Yo ho ho!  It’s the Pirate’s life for me!  Or maybe a viewing of this new entry in the Pirates of the Caribbean series instead.  It’s a rollicking tale of swash and buckle that peeks at what it must have been like to be a pirate in the days of old while still giving audiences one heck of a fun ride.  I’ll sit with a box of popcorn and watch rather than swab a deck, thanks everso.

When we last left Captain Jack Sparrow…oh, who cares?  The last two movies – Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End if you’re bothering to keep score — felt like nails in Davy Jones’ Locker for any possible continuation of this franchise.  But On Stranger Tides brushes off the dust, the seemingly endless sub-plots and characters, and gives us what we want; more Jack, and a bit of the old ultra violence.  The emphasis is on action in this action adventure, and though that means you won’t be seeing characters hop from locations over and over, it does mean that director Rob Marshall keeps things moving at a fast clip.  The beginning of the movie wastes no time in getting Jack down to business, and he’s quickly stirring things up.  He even gives the King a run for his considerable money (tip: keep an eye on the cream puff.)  His new assignment, er, voyage?  Find the Fountain of Youth before the Spanish do.  Easy, but Jack has nemeses old (Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa) and new (Ian McShane’s Blackbeard) and a former love that has her own agenda (Angelica, played with lighthearted gusto by Penélope Cruz).

What about Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, you might ask?  Nowhere to be found.  And that’s okay, since this is basically a stand-alone piece (though there are plenty of things that hint at further sequels, including the obligatory Pirates “hidden scene” at the end of the credits.)  After extensive research on Pirates 1, 2 and 3,  it’s better this way.  Seeing the Will/Elizabeth story wrapped up nicely opens the playing field to other characters.  Along with Blackbeard and Angelica, there’s Father Philip, the pious man of the cloth that serves as Jack’s moral compass (probably a finer tuned compass than Will Turner’s, seeing as how our Will became a pirate himself) and lovely but dangerous mermaid Syrena.  Philip and Syrena are played by relative newcomers Sam Claflin (Pillars of the Earth) and Astrid Berges-Frisbey.  This time around their stories are kept to a bare minimum, with only enough peeking out from Jack’s grand adventure so it doesn’t feel like a one-man show.  There’s even a cameo from Dame Judi Dench towards the beginning of the movie that was fun to see, but blink and you’ll miss it.  Same with Keith Richards, who gets the best line of the movie.  And no, I won’t spoil it.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides isn’t about the story, the character development or the grand themes of life and death.  It’s about action, swordplay and general pirate-ness.  And they’re here in spades.  It’s lovely to see actual sword chorography here, rather than an extreme close-up with a bit of flash around back (which is often used to disguise the lack of real sword work.)  Audiences like Jack hopping from one thing to another, brandishing his cutlass. They won’t be disappointed.  Special effects are used sparingly in this movie, so there’s no SyFy Channel cheapy rubber-looking animated monster looming out, and no bits of tape or latex peeking out anywhere.  Still, when the mermaids get down to business, I would have liked to have had a closer look rather than a quick flash of tail here and there.  (No, I mean fish tail.  What?)  The 3D is effective but not overpowering, now that the sheen of it has worn thin and just about anything coming out nowadays with even the faintest whiff of fantasy or adventure has 3D as a viewing option.

The end of On Strange Tides has a Casablanca feel to it, with Captain Jack off to his next adventure. As much as I’d like to see Cruz’s Angelica come back if there’s a sequel, Captain Jack is best when he’s a big mess.  Love could only squash his groove.  And if this movie is any hint, there could be life in the ol’ series yet.  Here’s to our favorite wandering, wavering, weaving anti-hero, huzzah!

I’m watching this movie and thinking to myself, ‘now why didn’t they make this in 3D?’ but as I thought about it more, thank the stars they did not – it didn’t need it, it would have killed it.  In retrospect, the detail was so vivid and pronounced; at times I thought I was looking at real life animals.  This spaghetti western-mystery-comic-thriller is just the smart, adventurous, so pleasing on the eye ‘shot in the arm’ the Box Office has been looking for.

BLOG: Four big releases vowing for #1 at this weekend’s box office, I make my leadpipe lock of the week Rango gets the #1 spot.      (4/4 in 2011 so far!)

Rango stars Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands) as an imaginative and severely lonely caged house chameleon.  As he and his owner make their highway move to points unknown, a bump in the road sends our hero out of his owner’s care and into the wild of the desert (this scene is also just a spectacular example of the quality of animation in the film).  Having spent his formative years alone, and knowing nothing more than his self-taught acting skills honed against the inanimate inhabitants of his former tank, he happens upon the town of Dirt and creates the role of a lifetime.  With no one who knows who he is, there’s nothing that stops him from taking carte blanche with the lizard he wants to be.  Boasting of his abilities to handle tight situations, he’s made Sheriff of the town and soon finds himself knee deep in a mystery.  Somehow, the supply of water in Dirt is disappearing.   As the bank’s supply dries up (hilariously displayed as a huge office water jug ensconced inside a safe), Sheriff Rango corrals a posse of believers and sets out to answer the mystery and along the way, becomes the very hero he created in his mind.

