Reeling Backward: "Elizabethtown" (2005)

 

It's not often you can lay low a bunch of careers with one movie. But "Elizabethtown" managed to do just that.

Consider that Cameron Crowe was one of the hottest, most original voices of the 1980s through early 2000s -- with the box office, industry clout and Oscar recognition that entails. Stars Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst were riding high off their recent participation in the Lord of the Rings/Pirates of the Caribbean and Spider-Man series, respectively, and would continue to do so awhile longer, being carried by those franchises rather than carrying them, their brief heydays as A-listers over.

"Elizabethtown," a tragicomedy/romance in the vein of "Harold and Maude," was panned by critics though it didn't do as badly at the box office as everyone thinks, eking out a mild profit with $52 million in ticket sales against a middling budget of $45 million. (Not accounting for distribution costs and  theaters' cuts.) And yet it sideswiped Crowe almost completely.

Other than a couple of musical documentaries, Crowe wouldn't make another feature film until 2011's ill-conceived "We Bought a Zoo" -- "I'd rather not go," audiences said just based on that title -- and seemed to reach his nadir with 2015's "Aloha," which had the dubious distinction of casting Emma Stone as an Asian-American. Other than a short-lived Showtime series, his IMDb profile is blank the last five years.

Usually for a big-name director (especially a white dude), it takes at least three bombs in a row to knock the off their privileged perch, though "Elizabethtown" managed to do that in one fell swoop. It's a quirky, offbeat film about a morose shoe designer who returns to his dad's Kentucky hometown for his funeral and finds unexpected romance with a inimitable flight attendant.

Here's the big twist: it ain't terrible.

Is this a good movie? It is not. The script is equal parts memorable and forgettable, with plenty of terrific dialogue that sticks with you and a lot of scenes that just sort of piss themselves away into nothingness. 

And yet, I couldn't bring myself to dislike it, even at times when I wish'd the movie would stop what it's doing and do something else. 

It's a mess, but it's an authentic one. 

With so many films, especially the romances, that are slick and facile, steering us right to every quick and easy emotional high or low, here is a movie that is more like life as it really is: inconsistent, not always making sense, sometimes filled with weirdness for weirdness' sake. It's not chasing a single story thread, but having a nice wander.

Its enduring charm is Dunst as Claire, a self-declared one-of-a-kind girl who sees herself as one of the "substitute people." These are the people other folks hang around with until they're ready to move on to the real thing. But she sees something in Drew (Bloom), a morose shoe designer who has just cost his company $1 billion on a horrific sneaker that looks like the creature from "Alien" swallowed an Air Jordan.

It's called the Späsmotica, which sounds less like something Hollywood is parodying than showbiz types being out of touch with an industry they don't understand. 

Drew has, not surprisingly, been fired by his boss (Alec Baldwin) and the news of his spectacular failure is set to hit the business world next week. His girlfriend, Ellen (Jessica Biel), the boss' right-hand woman, doesn't even bother to say she's breaking up with him since it's so self-evident that's what someone like her would do in that circumstance.

"I have recently become a secret connoisseur of 'last looks.' You know the way people look at you when they believe it's for the last time? I've started collecting these looks," Drew narrates. 

He resolves to kill himself, rigging up his expensive exercise bike to stab him in the chest with a butcher's knife, when he gets a call from his sister, Heather (Judy Greer): their father, Mitch, has just died of a heart attack while visiting his hometown, Elizabethtown, just south of Louisville. 

(Of course, he pronounces it loo-ee-vil, as is the way of Yankees, not the proper loo-ah-vul.)

Their mom, Hollie (Susan Sarandon), is so distraught she refuses to attend the services in Kentucky, not to mention she knows she's still seen by the people there as the harridan who stole Mitch away to California (nevermind they've lived in Oregon the past 27 years). So Drew is conscripted to go represent the family.

On the redeye flight there, Drew is the only passenger. Claire is the personable, overly familiar flight attendant who insists he be upgraded to first class, just because she doesn't want to have to keep walking to the back of the plane. She invades his personal space and asks all sorts of uncomfortable questions about his trip and pretty much violates every rule I'm guessing they have in the flight attendant training manual.

