This lady saved Pirates
The weekend viewing of the pirates was nervy. because I was hoping it would please my friend who hadnt exactly come for that movie. so i felt liek the movie was my thesis i was trying hard to impress a prof with. now that depp's made it commercially, i think i dont fancy him anymo. admittedly he took the risk of vouching for his faith in the anti-hero with transvestic theatrics to disney jewboys. but i wouldnt call his show award material; just a fancy departure that can be easily overdone and did go overboard. To me, one performance did stand out and absolutely bewitch: tia dalma, the jamaican witch, played by naomie harris. in her short moments on screen she built a defnite intrigue and i wished she had a lot more to do. some reviews are even saying, she stole the thunder from right under depp.
meanwhile the pratfalls and slapstick were all hackneyed and overbearing and there was a huge other disappointment too, a far greater one. The representation of the island native - caricaturized and reduced - to the onetrack cannibal. and since depp's sparrow does 'interact' with them the most, i don't believe the lack of depth in the representaion didnt suggest an alternative to him to wave at to directors. Ok, forget depp, noone else had an issue? anthropolgy; rousseau, claude levi? depp - french connxn? forget it then. depp, for all his apparent withdrawn disaffection for the mainstream, a posture that created his cult, is a keen strategeist and shrewd networker. just a pity that the themes dont matter to him anymore.
keira knightley was an unmitigated pain. i winced everytime she yakked and moved. Supremely wan and exceptionally vapid, only rivalled by bloom. Who are these people, what is their calling, who calls them actors? This is the theme for another movie. To conclude, I regret i didnt get tickets to the naseeudhin shah movie and wail at then proceding to pick pirates over the hedge. maybe next time, but i'm overunning my leisure account.
posted by Finny Forever at 23:59
6 Comments:
whoa ... scathing review if i may.
whlst you watched the pirate go caribbean i was unlucky enough to be seated besides the cinematographer of naseer's debut film ...
and much as i tried to enjoy the onscreen effort i am reminded that often there is more than what runs on the scope projectors.
uttam gada has placed his screenplay online to show what a hash naseer made of it, intelligent performers have been edited out to look like excellent casting for extras ...
so much for the coked out naseer's film sensibility.
Funny, what you say about Depp's charm fading with increasing commercial success is exactly what I've felt about tons of actors :-)
"Who are these people, what is their calling, who calls them actors?" That's what I'd like to know :-)
Anon: I too heard that it isn't such a nice film. And, where can one get to read that screenplay?
anon: really?
ghost: o
-Finny
Even so, the witch character was as much a stereotype. I realise that these movies derive from pulp fiction, which were written at a time when the colonial project was in full swing, or later, in its last throes, and the whole point was to set white protagonists against 'exotic' places and peoples. Still, it just seems lazy and annoying to resort to outmoded stereotypes when it would be quite easy to update the pulp adventure tropes. Basically, they don't give a shit.
http://www.naachgaana.com/item/3266
uttam gada's letter to naseer and a link to the original screenplay.
jp: stable, particularised and continuous screen time for a subject correlates to intended identity value. except for the collective herd scenes where the tribals are shown as a distant group evaluating a situation, pausing and then reacting (a comic reduction), this doesnt happen. herd scenes are the easiest way to caricuratize and are a sure bet for deliberate comedic effect. i am contesting the issue of dignity and limits of the sterotype. Because to a visual extent, everyone is sterotyped to be identified. also, in this case, the onus on filmmaker/scriptwriter is greater because this required no fidelity to the novel anyway. Hey and what language were the Kalinago people speakign anyway? S A Bonasi: "The lack of subtitles meant that the audience never got to really understand what the Kalinago people were saying. Actually, that's kind of the core problem with the representation: we see them exclusively from an outsider's perspective. Did anyone else notice that the Kalinago didn't seem to talk to each other a whole lot? I didn't pick up on any side conversations or anything."
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