This was just a complete joy to watch for me.  From the tongue-in-cheek copy of Western film narrators (using a mariachi band of owls), to its deadpan copy of towns, schemes, wily characters and even the classic showdown – this film typifies the classic genre of Westerns and makes it fun and accessible for the kids along the way.  Depp is given witty and smart dialogue and overcame my biggest fear which was that his character would sound like an animated Jack Sparrow from the ‘Pirates’ movies.  It didn’t.  It was unique and not once did I hear an utterance that made me think of the former character.  The film also features the voices of Ned Beatty (The Toy) as the town’s Mayor, Isla Fisher (Scooby Doo) as Beans – Rango’s female lead, Ray Winstone (Beowulf) as Bad Bill, and Timothy Olyphant (The Girl Next Door)  as ‘The Spirit Of The West.’ 

Four Stars out of Five.

Rango is rated PG for rude humor, language, action and smoking.  Running Time: 107 minutes

Some might say that Angelina Jolie has only gotten better with age, both from a physical perspective and from an acting one; likewise could be said for Johnny Depp (remember his hair in 21 Jump Street?).  But, “The Tourist” opening this weekend, is not the best vehicle to continue that assumption of improvement.  The film is enjoyable but not for the reasons today’s moviegoer would expect from a film touting two icons of Hollywood and an action-thriller theme.  Where The Tourist succeeds is its breathtaking scenery, where it fails is its haphazard attempt to pull you through a plot that to put it mildly, strains credibility.

The Tourist follows Frank Tupelo (Depp), an American tourist traveling Europe (France & Italy specifically) to mend a broken heart from the loss of his wife.  Elise Ward (Jolie) is a mysterious (and extremely well dressed) woman he meets on a train that draws him into a personal plot designed to make him look like he’s her husband, Alexander in an attempt to throw off INTERPOL and the British police who are desperately hunting her husband who is wanted in 14 countries for various financial crimes.  Against the backdrops of Paris France, Treviso & Venice Italy, the two are chased by a reclusive gangster whom Jolie’s husband has robbed of millions as well as multiple law enforcement agencies that are seeking to bring him to tax justice.

I’m not going to pounce on Jolie (Beowulf) and Depp (Cry Baby) for this mediocre film effort.  The truth is they both do exactly what their characters are designed for.  When you watch the film, it may seem odd to watch a bumbling almost inept Depp play a subservient role to Jolie as she weaves the web of intrigue, but in actuality, his performance is nothing short of spectacular after you’ve seen the third act.  Jolie moves through the film like all of her action/spy roles.  She’s quick witted, resilient and oh yeah, smoking hot as you’d expect.  The world knows her as a ravenous (or did I mean ravishing?) beauty, but the costume designer weaves magic with her wardrobe, accessories, and make-up to make her even more stunning than the red carpet pictures we’re titillated with in the daily gossip rags.  Even characters within the film (that aren’t government operatives) turn their heads as she moves through every scene.  She really looks good – not distractingly good looking like Megan Fox in Transformers, just resplendent as you’d expect from a character that is the wife of a billionaire embezzler.

There’s a nice twist to the story in the third act but unlike the film ‘Inception’ you won’t be dying for the DVD so you can watch and re-watch to find the potential gaps in the storyline.  For this film, you’re much less likely to care if the filmmakers made a gaffe to sustain the storyline and just accept the twist as it’s presented.  See it for the scenery, see it for the Jolie eye candy, see it for Depp pulling off another quality performance – the plot is one destination you can, as a movie tourist, bypass.

3 Stars Out Of Five

The Tourist is rated PG-13 for violence and brief strong language.

Running Time: 103 minutes

By now you’ve surely seen the teaser trailer for Rango starring Johnny Depp (Alice in Wonderland, Ed Wood) directed by Gore Verbinski ( The Ring, The Weather Man, Pirates of the Caribbean)

So what is Rango? How about this teaser poster-

Johnny Depp is a chameleon. Well, we all already knew that what I mean to say is that Johnny Depp lends his voice to be the voice of Rango a chameleon “with an identity crisis.” The new trailer helps clear this all up for us, enough teasing-

I only wish we didn’t have to wait until March 4, 2011 to see what looks to be a fun family film! Starring along side Depp will be the voices of Timothy Olyphant, Abigail Breslin, Bill Nighy, Isla Fisher, Alfred Molina and Ray Winstone. Great cast. Okay now we can talk about the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas resemblances, mostly the desert setting and flowery shirt. What do you think of Rango?