Claire believes many strange things, not unlike Sarandon's delightfully batty Annie Savoy. "I don't know a lot about everything, but I do know a lot about the part of everything that I know, which is people," she says, more truth than boast. Her signature "thing" is to make a rectangle of her fingers in front of her eyes, miming a camera, which she then depresses an imaginary button to take a picture of this moment. 

(This movie taking place in the day of flip phones, I wonder if anyone of Generation Z or under would even recognize this gesture.)

In Kentucky Drew is surprised to find himself the local celebrity, even though he hasn't been there since he was a kid. Mitch (Tim Devitt in the flashbacks) was the local favorite son who bragged all over about Drew and his incredible shoe. 

There's too many background players to name, but they collectively act as a sort of Greek chorus of energetic Southern hospitality. There is constantly food everywhere. Paula Deen, per-canceling, is Aunt Dora, always in or just coming out of the kitchen, and Loudon Wainwright III plays his Uncle Dale. Paul Shneider plays their kid, Jesse, a never-was rock star still adjusting to the role of father, as his kid is the local terror.

The great Bruce McGill turns up as Bill Banyon, a former business associate of Mitch's who... well, we're not really sure why he belongs in the movie, but we sure are glad having him around, per se. Gailard Sartain is Charles, the local mortician who regards people from California as puzzling curiosities, and thinks the word "cremation" is a foreign language.

Drew stays in the famous Brown Hotel, where a days-long wedding celebration between Chuck and Cindy results in a never-ending party all around. His head ready to explode, Drew gives Claire a call and they end up having an all-nighter conversation, finally deciding to drive for a sunrise meetup.

It's a classic movie magical moment, except real life usually isn't so magical, and neither is their meeting. "I think we peaked on the phone," Claire quips. But she ducks out of a flight to Hawaii and she and Drew give it another crack.

Things just sort of happen in "Elizabethtown," whether you expect them or not, or even if they make sense being in the movie or not. It can be dizzying but occasionally delightful, like stumbling onto an entire city block of street performers. It may not all go together, but you enjoy stopping here and there for a listen or a look.

For instance, Holly, having been absent for almost the entire movie, suddenly turns up at the end to give a big speech at Mitch's service, complete with a randy story about a neighbor giving her a comforting hug and getting an erection. She even breaks into a tap dance to the tune of "Moon River," which you'd not have thought was tap-able. 

There's a lot of music in the film, of course, and I admit sometimes it feels like Crowe constructs his screenplays around the songs he would like to play in certain spots rather than the other way around. But his ability to pluck the emotional heartstrings with a few seconds of a well-placed pop song is pretty magical. 

I'll admit that just a few bars, the refrain of Tom Petty's "Square One," got me welling up. How we miss him so.

Claire goes away again at the start of the last act, and I couldn't help thinking the movie would be better if she doesn't turn up for the inevitable reunion in a crowd at the end. Bloom's Drew is rather a sad drip whenever she's not around, and the movie tends to deflate without her presence.

Really, what would make the most sense is to have this be Claire's movie, and Drew is just a guy who wanders in toward the end. I'd love to see what made her turn into such a brilliant, self-confident, self-sware creature. 

Dunst, whose looks have been cruelly commented upon, is dazzlingly winsome here, and even a little bit unhinged and threatening. With her adorably imperfect teeth and piercing blue eyes, Claire seems just off-kilter enough to be distinctive but not merely some cool-girl concoction of Hollywood.

"I'm impossible to forget but I'm hard to remember," she says, which is a great line in a not-so-great movie.

If "Elizabethtown" were a recipe, it would be the kind where the list of ingredients is a page long and reading them you're not quite sure how it all goes together together. The best dishes, and I think the best movies, only have a handful of flavors at most. Crowe tries to include three-fourths of the spice rack and whatever's in the pantry, too.

Even when this soufflé deflates, though, there's some surprisingly good lickings around the edges.

Reeling Backward: "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, extended edition (2001-03)

I've in a groove. (Some might say a rut.) Exploring Ralph Bakshi's fantasy animation rekindled thoughts of his version of "The Lord of the Rings," which led me back to the Peter Jackson-directed trilogy of the early 2000s.

