Possibly my favorite paragraph in film criticism comes from David Thomson’s “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film”, where he writes about seeing David Lynch’s masterpiece “Blue Velvet” for the first time. In it he writes “The occasion stood as the last moment of transcendence I had felt at the movies – until The Piano. What I mean by that is a kind of passionate involvement with both the story and the making of a film, so that I was simultaneously moved by the enactment on screen and by discovering that a new director had made the medium alive and dangerous again. I was the more captivated in that I had not much liked David Lynch’s earlier work”. This perfectly captures the feeling for me of experiencing a new film that I almost immediately sense is one of the greats, the kind of moment that I go to film after film in search of.  His description of both fully engaging with the film on a narrative level, while also evaluating it and marveling at the making of such a film as ‘transcendence’ is apt: it is a kind of experience where one completely loses one’s self-consciousness and becomes completely absorbed by the film experience.  This kind of experience seems to rarely occur when you expect it to, but rather seems to sneak up on you and take you by surprise. Perhaps the first time I was aware of such an experience (i.e. after reading Thomson’s piece) was at the screening of another David Lynch film: 2006’s “Inland Empire”. Since then I have only had a similar experience at three films: 2007’s “There Will Be Blood”, last year’s “Melancholia”, and now “Cloud Atlas”.

There is some difference between the experience Thomson describes and mine: in all four cases I was very aware of the filmmaker in question (I would have been disappointed at any less of an experience at Inland Empire), and Lars Von Trier is the only director of the four films whose previous work I didn’t care for at all. But in all of these cases there was a real sense of discovery, and perhaps none more than “Cloud Atlas”.

The directors of the film were a big part of my surprise: it is one of the rare movies that credits three directors, who apparently directed different portions of the film in separate production units, one headed by siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski, the other by German director Tom Tykwer. The Wachowski’s are hardly an obscure duo: they have a very particular place in film history (and infamy) as the directors of the Matrix trilogy, a series that began with one of the greatest American action films, and eventually devolved into a duo of interesting, memorable, but enormously flawed and heavy-handed followups that attempted to take on far more weight than they could sustain. Their work since then has been a mixed bag: first an adaptation of the classic graphic novel “V For Vendetta”, which had it’s equal share of admirers and haters, and a live action adaptation of the 60’s anime “Speed Racer”, which seemed to exist solely to capture on film the feeling of throwing up after eating too much candy. Tykwer’s career has been just as odd and uneven, including “Run Lola Run”, his engaging but spastic debut,“Heaven”, an adaptation of a Kryzstof Kieslowski script, “Perfume”, another imaginative adaptation of a difficult novel, and “The International”, a generic heist film. Based on this eclectic and inconsistent pedigree I expected an interesting but incoherent mess of a film, but was surprised by how emotionally engaging, and thematically powerful it ended up being.

The narrative is difficult  to describe: it involves six different storylines, one revolving around a plantation owner (Jim Sturgess) stranded on the Chatham Islands in 1849, one about a young gay musician (Ben Whishaw) who collaborates with a cranky but  brilliant composer in Brugges circa 1936, one about a female reporter (Halle Berry) in 1970’s San Francisco, one about a bumbling author in present day England (Jim Broadbent), one about a Korean clone (Bae Doona) in “Neo Seoul” circa 2144, and the last about a goatherder (Tom Hanks) in an unspecified, post-apocalyptic future setting. Though each story revolves around a different character, most of these actors (along with several others) appear in almost all the other storylines as reincarnations of their characters. The film carries on in a long tradition of “everything is connected” films, where a vast number of characters are coincidentally linked together (the masterpiece of which is still Paul Thomas Anderson’s devastating “Magnolia”). This genre appeared to have been repeated to the point that nothing original could be added to it, yet Cloud Atlas succeeds by connecting the characters across time in an extremely satisfying fashion. Other films, particularly Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious failure “The Fountain”, have attempted such a structure, but were overly obvious and emotionally hollow.  Unlike the weaker films in this genre, like the heavyhanded “Babel”, “Cloud Atlas” does not establish direct and convoluted narrative links between the segments, but ties them together thematically, and through coincidental and unpredictable interactions between the key characters.

It is certainly an extremely unusual film, in that almost all of it’s power of the film lies in its structure. At first the film seems disjointed, and seems to be attempting to tell six stories at once, and it isn’t until nearly an hour in when the different tones and style start to mesh together. None of these stories would be particularly stunning or unpredictable if taken individually, but linked together they create an unforgettable and stirring kind of mosaic narrative. There are elements in the film that don’t seem to belong in any respectable work of art: among many other spectacles the movie features Hugo Weaving essentially playing Nurse Ratched in Mrs. Doubtfire style drag, a significant plot twist ripped straight out of “Soylent Green”, several nearly direct addresses to the viewer, many instances of bizarre casting across gender and race lines, and voiceover that sometimes seems to run throughout half the movie. Yet the film is so self-assured in its direction that it not only carries the viewer through these rough patches, but transforms them into strengths. As it goes on, the editing intentionally becomes more and more fluid, and key scenes across time periods and storylines are inextricably linked to each other. It isn’t clear until the final 30 minutes (out of nearly 3 hours) what exactly these stories have in common, but by that point the viewer is unable to separate the threads from each other, as the editing links them in visual and emotional ways that make sense on a completely different level from the intellectual themes.

But I do not mean to indicate that this is a particularly intellectual or difficult film. Like most successful films with complex narrative structures, it seems vast and nearly incomprehensible at first, yet is deceptively simple by the end. On paper it may sound like the kind of postmodern structure that would be comparable to a Charlie Kaufman or David Lynch film, but it has just as much in common with epic, crowd pleasing romances like “Titanic” and “Gone with the Wind”. Like those films it has massive flaws which are nearly impossible to overlook: including wildly over the top supporting performances, massive tonal shifts, pieces of tin-eared dialogue, and underdeveloped storylines, but features such universal emotions and entertaining spectacles that its power is difficult to deny. Once the themes of the movie reveal themselves, they are much more romantic than intellectual in nature, something that the directors wisely realize and emphasize. There is a self-awareness to the film that manages to temper the sillier aspects while not distracting from the serious emotions at it’s core: it is clear that the directors know that is inherently amusing to make up the beautiful Halle Berry as a decrepit male Korean doctor, and make these kinds of moments gleefully absurd, rather than awkward and embarrassing. This is aided by the exceptional makeup effects, which are by turns subtle, artful, grotesque, and hilarious.

There are six different narratives and nearly eighty significant characters here (almost all played by the same 12 or so actors), yet the script and editing are so artful and precise that the various threads never become difficult to parse. This is partly because some narrative shortcuts are taken: there is not really time to develop the characters as specific individuals, so most remain archetypes on which the audience can project their own emotions and experiences. While normally this would result in vague characters that arouse little in the way of emotion, this works for two reasons here. Firstly, though the reincarnation theme causes some actors to be cast very oddly in small roles, all the central roles are cast to perfection, with the actors conveying the specific humanity within the characters that the script does not have time to establish, and  secondly because the editing clarifies the arc of each character outside of the context of their specific storylines. Certain narratives might be much more effective than others if the storylines were separated (the parts set in Neo-Seoul, and 1930′s Brugges are particularly engaging) but the directors makes it impossible to do so, tying every stray part into an inextricable whole. While the reincarnation theme could have come off as a goofy pseudo-profound gimmick, instead it works to clarify certain character arcs and heighten the emotional payoff. Perhaps the most original aspect to the film  is that it suggests that the characters do not experience their other lives in chronological order: for instance there is a moment in the film where a pair of lovers are separated in a future storyline, and simultaneously reunited in a past one. This kind of situation sounds inscrutable and abstract, but it is edited in such a way that becomes a powerfully emotional and relatable romantic moment. More than any other film in recent memory, “Cloud Atlas” is a reminder of the magic of cinema, that there are certain ideas and feelings that film is better equipped to convey than any other art form.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

The latest Batman film has a rather hubristic title considering how much it has to live up to: it is a sequel to “The Dark Knight”, which is generally considered the greatest comic book based film ever made, as well as director Christopher Nolan’s even greater “Inception”, the best summer blockbuster film of the last decade. But while it doesn’t exactly succeed in surpassing Nolan’s previous two films, it manages to get enough right that it is sure to go down in history as one of the most successful finales of any film series.

While the previous two installments in the series had little direct connection plot wise, “The Dark Knight Rises” binds together important plot elements from both in order to lay the ground for this film’s story. This is both the best and the worst thing about the film: while the way in which it pays off seeming loose ends from the earlier films is satisfying, the return of weak plot elements from the first chapter in the series (2005’s “Batman Begins”) prevent the film from reaching the level of “The Dark Knight”. That second installment far surpassed “Begins” because Nolan figured out how to keep the elements that worked from the original, and toss out most of the ones that didn’t to craft what was essentially an epic crime thriller that was able to stand alone, outside of the context of the larger series. While “Rises” shows Nolan continuing to grow as a filmmaker, the obligation to return to the missteps of his earlier work is a big part of what makes this one of his weaker films.

The film opens with a stunning and memorable action sequence that far surpasses that of any previous Batman film, in which the film’s central villain Bane (played by an unbelievably bulked up Tom Hardy) allows himself to get captured and taken on board a plane, in order to kidnap (and fake the death of) a Russian scientist, for mysterious purposes. While this scene isn’t actually that important to the overall story of the film, the imaginative staging and Hardy’s bizarre and scary vocal performance make it comparable to the stunning opening sequences of Nolan’s two previous films.

After that we discover that 8 years have passed since the ending of “The Dark Knight”. The public still believes that Batman murdered Harvey Dent, and Gotham’s “hero” hasn’t appeared since. Jim Gordon has managed to use the incident to pass the “Harvey Dent Act” which allows the police far greater power, including the ability to deny parole to criminals. This has managed to make Gotham a far safer place, but it exists essentially as a police state, and the gap between the obscenely wealthy and the impoverished is greater than ever. Without Batman, or his lifelong love Rachel Dawes, Bruce Wayne has retreated from the world, rarely leaving the east wing of his house. It turns out that some years ago he invested most of Wayne Corps’ resources into a machine intended to harness fusion power, a project led by a board member named Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), but suddenly shut it down when he discovered it could be weaponised. This crippled the company hugely, and he ceased to play an active role in its development. His ever faithful butler Alfred desperately wants him to return from his self-imposed exile, but Bruce has given up on the world.

