I am going to be switching Cowboy Pete to be a regular feature on my Patreon account. No, not everything will be: Freaky Friday is going to be remaining right here. But I figure so many people have been asking about it, why not reinstitute it? The TV aspects of it will be minimal during the summer as everything is in repeats, but God knows I see enough movies, so that will get us through the summer.
So what will be discussed in this last public outing? Two recent films.
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES. Why in the hëll are people bashing this film?
I have to admit, I’ve always had a weakness for these films. People seemed to be hyper critical of the second and third installments, claiming they were overlong and needlessly complicated. Me, I loved the complicated stuff and never once lost track of the plot. The fourth installment never really sang to me–Blackbeard was uninvolving as a villain and Jack was uninvolving as a hero–although there were some moments that were entertaining. What the fourth film proved was that Jack was the most interesting when he was a side character to another hero’s quest. Apparently the folks at Disney realized this as well as “Dead Men” kicks off with exactly that: the son of Will Turner, who first showed up in a post-credits sequence at the end of the third film, is now twenty years old, has a name (Henry), a new actor (Brenton Thwaites) and is looking to free dad from the curse he’s living under. Apparently the last ten years have been hard on Will and he’s starting to get as scrungy looking as his predecessor. But what would a young hero be without a heroine? And that is Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario) who is constantly accused of being a witch because she is an intelligent woman, as opposed to nowadays where she would just be accused of being a bìŧçh. They are both looking for the same thing: the trident of Poseidon, Henry in order to free his dad from the curse, and Carina because of her thirst of knowledge that she partly got from her unknown father (whose identity I managed to figure out a half hour into the film.). Meanwhile Jack Sparrow is once again being pursued by an unnatural individual, the formidable Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem) who died while pursing Jack but didn’t let that stop him. A full blown ghost with the unique ability to have hair that keeps moving even when he’s standing still, Salazar has managed to escape captivity and is looking to kill Jack once and for all. And it’s up to Jack (Johnny Depp, of course) to ride herd on all this insanity while also keeping his dissatisfied crew happy.
Basically it’s a soft reboot of the series, taking the most popular elements of the first three and crafting a film that could stand as the last one or possibly set off a new series of adventures thanks to yet again a post credit sequence that drove my daughter Caroline nuts trying to suss it out. I found it perfectly entertaining, adventurous, engaging and diverting. Meanwhile everyone else is condemning it harder than Kathy Griffin’s photograph. I can’t even begin to understand why. Did they see the same movie I did? Are they still that pìššëd øff over the fourth film which made over a billion dollars despite negative reviews? I can’t begin to figure it out. All I can tell you is that it was a fun two hours spent at the movies and if you like pirate films or ANY of the first three, it’s definitely worth your time.
WONDER WOMAN.. The whole Marvel vs. DC dynamic has been that Marvel has theatrical films down pat while DC rules the TV waves. Except that now seems to be shifting. Not only does SHIELD remain a fun hour (although they spent WAY too long in the computer world) but the Netflix Marvel series have been great (yes, even Iron Fist, sorry haters). Meanwhile the one thing that every fan in the world agreed on with Batman vs. Superman is that the best thing in it was Diana Prince. Whether it was Diana speaking privately with Bruce Wayne or Wonder Woman grimly smiling as she faced Doomsday, the Amazonian princess walked away with every scene she was in. Now we get her origin and it is quite simply the best DC superhero film since Dark Knight. Forget Man of Steel or Green Lantern or (God help us) Jonah Hex. Wonder Woman is the standard against which all future DC superhero films will be measured.
