Not a bad weekend, in spite of the fact that it was the debut of a new, absurdly early date for the start of Daylight Saving Time, which, according to the link in this earlier post of mine, doesn’t necessarily save any energy at all. Back when I was a lad, (in the time of Henry VI, Part 1), you had some consolation for losing an hour of sleep in the knowledge that spring was coming soon, and it was getting warmer). Now we’re making the change in the dead of winter (though today got up to about freezing, and the rest of the week looks good. But spring it ain’t).

I got together will my old buddy Chip on Saturday, and we went out to lunch at a marvelous place called The Fifties Grill. I’d heard about it but had never tried it. As you’d expect, the ambience is Ron Howard/Henry Winkler, and the waitresses wear poodle skirts. But the hamburger I enjoyed was better than anything I remember getting in a grill during the Eisenhower administration. If you live in the Twin Cities, you can find the place in Brooklyn Park, hard by Brookdale Mall. (Of course if you live in the Twin Cities, you probably knew it long before I got the hint.)

Then we went to a bargain theater to see “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.”

My evaluation: Fun, but dumb. But you knew that.

It’s nice to see a movie where they actually manage to talk about America without irony. But I’m too obsessive to just take the thing at face value. I had a couple problems with it.

One is, I just don’t like Nicholas Cage. From the first time I saw clips from “Raising Arizona” (which I’ve never watched), I haven’t liked his flat, dull eyes. I would not buy a used car from this man. He’s probably a great guy for all I know, but when you’re an actor, your eyes are a big deal.

Secondly, I’m too much of a writer to entirely enjoy a movie that plays that fast and loose with logic. I’ve talked about “movie logic” before. Movie logic is when somebody leaps a car over a river in a film. It all happens so fast—vroom, they’re gone—that you don’t have time to stop and think, “Would a vehicle with a heavy front end and a light back end actually stay horizontal through a jump like that, or would the front end dip?” Movie logic is when something explodes in a building, and the hero runs out and beats the fireball to the exit. It doesn’t make sense in the real world, but you just saw it happen right there on the screen, so you buy it.

In the National Treasure movies, they come up with these obscure clues (traveling all over the U.S. and Europe to follow them up), and once they’ve read them, Nicholas Cage says, “This has to mean X.” So they run off to check out X, and of course he’s right.

In real life, a clue that esoteric could probably mean a hundred things. But the process of actual and trial and error would slow down the movie, and the task of producing clues that actually make sense would tax the creativity of the writers. So they fall back on movie logic.

And it works, in terms of entertainment.

But it’s lazy, and I don’t like it.

I also finished reading The Face by Dean Koontz. I’ve done enough Koontz reviews in this space, but I just want to say that, although it doesn’t bear close examination theologically, this is an intensely, though subtly, Christian book. The payoff was very elegantly done, and I wish I’d written it.