Enter Selina Kyle (a stunning Anne Hathaway), who breaks into Bruce’s manor (seen here for the first time after being mostly destroyed in the first film) who breaks into the east wing, stealing the necklace Bruce’s mother was wearing when she was killed, but most importantly Bruce’s fingerprints. It turns out she was hired to steal the fingerprints by a crooked CEO, John Daggett (a character based on the animated series’ crooked pharmaceutical businessman Roland Daggett). Kyle had made a deal to give Daggett the prints in exchange for the “Blank Slate” program, which would allow her to erase her criminal record from every database in the world, leaving her free to live a normal life outside of the confines of Gotham, but Daggett betrays her. Meanwhile, Commissioner Gordon discovers a secret underground lair in which Bane has taken up camp, and barely manages to escape alive, and Bane hatches a plan with Daggett to run Wayne Corps. into the ground so Daggett can take over. And finally there’s the introduction of the film’s moral compass, a young cop named John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the only character uncompromised enough to become a true hero in the eternally grey area of Gotham. It may sound like I’m giving away a lot, but these events only take place in about the first hour of the film, before the real thrust of the story gets started. The result is a complex, and sometimes overbearing knot of story threads that manages to serve as an analogy for America’s worst fears in the wake of 9/11, and a commentary (and perhaps critique of) the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Heady stuff for a superhero film, but make no mistake: this is a superhero film through and through, much more-so than Nolan’s previous Batman films. “The Dark Knight” in particular seemed to be trying to distance itself from other comic book films in order to function as more of a “Heat” style epic thriller, with much more grounded and plausible takes on The Joker and Two Face characters than appeared in the comics. “Rises” is chock full of comic book logic, highly implausible developments, and over the top villains. Though he no longer has a steroid pumping tube in the back of head, and isn’t able to double in size, Bane is essentially a cartoon villain, and Hathaway’s Catwoman is a fun, sexy, wisecracking type of character: Nolan has finally let go of his rather pretentious attempts at “realism” in his previous films and gone for broke.

The area in which “The Dark Knight” improved the most over the original film was the performances, but it was unclear if a third film would repeat that success, since Aaron Eckhart and Heath Ledger, the real game changers in that the previous film, would be unable to return. Yet the cast here is more than capable of picking up the slack, and the performances are much better-rounded than in the previous films. Christian Bale’s performance in the other films seemed cold, distant, and aloof: he was attempting to show how disengaged Bruce had become emotionally since the death of his parents, but his character just came across as dull and unlikable. Here he finally shows the vulnerability and pain that came across in his great performance in “The Prestige”: despite having less screen time than in the other two films, his character gets a lot more definition and development. Michael Caine also improves here immensely in his few scenes: his wisecracking performance seemed a bit like he was on autopilot in the other films, but here he manages to portray just how deeply Alfred cares for Bruce, and delivers his best performance since “The Quiet American”.

But the performance that people will leave the film talking about is Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle. Kyle only appears in maybe 30-40 minutes of the film’s 165 minute running time, but Hathaway makes the most of every scene. The range on display here, particularly early in the film, is astonishing. She can shift from a terrified maid, to a confident and in control burglar at the flip of a dime, and in her most surprising scene she plays the role of the terrified victim only moments after beating up several grown men. Hathaway’s performance is so convincing that we actually feel frightened and sympathetic for her, even though we know it is an act. Best of all, her character is just fun and believable, and Hathaway exudes a cool assurance that lets us know we are in good hands. The character functions much like The Joker did in “The Dark Knight” (though her character is less thematically important): it’s thrilling every time she appears onscreen and most of the film’s best scenes feature her prominently. While this Catwoman may not make us forget about Michelle Pfeiffer’s similarly stunning performance in 1992′s “Batman Returns”, it certainly lives up to it. For some reason Hathaway has yet to be taken seriously by most audiences, despite managing to go toe to toe with Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada”, and her realistic, transformative performance in “Rachel Getting Married”. If this performance doesn’t manage to put her on the map, then nothing will. Though Kyle is not the most important figure in the film, she is what makes it work: her lighter, carefree attitude to life manages to keep the film from sinking under its weighty themes. Though spinoffs are usually a bad idea, it would be a shame for this to be her only appearance as Selina Kyle: there’s just enough of the character to make one wish for a film in which she played a more central role. Tom Hardy does fine work, and it’s hard not to admire his physical commitment to the role, but Bane’s voice straddles the line between silly and scary, and it is a bit disappointing how much less threatening he is than The Joker. Oddly, Marion Cotillard is the black sheep in the cast: whereas she was the emotional lynchpin in every other film I’ve seen her in, her character is unnecessary and highly disposable here, and her performance follows suit. Miranda is underdeveloped to the point that she barely exists, and it’s difficult to see what her romantic interest in Bruce is. Whereas Hathaway and Bale have surprisingly intense chemistry, Cotillard’s scenes with him fizzle, and her final scene in the film is an almost embarrassing display of bad acting.

The film’s structure is problematic as well: while it begins with a nicely paced first act, which is capped off with an absolutely stunning action sequence in which Batman first reappears on the streets of Gotham, the second act suffers from a surplus of ambition. Attempting to weave together three epic and famous story arcs from the comics (The Dark Knight Returns, Knightfall, and No Man’s Land), as well as various elements of other comic stories, the film is incredibly overstuffed. It also suffers from Nolan’s tendency to force the plot to fit the themes he’s trying to explore in too obvious of a fashion: his biggest weakness has always been his tendency to sacrifice storytelling logic for thematic resonance, a tactic that is taken to incredible extremes here. The second half of the film is absolutely riddled with plotholes and unbelievable developments, even by summer blockbuster standards: a huge step down from his airtight “Inception” script. The film is insanely overlong as well: half an hour in the middle could easily be trimmed either to cut down the length, or could have been more wisely used to feature more of underserved characters like Gary Oldman’s loveable Commissioner Gordon, or just to give Hathaway more time to do her thing. Still it picks back up in the third act, which is tense, exciting, and surprisingly moving, in spite of a forced and predictable shock reveal that occurs extremely late in the film.

Still the film does so much right it’s hard to fault it too much, and at its best it feels ripped from the pages of a great Batman comic in a way that no other Batman film has to date. Nolan’s weakness in the first two films was the action sequences, which were so darkly lit and choppily edited it was hard to tell what was going on. Although there are only four major action sequences here in a nearly three hour running time, they are all exciting and memorable, particularly when seen in the film’s intended IMAX format. Although Nolan’s Batman films are all extremely flawed, they are also standout examples of what summer blockbusters can strive to be, and provide plenty of fodder for discussion and thought. This may be far from Nolan’s best film, but as a capper to one of the more successful trilogies in film history, it is still an achievement that helps to cement his status as one of the greatest current English language filmmakers.

Rating: ☆☆☆

The most interesting thing about “John Carter” is the way in which it proves how much the film world has been altered in the last ten years by the advancement of CGI and the popularity of films like “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter”.  For decades Edgar Rice Burrough’s pulp novel “A Princess of Mars” and it’s sequels have been heralded as unfilmable, yet filmmakers couldn’t help themselves from making the attempt. The first failed effort to film this story goes all the way back to 1931, and Disney’s current production heralds back to  2004, with both Robert Rodriguez and Jon Favreau trying and failing to get the film off the ground. The lengthy production history is enough to make anyone curious about the adaptation, and what the final product would look like, especially when Pixar’s Andrew Stanton (who did brilliant work on “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E”), a director that had only worked on animated features previously, signed on board. Would John Carter be the next great sci-fi epic, or a disaster of epic proportions?

Unfortunately, the result is far less interesting than one would imagine, mostly due to the fact that in the time it took to get an actual adaptation of “John Carter” off the ground, the ideas of the series have been so completely absorbed by the film world. At this point epic space operas are old hat, beginning with “Star Wars” and the glut of ambitious science fiction failures (and occasional successes) that followed in its wake, to more recent (and financially successful) films like “Avatar”, “District 9”, and “Star Trek”.  Even the science fiction/western mashup seems trite and unoriginal after last year’s tiresome “Cowboys and Aliens”. Though John Carter is still a pretty terrific looking film, images that would once have been stunning now seem a bit generic, and certain sequences are unfortunately reminiscent of the recent Star Wars prequels (though I’m not sure whether George Lucas copied these images  and ideas from Burrough’s series, or whether director Andrew Stanton was inspired by Lucas). This could have been a breathtakingly ambitious epic if it were made in the 70’s or 80’s, but today “John Carter” just looks like yet another in a series of very similar space operas, memorable only for its unusually detailed special effects, unnecessarily complicated storytelling, and a particularly petulant and unlikable hero.

John Carter begins with a series of brief and jarring sequences, which appear to have little to do with each other, and much of which doesn’t pay off until the closing scenes. It first begins with an unwieldy chunk of exposition (delivered by a narrator that never pops up again) reminiscent of the opening of David Lynch’s “Dune”, informing you of places and character names without giving you any indication as to why this information is important, before abruptly launching into a highly unnecessary action sequence. The real point of this scene is extremely minor, simply showing how the film’s villain comes into possession of his power, and the lack of context makes it extremely confusing. It is almost impossible to tell from this sequence what role Dominic West’s Sab Than, the central character of this sequence, is going to play in the remainder of the film: I expected him to be a mysterious character who would become the lynchpin of the plot, and was extremely surprised when he is nothing but a snarling, generic villain for the rest of the film. The scene is highly unnecessary, as everything that happens in it is explained later in the film in a much more organic way later on. It is an early indication of one of the film’s greatest failings: its tendency to deliver massive chunks of exposition that could easily be shown to the audience in a more natural manner.

