Whoops

By way of this blog post, I have not, technically, gone a whole month without writing a post. Unless you count February, but it's not bloody February.

I don't really have anything terribly witty to write about right now, but I feel as though I need to post something. So I figure I'll talk about the movie I'm currently watching as I sit in between classes, waiting for my next one to start (presuming it, too, isn't cancelled). That movie is Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which has been one of my favorite movies for a long time, since I got it for Christmas as a kid (though I thought myself mighty mature and grown-up at the time). Actually, if I were to talk about the first PotC movie, it'd basically go like this:

PotC is awesome.

...

So awesome.

And that's no fun. So instead I'm gonna talk about the sequels to the movie, which have always been a weird spot of contention. On one hand, do I feel that the original movie deserved sequels? Yes. I just didn't think that any of the characters save for Jack Sparrow and perhaps Commodore Norrington needed to be held over from the first film: they were largely just vehicles for the plot to move forward, whereas Sparrow and Norrington provided the real guts of the movie, in my opinion. The face that Will and Elizabeth, two profound bores, will not be returning for the fourth movie, strikes me as a bit of a light in a very dim tunnel, but I'm taking it with a grain of salt.

The sequels do provide a fun distraction, I think, in watching Jack Sparrow interact with other characters, and the degradation and eventual reinstatement of Norrington were spots of interest for me, but unfortunately the rest of the films were bland, cookie-cutter blockbuster material, with no real point or purpose to them. *SPOILERS* I think the mishandling of Will Turner in the sequel films was part of the problem. In the first film, Will was Jack Sparrow's straight man, and could sometimes even be charming and funny. In the sequels, they tried to play Will up as a pirate, and Jack's equal, which failed utterly because the character is, frankly, uninteresting. This is pure speculation on my part, but I would guess that the Will character might be a holdover from early drafts of Pirates of the Caribbean, possibly attempting to blend some of the traditional character elements that Jack Sparrow was supposed to possess into Will's good-natured straight man routine. Frankly, it didn't work.

Elizabeth was even less enjoyable to watch, at least for me. To my eye, she is trying far too hard to be the rough-and-tumble badass fighting chick didn't work terribly well, since not a film or so ago she was running around in dresses all the time (and not prepared to do very much else). The excuse that she learned swordplay from Will comes off about as unconvincing as Will's assertion that he trains with his swords three hours each day. If they wanted to give Elizabeth a bit more clout, she could've used her wits, but then again she tries to do that a couple times in the sequel films and comes off as rather annoying. If they wanted a badass pirate-lady, they should've just introduced a new character.

By this point I'm rambling. I guess my general feeling on Pirates of the Caribbean is that the sequels were sadly mishandled, but they were at least fun to watch Jack Sparrow in action. Nevermind the bloody CGI squid Davy Jones, that's a whole 'nother post's worth.

Hopefully, with the fourth film coming out having gutted about half the cast of the previous movies, maybe the next one'll be better. But I'm not holding out.