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Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Yes - but is it Arrrrt?
Belle and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. We agreed it was great fun. Now it turns out the critics agree: it stinks. To some degree this seems to be due to the usual ‘so you didn’t want to see a silly pirate movie’ problem. De gustibus and all. But you shouldn’t criticize a pirate movie as though it ever had any chance of not being a pirate movie.
But there seems to be something else going on - which, on reflection, is more of the same thing. Plot-wise, the film has pretty clearly decided to manage the problem of being the middle stage of a three part rollercoaster ride by turning into a Rube Goldberg device - just substitute kraken for mouse. Don’t you think that’s a funny way to play it? (I do.) But the critics all seem to be grousing about the over-elaborate plot. (Yeesh. What do you want from a Rube Goldberg device? Modernist simplicity?) This Mick LaSalle pan seems to get the whole thing perfectly upside down and backwards (ah, reminds me of all those Mick LaSalle reviews I read in grad school). “Worst of all, director Gore Verbinski doesn’t seem to understand the difference between motion and action. It’s an important difference. Motion is just violence and tumult happening onscreen. Action is violence and tumult that actively advances the story.” But isn’t there sort of an art to violence and tumult that keeps choreographically cancelling itself out? Roadrunner cartoons? Buster Keaton? Indiana Jones trying to get out of the tomb alive? For better or worse, it seems like the film is really quite hilariously attempting to expend the maximum possible energy, getting almost nowhere fast.
What did you think of the film? And what do you think of the somewhat earnest, critical handwringing in the NY Times piece I linked?
(Obviously I didn’t feel up to writing more about Badiou and Witttgenstein tonight.)
Comments
I like your post title. But the movie itself I found so disgracefully bad that I was quite depressed afterward, and I have a very high tolerance for movie badness.
I disagree about what you’re calling “the ‘so you didn’t want to see a silly pirate movie’ problem”. I just think pirate movie is a genre with as much potential as any other, and I wouldn’t assume it has to be silly to get the most out of the material bequeathed by the genre. To me POTC didn’t succeed as a pirate movie. It looked and felt like what it was: the movie of a disneyland ride. Cavell said, and I agree, that to accept movies as a genuine art form you have to embrace a certain indiscriminateness about what kinds of movies you’re prepared to like and take seriously.
As for the A.O. Scott piece you linked to & asked about, I thought it wasn’t too bad. I get what you mean about handwringing but I think Scott is taking one of the few honourable positions available to you when criticising a movie that strikes you as corrupted - he’s trying to account for the seeming public taste for such things.
You mean this isn’t a post about Badiou and Wittgenstein?
It looked and felt like what it was: the movie of a Disneyland ride.
Laura, did you feel that way about the first one as well? (Still waiting for the second one to turn up here in Switzerland.) ‘Cause I’ll settle for that, if the alternative is “Cutthroat Island”....
I have to disagree with Laura. I really enjoyed POTC. I regretted that Johnny Depp’s character played down his sexual ambiguity—more of Depp’s ad lib zaniness is always welcome.
But I liked the fact that the plot was at once over-complicated and rather simplistic. It reminded me of the film versions of *The Big Sleep* or *Kiss Me Deadly*. The point in each case is to keep your eye on the ball, no matter what other bells and whistles are going off around it. It’s rare for a Hollywood action movie to attempt to juggle the moral ambiguities featured in POTC. Each character wants muultiple objects, each different object offers different moral valences, and often the characters themselves don’t know that they want something (Knightly and the compass comes immediately to mind).
LeSalle writes, “Good long movies are long because they have to be. They’re not made of air.” One could argue that the problem with POTC is that it is paced like a novel rather than like a film. But that’s what I enjoyed about the plot. The movie brought to my mind Bakhtin’s description of Greek novels: incredibly long stories with only two major events—the splitting-up of the lovers and their ultimate reunion. Everything else that goes on in the middle is complication, pure and simple, and it can go on for as long as the author can sustain it.
This is the problem with LeSalle’s distinction between motion and action. In a classic romance, or in many classic noir, the structure goes like this: Find an informant—punch him in the nose—get an address—punch this guy in the nose—get another address—punch this guy in the nose—repeat—find object of quest. And that’s exactly how POTC is structured. The only goal of the complications is to delay completion of the plot. This isn’t Chekhov, dudes.