Then the audience is introduced to the actual main character, John Carter, on 19^th century Earth for a brief sequence, only to immediately be informed that he is dead and introduced to his nephew (apparently meant to be Edgar Rice Burroughs himself, and played ineptly by former spy kid Daryl Sabara), who is given his journal and starts reading of his fantastic adventures on Mars.  In the space of about ten minutes we are dropped into four separate time periods and places, with whiplash inducing results.

We discover that John Carter (played by Taylor Kitsch of TV’s Friday Night Lights) was a great Confederate soldier from Virginia in the Civil War, who suddenly decided to defect and blaze his own trail as an outlaw searching for gold (for predictable reasons that are revealed later). When General Bryan Cranston (who plays the role as Walter White in a ridiculous blonde wig) catches up with him in the Arizona desert and attempts to forcibly recruit him, only to be ambushed by Indians, John ends up accidentally finding the “cave of gold” that he was searching for. He doesn’t have much time to enjoy his discovery however, as he is quickly attacked by one of the creepy bald guys who appeared in the first scene. Carter quickly dispatches him, but discovers a medallion the man was carrying which teleports him to Mars. The best and most imaginative sequence of the film takes place immediately afterwards, when John finds himself back in the desert, and can’t figure out why he can’t walk like he did before (presumably due to the different gravity on Mars). The film’s best concept is that since John isn’t built for this planet, he can jump higher, hit harder, and throw further than any of the natives. This sequence introduces the concept in a fun, comedic (and nearly wordless) sequence that is reminiscent of director Andrew Stanton’s best work in his previous film, “Wall-E”. However this sense of fun and discovery doesn’t last long, as we are quickly dragged into a muddled, yet utterly generic plot about a battle between two warring factions on Mars (called Barsoom by the natives) and the green skinned, six limbed race called Tharks that refuse to become involved. It also involves a Martian princess, Deja, played by Lynn Collins, who is being offered as a bride to the evil Sab Than as a peace offering by his father, and the race of Creepy Bald Men, who apparently gave the brutish Sab Than a weapon called “The 9^th Ray” so he could take over Barsoom and allow them to destroy it, using him as their puppet.

The screenplay for the film is a complete mess, hopping from place to place on Barsoom without much rhyme and reason, and the film’s sense of momentum is constantly bogged down by characters stopping to deliver long monologues containing “important information” that rarely helps to progress the simplistic storyline. It is a wonder that Carter’s nephew chooses to believe his tale in the end, since it has all the flaws of a bad lie: a simple story filled with unnecessary details. The plotting is incredibly formulaic, as John is continuously sent on quest after quest, paired up with different variations of characters, ends up getting involved in battles, and is then sent on a new quest. The film is essentially comprised of a series of abrupt starts and stops: John will seem to sit around forever having dull conversations, until he suddenly runs into the next character required to advance the plot or becomes involved in a massive battle out of nowhere. The dialogue is disappointingly witless, considering Stanton also helped write Finding Nemo, one of the funniest films of the 2000s, and Michael Chabon, a great storyteller in the world of literature also did work on the script.

Perhaps the greatest flaw is that the central characters are so uninteresting: John never comes off as more than a smug, selfish prick and his supposed “redemption” by the end of the film is utterly unconvincing (especially since it’s impossible to think of a moment where he acts out of anything other than self-interest). Lynn Collins looks beautiful but between her terrible British accent and poorly written dialogue it’s impossible to discern any personality. Dominic West’s performance is incredibly over the top, yet another in a series of weak film roles for the actor. By far the most interesting characters are the Tharks, played mainly by Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, and Thomas Haden Church, but their appearances are disappointingly minor, and the characters are only really important at the beginning and end of the film.

It should be mentioned, however, that the film does have some excellent action sequences, which never get bogged down in blurry special effects like the Transformers films, and manage to be varied and imaginative enough that they haven’t gotten tiresome by the film’s climax. John’s ability to jump increasingly far distances leads to some exciting and unusual sequences, as do small air ships that lead to some truly breathtaking and three dimensional sequences. Too many blockbuster films get pretty much everything other than the action sequences right (“The Dark Knight” is a perfect example of that), so it’s disappointing that these sequences are surrounded by a film that is otherwise dull and lifeless. The animation is also quite stunning, blowing the Star Wars prequels and even Avatar out of the water in terms of how detailed the CGI characters are. Despite looking so alien, the Tharks’ movements and expressions seem utterly natural, and they rarely look fake or cartoony.

“John Carter” ends up being a mediocre but curious beast: a film that is clearly a passion project from a filmmaker that has always dreamed of bringing a beloved series from childhood to life, but ends up feeling utterly generic and devoid of personality. Though I have never read Burrough’s books, I get the impression that Stanton stayed true to many of the details of the book series, but has left out the passion and personality in order to make the film a slickly marketable product that Disney can safely release. Yet the film still feels too idiosyncratic and full of ridiculous names and concepts to really catch on with a mass audience. It’s a movie that’s stuck in the middle: it can’t decide whether it wants take ambitious risks or dumb down the story to resemble every other fantasy action film, so it ends up in a middle ground that is neither interesting nor effective as mindless entertainment.

Rating: ☆☆

While last week’s premiere was pretty much more in the same vein as last year of Glee, this week revealed some of the changes that the change in writing styles is causing for the show, and it’s definitely for the better. This show hasn’t paid proper attention to continuity since it’s original 13 episode run, often feeling as if the episodes were airing out of order, or important scenes had been cut out of the script, resulting in extremely jarring character development and storylines that would disappear and reappear out of thin air. No one is a better example of this than Quinn, a character that the writers seemed to know had to be a central character, but had no clue what to do with. Way back near the beginning of the first season she had one of the most emotional storylines and made an impressive turnaround from one dimensional villain to become a sympathetic and touching character. However, somewhere towards the end of the first season the writers lost the thread: Quinn barely appeared and we were never privy to any of the details of her life, perhaps because the writers thought her storyline would be too heavy and would bring down the otherwise frothy show. The finale at least wrapped up her storyline pretty nicely, with her giving the baby to Rachel’s mother Shelby, neatly tying up two important character threads. Nevertheless, the second season took things back to square one: she went back to being a bitchy cheerleader, started dating again, got back together with Finn (beginning by cheating with her current boyfriend with him), ran for prom queen, and ended up losing it all. All these events happened with hardly any reference to her baby, and without her and Puck even sharing a scene together (at least not that I can remember). The writers seemed pretty content to pretend none of it had ever happened, and I imagined the show would continue without any real further references to Quinn’s pregnancy.

So it was a pleasant surprise this week to see that Idina Menzel’s return as Shelby was mostly used as a chance to return to that aspect of Quinn’s character, and deal with what she was going through in the second season. This actually led to some pretty complex characterization which helped tie together the various Quinn plot threads of last season: she was just trying to go back to her old life and forget everything, so that she wouldn’t realize how much she missed her baby. I’m not convinced the writers had this in mind the whole time, especially since the whole storyline comes out of nowhere, but it was a good sign that Glee could be more reliable this season, and that it’s making an effort to make the characters more consistent and believable. There were even several pretty strong scenes with Puck, who’s making an effort to get back into Beth’s life, and urges Quinn to do the same. After a season of Mark Salling having nothing to do other than be Lauren’s tagalong boyfriend, it was refreshing (if a bit odd) for him to get such a large emotional role in the episode. There were a few false notes in the storyline: everyone’s insistence that Quinn needs to “get her act together” was a little over the top. She hasn’t actually done much other than quit Glee club and dye her hair, but everyone was acting like she dropped out of school to become a crack whore. However, there may be something to Shelby trying to get Quinn to turn her life around: something about her behavior in this episode gave me the impression that she isn’t planning on keeping Beth forever. We’ll see why that would be (my guess is that she’s dying, though that seems a bit intense for Glee), but this storyline could be one of the best that Glee’s pulled off if it plays it’s cards right. I also like the path it’s taking Quinn’s storyline: she’s already gone back to the Glee club and blond hair, but the writers aren’t resetting her character. She isn’t going back to her old life, but rather embarking on a new path.

But other things happened in this episode as well which were promising. Rather shockingly, the episode directly addresses everything that was set up last week: auditions for West Side Story begin, Brittany helps Kurt out with his presidential campaign, and that Sue running for Congress storyline is still happening for some reason. Oh yeah and there’s a reason that Shelby returned: Sugar’s dad has decided to start up a rival Glee Club, which so far only includes Sugar, and Shelby’s returned to coach it. As usual, the storylines involving the kids are pretty good, and the ones involving the adults are terrible and nonsensical. I realized something about the adult characters this week: it’s not that they’re bad characters in and of themselves, but rather that the writers have no idea how to write good storylines involving them. When they interact with the kids most of the adult characters work well, but when they’re saddled with their own storylines they become shrill caricatures. Luckily there wasn’t much of the adults this week, though it’s odd how Sue is now the worst part of the show. Will actually came off very well in this episode: his big moment was his speech to Quinn, which was probably inappropriate, but still felt like the comeuppance she needed. Matthew Morrison played the scene quite well, which helped, though it would have been more effective if Will was a better role model for the kids.

I also appreciated Kurt’s storyline this week, in which he realizes that the persona he’s developed for himself is detrimental to getting leading roles. It’s an interesting look at a common teenaged dilemma: when the personality you’ve developed to set you apart from others starts to get in the way of your life. Kurt is comfortable with who he is, but he isn’t comfortable for what that means for him. He’ll never get the great leading man roles because they all demand a kind of masculine presence that Kurt can’t hope to convey.  Glee tends to paint things a little white and black when it comes to dealing with these kinds of issues, but it doesn’t blame anyone for denying Kurt these kinds of roles. It also, nicely, doesn’t make Kurt’s sexuality the issue: Blaine, who will surely win the part of Tony, and is seen as more traditional and masculine, is also gay. I didn’t much like Burt’s insistence that Kurt just needs to write his own roles if there aren’t traditional leading men’s roles out there for him though. This show weirdly seems to think that in order to b though. This show weirdly seems to think that in order to be creative you have to act as author and performer, rather than one or the other. What indication has there ever been that Kurt could write? Or that that would even be something he’s interested in doing? It’s another example of Glee’s bizarre worldview, in which it treats unrealistic or strange propositions like they’re common sense conclusions. I’m also slightly afraid of where this is going. Is Kurt going to add a character to West Side Story that acts exactly like him? Because that sounds like the kind of embarrassingly stupid thing Glee pulled in some of their worst episodes last year.

