I haven’t yet had the chance to see Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. An oversight, I know. But yesterday I did see Dead Man’s Chest. Wow.

It stands on its own as a quality cinematic romp. That is, I didn’t feel lost having not seen the first installment. The special effects are top-notch. Davy Jones, the tentacled legend of the sea, and his vile crew give the film a palpable darkness (which I’ve read a shade darker than the first movie). The Jones character is voiced by Bill Nighy, who played the stodgy Phillip in Shaun of the Dead – a personal favorite. Johnny Depp shows again what makes him one of the best acting talents of my generation – on a plateau with names like Brando, Hoffman and Fonda. Performances by Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom also shine.

And, the movie leaves viewers hanging with a few surprises at the end, giving a taste of the third installment At World’s End.

With so many bad films out there, it’s nice to find a pearl. High ticket prices often often have me thinking on the way out of a movie, “I want my $8 back; that was a waste of time.” This was well-worth the cost of admission. Hell, I wouldn’t have felt ripped off if I’d also spent $10 on a small popcorn and a coke. These pirates have earned their big booty.

It’s late, and I’ve had a long day, but I wanted to scribble down some thoughts on Peter Jackson’s King Kong before dropping off. I’d read a couple of rave reviews of it, notably here and here, but had to judge for myself.

Amazing, in a word. Jackson set a high filmmaking bar with Return of the King, particularly in the Battle of Pelennor Fields sequences. He soars over that bar for King Kong. I actually wanted to cry when Kong plummetted off the Empire State Building. No spoiling here; like Titanic, you know how it ends. Yet, Naomi Watts and Andy Serkis (with CGI magic) make retracing the steps to the foregone conclusion of the 1933 version a delight. And the delight remains throughout this 800-pound gorilla of a film.

Fay Wray would be proud.

Pay special attention to the recreation of Depression-era Times Square and jungle brawl scenes.

I was the lucky recipient of Beavis and Butt-Head, The Mike Judge Collection for Christmas. It’s totally #%@^*in’ funny, and quite indulgent.

But MTV gets a big turd in their stocking for putting commercials on the DVDs that you can’t fast forward through. I don’t mind ads on DVDs, but at least let me hit Menu and get through them. While I didn’t buy the set myself, it’s inexcusably nasty to the people who plunked down cash for the product to force them to watch commercials every time they watch your DVD.

It’s bad enough when ads sneak into the space before a movie’s credits on a DVD. Putting ads on each of three DVDs is just plain asinine.

OK, I’m done complaining.

Last night, I rented the new zombie film Dead Men Walking – not the most brilliant movie on the new release shelves, but I figured I’d enjoy it more than this.

It got me thinking about the components of the zombie movie, and why I get such a kick out of them. First, I want to examine the genre, then take a look at my penchant for it.

Here are the basic building blocks of the genre, as I see them.

Living, breathing humans. Most people think, oh, zombie movies, then man-eating corpses must be the stars. No. The first ingredient (just like Soylent Green) is people. People to run. People to scream. People to plot, scheme, unite and be divided by the freakish events around them. People to have chunks taken out of them, thereby becoming the second ingredient…

Man-eating corpses. Zombies can surface in a 1,000 states of disrepair, but most genre filmmakers agree that the head and some portion of the spine must be intact to enable reanimation. Walking upright (like us non-zombie types) usually requires a brain – though no apparent thought – and a path through which electrical impulses for flesh-eating hunger and mobility can travel.

A raison d’être for reanimation. In the case of Dead Men Walking, it was an experimental toxin developed and loosed by a maverick South African drug company (with, of course, a branch in the U.S. being investigated by the FDA). In this way, the movie was akin to 28 Days Later. Toxic waste is also popular. Still, I think my favorite motivations for animation are only vaguely hinted at through philosophic or existential scripting. Take Dawn of the Dead and the famous line, “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”

A clever location. Dead Men Walking, as you might expect, took place in a maximum security prison — a locale I hadn’t seen in the genre before. The clever curve for the genre, of course, was set by George A. Romero with the aforementioned Dawn of the Dead, but it gets bonus points for irony. The zombie mall-walkers remind me of why I used go to malls to watch people in all their autonomic, consumerist glory.

