Month: July 2006

Pirates of the Caribbean:
Dead Man’s Chest
PG-13, 150 minutes
Now playing at Carmike Cinema 6

When Pirates of the Caribbean : The Curse of the Black Pearl sailed into the harbor during the summer of 2003, it was as if none of us had ever seen a pirate movie before. We were delighted, dazzled.  Surprisingly buoyant, thanks in part to Johnny Depp’s light-in-his-loafers turn as Captain Jack Sparrow, the movie didn’t begin to take itself seriously, treating the old familiar tropes—parrots, buried treasure, walking the plank—like old familiar friends, ripe for teasing and good for a laugh, no matter how many times we’d heard the joke before. Director Gore Verbinski managed to keep the movie on course, and Depp gave it an anything-goes edge, sashaying from one side of the screen to the other, delivering his lines sotto voce, as if he didn’t expect anybody else to understand them. Making off with $650 million in gold bullion, The Curse of the Black Pearl dispelled The Curse of the Modern Pirate Movie, perhaps forever.

What, you’re not familiar with The Curse of the Modern Pirate Movie?  Well, maybe you didn’t see Cutthroat Island , then. Or Roman Polanski’s Pirates. (Worse, maybe you did.) The former lost more money than any movie ever had, and eventually sunk the company that produced it. Crushed under the dead weight of these two stinkers, it seemed as if swashbucklers might never find their sea legs again. But here’s Pirates of the Caribbean : Dead Man’s Chest, following in The Curse of the Black Pearl’s wake (what’s more, another installment, the third in a projected trilogy, is already filming).  And, like most sequels, this one’s bigger, louder and fiercely determined to entertain us, whether we like it or not. Yes, there are some decent bits amid all the hullabaloo—like when Jack shoots his way out of a water-borne coffin, then uses the occupant’s skeletal remains to row ashore. But what passed for inspiration the last time is largely missing this time, leaving only a sheen of perspiration.

Well, O.K.—perspiration and digitalization. To replace the ghost pirates that brought a kooky-spooky element to Black Pearl, scriptwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have conjured up a crew of Red-Lobster rejects under the command of the legendary Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), who has an octopus where his head should be and a crustacean’s claw for a hand. The effect is certainly special, which is why we call them special effects. And Nighy somehow manages to give an actual performance under all of those writhing tentacles. But Verbinski overplays the  aquaman card, bringing forth his critters early and often (even in broad daylight—a notorious CGI danger zone —where their skin turns all rubbery). Then there’s the Kraken—a gigantic CGI-to-the-max cephalopod capable of wrapping its arms around an entire ship, squeezing the life out of it. The third time it does so, you may find yourself absent-mindedly dreaming of calamari.

Or not. For, if nothing else, these sequences basically deliver the goods, supplying heft to what is in fact nothing more than a few gigabytes of computer memory. Where the movie comes up short is in the smaller, quieter moments, in which the cast is asked to rely on things like dialogue and, you know, acting. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley return as one of the more boring couples in the long history of high-seas romance. The script certainly puts them through their paces, sending them all over the Caribbeanin search of a compass, a key, a chest and—because they’re often separated—each other. But Bloom, with that pencil-thin mustache, still looks like an emaciated Errol Flynn (only without the devilish gleam in his eye).  And Knightley, though as beautiful as they come, still has to disguise her feminine charms to get by. Not unlike a pirate ship, the movie seems to have no place for a woman, no matter how skilled with a sword she may be.

Speaking of which, the all-important sword fights—which are supposed to put the swash in this swashbuckler—are perfunctory at best (even the one set on a water wheel that’s rolling down a hill toward the ocean). On Pirates maiden voyage, Jack Sparrow’s swordsmanship was a clue to his character: inept, but deadly. This time, he lets his mouth do the talking—and that’s too bad, because Elliott and Rossio haven’t given him very much to say. Depp’s performance came out of left field in The Curse of the Black Pearl; nobody had ever thought of channeling both Keith Richards and Pepé Le Pew before. And with his brilliant, Buster Keaton entrance (disembarking from a sinking dinghy onto a pier without missing a step) Jack Sparrow basically had us at “‘ello.” But this performance seems pitched from center field, lobbed over the fat center of the plate. It’s surprisingly unsurprising. And the character isn’t any richer or deeper, either—just less funny, less weird. Obviously, Depp’s oddball charm worked better as comic relief than as a romantic lead.

