Post-Con Report: The Short Version

The long version will be up later, because the short version is that we are having some internet issues at Chez Jack... we got back and found that the router is defunct, leaving us with one internet connected computer at a time in a household of four people (the horror!). I'm investigating alternate solutions to get my lappy back online but it will probably come down to a new router.

In the meantime, this is just to say that near radio silence on the internet (I guess I could just say "internet silence" is not indicative of anything worse than not having much internet to go around.

On Shabbier Tides

Still getting caught up on various things after being at con for several days, a somewhat more arduous than expected trip home to Hagerstown, and the discovery that my aging router gave up the ghost at some point over the weekend. In the meantime, here's a movie review that I started last week.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides feels smaller and cheaper than the preceding films, which is odd given that it had a budget that was at least comparable to the first and possibly in the same range as the second (reports vary). Is this the cost of the 3D process rearing its head, or is it the result of other creative decisions? I suspect there's a bit of both at play. Actually, there may be a metaphorical cost to the decision to make it 3D... possibly that influenced the filmmakers to keep things a little more narrowly focused. Fewer sweeping vistas, more deep ones.

In part this film suffered a bit from the Bugs Bunny problem. Jack Sparrow is a better man than he'd like us to believe but that's not to say that he is a good man. Worse, he's been cut loose from any real motivation. He's clearly having second thoughts about the quest for immortality long before the film's denouement, as his faithful sidekick Smee Gibbs notes in the very first act. He does eventually reacquire his standard goal of reclaiming the Black Pearl, but he spends a good portion of the movie sure the ship is sunk. He's had his revenge on Barbosa, he has no particular beef with the English authorities or with Blackbeard. In the original PotC movie and the sequels, the basic idea was that Captain Jack Sparrow's path and goals appeared to intersect with some other people's in a loopy spiraling way until eventually either his stubborn decent streak came out and he tipped the balance in their favor or else maybe he really was always on their side but his plan was too convoluted to see it.

In this movie? He doesn't really have a side, and no one else has one for him, either. The other principal character is his slightly less selfish (and more ruthless, but less cunning) female foil, and while he ultimately "helps" her he does it by doing the exact opposite of what she'd set out to do.

All of this was why we had Will Turner and Elizabeth in the initial trilogy. Just like in the Marx Brothers' best films, we have to have the leading man and the leading lady or we're left with nothing but two hours of disconnected wascalliness. I didn't really want Will and Elizabeth Redux, but the film needed something more. The new film offers us a poor man's Will Turner in the person of one (Anglican?) missionary whose name might have been mentioned once in passing and his lady-love, a mermaid whose name he makes up on the spot.

Now, I love mermaids. I love genuine examinations of Christlike behavior in fiction. But this whole angle of the story was undernourished and underexamined. Brother Christian and Syrena were the living embodiments of the film's biggest problem, and that is that compared to the previous films this felt like an episode in a Jack Sparrow TV show. The missionary and the mermaid felt very much like the ancilliary characters who are introduced in a single episode, with their entire arc set up and resolved in 42 minutes plus commercials.

For all that?

My final judgment is that I enjoyed it, because I would totally watch a 42 minute Captain Jack Sparrow TV show. Watching Johnny Depp "sea-turtle" his way out of trouble (and back into it) is a pure and simple joy. His first improbable escape contains a nice touch where during the set-up you see him glance at each of the distinct elements of the eventual escape, like in a video game when you enter a room with a massive puzzle and it pans across the things you'll need for the solution. I missed the significance of those glances and assumed he was just sort of taking stock of the situation in general, and then also figured he'd messed up when he got the stolen sweetroll stuck on the chandelier. When he reached the balcony pastry in hand, the purpose of the scene became apparent: yes, sometimes he actually does have a plan.

The depiction of George II will no doubt set some teeth on edge, but... eh. They knew his lineage and titles, so I believe they did the homework and realized that he wouldn't have been an Englishman speaking Englishy English with an English accent of Englishness, but someone made the decision that this detail would confuse and/or bore the audience. Actually I can imagine that Captain Jack Sparrow's (feigned?) ignorance of his identity might have started as a way of having a line to explain the Hanover dynasty that was swiftly cut... or maybe they just didn't care. Whatever, it's not like these are documentaries.

And this wasn't a bad episode of the Captain Jack Sparrow show in other regards, either. The villain? Taking a stock piratical character (Blackbeard) and dressing him up with supernatural elements is the sort of thing I imagine would be somewhat overdone on such a show, but here they did it well... actually, Blackbeard was about the only element that properly felt like he belonged in a Pirates movie. And while this was clealry a fantasy incarnation of the folklore version of Edward Teach, they hit the touchstones I was looking for. He had the burning fuses. He said "If I don't kill someone now and then, they forget who I am.", or words to that effect. He had, of course, a black beard. I'm satisfied.

And this episode had mermaids! It also had a genuinely virtuous man of faith who met a monster and fell in love with each other and they saved each other a couple of times and yet he didn't realize that his faith had misguided him or that the power was in him all the time or whatever. It's not that the power wasn't in him all the time, but absolutely nothing hinged on him realizing that. In fact, according to his recitation of the moral he learned, he actually grew in faith from his travails... that didn't really come across, though, except insofar as that single line where he said he'd been lost and empty conveyed that he had been lost and empty. Really, he seemed about the same, faith-wise, when he first appeared as when he disappeared under the water with Syrena. I mean, he had been lashed to the ship's mast for who knows how long when we first saw him, and when he was let down off it he was both unafraid of Teach and talking of salvation and forgiveness. Those aren't the actions of a lost soul.

So the missionary's story was a poorly realized and badly abbreviated arc but it was still more than I expected from Disney.

(Though privately I choose to believe that Syrena was taking him under the water to mate with him and eat him at the end. I just think she was doing it with love in her heart as well as hunger.)

Anyway, final analysis: probably my least favorite movie of the series so far, but good enough that I hope for another one.