Shake your booty.

Johnny Depp & Co. are here to take even more of your money back to Disneyland.

Went to the early Friday AM 12:35 showing of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, mostly because:

a) I wanted to see it to get the bad taste of PTC2 out of my mouth.

b) Shrek the Third left bad taste in my mouth too, so I had to get SOMETHING done about it...

c) All the previous showings (from 8 pm on) were sold out.

d) Fewer teenaged bastards in a super-late night showing.

e) I figured I'd be up anyway.

f) All of the above.

If you answered "f", that'd be the correct answer. First off, lemme say I'm a fan of the PTC franchise, if not so much the films themselves. Damnit, these movies are so insanely huge undertakings, the only thing bigger seems to be the stories they try to tell and the way they tell them. My biggest problem with PTC2 was that, when watching it in the theater for the second time, I realized as the FISH HEADED FREAKS came out of the water that I was watching a really expensive and elaborate Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers movie, and that kind of thinking really sucked the entertainment out of the picture for me. Needless to say, PTC was bloated, under-acted, under-written, and over-long; but still a solid "B" movie due to the sheer spectacle of it all.

PTC3, however, is a different story. Not as tight as Numero Uno, and still a good 30 minutes too long, PTC3 takes spectacle to a whole 'nother level, with CGI shots that would win best animated picture Oscars for everyone - if only we could tell where the animation ended and the reality began (or vice-versa). Add to that a script that is so ludicrous that it only makes sense if you don't think about it too much, and we're talking one of the first movies I've seen that doesn't give a flying rat's ass if you WANT to willingly suspend your disbelief; it grabs you by the knickers and shouts, "DEAL WITH IT!" at the top of it's lungs.

Curiously enough, it seemed to work. And, amid all of this chaos and confusion there were moments of surreal beauty and (gasp!) script depth.

Script depth? Yeah, I wrote that. And, yeah, I wrote it in conjunction with PTC3. Why? Because the movie does a curious thing nearing the end: it takes what would normally be an opportunity for sugar and honey - staples of a Disney flick - and gave us an honest moment that came off as neither contrived nor a cop-out. Is PTC3 an overwhelming clunker of a movie with truck-sized logic holes, too many characters, too much counter-Esperanto, too much everything? Yep. And it's still damn entertaining (with the exception of a 20 minute lull that ends the second Keith Richards shows on the screen to steal the show for awhile), with one big difference between it and its predecessor: the crazy in PTC3 is honest here, while in PTC2 the crazy was a thinly veiled lie.

So what's this got to do with Boise Filmmaking? Hunh. Well, that's the subject of my next blog...

... but right now I need sleepy.

-Will

Real Filmmakers. No Tourists.