In addition to watching Will Smith hand out technical awards for what felt like 30 solid minutes as his suicide-by-jellyfish awareness brooch glittered in the stage-lights, the highlight of last night's Oscars broadcast was seeing commercial after commercial for movies that will never win Oscars. The most notable of these movies is Know1ng, a movie that asks, "What happens when the world runs out of mountains full of hidden treasure for Nicolas Cage to find?" Answer: the apocalypse. And whispering, lots of whispering.
Thank God some schizophrenic elementary school student managed to write down his number code to the Apocalypse and sneak it into the time capsule, or else Nic Cage wouldn't have any clues to decipher leading to the treasure ("treasure" here meaning "not dying by the hand of the shadowy whisper people").
Still, even though Nic Cage is perfect for this role and any role that requires him to use his I'm-seeking-the-secret-message-in-this-artifact face,
due to his extensive preposterous movie treasure hunting experience, he was probably a little difficult to work with. No doubt a lot of film was wasted as Cage struggled to get his secret codes straight. "It's a list of dates. Every major disaster of the past 50 years," Cage would start off in take after take, before inevitably lapsing into National Treasure speak. "Now all we have to do is get Benjamin Franklin's glasses, take them to the top of the Ford Theatre, and….Shit. Shit. I'm sorry, guys. It's a number code, not a history code. Apocalypse not treasure. Apocalypse not treasure. Okay, I can do this. Let's take it from the top."