PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: SALAZAR SETS NO SAILS

            The official story is that Johnny Depp was totally committed to On Stranger Tides ... The fourth Pirates film, released back in 2011.  He made casting decisions, tinkered with the story.  He really got involved.  Sometimes that can lead to great, inspiring work.  Other times that can make a for an unwieldy vanity project.

            The resulting film was okay.  The inspired casting of the literally-can-do-no-wrong Ian McShane helped things along.  Freshened things up.  But Rob Marshall isn’t an action director, and he isn’t a director with the dark vision that Gore Verbinski brought to the first three films (the second and third of which are far better than most people give them credit for.  There, I said it).

            Despite being just okay, the film went on to gross over a billion, which guaranteed there’d be another.

            Anyway, the point is he was totally committed to the fourth film.  Gave his all.  

            So, what the fuck happened?  Cos, this time, he’s phoned his performance in.  I did wonder if he was genuinely drunk, or stoned; as the lightness of touch that he brought to the role originally has now gone, and he’s playing Captain Jack simply as a clumsy, drunken oaf, with a perpetually bored expression.  Not unlike that on my face when I was watching this turd float across the screen.

What do you mean?  This is my happy face.

            Since the catastrophic industry-shaking nose-dive of Depp and Verbinski’s Lone Ranger in 2013, Depp’s career has entered a challenging phase.  In fact, when exactly was the last time Depp made a financially successful film?  Y’know, when he isn’t wearing Sparrow’s dreads?  Well, there was Alice in Wonderland in 2010, but everyone pretty much knows that was hit mostly because it was riding Avatar’s 3D coat-tails.  So, when was he actually good in a film?  Personally, I thought he did great work as the gangster Whitey Bulger, in Black Mass (2015).  If anything, the story let him down; but it was true so, whaddya gonna do?  And, of course, he was glorious in Rango in 2011 but, y’know, that was just a few days in the recording studio.

            It’s fair to say that Depp is not the cultural behemoth that the first Pirates made him.  Before that film, he chose mostly odd-ball indie films, when he wasn’t playing Tim Burton in various Tim Burton films.  He carved out a very lucrative, very eccentric niche for himself.  This didn’t, apparently, prepare him for megastardom.  It’s been common knowledge over the last couple of years that his life has been in something of a (relative) free-fall and it is, therefore, very possible that he wasn’t emotionally and psychologically in the best place when he was making this Pirates film.

When your career gets to that 'I can't get arrested' phase ... Take a trip to a land down under.  They'll sort you out.  (Just don't forget to take the dogs).

            The story concerns the son of Orlando and Keira’s Will and Elizabeth, and his search for the way to break the curse that keeps his dad undead on The Flying Dutchman.  Despite the success of Stanger Tides, this film, essentially, ignores it and returns to addressing questions that were already answered in the original trilogy.

            We start with undead sea captain Barbarossa Salazar in his haunted galleon The Pearl The Flying Dutchman, Silent Mary, a ship which swallows up other ships (like Stromberg’s tanker in 19777’s The Spy Who Loved Me); he tasks young Henry with finding Jack Sparrow and delivering unto him a message.  “Why can’t you tell him yourself?”  “Because ...” Pull back to wide shot, deliver the punch line: “Because ... Dead Men Tell Know Tales!”  And there is the title, written large across the screen: Salazar’s Revenge.  God knows why they decided to change the title from Dead Men Tell No Tales here.  It’s not like we culturally don’t understand the phrase.  But, it is emblematic of the lack of identity this film has.  It isn’t really its own beast; it’s more just a patchwork of elements from the first three films.

            Newcomer Brenton Thwaites plays Henry, the son, and you can tell why they cast him, he very much has the air of a younger Orlando, all fresh-faced and bushy eye-browed.  His opposite number is Kaya Scodelario as Carina, who is quite convincing as that most terrifying of creatures, an intelligent woman.  So intelligent that she spends the first act of the film avoiding being burned as a witch by terrified men.

            It was a nice move making the female lead an independent and intelligent woman, who doesn’t need rescuing and, indeed, actually does some rescuing.  It’s just a shame that they then felt the need to get her into her (voluminous) underwear and make repeated lascivious jokes about her being a HOR-ologist.  That’s hardly advancing the cause of women in film.

It's alright, it'll be fine.  I'm sure SyFy will hire us both for one of their shark films after this.

            Both of these young leads do earnest work here, but the returning lags mostly seem distracted and irritated by the needs of acting a scene.  Presumably it was annoying being dragged away from counting all the money they were getting, since that is clearly the only reason they came back.  Yes, okay, Jeffrey Rush’s Barbarossa has been given more to do than in any film since the first one.  Which is good, cos he was kinda window-dressing for a while there.  But he’s still fairly superfluous here, since Javier Bardem is on hand to be the proper badguy.