Though I’ve mostly praised this week’s episode so far, it still has issues, as always. I’m becoming concerned by how disconnected from the action the songs on this show are becoming: this time around the songs are only motivated by plot, as all the numbers are performed as auditions for West Side Story. The show’s gone down this route before, and I don’t really like it: it feels like after more than two season’s worth of episodes this show still can’t decide whether it wants to be an honest to God musical or just a show where people perform songs every so often. The songs here don’t express what the characters are feeling or thinking, they’re just songs they’re performing because it showcases their talents. The musical numbers used to pack a real emotional wallop and the songs actually expressed the feelings of the characters: now they seem to be there solely to fill time and make money on iTunes. It can be hard not to feel like the songs are taking away time from crucial character development, even when they’re very enjoyable (as they were in this episode). Though all the songs were well performed, they killed the episode’s momentum each time, and felt a bit tacked on. Only Rachel’s “Somewhere” (the only song that even slightly connected the performance to what was going on in the episode) made a real impact. Many seem to be ecstatically praising Blaine’s performance of “Something’s Coming”, but it felt slightly lacking for me, perhaps because the show kept telling us how great it was. I’m tired of the show telling me that I should be impressed: it would be nice to be surprised by a performance for once.

This episode seems to promise good things in this season’s future, but I still have to remain very cautiously optimistic: there’s enough potentially stupid stuff promised here to undercut some of the emotional payoff. The “Sue runs for congress” storyline continues to be awful, and there’s no end in sight, as this episode seems to suggest that Will might run against her. I really hope this is one of the plotlines that gets randomly dropped in a few episodes, but it looks like the show might be committed to dragging this one out. But for better or worse it looks like this show is finally willing to commit itself to sticking with storylines and using what’s happened in the past as a basis for what will happen in the future (and not just by repeating former storylines). If this season can continue in this vein Glee might be due for a comeback.

Rating: ☆☆☆

The second season of Vampire Diaries was a very curious one: the show at once came into its own as possibly the best genre show currently on American television, and revealed massive flaws that show how the series could easily jump the shark with just a slight tipping of the scales. The blistering pace and moral ambiguity of the series have always been dangerous elements, ones which simultaneously make it exciting to watch, and difficult to keep in check. It’s anybody’s guess as to when the obstacles the series has built for itself will become too much to overcome, but seeing as it’s more or less a given that the show will continue for years to come, that time will come eventually. Till then we can just hope for a couple more seasons as exciting and crazy as this one.

The season immediately establishes an edge over the first season by “introducing” the two best characters on the series yet. As the ending of last season’s finale suggested, the premiere is all about the return of Katherine, Elena’s vampire doppelganger who was responsible for turning Stefan into a vampire. We’ve seen Katherine in flashbacks, but she didn’t have nearly as much power in them as she does here, where she turns from murdering psychopath to playful sex kitten on a dime. Nina Dobrev proves once and for all that she can actually act: her Katherine is immediately distinct from her Elena, merely from the way she moves. There a few costume and hair shortcuts here that indicate whether it’s Katherine or Elena in a particular scene, but they’re quite subtle, allowing Dobrev to do most of the work. Katherine is somehow far sexier and more charismatic than Elena: all the air goes out of the room when she enters the scene. She’s the funniest, sexiest, and scariest character on the show, as if Dobrev had spent a whole year thinking up ways to top Ian Somerhalder’s scene stealing performance and was finally given free rein to do so.

Katherine is also responsible for introducing one of season 2’s other big additions: Vampire Caroline. Admittedly this is not a new character, and the power of this development draws from the surprisingly deep character work that the first season had established, but Candice Accola finds another gear for this character that makes her not only the most relatable and sympathetic character on the show, but also one of the most fun. One of the best ideas in the series is that vampirism doesn’t make people less human, but more so. All their emotions, strengths, and weaknesses are heightened exponentially, to the point that they are completely uncontrollable. Caroline was already an insecure, neurotic, yet surprisingly bubbly mess of a person and becoming a vampire takes these tendencies to the extreme. She’s quite frightening when first turned, and even kills a random bystander as a result of her initial uncontrollable bloodlust. Yet in the same episode she is also sweet and funny, impossible to dislike. She’s involved in the plot in a way she had never been before: she starts out as a pawn of Katherine’s, forced to spy on her best friends, and ends up being entangled in the season arc, which involves a super evil vampire/werewolf hybrid named Klaus who sends a succession of henchmen to retrieve a mysterious relic called the Moonstone for mysterious purposes. Sadly, she becomes sidelined in the final third of the season, weirdly isolated from the rest of the cast as she is entrenched in a love triangle that is compelling, but feels low stakes compared to the other happenings in Mystic Falls.

I’d go into greater detail describing the storyline, but I could probably use up 5,000 words just trying to recap what happened over the course of the season. Vampire Diaries is hugely focused on plot, perhaps more than any other show I’ve seen, and that works well for it. The sappier love scenes are easily ignored, or even embraced, when the show keeps moving forward like this. It never draws out a storyline too long, but also never seems like it shortchanges one. Its pace can feel a bit breathless at times, but that’s mainly because we’re used to shows having lots of filler episodes to keep from using up too many plotlines in a single season. This season is much more elegantly structured than last year’s: it gradually builds up a single season long arc, and the succession of new villains serves to build one big, most evil vampire of all, Klaus, as opposed to season 1’s rather aimless string of increasingly powerful vampires who show up and died a few episodes later. My only issue is that the final episode was a bit of a letdown: the show opts for a True Blood-esque calm after the storm finale, which suggests some intriguing places for the next season, but is ultimately too slow and unsatisfying for this show. It could have worked as a surprising, moody, unusually meditative pause from the breakneck pace, but the show doesn’t quite seem to know how to do this: instead it just comes across as a lot of exposition and foreshadowing that will pay off next year. The final scene, in which Elena’s brother Jeremy, having recently been brought back from the dead by his girlfriend Bonnie, has visions of his two previous (dead) girlfriends kind of encapsulates the episode: on one level it’s intriguing and surprising. But on another level it’s hard to see where they’re going with this, and it has nothing like the visceral power of Season One’s unforgettable cliffhanger.

Which leads to my next issue: can Season 3 possibly live up to this standard? It’s a question of how long the series it can keep going like this, and although this season is probably the show’s peak, there are very visible cracks in its foundation, just beneath the surface, that makes me worry about how long it can sustain this kind of momentum without devolving into a soap operatic mess. Worst of all is the possibility that the show will simply slow down, content to play the same kinds of beats over and over again, like pretty much everything else on the CW. What’s great about The Vampire Diaries is that it’s always moving forward, especially in the midst of dull, repetitive modern vampire romances like Twilight and the last two seasons of True Blood.

Because a critic can never be happy (perhaps TV critics most of all), let’s focus on what this amazingly consistent, constantly exciting, and overall pretty great season of TV got wrong. After all my review for Season One consisted of almost universal praise aside from the first few episodes: that kind of optimism can’t last forever. This is a fantastic show, but one that has issues built into its basic premise that will be difficult to overcome year after year. Let’s take a look at Season 2’s three biggest issues:

1. Bizarre Ethics:

Okay, this issue comes up in every vampire romance, ever. Vampires are, by nature, vicious killers that thrive off of human blood. It’s pretty much impossible to tell a good vampire story in which the vampires don’t kill people: it neuters the entire concept of what a vampire is. Buffy avoided this for a while by making the sympathetic, lovey dovey vampire, Angel, have a soul: his soul can be taken away from him, but when he has it he has free will and tries to do good. When he doesn’t, he doesn’t really have any free will, and becomes a vicious killer. Yet as the show wore on and more and more major characters were introduced to the central cast who were former demons/vampires/whatever, the show’s code of ethics got increasingly bizarre: certain vampires and demons could be killed without question, but others couldn’t, especially if they had some kind of romantic attachment to a member of the core cast of characters. This fuzzy logic was one of the many factors that led to the final two seasons being such a drag. Its spinoff Angel avoided this issue by pretty much saying upfront that the central characters weren’t really heroes, or necessarily the good guys. They usually tried to do the right thing, but ended up making the world a worse place as often as not.  The central characters could get away with doing the most terrible things, because either their actions were caused by good intentions, or they immediately attempted to atone for them. Furthermore terrible actions had repercussions even a season later, and none of the characters ever forgot what the others had done in the past.

The Vampire Diaries would probably be wise to follow the path of Angel. Make it clear that it’s not just Damon who’s the antihero: Stefan, Bonnie, Caroline, Alaric, and Elena all have teamed up with mass murderers time and time again to serve their own desires. Stop acting like Elena is pure and good: she cares about those close to her, but has a strange disregard for the lives of those who aren’t her friends. Her actions mainly come about from her strange undying affection for the Salvatore brothers, both of whom she refuses to give up on, even though one or the other of them have basically ruined her life, hurt all her friendships, tried to kill members of her family, etc., etc. She’s hardly a saint, and doesn’t think very rationally most of the time, but she’s sympathetic because all her actions are informed by love. The show just needs to stop acting like she’s the pure, good, unselfish one: though she seems to have a nearly complete disregard for her own safety, in a lot of ways she’s selfish, willing to choose what’s best for the people she cares about over what the right thing to do is.

The same is true for many of the other characters: when Bonnie voices her anger towards vampires, it’s easy to see her point. I don’t need my shows to be populated by “good” characters, so long as they’re sympathetic, but I do think the show needs to abandon this good versus evil perspective it has. The heroes’ motivations aren’t always that much purer than the villains’ and they both seem to get a ridiculous number of innocent people killed. For the show to continue work, it will have to essentially abandon ethics, and shift its perspective to a kind of “us versus them” perspective instead. Still, handling this sort of thing can be tricky: how far can the heroes go before they become completely unlikeable? I suppose we’ll see with next season’s “Dark Stefan” storyline.

