Soon after Heath Ledger’s untimely death (ultimately ruled an accident) a few weeks ago, there was a rumor floating around that Johnny Depp would step in to save Terry Gilliam’s Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus by playing the “mirror-world” Heath. (“There is a point in the film when Heath falls through a magic mirror. He could change into another character after that and that is where Johnny would come in.“) As it turns out, the truth is even more interesting. According to AICN, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell have all signed on for Imaginarium to pay tribute to Ledger and to help salvage his final performance. All class acts…here’s hoping Gilliam can make something special out of Ledger’s final bow.
Tag: Johnny Depp
From one actor to another.
“I feel very unsettled at the moment…It seems somehow strange to be talking about anything else. Not that there’s anything to say really except to express one’s regret and to say from the bottom of one’s heart to his family and to his friends that I’m sorry for their trouble.” Daniel Day-Lewis pays an emotional tribute to Heath Ledger. [Story.]
In related news, some reports indicate Johnny Depp, of the previously sidelined The Man who Killed Don Quixote, may be asked by Terry Gilliam to finish Ledger’s work on Imaginarium. “There is a point in the film when Heath falls through a magic mirror. He could change into another character after that and that is where Johnny would come in. It’s a weird, fantasy, time-travel movie so Heath’s character could easily change appearance. It would be a poignant moment. Johnny’s not working at the moment so everyone is praying he will do it.“
Update: Daniel Day-Lewis dedicates his SAG award to Heath Ledger.
Oscar loves Michael (and Juno).
Writers’ strike or no, the 2008 Oscar contenders were announced this morning. And the nominees are:
Best Picture: Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood. Juno? Michael Clayton? Man, these are some weird choices (and I’m Not There and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are notably missing.) Of these, I personally would pick No Country, but I could see Atonement garnering the staid English Patient/Beautiful Mind vote.
Best Actor: George Clooney, Michael Clayton; Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood, Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd, Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah, Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises. Nice of ’em to give Viggo a nod. I’d give this to Tommy Lee Jones for Elah, but I suspect DDL’s scenery-chewing Daniel Plainview will be hard to beat. He drinks Oscar’s milkshake.
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth II: The Golden Age, Julie Christie, Away from Her; Marion Cotillard, La Vie En Rose; Laura Linney, The Savages; Ellen Page, Juno. Glad to see The Savages get some run, even if Linney makes more sense in the Supporting Actress category. Still, I haven’t seen Away, but I expect Julie Christie will run away with it.
Best Supporting Actor: Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men; Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War, Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton. Ok, while Hoffman was Best Supporting Actor of the year (this, Savages, Before the Devil), Tom Wilkinson is still owed for In the Bedroom, and Hal Holbrook is basically this year’s Peter O’Toole, I’m guessing Javier Bardem is a lockity-lock. And why is Casey Affleck here? He’s the main character in that three-hour film.
Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There; Ruby Dee, American Gangster, Saiorse Ronan, Atonement, Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone, Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton. Again, some strange choices here: Ruby Dee is one of the best things about Gangster, but she’s barely in it. Tilda Swinton is a good actress who I thought was a net negative in Clayton. And Ronan was fine in Atonement, but why not Romola Garai? At any rate, this is a two-woman race between Ryan and Blanchett, and it’s looking like Blanchett is pretty much a lock. (I thought Ryan was superb in Gone, but if more people see I’m Not There because of this win, I’m all for it.)
Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood, Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men; Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton; Jason Reitman, Juno, Julian Schabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This is tricky. I’d guess whichever of No Country and TWBB doesn’t win best picture will win here. But, since Schabel’s Diving Bell got locked out of most categories, it could win here too. For now, I’ll say Coens.
Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins, The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford; Roger Deakins, No Country for Old Men; Robert Elswit, There Will Be Blood; Janusz Kaminski, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Seamus McGarvey, Atonement. Hmm. Normally, I’d say Deakins, but given that he’s nominated twice, his vote will split. So, it’s Elswit for TWBB, I guess.
Best Adapted Screenplay: Atonement, Away from Her, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood. Again, a tough one, I’ll go the Coens for No Country.
