Arts & Entertainment

This Week at the Movies

It's Paris Je T'aime for Woody Allen, But 'Pirates' Just Avoids Shipwreck

Sometimes, it’s best to quit while you’re ahead.

“Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” the fourth in the popular franchise, rides on the back of charismatic star Johnny Depp, but the film never quite gets its sea legs (drumroll).

If the summer season’s first entries – “Thor” and “Priest” – are any indication, the next three months could be one long cacophonous, 3D-induced headache. So, you could do much worse than “Pirates.” But the series is running low on steam.

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Gore Verbinski’s 2003 kickoff of the franchise was a rowdy summer blockbuster with an inspired performance by Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, a frequently drunk and slurring pirate. The actor went on to receive an Oscar nomination for his portrayal.

As the series continued, the films got longer and slightly more convoluted but managed to retain interest due to Captain Jack’s loony behavior.

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The same can be said of this fourth installment. But whereas the first three pictures were primarily swashbuckling adventures, the fourth ‘Pirates’ relies too heavily on its phantasmagoria of mermaids, undead ship captains and the Fountain of Youth.

Depp, as always, manages to liven up the proceedings, but “On Stranger Tides” is a mostly routine voyage.

If “Pirates” is a guest who has overstayed their welcome, then Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” is a visit from an old, familiar friend.

The picture ranks alongside “Match Point” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” as one of the filmmaker’s best from the past decade.

While Hollywood blockbusters offer all manner of explanations for their fantastical elements, Allen’s film asks viewers to accept them at face value.

In the picture, Gil Pender, played by Owen Wilson in one of the best stand-ins for the “Woody” character to date, is a screenwriter of bad studio films who has arrived in Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her disapproving parents. Gil’s plan is to become inspired by the titular city and write his first novel.

During a stroll one night, he is picked up by an old fashioned cab and taken to a club that appears straight out of the 1920s. You can imagine Gil’s surprise throughout the course of the evening as he cavorts with Ernest Hemingway as well as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

On a second visit to Paris’s past, he meets a beautiful woman named Adriana (Marion Cotillard at her most charming) as well as a bevy of that era’s icons, including Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso.

In one of the film’s best sequences, Gil shares a table with Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and Man Ray and is frustrated when the surrealists accept his tale from the future without question.

He is also surprised to find that Adriana is just as bored with her existence in 1920s Paris as he is in 2010. The romanticism of the past, Woody argues, is a means of preventing people from dealing with the mundane present.

The picture bears some similarity to Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” in which a movie star stepped off the silver screen to rescue a bored housewife from her neglectful husband.

“Midnight in Paris” is a sweet, funny and fantastical exploration of artistic inspiration.

Drop by Douglaston Patch next Monday for This Week at the Movies. Reviews will include Terrence Malick’s Palm d’Or winner, “The Tree of Life,” and “The Hangover Part II.”


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