Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Rob Marshall, 2011)

There's no point in even trying to write a pan for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, not after Ali Arikan used his walk-out as an excuse to vent his splenetic fury on the society that would allow it to happen. I sympathize with objections to the piece that cite its lack of hard facts, but then the article openly states it is not a review (and couldn't be, since he walked out) and reads more like an account of the proverbial last straw. Those raising hell over his piece, however, must not have seen the movie, because even if Arikan wanted to discuss the film, I don't see how he could. The fourth installment of this bloated, long-since tired franchise barely qualifies as a movie. In a literal sense, of course, its production value is enormous, worth some $150-250 million depending on the estimate (and that's not even counting the marketing, which has been so overwhelming and seemingly endless I begin to wonder if ads for the movie came with the first pressing of the Gutenberg Bible). Artistically, however, Rob Marshall's insipid, scattershot behemoth is nothing more than a ludicrously expensive cash-in and a woefully safe bet on the presumption that Americans will never ask for anything better.

Through its own ineptitude and transparent avarice, On Stranger Tides ultimately condescends so thoroughly to its audience it's all the more troubling and saddening that so many will cheer it. Marshall, one of the least talented directors to be a star director in Hollywood, pieces together such a disjunctive movie it betrays its apathy on the assumption that the people who see it will be too attention-deficit to care about scenes simply starting and stopping without care for flow or continuity. What am I saying? You need a story to be able to adhere to it.

Picking up where the finale of At World's End left off, On Stranger Tides shows Capt. Jack Sparrow searching for the Fountain of Youth, though why anyone blessed with the perennially young face of Johnny Depp would risk his life for a few more years of looks is something of a mystery. Without his compatriots from the previous films—save the boozy proselytizer Gibbs—Jack simply exists for his own gain, lacking the foils that bring out his humanity. This may only be more true when an old flame, Angelica (Penélope Cruz), enters the film recruiting sailors for her father, Blackbeard (Ian McShane). Yeah, that one.

Jack Sparrow's greatest asset and greatest weakness as a character has always been a moral ambiguity that actually simplifies rather than complicates him. He will act according to his own selfish desire, even in cases that he aids others. The morality of the Pirates films always fell to Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan, whose dealings with Jack managed to complicate and enhance them even as the dear captain remained his two-dimensional self, if he did not in fact become even more of a caricature. The palpable friction he had with Keira Knightley gives way to empty scenes of innuendo between Depp and Cruz, neither of whom has ever seemed less sexy. Cruz is there to be eye candy and knows it, and the look of boredom on her face throughout suggests that even the person who speaks English as a second language found the writing to be stilted and obvious. For the majority of the film, On Stranger Tides has no one to represent an actual human being with motivation and purpose, and when the person with an actual stake in the fight against Blackbeard is revealed, it's the one character more solidified in his simplistic franchise role than Sparrow.

Thus, the film immediately breaks apart, splintering into vignettes by a director known for his musical work. Marshall even has the audacity to frame some sequences as if bits in a musical, including an obvious interlude between Jack and Angelica on the deck of Blackbeard's ship with Stephen Graham in the background playing Spanish guitar. But Marshall could never even find a line of consistency for his musicals, leaving this swashbuckling epic high and dry from the start.

The musical-esque excesses extend to the acting and dialogue of the film, which is so broad that the rousing wit of the first Pirates cannot be seen for the loud punchlines and hammy acting. With Depp on autopilot, Geoffrey Rush hobbles up with a fresh wooden leg to teeter and preen his way through Barbossa's new gig as a privateer hired by the Crown to essentially perform his old job for the state. To offset Rush's dip into absurdity, he gets placed with ludicrous cutouts, most notably Richard Griffiths' borderline obscene take on King George II, in which every line is so over-pronounced that he bypasses parody for travesty. Sam Claffin plays a missionary held captive on Blackbeard's ship, where he constantly tries to entreat the good within the supernaturally evil pirate and even falls in love with a dangerous mermaid—an almost hilarious attempt to put romance back into the film by finding some garish midpoint between Will and Elizabeth's relationship and that of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (A sexy missionary! A beast from the lowest pit! Can it work?!). Taken with the highly Catholic Spanish fleet also in pursuit of the Fountain of Youth only so more bodies can be added to the climactic showdown, the missionary's constant, perfunctory invocation of his faith marked one of the few times I have ever felt sorry for God.

