Shiver me timbers

Once in a while it's fun to go against one's better judgement and make a trip to the movie theater to see a summer blockbuster the way it's meant to be seen. Despite hearing the mixed reviews and not being all that crazy about the other films in the series, we found ourselves at the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie on Saturday night. It was R's pick, but I was fine with the choice. I figured I owed it to myself to see one of these movies on the big screen after having seen the second one on 13-inch television in the woods over our Christmas vacation last year. When it comes down to it, I'm a sucker for a good action movie. This one delivered in that respect, although the action seemed highly condensed into the last 40 minutes or so. Until that point I was shaken by the difficultly I had in following what was going on. I even caught myself nodding off a few times, which, I will say, rarely happens to me in a theater that I spent $10 getting into. I consider it more an indication of me not getting enough sleep last week, and my plot-following problems were probably related to me nodding off a few times during the second installment, which I can justify because, again, I saw it on that 13-inch screen! In case I need to further justify my light slumber, I could also place some blame on the wine that had been consumed at a BYOB restaurant before the movie on Saturday and before/during the one we saw over Christmas. My joke to R was that seeing a trippy Pirates movie in 2007 with a wine buzz is akin to seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey while high in the late 1960s, at least from what I hear. Anyway, I digress. When the movie ended, I didn't think I liked it much. Yet, for some reason, I woke up this morning wanting more. Many of the visuals from the movie were stuck in my head. I started to appreciate the wealth of ideas, the spilling over of story, the ragged wardrobe contrasting with the colorful settings, the coarse pirates of kids' daydreams seeking out adventure for adventure's sake. Maybe it just takes time for an adult to give in to the fun and to stop thinking so much. I went out for a roller-blade ride this afternoon during which my head was filled with thoughts of my childhood: of how we used to assume the Gilbert cemetery was haunted, of how one time I tried to ride my skateboard down the steep road to "the pit" and got going so fast the deck shook until I was thrown into a water-filled ditch half way down, of how we used to camp out in our back yards so we could explore the neighborhood in the middle of the night. If I have a point, it is that the Pirates movies are movies I would have loved as a kid. And it upsets me now to think I could fall asleep during them.