Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

"Sinking to Lower Depps"
or
"PG-13? It Should Be Rated "Arrrrrrrrrrr."

I enjoyed the boisterous first Pirates of the Caribbean—who would have thought that even talented film-makers and writers could turn a ride at Disneyland into a good movie?  But, it had been awhile since there'd been a quality pirate pic, and POTC hearkened back to the giddy Saturday-matinee thrills of past sea-faring adventures, but with a nice, gritty frou-frou quality.  Yes, it was loud, and confusing, and piled on too many episodes of buckling swashes, so it was hard to separate the buccaneers from the privateers.  And it gave Johnny Depp a break-through role that saved him from the pit of despair that is Tim Burton's cob-webbed basement-rec room. 

It was just plain, simple fun.

I passed on the second and third films because I figured they'd run the formula for movie trilogies: the second one turns dark and complicated without the fresh feeling of the first, leaving cliff-hangers that could grow barnacles on any writer's knuckles; then the third complicates things more, and resolves everything quickly and rushes to a well-deserved finale where everything (*sigh*) turns out alright.

I gave them not so much as a hailing shot across my bow.  I'd sailed on.

But, I thought I'd give Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides a chance.  For one thing, having resolved the Keira Knightley/Orlando Bloom romance (again), they're no longer present on this passage and the additions of Penélope Cruz and Ian McShane was an inducement.  Plus, the director is Rob Marshall and I wanted to see how he did with a project of a lesser pedigree than his previous work.  I liked Chicago, and parts of Memoirs of a Geisha.  But I thought Nine was an unmitigated disaster, occasionally brightened by performance (I was surprised to find numbers by Fergie and Kate Hudson the highlights).  Marshall needs a hit, and On Stranger Tides is just the ticket—an established franchise ($2.6 Billion in revenues?) with a built-in audience that doesn't care who directed it—all they care about is Depp's tipsy Keith Richards imitation and running like a girl from trouble.

Those sunken souls will be pleased; Depp does that schtick but with that silent-comedian's crack razor-sharp timing in the reactions.  It plays like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with three groups of sailors all after one thing: Ponce de León's fabled Fountain of Youth (it seems, all of a sudden, Spain, England and the Pirates are interested in the same thing).  After a brief sequence where Sparrow frees a member of his crew, he is arrested and brought before King George II (Richard Griffiths—when he sits there is a big musical fwump from Hans Zimmer's "Mickey-Mousing" score).  It seems that Spain's interest in the FOY has reached the King and he hires Captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush, or most of him anyway) to lead the expedition.  Jack escapes...and then things get complicated.

In the meantime, there are McShane and Cruz, as the pirate Blackbeard and his daughter, Angelica, mermaids, a Jack Sparrow imposter, silver chalices to find, and the series' obligatory focus on the supernatural (while also having a missionary hero, despite all the disparagements of religion in the script).  Blackbeard knows his voodoo, has a "zombified" crew, a magic cutlass, and a fine collection of ships-in-bottles.  Plus, his vessel "Queen Anne's Revenge" has a few nifty tricks that other pirate ships do not.  McShane is terrific, playing the comedy for truth ("If I don't kill a man now and then, they forget who I am"—a line similar to one from The Princess Bride—is played absolutely straight and with a baleful disinterest that never leaves his face.  Cruz is fine, but it appears she's just along for the ride—as duplicitous as her character is, she doesn't register much range, or fire...as she can. 

Marshall keeps things moving, editing things a bit too quickly for continuity to rush the dialogue, eliminating any pauses, and he does a few cute things with the 3-D imaging, beyond the snakes and pointy swords and rolling barrels, moving his cameras over the heads of a court-room, giving a sailing shot of the sea actual depth, and making the split-screen Jaws water's edge shot work well.  And although he isn't that good framing the fights, which jerk along with the breezy calculation—and lack of zest—of a Roger Moore fight from a James Bond film,* and there really isn't much of an ending—although there are three of them—it's pretty sprightly, the highlight being an encounter with mermaids—portrayed as supermodels with the manners of piranhas**—that is genuinely exciting.  There are even a couple of charming, if brief, surprises along the way. 

