National Treasure 2

As of the end of this workday, I am on vacation! I celebrated by going to see a movie, the first in a while. It really is astonishing how much Hollywood has done lately to break me of my decade-long, movie-a-week habit. But I finally saw a title I wanted to see: National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

This film is the sequel to, duh, National Treasure, starring Nicolas Cage as a conspiracy theorist hyphen treasure hunter, the nummy Diane Krueger as his wife, Jon Voigt and Helen Mirren as his parents, Bruce Greenwood as the President of the U.S. (again), and Ed Harris as the bad guy. It's all the same kinds of fun as the first movie, and pointless to describe, so I'll just say "a good time was had by all" and leave it at that. The only reason to bring up the word "Oscar" when discussing this movie is to lament how Greenwood was robbed of the one he deserved for playing JFK in Fourteen Days.

Well, there may be another reason to mention "Oscar." Apparently Disney has tired of letting Pixar get all the animated-short statues. I'm not sure if their new Goofy sketch on "How to Set Up Your Home Theater System" is exactly a shoo-in, but at least it shows that they're still in the animated-short business.

But even more exciting than that were the trailers I saw, trumpeting the advent of two upcoming kiddie-book-adaptation flicks. First, Andrew Adamson's "Chronicles of Narnia" series continues with a take on Prince Caspian, featuring many of the same actors as the jolly good Lion/Witch/Wardrobe picture of a couple years back. Second, anyone who knows the name of Cornelia Funke (hint: not a character on "Arrested Development") will be thrilled to know that a film version of Inkheart is due out next May, with Funke's handpicked star Brendan Frasier as Silvertongue (a bibliophile who is so good at reading aloud that he can actually summon characters from books into reality), Andy Serkis as Capricorn (the villain), Paul Bettany as Dustfinger (a lovable thief), Helen Mirren, and Jim Broadbent. The girl playing Meggie (Silvertongue's daughter) is someone named Eliza Bennett, for whatever it's worth...which will be a lot more next spring, no doubt.

And since I am on vacation, and leaving town for a short while over the New Year's holiday, I will take leave of this blog for now. Let's catch up again next year, when exciting things will be happening - including an interview, right here on A Fort Made of Books, with Erec Rex author Kaza Kingsley. This is her first stop on a two-week "blog tour" (the first such creature I have ever heard of), and I hope you can tune in. If it works out well, this might be the beginning of a nice little sideline, since I happen to know the email address of a few other published authors (ahem - watch out, guys).