"Pirates of the Caribbean" Stinks / More on "Spider-Man 3"
1) Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
The reader ought not misconstrue the meaning of that statement. Often, when someone sees a particularly awful movie, they’re almost always tempted to say it was one of the worst they’ve ever seen because they can think of no other way to convey their lack of satisfaction. So let there be no misunderstanding. Even with the pass that allowed me seven dollars off the ticket price, meaning I paid only 50 cents for entry, I still overpaid. The trip to the bathroom taken just before I sat to write this blog entry produced a result that was not only more tightly constructed than Pirates, it also made more sense.
Pirates’ greatest sin is that it descends to what has become Hollywood’s most disturbing recent trend (most recently employed in Spider-Man 3, but also notably in such unintended disasters as King Kong): It’s drastically, terribly overwritten, and because of that, everything else suffers. I can only imagine that the final shooting script must have rivaled Atlas Shrugged in length.
In a desperate, mad dash to make Orlando Bloom’s character interesting for the first time in three films, (what feels like) twelve plot twists involving Turner are inexplicably woven into the story. The goal is to create an illusion of unreliability around him, but the actual result is that all this “Is he or isn’t he?” gets old, and at a record pace. On several occasions the main characters are forced to confront each other, and you’re never really sure why, because in the end, the notion of Turner as heel is so preposterous, you know everything will work itself out, and everyone will end up on the same side.
Same with Keira Knightley’s character, who until At World’s End has been interesting only because she comes close to genetic perfection, with a sexy-as-fuck accent. We find her not far from where she was this time last year, although in the beginning a vehicle for a pretty good gag about the large number of weapons she’s able to keep on her person. In short enough order (if there can be such a thing with this movie), she’s a captain, then a King; and then, as their ship swirls around the rim of (what amounts to) a giant toilet bowl in the ocean, hers and Bloom’s characters manage to both swordfight the villains and take marriage vows, administered by Barbossa. While I appreciate the desire to be tidy and tie all loose ends, I staggered away knowing it could have been done utilizing more creativity and forethought.
But never mind those two. John Depp makes the franchise, and it’s Depp who suffers the most from this unrestrained overwriting. On the verge of ushering a truly iconic character into the American cultural lexicon, Depp is instead contractually regulated to the material provided him, which turns out to be even more slapdash and wasteful when it comes to Jack Sparrow than the others.
Depp may be a socialist twat, but he’s also a fucking genius as an actor – the unfortunate byproduct of the meandering script is that his great talents are wasted because the writers wanted so badly to add a little more silliness and mental instability to a character that seemed perfectly silly and unstable in the first place. (Depp’s first turn as Sparrow didn’t earn him an Oscar nomination for nothing.)
The music employed throughout is positively ponderous, and never lets up. (Thank Christ it’s there, or else I wouldn’t have known how to feel!) Of course, Pirates is not unique on this score (no pun intended), but as the movie continued, and continued, and continued (with a running time of 2:47), it seemed in this example to be particularly relentless.
Also disturbing were the long, rambling monologues our heroes are forced to utter. I’m not against them, per se; when properly written and undertaken, a long monologue can convince the viewer to offer their undivided attention. (There are many examples, but the first that pops into my head in Christopher Walken’s turn in Pulp Fiction.) In regards to Pirates, the speeches are inserted because the writers have done such an awful job of explaining their plot for the last two pictures, and need desperately to get out from under their own work.
Everything in the world of entertainment should come back to HBO’s Deadwood. Any writer thinking of adding long diatribes to his script should first, by federal law, be forced to watch all three seasons of Deadwood, wherein they will learn how important it is to know their characters, the circumstances that bring them to this moment in their script, and the importance of foresight.
The special effects are, of course, marvelous. But if you’re over the age of 18 and have already seen much of what Hollywood has to offer in that area, special effects can only mean so much. The opening sequence, where wave after wave of people are hung for their support of pirates, is perfectly dark and well assembled; but that is the last interesting idea the film has to offer.
