"Bring Me That Horizon, Really Bad Eggs, and Johnny Depp in a Corset"* -- or --
The Slacker Stalker Review of Pirates of the Caribbean
First of all, apologies to the stalkers of this site for my blogless week. I am experiencing a certain amount of brain damage from lack of sleep caused by the evils of Cyberskin. Now for your review.
Somebody once told me that Johnny Depp is the rare male actor who is a lesbian icon: his role in Pirates seals this fact for me. His strong androgyny, his heavily mannered/ put-on swish/swashbuckling, the eye makeup and hippy hair with a twisty moustache (that I know is the envy of so many butches)... Basically, even for the most man-hating of dykes, Johnny Depp is a good argument for not doing away with the Y chromosome.
But most of all I liked Pirates because it has pirates. I liked pirates before I started volunteering at the amazing pirate-tastic 826 Valencia / pirate store/ tutoring and learning lab in San Francisco, which inspired a pirate-themed bellydance performance I did last Halloween, and where I encountered the book about girl pirates, Booty, which inspired the pirate-themed spoken-word queer cabaret-style show of the same name that I produced earlier this year. Pirates have a lurking, growing presence in my inner and outer worlds. I'm always happy to hear lines like the one in this movie:
Piracy itself can be the right course.
...on a big screen aimed at small impressionable young US Americans. I think my inner pirate used to be nurtured by things like the now-defunct Lesbian Avengers, whose icon/logo is a bomb, and the original open mic. incarnation of Sister Spit, whose icon/ logo was a pirate. But I digress.
The LMS Rating: This movie meets the lesbian movie standard. There are three female characters (our lovely heroine, her maid, and the woman pirate) with speaking parts beyond the strumpet-slap "take that"-s. Our heroine has two different tactical non-boy-related exchanges, one each with the other women. Mind you, there's not much to the conversations, but for an action movie for children, it's a stunning contribution to the world of female-to-female dialogue on mainstream screens.
The Gay Character: This movie has a pair of gay characters (the pirates who are clearly life-partners, with parasol fetishes), and several explicit homoerotic moments (an old drunk sees Johnny Depp's character and says "ah, my first love!" -- my friend I was seeing this with both thought we could've done without knowing that detail, ew-- and some flirty threatening between male kidnappers and male captives), and substantial amounts of crossdressing, with at least two each of very emphasized instances of male-to-female and female-to-male. All the research I've done on pirates supports the idea that pirates attracted genderqueers to their ranks, and reputedly enjoyed breaking all kinds of gender and sex taboos. I'm so, SO glad this movie didn't make pirates just big mean drunk rapacious criminals. They were that too I am sure, but also lusty rebels relishing life amidst danger, and playing hooky around the edges of all kinds of laws, not just criminal laws.
The Jesus Figure: of course, Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp's character. Did ANYONE think he was going to really hang, though? At least they didn't have his rescuer cut the damn hanging rope so he could scamper away and sword fight his way through the throng. They did something more creative, bless their hearts. The makers of Xena would be proud.
Other notable moments: the cgi moonlight-illuminated-skeletons intermixing with the shaded live actors-- amazing. Really, I thought it would be hokey, and it was beautiful, creepy, and used without a lot of underlining, which made it all the more stupendous. Lastly, whether you are into S&M or not, EVERYONE can enjoy the heroine's line:
If you like pain, try wearing a corset.
(*the Slackerstalker paraphrase of the movie's ultimate line, which you can imagine being delivered by the captain's first mate [the one with the "you were my first love" line], sneaking up on the slurring, swaying Johnny Depp.)
