Halloween is still months away, but there are enough zombies promenading through Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and The Devil and Daniel Johnston to give anyone pause. The walking dead of Pirates are the more traditional variety — rotting flesh, zero pulse, abominable table manners — but the glassy-eyed soul shuffling through the latter film is another story altogether.
Daniel Johnston, subject of the beguilingly bizarre documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, is a prolific artist who counts Matt Groening and Sonic Youth among his fans, and whose songs have been covered by Beck and Pearl Jam, and even used in Target commercials. Daniel Johnston is also a diagnosed manic-depressive who spends much of his time staring at the walls of his room in his parent's basement. When not properly medicated, he's prone to clubbing friends over the head with lead pipes, jumping out of planes without a parachute, and delivering hysterical tirades about multi-eyed demons, Mountain Dew, The Beatles and Satan.
Daniel lets us know in no uncertain terms that he's intimately acquainted with the devil, but you could tell he's been to hell and back just by looking at those dead man's eyes (think Catherine Deneuve at the end of Repulsion). Just like another, earlier musician with a nearly identical last name, blues legend Robert Johnson, Daniel tells us that he's already been to the crossroads to sell his soul for celebrity. At least that's the way the story plays out in his head.
An honest and oddly endearing portrait of the artist as a young (and old) loon, The Devil and Daniel Johnston is the best movie of its kind since Crumb, exploring the fine lines and tangled connections between creativity and madness. Like Crumb, The Devil and Daniel Johnston mainly functions as a fascinating and surprisingly entertaining study of specific, colorful individuals — but the movie gets us wondering about bigger, more abstract questions too, like how do we recognize genuine mental illness in our artists (in whom eccentricities are increasingly both encouraged and cultivated), and how do we deal with those damaged souls when we find them? There's plenty to think about here, but director Jeff Feurerzeig never lets it drain the fun out of his film.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston draws a more-or-less direct line from troubled visionaries like Vincent Van Gogh and Antoine Artaud to Daniel Johnston — and although the jury's still out on the worth of Johnston's talent, it hardly matters. You don't really need to be a fan of the music (primitivist pop yelping a la Jonathan Richman, Jad Fair and Wild Man Fischer) to appreciate Feurerzeig's chronicle of the long, strange trip of Daniel Johnston.
Combining archival footage, rare performances and skewed talking heads (The Butthole Surfers' Gibby Hayes is interviewed while getting his teeth drilled), the movie makes us laugh while breaking our hearts with the spectacle of a promising, lively kid who, worn down over the years by medication and personal demons, transforms before our eyes into an impassive, bloated shell — albeit one still capable of rising to inspired lunacy on occasion.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston weaves a rich, funky tapestry from a life that often seems on the verge of slipping away, marrying hard facts with the elaborate fantasies that dominate its subject's inner world. Ultimately a weirdly touching riff on director John Ford's famous line about the dubious merits of keeping it real (when given a choice between fact or legend, Ford insisted, always "print the legend"), the movie gives us facts critical for bringing us into the story, but it's those wonderful and terrible fantasies that keep us watching.
There are still more wonderful and terrible fantasies on display in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, a slightly scattered but basically satisfying sequel to Disney's 2003 blockbuster. Most of the elements that turned the original film into a surprise hit are in place here, retooled in a more lavish, frenetic Indiana Jones-ish manner that invites us to slam-gaze through an array of exotic locations, head-hunting cannibals, voodoo priestesses, swordfights, bad teeth, brawls, lots of swashbuckling pirates and, of course, zombies, zombies, zombies.
The movie achieves an admirable fusion of adventure, romance and horror that's similar to, but not quite as effortless or elegant as, the brew cooked up by the first film. The special effects and individual set pieces in Pirates are fabulous, but the story comes off less like a crisply shaped narrative and more like an assortment of North by Northwest-inspired wild, wild goose chases in which various friends and foes collide while scurrying after a series of red herrings and holy grails.
As popcorn-movie spectacle it's all hugely diverting, in fits and starts, but the story gets swallowed up by detours, with a human element that's often too bland to compete with all the sound and fury swirling around it. Even the franchise's not-so-secret weapon — Johnny Depp's Keith-Richards-with-a-sword schtick — loses a bit of luster the second time around, and Pirates is unduly cautious about messing with its other well-established characters.
But then there are those zombies. The zombies in this year's Pirates are alone worth the price of admission, although they're not your average, garden-variety zombies (or even the skeletal, transforming wraiths skulking under the moonlight in the 2003 original). The creatures featured in the sequel are unique and, in a word, amazing — a motley crew of former humans whose cursed bodies have merged with every slimy, crusty or otherwise unappetizing item found beneath the waves.
We get hammerheaded, razor-toothed thingies, bizarre apparitions composed of fragments of crustaceans, mollusks and barnacle, and, best of all, a fearsome Davy Jones (the great Bill Nighy) who manages to emote through a face full of wriggling tentacles. All of this is brought to life by some wildly imaginative yet thoroughly believable special effects work sure to give young tykes nightmares for the next year or so.
As with the summer's other recent blockbuster, Superman Returns, Pirates is too long by at least a half-hour and takes its sweet time getting going, but once that final hour kicks in, the movie takes off and doesn't look back. The stunts and battles of Pirates get bigger and better, finally achieving serious forward momentum; those undead, aquatic thingamabobs take center stage, and the movie's impact finally catches up with its inflated budget. It all ends on the most frustrating cliffhanger since that second Matrix movie, but what a ride getting there.
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2006.