There is another quality issue, though.  On Stranger Tides, shot in 3-D, has an opening that is pretty murky once you put on the dark glasses, the same kind of clarity issues you get at drive-in's when they would start a movie at dusk.  Even in 3-D and IMAX (which is how I saw it—I was splurging), it's a little difficult to determine precisely what is going on.  It's something of a toss-up just how one should see the latest Pirates of the Caribbeans. It might be worth it to see it in three dimensions, but I'd do it at home.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides makes a fine Rental.


* Every once in awhile, sitting through this, I got the odd "formulaic" bustling feeling I get from the Bond films and the Indiana Jones movies (Zimmer's "Pirates of the Caribbean" dance-step has to accompany every bit of derring-do, like the "Indiana Jones Theme"), where the dialog is just not clever enough, but "it'll get by," if you don't mind a bit of eye-rolling (it does, after all, relieve some of the eye-strain produced by those glasses), and the action set-pieces just go on and on.  And one can set their watch by when action is timed in this thing.

** ...or is that redundant?

Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Take Two

"Elizabeth: The Golden Age" (Shekhar Kapur, 2007) Like its 1998 predecessor, "The Golden Age" is sumptuously produced, ornate in both costuming and production design, but also in filming and conceptual work. It is one of the most beautiful films I've seen in a longish time—excepting the sequences of torture and carnage—but the material feels a bit shallow (if not altogether juggled, shuffled and finagled*), like one of those bio-pic's that attempt to tell a tumultuous life in 90 minutes; no one likes to have their life, especially a Queenly one, summed up in Cliffs Notes.

"When last we left" Elizabeth I, she had ascended the throne, unmarried and without heir, but unbowed as "The Virgin Queen." Catholics to the right of her, Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton) to the left of her, and a seemingly endless line of suitors brought before her. No one has her back except her adviser Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush returning to the role) and lady in waiting Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish).

But there's one angle overlooked, although director Kapur has it covered with a dizzying number of overhead shots. Since the issue in "The Golden Age" boils down to whose side is God on—between the Protestant England and the Catholic Spain—a lot of time is spent from His point of view.**


Kapur, who started his career in Bollywood, uses color more imaginatively than most current directors (rather than embracing the current trend of leeching the color from films, he adheres to using it as another communicative tool). At the end of "Elizabeth" the audience was confronted with Elizabeth "the Virgin Queen" symbolized in all her alabaster glory. We see that same white Queen often in "The Golden Age" but are also confronted with different aspects of Elizabeth. Here, with the issue of finding a proper husband and the potential of an heir, she is frequently seen behind closed doors in far rosier tones than the alabaster appearance—"the divine here on Earth," in the words of Walsingham—that she uses for regal functions. She tells the Archduke Charles, a negligible suitor: "I have a secret, my dear. I pretend there's a pane of glass between me and them. They can see me, but they cannot touch me."

In times of regal impartiality, that "pane of glass" informs itself as the color blue in Kapur's direction. It sets Elizabeth apart and keeps her coolly disengaged and formal, as in the scene below, her she visits her former suitor, Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), and wife, her former lady-in-waiting to bestow her blessing on their first-born. The rest of the room, in slightly gloomy but warm colors, are off-set by her glowing in a frosty light.


And here, leaving the death-bed of a trusted advisor, she shows no emotion as Queen, allowing the man to know that he can die in peace, his work preserving her Monarchy—and her—is done.


The shot is also centered and composed like a Baroque painting, with many tableau layered in three-dimensions within it, each with their own lighting scheme. Kapur and his production designers fill the movie with such images (when the camera isn't flitting from one side of the room to the other), especially in the climactic sea-battle where some of the battle sequences look like they could have been copied from the cover of a Patrick O'Brian novel.

Ultimately, the cold blues and alabasters give way to "the golden age," and Elizabeth is bathed in a warm glowing sunlight, holding the child of Raleigh and Bess—her position of Queen finally legitimized in reality and defended in battle—and the child that might have been hers, a subject—part of her charge, with no man her master and all of England under her protection.

