“Who was that masked man?” That is not a question likely to resonate much with young people today, unless they are asking it in earnest puzzlement. By young, I mean under 70. The Lone Ranger belongs to the ancient pop culture of the Great Depression and the early baby boom. His adventures were heard on radio, starting in the 1930s, and seen on television from 1949 to 1957, but unlike some of his cape-wearing peers, he has mostly stayed in the past, an object of fuzzy nostalgia and mocking incredulity, a symbol of simple pleasures and retrograde attitudes. Until now. Someone in the Disney-Jerry Bruckheimer corporate suites has decided that today’s kids need their own version of the white-hat western hero with his laconic Indian sidekick, and so now we have “The Lone Ranger,” a very long, very busy movie that will unite the generations in bafflement, stupefaction and occasional delight. Directed by Gore Verbinski from a script credited to Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the movie tries to do for the post-Civil-War frontier what the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise did for the high seas in the Age of Sail, turning history (including the history of movies) into a hyperactive, multipurpose amusement machine. There are moments when this approach — which combines fussy, facetious knowingness with naïve, omnivorous enthusiasm — pays off nicely. The main action of “The Lone Ranger” takes place in a fantastical 1869 Texas, but it’s framed by scenes set in San Francisco in 1933, the year the Lone Ranger made his radio debut. As the half-built Golden Gate Bridge looms in the background, a young boy in cowboy duds and a black mask wanders into a Wild West fairground attraction, where he gazes on a taxidermied buffalo and grizzly bear, and also on an elderly American Indian with a dead crow on his head. A brass plate identifies him as “The Noble Savage in his Native Habitat.” The boy comes to know him as Tonto, and the rest of us recognize him, even under heavy prosthetic wrinkles, as Johnny Depp. Read more http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/07/03/movies/in-the-lone-ranger-tonto-takes-center-stage.html?_r=0
