Disney aside, fairy tales are supposed to be dark, scary stories that impart a moral to children and adults, generally by scaring the heck out of them. Kids get tortured, imprisoned and eaten, benign animals turn violent, grandparents turn into monsters, blood, madness and mayhem rules! Sheesh. But sweet fairy tales where the evil is mild and there’s a unrelieved overtone of sweetness and light? What’s the point? That’s always why the recent “nice” version…Read More
Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
It’s a cinematic rule of thumb: the further into a series, the worse the film. There are a lot of reasons for this but the primary is that the first film in a series always introduces the characters, the world they inhabit, and the basic tension between them. In the Pirates of the Caribbean series, we first met Johnny Depp’s memorable Captain Jack Sparrow in The Curse of the Black Pearl, and it was a…Read More