Why is there not a thread for this yet? I just got back from seeing it. I loved it, although I may have to go see it again to make sure. Also, I have decided that an undead monkey is the best pirate pet ever. Way better than a boring talking parrot.
The part with the sword fight where the three of them were sharing two swords was funny.
It was indeed a good movie. Darker than the first, but it still kept all the humor. Long though.
I have but one question. Why is the rum always gone?
984: So they could recycle the jokes from the first movie.
I saw it on Friday, it was really good.
Oh, and WOMG BARBOSSA…IS BACK!!!1
Okay, did anyone understand what was going on with the dice game thingy, because I didn’t.
With the dice, why they were playing or how it was played?
They played it as you knew what you had, but tried to get more than ure oppoenents had, and also get them to bet higher, but not have it.
I wanted to know how they were playing, thanks.
I thought the game was something like: every player has five dice in a cup, and they have to guess how many times a specific number shows up on the dice (including the dice in the other players’ cups. Or I could just be insane.
Anyway, I liked all the references to the first movie. They kept the story from getting to dark or serious. My only complaint was the look of Davy Jones and his crew. They were a little too… dumb looking for my taste. But that’s just me.
I went to see this in a group of five that included Frameskip and Jo the Mighty. There was an unexpected treat; apparently one of the extras in the movie, a candle-bearing extra who gets a brief close up, was sitting in the row behind us in the theater with about ten of her loudest fans 
The dice game was a fun idea, sort of like Yahtzee! crossed with Bullshit.
For those who haven’t seen the movie yet, and repeating some things that have already been posted: Each player has a cup with five dice. Shake it, put them all on the table, and then one of you bets (the stakes have already been determined) that a certain number of the dice have rolled a number of your choice. The next person must either call you a liar (which ends the game, it seems), or bet on an even less likely outcome. (i.e., you bet seven fives, the next person either calls or bets eight or more of something). The only information you have to go on is the contents of your own cup, which you can look at, and the faces of your opponents, which you may also look at. Everyone’s trying to decieve everyone else, of course.
My take, in short: <i>Dead Man’s Chest</i> is not <i>The Curse of the Black Pearl</i>.
My take, in long: This is a great movie to <i>look</i> at, at the very least. The visuals are top-tier No, I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. The filmmakers made the wise move of never showing me in full; even with the latest special effects, the producer cannot afford to show you what you’re imagining is there, but the cinematography struck me as strangely lifeless. I don’t know what it is, just that, whatever it is, it’s not there.
The visuals also include Davey Jones and his crew, which have been mentioned so I won’t spoiler them. They seem to be there to make the audience go “eeeew!” and I heard they accomplished that. Heard it all the way through the movie, I did ba-dum tsh. I didn’t really have a problem with it. I’d rather not have Davey Jones preside over a crew of Jacob Marleys.
Captain Jack Sparrow wasn’t as good here as in the first movie, either. Maybe it’s because he’s preoccupied with something throughout this outing. Maybe it’s because he didn’t have a callow youth to play off of. Maybe it’s also because his “humor” scenes in this movie were in large part <i><b>OMFG HORRIBLY CONTRIVED SLAPSTICK</b></i> (And midgets). There was no equivalent to “Stop blowing holes in my ship!” in this movie, nor to Jack’s exchange with the two guards at Port Royal (“I said no lies!”).
Jack is more of a pirate in this movie, but then, isn’t everyone? There’s a couple scenes of <i>Black Pearl</i>'s pirate legalese (which is sort of realistic; pirate crews often had a formal charter), plenty of Pirates-Being-Crafty, et cetera, et cetera. Everyone from the first movie who had a sense of fair play is disabused of that notion by the time things get rolling. I almost missed it, until I realized that I didn’t need a straight-laced foil hanging around asking dumb questions to know when someone was being shifty. Neither do the characters.
The setpieces are pretty good, too. There’s plenty of swashbuckling to be had, which is something I like. I’ve got my DVD drawer at home arranged so that I can see all the fantasies, swashbucklers and sword-and-sandal movies in one glance. Gunfights are okay, and kung-fu flicks are fun to watch too, but there’s something visceral about a good movie swordfight, especially a swashbuckler, that I can’t resist. What’s more, the swordfights in this movie are interesting for the way they’re constructed.
There’s the aforementioned three-on-twelve-or-so fight in this movie, where the three we’re rooting for only have two swords and a MacGuffin between them. I thought this was an interesting idea for a swordfight when I saw it was coming, but I didn’t get to see much of it as the entire thing is accomplished with “MTV editing” which is interspersed with the “good” guys (everyone’s a pirate, remember?) running for their lives.
The real treat for me is spoilered to protect the innocent [spoiler]The one-on-one-on-one swordfight between Jack, Norrington and Turner actually took me by surprise. It was interesting to watch a three-party fight where everyone was everyone else’s enemy, or at least not always their ally. Looking back I can see that this is also what endeared me to the last third of <i>Jaws</i>, where Quint, Brody and Hooper are all on the <i>Orca</i>, alternatively needling and consoling each other.
This fight was nice because it didn’t rely on fast cuts to try and convey action. There was rope swinging, balancing on walls, a chase scene throughout, and of all things, a swordfight on a water wheel, which I think has been done before, but not with the wheel out of the water and rolling down hillsides. It was also fun to keep track of the MacGuffin changing hands so that the chase could have a new leader (and consequently, a different pair tripping over each other to catch up)[/spoiler]
Here’s something Jo’s girlfriend mentioned afterward, if I remember it correctly. She thinks the fortune teller woman (I hesitate to call her “voodoo queen”) is the woman who Davey Jones cut out his heart for, based on seeing the same locket in her house on the Blue Bayou as in Jones’ cabin (y’know, the music-playing locket). Can anyone corroborate this? I missed it.
