have to really, really, really go to the clinic. Once there, you must sign in, a laborious and unnerving process, followed by an inhuman wait. Each time the door opens, you both want and don’t want the next name summoned to be your own.

But even when the summons finally comes, the concentric rings grow smaller. There’s the weighing in, the nurse’s queries, the BP and other measurements. Then there is the doctor himself, to whom one must reiterate for the second or third time that night (and the umpteenth time that week) your various symptoms. There is another wait, another test, another wait, and finally the doctor arrives with the verdict. Will you live or will you die? In this case, at this time, it was life, at least provisional life for the nonce.

That’s the horrific prelude to terminal judgments. The Bucket List is about the fun part.

The fun part of death is having enough money and an equaniminous mental balance to indulge some final fantasies, the bucket list being those things you want to do before you die. Lists are big in the media these days, what with Earl and his list, and the year-end round ups. But here these sorting, organizing aids are an excuse for a series of dull, poorly shot globe-trotting vignettes that put one in mind director Rob Reiner’s earlier disaster, North.

The script is credited to Justin Zackham, and has what feels like 40 minutes of back-story as it laboriously contrives to put in the same hospital room Edward Cole and Carter Chambers. Chambers (Morgan Freeman) is an auto-repairman; Cole owns the very hospital in which he is confined. Both have cancer with poor prognoses. Cole’s assistant, Thomas (Sean Hayes) insists that Cole not be perceived to go against the punitive rules of his own institution by having a private chamber. Wariness; a grudging friendship; Chambers’s wife doesn’t understand what he is going through; the bright idea, take that list and do all the things on it, such as sit on top of Mount Everest (where Freeman has already visited, by the way, in Bruce Almighty); wacky sequences sky diving and auto racing; a medical set back or two; secrets revealed (Cole has an estranged daughter), a contrived falling out just like in a romantic comedy starring Drew Barrymore; the tear-evoking reunion. We have all been there before, so many, many times before, but never so mechanically, nor with special effects, such as a view of the pyramids the pair are supposedly visiting, that are beyond laughable, beyond contempt for the audience. While dining in an exclusive Italian eatery, one can see the ocean through the windows in the background, where the boats don’t even bother to bob on the water. Are they sick, too? This is the kind of movie in which “France” is introduced by the use of an Edith Piaf song.

This being a cynical escapist entertainment made by rich Hollywood “intellectuals,” Cole has to hint that he is an atheist, and then be refuted by Chamber’s dignified and wise counsel, for no brow is so broad in the middle it can tolerate diversity in its movies. There are a couple of well-delivered lines. Cole, vomiting from chemo, says to himself in the mirror, “Somewhere some lucky guy is having a heart attack.” In addition, Chambers quips, “I’ve taken a bath deeper than you,” and there is a Freeman in-joke about Sesame Street. However, most of the jokes are borrowed from the easy laugh catalog, such as this on the pyramids: “How do we get down from this tomb?” “Well, how did you get up here?”

These witticisms are rendered further unappetizing by Nicholson’s gruff voice, which I find unlistenable these days. Couple with his patented screen-time hogging mannerisms, the film is insufferable. Nicholson is just one of several actors whose voices seemed to be shredded by misuse or perhaps poor theatrical training, including Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and Clint Eastwood. English actors, regardless of how aged they grow, don’t seem to suffer this late-life deterioration.

But the worst aspect of the film is the treatment of Sean Hayes’s character. I don’t get why it is funny that he should be abused and put down so much by Cole, especially in light of the recent scandals about abuse that personal assistants receive at the hands of celebrities. But maybe that is another sign that Hollywood insiders continue to be detached from ordinary salt-of-the-earth morality.

