Before Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, box-office wisdom—based mostly on disasters like Roman Polanski's Pirates and Cutthroat Island—was that the genre was jinxed. That this movie was budgeted at $125 million and based on an amusement-park ride only seemed to seal its fate.
But give producer Jerry Bruckheimer enough money and odds are he'll create something audiences will love. Critics may not like his movies, but no one does breakneck action and fiery pyrotechnics better than the overseer of Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down and Bad Boys, and TV's CSI, Without a Trace and Cold Case. Sure enough, Bruckheimer turned what could have been a loud and expensive bomb into an international sensation.
(OK, a swashbuckling Johnny Depp might have had something to do with it, nor did the presence of teen heartthrobs Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley hurt.)
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the 37-year-old Disneyland ride inspired much of the bonus material in the two-disc package. In addition to the usual array of deleted scenes, bloopers and making-of material, there are a history of the ride, peeks behind the special-effects curtain and image galleries.
Disney's never been shy about exploiting its cultural heritage, but with Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion and last year's commercial disappointment, The Country Bears, the company appears to have dialed up the synergy meter to 11. If all future Disneyland by-products turn out as artistically and financially successful as Pirates, however, no one will need fear the live-action movie version of It's a Small World.
Follow the white rabbit
Speaking of small worlds, Home Vision has just released the BBC's delightfully surreal 1966 Alice in Wonderland, starring such luminaries as Peter Sellers, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Michael Redgrave, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett. Director Jonathan Miller's conceit was to make Lewis Carroll's fantasy animal characters human, in order to lampoon the British class system of the time.
Shot in glorious black-and-white, Miller also had great fun with some of the more hallucinogenic aspects of the story, including the addition of a score by sitar master Ravi Shankar. Also in the package is a restored version of Cecil Hepworth's1903 Alice in Wonderland.
The world of the supernatural also is examined in Fairy Tale: A True Story. The 1997 film is loosely based on a hoax played on the world by two English girls who in 1917 produced photographs that purported to show fairies living in a nearby forest. The photos were published in a magazine by Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Peter O'Toole), and soon thereafter, investigated by magician Harry Houdini (Harvey Keitel).
Another Tango in Paris
Adults looking for fairy tales of their own might enjoy Claire Denis' Friday Night, an intensely sensual story of two human ships that passed on one magical night in Paris. Set during a paralyzing transit strike and the citywide traffic jam that ensued, Denis (Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day) imagines an accidental liaison between a strangely attractive young woman and a ruggedly handsome man who needs a lift across town. Without much prompting, the two wind up together in a nearly vacant hotel, and their passion for each other literally explodes. This is hardly an unusual scenario for a movie, but Denis found an entirely new way to reveal its mysteries. And, Paris is the perfect place for this kind of unlikely love story to unfold.
Trading Places, French-Style
In Man on the Train, Patrice Leconte describes a completely different kind of chance encounter, this time in a sleepy French village and between a bank robber and a retired poetry teacher. Played with typical emotional dexterity by the great Jean Rochefort, the teacher is the kind of lonely, old bachelor who never seems to be able to get over the death of his mother, and therefore, is capable of all sorts of bizarre behavior. The relationship that develops between him and the tough gangster (the French Elvis Johnny Hallyday) is alternately ominous, funny and deeply moving. There's no way an American studio could duplicate the texture of this absorbing buddy film, and here's hoping no one tries.
Gender Studies 301
Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things describes a rather nasty skirmish in the war between the sexes, of which the writer-director is something of an expert. When a beautiful graduate student (Rachel Weisz) enters the life of a geeky campus museum guard, and by extension his two closest friends, her motives for dating the guy are immediately suspect … by them and us. Evelyn's mission is even more devious than we can imagine, and its unraveling will reward patient viewers of this companion piece to LaBute's equally challenging chamber pieces, Your Friends & Neighbors and In the Company of Men.