Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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Vampire Mermaids and Voodoo Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Rated PG-13) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS Gore Verbinski passes the director’s chair to Rob Marshall in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (a bloated 137 min- utes, but still the shortest of the four Pirates films). Not that it does anything to make the franchise interesting or watchable. Really, the whole series is completely beside the point and always has been. While I have been forced to watch the films, I have never managed to get through one of them in a single sitting, mostly because there is nothing there to hold my attention besides seemingly endless sword- fights. In any case, after 600 cumulative minutes of watching Johnny Depp stagger around wearing eyeliner the only really memorable bits are the sharp pointy things and Kiera Knightly and Penelope Cruz being way too skinny. It’s not so much that the writers and directors are doing anything wrong, more that they don’t really manage to do anything right. After some preliminaries to introduce random Spaniards, Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp) intervenes in the trial of his former first mate Joshamee Gibbs (Kevin McNally). Gibbs tells him that a Jack impersonator is recruit- ing a crew to search for the Fountain of Youth, but before they can figure out how to handle that Sparrow is kidnapped and bought to King George II (Richard Griffiths). Why the King needs Jack when he could just follow the random Spaniards or steal the map to the Fountain of Youth is puzzling. After all, Sparrow is a pirate, and isn’t piracy illegal? Apparently not illegal enough, because in walks yet another pirate, albeit a reformed one … Captain Hector Barbarossa (Geoffrey Rush). Barbarossa fills in the audience on why he has a peg leg, which involves the story of how he lost Jack’s precious ship, The Black Pearl. Expository mission accomplished, Sparrow escapes, which makes one wonder why this scene exists at all. During the painfully repetitious escape scene, Jack is rescued by his father Captain Teague (Keith Richards), who issues a fairly vague warning before disappearing. Go Team! Friday Night Lights finds epic grandeur in small-town football TV by DEAN ROBBINS In the midst of its final season, Friday Night Lights remains one of the best shows on TV (Friday, 8 p.m., NBC). This week, things look grim for our small-town Texas football team after a loss jeopardizes their spot in the playoffs. The problem is ego- centric quarterback Vince (Michael B. Jordan), who’s sowing dissension. Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) must find a way to bring the team together before the promising season slips away. “I’m not going to let that happen,” he says, in one of his pat- ented pep talks on the school field. “You’re not going to let that happen. You’ve all spilled too much sweat and blood on this damn piece of dirt out here to allow it.” Coach Taylor has a knack for lifting everybody’s spirits — including the viewer’s — but your stomach sinks when he insists on benching Vince and subbing in the inferior quarterback Luke for the big game. Even Luke knows it’s a bad idea. “I don’t think I can do it,” he says after a rotten performance in practice. As if that weren’t enough to worry about, Principal Tami Taylor (Connie Britton) sees her relationship with a troubled student spiral into disaster, and Julie (Aimee Teegarden) has a tense reunion with Matt (Zach Gilford). That’s an awful lot of drama for one damn piece of dirt. Tony Awards Sunday, 8 pm (CBS) I’ve always admired South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker for their commit- ment to bad taste, albeit bad taste redeemed by comic genius. These guys are dedi- cated to pee and puke, respectability be damned. But what do we have here? Stone and Parker’s Broadway show, The Book of Mormon, has been nominated for 14 Tony awards, including Best Musical. That’s more nominations than any other production. A big win at the glittering prime-time Tony ceremony would bring, gulp, re- spectability. If Stone and Parker don’t pee or puke when accepting their awards, I will be deeply disillusioned. WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM The Real Story Sunday, 8 pm (Smithsonian Channel) This enjoyable documentary interviews paleontologists about the scientific accuracy of Jurassic Park. Believe it or not, the scientists argue that a dinosaur really could be re-created from DNA preserved in amber; it’s just that no one has found the right hunk of amber yet. “I think [it] will become a reality one day,” says Princeton professor Lee Silver. That’s a fun idea — until you learn that it’s more than just an idea. Some eminent scientists are trying to bring dino- saurs back to life right now, when you and I are around to run screaming from their murderous rampages. Dr. Hans Larsson of McGill University, for one, is manipulating chicken em- bryos to bring out the animal’s latent dinosaur features. Obviously, none of these scientists bothered to watch the end of Jurassic Park, when all hell broke loose. Somebody had better screen it for them, and fast, before we all get pecked to death by a 20-foot escapee from a KFC. Memphis Beat Tuesday, 9 pm (TNT) This police drama doesn’t offer much in the way of originality. In the season premiere, Memphis cop Dwight (Jason Lee) investigates the death of a fellow officer — a mystery with all the usual twists and turns. We get the tense interrogations, the parade of suspects, the bomb exploding at the halfway mark, and the model-caliber female cop for Dwight to bicker with. The way Memphis Beat tries to distinguish itself is with Memphis-specific texture. The episode is thick with Elvis references, blues guitar licks and Otis Redding on the soundtrack. Can the series really hook viewers with such su- perficial elements? Well, it hooked one viewer, at least. I’d watch even the latest Paris Hilton reality series if it had Otis Redding on the soundtrack. JUNE 8-14, 2011 UCW 17 Turns out that his father has brought him into the same pub as the imposter, a woman from his past named Angelica (Cruz). Her character is poorly written, poorly acted, and serves no real narrative purpose. She is pretending to be him for some reason never fully ex- plained, in order to hire a crew for Blackbeard (Ian McShane). Jack manages to join Blackbeard’s crew and plans to sail The Queen Anne’s Revenge to the Fountain of Youth. He decides the ship would get there much faster with him in charge, and he doesn’t even believe that Blackbeard is on the ship anyway, so he foments some insurrection. That blows up in his face because it turns out that not only is Blackbeard hiding in his state room, he also has voodoo powers. (Sure, why not?) and can control the ship riggings with his magic sword. Hmm. It seems that could have used some backstory, but, you know, whatever. Blackbeard decides not to kill Sparrow, but he needs someone to kill so he picks out a red shirt from the crew and kills him instead. Released during the attempted mutiny is a captured priest (Sam Claflin) who objects to pirates ... being pirates, basically. Even though the Spaniards have a huge lead, the English sight them at sea but somehow The Queen Anne’s Revenge beats them to the mermaids. Oh yeah. There are mermaids. But wait! Not just pretty Peter Pan Disney style mermaids! These mermaids are vampires! Ok, that’s pretty cool. The pirates need a mermaid for the ritual at the Fountain of Youth, and they also need two chalices from the ship of Ponce de Leon. Blackbeard sends Sparrow off alone to retrieve the chalices, since pirates are generally so trustworthy. The film limps to an unsatisfy- ingly obvious conclusion, but if you’re willing to sit through the credits, there is a bonus scene. HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? editor@upand- comingweekly.com