On Stranger Tides is the fifth Disney film to use 7.1 surround sound, and the mixers appear to have used this setup to make the dialogue as stacked and incomprehensible as possible. Everyone's so busy being manic and loud that lines disappear in deafening roars of mass hackdom, which is actually a blessing when the film quiets down just enough for you to hear a line or two. These moments are infrequent, as Hans Zimmer's crashing, reckless score cascades over the entire film, making even the less action-packed moments so bombastic I left the theater with ringing ears.

And woe betide those who see this movie in 3D. Marshall filmed a great many sequences at night or in dimly lit areas, making even the 2D print so murky that large action sequences can be glimpsed in only a few of the fractals of Marshall's hectic, sloppy editing. I would have thought Marshall might have been able to pull off at least something approximating a good sword fight: it's all choreography, after all, and that's how Marshall got his start in show business. I wonder how he'd feel if someone came in and spasmodically jerked around the intricate moves he'd worked out with performers. The final fight between British privateers, the royal Spanish fleet and Blackbeard's crew is so messy, stiff and pointless that even Jack Sparrow calls attention to the ridiculousness of it, only to be drowned out like the peppered voices of sanity in the audience of this film who will find themselves overwhelmed by the bewildering support shown to it by masses who ignore the nagging sense of logic tugging at them in order to see a fight, any fight, no matter how meaningless.

As ever, On Stranger Tides will benefit from an audience without passion or care who will nevertheless defend it as if they made it so they can justify to themselves a total lack of standards. When I read Arikan's piece for Slant, I keyed in on his anguish and zeal over the state of Hollywood fluff and how people, even those supposedly arch critics, will forgive a bad, stupid, insulting film because it came out between the months of May and August and cost a lot of money. Nothing in this film feels complete; nothing in this film even has a spark of inspiration. There aren't even inventive setpieces; as bad as Dead Man's Chest and At World's End were, at least Gore Verbinski used his budgets to try out some wild sequences to offset his writer's scripts. Now he's off making a unique, imaginative film like Rango while everyone here lines up for another go in the slop trough. When Jack proudly shows the map to the Fountain of Youth at the start, Depp may as well have unfurled the paycheck he received for this movie. That's all anyone here seems to care about, anyway. So why will people once again absolve it with that most useless of benedictions, "It does what it says on the tin?" It doesn't: rewatching the first Pirates film for the dozenth time will offer more fresh, unexpected moments than this predictable farce.

If there is any bright side to On Stranger Tides, it's that Rob Marshall is only desecrating a franchise already worn down by its desperate attempts to outdo itself in convolution and tedium rather than ruining something potentially worth seeing. His take on Memoirs of a Geisha was nearly as inflated and obvious as this, but it tore down a gentle, nuanced story in the process. Giving a hack hundreds of millions of dollars piddle away this wanton incompetence with a murky, haphazard piece of tripe, though, does not exactly seem a step in the right direction. Besides, I hear he's returning to dramatic fare soon. So scratch that; everyone loses.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998)

It may come as a surprise that Terry Gilliam, surrealist animator and maker of various self-contained fantasies, has never touched drugs in his life. It therefore comes as an even bigger surprise that he would put one of the great drug odysseys ever written on the big screen. As a fellow teetotaler, even this writer can plainly see Gilliam's vision owes nothing to drug-induced hallucination.

However, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas succeeds in a far more important task: it successfully presents the sentimental cynicism of a cult hero's last-ditch effort to find the dwindling glimmer of hope of the American Dream. That this effort came so early in Hunter S. Thompson's career says something about the bleakness of the majority of his output. Gilliam succeeds by filming the story in emotional retrospect: his broad interpretations of Thompson's prose and Ralph Steadman's sketches contain less the hints of addled paranoia than the creeping horror of seeing the naked, reptilian face of America.

Gilliam films the Fear and Loathing in shallow focus, framing Johnny Depp's Thompson and Benicio del Toro's Dr. Gonzo in unflattering close-ups. When he pulls back, the deep focus places everything in warped subjectivity but also horrible clarity. Thompson's book detailed a wild, frenzied, hilarious tour of the Nevada desert, but Gilliam presents this journey as terrifying and self-destructive.