The 1978 animated film, which ended suddenly a little more than halfway through the novel -- even with skipping large volumes of material -- was sorta/kinda "finished" with the release the following year of a TV movie, "The Return of the King."

Bakshi was not actually involved in the second film, which picked up at roughly the same point his left off but featured a completely different voice cast. It was made by the same team that had done the lackluster 1977 animated version of "The Hobbit," and they apparently changed gears when they heard Bakshi's LOTR saga would not be completed. They even turned it into a musical, for God's sake.

Nightmares of "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" still haunt me at night.

In contrast to this slapdash effort, the live action trilogy was carefully planned from start to finish, with most of the principle photography for all three films completed over a contiguous one-year shoot in New Zealand. Jackson and his screenwriting team also wisely chose to separate J. R. R. Tolkien's 1,000+ page novel into three separate parts, as has generally been done during its printing history: "The Fellowship of the Ring," "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King."

For our purposes here I'm going to deal with them as one work, and specifically the longer, extended editions that were released on video within a year or two after "RotK."

Specifically, I want to focus on how the movies differ from the book, and how the extended versions for home video vary from the theatrical films. And why I think that, although the extended versions are superior, they're specifically better for the more leisurely experience of watching them at home instead of a movie theater.

To wit: let me be up front and say I did not watch the trilogy in one sitting. With additions the extended versions hit right around four hours per movie, adding somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes of screen time to each. I watched them over a one-week period with my 9-year-old as my enthusiastic companion. My 6-year-old was also there some of the time, flitting in and out as his interest waxed or waned.

I should also preface that I am a lifelong fan of LOTR and was both excited and greatly afeard of the project before the first movie came out. The Bakshi film and its wayward "sequel" are pretty universally loathed by true fantasy fans as kiddie cartoon bastardizations of a great work of literature.

Perhaps the biggest way the movies differ from the books, and the extended version from the theatrical, is the love affair between Aragorn and Arwen. If you had just read the book (and not the long appendices) you'd wonder if there even was a romance going on. It's barely mentioned in passing in the text.

This interracial affair between Man and Elf is a continuation of another romance, between Beren and Lúthien, that previously occurred in Tolkien's vast mythology of Middle-earth. You have to dive into his much less readable works like "The Silmarillion" and "Unfinished Tales" to get at that stuff.

Suffice it to say that Arwen's father, Elrond, disapproves of their love. He wants Arwen to take the ships west to the Undying Lands -- roughly the immortals' equivalent of passing into the after-life -- and Aragorn to take up the throne of Gondor. Aragorn and Arwen try to do their duty but find the pull between them too strong to resist.

Uplifting this romance, nearly to the point of having it equal Frodo's quest to destroy the One Ring, essentially makes Aragorn the trilogy's co-leading character. In the books, he's a sort of generic, stolid hero-type who mostly stays in the background, doing his derring-do, until nearly the end.

In the films we watch him gradually transform from surly Ranger to reluctant leader of the Fellowship to a kingly figure embracing the incredible weight of his destiny.

Among the added or extended scenes, we learn more about Aragorn's lonely childhood upbringing among the elves, how the romance came to be and how their love for each other presses heavily on their actions. "The Two Towers" in particular is replete with quite languid flashbacks and visions that help us embrace their melancholy.

There is also a lot more footage of the relationship between Aragorn and Eowyn, the princess of Rohan who falls in love with him. The extended editions have a number of interactions added not in the book, from taming a wild horse to the revelation that the long-lived man of Númenor is 87 years old at the time of the events in LOTR, having fought alongside King Théoden's grandfather during his wandering years.

Eowyn's ache is quite palpable in the longer version, and the addition of glances and dialogue heightens our sense that he returns her affection in at least some way. (This takes place during the section where he mistakenly believes Arwen has departed Middle-Earth.)

The additions also flesh out Eowyn's character to a much greater degree, so at the moment when he dismisses her -- "It is but a thought and a shadow that you love; I cannot give you what you seek" -- her pain is sharply palpable. It colors her subsequent decision to secretly accompany the men to war as not just proto-feminist bravery but the actions of someone who has truly given up on life.

