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Reviews
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Sorry for the late warning!
This is so much worse than the first Pirates movie! I slept through a great deal of it and was sorry I didn't sleep longer. To me, the elements of a good movie are that it should keep your interest throughout, make you care about the characters, and leave you with a little different perspective on life. This movie lacked all three elements. Really good movies evoke a strong emotion (preferably a pleasant one), but do something other than bore you to tears. Pirates has many dark scenes with gross, gory, slimy, sickening effects, most done to redundancy, such as the character Davy Jones' beard made of octopus tentacles. In one scene, Johnny Depp has blue eyes painted on his eyelids so that when he closes his eyes, it looks like he is looking at you with these very blue eyes. During that scene, he closes his eyes A LOT, in case you happened to miss the cleverness of it all. All the movie had to say was "Oh, look at my clever special effects". That's it. A gigantic waste of a whole lot of people's time and way too much money. If there is anyone, anywhere who has not already seen this movie...DON'T BOTHER!
Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (2005)
Formula movie
This is like Racing Stripes with the the thoroughbred instead of the zebra. For those of us who have seen 500 of these formula movies (down on the luck people (who happen to be better looking, charming, and appealing) make an amazing comeback while evil, rich, established people (who happen to look like Arab terrorists to really make us hate them),try to thwart them. (Spoiler, if that is possible). Oh boy, the down on the luck people win. Cheer Cheer. The good horse is attacked by the evil people's horse (who is also evil, of course) just before the race. The good people want to withdraw, but the horse insists on running. (Right) Get real. Of course the horse starts the race "dead last" and at the last minute moves up to win the race. Yawn. Boring. Incidentally, the children in the theater obviously were bored also and tried to entertain themselves by kicking the seats and making multiple trips in and out of the theater. The sad part is that I left the also boring Legend of Zorro movie hoping Dreamer would be better and ended up watching two duds. Pretty horses in both movies, anyway.
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
Close, but missed the mark
I have always loved the Wallace & Gromit shorts but found this movie to be lacking in the writing department. One scene shows Wallace wearing only a cardboard box stamped "Cheese - May contain nuts" - a joke, yea. Unfortunately, this was one of the few jokes. This picture relied on its wonderful, cute, characters and amazing claymation to carry it, but it just fell short. There was not enough of a plot and the writing was just not interesting. I found myself falling asleep several times. All and all, lackluster. You'd have to pay me to sit through it again. Maybe I'm getting jaded, but after Toy Story and the first Shrek, which were both so well written, it just seems a shame to spend so much effort on producing eye candy without an equally excellent plot and script. How do the people who produce The Simpsons do it week after week? Sorry to badmouth this effort, but life is too short to waste time seeing this movie.