A bucket of gore. Directors Lucio Fulci and Stuart Gordon are overachievers here with Zombie 2 and Re-Animator, respectively, though again Romero’s no slouch. In fact, I believe it was Romero who first filmed zombies tearing into some poor sucka’s tender midsection and eat his intestines like raw sausages. That horrific scene couldn’t have been put to celluloid without the help of special F/X artist Tom Savini. It has also inspired dozens of imitators, including Dead Men Walking and painfully funny Shaun of the Dead.

How do those grim aspect produce films that appeal so much to me? Naturally, in exploring this phenomena, I turned to Google. (I doubt the search term “zombie psychology” gets many hits at a public library.) A selection of the 364,000 hits follows.

This site defines three types of zombies and focuses on one, the “philosophical zombie.” Close. But, I was more precisely looking for what a penchant for such films says about a person. Or perhaps a clue as to motivations.

Through the first site, I found this helpful how-to guide for identifying and destroying zombies. “If an encounter with a zombie(s) cannot be avoided, citizens are strongly advised to attempt one or both of the following survival methods: Method 1, Dismemberment; Method 2, Incineration.”

This thought experiment speculates logically on the condition of being a zombie. “Consensus consciousness,” it discusses, acts as a baseline for the human condition. In this argument, we all sleepwalk through life.

Now, we’re getting somewhere. Maybe I feel better about my modest karmic condition by observing the antics of those I deem to be lower on the consciousness continuum.

Woah, that was deep.

Or, maybe I’m just a sick puppy, and like watching reanimated corpses satisfy their unending hunger by tearing into movie extras. It’s just this thing I have with movies that include the words “of the dead” in the title.

Could it be that simple?

Supplemental reading:

• “Vote republican, and the dead will rise.” Arguments of convenience leading up to the 2004 election.
• On eating brains as a survival skill.
• On eating brains as a delicacy.
• A discussion of whether zombies have souls.
• A blog from a zombie’s perspective.

It’s over, and well done. The (allegedly) last installment of the 28-year franchise compares favorably with Empire Strikes Back, and makes up for Phantom Menace. The pacing carries the viewer along – it didn’t feel like a two-hour plus movie. Special effects lived up to the Lucas mantle. The acting felt natural in most cases, and the dialogue played out well given that much of it (I’m sure) was filmed against blue screens.

I won’t say more, since a lot has been said already. Again, well done. Three and a half stars.

Outfoxed makes no pretense about its agenda.

The movie, distributed by MoveOn.org, supports a complaint the group filed against Fox News with the Federal Trade Commission. That complaint alleges the channel uses “deceptive practices in the advertising and marketing of cable television programming” through its slogan “fair and balanced.”

The group’s filing with the FTC belies excellent showmanship. Mostly organized, left-of-center believers have needed an effective organization at the national level – a focus – for some time.

FTC officials dismissed it summarily. “There is no way to evaluate this petition without evaluating the content of the news at issue. That is a task the First Amendment leaves to the American people, not a government agency,” Chairman Timothy J. Muris published in response.

For Muris, it’s an obvious call. It’s also the right call.

Still, Outfoxed does have good points. The “fear and consumption” concept is solid ground. Outpourings of reporting resources on crime and trivial environmental health issues scare viewers into buying security (in whatever indulgent form they find it).

Fox News, in my own experience, does rely too much on the weak “some say” crutch. MoveOn has a valid criticism. Good interviewers would avoid putting such a puny twig under a weighty inquiry. Read these aloud, and hear the difference:

Some say you had sexual relations with that woman, Mr. President.

Mr. President, did you have sexual relations with that woman?

The former absolves the speaker of the responsibility, and consequences, of having asked a question. The latter is how a responsible journalist asks a question, confident in the fact that his or her research already uncovered the answer.

Which leads me to the second point I took from Outfoxed: that opinion can’t be proven wrong. Or, more to the point, you can defend opinion with rhetoric, but facts have to be defended with sources.

That, for me, offers the main reason to tune out Fox News. I see a lot of flashy graphics and video. The only substances I feel are anger and xenophobia coming through their interviewers and paid analysts.

MoveOn has in the past put donors’ cash to innovative use, mainly through witty and intelligent ad spots. But this guerrilla film, though clever and entertaining for the sympathetic mind, is the easy fight and the wrong fight. MoveOn should put some of its vast resources to work educating news consumers. Give supporters entertainment, but leave them with a better idea of how to recognize good and bad journalism.

As Chairman Muris said, this is a task “the First Amendment leaves to the American people, not a government agency.”