1. 2. Damon

Damon was the breakout character of Season 1: at the beginning of the season he was fun, campy, and deliciously evil. Ian Somerhalder turned out the kind of crazy, wild, unpredictable performance that no one ever knew he had in him, and became the show’s first highlight. Damon was a lot of things, but he was never boring: he even managed to make brooding seem interesting. However, while everything around him improved immensely in Season 2, Damon’s character started to deteriorate. Yes he was still fun and interesting, but he was no longer as exciting to see onscreen, and the little quirks and mannerisms of the character began to get repetitive. The show doesn’t quite seem to know where to take his character, after burning through several years’ worth of character development in the first season. First he got about as bad as he could get, killing Jeremy (who happened to be wearing the immortality ring), but confessing that he had no idea he was wearing the ring. He did this for no better reason than that he was frustrated by Elena’s refusal to admit her feelings for him. Of course then he had to be sad and heroic for a while, since the show had to come up with some explanation as to why Elena would speak to him again (though this still rang a bit false), before returning to the bad boy behavior again, and having him basically mind rape a TV reporter by glamouring her into being his girlfriend as a cover (this is what I mean about the questionable ethics).

In the midst of this the show floats a tantalizing explanation for Damon’s behavior (in one the best scenes of the season): he tries to act as inhuman as possible, because acting human reminds him that he wants his humanity back more than anything in the world. It’s also revealed that Katherine didn’t turn him, but rather Stefan, who didn’t want to be alone. Damon never wanted to be a vampire, but was forced into it. However this thread quickly gets dropped, unfortunately, and the show goes back to Damon moping about how Elena will never love him, and getting depressed about that. Most unpromisingly, the show looks like it will move closer towards Damon and Elena acting on the sexual tension between them, which is the point where the bad boy vampire type of character always gets lame and tiresome (see Eric on the most recent season of True Blood). I’m honestly not sure what the show can do to keep Damon from continuing to deteriorate as a character: I just hope that the show will realize the problem, and be willing to massively shift the dynamics of the show by killing him off or making him shift to a full on, irredeemable villain before he starts to become a drag on the whole thing.

3. Sprawling Ensemble

Like seemingly all CW shows, The Vampire Diaries has a ridiculously large cast, and it’s not always clear why. I suppose it’s so that the show can feature more romantic pairings that way, and can involve unexpected characters in new plots, but it means that a lot of characters sit around with nothing to do an awful lot of the time. Bonnie has been given some character development this season, having to deal with one of her best friends becoming a vampire, and starting up a romance with her other best friend’s brother, but she’s still basically a plot device. The show is happy to feature her heavily when the writers need one of her plot advancing spells to come into play, and then not even feature her, with little explanation, for 2 or 3 episodes at a time. Then there’s Jeremy: he was sympathetic and fairly involved in the central storyline last year, due to his woebegone girlfriends both getting mixed up in the central vampire storyline, but no one quite seemed to know what to do with him this year. First he died, then got weirdly buddy buddy with Damon, and finally hooked up with Bonnie, died again, and got brought back to her life by her… mainly because the show needed surprising things to happen to Jeremy to justify his presence on the show. However it seems like this all might be going somewhere long term, now that he’s seeing the ghosts of Vicki and Anna because of Bonnie’s spell: let’s hope that storyline goes somewhere and gets involved with the other characters populating Mystic Falls so that Jeremy won’t seem like the useless kid brother anymore.

But the show’s least promising character is Matt. Looking back, there has been no point to his character over the last two years, other than to make Caroline more relatable. His past with Elena is easy to forget, as is the fact that his sister died, so his only real function has been to be Caroline’s boyfriend (and in this season, get involved in a love triangle with her and Tyler). He wasn’t even aware that vampires existed until towards the end of the season, which just made him seem even more isolated from the rest of the characters. The show has shown that it knows how to resolve some of these issues, as it made Season One’s most annoying and pointless characters, Tyler, integral and sympathetic by having him become a werewolf and making a connection with Caroline, and killing off Jenna, Elena’s likeable but rather pointless aunt. Hopefully Season 3 will draw in its outliers more, instead of isolating even more characters from the main plot.

And so we approach Season 3, the season that could make or break the show. Is the show one of the greatest genre shows of the millennium? Or has it just briefly distinguished itself from the rest of the CW crowd, before lingering on for 5 mediocre seasons, causing everyone to forget what they liked about it in the first place? Only time will tell. For now, however, the second season of The Vampire Diaries can stand alongside the best seasons of teen and horror/fantasy shows, a surprising breakout triumph coming from a show that seemed like one of television’s worst offering when it first premiered.

Glee has a lot to answer for in its third season. The show is no longer a novelty, or a breakout hit: it’s become an institution. Everyone knows what Glee is: everyone’s heard the covers of hit songs on the radio or in grocery stores, and most everyone knows that the show’s been on a fairly steady decline since its breakout first season (really the first half of that season). The show’s permeated popular culture about as much as it’s going to at this point, and it’s main goal now is simply to retain it’s popularity for long enough that Fox maintains this kind of profit for three or four more years. On the one hand this seems easy enough: just keep giving the people crowd pleasing pop numbers, an upbeat attitude that embraces alternative lifestyles, and, of course, more Sue Sylvester. On the other hand, this approach tends to bring out the worst in the show, and there’s been a massive backlash against Glee over the last year. It’s no longer the critical darling: in fact these days, any critic that doesn’t at least have some serious issues with the show is an anomaly. Somewhere in middle of the second season this show stopped being quite the massive hit it once was, and the numbers steadily dropped over the course of the year. About 3.5 million more viewers watched last year’s premiere than this one: if that happens again, the next season could be the show’s last. Something will have to change if the show doesn’t want to keep bleeding viewers.

And, at least over the summer, it seemed like Glee was willing to mix things up more. Ryan Murphy had made statements that the show would be downplaying the constant musical numbers a bit and focusing more on character development. The theme episodes would be reduced: there will only be two this year. Most intriguingly, the show took on six more staff writers (previously the only writers on staff were the show’s three creators), including Buffy alum Marti Noxon (who also wrote for Mad Men in its second season) and former Big Love writer Robert Aguirre-Sacasa. Additionally the show’s second season ended on a relatively high note: the final four episodes were surprisingly strong, and the show seemed to be getting back to some of the things it had done well in its first season. On the other hand, there’ve been many patches like this over the last season and a half of the show: every time it seems to be getting better, it comes back with an episode that’s twice as bad. So the big question this season is: how good a show is Glee? Was the spotty second season just a result of the show being unsure how to reconcile it’s popular aspects with consistent quality? Had Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan just gotten too full of themselves and need to get grounded again by bringing in the fresh perspectives of new writers? Or are the show’s characters so inconsistent and unlikeable at this point that a full recovery is impossible? Is the show just content to be wildly inconsistent, lack any kind of continuity, and allow characters that don’t work at all run rampant on the show?

If the season premiere is any indication, it seems that the answer is a little of each. It’s too early to tell if this year will be a slight improvement on last season, or a terrible season that drives away all the viewers, but the premiere didn’t exactly promise a complete turnaround for the series. It’s definitely the same Glee we’ve known for the last season and a half: characters were abruptly written out, relationships ended and began off screen, and about half the main cast was completely sidelined. There was great stuff, and there was terrible stuff. It was basically what a person would expect from Glee in a nutshell: no better or no worse. I’m just not sure that the show won’t have to do better than this if it wants me (and everyone else) to keep tuning in every week.

If the new writers will shake up the show at all, it doesn’t show in this episode. The episode “structure” (or lack thereof) was typical Glee: throw around a bunch of plots at once and see if any of them stick. After a quick introduction that establishes an awful lots of new plot points: Sam and Mercedes dated, broke up because Sam’s dad got a job in another state, and now Mercedes is dating another football player; Tina and Artie are juniors, which makes no sense; Mike wants to go to an Ivy league school; Quinn’s gone punk and quit the Glee club; and Will and Emma became a couple over the summer but, of course, are having problems in the bedroom. About that last one, I may just have forgotten that Will and Emma had officially become a couple last season, which shows how little I care about them at this point. At the end of Sectionals it was thrilling to see their first kiss, but now any scene with them almost instinctively causes me to roll my eyes.

Kurt and Rachel are still best friends, as in last season’s finale, and want to attend a school in New York together and major in musical theater. They had their sights on Guilliard, until Emma explains to them that they don’t have a musical theater program (which you’d think they would check up on, but they are pretty flaky), and instead recommends another program to them, the best musical theater program in the US, and tells them about a mixer for it that’s apparently happening the next day. It’s weird how on Glee anything less than number 1 is deemed a failure. The club acts like it’s pretty respectable 12^th place position at Nationals is a complete failure, and Rachel and Kurt seem devastated by the possibility that they may not get into this school they just heard of. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

They practice yet another musical number from an Oz themed musical to impress the competition (this time “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead”, as performed by Barbara Streisand, of course), but don’t even bother to perform after seeing what the others at the mixer have put together, a lively, well choreographed mashup of “Anything Goes” and “Anything You Can Do”. The leader of the group is a girl named Harmony, played by Lindsay Pearce, who makes a big impression in her sole scene. She fits in wonderfully with the cast and is an excellent performer with a great voice. Surprisingly she came in third place in the recent Glee reality show competition but was rewarded with a 2 episode stint on the show: frankly if she could bring the energy she brought to that scene she’d outshine most of the main cast members. Anyway, Kurt and Rachel are devastated, but resolve to try harder to build up their experience and credits this year: Rachel starts work to put together a school production of West Side Story, and Kurt decides to run for class president. All of this worked wonderfully: the songs were quite strong, Chris Colfer and Lea Michele have the best chemistry on the show next to Naya Rivera and Heather Morris, and the story shows some direction and a goal for the season to come. Of course none of it makes much sense when you stop to think about it (like why have neither of them been in a musical before?), but Glee runs on emotions rather than logic, and it managed to land the emotions well with this storyline.