            Although he is really just an amalgam of Barbarossa from the first film (he’s cursed to be dead but not dead) and Davy Jones from the second (his hair swirls around his face like Jones’ tentacles did his).  Bardem is obviously having fun, spitting black ink and chewing up the scenery.  It’s a shame they chose not to bring back Penelope Cruz’s Angelica, it would have been interesting to see Spain’s most glamorous married couple in a fun film.  It might’ve helped erase the memory of The Counselor (2013).  It might have helped erase the memory of this film!

Looking good, there, Bardem.  You must let me know your moisturising regime ...

            Visually, the film is quite dark, with that muddy lack of contrast that bad 3D has.  Except, I watched this in 2D.  The dialogue is similarly charmless, and never more than functional.  The film lacks the transgressive energy and thrill that Verbinski brought to the first three.  It’s not completely without charm, though, the scene where Jack is in the guillotine as it pendulums and the blade gets closer, gets further away, gets closer again; that has something of the inspiration of the set-pieces of the first film.  But, all too often, the film falls foul of its lame sense of humour.  The scene where Jack is forced to marry a fat woman, for example, is lifted straight out of a Carry On film.  Isn’t this the guy who faced off against a vast tentacle monster ... And yet it’s come to this?

            There’s a lovely tip of the hat to Ray Harryhausen, when the ship’s masthead comes to life and attacks Jack.  And there’s an enticing flashback to young Jack, played by a ‘digitally de-aged’ Depp, taking on his first captaincy.  That’s the film I want to see, not this bilge!

A fresh faced digi-Depp, offering us a tantalising taste of Jacks of the past.  A much more engaging person than the tired, overly familiar and dissolute character (and actor) we get here.

            So, what we’re left with is a muddled plot, which Jack Sparrow doesn’t drive, but is more of a passenger within; a leaden script with very few well-turned lines or memorable one-liners; and a roster of faces returning who do little more than wink at the camera and say “Remember me?”  I love the magic and the marvel of the first three films, but that’s almost entirely lacking here (with the exception of the parting of the waves scenes at the end - but it’s too little too late by then).

            At just a hair over two hours, this is the shortest of the five Pirates films, yet those two hours drag on forever.

            And Paul McCartney?  Really?

Written by: Jeff Nathanson

Directed by: Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg

Cert: 12A

Dur: 129 minutes

Top Ten Animated Films That Screw With Your Head – part 1

There is a noble heritage in animation of using the limitless possibilities of the medium to present a world entirely unlike the real world.  Of late, the rise of CGI has been responsible for a drive to create ever-more convincing depictions of the real world.  This seems beyond futile to me and Robert Zemeckis’ photo-real movies (The Polar Express etc) fail, for me, in just about every respect.  There is no point in using animation to create real people, you might as well just use real people!  The magic of animation is that it can present visions that are simply not achievable in the real, world where the laws of physics hold sway.  Some things can only be presented in animation and that should be celebrated.

Rango treads a line between these two traditions … It presents a photo-realistic vision of a world that simply could not exist.  A careworn, ramshackle wild west populated with a menagerie of anthropomorphic animals all of whom live together irrespective of their natural habitats.  The town of Dirt becomes their natural habitat.  It’s almost a though the works of Enid Blyton or Kenneth Graham were filmed by Sergio Leone and David Lynch.  But the film goes beyond this because, as a bifurcated armadillo points-out early on, “It’s a metaphor!”  The film plays with our post-modern sensibilities and feeds our appetite for the unusual.

Yes, the film is full of meta-narrative quotations from other films, subtle or obscure ones, like Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) or stark-staring-bleedin’ obvious ones like Apocalypse Now (1979) and A Fistful of Dollars (1964).  Yes, its story is wafer thin … bogus sheriff learns to protect the town that trusts him … making it a sort of Carry On Chameleon!  But it goes beyond these all-too-common motifs.  It is a film which is not simply content to engage us emotionally, it wants to stimulate us intellectually as well, by constantly pulling the rug out from under our metaphorical feet.

It is certainly a heady mix which, when Rango wanders into the desert and begins to hallucinate, crosses the line into The Surreal, a place where animation is particularly comfortable!

 Animation often does and should stretch the mind of the viewer, it should open your eyes wide and show you marvellous new things the like of which you have only ever dreamed and, if you are occasionally reminded that you are watching a cartoon, that’s not such a bad thing, it means you are conscious and not in the blank-eyed, slack-jawed, empty-headed state so many big Hollywood movies seem to require.

With that in mind – I have begrudgingly conceded that I need to publish a list.  It is, simply put: My Top Ten Animated Films That Screw With Your Head.

