Yo Ho, Yo Ho, A Pirate's Life for Me!
We pillage, plunder, we rifle and loot,
Drink up, me 'arties, yo ho!
We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot,
Drink up, me 'arties, yo ho!

We extort and pilfer, we filch and sack,
Drink up, me 'arties, yo ho!
Maraud and embezzle and even highjack,
Drink up, me 'arties, yo ho!

We kindle and char and enflame and ignite,
Drink up, me 'arties, yo ho!
We burn up the city, we're really a fright,
Drink up, me 'arties, yo ho!

We're rascals and scoundrels, we're villains and knaves,
Drink up, me 'arties, yo ho!
We're devils and black sheep, really bad eggs,
Drink up, me 'arties, yo ho!

We're beggars and blighters and ne'er do well cads,
Drink up, me 'arties, yo ho!
Aye, but we're loved by our mommies and dads,
Drink up, me 'arties, yo ho!

Every last verse is earned by each and every pirate character in Gore Verbinski’s PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, but none more so than Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow.

Johnny Depp is literally performing on another cosmic level of existence. I have seen just about every pirate movie ever made, I love the genre and know the woes inherent to it in the past 45 years or so. Depp’s Jack Sparrow isn’t a combination of pre-existing pirate characters… in fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d be willing to bet that Johnny Depp has never seen a pirate film. He isn’t an actor so beholden to what has come before that he’s sleepwalking in the steps of Flynn or Power or Lancaster or Newton or Laughton. I saw in an interview somewhere that he claims he based his performance on Keith Richard from THE ROLLING STONES, figuring that pirates were the Rock Stars of their time… Those guys that the world moralistically condemned for their debauched existences, yet reveled in the telling of their… shhhhh… tales.

Their names were known in every port, whispered upon the deck of every ship and each far off dot on the horizon could be them. Depp’s Jack Sparrow is a truly tremendous creation. When Mr Beaks brought up the concept of the shame belonging to an Academy that would never really consider a role like this as suitable material for award consideration… I kind of chuckled. Chuckled because… well Beaks makes me chuckle, my belly jiggle and causes me to smirk… But he’s right about this character and this performance. Depp towers above all else in this movie.

That isn’t an easy thing because there’s a lot to like here. There’s Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Swann. Ok, there isn’t a terrible lot to her other than… well light really really does like to bounce off her skin and be pretty. Really pretty. Orlando Bloom is good here, far more alive than Legolas is typically allowed to be in anything other than his action scenes, but he’s still being given stoic quiet types, I’ll be curious to see him pushed a bit harder than he has been thus far. However, he is quite good as the handsome romantic male lead adventurer young fella attempting to save the girl of his dreams.

Now… ordinarily, the character I’d spend the vast majority of the review cheering about would be Geoffrey Rush and his Captain Barbossa. It’s a great villain… a great villain. Essentially, Pirates are a group of sensualists… they do what they want, when they want because it makes them feel good. So they are creatures of excess… thus Depp’s Rock Star parallel… However, Barbossa… he and his crew come under a curse that takes all that sensation… all that feeling away. The scent of the sea air, the warmth of a ocean breeze, the taste and intoxication of rum and all the pleasures of the flesh that make a pirate a pirate… Essentially they’re cursed by the executive bastards that run the Walt Disney Corporation and the Politically Correct assholes of the world. They’ve become tasteless eunuch ghouls wandering the world with one single purpose… get gold and spill blood for every piece.

Like I said… it is definitely an Executive Disney thing, and Rossio and Elliot (the screenwriters) should get big heaping bonuses for somehow working every bit of the “modern Disney-fication” of the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN ride and make it a sad curse plaguing their existence… keeping them from even the simplest pleasures of excess…

Rush was born to be a pirate… he’s got that Vincent Price style menace – and the sadness of not being able to enjoy an apple… pains him… haunts him… drives him. Wonderful sympathetic bad guy… but as great as he is… I’ve seen sad dissipated villains before and I’ve literally never seen anything like Johnny Depp in this film.

I’ve even seen skeletal quasi zombie like swashbuckling bad guys before… love em to death… I mean, Keira’s first moonlit jaunt upon the deck of the Black Pearl is pure nirvana bliss. There’s plenty of accomplished Visual FX moments that I’ve never seen so beautifully handled here… the nighttime underwater and fish scenes with “undead pirates” just rule… But still… DEPP REIGNS SUPREME over this film.

Better than the locations, the sets, the ships, the filters and lights… Better than Klaus Badelt’s FANTASTIC score is Johnny Depp. The whole flick is great, but Depp is greater.

I’m all sorts of a fan of this flick. It just starts. At the promotional screening last night, after the trailers – including the new HAUNTED MANSION trailer, the first thing to pop up was the title, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, and it wasn’t held long at all… in fact I almost missed it, cuz I was turning to look at a friend, expecting 3 minutes of company titles… There was no Walt Disney presents with the castle behind it… no furious ride above around halting to the booming of a lightning bolt striking a tree… nope… just PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL giving way to a galleon making its way through a nasty sea of fog with a little girl standing upon the bow singing to herself a verse of the song atop this page… Haunted singing, like a nursery rhyme for children of Port Royal… sung like “One, Two Freddy’s Coming For You.” VERY NICE… this isn’t that fiery hell-bent soused singing of the classic… this is dramatic and cool…

That’s when a mate aboard the ship tells her to stop her singing lest she call the pirates to silence them all… As the little girl stares out at sea before her ship she eyeballs a parasol dancing in the inky drink so to speak. Then a boy unconscious atop some manner of rough raft. The boy is fetched aboard, she’s given charge over him as the rest of the boat watches the fiery wreckage of a once grand ship destroyed… perhaps it was pirates… shhhh… perhaps the pirates of the Black Pearl, they sail these waters we’re told.

