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Audiences expecting a Pirates of the Panhandle from Verbinski — who paired with Depp on that swashbuckling franchise as well as on the ingeniously eccentric animated Western Rango — are in for some serious dry stretches.

The director's been saying his Lone Ranger is a sort of Don Quixote as seen through the eyes of a demented Sancho Panza, and as with that tale of a knight tilting at windmills, there's social commentary everywhere you look in this adventure. The script fancies itself a critique of capitalism, a manifesto on manifest destiny, and a saga about silver mines and the slaughter of Native Americans.

All very admirable, if not a great fit for scenes that involve Depp communing with snaggle-toothed cannibal bunny rabbits and taking a runaway train ride or six.

I mentioned Buster Keaton's train movie The General earlier, but when Keaton did stunts — playing pickup sticks with railway ties to clear the track in front of a moving locomotive, say — he actually did the stunts. The ties had weight.

Here, the director laid six miles of track in New Mexico and built two locomotives — built the locomotives, I said, reportedly for authenticity's sake — so he could do things with real trains.

But he's digitally enhanced and implausibly staged those sequences so thoroughly that he might as well have done the whole thing as a cartoon. There's a couple of hundred million dollars' worth of technical wizardry up there on screen, and nothing is at stake.

Except, maybe, for some future amusement park ride, and the sequels, and toys and hats and masks. And piles and piles of silver, if enough people lay down their hard-earned dollars to hear Hammer's hearty "Hi-yo."

Egypt's military has played a dominant role in the country since a 1952 coup, and Wednesday's ouster of President Mohammed Morsi showed that the armed forces still feel empowered to intervene when they disapprove of the country's course.

"They are the center of gravity in the Egyptian state," said Jeffrey Martini, a Middle East analyst at the Rand Corp. in Washington, speaking shortly before the coup on Wednesday night. "They are the strongest player in the game."

The military's decision to push out Morsi, the country's first democratically elected leader, prompted a huge celebration in Cairo's Tahrir Square. However, it's not clear how long the military's popularity will last.

In the 2011 demonstrations that ousted Hosni Mubarak, the military was widely despised by the secular liberals who filled the same landmark square in central Cairo.

After Mubarak's ouster, the generals ran the country for nearly a year and a half, but they faced widespread opposition from many sectors of Egyptian society.

That experience may have convinced the military that it did not want to formally be in charge of the country.

After Morsi was elected and took power a year ago, the military was no longer front and center, though it retained its position as the country's most powerful institution.

And in announcing Wednesday's coup, the military said that the chief justice of the constitutional court would lead Egypt until new elections are held, though no date was set.

A Long History

As NPR's Eric Westervelt noted during the protests that toppled Mubarak:

"Since the 1952 military coup that toppled the monarchy, all of the country's leaders have come from the military. But Mubarak worked hard to keep his commanders out of politics and out of the public light. He frequently fired generals and reshuffled their commands so no one general grew too powerful or popular."

Audiences expecting a Pirates of the Panhandle from Verbinski — who paired with Depp on that swashbuckling franchise as well as on the ingeniously eccentric animated Western Rango — are in for some serious dry stretches.

The director's been saying his Lone Ranger is a sort of Don Quixote as seen through the eyes of a demented Sancho Panza, and as with that tale of a knight tilting at windmills, there's social commentary everywhere you look in this adventure. The script fancies itself a critique of capitalism, a manifesto on manifest destiny, and a saga about silver mines and the slaughter of Native Americans.

All very admirable, if not a great fit for scenes that involve Depp communing with snaggle-toothed cannibal bunny rabbits and taking a runaway train ride or six.

I mentioned Buster Keaton's train movie The General earlier, but when Keaton did stunts — playing pickup sticks with railway ties to clear the track in front of a moving locomotive, say — he actually did the stunts. The ties had weight.

Here, the director laid six miles of track in New Mexico and built two locomotives — built the locomotives, I said, reportedly for authenticity's sake — so he could do things with real trains.

But he's digitally enhanced and implausibly staged those sequences so thoroughly that he might as well have done the whole thing as a cartoon. There's a couple of hundred million dollars' worth of technical wizardry up there on screen, and nothing is at stake.

Except, maybe, for some future amusement park ride, and the sequels, and toys and hats and masks. And piles and piles of silver, if enough people lay down their hard-earned dollars to hear Hammer's hearty "Hi-yo."

On Duplessis' death of tuberculosis as the great romantic story of the mid-19th century

"I think it was something that appealed to artists because there was something at that point rather romantic about tuberculosis, and it wasn't known quite how it was transmitted. And so ... the consumptive heroine was almost like an archetype in literature. ...

"People now think of her as an older woman because performance history has always made her this sort of older woman with a young boy, and that's the way I think it's played now. But she was a kid, she was just 23. She just had her birthday ... when she died."

On the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils

"He was very much in the shadow of his much more famous father, Alexandre Dumas, who was the author of The Three Musketeers, but he wrote this novel ... in eight days, and it was done in response to her death. And he wrote the novel, which was published in 1848, called La Dame aux Camlias (The Lady of the Camellias).

"There was then sort of a revolution in Paris, and so the novel sort of didn't make much of an impact, but he wrote a play based on the same subject. But he then spent three years trying to get it staged because it was thought to be just too shocking because French theater was very sort of embalmed in the past. And what he was trying to do was put a living courtesan who people still remembered — I mean, she'd only just died a couple of years ago — onto the stage. And this was so revolutionary that it couldn't be staged. But then finally he managed to get it on in 1852, and it was a sort of overnight, huge success."

Deceptive Cadence

'Becoming Traviata': A Look At Opera From Behind The Curtain