2) Having now spent nearly 900 words slamming Pirates of the Caribbean, I turn back to Spider-Man 3, which I am sad to say I have not appropriately damned to the five dollar bin at your local video store.
Writing about Spider-Man 3 for National Review, Ross Douthat says some fun and interesting things, with which I agree wholeheartedly and excerpt here for your enjoyment.
“… [It] isn’t a good sign for the franchise that I was more interested in figuring out what it takes to kill off Spidey – four punches from the Sandman’s elephant-sized fists? five? six? – than in anything else that had happened on screen in the previous two hours. There are rumors that this was the most expensive movie ever made, eclipsing even the inflation-adjusted price of the Taylor-Burton Cleopatra, and the money wasn’t exactly spent in vain: Spider-Man 3 is stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey [i.e., overwritten], with more villains, more love interests, more special effects and (alas) more dance numbers than the previous two numbers put together. Indeed, given the price tag, I suppose it’s almost understandable that a Sony Pictures accountant looked hard at the balance sheet and decided that if they were going to finance all the CGI, they couldn’t afford to shell out for a screenplay, too.
“Or maybe they splurged on four screenplays and then hired a team of baboons to run them all together…. That [Peter Parker’s transformation to the “dark Peter Parker”] is supposed to be sinister rather than hilarious is just one of the many problems with Spider-Man 3…. But when the meteor carrying the black goo happens to land ten feet from the web where Peter and Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane are making out, with no explanation save coincidence, the audience grown restless; when the Sandman happens to be the real killer of Peter’s uncle, thus undercutting a major plot point from the first movie suggesting a certain stakes-raising desperation in the filmmakers, the grumbling grows louder; and when the tycoon’s son turns out to have a butler, heretofore unglimpsed, who happens to offer a revelation at a crucial moment without explaining why he never mentioned it before, the only appropriate response is heckling, or maybe giggles.”
Here, here, Douthat. Well said, though I wish I’d said it first.
The reader ought not misconstrue the meaning of that statement. Often, when someone sees a particularly awful movie, they’re almost always tempted to say it was one of the worst they’ve ever seen because they can think of no other way to convey their lack of satisfaction. So let there be no misunderstanding. Even with the pass that allowed me seven dollars off the ticket price, meaning I paid only 50 cents for entry, I still overpaid. The trip to the bathroom taken just before I sat to write this blog entry produced a result that was not only more tightly constructed than Pirates, it also made more sense.
Pirates’ greatest sin is that it descends to what has become Hollywood’s most disturbing recent trend (most recently employed in Spider-Man 3, but also notably in such unintended disasters as King Kong): It’s drastically, terribly overwritten, and because of that, everything else suffers. I can only imagine that the final shooting script must have rivaled Atlas Shrugged in length.
In a desperate, mad dash to make Orlando Bloom’s character interesting for the first time in three films, (what feels like) twelve plot twists involving Turner are inexplicably woven into the story. The goal is to create an illusion of unreliability around him, but the actual result is that all this “Is he or isn’t he?” gets old, and at a record pace. On several occasions the main characters are forced to confront each other, and you’re never really sure why, because in the end, the notion of Turner as heel is so preposterous, you know everything will work itself out, and everyone will end up on the same side.
Same with Keira Knightley’s character, who until At World’s End has been interesting only because she comes close to genetic perfection, with a sexy-as-fuck accent. We find her not far from where she was this time last year, although in the beginning a vehicle for a pretty good gag about the large number of weapons she’s able to keep on her person. In short enough order (if there can be such a thing with this movie), she’s a captain, then a King; and then, as their ship swirls around the rim of (what amounts to) a giant toilet bowl in the ocean, hers and Bloom’s characters manage to both swordfight the villains and take marriage vows, administered by Barbossa. While I appreciate the desire to be tidy and tie all loose ends, I staggered away knowing it could have been done utilizing more creativity and forethought.
