Movies, movies, movies.
National Treasure starts out looking like it's going to be a stupid Nicholas Cage caper, and then goes on to prove it. But it's funny all the same. We open on Nicholas Cage as a child, going into the attic to find The Never Ending Story book. There's some babble about freemasons hiding treasure to keep it from the evil English who can't be trusted, and then we cut to him as himself, hunting treasure in the arctic. With an English-accented companion. Who *SPOILER! AS IF YOU WOULDN'T KNOW!* turns out to be evil. The goodies then go on to solve Batman-quality riddles ("this phrase includes the word 'poison', which is similar to 'poisson', which is French for fish, and English people eat fish and chips, and in America we called chips French fries a hundred years ago though they are Freedom Fries now, so the Riddler must be in the abandoned warehouse by the docks for some reason!"), while the bad-guys are stuck with just fragments of the clues, which they type into a Yahoo search (because they have near-unlimited resources apparently) to immediately find the right answer. For example, searching for "stow" in Yahoo will bring up, as hit number one (this was specified explicitly) a page about the Liberty Bell. Also, according to the movie, a shadow will fall in exactly the same place at 2:22 on an unknown date during Ben Franklin's lifetime as it will at 3:22 on what is very probably not the same unknown date during daylight savings, present-day. Presumably the writers figured that if shadows don't consistently fall in the same place over time then you couldn't possibly tell the time with a sundial, so they must. Also, it's perfectly reasonable to pour lemon juice on a 200-year-old document and then heat it with a hairdryer, so long as you do it in an uncontaminated room. Acids don't damage manuscripts at all, or possibly lemon juice isn't acidic because if it was then how could you eat it? This is the logic of National Treasure, which is the only thing that makes it enjoyable. According to IMDB, Nicholas Cage's character, who isn't named Nick, is referred to as Nick at some point in the movie too, though I didn't notice that.
Lemony Snicket's a Series of Unfortunate Events is quite good. People who've read the books don't seem to like it, generally, because people are idiots who think a movie based on a book should reflect the book exactly or it's crap, an opinion which was amply rubbished by the Lord of the Rings movies. Changes made to the story were sensible ones for the transition to movie format, including an admirable and anachronistic (in that people don't do this much these days) increase in pace. My only objection to the movie is that Jim Carrey is back to being his old Jim Carreyish self a bit too much, after his brief stint in acting for Eternal Sunshine of the Bla Bla Bla.
Cypher is also quite good. In both feel and content, like a cross between the aforementioned Eternal Bla Bla and Memento. If you liked both of those, Cypher would probably be your cup of tea, too, if it weren't too busy being a movie for lots of people.
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