Reviews

This is a fun and energetic Christmas movie. It has managed to pull off the seemingly and previously impossible task, combining modern technology and Christmas. In past movies, any efforts to alter the traditional spin of Christmas, elves, reindeer, stockings, chimneys, and the Christmas list... This movie includes broken homes, disobedient children (who still get what they want for Christmas), and hi-tech devices that Santa compliments his usual "magic" with to accomplish the task of delivering toys to much of the world in one night. Earth's rotation and the effects of 24 time zones really wouldn't help all that much. This is worth watching, just be sure to have several grains of salt handy and you'd better be prepared to suspend your usual tastes for quality and surrender to Disney's simple minded, basal, Christmas fluff.

National Treasure was great. I rated this so highly because it touched on several of my own personal movie fetishes: archaeology, action, history. My thoughts were turned to a childlike admiration for our founding fathers like I hadn't felt since watching "Johnny Tremain" in grade school. The "tomb raiding" qualities were far better than in the "Tomb Raider" movies, which hinge the survival of all humanity on ancient artifacts (though they didn't seem very effective at their task in past, why has humanity lasted this long beyond the invention of such terrible devices?)

To criticize NT, the movie is not going to win an Oscar in any category. and Bruckheiemer's addiction to Nicholas Cage made the main character (Benjamin Franklin Gates) seem like a reincarnation of the guy who saved San Francisco in the ROCK! In all, go see this movie if you like it's themes, please don't look for substance and suspend your disbelief when the good guys and bad guys easily navigate miles of historic Philadelphia at a pace that would put the significant sites on either end of the same block (or would qualify them for the Olympics.)

Simple stories are probably the result of budget and material restrictions, which is what makes this show so great. Each has some basis in science, technology, or military. All fascinating subjects for "cool" television shows. It is as though a ten year old boy imagined 24 minute plot-lines and had an unlimited amount of model-builders to create a world in which those action figures live out his stories. If you ever played with toys and honed your skills enough to see your "controlling" hands disappear, you'll love Captain Scarlett. However, like watching Knight Rider as a kid, you may not love it so much now because that was a really dumb show. You've got to be able set your frame of mind, again, to that of childhood.