More undead pirates in the carribbean again... woo hoo ho and a bottle of hum

[JasonPratt]

Early reviews are coming in; here's Mr. Sunday Movies who is, as always, quite a hoot. His opinion of "Dead Men Can't Jump"?

Eh, better than 2 or 3, but not as funny (?!), more of the same, surprisingly glad to be back in this story's universe. Could be a lot worse, some great things in it but those are also more of the same. People who are fans of the characters may like it better.

[JasonPratt]

Less positive review from the gal at Beyond the Trailer

And she went in ready to love it.

[mirth]

Ouch.

This review will be short and dismissive. The movie under consideration — "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" — is, by contrasts, long and punishing. Its pleasures are so meager, its delight in its own inventions so forced and false, that it becomes almost the perfect opposite of entertainment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/movies/pirates-of-the-caribbean-dead-men-tell-no-tales-review-johnny-depp.html

[JasonPratt]

Undead fragments of pirate bottles arise!

Bro and his girls got me PotC5 for my birthday this past weekend and I watched it for the first time.

Thoughts, with some spoilers for a film that has been out for a few seasons now and which there's almost no reason to bother watching really:

1.) The direction felt very weak. As did the score where it seemed obvious the original Badelt/Zimmer music cues were stitched in occasionally. The original music was so forgetful I forgot that another composer had done it.

2.) I can't testify to the theatrical experience, but on Blu the film seemed to have been shot on such ultra-high def and/or on the 48fps high speed digital (introduced with the first Hobbit film long ago), that practically every scene looked like an unusually high budgeted television show. This was not to the advantage of the experience.

3.) This crop of undead pirates (or non-pirate but very piratey pirate hunters) didn't stand out very distinctively, except for their fragmented look which was played with a lot. Arguably the best part of the film, but that's not saying much.

4.) I was worried when the trailer editors thought Bardem's line of "People? no no no, Pirates!" was supposed to be so good as worthy to be put in the trailer. Because it wasn't. At all. My worries came to fruition: most of his lines are a garbled mess, except when he's telling his flashback story. (He does look cool in the ghostly holographic-caught-in-the-moment-of-destruction fashion of his crew.)

5.) For the first time in the series, islands just pop up nearby when clearly they haven't been, as convenient to the plot. The Devil's Triangle arch (which on maps looks nothing like the same thing) might be kind of explicable that way, except no one on the ships reacts like it's weird that this thing just popped up out of nowhere. And other, normal islands do it, too.

6.) Item #5 might be an example of bad macro-blocking design for scenes in general. A house being dragged through town might disappear as it turns a corner (turns a corner??) and then reappear half a minute later in more or less the same place. When plot convenient.

7.) While I'm complaining about the Devil's Triangle, its functioning is kind of pointless and unexplained. For this series, that's lazy as hell.

8.) Relatedly, random bald hot bad teeth witch who exists solely for plot convenience and maybe a bit of visual flair. She VERY LITERALLY pulls a key item, previously given away in order to trigger a plot ability that has never been spoken of before (and which technically might have counted as already triggered a few times previously in other films), out of plot-nowhere with the toss-off explanation that she has her ways. This was around the point I totally lost patience with the film. I think somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 through it.

9.) While I'm complaining about the dumbass islands, let me give an appreciation to the gemstone island that mirrors a star field toward the end of the film. That looked awesome.  :clap:

10.) The parting of the sea to get to the Trident of Doom or whatever, not so much. I assume the Trident of Neptune or Poseidon or PlotGuffin is why the film might be considered a finale to the series, since it breaks all curses at sea, meaning no more undead pirates or things like that, the end. Except that Davy Jones appears to be back in the post-credit stinger. This movie doesn't give a flying crap about its own story mechanics.

11.) Relatedly, for literally no explained reason, Will Turner (no dad around) has been cursed with the Dutchman disease. In the previous films this was explained as a definite result of Jones' broken heart after being jilted by a (the?) sea goddess. No explanation here, it's simply a plot motivation. (He also doesn't appear to be doing his job, just sitting on the bottom of the sea in a wreck of the Dutchman.)