Another character who sees a lot more screen time and shadings than in the book or theatrical movies is Faramir. When I first read the book, he instantly became my favorite character: an introverted, scholarly figure whose worth is often discounted in a world of men-at-arms. Living eternally in the shadow of his older brother, Boromir, Faramir is openly scorned by his father, Denethor, the increasingly mad Steward of Gondor.

The late romance between Faramir and Eowyn is given, I think, just a few sentences in Tolkien's text, and got even less in the theatrical films. Here we get a couple of sequences of their interaction, and we grasp how these two, wounded in body and soul, would find refuge in each other's company.

One addition to the extended versions I'm not especially keen on is Faramir's interaction with Frodo and Sam on their journey to Mount Doom. In the extended version Faramir forces them to return with him as far as the river fortress of Osgiliath -- quite a diversion from their journey, both geographically and thematically -- before allowing them to continue on their way. This never happens in the book.

Ostensibly this makes sense, since Faramir learns of the Ring and seeks to give it to Denethor as a way to show his "quality" to his father. But from a strictly narrative standpoint, it feels like a bit of a bait-and-switch, creating tension solely for the purpose of releasing it.

I have the same quibble with Treebeard initially refusing the plea from Merry and Pippin to declare war on Saruman, something wholly absent from the book. The ents have their (ridiculously overlong) entmoot and say no, preferring to weather out the coming storm. The hobbits trick Treebeard into taking them south, instead of west, so that he can witness the destruction of his beloved trees of Fanghorn Forest by Saruman and become enraged into action.

Aside from the obvious question -- how would the halflings know Saruman had done this? -- it again feels like a screenwriting ploy that's too clever by half. It also presents a logistical impossibility, of Treebeard being able to travel for hours through his forest for what must be dozens of miles, do a little toodley-toot to call the other ents, and having them appear almost instantly.

I caught one other temporal incongruity created by the addition of the extended footage. In this case Sam and Frodo, having finally made it inside the rim of Mordor, talk about having to "find a way down" to the plains below infested with orcs. We then cut to a discussion of the surviving leaders after the battle of Gondor, followed by a mustering of their forces and riding to the Black Gate many leagues away to draw Sauron's eye and armies. Then we cut back to the hobbits arriving at the bottom just in time to watch the orcs shuffling away.

So we have parallel timelines conjoined even though one action must have taken, at most, a couple of hours and another that would have needed, at a minimum, a few days' time.

Gimli the dwarf and Legolas the elf get bits and pieces of added screen time, mostly to affirm their growing friendship. Their friendly competition in killing the most orcs, which seems like a Hollywood add-on but is right there in the book, is given a few extra beats.

Similarly, Merry and Pippin are both rounded out a bit more, with some shadings to make them seem more than just fun-loving rapscallions. I also enjoyed the addition of the little subplot about them growing much taller as a result of drinking Treebeard's ent draught, with commensurate one-upmanship.

Within Tolkien's book the younger two hobbits are supposed to be in their "tweens," aka in their 20s, which would make them about late teen years for humans -- so not beyond the possibility of a late growth spurt, with a little entish help.

Speaking of ages, Tolkien was quite specific about those of Frodo and Bilbo. At the time of their shared birthday party that launches the book and films, Frodo is turning 33 (roughly 21 for human), signifying full adulthood, and Bilbo is turning 111. However, the movies omit the 17 years that passes between the party and the beginning of Frodo's quest with the ring.

Both Frodo and Bilbo were about 50 when they had their great adventures, which would be approaching middle age for humans. I think that greatly colors Frodo's personal journey. Elijah Wood was only 19 when they began shooting the movie, and was fresh-faced as a new apple. By the end of RotK, he legitimately seems decades older.

It's also harder to explain such a large gap of time in a cinematic version than one on the page. It makes it seem like Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel and the other leaders of the resistance against Sauron were tragically inept. As one of the five Istari sent by the godlike Valar to Middle-earth to oppose the enemy, what else exactly has Gandalf to do?

Maybe he was off spending too much time infatuated with the halflings' tobacco leaf, as Saruman mocks.

