Review: Pirates of the Caribbean - Salazar's Revenge

Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge / Dead Men Tell No Tales (2D)
Cert: 12A / 129 mins / Dir. Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg / Trailer



Now the main thing to bear in mind for the duration of this review is, Salazar's Revenge*¹ wasn't going to be 'for' me. And I'm fine with that. I've never really found Disney's PotC series any more than quite good at best, and my recent live-tweeting of installments one-to-four was knocked on the head after the first two, as I was becoming bogged down by the rapid succession of the things I didn't like about them.

So, we're now approximately nineteen years down the line from the end of At World's End, and young Henry Turner (Brendon Thwaites) thinks he's figured out a way to free his father Will (Orlando Bloom) from his 'Being The Captain Of The Flying Dutchman' curse. This will involve tracking down Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Meanwhile elsewhere, young scientist and scholar Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario) is on the verge of being executed by her townsfolk for witchcraft, and is determined to discover the identity of her long-lost father. This will involve a chance meeting with Jack Sparrow (Spoiler: he's not her dad). Old faces from movies past return for the outing (although there are more than a few notable by their absence), and despite having a superb villain in the form of Javier Bardem's Salazar (think: a livid, Spanish Darth Vader), the inevitable violence is kept within 12A-certificate levels. For a family thrill-ride, you could do a lot worse.

I just didn't find the finished product particularly interesting. And it's not as if there's an absence of plot mechanics or pacing issues slow that plot down at all; action set-pieces are delivered, swashes are buckled and timbers are shivered with watch-setting regularity. I just couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen all of this before, and barely even in a different order.

Outside of the aforementioned scene-stealing by Sr. Bardem, Kaya Scodelario, Brendan Thwaites and Geoffrey Rush are all aching for a better screenplay, their obvious talent largely wasted. But I may as well join the choir in saying that the real problem here is Johnny Depp, not even mustering his usual lacklustre levels of performance. By this point, Jack Sparrow*² feels like he should be an incidental character in 'Allo 'Allo, wheeled out once a week with his worn-out schtick in the hope that audience-familiarity will be enough to pad over the gaps in the script. It won't. If anything, the one-note seafarer is just getting in the way now, the very agent holding the series back rather than pushing it boldly forward. Ironically, the character has become more of an anchor than Disney ever intended.

All that said, I don't feel able to lay out the beating that many critics are currently getting off their chests, if only because I don't feel the film's put in enough effort to really warrant one. There are good things in PotC5, but nowhere near enough of them and for nowhere near as long as they need to be.

However, it's also important to note that I actually fell asleep during the multi-million dollar, climactic battle of Salazar's Revenge. I mean only to the point where I jolted myself awake, but still. What can I tell you? By that point I was all out of fucks to give, and the murky*³, fast-cut action/mayhem shaky-cam, coupled with what can only be described as overwhelming symphony of grey-noise from the orchestra, audio-effects department and indeed the cast, basically just said to my brain 'you can't actually concentrate on any of what's meant to be happening here. Just sleep and pick it all up from the ending you know is in the post anyway'.

And with the exception of Bardem, the after-credits sequence made me happier than anything in the preceding one hundred and twenty eight minutes.

The other PotC films.



Only if you like watching the same thing again but bigger and louder.



I have no idea.



Going to go out on a limb here and say no.



Probably not. But you'll have to explain yourself.



There is.



Level 1: Sabé and Tion Medon are in this.





*¹ No you're right, Ian Disney, giving a different episode-title just for the UK release makes absolute sense. I'm assuming this is so you can tell how many cam-jobs are originating from our shores, given that it's not like "Dead Men Tell No Tales" is a phrase us Brits would look at and think 'hey hang on, how is that pirate-related?'. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Sorry, 'Captain' Jack Sparrow. Hahaha, yeah, that never gets old… ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ And given that the final half hour is way too dark (visually) in 2D, my heart goes out to the poor saps who watched this in 3D and had to put up with the associated light-loss… ^{[ BACK ]}


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Paterson

Paterson
Cert: 15 / 118 mins / Dir. Jim Jarmusch / Trailer



There's only one way to round off a day watching movies about the recently bereaved wife of an assassinated president and a psychopath with 23 personalities, and that's with a film about a quiet week in the life of a bus driver who writes poetry when he's not at the wheel.