Finally, I was at first concerned about the Davey Jones character, who looked more silly than scary in the commercials. But the film does an excellent and creepy job with his character and *The Flying Dutchman* as a whole. Is it geeky to admit that the movie finally made me see what was similarly creepy about *The Rime of the Ancient Mariner*? That world of eternal, Sisyphus-like service aboard an eternally-errant ship is pure nightmare. It’s the nightmare side of the film’s plot structure as a whole, and it’s perhaps what is driving the critics and some audience members crazy: the feeling that the plot keeps going and going without offering satisfaction. When POTC ended, many of the people around me were audibly pissed off that the film refused to compose even a tentative or chapter ending. I thought it went well with the film’s themes of ever-delayed fulfillment (and ever-delayed death).
Plus, the kraken totally creeped me out. Much better than the godzilla-ish thing from *Clash of the Titans*.
I’m probably way too much of a fan of steampunk, Neal Stephenson and pulp set in the 17th-18th centuries generally to offer much of a critique, but I too enjoyed this film. ‘Curse of the Black Pearl’ was a fun vehicle and created characters that apparently resonated with the public. To me, ‘Dead Man’s Chest’ and the film to follow are a test of whether moviegoers are invested in these characters. Will we actually watch them deal with pain, regret and betrayal?
Yes the plot had its complications, but I find that refreshing. Half-way through the film I wondered when exactly it had turned into an Italian opera. This was more ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ than the film version of that book managed to be. This was John Woo does Lawrence Norfolk. Sure, it is just and action film (and yes, based on a Disneyland ride--I’ve not been to Disneyland, but my wife went once a year as a child and truly enjoys the moments when a portion of the ride suddenly emerges onto the screen). Must a good action film be simplistic and predictable?
I had a similar feeling at the end of ‘Dead Man’s Chest’ as I did at the end of ‘STIII: The Search for Spock’ (a bit surprising, since I was a teenager at that time). Some thing along the lines of “Shit, now I have to wait a year to see how this ends”. A mix of frustration and anticipation. To audiences especially frustrated by this, I say: deal with it.
Yes, it’s a pirate film. It’s fluff. It’s a hell of a lot better than average fluff. The last time prior to this that I bothered seeing something in the theater was The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. No, POTC is not Tolkien (it isn’t even the Chronicles of Narina, which I have yet to bother to see in its cinematic form--I was beaten about the head and neck with C.S. Lewis and how terribly clever he apparently is a few too many times in Catholic School to really care anymore). But Christ, we have pirates battling with a sea-monster controlled by a conflicted half-cephalopod villian, who I think isn’t likely to actually be the villian by the outset. A hollywood blockbuster in 2006 with the British East India Company as the nemesis? If only all big-budget films could be this stupid.
I completely agree with Luther. In fact, if it wouldn’t be completely confusing, I’d make Luther’s comment the post, and I’d relegate my post to comment status.
The best review ever of Pirates can be found at http://www.askaninja.com/node/1175
A. O. Scott is a great critic but he takes himself far too seriously. Now David Edelstein would never write something like that. :)
Am I the only one who found it horribly offensive that the island of cannibals was once again ok to be portrayed in a massive big budget Disney movie? I read it as a adoption of the spirit of conservatism in the US (like the Indy 500 cologne I saw today at the drugstore) and saw it as generally repugnant. I like pirate movies, and I think the genre (along with westerns) is making a comeback, and can be done well (Deadwood) or terribly poorly (dead man’s chest). I think there are a bunch of reasons for the resurgence, but overall I thought Dead Man’s was so much more convoluted and ridiculous (and in none of the fun ways of the original) that it lacked almost everything that made the first one interesting.
I have to say I’m sympathetic to a lot of LaSalle’s criticims. The original was an unexpected success because it was witter, better-crafted and more cleverly conceived than it had any right to be. The sequel has its moments here and there, and the cast seem very game, but for the most part it simply lacks those virtues. There’s also way too much gimmicky allusion to the first film, culminating with a true groaner of a moment in a final scene.
I’m not quite ready to say it’s a terrible film, but it certainly seems a perfectly disposable film; I’m never likely to watch it again or see the third in the trilogy.
I was down with Dead Man’s Chest. Found it extremely refreshing. A million times better than Crash or The Human Stain or Superman or fucking X-Men 3, which is the movie these guys should have written their “hold on, this isn’t pop-culture, eye-candy, rollicking good fun, it’s sinister and vapid” reviews about. (Maybe some of them did.)