Time Out Chicago provides the scoop that Jonathan Rosenbaum, esteemed reviewer at the Chicago Reader for decades, is set to retire in February of 2008. Rosenbaum is the heady masterpiece-seeker who often preferred to review obscure Eastern European, Iranian, or experimental movies that were difficult for his readers to find. His reviews were notable for their complete lack of humor and for the absence of personal detail or “confessional” passages, which the Web traffics in almost exclusively. His insight into the structure of contemporary movie distribution was salutary, however. Rosenbaum was caught up in a controversy in the twilight of his career when he was roundly attacked for daring to suggest in a NYT op-ed that perhaps, maybe the late Ingmar Bergman was a tad overrated. But his musings will not evaporate completely. The Reader’s new owners, the Creative Loafing chain of “alternative” newspapers, is going to design a web page for (the seemingly computer-phobic 65-year-old) Mr. Rosenbaum to continue writing occasional pieces.

At Dennis Cooper’s blog, the novelist has posted a long and detailed “oral history” of the cult actress Tuesday Weld, who is also a favorite of our colleague Kim Morgan, the TW of film critics. Perhaps the most interesting revelation of the oral history is the comment on Miss Weld’s hidden life as a Satanist. Someone named Douglas Hawes is quoted as saying that, “Over the years I have met a number of people who were aware of the remarkable behind the scene aspects of Tuesday Weld’s life and influence. A friend of mine in Santa Cruz talked at length with Kenneth Anger at the Silver Screen years ago about Tuesday Weld’s hidden influence in the realm of underground occult activities … The hidden life of Tuesday Weld has largely been undisclosed in the media, and remains one of the great undisclosed stories of the sixties and seventies. The only major reference to her that discloses her occult connections, but only in a discreet way, is a long forgotten book, Popular Witchcraft, which was published by Bowling Green University Press in 1972. In it, Anton LaVey, in an interview, says that his book The Satanic Bible was partially dedicated to Tuesday because ’she was the embodiment of the goddess,’ and was ‘part of the ritual.’ LaVey’s remarks reflect a close personal acquaintanceship with Weld, and hints heavily on her involvement in his ritual activities.” Now, if only someone will do an equally detailed oral history of Mimsy Farmer!

When confronted with a two volume set of the work of Edmund Wilson, the primarily-Internet-based reviewer has to confront the question, What value does Wilson’s work have for the modern scribe? A scribe who dwells in a digital realm, where the prose is nearly uniform, where the subjects are both immediate and fleeting. Where the true eventual endurance of the writing is ultimately more fragile than millions of old books in dusty rooms. Where people read for utilitarian reasons, rather than any pleasure in prose.

This new dual compilation of Edmund Wilson’s work is a big collection, comprising Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s (The Shores of Light, Axel’s Castle, Uncollected Reviews and Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s (The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, Classics and Commercials, Uncollected Reviews) (Library of America, 1025 and 1000 pages, $40 dollars each, ISBNs 978-1598530131, and 978-1598530148, Library of America volumes Nos. 176 and 177). The two volumes arrive with the promise of more to come, but is already a magnificent tribute to a man of letters.

But the sobriquet “man of letters” is old fashion. And Wilson himself was old fashioned. Indeed, in his not-so-later years he viewed himself publicly as a man of the 19th century. He was, barely. Wilson was born in 1895 in Red Bank, New Jersey, to a difficult mother and a taciturn if prominent lawyer in fragile health. After a superb education that culminated in Princeton (which he attended with F. Scott Fitzgerald and other future literary lights), Wilson served as an ambulance driver in WWI, after which he settled in New York City to pursue a literary career.

Very quickly he became a prolific reviewer, culminating in appointments at The New Republic and then The New Yorker, and also as the author of a regular succession of books, in which he became the explicator of modern European literature to Americans as well as the historian of the socialist idea, among other political projects. His book, Axel’s Castle, published in 1931, is a remarkable feat, a survey of symbolist literature by a non-academic for general readers that was published by a prominent house (Scribner’s) and was something of a bestseller. Today the book would come from a university press and sell poorly, because written for other academics.

His friends constituted a catalog of the era’s greatest writers, including Vladimir Nabokov, and the subjects of his wide-ranging interest comprised all of the world’s literature itself. He ceased writing strictly about modern fiction sometime in the late 1940s and instead turned himself to broad topics such as the literature of the civil war, Canadian writing, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He kept a life-long journal, which began publication in his twilight years and then for decades after his death, in 1972.