Unfortunately the rest of the episode didn’t fare as well. For one thing, it sticks to closely to the last year’s premiere: once again we’ve got an impromptu performance in a public part of school (this time the cafeteria) to try to attract more people to the Glee club, Sue and Becky insult newcomers auditioning for the Cheerios, and potential new member of the club is introduced and dropped. The rest of the episode was taken up with really, really bad Will and Sue storylines. Sue’s now decided to run for Congress (huh?) and needs something to hate on, as that attracts more voters than lobbying for something positive. So she decides that all funding should be cut from arts programs at schools, which obviously infuriates Will. Will’s response to this is to take an increasingly insane course of action: first he just goes and yells at Sue, easily breaking down and whining about his sex life after a cheap taunt from Sue, then storms off promising revenge. Apparently his great plan is to “glitter bomb” Sue (is this a thing?), have Emma record it on her phone, and put the video up on Youtube. Of all the bad storylines Glee has had, this may be the worst. Well, okay, not worse than Will trying to seduce Sue. But close. Dumping glitter on someone’s head well screaming at them is not a sane course of action. But the show makes it out to be nigh heroic. Then there’s the scene where Emma tells Will “You glitterbombed Sue. At that point you stopped being a man of words, and became a man of action. And that was kind of hot.” I may be paraphrasing slightly, but this is pretty much what she says. So apparently Emma is only turned on when Will acts like a childish, mildly insane asshole. This explains why he thought that whole Rocky Horror scheme would work.

And oh yes, there’s the name of the episode: Will has refurbished a bunch of pianos from repossessed homes, painted them purple, and put them around the school. Whenever the Glee sees one they’re supposed to sing or something, in hopes of attracting new members. This is kind of strange, and nothing really comes from it, aside from that aforementioned scene where the club performs the Go Go’s “We Got the Beat” in the cafeteria, which is a ton of fun. Actually pretty much all of the musical numbers here work well, which is a big bonus for the show, there’s not a really jawdropping, tearjerking number. The focus on Broadway numbers and slightly older songs is very welcome though, and all the songs are perfect for the range of the singers, though Michele and Colfer totally hog the solos.

Then there’s Quinn’s overnight change into an “edgy” punk rock kind of gal, complete with hacked off pink hair, nose ring, and smoking habit. Seems that losing everything at the end of last season prompted a major change with her and she gave up pretty much everything that was important to her (Glee and the Cheerios). One the one hand I kind of liked this development: it was nice to see them not recycling the same Quinn storylines over and over again, and I enjoyed Agron’s new look and attitude. The show’s never given her anything to do other than the same material over and over, and it’s nice to see them make a change for a character for once. However, this is just too much off screen development, and feels completely unearned. You can see how Quinn could have gotten to this point, but it wasn’t developed onscreen at all: it really requires the viewer to fill in the blanks in their imagination. I’m also afraid about how this will play out: hopefully it’s not leading to a standard drug addiction storyline (which would be really painful on this show) or Quinn immediately making a 180 and going back to her old self (the most likely scenario). I just don’t trust Glee anymore, and it’s going to have to do better than this for me to put any faith in these writers again.

Still, this was an entertaining, largely enjoyable hour, and I hope that the season can improve from here on out, and keep the musical numbers on this level. This episode had at least one part of the equation worked out: if it learns to keep the focus strictly on the kids, not give Will, Sue, and Emma as much painful material and think outside the box a bit more and not just recycle past storylines, it could have a shot at giving us a great season. However it seems more likely that it will continue the series of diminishing returns, and halfway through this season I’ll be yelling at the screen again, wondering why I’m still watching at the show. Only time will tell.

The Purple Piano Project: ☆☆1/2

My response to the Harry Potter movies has been very mixed and contrarian, especially considering that it’s a series which hasn’t really varied all that much in quality, aside from a big step up in quality beginning with 2004’s “Prisoner of Azkaban.” How much I enjoyed a particular book in the series has never been a good indication of how much I would enjoy the corresponding film, and my rankings of the books vs. the movies is almost completely different. Furthermore, no one else I know really seems to be able to agree on what the strongest and weakest films in the series are. I’m not sure if this is because the series has generally been so consistent that picking out certain ones as superior to others is a case of comparing apples to oranges, or because different people look for very different things in the films.

My feelings towards the books are so strong that I judge these films quite differently from most others. What I mostly look for in the Harry Potter movies is the film’s ability to portray emotions and story details from the books in genuinely cinematic ways, to visualize them in a way that the books weren’t able to, and to make the action and emotions more visceral and immediate. This is why, for instance, “Order of the Phoenix” worked so much better for me as a film than a book: in the book the climax was page after page of poorly described hallway chases and battles. Rowling’s prose made the whole thing very difficult to follow or understand, whereas in the film version the whole sequence was boiled down to its essence, and became an exciting, visually memorable, and high stakes action scene. While the movies aren’t really able to convey the excitement of being a wizard, and the daily routines and misadventures of the characters, which was always my favorite thing about the books, the best ones are able to make the stories more thrilling and immediate than Rowling was able to.

This was one of the reasons I was so excited about the final installment in the series: the second half of “Deathly Hallows” is one of the most jam-packed segments of the series, alternating between lengthy action sequences and dramatic character moments without any of the padding the first half was filled with. I wasn’t a big fan of all of this: the Deathly Hallows themselves and the strange wand switching rules seem like weird last minute inclusions that were only added to provide storytelling shortcuts, many of the deaths only seem to be added for cheap shock value, the final battle is pretty underwhelming and nonsensical, and the epilogue is possibly the most poorly written and conceived section of any of the books. But the overall effect was still fairly breathtaking, and the revelations about Severus Snape and Aunt Petunia are some of my favorite moments in the series.

Not to mention that Part One was, against all odds, one of the best entries in the film series. I figured that if director David Yates had done such impressive work with a section of the book I disliked, he must have quite a film in store for the good parts. Unfortunately “Deathly Hallows, Part Two” doesn’t come close to matching the first part: whereas that film was atmospheric, elegant, and well-paced, this one comes off as rather rote, rushed, and shoddily edited. It merely presents dramatic plot points and then moves on, as if checking off big moments from a list, while unnecessarily protracting certain scenes for no real reason, in a manner reminiscent of the worst aspects of Chris Columbus’s first two films.

Admittedly this doesn’t really set in until the second half of the film. “Part 2” might start off a bit shakily, and it would be difficult for it not to, considering that it opens in the middle of a story. However, after the first few minutes of Harry and co. awkwardly interrogating secondary characters, the film quickly moves on to it’s first (and by far best) big action set piece, in which Harry and his friends break into Gringott’s bank to recover the next Horcrux. The sequence, which begins with a nervous Hermione disguised as Bellatrix Lestrange attempting to fool a goblin, and climaxes with an escape via dragon, is probably the best action sequence that Rowling wrote, and it is portrayed just as well in the film. Yates has a genuine talent for staging action scenes that none of the previous Potter directors possessed, and he paces the scene brilliantly: it’s the film’s only sequence that manages not to feel rushed, or to overstay it’s welcome.

The return to Hogwarts afterwards is also well done, though the editing seems to get a bit shaky here, as certain characters appear and disappear in confusing ways. Many beloved characters that weren’t seen in the previous film reappear, as well as Hogwart’s itself. One of the greatest strengths of the films is their ability to show us around Hogwarts and allow the audience to understand where things are and how it’s set up in a way the books weren’t quite able to do. Because of this, the destruction it undergoes in the final installment is more heartbreaking in the film, as familiar areas are reduced to rubble.

However, once the film get around to the final battle, the seams start to come apart. The whole thing is a bit of a letdown, since there have been so many fantasy battle scenes similar to this before, and it’s difficult not to compare it unfavorably to the big climax in 2002’s “The Two Towers,” though the sequence where the wizards join together to place a magical barrier around the castle is quite breathtaking. While the final showdown between Harry and Voldemort was a bit of an anticlimax in the book, that seems merciful compared to the silly way it’s protracted in the movie, with Voldemort attempting to convince the good wizards to join him with a ridiculous big movie villain speech, and a strange and laughable sequence where Voldemort and Harry fight while flying through the air. The ultimate effect is that the excitement of the film dies about halfway through, replaced with dull, plodding, and uninspired sequences of people shooting light at one another. Worst of all, the wonderful character moments from the book are rushed through as if Yates just wanted to get to the next action scene: Harry’s final conversation with Dumbledore barely happens, Snape’s revelation doesn’t have a tenth of the power it did in the book and barely seems to affect Harry, and the deaths are reduced to Harry looking at dead bodies for a few seconds and looking sad. Many beloved characters, like Hagrid barely appear and are given nothing to do, and even the subplot about Dumbledore’s past is confusingly hinted at, never explained.

And though the epilogue was obviously going to be a misfire, it comes so quickly after the climax that there’s barely time to breathe before the big happy ending, which is mostly notable for containing some very odd hair and makeup effects. The overall result is a finale that isn’t exactly bad, but seems content to be merely good enough, making sure not to insult fans or make any dramatic alterations, but never seeming to put much effort into the proceedings. However, given the hugely positive response to the film, this tactic has apparently worked to great effect. Like too many films this summer, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2” is just good enough to keep people leaving the theater satisfied, yet severely lacking in genuine inspiration or emotion.

Stars: ☆ ☆ 1/2

So I’ve been reconfiguring my schedule, since I realized the one I laid out before was much too overwhelming for me to keep up with, and I’ll post my changes to it in a bit. But what’s important for now is that I’ve decided not to write about the second season of The Vampire Diaries: weekly reviews won’t begin until Season 3 starts up in the fall (the same goes for How I Met Your Mother) since I’ve got enough TV shows on my plate as it is. I might stop in occasionally and post some thoughts as I make my way through season 2, and at the very least I’ll at least write an overview of it as I finish it. But this might actually be the ideal way to write about this show. Because while I do think that The Vampire Diaries is one of the most underrated and unfairly ridiculed shows on the air, and that it’s certainly worthy of critical reappraisal (though there’s been a fair amount of this during the second season), it’s not the kind of show that is particularly fruitful to discuss episode by episode. This isn’t an insult, since this has more to do with the way it’s plotted than anything else. The Vampire Diaries may be more aggressively serialized than anything else on the air, and although the episodes have a certain structure and pattern, I imagine it would be pretty simple to edit multiple episodes together seamlessly. Because of this I think it’s more fruitful to talk about the show in groups of episodes than individually, much like VD’s (far inferior) sister series True Blood. Everything that happens in the show is rooted in both the past and the future, and it’s easier to judge the show when you have the full picture. However, this said, I am looking forward to seeing how I experience the show differently when I’m forced to watch episode by episode: I’m sure waiting for the resolution to some of these cliffhangers is going to be agonizing.