Now, I freely concede there is some wonderfully experimental stuff in Disney films, particularly the earlier ones, but you’ll likely be more than familiar with them, so I’m not going to include them here.  Similarly, there is a whole universe of extraordinary animation by the likes of Jan Svankmajer, Jiri Barta, Lotte Reiniger, Zbigniew Rybczynski, Stan Brakhage and my personal favourites, Norman McLaren, Terry Gilliam and, in a league of his own, Ray Harryausen, any one of which would seriously zap you in the head, but they tend to produce shorts rather than features so I’ll leave them out of this list.  They deserve a list of their own, anyway!

So, without further ado:

My Top Ten Animated Films That Screw With Your Head:

10:  La Planète Sauvage - Fantastic Planet (1973)

click to enlarge to Brobdingnagian proportions

 I first heard of this film at the end of the seventies when it was featured in Starburst magazine, every issue of which I pored over, practically memorising every word since, in 1978, there wasn’t a lot of other movie-related information available to me!  This film seemed wildly exciting simply because it was different from anything I’d seen before. 

Sadly, it isn’t; exciting, that is.  It’s essentially a version of Gulliver’s Travels, with the human race reduced to pets kept by gigantic blue-skinned aliens call Draags.  Some humans have escaped captivity and set up their own civilisation on this psychedelic and vastly-out-of-scale planet.  Like Rango, it’s a metaphor!

Produced by the peace, love and pass the spliff generation in the joint crucibles of late ‘60s fervour – Paris and Czechoslovakia - It was the first feature by French animator René Laloux, based on the designs of surrealist artist Roland Topor.

9: Metropia (2009)

It’s possibly the presence of Vincent Gallo as the voice of the main character that makes this film feel like an Independent American movie, but it’s actually Swedish.  Unfairly unreleased in much of the world, it tells a tale of a non-conformist in a 1984-like dystopia where civilisation is teetering on the brink because of a disturbingly familiar financial crisis.  The movie’s central metaphor is The Underground: all of Europe’s underground systems have been joined together so people can move around freely without ever needing to go to the surface.

The weirdness lies in the CGI which has taken photographs of real faces and distorted them slightly, to give every character a deathly blank feel and the whole film a disturbingly quality of the unheimlich (look it up).

There is an official website for Metropia here.


 

8: Renaissance

Another cross-cultural mongrel, this is a French, British, American, Luxembourgian co-production.  It’s a cyberpunk film shot in stark black-and-white (making it look more like Frank Miller’s Sin City comics than Miller and Rodriguez’s film version did).

Set in a piled-high Paris of the future, it concerns a corrupt mega-corporation, the fountain of youth and gangsters.  The stark visuals are very hard on the eyes, initially, but you quickly learn the film’s short-hand and are drawn into its other-worldliness. 

The film is produced through a process called rotoscoping which is a tried-and-trusted animation technique going back almost a century to the early work of Max Fleischer, where the performances are filmed then traced by the animators.  Modern rotoscoping employs computers to produce the final image but, other than that, the process remains largely unchanged.

7: Strings (2004)

 Arguably this isn’t animation, because it’s puppetry.  But it’s my list, my rules.  Like a lot of the films here, this is a peculiarly European movie, this time being a Danish-Swedish-Norwegian-British co-production. 

The conceit with this film, which is an idea bordering on genius, is that the puppets know they are marionettes, they are aware of their strings and, indeed, their strings are most important to them as they stretch up into the sky connecting them to the thing that gives them all life: be it, Heaven, God or merely a great Frank Oz in the sky.

The logic of life as a puppet is beautifully explored, but, as with all good animation, the clever depictions of an alternate form of life are merely the background to an astonishingly ambitious epic story.  The DVD has a documentary on it showing  just what lengths the producers went to ensure the film was finished to the standard they needed (including mortgaging houses and selling cars).  It was worth the effort.

Ignore the appaling voice-over on this trailer and just bask in the wonderous imagery ...

6: Baron Prasil – The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1961)

 This film is a collage of animation styles, including 3D models and 2D cut-outs interacting with live action.  It also mixes Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon with Rudolph Erich Raspe’s The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Given Munchausen’s claims (and it’s worth remembering that the fictional character is based on a real 18^th century German nobleman with a reputation for, shall we say, exaggeration) of a flight on a cannon-ball and a journey to the Moon, animation was the perfect way to present his adventures.

The film was also a clear and considerable influence on the magnificent Terry Gilliam and for that, alone, it deserves your attention.

This trailer has been cut together by a fan, but it better represents the film than any other clips I could lay my cursor on, so enjoy ...

 And tomorrow, I'll be unveiling my top five ... Ooh, the tension is almost unbearable ...Or, you could save your finger-nails and just click here.