Best Original Screenplay: Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, The Savages. This is often the “clever” award, given to movies the Academy otherwise didn’t much vibe to. My guess is this year it’s Diablo Cody’s for Juno.
Invisible Spinning Globes.
If they hold an awards ceremony in the middle of the ‘Wood and there’s no around to hear it, does it make a sound? Why, yes, yes, it does. And the Golden Globe winners are…
So there you have it. In case you missed it, my own best of 2007 list is now buried deep beneath the political coverage.
Grave and a Haircut, to go.
The trailer for Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sasha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman, and Timothy Spall, is now online. Burton wants me to see a bloody musical? I dunno.
From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea.
I know, I know. This ship has sailed, with its filthy hoard of ill-gotten box office lucre already stashed under decks, so get to Knocked Up and Ocean’s Thirteen already. At this point you really don’t need me to tell you that Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World’s End, despite having Johnny Depp and $100 million in special effects at its command, was a bloated, washed-up, and mostly boring two hours of needless exposition and empty spectacle. But, there it is. One might remember that I kinda loathed the second Pirates movie last summer, and that was with a stash of bootlegged spirits and a good woman at my side to help relieve the remorseless tedium. So, why did I even bother seeing At World’s End? Well, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon summed it up perfectly: “[A]t this point, the ‘Pirates’ franchise is essentially collecting a tax from moviegoers: See it and like it, matey, or you’ll be out of step with the whole universe! And who wants that?” Well, I paid my movie-tax tribute, you bottom-line buccaneers and covetous corsairs, now avast with ye.
So, as you may or may not remember if you labored your way through Dead Man’s Chest, this installment of the Pirates franchise begins with Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp) among the recently deceased, or at least trapped in the pirate Underworld that is Davy Jones’ Locker, while the rest of the team (Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightly et al) finds they must band together with first-film villain Capt. Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to break Sparrow out, Jabba’s-palace style. But before that plot resumes, we witness a series of grisly civilian hangings undertaken by the East India Company’s Big Bad (Tom Hollander), who now has the supernatural man-squid Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) in his thrall. (It’s a long story.) These executions happen not only to weed out the pirate insurgency and win the war on (naval) terror but, more ominously, to provoke a particular seafaring ditty in the unwashed masses, one that, once uttered, must provoke a meeting of the Pirate Council, whose nine lords are known by their special Pieces of Eight. But, let’s not forget, there’s also the matter of an enchanted compass on Jack’s person which points the way to one’s heart’s desire, and, for that matter, a magical heart thumping in a special chest that grants power over Davy Jones, and some very important charts on the person of Lando-ish pirate Chow Yun-Fat, and an undead monkey and a scorned sea-goddess and Gareth from The Office and…oh, I give up already. Just go see the movie. Or better yet, don’t.
To be fair, At World’s End isn’t as depressing or disappointing an action-packed threequel as, say, The Matrix: Revolutions, if only because expectations were so much lower heading into these already-muddy waters. And, ’tis true, Pirates of the Caribbean III is a marginally better film than the last outing — Instead of beating you into submission with blunt, numbing spectacle, this film mostly just tries to exposition you to death, which strangely enough I found preferable. Still, this is a bad film. Even Depp, who is an inordinately gifted actor who can make almost anything watchable, starts to grate here (as, alas, does Geoffrey Rush.) In fact, Depp’s once-fresh and funny mannerisms as Jack Sparrow have badly calcified by this point — at times, particularly when the movie steals a page or three from Being John Malkovich, he looks like he’s just phoning in his Hunter schtick. (For their part, Bloom and Knightley, pretty as they are, have no other schtick. It’s Legolas and Love, Actually, all over again.)
World Without End.
The trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End is now online. I thought the last one turned out to be an abysmal shipwreck of sorts, and, great blistering barnacles, this sadly looks like more of the same to me.
Caribbean Blue.
Since I just mentioned Pirates 2, which is a film I sadly kinda hated, I should perhaps note that the promotional materials for Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World’s End are now online, and they include a decent look at Chow Yun-Fat in samurai-pirate regalia. Why do I get the sense I’ll be seeing this despite myself?
Severus does Sweeney.