The filmmakers wisely set it during World War I. This was exactly the right move. Not only is that time period far less explored cinematically than World War II, but it avoids comparison with Captain America: The First Avenger. . It also enables Diana (Gal Godot, an Israeli actress whose nationality got it banned in Lebanon) to come across as astoundingly naive. Yes, she leaves Paradise Island (I’m not going to even try to spell the actual name) because she meets Steve Trevor (Chris Pine doing the best acting he’s ever done), but she is also certain that the God Ares is creating the war to end all wars. So she figures all she has to do is kill Ares and war will stop. Now yes, granted, Ares is out there, and once again I figured out his identity (this time it took me forty five minutes) but Diana is on a steep learning curve as she slowly figures out the world doesn’t conform to her remarkably simplistic worldview. It’s a wonderfully thought out script as we see things from Diana’s POV and know how horrible it is going to be when she learns the truth: that mankind is far more screwed up than she could possibly have imagined. One can only wonder what she thought of World War II.
One can only hope that this film finally puts a lie to the belief that movies with super heroine leads are always going to tank at the box office, if for no other reason than that maybe we can get a Fallen Angel movie launched.
PAD
• 
One thing I really liked about Wonder Woman was that her supporting cast in Belgium was made up of cynical, damaged people who had seen the worst of war…and still believed in trying to do the right thing. Exactly what was needed to balance out her naivete. I’ve seen people complain that Pine’s performance was “jittery,” but I read that as “barely holding it together shellshock under a veneer of Cool Guy.”
Re: Wonder Woman. Another key differentiation between this movie and “Captain America: The First Avenger” is that Cap shows up at the beginning of his war, and, though we see it only in snippets, is portrayed as having been a force throughout it (at least in the European theater of war.) Diana, on the other hand, shows up on the very LAST day of the war. Rather than affecting the outcome of the war as a whole, her role ends up being non-trivial (helping to save London from a devastating gas attack), but peripheral. I think that reinforces the theme that in war, the great villains and heroes (Ares, Wonder Woman herself) are secondary to the social, political and psychological forces that move nations into conflict. Workked for me!
Spoilers ahead!
I really enjoyed both these movies, but I have a lot of questions about them.
Why is Will encrusted with barnacles when he is keeping the contract of the Flying Dutchman?
Where is the rest of his crew?
How the heck (post credits scene)?
Where did Diana’s gauntlets come from? Why is Antiope considered a great general when her handling of the one battle we see is supremely incompetent?
Why is the barrier around Paradise Island so weak? Did killing Ares end the war? If so, why is there still war? If not, why were the Germans and Allies all chummy after his death?
I’ll say again, I really enjoyed these movies. The fact that I’m still thinking about them is a large part of that enjoyment.
All I’ll say about “Wonder Woman” for now is that, when the movie ended, the audience applauded. It’s been a long time since that sort of thing happened at any movie I’ve attended.
Well, I’m gonna miss these, as infrequent as they are lol
.
Also, whaddya mean everything on TV is in repeats? We have Dark Matter, Wynonna Earp, & Orphan Black returning this week; Killjoys & Preacher returning in a few weeks; The Mist premiering sometime this month; Game of Thrones, Salvation, & Midnight, Texas in July…
.
I enjoyed PotC 5. If there is a sixth, I really, really, REALLY want Henry Turner bringing back the HMS Interceptor, somehow – either magic brings it back up from the depths, or is rebuilt, or another ship of the class, whatever. The Black Pearl keeps returning, why not the Interceptor? lol Such a pretty ship…
.
I was kind of confused about Wonder Woman being set in WW1 for a bit, until I realized it was WW1 and not 2 lol. But this was the first DC movie in I don’t know how long that I was actively looking forward to, and it did not disappoint.
Peter David: Now we get her origin and it is quite simply the best DC superhero film since Dark Knight.
.
Luigi Novi: Not a very high bar.
.
.
Peter David: The filmmakers wisely set it during World War I. This was exactly the right move. Not only is that time period far less explored cinematically than World War II, but it avoids comparison with Captain America: The First Avenger.
.
Luigi Novi: And yet, I compared the two when watching it, thinking that WW showed the brutality of war far better than CA:TFA.