Some anarchist (I take it) examination of Pirate Utopias.
The film was pretty good, but not as great as the first, which has stood up well indeed. Viv and I just watched it yesterday evening and even as familiar as it it is now, there are repeated moments in which I shook my head in wondering appreciation of the spectacle laid before me.
The first film included a wonderful reimagining of the Buster Keaton gag wherein a house’s front falls just so, leaving Keaton wonderingly untouched. Verbinski recast this from comedy to destiny as Barbosa strides though the hurricane of battle, his falling mainmast raining rigging about him. In this film, I counted at least one direct Keaton quote and an indirect reference to Keaton by way of Chuck Jones’ roadrunner cartoons.
I did find myself rolling my eyes in a couple of places. For pete’s sake, can’t the filmmakers cast a person of African heritage in a major supporting role other than that of a mystical witchy woman?
Despite that, several of the action sequences were grandly satisfying, and the final image on screen of Captain Sparrow is likely to resonate with me and I imagine the rest of the culture as powerfully as the Wyeth illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s piratical did in establishing the contemporary visual idea of the 18th Century pirate.
I submit for your consideration, however, that Cthulu might well find the idea that a seaman driven to immortality by a broken heart is the elder lord’s primary aspect or incarnation earth – or under seas – demeaning.
Peter Lamborn Wilson wrote a book, ‘Pirate Utopias’, about Noth African pirates. Really interesting. They were mostly Europeans, but they operated under the protection of Muslim rulers and they were quite openly anti European. Western civ doesn’t seem to know what to do with it’s internal opponents, so it is not uncommon for disposessed westerners to go over to the side of ‘The Other’ just so that they can feel human. That anyhow, is PLW’s thesis and it makes sense to me. I’ll be seeing ‘Pirates’ later. Today I went and saw ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’ I liked it. More on that later. I was genuinely pissed that ‘A Scanner Darkly’ has a limited opening. I’ve been waiting for it for more than a year. I’m a big Linklater fan and a big PK Dick fan. Despite numerous attempts, the closest thing that I’ve ever seen to a genuinely PK Dick movie was Cronenborg’s Xistenz. That wasn’t even based on a PKD story, but it captured the spirit of the man. When I was young, I was a huge Dick fan. This when he was strictly a cult item and not even well known in Sci Fi circles. Now, I’m the same age he was when he died and a lot of his stuff doesn’t seem as brain twisting and inscrutable as it did when I was younger. Still have high hopes for ‘Scanner’.
Looking beyond its primary function as a 2.5 hour trailer for the third movie, my main grievance with Dead Man’s Chest was its pacing. It was slow to start, dragged along in spots, and the act involving the cannibal tribe was wholly superfluous to the plot. The entire reel could have alit upon the cutting room floor and nary an audience member would notice.