The girl finds the boys’ medallion about his neck, figures it would mark the boy a pirate and scared he’d be hung, she takes it from about his neck… He awakes to give his name and learn hers… In the end she’s staring at the strange gold, blinking a bit, BLINK… Kiera Knightly awaking from a dream…

We are now fully into the movie, out of the phantasmic past and moving forward…

Instantly in this film by Verbinski we’re in the tone of a spellbinding tale of rollicking good fun. There’s sadness amidst this story of adventure. Kiera dreams of being away from the stuffy confines of the Governor’s trappings (her father), Orlando dreams of winning her heart, Johnny… well…

Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow is a classic figment of cinema… There are touches here and there of Ben Gunn, Peter Fonda’s Captain America, Keith Richard and all things askewed. Hell… there’s even a layer of Jeff Bridges’ THE DUDE here… The Dude may have been searching for his carpet, cuz it really tied the room together, but Depp is searching for his ship. “Not all treasure is of the silver and gold variety” he says, of course he says that regarding Bloom’s obsession with Keira’s character, but nothing he says is not also about himself.

He’s one man in an ocean without his crew and ship… a captain cast aside, away from the thing he loved best. His ship, the freedom he felt upon it. Depp’s Sparrow realizes the wealth of legend and tales and how it helps to acquire things that gold can not purchase… He understands the value of perceived witlessness, when cunning. In many ways Jack Sparrow is astride insanity and genius, swaying to and fro like a nude Nell in the wind. Imbalanced with direction, sailing the sea of serendipity. Jack Sparrow sees things only Sparrow can see… He’s so far ahead of everyone else that his actions seem absurd, mad, rambling, yet it’s borne of wit, paranoia and a gifted kismet that seems adore him. What’s the saying? Fortune smiles upon the foolish?

That’s Jack Sparrow.

Lastly… about adapting a theme park attraction…

You see… I’ve never thought adapting PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN or the HAUNTED MANSION were absurd notions… Hell, even COUNTRY BEARS could have been fun had they waited for the right passionate folks to adapt it.

Getting Jerry Bruckheimer to adapt PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN was a masterstroke. Jerry fighting to make it PG-13 instead of the original PG that the addle-minded nitwits between the “Ears” wanted… well, again perfect. See, a proper cool telling of a Pirate film doesn’t NEED to be R-rated. I can be made that way, but the most fun way to make a pirate film is exactly the way they made this one.

First they took the theme park ride… the various Marc Davis conceptual sketches for the ride and used them, almost exactly the same way that Ray Harryhausen used his 8 concept sketches to pitch folks on the ideas and inspirations for his “next film.” I’m also betting that Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (the screenwriters) took a look at all the various merchandize having to do with the ride… the model kits in particular which had “animated” skeletons with swords in pirate gear… The lines on the ride about a cursed treasure.

Then they applied it to everything that makes wanting to see a pirate movie, just so damn delicious. Sacking a town. Taking your loot and heading to Tortuga, the pirate city of decadence and debauchery… A town of gigantic breasted women in those “milk maid-ish” blouses pouring jugs of wine in the open gurgling mouths of drunken howling fools of men. Fights, in-fighting, crew challenges, taverns turned upside down… Tortuga is PLEASURE ISLAND from PINNOCHIO, only you never turn into a donkey, instead you wake up to indulge another day till your loot be gone, then it’s time to pillage for more.

“Take all that you can…. ….Give NONE of it Back,” they toast… Aye, that’s the spirit! Pirates look best by warm golden flickering hues of flames contrasting to the cold blues of the darkness beyond. They never forget that here. The prettiest most magnificently lush looking pirate movie that I’ve ever seen is Tyrone Power’s THE BLACK SWAN… their pirate city wasn’t nearly as debauched as this… BUT… 4-Strip Technicolor gave it all a luster that is still not quite here.

The skeletal cursed pirates are fantastic. Initially you’ll be upset by the erratic way they’re first introduced… how you can never really fix your focus upon them, but worry not laddies and wenches… you’ll get your fill and they’ll take center stage more than once.

Oh… and about those cursed pirates… You know how in every pirate film of the modern era… let’s say that’s the Seventies ta present… How other than say the captain and the first mate, all the other characters are just… pirates. That’s all there is to them. They don’t really have individual eccentricities beyond an eye patch here or a mop to swab the deck with. Well, here… in this film, each and every last single pirate has their own thing going on. Like in a PIXAR film, they’re perfectly defined, given the proper amount of material to play with and you will have your faves amongst a wide selection.

My favorites are called Pintel and Ragetti played by Lee Arenberg and Mackenzie Crook… they’re mates… characters that orbit about each other, a team of not entirely vicious pirates that simply rule. Lee Arenberg played that utterly absurd 6 ft tall red-bearded dwarf in the wonderfully awful telling of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, and here… he’s given a character worth playing. Very cool. He’s the butch, the top to the rather fey or bottom played by Mackenzie Crook. Mackenzie Crook has the best weird quirk of the film. He has a false eye that wanders about, gets knocked from the noggin and well… all sorts of eye-ventures abound with him. Their cross-dressing scene reminded me in a way of something out of a Hope & Crosby ROAD TO flick, but if Hope & Crosby had spent too many years in prison and embraced their obvious mutual attraction and confused sexual identities. No matter though, Lee & Mackenzie should be cast as a team in 10 or 15 movies together… playing eccentric mates. They rule.

I’ve also just come back from LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, if you must see that film… which I don’t necessarily recommend, I’d say see it first, because after this… it’s pretty much drippings…