12.) Remember how Barbossa got the magical sword of Blackbeard at the end of the prior film? He does almost nothing with it here, including when he might have used its magic powers to defend himself. I say "almost nothing" because he does use it for one purpose that he could have done (and would have been motivated to do) in the seven story-years since Potc4, namely freeing the Black Pearl from its cursed bottle state.

13.) Jack carries the cursed bottle with him in his jacket where it could and should have been easily destroyed, but isn't.

14.) We meet Jack's heretofore unknown uncle, for a 30 second non-cameo that comes from the nowhere and goes to the nothing. A few cheap jokes are involved, which the film itself pokes fun at for being so weak. What in the actual hell, movie?

15.) The new young couple are necessarily more interesting than the missionary and the mermaid from Potc4, simply because they're doing more in the plot (although the prior couple were more thematically interesting). But they made such little impression I don't recall their names. Both are related to characters from the films, although science-girl's relation to the plot is necessarily treated as perfunctory on her side. (She's Barbossa's daughter, and he has a small character arc about this. Good for him? -- and then he dies. Also another way this could be considered "the adventure ends".)

16.) There's a tiresome running joke where she's considered a witch, often for no good reason even by the standards of the supposed plot-setting other than the modern snide assumption that anyone and everyone "back then" would have considered a woman who knows science to be a witch. Considering that there are actual witches in the series (including one in this film, rather surprisingly), maybe this is understandable; but considering that they look and act so greatly different from Ms. Smyth, you might think people would get a clue anyway. It's a plot point dropped in for lazy jokes and lazy plot tension, and then stomped repeatedly into the ground.


Any or all of this might be forgiveable if the plot and Jack Sparrow were up to par.

17.) The prior films had some overly convenient and dumb plot holes sometimes, but they were at least seriously trying to be witty and often succeeded. This film's plot fails so hard to be witty that I can't even tell that the writers (and anyone else involved in the story) were trying.

18.) This becomes particularly grating when Ms. Smyth's scientific knowledge ends up having next to no real impact on resolving the plot. Literally anyone at the right time with the right pieces could have gotten the key clues, which weren't hard to understand; and the film itself goes out of the way to remember that any ocean navigator would know enough about stars to navigate the ocean (although then to make her look more necessary the film pretends that captains and navigators were doing this by a sort of brute instinct. To hell with you, movie.)

19.) But by far the worst transgressor of this film's anti-wittiness is Jack Sparrow. It isn't only that the humor constantly misfires (with so few successes that those felt like random accidents of low probability) -- for God's sake, the film stops for about five minutes to run a skit about Jack being shotgunned into a wedding in the middle of a whale's skeleton, that comes out of very literally nowhere and which disappears after serving no purpose to the plot other than drawing out the run-time, and this tedious time-waster is as unfunny as it is confusing for its existence (where and when it happens) at all.

But no, it isn't only that the humor surrounding him (and generally in the film) is dull and scatty. It's that the writers (one of them supposedly Ted Russo, a chief writer of all prior films) seem to actively shift gears to a new thesis that Jack survives and occasionally wins by random dumb luck and otherwise is both totally incompetent and has no real idea what he's doing. He flings pickle slices of ideas up onto the window, so to speak, to see if any stick, and if not well then dumb luck or someone else saves him. And he can hardly be bothered to be bothered about the result. Maybe this was supposed to reflect dottering old age and alcohol poisoning (and scabies) catching up with him -- it may very well reflect the real-life deterioration of Johnny Depp personally after the sort of life he has lived (he had his lines fed to him through an earpiece for this film, during shooting) -- but it isn't entertaining, and it isn't why audiences love to watch his character in these films.

20.) While I'm at it, all those "effects" he carries or hangs about his person? Which are supposed to represent events in his colorful life, and which Depp (and/or the writers) have come up with amusing half-stories for behind the scenes? Nope, all given to him at one time, back when he first became a captain, and five minutes after he also gets the magical compass. When the new explanation is more boring than the prior explanation, and doesn't even arrive with a necessary tradeoff in explaining or advancing the current plot, then you have failed this series, movie.

[JasonPratt]

Much to my unexpected surprise, Lindsey Ellis dropped a video essay about Potc1 (mostly) today. Yo ho ho! 