I read the first bit of the AO Scott piece and remember being surprised that it didn’t even occur to him to think that he could be wrong about the film. (I didn’t finish it, so maybe he qualifies himself later on.)
But I heartily second what Luther says about the moral ambiguities of the film. Instead of a buy the numbers plot, the story hinges on the constantly changing fortunes of a group of characters who are constantly pursuing their own interests. The difference between the characters, the human ones anyway, is the degree to which each one thinks its appropriate to maintain or discard a veneer of conventional morality.
Another refreshing aspect of the movie was the degree to which all of its characters are 1) well and thorougly rendered both by actors and writers and 2)have the time and space to express credible readings of the movies events.
As for the handwringing, it strikes me as pretty arrogan.
I could go on re: the real bad guy is the east india company and other items, but time is short.
Fine. Whatever.
One word for the panning critics I skimmed over: Farce. Study up.
The pirate captian’s name is Sparrow, for crying out loud. You want drama, depth, sincerity, racial and gender sensitivity and so-forth from a moving with a Pirate named Sparrow?
Let’s not be wanting aesthetic objects to be other than they are. That’s the buisness of politics.
One sentence for the fantasy and SF writers, directors, and SFX personelle: Get over this fixation on the vagina dentatta, please. There is a motif developing in these genres that belies a fear folks should be over by now, even 14 year old boys and digitally savvy geeks—bless you both.
One question: Did any of the rest of you see this with audiences that either did not catch, or were too repressed/polite to laugh at the sexual innuendo? I was perplexed. For a minute I thought I was in a room full of people too stupid for a Disney film.
I missed the swish in the swashbuckle too. Fit so well with the Sparrow bit. But let’s face it, this romp is a trailer for the third in the set, to which much looking forward on my part.
A review needs to be written about how Johnny Deep isn’t so much stealing the vibe of Keith Richards (aside from the wardrobe), but rather how he’s picking up on the vibe that of Bob Hope in the Princess and the Pirate. You know, the cowardly hero type.
Also, the scenes between Knightly and Deep were damn sexy. I would have paid the 9 bucks for that alone.
Oh, come on, Laura, just because all these people liked it doesn’t mean some of us aren’t interested in hearing why you didn’t.
dreddly, you’re not the only one. See the Carribean American Centerlink Review.
Haven’t seen the film yet, although I am excited to (can’t tear myself away from my re-re-reading of “Gravity’s Rainbow"). The first one was fun, silly, and cheaper than a ticket to Disney World. I’m sure this one will be more of the same with slicker CGI and a more toned-down Depp.
But that linked NYTIMES piece by A.O. Scott was perfect shite, of course. The reviewers for the TIMES are so infatuated with their word allotment, and their own voice, that they go to great pains to be witty and arrogant all to tell you that candy is bad for you. I like how it takes four or five paragraphs to state the obvious in boring, longwinded terms: reviewers’ disdain has no effect on box office sales. No… really?
The film reviewers at the NYTIMES are so arrogant that they use films solely as an excuse to churn out trifling bon mots, numb pseudo-intellectual witticisms and endless self-references in the name of movie reviews. Oh, for the guts of a Pauline Kael or the intricacies of a Gary Indiana would I not burn my subscription bill!
Remember that Family Guy episode, where Stewie is dreaming of a perfect life, and it is him and another version of himself sitting in an nineteenth century drawing room, twittering silly aristocratic nonsense to each other? That’s the essence of the NYTIMES film critic staff.
While you’re debating whether or not it’s Art or merely Arrrrt you can read about the CGI work here:
http://www.vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=319b255d&atype=articles&id=2940
and here:
http://www.vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=319b255d&atype=articles&id=2941
Having seen the first film but not this one, I agree with Laura about it being a stain on our collective soul.
I’m having trouble reconciling the apparent contradiction between this comment of Simone’s:
The pirate captian’s name is Sparrow, for crying out loud. You want drama, depth, sincerity, racial and gender sensitivity and so-forth from a moving with a Pirate named Sparrow?
... and this one:
One sentence for the fantasy and SF writers, directors, and SFX personelle: Get over this fixation on the vagina dentatta, please. There is a motif developing in these genres that belies a fear folks should be over by now, even 14 year old boys and digitally savvy geeks—bless you both.
... which appears (rightly) to be demanding a form of gender sensitivity from this particular farce.
