Friday 7rh July 2006

Yes, yes I know this is extremely unusual for me, posting on two consecutive days! Shock! Horror! However, there is a reason for this anomoly. I have just returned from seeing 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest' and couldn't help but voice my thoughts on the film. (For those of you who have not seen the film, there are spoilers in this Diary log, if you have already seen it or don't care then please continue to read.)

Like the movie's title, the film is overly long. It was during yet another sword fight that my mind began to wander... and as you know, when a mind begins to wander it tends to come upon odd thoughts. For instance, I deduced that although Pirates 2 (as I shall call it, as I cannot be bothered to write out the whole sodding title) is character driven - and it likes to hide behind this flimsy mirage often - it cannot escape the fact that it is a Hollywood blockbuster. "But we already knew that!" I hear you say. Well, yes, of course it is. But the point of it is, that I have come to expect a lot more from this franchise. The first installment was excellent, it was witty, interesting and engaging. Alas, it seems that it has become a victim of it's own success. Every year we, the viewing public, are force-fed Hollywood drivel. Brainless rubbish, that challenges no one and requires only the tiniest piece of the audience's attention. I expected more from Pirates 2, I wanted to be excited by it! Not even Johnny Depp could lift it out of its turgid puddle.

There were many things wrong with Pirates 2. For example, the film was over 2 and a half hours long, which, apart from making my arse numb, made the film feel excessively flabby and dull. As my friend said afterwards 'you could some it all up in one sentence.' There seemed to be a lot of sequences that was completely irrelevent to the story, for instance when Elizabeth Swann's father tries to get her to sail to England, the filmmakers could have quite easily found some other way for her to break out of the jail in order to find Will. Although I suppose they had to find something for Jonathan Pryce to do. Another thing which made the film feel flabby was the number of characters in it. Of course, there are some that have to be in it (Captain Jack, Elizabeth Swann, Will Turner and a bad guy etc.)but was Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) really necessary? Couldn't they have just kept Norrington (Jack Davenport) as the stiff-upper-lip English man instead of reducing him to some pathetic pirate-wannabe? For one, Davenport did it much better in Pirates 1 than Hollander and secondly, it seemed to add extra scenes to the film that weren't needed. And those two 'comic-relief' pirates from the first film (the joke is that they're actually not that funny) had no point or purpose being there at all.

Perhaps I am being overly cynical, but am I really the only one that is fed of the meaningless, boring old tripe thrown out by the studios every year? Is it too much to ask for a continuation of the fantastic start to the year? 'Goodnight, and Good Luck', 'Syriana', 'Munich' and others gave me hope for the future of film. Hollywood has just taken it away from me again.

Want to tell me your thoughts on Hollywood today? (or anything else for that matter) Then email me!