Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #371: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

I once read a magazine article in which producer Jerry Bruckheimer said that when it comes to story ideas, movie writers look everywhere. This includes newspapers for real life events, books, investigative articles in magazines, TV show and yes, even video games. However, when he supported a project based on a Disneyland ride, people must have been a little skeptical. Yet low and behold, the first entry in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise surprised everyone by becoming of the biggest hits of the summer of 2003. It resurrected a dead genre, and introduced the world to Johnny Depp’s Academy Award nominated performance as Captain Jack Sparrow, the Keith Richards-like scoundrel of the seas with a taste for rum.

This was one of the many big movies I saw in the summer of 2003 after moving back to Canada, following an eight-year stay in South America. Since all movies are released on different dates in South America, this was the first I got to see all big studio movies released one after the other, with all the TV previews saying how good they are. That can be misleading sometimes, but after seeing “POTC” with my brother, I was pleasantly surprised to see they were right. This is the sort of movie that ten-year-olds watch and then go replay the scenes with make-believe swords. In my case, the kind of movie you want to get for Christmas so you can see how they built all those ships (and all the fun they had making the movie).

The key to the movie’s success is keeping it mostly simple and very fun. I once took a creative writing class where we watched “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” as a template for classic storytelling. You have Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), the damsel that needs to be rescued from the movie’s villain Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), a man so evil apparently the gates of hell would not let him inside. His ship, the Black Pearl, is manned by a crew of miscreants cursed after stealing Aztec gold from an island called, of course, Isla de Muerta.

Then we have our heroes. Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), is a lower class blacksmith in love with Elizabeth, even though she is the daughter of the governor (Jonathan Pryce) and is out of his league. Yet as a blacksmith he has access to many swords and practices with them three hours a day. “You need to find yourself a girl mate,” says Captain Jack Sparrow, the story’s trickster. “Trickster” is the right word, since Sparrow is neither hero nor villain. As a pirate he cheats, lies, steals, drinks and sleeps with prostitutes. Yet he will help Will rescue the woman he loves, since it will help him find the Black Pearl, his ship until it was stolen from him during a mutiny led by Barbossa.

Story-wise, that is all you need. Screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio also filled the film with entertaining supporting characters such as pirates Ragetti and Pintel (Mackenzie Crook and Lee Arenberg) one of whom spends most of the movie chasing his wooden eyeball. Then there is Joshamee Gibbs (Kevin McNally) a member of the royal navy and later a pirate himself who utters sentences like “It’s bad luck to have a woman on board. Even a miniature one.” Of course, there is also a monkey and a parrot. The only thing missing was mermaids, but that came three movies later.

At 135 minutes, it makes for a bit of a long ride, but you enjoy every minute of it. Director Gore Verbinsky, who started out by making that Budweiser commercial with the croaking frogs, keeps the pace brisk and shoots everything on location. That’s the great thing about movies: they can take you to places you have never been. When the action slows down, you notice the Caribbean is a very lovely place to be a pirate. And when the action picks up again, you have that terrific score by Hans Zimmer and Klaus Badelt as the characters fight with swords, ships fire their canons and Jack Sparrow swings into the air to escape the British Navy. Drink up me mateys!

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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