But I'm making this sound like a moralizing condescension to Thompson's work. On the contrary, Gilliam retains the journalist's caustic wit and eye for detail that always seemed to bypass facts on the way to truth. He also places his faith in Depp's performance, which seems more than mere imitation the more I return to this film. Depp gets Thompson's quirks and mannerisms down pat, his mumbles and darting glances and penchant for banshee fits of shrieking frenzy, but he also presents the yearning beneath Thompson's self-annihilating binge.

The movie is so disjointed in its twisted comic vignettes that even now, after at least nine or 10 viewings, I still watch whole chunks of the film as if for the first time. Gilliam makes high comic setpieces out of banal settings, such as the desert bike race that served as the impetus for Thompson's trip to Vegas: the director turns the event into a maelstrom of dust and pent-up aggression from white-trash shit-kickers shooting and driving their demons away in the middle of nowhere. Pathetic staggers through the funhouse world of the Vegas strip and its outlying provinces of even stranger attractions becoming miniature epics of endurance as the two careen and stumble around trying to find a safe zone for their thoughts.

Depp and del Toro hone in on the mad humor of it all: from the start, both are so consumed by suspicion and rum-soaked fits of rage that they justify their paranoia in their violent tendencies toward each other. Flashing blue strobe-lights pulse over numerous interior shots, as if the cops are always watching and pursuing our unlikely heroes. Yet when an officer finally catches up with ol' Raoul Duke, he proves as strange as the gonzo king himself.

Gilliam constantly contrasts the two leads with the regular people around Duke and Gonzo, not only emphasizing the eternal weirdness of button-down normalcy in society but also the horrible spiral of the main characters. One almost has to feel sympathy for the "villains" of the movie -- hotel staff, valets, unsuspecting tourists -- for Duke and Gonzo bring acid-sweating delirium into their tepid, calm lives. Once the initial shock of the regulars' quotidian, dull lifestyle abates, the roles reverse, and we see how two banshees screaming out of the desert wreak havoc on them.

Oscar and Hunter leave hotel rooms in states that would make Motlëy Crüe blanch. Everywhere they seems to be wet and demolished and on fire all at once, room service trays upheaved as the two make barriers against the forces they see outside their door. Whatever color these places once were, we see them in musty pinks, dirty light breaking up harsh red lights: they look like they live under a heat lamp in a fast food restaurant, and they probably feel the same way. Breaking up this damp pink are cakes of Stucco vomit and that ever-encroaching blue light, always pressing down on these fetid war zones.

Has a film ever been so anti-drug? At one point in the film, Gonzo and Duke find themselves in a bizarre convention that seems to mix the DEA with Scientology, where mad officials play a knock-off of Reefer Madness warning about the dangers of marijuana use. But its stern, histrionic proclamations both vastly overstate the evils and telltale signs of drug use and utterly fail to capture the full horror unfolding around these two characters. The despair in some of their actions digs into the heart of Thompson's work. He subtitled his book "A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream" for a reason, and Gilliam aims to extract that truth, not merely recreate the slow descent into hell that makes the book such an entertaining, fresh and perversely inspiring read nearly 40 years later.

Some might fault Gilliam for making a drug movie, having never been on one himself, but the true mark of authenticity in that respect would necessitate him not remembering his drug trips anyway, so even if he had lost a decade to heroin and mescaline he'd basically wind up in the same position. Gilliam pulls out all the stops to put altered states on the screen, using rear projection, canted angles, shifting focal lengths and more to make cinema of a thoroughly literary sojourn.

But the director's greatest moment might be the one in which he removes himself entirely from the film and places all focus on Thompson's great words. During one of the projects previous phases, Alex Cox intended to direct the film, but Thompson barred him from the film in a rage when the director proposed taking the central moment of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the "wave speech," and animating it in cheaply symbolic yet crudely literal fashion in a manner that would have sucked the beauty and power from the moment. Gilliam simply makes a montage of countercultural footage, the sociopolitical home-movie vibe meshing perfectly with Thompson's great elegy of the Love Generation.