You have not failed this series, Nostagia Chick.

[JasonPratt]

Appropos of nothing, I was randomly considering tonight that Disney ought to cleanse their palette of the burning crash of the PotC franchise by working on adapting Russel Thorndyke's Doctor Syn / Scarecrow novels. I mean again: Disney made a good stab at adapting one of them earlier innn... 1964, I think? Starring none other than the DangerMan / Prisoner Himself, Patrick MacGoohan. 

In 1963, Hammer Films (under their Hammer Horror line) adapted, in a coterminous production with Disney (filming overlapped but different projects) the first book of the series, which chronologically is also the dead last story, as Captain Clegg (another alias for Dr. Syn), released in the US with the somewhat misleading title of Night Creatures, and starring Peter Cushing in the title role.

The same first/final novel also served as the basis for George Arliss' final film (also in the title role) back in 1937, iirc (I don't have it at hand atm), at a time when Thorndyke was smack in the middle of writing what eventually became the whole cycle. (First novel published in 1915, but he wrote them until 1944. First sequel, actually the earliest prequel, was 1935, twenty years later! Gives hope to some of us authors. ;) )

Theoretically, Disney wouldn't even have to finish out with the death of the main character: that story is set near the start of Britain's involvement in the Napoleonic Wars, and he could just go back to being a notorious-but-secretly-kind-hearted pirate in protection of his beloved home (though not necessarily the crown) against the French, having faked his death once again.

For those who don't know or remember, the main character, Christopher Syn, is a talented theological scholar from the mid 1700s, whose wife thinks he isn't exciting enough so she has an affair with a sea rogue who absconds with her to the waters of the New World. When Syn finds out, he resigns his studies and promptly starts a campaign to accrue several dozen Levels In Badass by hunting for the pirate to rescue his wife (and, unbeknownst to him, his son whom she had just conceived before the affair). In a strategy that would later inspire the author of the Green Hornet, he decides best way to find the pirate is to become a pirate, and so he and his trusted (and far more ruthless) sidekick pretend he's a murdering super-criminal named Captain Clegg in order to keep the truly villainous crews in line whom they have to work with.

While he does find his wife twenty-ish years later, and manages to sort of rescue her and get vengeance on his foe, he fails to save her life and learns his son has been lost in the meantime as well. Wiping out the pirate fleet in a roaring rampage of genius revenge, he turns his back on the whole sordid business and comes home -- but on the way to find an old seminary friend in southern England, his ships wrecks on the Romney coast in a storm. Most of his crew is lost and he's presumed dead, but a noble vicar from Romney Marsh actually dies diving into the stormy water to save as many of the crew as he can.

Inspired by this feat to remember his old days and dreams, Doctor Syn petitions his friend for the now-vacant job, and becomes the new vicar of Romney Marsh.

Unfortunately, the whole area is infested with more-or-less cutthroat smugglers, in bed with pirates; and his sidekick gets deeply involved with the gangs. Moreover, Syn comes to realize that most of these folks are simply trying to feed their families against the harsh royal taxes (this now being the reign of King George III and approaching the Revolutionary War in America.)

In order to help his flock, and also to regulate the smuggling activity on the coast, Syn and his sidekick create the persona of the mysterious Scarecrow, who with Syn's daring and genius progressively wipes out and assumes control of the smuggling gangs. (Parts of this story may have also inspired the recent series Breaking Bad, come to think of it.) Only a few gang members know the Scarecrow's true identity, and that he's really a nice guy at heart, who is mostly (but not entirely) bluffing the smuggling crew to keep the shadier characters in line.

This is where the original 60s TV miniseries (later edited to a film) comes in, as the Scarecrow in one of the middle books helps incipient rebels trying to start the American Revolution.

So he's a darker Robin Hood character, operating much along the line of the later Green Hornet: pretending to be the scariest of villains but actually trying to do good.

I'm honestly amazed Disney hasn't revisited this yet. I know they haven't forgotten the character, exactly, because one of the Captain Sparrow comic books featured a crossover story with him, and they've somewhat recently adapted the MacG era film into a graphic novel miniseries. (They also released the miniseries and film compilation in a collectors' tin several years ago; I naturally own it. ;) )