It is arguable that not too long after his death, Wilson started to become a forgotten figure. Were it not for the fact that he also wrote poetry, plays, and novels of some repute, he would probably be consigned to the category of mere critic. Though many of his books stayed in print, and new ones continued to come out, he was an acquired and recherché taste, each new volume by or about him inevitably reviewed in the literary weeklies, but more as an in-house interest. Too many new writers with a flashier style and a hipper worldview were the critics of choice for younger writers with literary aspirations. After Wilson’s death, only Gore Vidal, Wilson’s true heir, kept the meager flame of Wilson’s standards and breadth of interests alive in the wasteland of literature.

Now Wilson has come full circle, honored by inclusion in the series of books of American literature that he himself helped bring into being through his essay “The Fruits of the MLA.” A grant from a beneficent institution guarantees, as a note at the start of each book announces, that these volumes will never go out of print. But who will read them?

If you’re like me, a great deal of your time is spent on the Internet visiting narrowcasting websites. I’m looking for news or distraction. The sites I go to, though, are 90 per cent meatless, even the political forums. They are designed for the short attention span, for the immediate need, for the acerbic crack and the viral put down. Probably the proper nouns found in these sites add up to around 300; few of the people continually mentioned were born before 1940, and most much more recently. The prose of these sites sounds the same, a grand Babylonian repository of first drafts.

The readers of these websites are starved and don’t know it. And it wasn’t until I started reading and re-reading Wilson in these books that I realized how little is mentioned, how little matters, in the great mass of the Internet. By contrast, the indexes for the two Wilson volumes are over 20 pages each, with additional 53 pages worth of brief, explanatory notes. Yes, you can probably find all the names in these indexes and notes on the Internet somewhere. But at one point, they were all in Wilson’s head, while most of the web text about these people is of a superficial or cursory nature, written after 1999. Even more important, Wilson wrote about many of the writers and politicians and activists whom he covered with informed skepticism, and with the goal of elevating or educating his reading public, helping them hone standards of quality that essentially match his though not necessarily mimic his.

The two volumes at hand gather together five of Wilson’s books, with a small sample of his uncollected reviews (which, if intended as a selling point, will come as a disappointment to Wilson fanatics in their meagerness, just 12 of what must be hundreds, at least enough to inspire a collection of uncollected material in 1995). Taken together, they cover the early middle decades of the century, 1920 to 1949. Thus, Wilson is on the beat when Hemingway’s first novels appear, and when Fitzgerald’s last come out. In the review compilations, Wilson covers novels, theater, poetry, and some public performers; Willa Cather, Wallace Stevens, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Ring Lardner, Eugene O’Neill, Houdini, Mencken, Shaw, Wilder, Dos Passos, Max Eastman, Kay Boyle, Sartre, Kafka, and many national literatures and movements.

For a good introduction, dip into The Wound and the Bow and read his long essay on Dickens, which rescues the novelist from children’s literature. Wilson doesn’t go in for the type of “close readings” of then current literary vogue, though he can. He compares the writer’s life to the literature and back again, making the man come alive and the literature blossom (though Wilson, a man of the times, can slip into hand-me-down Freudianism). By contrast, read his essay on the now forgotten John Jay Chapman, a great American prose stylist with an interesting past and amorphous career. Or sample his three progressive essays on the murder mystery, which clear the head of prejudices in favor of the genre as enduring.

Wilson had a knack for great titles; The Triple Thinkers comes from Flaubert’s definition of the artist; The Wound and the Bow from classical art. His essays generally begin in a tame fashion, and then pick up speed, rhetorical force. For example, his introduction to his survey of Civil War literature, Patriotic Gore begins blandly but ends up a searing indictment of the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex. More important, Wilson writes each review as if it is the definitive statement on a given book, author, or movement. It was important for him to get his position clear, registered for all time. He also had a habit of “reviewing” the book under consideration in a near throwaway ‘graf near the beginning and then spending the rest of the piece talking about what he wants (for example, in his review of Gene Fowler’s book about John Barrymore).

