Ill-Informed Gadfly

A strange and delightful thing happened on the set of the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, “The Curse of the Black Pearl.” Johnny Depp showed up and, with little help from the vague and vapid screenplay, fashioned Captain Jack Sparrow into a loopy, indelible antihero. The movie became a surprise hit, Depp got an Oscar nomination, and Disney greenlit two megabudget sequels, to be made back-to-back. A movie whose success rested on the mysterious inspiration of an eccentric actor was transformed, retroactively, into Part One of a lumbering trilogy. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, convinced of their genius, constructed an elaborate, impenetrable mythology with rules that changed according to their whims. Depp was reduced to a star-for-hire, asked merely to reprise his fey, boozy antics in service of a juggernaut franchise. I’m not alone in dubbing last year’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” a disaster – an aimless and soulless succession of set pieces. Now, mercifully, comes the finale, “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” and this time I give the makers credit for fashioning an effective ersatz entertainment. The movie is so massively scaled, so crammed with action and double-crosses and supernatural hooey, that audiences will think they’re having fun when really they’re just being overwhelmed by spectacle. There are moments of genuine pleasure sprinkled like oysters through “At World’s End,” but it’s pointless to single them out: The money’s already in the bank.

LISTEN: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

Here’s my review of “Waitress” from WTMD on Friday, May 25 (sorry for the delay).

LISTEN: Waitress

Does anybody have the slightest idea what this movie is about? I know this much: There’s a chest. Inside the chest is a heart. The heart belongs to Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), a tentacled, undead, humanoid sea-beast. Somehow, whoever possesses the heart will rule the seas. But why? I’m not sure even the moviemakers know. The chest is a giant, rickety MacGuffin on which to build an endless series of effects-driven set pieces. “Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest” is loud and wearying and strangely inert, all kinetic energy but no destination — like a NASCAR race where nobody keeps score. At the end of its 2 1/2 hours, nothing has changed! The quest, such as it is, continues, as if the story were controlled by a gamer who got bored and decided to reboot.

I wasn’t wild about “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” either. Obviously Johnny Depp was inspired during its making and, out of thin air, fashioned Captain Jack Sparrow into an indelible character. The baffling, witless script was no help — he did it all on his own. As I recall, he seemed to be acting in a different movie than everybody else — and the rest of it wasn’t a movie I cared to watch. It was tortuously long, with repetitious sequence after sequence of ghost pirates slaughtering live English soldiers, which seems to me an unfair fight. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley were tragically vanilla, and Geoffrey Rush chewed the scenery, as he does.

I give both movies credit for having top-notch production design and cinematography, by Dariusz Wolski, that somehow makes the incredible look real, much like Bill Pope’s work in the “Matrix” trilogy. For me, the saddest thing is that the director, Gore Verbinski, actually has a lot of talent when he’s working on a reasonable scale: “The Ring” and “The Weather Man” are crackling entertainments with suprising depth of feeling. He hopscotches easily across genres, and he scatters evidence of his cinematic intelligence like doubloons through the bloated, soulless “Pirates” movies. Two down, one to go!

Here’s my review of “Black Book” from WTMD.

LISTEN: Black Book

If it’s not clear from the radio discussion, I loved this movie. It has everything you want: sex, violence, espionage, evil Nazis, heroic resistance fighters, heroic Nazis, evil resistance fighters, and a beautifully constructed plot that acknowledges the war’s complicated legacy. Verhoeven directs with confidence and verve, and he’s a master provocateur, as he shows in a few choice scenes: the repatriation that I discussed on the radio and the heroine dying her hair blond — the drapes and the carpet. It’s an old-fashioned espionage thriller pained in fascinating shades of grey.