But never mind those two. John Depp makes the franchise, and it’s Depp who suffers the most from this unrestrained overwriting. On the verge of ushering a truly iconic character into the American cultural lexicon, Depp is instead contractually regulated to the material provided him, which turns out to be even more slapdash and wasteful when it comes to Jack Sparrow than the others.
Depp may be a socialist twat, but he’s also a fucking genius as an actor – the unfortunate byproduct of the meandering script is that his great talents are wasted because the writers wanted so badly to add a little more silliness and mental instability to a character that seemed perfectly silly and unstable in the first place. (Depp’s first turn as Sparrow didn’t earn him an Oscar nomination for nothing.)
The music employed throughout is positively ponderous, and never lets up. (Thank Christ it’s there, or else I wouldn’t have known how to feel!) Of course, Pirates is not unique on this score (no pun intended), but as the movie continued, and continued, and continued (with a running time of 2:47), it seemed in this example to be particularly relentless.
Also disturbing were the long, rambling monologues our heroes are forced to utter. I’m not against them, per se; when properly written and undertaken, a long monologue can convince the viewer to offer their undivided attention. (There are many examples, but the first that pops into my head in Christopher Walken’s turn in Pulp Fiction.) In regards to Pirates, the speeches are inserted because the writers have done such an awful job of explaining their plot for the last two pictures, and need desperately to get out from under their own work.
Everything in the world of entertainment should come back to HBO’s Deadwood. Any writer thinking of adding long diatribes to his script should first, by federal law, be forced to watch all three seasons of Deadwood, wherein they will learn how important it is to know their characters, the circumstances that bring them to this moment in their script, and the importance of foresight.
The special effects are, of course, marvelous. But if you’re over the age of 18 and have already seen much of what Hollywood has to offer in that area, special effects can only mean so much. The opening sequence, where wave after wave of people are hung for their support of pirates, is perfectly dark and well assembled; but that is the last interesting idea the film has to offer.
2) Having now spent nearly 900 words slamming Pirates of the Caribbean, I turn back to Spider-Man 3, which I am sad to say I have not appropriately damned to the five dollar bin at your local video store.
Writing about Spider-Man 3 for National Review, Ross Douthat says some fun and interesting things, with which I agree wholeheartedly and excerpt here for your enjoyment.
“… [It] isn’t a good sign for the franchise that I was more interested in figuring out what it takes to kill off Spidey – four punches from the Sandman’s elephant-sized fists? five? six? – than in anything else that had happened on screen in the previous two hours. There are rumors that this was the most expensive movie ever made, eclipsing even the inflation-adjusted price of the Taylor-Burton Cleopatra, and the money wasn’t exactly spent in vain: Spider-Man 3 is stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey [i.e., overwritten], with more villains, more love interests, more special effects and (alas) more dance numbers than the previous two numbers put together. Indeed, given the price tag, I suppose it’s almost understandable that a Sony Pictures accountant looked hard at the balance sheet and decided that if they were going to finance all the CGI, they couldn’t afford to shell out for a screenplay, too.
“Or maybe they splurged on four screenplays and then hired a team of baboons to run them all together…. That [Peter Parker’s transformation to the “dark Peter Parker”] is supposed to be sinister rather than hilarious is just one of the many problems with Spider-Man 3…. But when the meteor carrying the black goo happens to land ten feet from the web where Peter and Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane are making out, with no explanation save coincidence, the audience grown restless; when the Sandman happens to be the real killer of Peter’s uncle, thus undercutting a major plot point from the first movie suggesting a certain stakes-raising desperation in the filmmakers, the grumbling grows louder; and when the tycoon’s son turns out to have a butler, heretofore unglimpsed, who happens to offer a revelation at a crucial moment without explaining why he never mentioned it before, the only appropriate response is heckling, or maybe giggles.”
Here, here, Douthat. Well said, though I wish I’d said it first.
posted by Brian S. Wise | 7:44 AM
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