Welcome to another edition of Over/Under Movies, the podcast in which we choose one overrated film and one underrated film — similar in tone, genre, style, or however we may see fit — and we discuss them.
I’m joined by my co-host Oktay Ege Kozak for another entry in our Director’s Series, where the films we discuss don’t necessarily match up thematically, but the through-line lies in the films’ director. On this episode, the director in discussion is Gore Verbinski, the former music video director who hit the mainstream with 2002’s J-Horror remake “The Ring,” but found massive worldwide success in 2003’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” which is where our conversation begins.
14 years ago, the knives were out for ‘Curse of the Black Pearl, as no one believed that Disney could pull off a big-budget summer blockbuster based on a theme park ride. However, four films and $4.24 billion (and counting) later, everyone was proved wrong. Though the sequels (including the latest entry, ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales‘) have seen a dip in quality in each subsequent film, ‘Curse of the Black Pearl’ is still revered as a fun, fresh summer popcorn film. Oktay and I find a few things to praise about the film (the production design, the score, the weird touches that were clearly Verbinski’s), but we argue that this film — locked so firmly into the Jerry Bruckheimer machine to avoid being Disney’s version of “Waterworld” — was never that great a film to begin with.
READ MORE: Adjust Your Tracking Talks ‘Wonder Woman,’ ‘It Comes At Night’ & ‘War Machine’ [Podcast]
We then move onto Verbinski’s 2005 oddity “The Weather Man,” with our conspiracy theory suggesting that Verbinski and Nicolas Cage met on the Disney lot (working on POTC and “National Treasure,” respectively) during lunch, vented, and decided to make a strange character study together on a studio budget. There’s no doubt that the success of ‘Curse of The Black Pearl’ allowed Verbinski to make this “one for me” film, but we argue that this existential dark comedy holds up incredibly well, and is well-worth going back and revisiting. We also squeeze in a little talk about “A Cure For Wellness,” Verbinski’s gothic horror film that flopped hard earlier this year (now out on Blu-ray and DVD) that we were big fans of (Oktay hadn’t seen it at the time of this recording, but now has and really dug it).
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