Although I’m quite certain in my conviction that The Vampire Diaries is a very good show, and probably the best American fantasy/sci-fi show on the air right now, I’m still a bit embarrassed to admit that I watch it to some of my friends. It doesn’t have the HBO certification of quality of True Blood, or the claim to be bloodier, grittier, and sexier than your average vampire show (though it is actually a much darker and more brutal show than True Blood), and the terrible title makes it sound like a third rate Twilight knockoff. It’s on the CW, of all channels, and boasts a cast that appears pretty and vacant in typical CW fashion (including star Nina Dobrev, a graduate of Degrassi: The Next Generation), and worst of all, a pilot episode that basically confirms all these assumptions. It’s also from Kevin Williamson, who’s last successful series was the mawkish teenaged prime-time soap Dawson’s Creek. There’s pretty much no way to convince someone to watch this show unless they’re a devotee of the CW, or a huge vampire fan, which is a shame since it has some of the most suspensful and unpredictable storytelling on network television currently.

Even I scoffed at this show when it first began, thinking that it was a limp TV Twilight copycat, basically the nadir of vampire entertainment. Reviews of the pilot confirmed as much, and though I usually can’t resist a new vampire fad, I stayed far away from this show. Until season 2 began and a strange thing started to happen. Critics that had originally hated the show checked back in for the season 2 premiere, and actually gave it good reviews. The season continued to consistently get excellent reviews throughout the second season, critical reappraisals were written, and the show went from being “that terrible CW vampire show” to “one of the best genre series on the air”, at least within television critic circles.

I knew the pilot episode was going to be rough, and it is certainly the least promising pilot for a good series that I’ve ever seen. Usually with these kinds of series there’s at least some spark in the pilot, some promising aspect that the writers eventually build on as the series progresses. And those aspects are in the pilot, once you know where to look for them. But they are buried very deeply beneath the silliness and cheesiness of that episode. The characters eventually become quite well developed, but in the first episode they’re each allowed only one personality trait: Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev) and her brother Jeremy (Steven R. McQueen) are grief stricken because of their parents’ death at the beginning of the summer. Elena is trying to move on and return to her old life, but is having difficulties getting back to normal, while Jeremy has become an emo druggy who’s messing around with douchey football star Tyler Lockwood’s (Michael Trevino) wrong-side-of-the-tracks girlfriend Vicki Donovan (Kayla Ewell). Vicki is the sister of Elena’s ex-boyfriend (and friend from childhood) Matt (Zach Roerig), who’s still lovelorn over Elena and hoping to win her back. Of course the action begins when the (obviously vampiric) new kid Stefan Salvatore (Paul Wesley), rolls into town and hits it off with Elena. In the background of all this is a rash of “animal attacks” occurring throughout the town of Mystic Falls, which began about the same time that Stefan first appeared. Of course, by the end of the pilot we discover that he’s not the one behind the attacks, but rather his insidious brother Damon (Ian Somerhalder). Stefan does have an ulterior motive however; he’s returned to town to seek out Elena, apparently because she looks identical to Katherine, a woman that both brothers were in love with over a hundred years ago. In the background of all this (because this show doesn’t have enough characters yet) are Elena’s best friends Bonnie Bennett (Katerina Graham), who’s starting to develop magical powers, Caroline Forbes (Candice Accola), the blonde bitchy cheerleader who has a thing for Stefan, as well as Jenna Sommers (Sara Canning), Elena and Jeremy’s aunt and guardian, who’s concerned that she’s too young to care for them properly.

This all seems like a standard issue CW teen soap with Twilight vampires thrown in for good measure, and unfortunately, that’s just how the pilot comes off. We’ve got a menacing bird that seems to be everywhere and once and caws incessantly, a romantic meeting by the graves of Elena’s parents, complete with fog machine smoke effects, and family/friend relationships that seem to have been generated by some sort of computer that puts together the formula for CW shows. The only cast member that comes off as particularly promising is Somerhalder, whose charismatic, insanely over the top performance infuses the pilot with a sense of fun and life in his few scenes towards the end. I would never have guessed that he had this kind of star power and scene stealing ability from his amazingly dull performance as Boone on Lost. The second episode isn’t much better, but has a hint of promise, and the quality escalates to an amazing degree throughout episodes 3-5. But it’s not until episode six, in which Elena discovers what Stefan and Damon are, Damon turns Vicki into a vampire, and flashbacks begin to reveal Stefan and Damon’s hidden past that the show really reaches a ridiculously high level of suspense and excitement that it never backs down from.

There are a few things that really separate this show from pretty much any other recent vampire fare (aside from perhaps, “Let the Right One In” and it’s American remake). The first is that it can actually be pretty scary: probably the best scene of the pilot is the opening, in which Damon viciously attacks and kills a young couple. Williamson proved with his “Scream” movies that he knows his way around a scary, suspensful scene and he uses those chops well here. The show is also able to make it’s vampires sympathetic without taking away from what makes them frightening: Damon and even Stefan both have moments where they can be very scary and unpredictable in spite of how vulnerable their characters are shown to be. Vampires in this show are ruled by their emotions, which makes them unpredictable. Very few of the vampire characters are altogether good or evil, and when the show’s at it’s best many of the characters can be both likeable and frightening.

The show’s characterization and pacing are two of it’s greatest assets. Since Twilight became popular it apparently became the rule for all vampire entertainment to become incredibly slow paced love stories that feature barely one dimensional supporting characters. The days of Buffy and Angel, shows with excellent ensemble casts and supporting characters who were as appealing as the title characters are long gone. While VD doesn’t exactly rival Buffy’s ensemble, many of the supporting characters are likeable and well developed; after the first few episodes, I never found myself becoming impatient with the human characters or wanting to get back to the vampire action during their scenes. There are some problems here: the first season never really finds a compelling way to use Matt, Jenna, or Tyler and Bonnie sometimes seems more convenient to the plot than essential as a character, but most of the supporting characters are very likeable and surprisingly realistic. Caroline is a good example of how the show goes beyond the standard issue CW characterizations. At first she comes off as just a sterotypically bitchy cheerleader that Elena and Bonnie feel obligated to remain friends with, but she is quickly revealed as a neurotic mess, constantly insecure and frustrated by her failed attempts to have the perfect life. Her romantic endeavors are constantly frustrated: first she tries to seduce Stefan, but he’s preoccupied with Elena, so she hooks up with his brother Damon out of jealousy. Damon of course, uses her to feed off of and essentially makes her his pet, before Elena and Stefan force him to stop abusing her. Then she develops a crush on Matt, and they begin dating, only to be frustrated again by Matt’s continued devotion to Elena. She knows she should be the center of attention, the most popular, desired girl in school, only to have everything constantly taken from her by her unwitting best friend. Her failure to live up to the archetype that she appears to be is what drives the character, and Williamson and his team of writers develop her in surprisingly interesting and insightful ways.

As for the pace, it’s relentless, breathtaking, and keeps the show constantly moving forward. We don’t get things teased out till we become impatient with them, but rather new plot elements come out of nowhere, by surprise. As soon as one threat appears to be eliminated, three more appear in it’s place. Much like Lost, it’s hard to relax during this show, because even in the most innocuous moments there’s always a sense of danger lurking just around the corner. However, even though everything happens so quickly, the show rarely feels rushed or undramatic: each of the plot twists hit home beautifully, right up to the jawdropping end of season cliffhanger. The various romances (particularly the Stefan-Elena-Damon love triangle) are obviously a major focus for the show, but they never take over the plot. Rather, the romance is tied into the story and informs how the characters behave in certain situations in interesting ways. This isn’t an idealized vampire love fantasy, but a dark and twisted story in which love can be the cause of both good and terrible things.

A lot of praise should go to Dobrev, and the writers, for making Elena such a strong protagonist. Though she’s surrounded by forces much more powerful than herself, she never surrenders her autonomy, and never becomes a victim for Stefan to protect. Unlike True Blood’s Sookie Stackhouse she isn’t rash or stupid, but remains calm in dangerous situations and frequently devises clever, well thought out plans. She never becomes enslaved by her love for Stefan: he’s important to her, but she never throws away all her other priorities to stay in a relationship with him. In a particularly refreshing subplot early on, she nearly breaks up with him because of his reluctance to trust her and tell her things, a rare move for a romantic vampire heroine these days. And when Dobrev is called on to play Katherine in the flashback scenes she’s a marvel; Katherine is every bit as much of a scene stealer as Damon, and Dobrev makes the difference between the characters extremely clear. There isn’t a hint of her performance as Elena that lingers when she’s portraying Katherine.

The show is far from perfect though, and it has a number of flaws. That CW quality unfortunately lingers, much like the cheesy feel of WB shows clung to Buffy. The show is rather blandly shot, outside of a few horror sequences, and the show tends to be too dimly lit. The dialogue can be amazingly cheesy at times (though in an enjoyable way, for me) and the use of pop songs throughout the series is really terrible: often hit songs are just stuck distractingly in the background of dialogue scenes. So many episodes are built around big town parades or parties, to the point that it becomes a bit of a crutch for the show as it wears on. The pace, though refreshing at first, can be a little too relentless, as one wishes the show would allow itself more room to breathe sometimes. It also becomes a bit overwhelming, as there’s about three season’s worth of story crammed into the first season, which makes the overall season arc a little shapeless. I had to take a break for a few weeks towards the end of the season because so much was constantly happening: the pace is exciting, but it can also be wearying. VD is a classic example of a “shark” show: it has to keep up it’s momentum, or it will die. The cast might be a little too big: some of the main cast members can disappear for several episodes at a time, while new characters seem to be introduced every other episode. The episodes can fall a little too much into familiar patterns: at this point I don’t even know how many episodes there are in which Stefan and Elena have some fight which is resolved by him doing something unexpectedly sweet for her in the second to last scene of the episode, just before the shocking cliffhanger. Nearly all the show’s references to events in the past relate to things that happened in Mystic Falls in 1864: you have to wonder what exactly these vampires have been up to in the time since then. I also wish that Mystic Falls had a bit more personality and sense of place, since the setting is so important to the show: it’s difficult to buy that these events are happening in a small Virginia town rather than some suburb of LA.

