My folks were down for my Grandma’s birthday this weekend. She turned 92 on Friday. Happy Birthday Gra’ma! It’s amazing the sort of people who are on the internet now, isn’t it? I’m not saying that she is, just that she could be… So her party was at noon on Friday, so my Fiancee and I couldn’t attend… We sent flowers, which were well received.
After that, my folks came down to visit. Saturday afternoon we hung out and headed out for dinner and a movie. My folks are from Up North, and the movie places up there tend to damage their prints after the first couple showings, so it was a bit of a treat for them to see a movie without a huge scratch down the middle. We hit Pirates of the Caribbean, and it was awesome.
There are a lot of good reviews on-line… Bob the Angry Flower has one, and Lileks wrote a couple of paragraphs that reminded me why I like reading his stuff when he’s not talking politics.
I’m going to ignore the awesome CGI, the sailing, the plot, the dialogue, the costuming, the acting… All that unimportant stuff. I’m just going to focus on the fighting.
You just can’t have a pirate movie without swordplay. It’s a simple relationship. Better sword fight equals better pirate movie. I’m sure some insane Hollywood mathematician could work out the precise formula linking quality of pirate movie to quality of fight sequences, but I bet it’d be a nice boring graph with a straight line climbing off into infinity.
There are a good half-dozen fights, both on ships and on land, but the tone is really set in the first fight between Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp. It starts out tentative, the experienced pirate having a bit of fun with the angry swordsmith. Then it builds, from careful footwork to leaps and lunges, from parries and ripostes to hurled blades and thrown dirt. It goes from being a bit of fun to a vicious, slashing fight for survival. It makes sense. And it’s done incredibly well.
Go see it.