Super Size Me doesn’t give viewers much in the way of revolutionary messages. We know, at least subconsciously, that fast food dissolves our insides into pudding. The film’s value, like that of Fahrenheit 9/11, lies in the aggregate of images and its style of delivery.

Director Morgan Spurlock uses a personal experiment – a month of McDonald’s for every meal – to show the dangerous and ridiculous effects of fast food on an average American.

His cavalier honesty gives the film a kind of empathy: Most of us have ridden the fat and sugar highs he talks at length about. I’d bet that many of us have also experienced the sickness, nausea, weight gain and worrisome blood work that he did.

Few of us do anything about it. The CDC says that two-thirds of Americans fit snugly in the overweight or obese categories.

The measure they use is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared – the body mass index. My BMI, for example, is just over 20, or on the low end of the average range. A BMI of 25 to 29 qualifies for overweight, and one of 30 or more qualifies for obese.

Fast food isn’t the only culprit. Many of the best-selling supermarket items are packaged foods with high sugar, high sodium, high fat or all three. Foods that taste good but lack the best nutrition make up the majority of choices available to us.

The choice of foods, as an issue, outstrips class and economy in America. I volunteered for more than two years (2000-2003) at a food pantry, and a number of the “consumers” were overweight or obese. (They insisted we use the empowering term “consumer” for our patrons, a policy I never felt comfortable with.) Much of the food we had to give away came from the USDA, which Spurlock highlights in a school cafeteria scene. We filled out the grocery bags with high-sodium packaged foods, sugared cereals and desserts, and sent them on their caloried way.

Our attention seems directed away from health to focus on issues like who’s marrying whom, and who’s last on the island with the barrel of cash. Neither of those issues will kill us if we ignore it.

We have a nation of abundance. Changes to that basic fact of nature, with luck, lay far in the future. With that in mind, as a nation we need to focus on nurturing a little discipline when it comes to food.

Could it be that the New York Times (and me, by extension) fell for a publicity stunt? It’s not too far-fetched. I’ve been a PR hack, and it happens more than newspaper people want to admit.

Michael Moore has said on CNN, as the Beeb reports, that he knew in Spring of 2003 that Disney would not allow Miramax to distribute Fahrenheit 911, which, as Moore’s track record shows, will prove uber-critical of the powers that be.

That means, as I pointed out in the previous post, that we were duped. But, so was the slew of 24/7 news channels that went with the story, splashing around file footage of the scraggy-faced Moore.

Ah, nuts.

Props to BuzzMachine for pointing the way.

Disney has decided not to distribute Michael Moore’s new film, Fahrenheit 911, through its child company, Miramax. At least, that’s what the BBC’s reporting. (Ed. note: The Beeb’s coverage riffs heavily off The New York Times, but their site requires registration.)

Michael Moore, on his site, has this to say: “For nearly a year, this struggle has been a lesson in just how difficult it is in this country to create a piece of art that might upset those in charge…”

Turning down distribution causes controversy and more coverage (like me writing about it here). It’s basically free hype for the movie, and just before Moore takes it to Cannes. Someone should tell Disney that, if they want the movie to go away, they should embrace it. I mean, it’s Michael Freakin’ Moore. It’s not like he’s going to go away. He’ll just get crankier and find another distributor.

I just got back from seeing Jersey Girl, and it prompted a few thoughts.

Kevin Smith’s directing has tickled my funny for a decade now. I’ve found something to like in each of his films. The hook set in with Clerks, and carried right through this recent one.

I hardly expected to like Jersey Girl. The “chick flick” format, as it’s often called, has few things to offer the extended bachelor. Advertisements portrayed this as a chick flick. Based on trailers, I doubt I would have seen this film had it not been for a couple of free tickets I’d recently received.

Setting preconceptions aside, I settled into the theater’s stadium seat, and braced myself.

When the credits rolled, I realized I’d enjoyed every minute. Smith successfully walked a fine line between romance and comedy. He didn’t make a honey-coated movie. He made an accessible movie (compared to earlier efforts). He, gasp, made a family movie. Even with the inimitable mouth of George Carlin in tow, he made a film with broad, all-age appeal.

I’ll always reserve a place for Clerks on my movie shelf. The irreverent humor of that movie, epitomized by the homophobic and illicit substance jokes of Jay and Silent Bob, still makes me laugh. Repeated viewings have yet to dull it for me.

Yet, I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago, and neither is Smith. His latest movie reflects that.

Jay and Silent Bob are dead. Long live Jay and Silent Bob.