For that matter—as dreddly notes—it’s not really asking too much that farce have the creativity to avoid the sort of godawful Stock Cannibals that Hollywood used to borrow from boy’s own adventure yarns in times past. And I don’t know about drama, depth and sincerity, but I’d love some witty dialogue that’s actually witty, or at least somewhat memorable. (The dialogue was one of the pleasant surprises of Curse of the Black Pearl that wasn’t repeated in the sequel.)
Of course, you don’t need all of these things for farce. You can have (mediocre) farce without them, and people will still pay to see it. Celebrity names and good FX are worth something. And I think the disapproval of critics even adds to the attraction, actually; who doesn’t like to feel that they’re more in touch with the authentic magic of the movies than those arrogant, stodgy critics?
I’m having trouble reconciling them too, Dr. Slack, but I think you did a great job for me. Thanks!
There’s no reason that medicore/good/great farce can’t be, well, respectful—except that respect and farce are not long time companions.
The problem with the motif is not peculiar to Pirates, but shows up in Lord of the Rings, and simmers beneath the co-dependent stalker that is Uma Thurman in My Ex-girlfriend Is a Superhero. She’ll consume you if she can. Superman saves the earth (again), but Superwoman just wants to frighten her ex-boyfriend back into her life. Of course. A kind of consuming.
It’s a trend. It bugs me. But, and here’s my less astute reconciliation: if I just sigh and ignore the sexism and racism (which I shouldn’t have to do), then I can just romp along with the farce.
I also contradict myself a bit in wishing the critics would chill out and stop wanting a film to be something else while I also want it to be something else.
I suppose the question I’m not really addressing is this: if we add a good dash of respect to the genre, do we still have farce?
Simone: if we add a good dash of respect to the genre, do we still have farce?
I totally agree with you that the last thing a farce needs is to be preoccupied with respect. But farce also can’t afford to be lazy, which I think is the bigger problem with things like the cannibals or the vagina-devouring-our-hero scene*. Sexism and racism aren’t just offensive, they’re also not that interesting—humour at the expense of easy, well-established targets.
(* Okay, I suppose the latter is more properly in the category of creepy instead of just lazy. But the general point is the same, I think.)
Compare a famous farce like Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro (which lest we forget was also a sequel, to The Barber of Seville). What made it notable was that it took aim at risky targets for its day, in particular the conceits and self-satisfaction of male-dominated society. This didn’t mean it was a strait-laced or otherwise tame play—quite the opposite. But what it did mean was that it was memorable.
I don’t mind the vagina dentata, but the cannibal stuff, I agree, is indefensible. And mystifying. As mystifying as the trend Simone points out. How is this something film directors can’t be self-conscious about? It’s very different in its shallowness than what you would see in Raiders of The Lost Arc or Star Wars or other films made ten years ago (with the exception of terrorists always being middle eastern and drug dealers columbian in action movies) My pet theory is that its a product of film makers/screenwriters thinking that a story and or atmosphere can be assembled out of pre-existing components. You see this a lot with Harry Potter/Children’s magical adventure-type films that are full of eerie castles and strange creatures, all the conventions of the genre, slapped together, and then sort of drawn loosely into the shape of the story. In the case of the cannibals, it seems that directors are just unreflectively, uncritically drawing on elements from movies made from within a much more racist or openly racist culture. Outside of the cannibals, this is not the case, I think, in Dead Man’s Chest. It’s dissapointing to me, nonetheless, that this kind of sloppiness cropped up in a movie about which I am otherwise very enthusiastic.
Loved it. So much fun. Everyone else seems to have disected quite wonderfully what made the movie so fun, as well as deflating Mick Lasalle’s review. We here in San francisco i subjected to his reviews on a weekly basis. the man is incapable of enjoying a film that is meant to be fun and have lots of action. Now I definitely had major issues with Superman returns but Mick’s review (if i remember correctly) began “the first thing one wonders is: did we need another superman movie?” Well ok… maybe not, but one could fairly easily argue that superman has been a highly successful franchise for warner bros and dc so why not milk a few more bucks out of him. Whatever.
More frustrating is that Lasalle is totally susceptable to pretentious crap. Now I love foreign movies, and I love movies where nothing happens. Lasalle though seems to automatically assume that if a film is composed primarily of people talking that it is better than a movie where say a kraken eats a ship. This is obviously ridiculous. It would probably make this more convincing if I could remember some examples, but I cant.
(* Okay, I suppose the latter is more properly in the category of creepy instead of just lazy. But the general point is the same, I think.)
--- Ha. Funny!
