movies: pirates of the caribbean: dead man's chest

pirates of the caribbean: dead man's chest - jack's backOh man... Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest rocks... Gold Class rocks... too cool... too cool...

This is the second time I've visited Gold Class, the first being for Brokeback Mountain, and it was just as cool as I remember... after all the screwups with ordering my tickets I was hoping not to get there and either having two sets of seats, or just the wrong seats... but no, everything panned out okay... well, everything except for the fact that when I showed the girly behind the desk my credit card (to confirm that I am indeed me I suppose), I then proceeded to leave it behind... luckily she took it over to the Gold Class food counter, so that wasn't a big drama (just par for the course after Thursday's fun and games really), and I actually didn't know that it was gone until that point...

And, for the record, I did end up getting the seats I originally tried to book online... yaaaay!

We ended up getting the Fisherman's Platter to share halfway through the movie... it seemed appropriate, given Bill Nighy's performance and appearance as Davy Jones... nothing like eating calamari and watching it acting on screen too...

I will give one word of warning, I guess you could say, on the movie... something I didn't know, but I don't think it would have affected my movie experience one way or the other... Dead Man's Chest is the first half of a two part movie... think two thirds of Lord of the Rings or the final two Matrix movies... conjoined stories that stop part way through. So don't expect the plot to wrap up nicely at the end of the two and a half hours.

Damn filmmakers (yes, Gore, Ted and Terry, I'm lookin at you three... bastards)...

I have to say that so far I'm undecided as to which of the two movies is my favourite... I think maybe it's Black Pearl... simply because it was the first one and I know it so well now, and it introduced all the characters... but this second one definitely runs an incredibly close second... partly because they could just jump right into the story without having to introduce characters and partly because there was two and a half hours of it... that's a lotta pirates... plus, Davy Jones and his octopus face... what's not to love!

Johnny is as broad and slacksticky and camp as ever as Jack Sparrow (Captain Jack Sparrow if you please!)... Orlando remains all sultry and brooding... and Keira actually gets a lot more swashing and buckling and much, much less fainting this time around (although the one scene with her fainting is actually really funny).

A lot of the supporting players are back again too... Elizabeth's father, Jack's crew, as well as the comedy pirate duo of Lee Arenberg and Mackenzie Crook... gotta love them.

The action was as fast and furious as ever, and although I knew I'd been watching the movie for a long while, it never dragged or felt like things could have been cut out (King Kong, I'm looking at you now)...

Davy Jones and his army of "sea-phantoms" looked as amazingly lifelike as the skeletal pirates from the first movie, and, it turns out, were about as real (which really surprised me, I thought they would have been partially in makeup and then augmented by CGI... I guess I'll have to wait for the DVD special features to find out exactly what was going on there)... although I will say that a few of the shots featuring the Kraken seemed a little less integrated and stuck out to me more... maybe because of it's size and scale and the actions it actually had to perform (and the fact you can't put a Kraken in a motion capture suit like you can with real actors).

Oh, and like the first movie, don't forget to wait until the very, very end after the credits for an extra scene... it's not going to change your movie experience if you miss it, it's just cute...

And now I'm hanging out for the third instalment, to find out if all the things that I think are going to happen actually happen, and to wrap up all the loose plot lines... it's only a year or so...

Arrggghhhhhh....

Hopefully Dead Man's Chest doesn't take that long to turn up on DVD...

yani's rating: 4 Kraken out of 5

3 comments:

Possbert said...

Hi there. We also saw Parrots at Gold Class (or as my friend calls it - Legs in the Air Cinema) - the only way to fly.

Did you catch the easter egg at the end of the credits? I leaned over to my friend and said, "You reckon it will feature the dog?"

Cheers.

yani said...

Yeah, I did catch it... that would be the fourth to last paragraph :P

What I think will be interesting is to see what animal gets featured in the third one...

Anonymous said...

Though I have never done Gold Class, I loved the movie (though not as much as the first) and enjoyed knowing that Depp studied Keith Richards while prepping for Jack Sparrow. As a stones and depp fan, this got me pysched.