Samwise Gamhee also is greatly elevated in the extended versions of the films, almost to the point of being the dominant character in the last film. Many people were vexed when Sean Astin did not receive an Oscar nomination for his performance, and my recent viewing has only served to underscore those complaints.

In many ways, Sam is the heart and soul of LOTR. Not coincidentally, both Tolkien's book and the extended version end with his return to Bag End.

With regard to the film's historic haul of Academy Awards, "The Return of the King" won an astonishing 11, despite not receiving a single acting nomination, which must represent some kind of record. It also won in every single category in which it was nominated, besting the batting averages of even "Ben-Hur" and "Titanic," which also won 11 each, the most ever.

Finally, let us talk of Tom Bombadil.

None of the film versions of LOTR have even attempted to depict him. Even Peter Jackson saw no reason to include him in the extended versions. His part in the story is not long, and surely could've been handled in 10 minutes, or even less.

But I understand the reason for the omission. He's a mysterious figure, resembling a dwarf but having druid-like powers over his domain. Indeed, his Old Forest on the borders of the Shire is described as being very similar to Fanghorn, overgrown and dark of mood, and in many ways he's analogous to Treebeard. He's depicted as being the one entity in Middle-earth who is immune to the temptations of the One Ring.

In the end, the hobbits' encounter with Bombadil is little more than a diversion that forces them to tarry on the way to Bree, which is where the story really picks up. The only thing notable that happens in his company is when Tom rescues them from the barrow-wights and gives their ancient blades to the halflings. In the movie, Aragorn simply pulls them out and hands them over.

Reading a book and watching a movie in a theater are very different experiences, and watching a movie at home is more different from the cinema than we would think.

In general I think two hours is about the most amount of time a person can concentrate deeply on an activity without needing a mental (or bladder-related) break. We're human and our minds begin to wander, even if we are intellectually and emotionally engaged. None of the LOTR movies were distributed with an intermission like "Lawrence of Arabia" or other long films of antiquity.

(For the record, 2003's "Gods and Generals" was the last one to include one, and I don't believe there had been another since "Gandhi" in 1982.)

My DVD edition of the extended versions each came with two discs about two hours each, so we essentially watched the movie in six parts. This makes for a very satisfying experience, as we can enjoy the enhanced storytelling and have time to think about it in between.

I'm not here to tell which version of "The Lord of the Rings" is "best." The book is its own singular experience, with Tolkien's dense imagination and writing style of the language-loving academic he was. I wouldn't be the first to admit that I tend to skim over his long stanzas of poems and songs.

The theatrical movies were marvels, made for the big screen. And the extended director's cut, or whatever we want to call them, are a more sumptuous experience for watching at home.

Watching the last credits roll to the end, I let Annie Lennox's marvelous "Into the West" wash over me, with almost heartbeat-like pulses of emotion. "The Lord of the Rings" represents the apex of the fantasy genre on film, even better than anything during pop culture's brief fascination with these kinds of movies 20 years earlier.

Fantasy has largely moved to television shows and streaming platforms, with wildly varying degrees of success. For every "Game of Thrones," there's a crappy show with shallow-end actors swinging swords or miming spells.

But there will only be one "The Lord of the Rings" -- even if there are now several ways to experience it.

Video review: "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"

There really isn’t any reason for a fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie to exist, other than guaranteed ticket sales and a boost to Johnny Depp’s flagging star. Still, as mindless special effects-driven entertainment go, “Dead Men Tell No Tales” was far from the worst the summer had to offer.

It’s pretty much more of the same: Depp stumbling about as Captain Jack Sparrow, the worst pirate in history; a CGI-enhanced villain, with Javier Bardem as Captain Salazar, an undead pirate hunter missing large chunks of his crucial anatomy; winsome youngsters in peril, in this case Kaya Scodelario and Brenton Thwaites; lots of swordplay and big action set-pieces; reprises from franchise alums Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, although the latter two are barely more than cameos.

The story is about… well, do you even need to know? As usual, it involves various forces chasing a MacGuffin, with most of the animosity aimed squarely at Sparrow.