Yes, you heard right: Jack has a little moment with Knightley’s Elizabeth, who may have more pirate blood in her than we thought. But the movie’s way too busy imitating the theme-park ride it’s based on to pursue such heretical notions. Barroom brawls, escapes from cannibals, a sea monster that might as well have “Vagina Dentata” scribbled on its forehead (if it had a forehead, that is)—the movie throws so much at us that it’s difficult to imagine what the next installment could possibly do to top it. Like any self-respecting pirate movie, Dead Man’s Chest keeps stealing from other pirate movies: revered classics like Captain Blood, The Crimson Pirate and The Curse of the Black Pearl. But with one more round of plundering to go, you wonder whether the filmmakers haven’t already run out of buried treasure.

Curse of the Modern Pirate Movie? No, just a nasty case of sequelitis.

An Inconvenient Truth
PG, 95 minutes
Now playing at Vinegar Hill Theatre

Rachel Carson on pesticides, Jonathan Schell on nuclear weapons, Chicken Little on atmospheric disturbances of indeterminate origin— with Davis Guggenheim’s gently hair-raising documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore joins the long line of Cassandras who have reminded us over the years that it’s not nice to fool with
Mother Nature. Only this time, instead of falling down, the sky is filling up with greenhouse gases—which trap the sun’s rays, which raises the temperature, which melts the polar icecaps, which floods the… Well, you know the scenario. Or do you? Because one of the reasons Gore, who (in his own words) “used to be the next president of the ,” decided to make this movie was his admitted failure, in all his years of public service, to get the word out on global warming. No matter how many times he told us the sky was filling, we kept blowing him off.

And we may keep blowing him off, because, although we love disaster movies, we’re a little slow on the uptake when it comes to preventing actual disasters—especially those that involve turning off the air-conditioner. Gore knows this, and has nevertheless mounted a valiant campaign to knock some sense into us. An Inconvenient Truth, which takes off from the multimedia presentation that Gore estimates he’s given over a thousand times in the last 17 years, is perhaps the most alarming dog-and-pony show of all time.  Using charts and graphs (and even the occasional “Futurama” cartoon) Gore lays out his argument—one that (as he points out) is accepted by virtually every leading scientist in the world. And he does it with a self-deprecating folksiness that was largely absent during his campaigns for national office. Not really losing to George Bush may be the best thing that ever happened him—and the environment.

That’s if enough people heed Gore’s call. But there’s a quixotic air about him now—the knight errant tilting at wind-powered mills.  Some have argued that he’s not just trying to save the world, he’s running for president. And parts of the movie—his recollections of his son being hit by a car, his sister succumbing to lung cancer—do have a campaign-bio feeling about them. But if he is running for president, this sure is a weird way to go about it. No—Gore seems quite comfortable in his new role as the Carl Sagan of climate change, laser-pointing to the billions and billions of carbon-dioxide molecules girdling the globe. He can still be a little stiff, as if he learned everything he knows about public speaking from Toastmasters. But a little stiffness, and even a little humility, may not be such a bad thing when prophesying the end of the world. Or as Gore calls it, in a wickedly evocative phrase, “a nature hike through the Book of Revelations.”

The Break-Up (PG-13, 106 minutes) Peyton Reed’s “anti-romantic comedy” about a mismatched couple (Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston) is often funny, sometimes uncomfortably so. Vaughn plays a guy’s guy, the kind who’d like to put a pool table in the living room, and Aniston is a version of her sweet, spunky character from “Friends.” (Kent Williams) Playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6

You, Me and Dupree (PG-13, 108 minutes) Owen Wilson (still hot off Wedding Crashers) stars as a down-and-out best man who moves in on two newlyweds (Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson). Since he got fired from his job for attending their wedding, they feel guilty and are happy to have him stay over for a day…or two …or three …or…  Eventually, of course, Dupree’s seemingly endless couch-surfing ways cause friction with the new couple. A fine cast jokes it up in the
same vein as Wedding Crashers. (D.O.) Playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6