Yo HO! Yo HO! A Pirate's Life for Me!

It's FRIDAY! Again. This "Hey, take Tuesday off" thing really messes with your clock. My aunt remarked last week that now that she's retired it drives her crazy becuase she can never tell what day it is. Did you care about this at 15? 20? 25? It would bug me NOW. I can only imagine 20 years from now. (I've come to the conclusion that I'll be mumbling the diaglogue to The Wrath of Khan in the rest home though.)

So it's National Talk Like a Pirate Day come two months early. Arrrrgh. Only you have to wobble and weave and look like you've had all the rum in the -- CARIBBEAN!

That's right, today is the return of CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow.

"I think you are the worst pirate I've ever heard of."
"But you HAVE heard of me!"

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is a very special movie to She Who Is My Wife (that's a Star Trek reference, thank you) and I. It was our very first date. Back when she was "She Who Doesn't Even Know I Exist". (Don't argue, love. Just go with it.) Yes, we've been together long enough for our movies to have sequels. Pretty soon we won't know what day it is. Time flies. (Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a bannana.)

"Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid."

What a great movie. (PotC: TCotBP, not PotC: DMC - we see that tonight.) But who knew then? I mean, really - a Pirate Movie (I love pirate movies, they just don't make good ones anymore. I payed full price to see Cutthroat Island - ergh!) based on a Disneyland ride from the maker of Armegeddon? Oh, dear.

"Where's Elizabeth?"
"She's safe, just like I promised. She's all set to marry Norrington, just like she promised. And you get to die for her, just like you promised. So we're all men of our word really... except for, of course, Elizabeth, who is in fact, a woman."

And yet, the previews started to look cool. And it wasn't Michael Bay. And Johnny Depp can be good. It had that elf fellow. Oh, and the princess who wasn't Natalie Portman (which was ALL to the good. You can never have enough NOT Natalie Portman). Well, we'll see. (Geoffery Rush means nothing - he's like the new Michael Caine - won't say no to a movie no matter how good or bad it is. Caine was in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Jaws IV within a year.)

"You've seen a ship with black sails that's crewed by the damned, and captained by a man so evil that Hell itself spat him back out?"

Well, we all know how it went. We started dating, we got engaged-- Oh! The MOVIE! Right, we know how that went too. It was glorious. It was a big 'ol pirate GHOST story. And The Haunted Mansion sucked. TANJ. (Look it up - it's an acronym.) It was brash, it was bold, the bad guys were worth fighting, the good guys who weren't as heroic as the heroes were smart enough to not be dumb (what's the point of outsmarting dumb people?) (yeah, I'm a Norrington fan) and you never QUITE knew what was going to happen next. Heck, you weren't even sure of all of the plot twists and turns AFTER you'd seen them.

"Whose side is Jack on?"
"At the moment?"

And they introduced this incredible insanity of a character called Jack Sparrow. (CAPTAIN. CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow.)

My biggest fear for this movie (aside from Men in Black II disease) is that they will not realize that Jack only works when the rest of the movie is as cool as he is. Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann were every bit as cool as he was (just not as crazy). They can't just be background, or who cares about Jack?

"You cheated!"
"Pirate."

Ahhh well, we'll see tonight, won't we?

Heh -- I of course have purchased the Dead Man's Chest score from iTunes. And one of the Big Themes just came on. In P1 it was introduced with Jack, standing proudly atop his sinking ship. Those Media Ventures guys are a wacky bunch. The story has it that there are great swaths of "Hans Zimmer" music that were written by his juniors. But with Pirates, apparently Hans did much of the writing even though the score was credited to Klaus Badelt (I think Zimmer got a "consultant" credit or some such, and the commentary on the DVD makes it pretty clear he wrote most of it). Well, now that Pirates is, well, PIRATES, Hanz is taking over the scoring chores full time. (Or at least putting his name up front - like I said, wacky bunch.)

It's a new sounding score (I mean, it still sounds like the Zimmer gang writing for Jerry Bruckheimer) but he brings enough of the old back (as mentioned above) while writing some really cool new stuff. The second track is this wild sounding organ piece. Neat.

It's one of the burdens of sequels. People want to hear the old made new. You can do a whole shiny new score with your fancy Imperial March, but I still want to hear Luke's theme once in a while. I remember when Goldsmith did Gremlins II, he only ever played about half of the Gremlins Rag. It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop for the whole movie. I know, you all felt the same way.

"Bring me that horizon. Drink up me hearty's, YO HO!"