Without a Doubt, The Worst Pirate I’ve Ever Seen?

Am I the only one totally underwhelmed with the prospect of this new Pirates of the Caribbean movie? Johnny Depp’s Keith Richards impression was hilarious the first time out, but the second movie just wasn’t great. Pirates are cool without adding organ-playing, computer-generated sea monsters. (Of course, it netted like a billion dollars in ticket sales, so what do I know?) Someone seriously needs to remake Captain Blood. Now that’s a real pirate movie.

At World’s End will have Chow Yun-Fat, though, and Geoffry Rush is coming back, thank God (I didn’t realize he was the best part of the first movie until he showed up at the end of that boring Dead Man’s Chest). So maybe I’ll hand my 8 bucks over to Disney, after all….

Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh!

There’s an article by Julian Gough (who just won Britain’s National Short Story Prize for his work “The Orphan and the Mob” which he described as being like Star Wars, but set in Tipperary) in this month’s Prospect, about the importance of comedy and the West’s overbearing preference for tragedy. He draws a straight line from the uneven survival of classical tragedies v. comedies and the dourness of the Middle Ages to Granta’s gloomy 2nd list of “Best Young American Novelists,” via novelists’ twentieth-century move to the universities. His conclusion is interesting:

“Don’t you touch that sumbitchin boat!”

In honor of the movie version of Aqua Team Hunger Force, a question: What’s the best Adult Swim cartoon? ATHF is, of course, a popular choice; it makes slightly more sense than the ones assembled from footage of Hanna Barbara characters, namely Sealab 2021 (what a catchy theme song!), Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law (with Stephen Colbert!), and the classic that launched the entire AS enterprise, Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

My favorite? Squidbillies. It opens with a Billy Joe Shaver song. It’s about hillbilly squids. And the sheer number of brilliant Atlanta jokes boggles the mind. The Cyclorama? Covered. Blue laws? Covered. Georgia state lottery? You betcha. Early wears hats that advertise both “David Allen Coe Live In Macon” and “Sonny Lied!” (for those unfamiliar with the politics of the state of Georgia, the biggest controversy of Gov. Sonny Perdue’s term was that he promised to hold a referendum on whether to remove the Confederate battleflag from the state flag; he didn’t.) His malapropisms make him a veritable Southern Dogberry.

All in all, the show’s pretty much the polar opposite of Southern Living’s construction of Southern identity.

Your thoughts?

Ironic

TLR: True Love Revolution, an on-campus abstinence group, or Tuchman Living Room, the epicenter of partying debauchery at Harvard?

Discuss.

i love harvard

it rocks.