The acting, the acting, the acting… well, it’s a pirate movie. Everyone’s hamming it up, because quite frankly you don’t often get a chance to play a pirate in Hollywood. Half the pirates in the movie are a special effect, which is exaggerated enough, and Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow is so animated he’s practically a special effect himself. The sad part about all this is also spoilered for her pleasure: Geoffrey Rush’s Barbosa returns. He’s on screen for all of three seconds, and in those three seconds he almost <i>steals the entire movie.</i> I’ll chalk that up to Rush being good at what he does and leave it at that.
A final note: we saw three trailers for movies with basically one word titles before the film proper. They were:
<ul>
<li><i>Fearless</i>, Jet Li’s final kung-fu outing. Fittingly enough, it’s a tournament movie, the quintessential type of martial arts movie in my opinion and practically a subgenre in itself. If pressed I will hold forth on the tournament martial arts film, so don’t push your luck with a synopsis this short.
<li><i>Invincible</i>, true story football movie. This looks good to me, which is funny because I usually avoid sports movies, especially football movies, like the plague. Maybe it’s because I watched <i>The Rookie</i> and liked it.
<li><i><font size =1>The</font> Guardian</i>, a movie about a Coast Guard instructor who must go back onto the field of battle one last time in order to learn the true meaning of Christmas or something. May contain large helpings of depressing realities about search-and-rescue operations not suitable for children, pregnant women or rodeo clowns. Use as directed. While watching this trailer I was alternately having flashbacks to <i>The Perfect Storm</i>/<i>White Squall</i> and <i>Men of Honor</i>, strange considering I have seen none of them in full.
</ul>
Frameskip thought this was rather noteworthy. “Fearless! Invincible! Guardian!” he said, three seats down from me. Jo made some joke about a movie called <i>The Fearless Invincible Guardian</i> or something, but I didn’t hear it. I told Frame he was lucky; in the sixties movies could come out with long and pretentious titles. I remember an MST3K presentation of <i>The Incredibly Strange Creatures who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies</i>, which began as <I>The Incredibly Strange Creatures: or how I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-Up Zombie</i> but was changed under threat of lawsuit from the creators of <i>Dr. Strangelove: or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb</i>. There were others, like one bad movie I read a review of; <I>Can Heironimous Merkin ever Forget Mercy Humppe and find True Happiness?</i>. And two of those are colon-punctuated movie titles, which both <i>Pirates</i> movies have, and in the nineties was a reliable way of identifying a movie as a sequel.
Well, my fingers are going to wear down to stubs if I go any further.
Keep a weather eye on the horizon.
~Kraken
It was just as much fun as the first.
I saw this on Friday as part of the Ladies’ Night I organized (hey, some people don’t invite me to the things they do, so I’ll have my own party dammit :D). We got the previews for Invincible and The Guardian along with the Transformers teaser. :\ I would have loved to see the Fearless preview again…
It was a little long for what ended up happning, but I really enjoyed it. I like the first one better, but this one rocked a bit too. Hamming it up was cool with me too; how often do we get pirate movies anyway? It’s practically impossible to resist doing it! … and yes, undead pirate monkeys do rock.
Kraken, your comment about the fortuneteller being the love is very interesting; I’m taking that back to the girls for discussion. One of my friends e-mailed today asking about the jar of dirt the fortuneteller gave Jack, as in “what’s the point?”. I remembered from the movie that Davy Jones could only go ashore once every ten years or something like that, but does that mean he can’t touch earth period? Personally, I thought it would have been hilarious if she gave him that jar of dirt just for kicks. 
The two formerly undead pirates totally cracked me up, especially when the one-eyed one starts explaining everyone’s issues. I was cracked up that those two came back.
One last thing - everytime I see Norrington, I think "Hey, it’s Steve from the BBC Coupling. That show was so much better than the NBC version… ha ha ha
My dad’s girlfriend thought that the katamari-cage scene was “so Pratchett.” And during the bar brawl scene, I muttered to her, “What is this, the Mended Drum?”
I only saw it on Saturday night, it hasn’t really been long enough for me to REALLY chew on any flaws I might have seen. Been a while since I saw the first one, too.
Umm the movie was so-so.
My Opinion:
I think they need to think a bit more about the character’s motivation. Especially in the end. They all want to save Jack? wtf? The two former undead pirates who are the equivalent to R2D2 and C3PO had almost no real relationship with Jack whatsoever. Yet in the end they say they’ll risk their lives again to bring him back to life. Will seems to have no problem letting Commodore Norris kill Jack on the island, he even insists that Norris does him in, but after Jack is dead he apparently changes his mind? I guess seeing him make out with his girlfriend makes him not want him dead?
So Will can take care of the making Jack dead part himself?
It will probably be one of those lame “Will loves Elizabeth so much that he will go and find Jack so that she can be happy” shticks.
I was thinking there’d be an “all right Leia, I understand you like Luke” bit in the next movie, a la Return of the Jedi …
I loved it as much as the first.
Just got back from it. Thought it was brilliant.
And that’s all. Agreeing with Kraken’s comment re: Barbossa.
Good stuff: They gave Will real lines this time (He’s no yeller, though…) and a purpose other than stand there and look pretty. Better stuff: He also wears stuff other than unconventional nice and dandy clothing. Best part: He gets stomped on, kicked on, slapped, wet as a dog several times, HE GETS ABUSED SO MUCH IT WAS HILARIOUS
Jack did what he did best, the perma-buzzed Pirate that he is.
… And of course Swann had to have a dual-wielding scene…
It was awesome. I’m going to go see it again, I think.