When good directors go bad: Curtis Hanson provides a case study with his leaden poker drama “Lucky You.” The cheeseball romantic dialogue, co-written by the out-of-their-depth duo of Hanson and Eric Roth, certainly doesn’t help, nor does their awkward attempt to capture the transformation of Texas Hold ‘Em from an esoteric, backroom card game into a personality-driven pseudo-sport televised by major networks. But I think “Lucky You” was doomed by a less obviously misguided choice: the casting of Eric Bana in the lead. Bana isn’t a bad actor; instead, he has a suffocating competence. An Australian native of Croatian ancestry, Bana is a gifted mimic who can inhabit characters from a wide array of cultural backgrounds. His dark eyes and well-proportioned face reward the camera’s close scrutiny. But if you’re looking for an actor who can foster that peculiar, ineffable connection between a viewer and a projected image, Bana’s not your man. It’s not that he’s superficial, exactly, but the physical mechanics of film acting come so easily to him that you feel like he’s putting you on. You don’t trust him. He doesn’t dig into the souls of the men he plays; he’s diffident, passionless. No wonder his scenes with Drew Barrymore have a deep-space chill. Barrymore is dreadful. Determined to be taken seriously, she tosses aside her cutesy mannerisms and projects a brain-dead blankness. But “Lucky You” rests on Bana’s sculpted shoulders, and he might as well be shrugging them with indifference.

LISTEN: Lucky You

Click on the link below to listen to my review of “Spider-Man 3″ on the WTMD Morning Show. (89.7 FM, Towson, Md.)

LISTEN: Spider-Man 3

To our discussion I will add: I liked Topher Grace as Eddie Brock, Peter Parker’s sleazy rival photographer at the Daily Bugle. Grace has a sprightliness, a sense of fun, that you rarely see out of Tobey Maguire. But what really stuck in my craw about this movie was the lazy screenplay (credited to director Sam Raimi, his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent). Beyond what I mentioned on-air — the lame dialogue between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson and the use of amnesia as a cheap, water-treading plot device — we have black sticky goo falling from space and attaching itself to Spider-Man’s suit. (I don’t care, fanboys, if this is how it happened in the comics! If you’re making a $300 million movie you should come up with something better!) That’s not all. There’s also a scene, astonishing for its ineptitude, in which a butler explains to Harry Osborn everything that he didn’t know about Spider-Man and his father. The butler did it! And during the climactic fight sequence, we get scorekeeping narration from a TV news anchor, filling people in on the difference between Venom and the black-suited Spider-Man.

A final, emblematic symbol of the huge waste of resources that went into this movie: Kirsten Dunst again dyes her hair red to play MJ. Meantime, Bryce Dallas Howard, a natural redhead, wears a blond fright wig to play MJ’s romantic rival, muting her luminous, ethereal beauty. Here’s a thought: MJ is an actress. Couldn’t she have gone blond for a role? That way Peter could be smitten by a real redhead, upping the romantic intrigue and potential for jealousy.

Plus, not only is the movie crammed with villains who never seem to die, but it doesn’t know what to do with them. Everybody has a backstory and an arc, but they have no ambition beyond: Get Spider-Man. Sandman, a.k.a. Flint Marko, doesn’t even want to do that. He just wants to rob banks to finance medical treatment for his terminally ill daughter. (We’re introduced to her, and to Marko’s wife, in a single, throwaway scene, and as far as we know, at the end of the movie the girl is still sick.) Another throwaway comes when Venom and Sandman join forces, for no other reason than they both want to wipe out Spidey. The people of New York, whom Spider-Man has sworn to protect, get a pass in this movie, because the bad guys aren’t interested in doing harm to the citizenry. They’re obsessed with Spider-Man. The moviemakers are obsessed with Spider-Man. Spider-Man, for a time, is obsessed with himself. The whole thing is circular, indulgent, maddening. I can only surmise that Raimi, who was showered with box-office receipts and critical acclaim for the first two installments, began to think he could do no wrong and, given a blank check by Sony, went off the rails. “Spider-Man 3″ is a lumbering, out-of-control behemoth.

“The Host” merges thrilling creature action, dysfunctional-family tragicomedy and strident anti-American allegory into an overstuffed but delectable movie. This Korean monster picture, about a vicious part-fish, part-serpent, part-rhinoceros that terrorizes the Han River in Seoul, has more scares and laughs than perhaps even the filmmakers know what to do with. But they save their anger for American interventionism. Our military creates the monster when an unscrupulous officer orders a Korean lab worker to pour gallons of toxic chemicals down the drain. Oops. Yet we think we know better than any Korean how to kill it – by using a biological weapon. “The Host” depicts a well-established culture of protest against the entrenched U.S. military presence on the Korean peninsula, which many believe has become a cancer. The title comes to refer not to the monster but to the nation of South Korea for allowing us to stay. Vitriol aside, director Bong Joon-ho conjures plenty of monster-movie chills as he follows a 13-year-old girl in the clutches of the beast. Her efforts to stay alive and escape tingle with excitement and dread like the best of Steven Spielberg’s child-in-jeopardy movies. But Bong doesn’t share Spielberg’s optimistic vision. “The Host” veers wildly between the heroic and the squalid, between tragedy and quirky nonsense, with little control of tone or pace. It’s not a masterpiece, but it contains multitudes.

