I just watched Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and I have to say I am happy I wasn’t talked into going to see the sequel while in Seattle. Wait, no, I want to say, I am so happy I didn’t waste a minute of my time in Seattle on the sequel. This movie was garbage. Of course, I suspected that when my friend Shawn[DeLong], who I’m told said of The Hulk, “It wasn’t that bad!”, praised it to high heaven. I love Shawn like a delinquent quarterback brother who’s (mostly) grown up, but the man has no taste in movies as far as conversations had led me to understand him.
Anyway, this film was junk, which says something… not even that rather good actor who starred in it could save it, because it was… crap.
Don’t forget Superman. Shawn and Maureen both liked that.
Of course, practically everyone liked “Pirates of the Carribean.”
But yeah, I’m also in the (distinct minority) camp of people who didn’t like it. Endless action scenes with preordained conclusions and that never achieved the tiniest suspension of disbelief to begin with are….
….well….
…really, really boring.
It was funny, because just before I watched it I watched “Scaramouche” again, a swashbuckler that I actually enjoyed. Since Scaramouche was made several decades earlier (1952) it was kind of interesting to look at the differences.
In many ways, they’re going for similar things: lots of sword fights, lots of quipping, hero’s got some anti-hero qualities….but, among many other things, as silly as the whole form is to begin with, all the heroics look impressive, but like something human beings might actually be able to do. The hero is seeing having to do rigorous physical training to get to the point where he can do stuff like that.
Whereas in “Pirates,” *everyone* fights like they’ve been training for twenty years, people do a lot of things I have a hard time believing evne if they *had* been training for twenty years, at least if they’re good guys. Even Keira Knightly can fight off two or three bad guys at once, quipping all the way, even though as far as I can tell, she’d never picked up a sword before that day.
Least of the problems with it, mayhap, but it bothered the hell out of me the whole time I was watching it.
Maybe some of this stuff is par for the course in current movie conventions, but it just came off as aggressively stupid to me in that movie for some reason.
Oh, I shoudl note, it’s a different Shawn who said the Hulk was not bad than the Shawn you know, Ben.
Word. To what you said. Haven’t seen Scaramouche, tho… sometime.