Depp always has a lot of fun in this role, and the filmmakers keep things fresh with a look toward Sparrow’s youth -- with a little de-aging CGI help -- where we find out a little about how he became the drunken nincompoop he is. For instance, there actually is a reason behind all those little bits of jewelry and odds-and-ends he wears.

It’s undeniably a fun movie, as long as you’re willing to pull up oars on your brain and just coast with the giddy current.

Video bonus features are ample, cemented by a comprehensive making-of documentary that includes interviews with all the principle actors and crew members. There are also four deleted scenes, a photo diary by producer Jerry Bruckheimer and a blooper reel.

You’ll have to pay a few dollars more to get most of this stuff, as only a single featurette is included on the DVD version.

Movie:



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Review: "Unlocked"

“Unlocked” wears the clothes of a B-movie spy flick but has A-list talent both in front of and behind the camera. The result is a taut, well-paced thriller high in both entertainment value and uncomfortable musings about how international intelligence agencies have reacted to radical Islamic terrorism.

Noomi Rapace stars as CIA agent Alice Racine -- foreign-born, to explain the accent -- who’s taken a low-level assignment in London. Her cover is an advocate for immigrants, passing along any suspicious cases to her British MI6 counterpart, Emily Knowles (Toni Collette). It’s tedious, unrewarding work, but Alice failed to stop a terrorist attack in Paris two years earlier, and her confidence has eroded.

Her specialty is “unlocking” hostile witnesses, aka getting them to spill the beans on imminent activity. Alice is not an “enhanced interrogation” sort, tending to use her wiles and relationship-building with suspects who are usually not the bombers and shooters, but (relatively) docile bagmen and such who make the connections between terrorist cells.

She’s brought in by the European CIA chief, Bob Hunter, played by expert-in-squirrelly John Malkovich. It seems their current “unlocker” has died of a heart attack, and there’s word of a mass chemical attack being financed by a “trust fund jihadist” of English birth (Raffaello Degruttola).

They’ve caught a young courier carrying a message from an imam (Makram Khoury) suspected of radical affiliations, so it’s up to Alice to save the day. Michael Douglas pops up as Eric Lasch, a retired spook and mentor to Alice who’s ready to lend a hand.

The screenplay is by Peter O’Brien, a promising rookie who blends high-octane action scenes with plenty of plot twists and paranoia in between. Without giving away too much, Alice finds herself caught in a no man’s land between the American and British spy services, whose integrity has been compromised, and the jihadis.

Popping up to help, sort of, is Orlando Bloom as Jack, a scruffy thief who’s unlucky enough to pick Alice’s safe house to rob. They throw in together out of grudging happenstance. Tosin Cole impresses as a (legit) client of Alice’s day job who also gets recruited out of pressing needs, and is appropriately awed by all the spycraft and gadgets.

The film is directed by British filmmaking legend Michael Apted, who has to go down as one of the most important director never to receive an Academy Award nomination. (Though he has plenty of recognition from the U.K. equivalent BAFTAs, not to mention the Director’s Guild of America.) He’s perhaps best known for his “Up” documentary series documenting the lives of ordinary Brits from childhood to middle age.

But Apted also directed a Bond movie back in the day, and clearly hasn’t lost his touch for action sequences. Despite her small frame, Rapace is entirely convincing as a hand-to-hand badass. There aren’t any big-money antics, highway crashes and boat chases and such. But these constraints actually make the film feel lower to the ground and ruggedly authentic.

“Unlocked” shows you don’t need Bourne and Bond budgets to craft a top-notch spy movie.

Review: "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"

If you can keep the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie straight, your cinematic compass is keener than mine. They made four of them in nine years, then none for the last six, so they merge together in a dim fog of sameness.

I remember the first one seemed fresh because it was a typical big special effects summer action bonanza set apart by Johnny Depp’s dizzy, daffy turn as the addled Captain Jack Sparrow. He quickly supplanted the ostensible stars of the franchise, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, to the point they didn’t even appear in the last one, and only make brief cameos in the fifth edition, “Dead Men Tell No Tales.”

It’s more of the same: crazy stunt set-pieces, supernatural threats, a brief foray into town for robbing and wenching, a couple of rousing sea battles and whole lot of sozzled Jack stumbling through it all.

