User Reviews

This is the funniest educational movie I have ever seen!! It actually is pretty good, and it makes you want to keep watching. It also taught me a lot about all Kennedy. I never ever knew about his big mistake. I think that the whole thing is really interesting. However this movie is soo overly dramatized its incredible. oh my goodness. they do not have to dramatize it this much. but it was over all a good school movie, and it was funny how the kids hair stuck up. One thing i didn't get, was how come everyone in the whole school hated him because of one time in his class where he wasn't paying as much attention to the teacher as he should of. HELLO!! it is just a stupid social studies class. This movie made me want to go out and find out more stuff about John F. Kennedy, and i also learned more stuff about the library and its uses. It may be a really stupid movie, but it kept my attention, and surprisingly, i learned something about Kennedy and the bay of pigs. I am not sure if this comment really contains spoilers, since this movie doesn't have much of a plot, and it is just pretty much for educational references, so I am sorry if it DOES contain some movie spoilers.two big thumbs up for this movie cuz it made me laugh.

Jack Patterson and Richard Manhouse are opponents in the race for student council president of their high school. Richard is the "smart choice," an intellectual who is always on top of things. Jack, too, is usually on top but his confident politicking has no substantial content: Jack is a master of hollow rhetoric. But, as the election draws near, Jack finds himself trammeled by fact-master Richard in their history class which is taught by Mr. Ekenwall, a teacher who doesn't take kindly to equivocation. Jack comes to the realization that he simply doesn't know the facts for tomorrow's assignment on John Kennedy and the Cuban crises, so in desperation he heads off into the mythical reaches of the school library. A sympathetic classmate and a bewildered librarian help make Jack's overnight stay in the library the adventure of his life.

This 90 minute video is a librarian's dream. Jack even needs directions to the school library to begin his quest! Once there he is obviously unclear on the concept as he expects all the answer to somehow come looking for him. Subtly, easily, the story starts with encyclopedias, then the card catalog (the automated one, like ours, comes later), then the Readers' Guide (ditto automated periodical indexing), to magazines on microfilm, and even to footnotes in books and the concept of the credibility (and honesty) of providing references.

Throughout, The Mind's Treasure Chest is as charming as an episode of Parker Lewis Can't Lose, instructive but not didactic, laugh-out-loud funny but not patronizing. Jack's character is acted well as are the roles of sympathetic and cajoled Samantha and Carla Sanchez, the librarian. Carla, jolted from her slumber by paranoid concern over the absence of the 1962 volume of the Readers' Guide at closing time that night heads back to the school at midnight in her bunny slippers and "027.8" (Dewey # for school libraries) t-shirt. She surprises our ex-information illiterate and his accomplice as they attempt to "break into" the university's library holdings using the librarian's computer. Jack's doe eyes (and glazed expression as future scenarios of an impostor exposed play themselves unhappily out in his fertile imagination) make another convert to the cause (his cause) and, with Carla's won-over enthusiasm, the trio heads over to the Mecca of knowledge: the university library. There, unchallenged, they use automated versions of the card catalog and Readers' Guide as well as the vertical (or pamphlet) file to ferret out the last bit of evidence for Jack's presentation, now only a few hours away.