Today, Disney announced that Sam Claflin has been cast in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the fourth installment in the popular franchise. Claflin will play Philip, a youthful missionary, alongside Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Geoffrey Rush, and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey.

The upcoming film sees Jack Sparrow and Captain Barbarossa setting off on an adventure to find the Fountain of Youth. Ian McShane is set to play Blackbeard, with Cruz as his daughter, and Jack’s love interest. French actress Astrid Bergès-Frisbey is portraying a mermaid. Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom have stated that they will not be involved.

Claflin’s has previously appeared in the TV mini-series Pillars of the Earth and the TV movie The Lost Future. I have not seen any of his performances, but he appears to be a talented young talent.

The movie is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and helmed by Rob Marshall. The director’s previous work includes Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha, and last year’s Nine. This seems like an odd mix to me, so maybe the film will turn out better than I am expected. Honestly, I really am not looking forward to this. I loved the first “Pirates” movie, but the next two were flat-out terrible. Sure, Depp is great, but the nonsensical plot did not work for me.

Anyway, the movie is looking to have an excellent cast, so hopefully I’ll be pleasantly surprised come May 20th, 2011.

It’s been about a month since Disney announced that Ian McShane (HBO’s Deadwood) and Penelope Cruz (Vanilla Sky, last year’s Broken Embraces) would be joining the cast of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. McShane was immediately revealed to be playing legendary pirate Captain Blackbeard, the film’s central antagonist to Johnny Depp’s now classic Captain Jack Sparrow, but information about Academy Award-winning Cruz’s character was still elusive.  That is, until producer Jerry Bruckheimer sat down with MTV News to shed some light on the film and its characters.

MTV News has exclusively learned exactly how Cruz fits into the story: She’s the daughter of Depp’s nemesis. “She plays the daughter of Blackbeard,” executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer told MTV News at ShoWest in Las Vegas. “She’s the daughter of the bad guy.

“She brings a lot of humor to it. And the fact that she’s so feisty,” he continued, adding that there will be “a little romance between [Depp's] Captain Jack and the character that Penelope plays.”

So what about Depp’s past nemesis Captain Barbossa, the smarmy, charismatic pirate portrayed by another Oscar-winner, Geoffrey Rush?

Geoffrey Rush, who has played Barbossa in the three previous “Pirates” films, told MTV News in September that he expected to reprise his role in “On Stranger Tides,” and Bruckheimer confirmed that will indeed be the case.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides will begin filming in Hawaii this June.

Oh frabjous day! Here at last is a Tim Burton film that fulfills the magical promise and eccentric whimsy that the off-kilter director has been teasing us with all these long years. Not quite the vision that Lewis Carroll imagined when he wrote Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass, this Alice is all the best possible parts of that fantasia coupled with the better instincts of Burton’s own voracious imagination.

Earning the title ‘wonderland’, the phantasmal dreamscapes of Alice’s adventure unfold with a pastoral, surreal beauty that spring to odd and awkward life in 3D. This is not the immersive technique of Avatar, but instead a kind of pop-up book diorama where we feel we can run our hands over each lovely, absurd image and they both have depth, and not-depth. The fx have been used to build an animated world that stretches the boundaries of what we are willing to expect and the grand delight of Burton’s universe is not that he gives us things we have never seen before, but instead reintroduces us to dreams we had long forgotten we had.

By basing most of the character designs on John Tenniel’s classic engravings  Burton pulls out a collective understanding of what Alice should be and the images onscreen reinforce childhood memories of a land full of illogical and irrational beings and dark, strange adventure.  Towards the end of the film, when the Jabberwocky comes whiffling through that tulgey wood and burbling in the foreboding tones of Christopher Lee, I was transported directly back to youth and I couldn’t help but feel a bit perplexed.

This indeed, is just as I had imagined it as a child and yet, I never would have placed Lee’s voice in its mouth. That touch is perfect though, and it aligns the Carroll creations, the pop awareness, and Burton’s own sensibility in one shimmering moment of fantastic delight. Almost the entirety of this new Alice is that way, a mythological and mad miasma of the concerns and insecurities of adulthood laid perilously over the matter-of-fact logic that often accompanies childhood.

Carroll purists, and I don’t honestly know how many of those are out there, may take offense at the way Burton has streamlined and arranged their story. For one thing, this isn’t a remake exactly or an adaptation of Through the Looking Glass. Instead, it’s a sequel of sorts, using Alice’s forgetting of the original events to make her return to Underland (as a child she mistakenly cited it as wonderland) new and uncertain while still including most of the signposts and moments that we know and love. The story follows a different tact that belongs more to the land of Oz or Narnia than to Wonderland. Alice is a prophesied warrior, The Red Queen an insecure tyrant, and The Mad Hatter a pitiable member of the royal court, faithful but fallen on hard times. All of this has been done no doubt so that audience members can have a more relatable, familiar fantasy to hold on to.