He’s the most inept hero of any movie franchise I can think of. Imagine Luke Skywalker being really clumsy, swinging his lightsaber around drunkenly and accidentally decapitating Ewoks left and right.

Javier Bardem is the newest villain as Captain Salazar, a former pirate hunter who’s missing part of his head, and all of his soul. The “Pirates” bad guys are defined more by their special effects than their characteristics, since they’re all undead or seeking immortality, despise Jack Sparrow and need him, one of his trinkets or a piece of lore from him to get what they want.

The effect for Salazar and his crew is pretty spectacular: they’re actually missing pieces of their bodies, as if parts of them have been erased. Salazar’s got no back of his head, his skin is cracked like old plaster and oozing blood, and his hair swirls in a ghostly nimbus around his head as if he’s underwater.

Some of his crew are missing arms, legs, even entire heads or chunks of their torsos. One guy appears to be just a shoulder and a hip.

The fresh new young faces are Kaya Scodelario and Brenton Thwaites as, respectively, Carina, a curious girl whose love of science keeps getting her branded a witch, and Henry Turner, the grown son of the Bloom and Knightley characters, and doesn’t that just make us all feel old. They get to spend the movie arguing and denying their obvious infatuation.

Geoffrey Rush turns up again as Captain Barbossa, who through the series has been a zombie, then just a human villain, then a privateer in service to the British crown, and now is just back to being a pirate again. He’s worried about Salazar cutting his fleet to shreds, so he decides to seek him to reach an accord and serve Jack’s head on a platter.

It’s a fun, giddy movie that only works if it doesn’t stop moving long enough for you to think about how the different pieces fit together. For instance, it’s weird that the local British officer (David Wenham) is hell-bent on executing Carina for supposedly being a witch, but is happy to recruit a real one (Golshifteh Farahani) to track down Sparrow.

A few moments that stand out: we learn the origin of all those quirky bits ‘n’ pieces that make up Jack’s accoutrements; some rotted shark carcasses get reanimated by Salazar and set to snapping; and a daring Carina doffs her stuffy long dress to swim to safety. “I saw her ankles!” Henry crows.

Co-directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg and screenwriter Jeff Nathanson keep things moving at a brisk pace, feeding Depp plenty of moments for his little woozy reactions and quips. Interestingly, if you think about the plot you realize you don’t really need Jack Sparrow to make it all work.

He’s the oddball bit of grease that keeps this pile of claptrap turning long after it had any business embarking on another voyage.

Video review: "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"

"The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" is now the fifth film to be spun out of the books of J.R.R. Tolkien, each tipping near or over three hours, so it's no surprise if casual fans of the sword-and-sorcery universe of Middle-Earth are growing a bit fatigued by now.

If you dismissed the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy as a whole bunch of walking with too many endings, then you might well be put off by the prospect of director Peter Jackson finding three movies worth of material in Tolkien's earlier, slenderer tome.

I still enjoyed the movie quite a bit, though they've ratcheted up the action set-pieces considerably over those in the book, and introduced or expanded a bunch of other characters. The net effect does tend to diminish humble hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) as the central figure of the story.

As the second film in the trilogy opens, Bilbo and his troupe of dwarves have survived a deadly trip over and under goblin-filled mountains, and must now face the daunting Mirkwood Forest rife with giant spiders and less-than-friendly elves. At the end of their journey lies Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch), the fearsome dragon who usurped the dwarves' homeland long ago.

Jackson and his screenwriters tend to skip over some of the best stuff in the book and substitute it with concoctions of their own that aren't nearly as compelling -- such as a made-up elven she-warrior (Evangeline Lilly) who strikes up an unlikely flirtation with one of the dwarves.

Your interest level for this movie will likely fall in line with your ardor for Dungeons & Dragons-type of stories. If you deem it all a bunch of adolescent silliness, best to steer clear. For those (like me) who let their geek flags fly proudly, "Smaug" is essential viewing.