In some ways, Terry Gilliam's interpretation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a harsh criticism of Thompson and his work. But I've never really bought the supposed iconoclasm in Hunter's best writing: I always saw a man looking desperately for the truth, even going so far as to invent new paths to it that would get any normal writer sued into oblivion. If I am stating this point for what seems the fifth time in this review, it is because I continue to marvel at how insightful Gilliam proved to be with the emotions and thoughts within one of the great works of culture criticism of the 20th century. This movie is funny, bizarre, unpleasant and haphazard, but it's almost mournful, an interpretation on the bitter hindsight of the '60s made even more dour by further aging.

Like Raoul Duke himself, Fear and Loathing caters to the whims of the zonked-out freaks out there with its hallucinogenic structure and kaleidoscopic whirlpool of color and sound, but it also holds up a mirror to those freaks to show how ragged and lonely they've become. Few authors can make me as sad while laughing as Thompson, and, after I got over the orgy of stylistic excess this film contains, it came to have the same effect on me.

Rango

When the Rango trailer met with near-unanimous derision and dismissal among critics and, seemingly, audiences, I wonder if Gore Verbinski sat back and knowingly thought to himself, "To hell with it. They'll come crawling back when the time comes." If he did, he was right: Rango wastes no time announcing itself the first major mainstream release of the year, driven by a visual design unseen in any recent animated film that comes to mind and laced with a humor that never feels cheap or easy.

From its opening moments, Rango carries a mild sense of Dadaist whimsy, a mariachi band addressing the audience directly and introducing a character "who has yet to enter his own story." Cut to a flower-shirted chameleon going stir-crazy in a terrarium, organizing plays with the plastic objects littering his boxed home and even holding conversations with such props as a wind-up fish and a mock tree. Just as the lizard hits upon a new idea requiring an ironic twist for his protagonist, his masters' car lurches in traffic and sends the terrarium out of the foolishly open back window, stranding the domesticated creature in the middle of a harsh desert highway with a sun so hot a drop of water sizzles and evaporates on the tongue before it can even offer the tease of a quenched thirst. The poor beast shrivels up and partially crumbles twice in the rays.

At this point, the metafictional devices employed with the mariachi band and self-reflexive acting of the protagonist among his props gives way to outright surrealism, from a squashed armadillo carrying on a cryptic conversation with the lizard and sun-baked hallucinations allowing for some truly breathtaking yet hilarious animation. At last, our hero finds his way to a parched town called Dirt where he avoids a swift beating by taking the name Rango and putting his acting chops to the test with fanciful tales of gunslinging prowess.

Amazingly, Rango sidesteps the lazy appropriation of winking clichés seen in recent animated films, even as it eschews putting a toe into the Western genre pool for splashing in with a cannonball. This is the closest anyone has come to making a CGI Tarantino movie. Rango does not simply regurgitate pop culture, it embraces it, honoring conventions even as it pokes fun and adds new dimensions to them. Leone references dominate the landscape, from the use of a Morricone-esque score by Hans Zimmer to a likeness of the Man with No Name. The film also incorporates the work of Chuck Jones in its chaotic yet carefully composed animation, ensuring strict adherence of spatial relationships and perspective so that the sudden breaks are even more clanging, hilarious and daring. Verbinski even throws in a Fear and Loathing nod, recalling not only Hunter's own mad, hallucinogenic ride through the desert but Terry Gilliam, whose influence can be seen all over Rango's visual originality rooted in the work of others.

To even get into how gorgeous, how memorable and how singular the animation of Rango is would send this review down a dead-end street of superlatives. Who on Earth could have guessed from Rango's unalluring teaser that the primary influence on its visual scheme, even above classical Western imagery, would be the work of Salvador Dalí? To be fair, the animators left a hefty clue for the audience in the unimpressive frame of the protagonist. Rango, too weird to appeal in a trailer, works brilliantly in context: set against the startlingly realistic animation of the other animals, Rango visually clashes. His askew, pencil-thin neck supports his vast head like a glacial till holding up a balancing rock, and his slightly uneven eye sockets with narrowed nipples for peepers subtly resemble breasts. Only Rattlesnake Jake, a massive, coiling psychopath who comes to town to pop the bubble of Rango's inflated persona, matches Rango's off-kilter animation, what with his seemingly endless body and his machine-gun rattler.