Alan Rickman joins Tim Burton’s forthcoming version of Sweeney Todd, already with Burton stalwarts Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter…as well as Sasha Baron Cohen. Verrry nice.
Abandon Ship.
[Argh! Shiver me timbers! I had just finished this post, when an accidental double-click conspired to send it to the depths of Davy Jones’ locker. Ok, let’s try this again…]
Given that it just enjoyed the biggest opening weekend ever and that #3 (World’s End) is already pretty much in the can, I suppose it doesn’t really matter what I thought of the relentlessly overstuffed Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest, which I caught last Friday with the rest of America. Still, for what it’s worth, I found Pirates 2 both remarkably disappointing — sadly, this film is yet another whiff in a summer full of them so far– and literally stunning, in that the movie spends two and a half hours remorselessly beating the audience senseless with spectacle, to the detriment of plot, character development, pauses for breath, or anything else you might think to expect in a 150-minute flick. (AICN’s best reviewer, Alexandra du Pont, hit the nail on the head on this one: “The movie is stimulating without being dramatic. Nothing is properly contextualized..”) What we have here with Dead Man’s Chest is a reasonably well-directed film brimming over with talented actors (Say what you will about Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, but Johnny Depp, Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce, and Stellan Skarsgard? That’s a Murderer’s Row), expertly crafted special effects, striking cinematography, and — yes — rousing action sequences, and for some reason it all adds up to so much less than the sum of its parts. Pirates’ magic, this is.
So, what’s the gist of Dead Man’s Chest, besides all the furious running back and forth, and then back again? Well, that’s most of it. Somewhere in there, a malevolent magnate of the East India Company (Tom Hollander, doing a Peter Sarsgaard impression) has decided to break up the wedding of Will Turner (Bloom, bland and pretty) and Elizabeth Swann (Knightley, pretty and bland), in order to send them out to locate the formidable Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp, even stranger than last time) and — more importantly — his magic compass. Sparrow, meanwhile, has run afoul of the unfortunately not-so-mythical Davy Jones (Nighy, by way of Serkis), the squid-headed commandant of a ship of lost souls — among them Bootstrap Bill Turner (Skarsgard), Will’s dad — that he has retrieved from shipwrecks (and who are now turning into sea creatures as a side-effect of their Faustian bargain.)
With the board thus set, the pieces move…and boy, do they. Jack and Will spend a good forty-five minutes running to and from natives, Elizabeth stows away on a “haunted” ship, Will serves some time with dear old Dad, the Kraken — a ginormous creature of the deep — attacks not once, not twice, but three times (“ah ah ah!), everyone stops in for a few voodoo sessions and/or swordfighting, and all the characters from the first movie drop by every once in a while for a pop-in or three. This all may sound fun, but trust me — the frenetic result goes from intriguing to exhausting to mind-numbing in surprisingly short order. After a smile on my face for the first quarter-hour, I was starting to check out after forty-five minutes, trying to will my watch faster after seventy-five, and was ready to cut a deal with Davy Jones myself by minute one-hundred.
I liked the first Pirates, although I also said that it felt twenty minutes too long, Well, for almost its entire running time, Dead Man’s Chest basically feels like being trapped in that extra twenty minutes. Still, I have to admit, it also feels like something of a watershed. Perhaps the best way to look at Pirates 2 is as [a] an homage to the action-packed, plot-irrelevant, somewhat nonsensical pirate serials of yesteryear and [b] a sequel to a movie based on a Disney theme park ride — really, how good could it have been? And yet, in another way this really does feel like the type of flick film historians of the future might look back to as a signpost in the devolution of American film — as the moment when the summer blockbuster ethos, Krakenlike, effectively swallowed the moviemaking process whole. (There may be something about the increasing caffeinization and decreasing attention span of America in there somewhere too.) I mean, when reasonably talented people get together to spend a whopping $225 million and hundreds of man-hours to make a “movie” like this, which, as DuPont also suggested in her review, is effectively a two and a half hour version of Indy running from the big ball in Raiders — and then are so amply rewarded for it, to boot — one has to fear for the quality of future film offerings. Can we turn this ship around, or are we just going to have to watch it run aground?