Previewing Pirates.

The Guardian's Steve Rose on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: "After flirting with Looney Tunes comedy, Hollywood pastiche, Peter Jackson-style grandiosity, and seafront pantomime, it eventually becomes clear what course the Pirates franchise has really plotted: a packed universe of characters; epic action; strange lands; freakish monsters; a curiously sexless central couple. This isn't an updated swashbuckler, it's a backdated Star Wars!" The bottom line: "Despite all the fits, starts, and flaws, there's enough invention and energy here to make you want to see the next installment."

Johnny Depp has cancelled all one-on-one international interviews - except for the one with Chrissy Iley. "[M]aybe it was because the last time we met, I gave him a dildo named Johnny. There was a reason: he had just done The Libertine, playing the sexually omnivorous Earl of Rochester. 'It was a gorgeous gift,' he says smiling naughtily. 'A great gift.'" As for Keith Richards, who'll appear in Pirates 3, "We did get together in a hotel room and dress up as pirates. He looked beautiful in the clothes and his hair was in dreads. Gorgeous! Just gorgeous!"

Depp evidently tossed his appointment calendar after he'd talked with the Telegraph's John Hiscock. All he toys with here is the idea of doing Hamlet "in a small theater on a small stage and it will have to be very, very soon because I'm getting a little long in the tooth for it."

Updated through 7/5.

Though David Poland finds Pirates about 30 minutes too long, it's "easily the best studio confection of the year."

At Slant, Nick Schager writes that it "ultimately stays just afloat thanks to Depp's uniquely idiosyncratic scalawag, the actor imbuing his preening, loose-limbed pirate with a drunken dancer's grace and a combination of colorful Walt Disney charm and rascally Chuck Jones mischievousness."

"In Dead Man's Chest, [Mackenzie] Crook reprises his role as the pirate Ragetti, as thick as the plank he makes people walk, and cursed with a wooden eye 'that does splinter something terrible'." Adrian Turpin talks with him for the London Times.

Kirk Honeycutt in the Hollywood Reporter: "The filmmakers seem cheerfully resolved that narrative never get in the way of buccaneer fun."

Updates, 7/4: Jeffrey Wells, who really, really hates this movie, gleefully points to Todd McCarthy's pan in Variety and David Ansen's in Newsweek.

Offline fiddling around tip. From the Disney Experience, a paper model of the Wicked Wench. Download, print, slice, glue, voila. Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Updates, 7/5: At Quick Stop Entertainment, DK Holm sends up a red flare: "Please do stay through the credits. Not only do you get to hear more of Hans Zimmer's score, but also there is a narrative surprise in the final five seconds." Otherwise, "I guess in the eyes of corporate media we are all seven-years-old now, a perhaps justified assumption. For me, the film just wasn't funny." What's more, "Pirates doesn't conclude. It just stops. It closes on a cliffhanger, while bringing back a major character from the previous film."

"Johnny Depp's foppish, mercurial, sexually ambiguous and probably very smelly scoundrel is the morally fluid, completely unreliable soul of the film, not to mention a welcome change from the drippy, neurotic heroes that have come to define what it means to be super in the movies lately," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. That said, "It's normal to expect some bloating with age, but by the time the second rolling waterwheel gag comes along, I found myself pining for the Shaker-like simplicity of, I don't know, Versailles.... At half the running time, it would have made for an amusing time-killer; as it is — no matter how clever, energetic and beautifully designed — it borders on waste."

Related: Greg Braxton rounds up the summer's villains.

Posted by dwhudson at July 3, 2006 12:48 AM