Dolby Digital Mono (French)

As a music lover, the phrase, “written by Paul McCartney” almost always signifies excellence in the performance to come. For a movie lover, this is not necessarily the case. Sure, A Hard Day’s Night is a great film, Help! is better than average, and Yellow Submarine is a fun departure from mainstream animation. Heck, even Magical Mystery Tour has a campy sort of charm to it.

Apparently, the same rule that applies to music also applies to cinema; without the rest of The Beatles, P...ul McCartney’s talent is just not the same. Sure, he can act fairly well, and the music is way above average, but taken as a whole, this film just plain stinks. The plot here is extremely thin. I have seen many _ hour sitcoms with more plot lines than this film. If you were to take out all of the musical numbers, you would probably have about 40 minutes of actual dialog. The rest of the film is filled with musical breaks.

Often, the success of one film in theaters will bring on a wave of classics on DVD with a similar theme. In this case, the new films are Pirates of the Caribbean and Master and Commander. These modern box office successes have prompted 20th Century Fox to release some classic films about the high seas onto DVD. One such film is A High Wind in Jamaica.

There are quite a few problems with this film, but most of them lie within the narrative. The technical aspects are all handled well, wit... good lighting, and some pretty inventive camera work from time to time. Unfortunately, no matter how well a film is made, if the script is dull, so shall the film be. That seems to be the case here, as it appears that the director felt that the exotic peoples, places and locations would be interesting enough to cover for the fact that there really isn’t that much to do at sea. Well, they aren’t, and I was bored.