Compare a famous farce like Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro (which lest we forget was also a sequel, to The Barber of Seville). What made it notable was that it took aim at risky targets for its day, in particular the conceits and self-satisfaction of male-dominated society. This didn’t mean it was a strait-laced or otherwise tame play—quite the opposite. But what it did mean was that it was memorable.
-- Then, OK, yes we can have farce without “picking on the little guy.” Thanks for the reminder, Dr. S. So, Memorable. Does Memorable relate to subversive, or revolutionary, or respectful? Farce and comedy that make fun of the way people assume, use, or ignore our power? Because how we so this really is a choice, where who we are isn’t, or isn’t the same sort of choice. Are we making a salad of aesthetics and politics and morality here?—which is one thing I think Great Farce can do well.
Hope I haven’t missed the thread…
I don’t think Dead Man’s Chest is a terribly good movie, but I enjoyed it a great deal. Here, though: when I walked out of The Matrix, I was jumping and laughing and freaking out the whole walk home. Its energy suffused me. My happiness about Chest ceased at the final frame (the little end-credits kicker was funny, I guess, but basically nothing). I’m with Laura on this point: it was a lot more like the trailer for an amusement park ride than the first film, which was tighter, more gleefully ambiguous (in any number of ways), naughtier. It earned its darkness; the second film is occasionally nervewracking but isn’t creepy like Pearl.
This week I read an early draft script of the first movie, and was struck by how much of the wit of Curse of the Black Pearl has been lost in the scaling-up to the sequel, replaced unfortunately with yuks. Look at the swordfights: the duel between Depp and Bloom in the first ep is a little jewel, while the climactic brawl in Chest - with the water wheel, you may recall - plays like a Disney cartoon, with all of a cartoon’s (ha) weight and delicacy. There’s a shot in which Keira Knightley is throwing shells at the three men fighting, while the box (which as I recall doesn’t contain the heart at that point, though who the hell cares?!) gets pilfered by the two other pirates. The swordfight is out of focus in the background, and that’s precisely the level of precision it achieves and deserves.
Criticisms of the film have nothing to do with ‘Why am I watching a pirate movie?’ - rather, I came away wondering, ‘Why am I watching another goddam pirate movie?’ One was enough, in this case. They stretched Depp’s character thin because he was so great in the first (and don’t assume like everyone else that his performance was all ad-libs - the writers provided enough raw material for him in that first film), and if Elliot and Rossio (writers) beefed up Knightley and Bloom’s parts as well, they did so at the expense of the fairy-tale consistency of the first flick.
I loved the second Matrix movie, and very much liked the third (though the long battle scene bored me); I’ve come to believe they’re far better films than critics have claimed, more rigorously constructed and precisely scripted than most filmgoers have been willing to credit, even if they boast enormous flaws that make it impossible to call them ‘great’. I enjoyed the second pirate flick but unlike the Matrix (or Tolkien or Star Wars) sequels it added only complication, not complexity, not generative substance. It has that in common with the largely risible second season of Lost, inexplicably lauded by audience and critics alike: Bette Davis was wrong about the ‘too much of a good thing’ problem, and so are Disney (what a surprise).
Nighy as Davy Jones was absolutely fantastic, by the way. As compelling as Ian McKellen’s Magneto.
Oh, Chris and Tim: it’s hard to give a damn about the East India Trading Company, not least because the film certainly didn’t. Perhaps the third film will gesture at social/historical relevance, perhaps not. It will make absolutely no difference to the series, which isn’t interested in pirates beyond their iconography and the periodic buckling of a little swash. The characters don’t know what they want? Of course not. If they did it’d be a nightmare trying to stretch this bloody series out to seven hours, wouldn’t it…
That film critic Mark Kermode says it best
‘When you leave the cinema with everyone talking about the film, either this film or any other recent blockbuster Over The Hedge, X Men. The Da Vinci Code,etc shout out as loud as you can “THAT IS THE DEFINITIVE EXAMPLE OF THE DEATH OF NARRATIVE CINEMA” and watch as everyone sees how clever you are.’
So have a go at that, Kermode did say he loved Davy Jones effects and something about a ‘Carbunkal’ I don’t know, I can’t comment I haven’t seen it, did see Superman Returns though, and although it was a great souped version of Richard Donners effort, I remembered I didn’t really like the Superman comics, I like my comic book heroes a bit more dystopian, Batman, The Watchman, V is for Vendetta etc