What’s refreshing is that though his prose is suffused with intelligence it is not at all academic and as you read you begin to think that you could do that to, with enough time and freedom. Wilson writes for an intelligent reader whom he assumes chooses to dip into the essay because he is interested in the subject or the writer. He doesn’t have to “hook” the reader with a clever lead, or reach into the depths for continual, exhausting witty turns of phrase to keep the reader going. The force of his rightness keeps you going. His one similarity to the Internet geek of successive generations is his competitive ambition to accuracy and detail. Although he could be wrong about facts of foreign grammar or historical movements, as the collected letters between Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov revealed.

It’s thus easy to see how Wilson could have become, during his late lifetime, a paragon to rising writers, such as Frederick Exley, whose second book, Pages from a Cold Island is a circling around the reputation and stature of Wilson. It’s difficult to imagine a contemporary writer composing a similar paean to an elder, unless it is someone like Nicholson Baker saluting an old-fashioned predecessor in a backhanded gesture. Exley’s book captures what it is like to love a writer. In fact, I can chart my own interest in Wilson by decadal attitudes toward the Nabokov - Wilson letters. First I was a Wilson fan; by the time the letters were published in 1979, I was decidedly a Nabokovian. Then with time and repetition I began to tire of Nabokov’s lesser books and crankier opinions, as Wilson’s calming prose rose in my estimation and his breath of knowledge was a good guidepost. Now I can see how they talk past each other, yet admire Wilson for his tireless work on Nabokov’s behalf even for books he didn’t like, which contributed mightily to Nabokov’s later post-Lolita reputation, and realize that they were both literary giants with largely irreconcilable aesthetic standards. What’s important is that a reader, over time, can change his opinions while maintaining his beliefs.

If you go into a used bookstore and manage to find a section on literary criticism you will see a lot of Wilson books there towards the end of the shelves. It’s not because they are popular, it’s because they don’t sell. They’ve been sitting there for years. The Library of America editions supersede many of those moldy old paperbacks unattended in the lower shelves of bookstore back rooms. With luck, the pleasant design and hefty volume of the books will make them appealing to newcomers though it is a paradox of our times that as reading, not to mention comprehension, decreases, books from some quarters get better physically and typographically. But the LoA Wilson books should not be mounted on shelves as trophies. They must be taken down, read, enjoyed, and allowed to open up a whole century to new eyes.

My colleague Michael Russell has offered up one of the most interesting of the 10 Best Lists at year’s end, in what he calls at his personal web page Culture Pulp a “director’s cut” of his Oregonian year in review. His list starts with Hot Fuzz at number 10 and moves up to There Will Be Blood at No. 1. He also has a number of other clever categories, such as Best and Worst Digital Nudity, and Strangest Recurring Comedy Topic. It is well worth reading as an alternative to the usual stuffy pontificating.

I Am Legend is a bifurcated film. The first half is moderately interesting; the second half deadly dull. The first half follows one Robert Neville (Will Smith), a military scientist alone in Manhattan after it has been abandoned to a rampaging virus; Neville is immune. He believes he may be the last man on earth (the title of a better adaptation of the 1954 Richard Matheson novel), but sends out radio transmissions to whomever can hear. By day the city is “normal.” It is isolated, overgrown, and former zoo animals and invading deer roam. Neville spends his days amusing himself with his German Shepherd Samantha (if you have pet issues, don’t see this film). At night, vampiric zombies, the resultant effects of the infection (which was caused by a vaccine intended to cure cancer), come out in search of whatever remaining human beings are up for grabs.

For a smart guy Neville occasionally acts dumb, though for the benefit of advancing the plot — or rather filling it with narrative. He keeps getting nearly caught by the vampires who lay traps during the day, or into whose lair he wanders, like a teenage girl in a Scream sequel.