I personally didn’t mind, as the new adventure satisfies on a narrative and thematic level and it allows Alice to come to the forefront of the story in a way she never has before. Mia Wasikowska is a vision of lovely innocence and curiosity as Alice and wisely screenwriter Linda Woolverton has aged  the character so she’s hovering in the uncertain ‘underland’ that exists beyond adolescence but just before the boundaries of adulthood.

On her first trip to Wonderland Alice was merely observer and testifier to the insane ramblings and riddles of its inhabitants. Now, with Wasikowska channeling reserves of youthful courage and confidence, she makes choices and interacts with the roiling universe she finds before her. Watching Alice confront and comfort the frumious Bandersnatch–think Jim Henson Creature Shop meets a bloated wolverine– is one of those sublime instances where Burton expertly has two things going on at once; Alice is growing up, and she’s reclaiming her youthful destiny.

The rest of the characters are realized in a multitude of ways. Most of them are completely CGi, and this goes for all of the monsters like the aforementioned Jabberwocky, Bandersnatch and the deadly Jub-Jub bird as well as the more benign residents of Wonderland like Bayard the hound, the door-mouse, the White Rabbit, and the oafish Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Some of the characters are played by actors but have been deformed and manipulated in the editing room so they are monstrous caricatures of real people.

The least effective is Crispin Glover’s Stain, the toadie and sometimes lover (ick!) of the Red Queen. Glover is quirky and fine from an acting perspective, but the strange decision to digitally elongate his body so he’s a thin imposing wisp of a man is off. It never looks plausible and so most of the time we are looking at something that reminds us of Gumby with an eye patch. Better is Depp’s Mad Hatter who is more or less the same character he always plays in a Burton film; the oddball whose extreme external flaws (he’s got eyes that don’t dilate, a lisp that never leaves, and a Scottish accent that disappears on and off, as well as a mind that goes everywhere and nowhere) mask the fact he is made internally of strong and steadfast stuff.

The character who steals the show however is Helena Bonham Carter as The Red Queen. The special effects work completely for her, and I think it’s because she’s mostly a giant head on a tiny body. We aren’t even thinking about the rest of her because that enormous orb on her shoulders has the expressiveness of Carter’s own face and those piercing, half-mad eyes stare so intently we dare look elsewhere for fear of losing a head. Carter makes the Queen more than a tyrant and less than a fully realized person.

This is exactly what the film needs though. She was an abstract absurdity in the book and all of her human traits are seemingly based on what Burton knows about outsiders; the way they can draw strength inwardly to combat difference or insecurely lash out and surround themselves with what they believe to be ‘normalcy.’ In Burton’s version, the Queen’s greatest crime isn’t her subversion of Underland, but that she is living an elaborate lie that requires all to be subjugated to her deluded self image. She’s the mirror monster of what Alice will become if she falls victim to outside expectations.

As escapist entertainment, I found the movie to be frightfully good. It has some compelling layers but mostly it just works as a joyful puzzle of rich imagery and random bizarre flights of fancy. The details are terrific and scanning Underland gives us a peek at hundred of diverse and odd species that one many only fully see when this arrives on DVD. As a fantasy fable for youngsters and their parents I believe it also works. It is transporting and exhilarating and only intermittently dark. For Burton, abandoning that constant itching melancholy proves to be as effective and freeing as taking off an albatross around the neck. Wonderland is better, brighter and more confident than almost anything he’s ever d0ne.

A master of the misfit, Tim Burton has faced the mirror images of his own career expectations and emerged with a new and beautiful masterwork. Calloo Calay!

Rating: ★★★★½ 

Okay. How do you generate interest in a film franchise that feels like it should have ended already?

Well, for one, you bring back Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, and then you pit him against a classic character; Blackbeard. Finally, and most importantly, get a great character actor like the gruff but suave Ian McShane to play him. And of course, that’s exactly what Disney has done.

Move over Barbossa and Davy Jones, here comes the granddaddy of all pirates, and like those previous villains he’s got an uber-talented, ham-fisted performer steering him.

McShane will join the cast of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film, subtitled On Stranger Tides, along with Penelope Cruz and Mr. Depp when it starts filming this summer. Chicago helmer Rob Marshall is replacing Gore Verbinski this go-round.

Here’s hoping that McShane’s Blackbeard is less the jolly, fat scoundrel from those Disney movies (where he played football if I remember correctly) and closer to the kinds of villainy that he’s portrayed in stuff like Deadwood.

Either way, the new Pirates just got more interesting. I think this could be the perfect outing for the franchise and a chance to return to the simple, sublime pulp adventure of the first film.

What do you all think? Is McShane a good fit for Blackbeard, or does the character carry too much baggage? Let us know what you think below.