Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

A great, shallow movie

This is a great shallow movie. No pretensions, great action, great jokes, pretty good actors. Directed by the well-known Gore Verbinski (no? not well-known? C'est la vie) and starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush, and some woman I forget.

Like Tommy Lee Jones, Johnny Depp has pretty much stopped acting and started playing the same role in all his films. (Tommy Lee Jones is now acting like Richard Crenna in Hot Shots! Part Deux or Wrongfully Accused or maybe Rambo IV, I forget.) But I digress. Depp here plays Jack Sparrow beautifully (and famously as Keith Richards), and the film kept me laughing from the opening scene to somewhere near the end.

It's a great buddy film, although lacking the ensemble acting of "The Princess Bride." The bad guys are not really bad, the good guys are really, really good, and our hero gets the girl. The special effects are excellent and used to good, uh, effect: creepy when they should be creepy and hilarious when they should be funny. I was sorry when it was over.