Eventually a woman and child appear; he takes them in; Neville discovers a cure for the disease; the vampires (apparently) figure out where Neville lives and mount a full-on attack one night (easily breaching his barricades) and in the last minutes Neville makes a grand sacrifice, after which the woman finds an enclave of human survivors, within whose community Neville becomes “legend.”

The first half of the film lacks tension or creepiness; the second simply lacks unpredictable incident. Hardly anything happens there, really. But just as predictable as the second half of the film is, so is the complaint that the film is rashly inferior to its source novel. The Vincent Price thriller, The Last Man on Earth, which was shot in Italy, released in 1964 (in black and white), and was a tremendous influence on Night of the Living Dead, is the most accurate adaptation of the novel, which has interesting nuances and cultural criticism (Matheson wrote the adaptation but later had his name removed). For example, in the book there are vampires but also later hybrid vampires that are more human-like. To them, Neville is a villain, because when he goes out by day to stake and behead vampires he doesn’t distinguish — he doesn’t know to distinguish — between the living dead and the living near-dead. Thus Neville becomes to the hybrids what legendary monsters and ghouls are to us.

The Last Man on Earth is in the public domain and easily downloadable. I strongly recommend that potential viewers of the tedious I Am Legend do that instead.

In the first seven or eight days of its big screen life, National Treasure received an especially severe hiding from the mass media reviewers. I could see what they meant. It is a relatively thin film with bogusly linked elements of American history posing as a quest-inspired narrative. It feels by-the-numbers in its succession of Indiana Jones-like events, and offers suspense scenes that are not quite nail-bitingly engaging.

Yet an aspiring screenwriter might want to transcribe this movie or hunt down its script, as it seems to offer a template of what Hollywood (and Jerry Bruckheimer-style producers in particular) are offering the public and therefore want to buy from scribes. Cancel those subscriptions to Creative Screenwriting: here’s an easy-to-use template for Hollywood success.

One thing I didn’t realize walking into the theater was that National Treasure was not just a Disney release, but specifically a Disney movie. The first reel was pre-loaded with trailers for all manner of now-forgotten kid movies and comedies, such as Guess Who, Electra, and Son of the Mask, making me wonder if all of moviedom had become infantilized. Are the same people who would come to see these comedies the same target market as those who would attend National Treasure?

But in the wake of its re-release on DVD in a new dual disc set (the first one came out in May 2005), I come to offer meager praise for National Treasure, not throw more dirt on its funeral bier. While not exactly enjoying National Treasure as fully as it wants to be enjoyed, I did find a few of what Truffaut called “privileged moments.”

For one thing, there were three clever moments in the film, and in a script credited to writers Jim Kouf, Cormac Wibberley, and Marianne Wibberley. At one point Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) comes up with the password to the room holding the Declaration of Independence, which he wants to steal, unscrambling a bunch of letters he knows that Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), an archivist, typed on a key pad — folarvyge. Cage beats the computer decrypting software by realizing that Abigail typed the letters “l” and “e” twice: thus the pass code is Valley Forge.

In another moment, as Gates and Chase realize that there really is a map on the back of the Declaration, and that lemon juice and direct heat will reveal it, they look at each other and say, in order, “More heat.” “More juice.” I thought it was kind of clever, but it is a dangerous bit of dialogue, easily flung back at the film by reviewers thinking that National Treasure lacks both those elements.

And later Cage makes a good joke when the FBI suggests he act as bait: ” You know, Agent Sadusky, something I noticed about fishing? It never worked out so well for the bait.” Well, it works in the movie.

Small moments, surely, and probably not described here adequately enough to portray how pleasing they felt in the theater. On a larger scale, there is an interesting sub-theme in the film about style. Gates, when he decides to steal the Declaration to protect it from a more ruthless opponent (Sean Bean as Ian Howe, a very agreeable, pleasing, even human villain), he engages a delicate, complex succession of sly intrusions, while Howe, coincidentally going in at the same time, basically just beats down the doors. It’s the style of Mission Impossible, almost too elegant for its own sake, versus The Dirty Dozen, so to speak. There is not much point to this contrast thematically, but it was a more substantial referentiality than some of the other filmic references National Treasure makes.