Still this is an exciting, daring show, one in which the most likeable characters can die at the drop of a hat, and even the central characters are capable of despicable actions. It’s exceptionally good at portraying morally ambiguous characters that manage to be dangerous, likeable, and believable. It would be easy for Damon to become like Spike on Buffy: an initially intriguing bad boy character that is gradually ruined by attempts to make him more palatable as a love interest. So far the show has resisted this, making his actions, and the actions of others towards him completely believable, while still retaining what’s interesting about him as a character. It’s a tough balancing act, but the show nails it. While it’s not as whimsical, funny, or inventive as Buffy, it is truly gripping and suspensful in a way that TV rarely is. Though it may have it’s share of problems, The Vampire Diaries has become a first rate genre show, and I hope that the show’s able to remain this good for years to come.

Season Grade: ☆ ☆ ☆

By reputation, at least, the Pirates of the Caribbean series thus far has followed the most common and definitive route that film series take: an instantly classic first film that was fun, surprising, and fresh, followed by increasingly more tiresome sequels that reuse and expand everything that was good about the first film in uninspired and tiresome ways. This was the trajectory that pretty much every film series took, with only a few rare exceptions, until the dawn of faithful fantasy novel and comic book adaptations gave film series a better reputation. While I loved the first film for breathing new life into the out of fashion pirate film, and managing to preserve the look and feel of older adventure films while bringing modern sensibilities to the genre, the dreadful “Dead Man’s Chest” (2006) was enough to make me forswear any further sequels. I would certainly be shocked if I had known that six years later I’d be showing up for the fourth film in the series.

I decided to pay my five bucks to see this film, in spite of the incredibly disappointing previous two films in the series, and the dismal reviews, for a few reasons. The first was my faint hope that this could be the film to bring the series back on track: I enjoyed the trailers and was pleased by the decision to scale this film back to the simple adventure story roots of the first film, by jettisoning most of the supporting cast of the previous films and making the film a simpler, less convoluted standalone film. The casting of Penelope Cruz, an actress who’s been in the prime of her career in the last few years (regardless of the qualities of the films she’s been in), was another plus, as was the fact that it’s based off of a (reportedly excellent) novel by Tim Powers. This was exactly what I thought the series should have done as a sequel in the first place, instead of trying to weave every single major and minor character from the first film into some sort of convoluted high fantasy “epic” as the first films tried to do. Even the decision to place hack director Rob Marshall in the director’s chair rather than the extremely talented Gore Verbinski wasn’t enough to completely throw me off this film. The last reason was that I simply wanted to write about it, and this May has been a surprisingly dry season, leaving me with few other options.

I was extremely disappointed when the film’s reviews indicated that it might be weakest in the series, but I stalwartly made my way to the theater, figuring that if it was somehow even worse than Dead Man’s Chest I could at least write a scathing review to cheer me up. To my great surprise, the film turned out to live up to my original expectations: it’s a fun summer film that proves itself to be a worthy successor to the original film. Like all the films in the series the story is a bit convoluted and the opening both seems too rushed and too expository, but it’s nowhere near as confusing as the last two films. As the film opens, Jack’s former first mate Gibbs (the reliable Kevin McNally) is brought to trial under suspicion of being Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, as if you didn’t know), and is saved by none other than Jack himself, who predictably turns up posing as the judge. However, both are soon enough captured by King George II (Richard Griffiths in a really bizarre cameo), who mistakes Jack for someone else pretending to be Jack, who is putting together a crew to search for the Fountain of Youth, a quest that the real Jack had already given up on (see what I mean by convoluted?). The King wants Jack’s map, which shows the path to the Fountain of Youth, so that his own crew led by the reformed Barbarossa (Geoffrey Rush, who could pretty much chew scenery in his sleep at this point) can reach before the Spanish fleet manages to. However Gibbs has already stolen Jack’s map, so Jack ends up empty-handed, and instead flees from the King and Barbarossa in one of the film’s many fantastic chase scenes. He’s saved by his dad (Keith Richards, whose appearance this time around is too brief to derail the film) who points him towards the crew that the impostor Jack is putting together. The person impersonating him is revealed to be Angelique (Penelope Cruz), an old flame of Jack’s who turns out to be none other than Blackbeard’s daughter. She’s helping her father find the fountain because he’s received a prophecy that he will be killed soon, and she wants a chance to save his soul, since she used to be a nun before Jack led her astray (or so she claims). Only now she needs Jack, since he’s the only one who knows how to reach the fountain, since he’d memorized the map long ago. Meanwhile Gibbs helps Barbarossa reach the fountain as well, and the quest becomes a three way race to see who can reach it first.

In classic adventure film fashion there are plenty of coincidences, twists, and double crosses, but they never reach the incoherence of the former films in the series. Unlike the other sequels, “On Stranger Tides” stays focused on it’s story, keeping Jack squarely in his place as the film’s not-quite-hero, rather than getting bogged down in needless subplots and supporting characters. Much like the first film, this is a simple quest story in the fashion of Robert Louis Stevenson, Errol Flynn, and Indiana Jones, rather than the Tolkien-lite historical fantasy maelstrom of the previous sequels. References to the previous films are brief and vague, and it would be perfectly possible to skip from the first film to this one (so long as you weren’t too concerned by why Barbarossa’s alive). The action sequences are the best of the summer so far, and the sword fights are both balletic and physically believable, if a bit outlandish (even at their worst, the previous films had excellent action sequences). Marshall manages not to become distracting, and is unexpectedly good at shooting action, resisting the urge to cut every 2 seconds as he did during the dance sequences in “Chicago” (2002) and “Nine” (2009).Whereas Verbinski seemed bored with the material in the last two films, often turning to strange, out of character bouts of surrealist humor, Marshall manages to do a good job recreating the look and feel of the original film and keeps the the film fast and light without the jarring tonal shifts of the previous films.

The performances are appropriately charismatic and over the top: Depp, who had been coasting a bit in the previous films, returns to his lively, seemingly improvisational performance with more vigor than ever. Jack Sparrow could have easily been reduced to a caricature at this point, but Depp manages to keep the character fresh and fun. His recent performances have seemed a bit tired and forced, so it’s nice to see him recapture that energy in one of his best roles. It helps that this time he has a performance that’s nearly as fun as his to play off of: Penelope Cruz adds this to her long list of fantastic performances in the last few years. She makes Angelique fun and fiery, simultaneously sympathetic and despicable. Unlike Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Swann character in the previous films, her crosses and double crosses are all driven by a single, simple motive: to bring salvation to her father, and get him to renounce his ways. Her steadfast faith in his ability to change, despite all evidence to the contrary, gives her character a tragic air. Though Jack is the central character, the film really revolves around her (much as the first film revolved around Will Turner), and Cruz is strong enough in the role that she could carry the film even without Depp’s help. Their scenes together provide the spark that Knightley’s scenes with Depp only hinted at, and the film is at it’s best when it just lets the two characters duke it out, both verbally and physically.

The supporting cast is about what you’d expect at this point, and mostly consists of veteran actors chewing the scenery. The film’s big addition to the supporting cast this time around is Ian MacShane as Blackbeard, who’s performance is really little more than adequate. He has some fun camp moments, but often just seems bored, not really revealing why Blackbeard is so feared, or convincing the audience that he’s a threatening antagonist. The film’s biggest weakness is that there’s never a real sense of any threat or danger for the central characters: the whole thing is a fun, breezy adventure with remarkably low stakes. Geoffrey Rush continues his string of incredibly lazy and hammy performances: he barely even seems to try in his films anymore, and his performance as Barbarossa this time around is remarkably uninspired. Hopefully this character will be laid to rest in future films, considering that he should never have returned after the original film. Sam Claflin and Astrid Berges-Frisbey show up in semi-major roles as a missionary and mermaid who fall in love, but their characters are largely forgettable, and seem to be mostly there to eat up time.

As should be expected of these films at this point “On Stranger Tides” is too damn long, despite being the shortest in the series at 139 minutes. This is the kind of film that shouldn’t be taken too seriously, and should never come in at over 90 minutes: the extra time really just weighs this one down. There’s way too much introductory nonsense here and the middle is saggy, with a lot of sitting around and talking in the jungle without much reason at all. The missionary and mermaid characters should have been excised completely, as their subplot adds nothing to the film as a whole. At least this one doesn’t climax with an endless series of dull ship battles as the others did, though the climax is still a bit underwhelming after all the time it takes to get there. The film also doesn’t manage to be as funny or surprising as the original, though this is hardly surprising in a third sequel. For all the comic energy of the performances, there are scant few memorable, laugh out loud moments, though the whole thing is so enjoyable that it’s easy not to notice it till after the film’s over.

I’m a bit confused by the overwhelmingly negative response this film has received, by critics and audiences alike. I think that most people have just become tired of this series after the seemingly endless second and third films: their capacity to enjoy this series has been worn out. I feel that if this were the second film in the series, it would have gotten much more praise and recognition as an enjoyably bubbly summer film, rather than being seen as a worn out and tired entry in a series that’s already dead on it’s feet. For me though, there’s always room for a light, funny adventure film, and “On Stranger Tides” fulfills this role wonderfully. I’m perfectly content to pretend that the disastrous previous films never happened, and proclaim this as a rare sequel that comes close to matching it’s original. Just a shame that it had to come six years too late.

Grade: ☆ ☆ ☆

In case you’re curious, here’s the the grades I would give to the rest of the series:

Curse of the Black Pearl: ☆ ☆ ☆  1/2

Dead Man’s Chest: ☆

At World’s End: ☆ ☆