Don't tell me I don't know how to enjoy a Saturday night.

While it's never quite 'Yellow Poster Movie Quirky', Jim Jarmusch's Paterson is quietly charming and funny without being needy, and very comfortable with its own identity. Adam Driver takes the lead in the eponymous role, playing the aforementioned poetic transport operative named Paterson, who lives and works in the city of Paterson, New Jersey. Seven titled segments make up his week as we see his interactions with friends, colleagues and partner, Laura, and we follow the patterns and irregularities of Paterson's life through the things which inspire his poetry.

While I wouldn't say I was bored by any of what we see, there's certainly a rhythmic soporific quality to Jarmusch's direction and Affonso Gonçalves's editing. Although there are tonal shades of Groundhog Day here, the film - much like the central character's writing - goes more for an irregular thematic echo than rigid rhyming and repetition*¹. Visually, it's a film about finding the beauty in the minutiae of everyday life. Which is fine, except the mundane largely bores me (no matter how intricate), which is why I spend half my time in the cinema trying to distract myself. The relationship between Paterson and his girlfriend Laura reminded me a little of Butch and Fabienne in Pulp Fiction, except they both appear to have social and developmental issues which undercut the heart of the movie for me.

While Paterson's quiet exasperation is a recurring source of gentle humour, I have to admit to being more anxiously preoccupied with the cyclical claustrophobia of his life, and the feeling that things were about to go disastrously wrong at any moment (the veiled threat of dog-theft, the gun stand-off etc). Although those thoughts are undoubtedly cued up by Jarmusch's screenplay, I realise that the prolonged negative-projection lies squarely with the viewer, ie: me, not unlike a cinematic Rorschach test. Do these bad vibes not bother Paterson? Has his worldview managed to help him rise about such worries, seeing as much as he does of human life on a daily basis? Or is he conversely insulated from larger reality to the point where he's just not picking them up?

Oh, and why isn't the on-screen text of Paterson's poetry in Adam Driver's handwriting, like the notebook we see? They've just used a script-typeface, which is glaringly obvious in words which feature double-letters. I wasn't expecting it to be a stroke-by-stroke recreation of his notebook scrawl, but it wouldn't have been that much to get Driver to sit down with a fineliner for half an hour then scan his writing, would it? The film's meant to be about Paterson's unique worldview, after all. While it's an extreme example, it reminded me of people who write their name in Brush Script at the bottom of an e-mail and get excited at the prospect of having a photo of themselves printed onto a mug.

Short version: I either kinda liked Paterson or quite loved it. I'm not sure which, but I suspect it'll sit in both camps, much like that Coen Bros flick that Driver also starred in.

But if Paterson is driving a bus out of the depot in the city of Paterson, why does it say 'Paterson' on the front? Who's that helping? You wouldn't get on a bus at Worswick Street that said Newcastle on the destination-plate, now would you?*²

This would make a good (and lighter) companion-piece to Inside Llewyn Davis.



You've probably missed your chance now, to be fair, but it's really a Sunday-night DVD anyway.



I think so.
Not sure at this point.
But I think so.



*raises hand*
I haven't seen any other Jim Jarmusch films.
Don't think this is Driver's defining moment, though.



Not at all.



Not at all.



Level 1: Kylo Ren's in this.





*¹ Although since I'm on the subject, I should say that I appreciated this more in the film-making than I did in the actual poetry. Even allowing for its freeform style, what Paterson is writing is far closer to rambling, twee prose. You can't make something poetry just by saying "oh yeah, and it's poetry" any more than you could build a shed and pass it off as a castle...

*² Actually, you wouldn't, as that station's been out of service for nineteen years, now. Oh yeah, that's how up-to-date my references are...


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.