Films featuring
Johnny Depp

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

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★★★★★[/types]]

Before the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the practice of shooting two sequels in quick succession had a short and unspectacular history. In the eighties, they tried with the Back to the Future movies and, while those sequels had some charms, they were pale imitations of the original. These efforts, however, were masterpieces compared to the Wachowski brothers’ follow-ups to The Matrix, which managed to completely suck all of our good will for the original into that blank space behind Keanu Reeves’ eyes.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

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★★★★★[/types]]

In Hollywood, success comes with its own peculiar brand of curses, most notably the expectation that one will follow that success with a sequel that will match, if not vastly exceed, the creative and commercial accomplishments of the original. Since any successful film is a matter of artistic and technical alchemy outside the control and understanding of us mere mortals, it’s little surprise that most sequels end up being pale, stunted, mutated offspring of the first movie. Continue reading →

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

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★★★★★[/types]]

Back when I was a lad, “Pirates of the Caribbean” was about the only cool ride left at Disneyland when the E tickets were all gone or the line for Space Mountain stretched to some time next Tuesday. It was either “Pirates,” “Small World” or head for parking lot. If you had suggested back then that the ride would be made into movie and that movie would not only not be rated G, but the lead actor would also pattern his character after a member of the Rolling Stones, Walt himself probably would have risen from the grave to personally throw your hippie ass out of the park.

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Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride

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★★★★★[/types]]

The visual imagination of Tim Burton is probably unequalled among today’s filmmakers and when he brings it to bear on a project suited to his particular talents, the results are almost always unique and special. Corpse Bride, like Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas, is an example of Burton playing on his home turf and swinging for the fences.

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Lost in La Mancha

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★★★★★[/types]]

Had everything gone according to plan in August of 2000, the film that became Lost in La Mancha would have been an extra on the DVD edition of a new Terry Gilliam film called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp. Instead, this film shows an often bizarre sequence of events that explains why there was never any such film.

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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

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★★★★★[/types]]

I dimly remember reading Roald Dahl‘s book as a child but, for the life of me, I can’t recall if I ever saw the 1971 adapatation with Gene Wilder. I almost rented it to watch a few weeks ago but the only copy I could get from Netflix was the original pan-and-scan “full” screen edition. I’m sorry, but if there is one thing that this writer does not abide, it’s the butchering of a film’s original image to fit the confines of a TV screen. Thus the Wilder version will go unreviewed here until I can track down a widescreen copy.

Tim Burton‘s other films based on other people’s material have been a mixed bag. Continue reading →