The backdrops offer even more chances for innovative rendering. Hallucinations of terrifyingly symmetrical cactus configurations, slow-motion shots of a desert highway illuminates overhead by cars passing over the hero, and a transparently fake (and thus disgustingly recognizable) Las Vegas are but some of the masterful background animations in which Verbinski places his characters. Where Wes Anderson's inexperience with animation did not preclude him from dictating style and movement to his supposedly tortured team on Fantastic Mr. Fox, the less-mannered Verbinski appears to have reacted to his own unfamiliarity with the medium with humility, ceding artistic control to his animators. Amazingly, Rango fails to fall into the trap that entangled infamous examples of competing visions in animation (Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland comes swiftly to mind), maintaining a cohesive juxtaposition between surprising realism and the most brazen use of Dada in children's entertainment since the early brilliance of Spongebob Squarepants.

Of course, to say that assumes Rango could conceivably be seen as a kid's film, which it most emphatically is not. Though it sidesteps Tarantino's vulgarity, the sheer amount of adult-oriented pop culture references and film history on display offers nothing for a child, and most of the dialogue plays at, at the least, a teenage level. Only the slapstick could fully appeal to a child, but then physical comedy, when done well, is universal, and the comedy here is dynamite. And if the sophistication of the writing does not turn off the children, the sight of Rattlesnake Jake surely will, each lunge of his bared fangs or constricting coil around heroes terrifying enough to shake an adult. Those dismissing Rango for not being palatable to children (or praising it in spite of this "shortcoming") have grown too accustomed to the idea of animation being something that must appeal to children. Rango has just enough to keep a kid entertained -- and for the love of God, parents, let your kids get scared; it does 'em good -- but it clearly aims for an older audience.

Part of Rango's promotional package highlighted Verbinski's staging of the voice cast as if they were actually on-screen, filming them acting together in what seemed a desperate gimmick. Yet the move paid off, and Rango sports one of the voice casts of major stars to sound as if the actors did more than simply speak into the microphone. Bill Nighy properly sinks into his role as Jake, adding menace to his speech and not just his movement. An unrecognizable Isla Fisher plays Beans, the unfortunately named love interest who chatters in a contradictory mile-a-minute drawl shockingly familiar to those of us who have heard the slowed-down Southern accent as sped up by inflamed passions. And what a weird niche in which Ned Beatty has found himself, playing a crippled authority figure exuding false comfort and harboring ulterior motives in an animated film only a year after....well, you know.

Casting Rango, a delusional pet with aspirations of being a thespian, as a chameleon was a sly gag, and one Johnny Depp undoubtedly got. After the last two Pirates movies, the relationship between Depp and Verbinski went stale, to the point one could not easily recall how incandescent their first pairing was (and on a film preemptively dismissed as derivative and money-grabbing). They capture lightning in a bottle once more here, letting Depp exercise his most exuberant techniques without the setbacks of watching the actual man contort himself into buffoonish shapes for a laugh. Never appearing on-screen, Depp hasn't been so watchable in years.

Stuffed with allusions and surprises, Rango occasionally goes so far as to recontextualize its references and make something else out of them. A massive canyon chase not only combines elements of the podcast race and Death Star trench run of Episodes I and IV, respectively, it also adds a dash of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, albeit with bats. Three superb sequences combine into one visual tour-de-force that borrows the best aspects from all of them and plays around in the white space left over. At the other end of the spectrum, the film pokes fun at the stereotypes of Native Americans, the somber raven to whom Rango incessantly condescends always subverting expectations based on genre clichés (a reference to Depp's involvement in the thoroughly anti-cliché, anti-Western Dead Man, perhaps?). I also enjoyed the idea of a town so literally dry that, when the locals laugh at the naïve city slicker asking for water, they do so because they'd all love nothing more than a sip of the stuff instead of alcohol.

In a year where Pixar already seems to be planning a working vacation with Cars 2, Rango might survive in the public consciousness through the year and win some accolades come the next awards season. One can only hope; Rango is one of the few animated films to ignore Pixar entirely, either as competition or influence. The makers focused only on telling a good story in the way they saw it, and the results freely leap off the screen despite staying in obsolete ol' 2D. Intelligent, witty, original films of any stripe do not come along often, and to see something this bold come from the seemingly dessicated corpse of Nickelodeon Studios proves one should never count anyone out. The film circles around the idea that anyone can be a hero given the right circumstances and sense of perseverance and duty; Rango itself proves how dedication turns a decent concept into great art.