LISTEN: The Host

A message for faithful readers in the Baltimore region, if you exist: Tune in Friday morning at 8:40 a.m. to 89.7 FM, WTMD, the superb listener-supported rock station in Towson. I will begin a temporary gig doing movie reviews in a live Q-and-A format, filling in for my pal Violet Glaze, who’s on maternity leave. The first review: “Spider-Man 3.” I don’t want to tip my hand, but if you have high hopes for Spidey’s latest adventure, it may be time to reexamine your life’s priorities. As I understand it, I’ll be on WTMD every Friday through most of the summer, and audio clips of the reviews will be posted here. In the coming weeks, I expect to review “Black Book,” “Away from Her” and “Knocked Up,” among others.

In “Shaun of the Dead,” writer-director Edgar Wright and his co-writer and leading man, Simon Pegg, crafted an uproarious sendup of zombie movies that still honored the conventions of the genre. It was equal parts parody and homage — overtly hilarious and stealthily scary. Wright and Pegg repeat the formula with “Hot Fuzz,” this time taking on action movies, in particular the buddy-cop subgenre. But this time I think the affection holds them back. Like many straight action movies, “Hot Fuzz” is loud, one-note and ultimately wearying. Wright does his best Michael Bay impersonation, overdirecting meaningless transitional montages and circling his camera around his armed, sunglassed and stylishly injured heroes. But aping Bay’s style doesn’t illuminate much — except, perhaps, that Bay is so overwrought that he parodies himself. I’m not so sure that’s a revelation. Often Wright seems to think we’ll be amused just by the style of “Hot Fuzz” rather than the content. At times I wished I was watching one of its sources of inspiration, like “Point Break,” from the gonzo action craftswoman Kathryn Bigelow (who’s way more talented than Bay).

Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a straight-laced and intimidatingly efficient London cop whose superiors (Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan and Martin Freeman in cameos) shuffle him off to the quaint village of Sandford because his gaudy arrest statistics embarrass the rest of the force (or “service,” as Angel would say — there’s an amusing running gag about appropriate police jargon). In Sandford, he’s partnered with rotund bumbler Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), the son of the village’s chief inspector (Jim Broadbent). A series of horrific deaths, poorly staged to look like accidents, persuades Angel that everything is not as it seems in the quiet little town, and he and Danny are swept up into the “proper action” Danny craves — gunfights, car chases and explosions.

Frost’s bumptious Danny is the best thing about “Hot Fuzz” — oversized, lovable and defiantly uncool. Frost knows how to use his girth to great visual advantage, and his run is somehow lumbering and lilting at the same time. He’s a human pogo stick. Frost’s doughy face and crooked mouth register pleasure, anguish and unabashed macho envy with a welcome broadness. “Hot Fuzz” makes overt the homoeroticism inherent in so many buddy-cop movies, and Frost is unafraid to sell it. Pegg, by contrast, commits to playing the stoic alpha male that action convention requires; his droll loser-hero in “Shaun of the Dead” was far more memorable. Amid the overstuffed supporting cast, the great Paddy Considine stands out as one of a pair of apathetic, mustachioed detectives. But I wonder if Wright might have made a leaner, funnier movie if he’d said “no” to a few of the seemingly dozens of luminaries who were keen to work with him after “Shaun.” “Hot Fuzz” gains nothing from having Nighy, Coogan and Freeman in the same scene, nor from the cleverly disguised cameos by Cate Blanchett and Peter Jackson. Nor does it distinguish itself when the bullets start cascading. There’s some invention to the mayhem, but it runs out long before the de riguer bombastic climax.