Of course the biggest citation is to the Indiana Jones movies, even to the extent of having Jon Voight stand in as a Sean Connery equivalent, and to have in Kruger as bland a heroine as appeared in most of the Jones films (Kruger is so ephemeral it’s as if she doesn’t have any facial features). There is also an equally faceless goofy hipster sidekick named Riley (Justin Bartha), and both pop up again in the forthcoming sequel.

Sadly, it’s when Gates and Co. finally find the treasure they’ve been looking for that the film fails to fulfill expectations. What should be a grand image, like the last shot of the first Jones film, or even Citizen Kane for that matter, here seems dark and purposely obscured, as if to hide a lack of imagination or a depletion of funds. Plus the writers miss numerous chances to make intellectual gags about the kind of stuff that might be part of the treasure. Only Abigail identifies a few rolled up parchments as books from the Library of Alexandria. Much more could have been squeezed out of the setting, and a director like, say, Joe Dante would have done it. Instead, Jon Turtletaub is a metteur en scene, but now on the bombastic level of a Michael Bay, at least as far as this film goes.

The double disc set is now offered up by Disney as a prelude to the sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Disc number one includes the movie, broken up into 19 chapters, along with a conventional making-of (11 minutes), two deleted scenes (coming to just over 7 minutes), and an alternate ending (1:01) with intros and yak tracks, and “Opening Scene Animatic” (2:21). In my humbled opinion, the quiet, greed-free less feel-good discarded ending is better than the finished film’s. The thing about making-ofs is that they try to sell you on a movie that you already have. I can’t do any more than I have already to make a commitment to owning this film, and yet it’s still selling me. Stop, already. You had me at “Here is your change, sir.”

In addition, apparently if you play a little game and “break a code” you get a couple more featurettes, “The Knights Templar” and “Treasure Hunters Revealed.” My philosophy is, if you want me to watch your goddamn features you’ll put them clearly and easily on the goddamn menu.

Finally, there are trailers for Disney movies in general, the 101 Dalmations DVD, for Blu-Ray discs in general, National Treasure: Book of Secrets (which looks like it draws its inspiration from The Da Vinci Code, just as this one is refried Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible), Disney Movie Rewards, and Underdog, all reaffirming again that National Treasure is viewed as a kids’ film. Aside from differences in the menu and the trailers, plus the addition of French and Spanish language tracks, it is the same disc that came out two years ago.

Disc two has five more deleted scenes, one of which would have made the final underground adventure even longer in the theater. These come with video intros and optional commentaries (7:53). Next there is a 12-minute featurette on codes and ciphers, with talking heads David Kahn and Simon Singh, among others, probably the most interesting feature of the lot. “Exploding Charlotte” (6:34) shows some set tech. “To Steal a National Treasure” (5:46) recounts how the filmmakers came up with the heist. And finally “On the Set of History” (6:08) chronicles the location work. Taken together, this amounts to about 40 new minutes of material. Does material of under an hour now constitute a “collector’s edition”? And what will happen when National Treasure: Ultimate Truths Revealed comes out? Will they add another new 40 minutes to each of the DVDs?

National Treasure hits the street Tuesday, December 18 and retails for $29.95.

MSN has just posted my essay comparing and contrasting the careers of Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman. As I point out, “30 Rock was created by Tina Fey, drawing on her experiences as head writer at Saturday Night Live. But 30 Rock isn’t the only comedy show on TV created by the woman who also stars in it. The Sarah Silverman Program is also in its second season, though it comes in shorter bursts (the first season was six episodes, while the second is slated for 14). But despite their broad similarities, the two shows couldn’t be more different; even their nominal similarities point to subtle contrasts. Indeed, Fey and Silverman thrive at opposing ends of the comedy spectrum.” I go on to list these numerous differences and similarities.