* The Wikipedia entry on "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" has a nice run-down of the shuffling of events in the Queen's reign. One wonders if they'll be more accurate in the inevitable sequel—after all, we haven't seen Essex yet.

** Before I get e-mails from the indignant, we'll use the paternalistic designation...because the participants of the film did.

Elizabeth (1998)

'Kiss Me, Cate.'

Elizabeth, (1998, Kapur)

A costume drama in the best Hollywood tradition that distorts the historical record and slips into anachronism at will in order to offer an insight into transformation of the young Queen Elizabeth into the Virgin Queen. There is amour amid the armor as Cate Blanchett learns the rules of realpolitik that she will need to keep herself on the throne and off the block. But she does it well and she is well supported by her court including Geoffrey Rush as Sir Francis Walsingham and Joseph Fiennes as her lover, Sir Robert Dudley. The compression of so many events into a two-hour movie does lead to some confusion at times but Shakhar Kapur can always be relied upon to give your eyes something to feast upon while you're trying to keep up with the plot. It is not quite a feminist re-writing of history as much as The Godfather with frocks, and for every heaving brocaded bosom there is a severed spiked head.

Elizabeth also features Christopher Eccleston, Fanny Ardant, Kathy Burke, John Geilgud and Richard Attenborough and is available on DVD from Universal Studios.

Elizabeth - The Golden Age

"I am your Queen - I am myself". There is so much we know about Queen Elizabeth I and so much we don't. We know more about what she did than why she did things. We know more about her role as monarch and less about her as a person. Not that this is so surprising - even taking away the distance of time, that is pretty much true of anyone we think we know. The tension between the public face and the private persona.

In Elizabeth - The Golden Age (I guess they realized they couldn't call it Elizabeth II), there was plenty of scope to explore this tension. Elizabeth is monarch of a divided country. She is the Virgin Queen, admired, we are told in the history books for her devotion to her country but under pressure too to marry, not just to produce an heir but also to make an alliance that will help protect England from its adversaries. This is the time of the Spanish Armada, a time when England was under threat from the most powerful country in Europe, when England was isolated and under the threat of invasion. Much like it would be 250 years later and again 400 years later. A time of conflict between two versions of the same religious faith with one determined to destroy the apostates because they have God on their side. Within the country, there are many who would support her overthrow. Well, you get the picture - there are plenty of themes here that would resonate with a modern audience.

But this Elizabeth is Good Queen Bess - Bette-Davis style. Though we see a little of her crisis of conscience over the death sentence for Mary Stuart, we see far more swash-buckling CGI as the filmmaker rewrites history for the convenience of the movie pitching Sir Walter Raleigh into the heat of the battle like an earlier Captain Jack Sparrow even though he actually spent the entire time firmly on dry land. Such distortions are to be expected and don't really interfere with the purpose of such a movie (this is not a History Channel documentary after all) but they are also symptomatic of why this movie was so disappointing.

It is as glossy and vibrant as its predecessor though it is a little disconcerting to see how clean this Elizabethan Age was. It was almost bearable to have the characters speak a strange mixture of modern English with a few archaisms thrown in for effect but in the end the movie was too over-blown and empty.


Where there could have been interesting contrasts between her public face and her private needs, between her sense of duty and her need for control, the movie sets up situation after situation and then shies away from them, preferring instead to go to the next great wide shot. Clive Owen starts out playing the foil to Elizabeth - theirs is not only a sexual but also an intellectual game they are playing with each other and he is willing to take great risks not just to advance his plans to open up the New World but also to entertain the thought of a relationship with her. Yet, the movie just meanders. It is not just that he becomes dull as she tells him, it is the movie. He dutifully straps on his high leather boots, dons his pirate shirt and does his best Erroll Flynn impersonation. Thank goodness, Samantha Morton is there to play Mary Stuart. Geoffrey Rush seems completely wasted as Walsingham and by the end, Cate looks like she can't wait to get back to playing real people like Jude Quinn.