Word: depp
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...love Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow? Of course we do. He worked up something strange and lovely for this character in the first Pirates of the Caribbean three years ago, and he?s deliriously at it again in the new sequel, subtitled Dead Man?s Chest. It is not just a matter of his eye makeup or his funny way of walking, running or (sometimes) sitting still - as when he discovers, to his dismay, that the cannibals have decided to make him the centerpiece of their banquet. It goes deeper than that: Jack is a modernist, unaccountably obliged...
...Jack, frankly, is an anachronism. A lot of his dialogue could be comfortably fitted into a contemporary Owen Wilson romantic farce, and a lot of his more muscular activities are desperate existential improvisations. Depp lets us see his mental gears whirring (and very often clanking) before he takes action that in some way subverts everyone's expectations. You might say that he?s the anti-Errol Flynn...
...Kiera Knightly) turned out to be representatives of the undead, which involved her swain (Orlando Bloom) and Jack with a lot of special-effects figures (they turned into skeletons when night fell). This was, I thought, a drag, but it was rendered tolerable by the wit and originality of Depp's performance. This time, the plot device is quite similar: The eponymous chest contains something that will return Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), king of the underseas underworld and, yes, captain of the The Flying Dutchman, no less, to the land of the fully living...
...time soon), while writers who were published only in cheap paperbacks (Jim Thompson) are heroes. Producer Stanley Kramer was the social conscience of Hollywood; yet his films receive little attention now (and if they do, it's dismissive), while Ed Wood gets a Tim Burton hagiography starring Johnny Depp...
...very notion of sequels might horrify Depp, Hollywood's best current example of dreamboat movie star and superserious character actor. "It's a dangerous game," he acknowledges. "Rocky went into almost Warholian levels of absurdity. But if your intentions are good and pure, then you can sort of skate through, make an interesting, entertaining film." His Captain Jack, the maniacally mannerist pirate, was plenty entertaining, to audiences and to Depp. "I truly love the character," he says, "and I didn't feel I'd had enough of him in the first...