As with previous iterations of Jackson's Tolkien movies, video extras are just ample enough to leave you hungry for better stuff that will likely come out later along with an extended version of the movie.
You get a making-of feature, "Peter Jackson Invites You to the Set," along with some short videos short throughout production. There's also a travelogue of New Zealand where it was shot, plus a music video.

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Review: "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"

The sort of people who slavishly read fantasy novels in general and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien in particular (like me) also tend to be the sort who play video games, especially the role-playing variety. (Again, me.) These overlapping constituencies are no doubt familiar with the concept of the expansion pack.

This is when the creators of a successful game issue a supplement that keeps the basic architecture in place, and just adds new elements -- extended storylines, new characters, new monsters, fresh hardware and so on.
There isn't nearly as much work involved in churning out an expansion pack as an original game, so they tend to be handsome going concern for game-makers.

In blowing up Tolkien's modest novel "The Hobbit" -- 287 pages in my ancient Ballantine paperback edition -- into a trio of movies tipping near three hours each, director Peter Jackson and his cohorts have essentially applied the M.O. of the expansion pack to moviemaking.

Oh, Tolkien's delightful children's story is still there, about an unassuming hobbit named Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) who gets recruited to accompany 13 dwarves and a wizard on a journey to faraway lands to slay a dragon and win back a stolen kingdom. But it's been "augmented" to such a ridiculous degree that keepers of the original flame might have a hard time recognizing the quaint little tale they remember so fondly.

I still liked the final product, which is a rip-roaring, action-packed good time, because as I said this sword-and-sorcery stuff is totally in my wheelhouse. But in giving it the grand, elongated "Lord of the Rings" treatment, I fear casual fans may feel Tolkien's tender prequel has been burgled of much of its charm.

At the outset of the second film of the triplet, "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug," Bilbo, dwarven leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), sage wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and their companions have successfully crossed through the Misty Mountains and escaped the clutches of a horde of goblins and orcs who want their heads.

They still have a long way to go to reach Erebor, the lonely peak where the eponymous dragon lies sleeping under a mountain of treasure. To get there, Bilbo & Co. must brave the suffocating Mirkwood Forest, battle giant spiders and encounter some woodland elves who aren't so sprightly in their attitudes toward dwarves.

For me, this section contains some of the most rapturous portions of Tolkien's novel, as the wayward adventurers are forced to navigate both treacherous terrain and tricky political/racial territory. For some reason, though, Jackson and his co-screenwriters (Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo del Toro) decided this is precisely they area where they must economize the story down to bare bones.

Thus, the party's encounter with fearsome "skin-changer" Beorn (Mikael Persbrandt) is over almost before it begins. Likewise, the claustrophobic taint of the Mirkwood isn't allowed time to settle in. And Bilbo's comedic-yet-scary rescue of his compatriots at the hands of the spiders, employing his new magic invisibility ring, stinging sword and a bit of clever poetry, doesn't summon up the scares or the laughs it ought to.

Instead, we're treated to a whole bunch of byplay involving elven king's son Legolas (Orlando Bloom), brought back from the "LOtR" movies for another go-round, and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a badass warrior elf woman who's completely invented out of whole cloth. We also get to know a lot more about the internal power struggles of Laketown and its would-be hero, Bard (Luke Evans), than is really necessary. Plus an expanded look at Gandalf's investigation of a mysterious Necromancer down south.

And, most bizarrely, the stirring of an interracial romance 'twixt elf and dwarf. Yes, really. The way Jackson and the gang are building this thing up, I think we're in store for the full Romeo/Juliet entanglement in the third installment.

I couldn't help noticing that  nearly every time the film deviates significantly from the book, it's to diminish Bilbo as a character. Instead of being the center of the action and the doer of deeds, he becomes merely the person who sets in motion events that others take full advantage of.

So for example, instead of single-handedly rescuing the dwarves from their elvish captors using empty wine barrels, he's a bit player in a big action set-piece starring Legolas and Tauriel. And rather than being the one who notices the not-so-proverbial chink in the armor of the mighty Smaug (captivatingly voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch), here he merely confirms what others have told him.

I still enjoyed the second "Hobbit" film. But in piling on so much extraneous other stuff, we feel less like we're watching a movie than playing it on our game console. Consequently, it's less consequential.