Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Henry Turner, the 9 year-old son of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, paddles out to sea then jumps overboard with a rock tied to his ankle.  He sinks to the bottom and lands on the deck of the Flying Dutchman.  The ship surfaces and his father (Orlando Bloom), who is partly covered by barnacles, confronts him.  Henry has a plan to free his father from the Dutchman but his father is skeptical.

Ten years later, Henry (Brenton Thwaites) is aboard a British Man-o-War as it chases down a pirate ship.  Seeing that the ship is about to sail into suicidal waters, he confronts the captain and is soon tossed into the brig.  Of course, the ship sinks and the ghost of Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem) leaves Henry alive to tell Jack Sparrow that vengeance is coming.

In St. Martin, Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario) has been convicted of witchcraft - because erudition is a clear sign of sorcery in women - and sentenced to hang.  However, she manages to escape the prison because she is also skilled at picking locks.  She happens to dash past the grand opening of a new bank.

 

In the bank is none other than Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), who is clearly inebriated, entangled with the banker's wife, and rather perplexed as to why he is there.  It turns out that he is robbing the bank.  Thus begins a ludicrous chase in which a team of horses drag the entire bank through the streets while Jack attempts to intercept and just happens to bump into Carina on the way.

 

To add to the cast of characters, Captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) has risen to the pinnacle of the Caribbean pirate hierarchy but the unleashed ghost of Captain Salazar is wiping out his fleet and can only be sated by the death of Jack Sparrow.  Thus, Barbossa sets out to find Jack.

 

Inevitably, all these parties collide in outlandish and comedic fights and chases.  Henry and Carina provide the romance.  It is a fun romp, but - like Alien: Covenant - does not bare much scrutiny after its over.

 

There are plenty of anachronisms, some of which have occurred in previous films in the franchise.  The guillotine is still some decades from being invented and, even when it was, it was not adopted by the British.  Why is everyone baffled by the idea of celestial navigation?  Carina is the only one who can navigate by stars.  Also, Carina is familiar with John Harrison's use of chronometers for determining longitude and uses a pocket watch for that purpose.  Such pocket watches were not introduced until 1759.  However, Blackbeard (died 1718) was prominent in the last movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.  Jack should be a very old man.  Executions of witches mostly ended with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, long before Carina was born but I suppose having an educated woman accused of witchcraft was supposed to be funny?

 

The movie contains the modern practice of making oafs out of men and a paragon out of the heroine.  Carina can do no wrong and is this endless source of confidence, witty comments, and demeaning barbs  At one point she asks if all pirates are this stupid to which all the pirates agree.  Yes, it was funny but it plays to an all too common trope in modern movies.  When she is on the gallows, she starts to give a lecture to the unwashed and banters with Jack who is about to be guillotined.  When rescued (no, that isn't a spoiler, we all knew she was going to be rescued), she upbraids her rescuer for the placement of his hands.  Such gratitude.

 

There is a post credit scene that promises a sequel with Will and Elizabeth.  At the current pace, I suspect this one will take place during the Napoleonic Wars.

Fake News Marches On

Here is a story that shows why Trump thinks the media are both hostile and fake.  Rather than headphones, Trump only wore an earpiece in one ear to hear translations during the G7 summit.  However, a casual observer could conclude that he wasn't listening.  One must remember, Trump has a very particular hairstyle and clunky headphones are not helpful in maintaining it.  Thus, he was just wearing an earpiece in his right ear.

 

The negative version - that he was ignoring the Italian translation - was posted on Twitter and has been spread far and wide - 20,000 retweets.  The correction was later posted on Twitter and it went nowhere - 175 retweets.  The false story - which reflects poorly on Trump - has vastly better circulation than the correction.  This is not unusual.  When papers publish a front page story that proves to be incorrect, the correction is very rarely front page news.

 

Is it any wonder that the media is distrusted?

Alien: Covenant

The movie opens on Earth with David (Michael Fassbender) having a discussion with a middle-aged Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), setting this scene decades before the events in Prometheus.  The story resumes a decade after the Prometheus went missing.  Walter (Michael Fassbender) is aboard the Covenant, a colony ship bound for Origae-6.  The ship is struck by a neutrino burst that requires waking the crew.  Several colonists and Captain Branson are killed in their stasis pods.  First Mate Christopher Oram (Billy Crudup) becomes the new captain and the new first mate is Dany Branson (Katherine Waterston), the grieving wife of the deceased Captain Branson.  While repairing the damage, Tennessee (Danny McBride) intercepts a signal - clearly human - from a nearby planet that appears to be a near perfect planet for a colony.  Though Dany advises against it, Oram changes course to investigate.

 

The planet looks great and even at the landing site, Oram starts plotting where to build the new colony.  Of course, a couple of crewmen are soon infected with a parasite that quickly grows into a xenomorph.  Disaster follows catastrophe and the surviving crew are rescued from rampaging xenomorphs by the arrival of David, formerly of the Prometheus.  David explains how Dr. Elizabeth Shaw died when they crashed on the planet and the planet is devoid of any non-xenomoprhs because of the parasite.

 

The movie is engaging and generally fun though often the suspension of disbelief becomes impossible.  The cluelessness of some characters grates although not as much as in Prometheus.  There is some great action and all the standard tropes one expects from an Alien movie.

 

Spoilers beyond this point

 

Oram is abysmally stupid.  Oh, and he is very religious.  Therefore, devout people are stupid and make terrible decisions.  I see no other reason for highlighting his religiosity.   First, showing absolutely no sympathy, he literally orders that there will be no observance of the death of Captain Branson and is later irritated that Dany and several others had an impromptu funeral for him.  Seriously?  How much more unsympathetic can we make this idiot?  The ship arrives at the signal origin and the majority of the crew go to the planet to investigate its habitability and the source of the signal.  They are not wearing any sort of air filtration as they exit the ship.  I'm sure it will be fine.  No, it turns out that it isn't fine.  The landing craft is destroyed and the survivors are stranded.  Oram finds David communicating with a full-grown xenomorph that has clearly just killed one of the crew in an area that David had assured them was safe.  Does Oram shoot the clearly treacherous android?  No.  Does he restrain him?  No.  Does he tell the rest of his crew?  No.  Our genius, devoutly religious captain follows David into the bowels of the complex and then, with further assurances that it is perfectly safe, approaches an alien egg that opens when he gets close.  Then, with added prompting to take a look, sticks his face in it to see what that thing is under the surface.  Hello, Facehugger.  Now, if he hadn't already seen an alien burst from one of his crew, this truly clueless decision might have rated slightly lower on the abysmal stupidity scale but not by much.  Sadly, he is not the stupidest character.

In the most brainless move ever, Dany leaves Walter to fight it out with his identical twin, David.  When 'Walter' rejoins her later, she has no doubts that it's Walter.  After all, Walter has only one hand and the android that just climbed aboard has only one hand; it must be Walter.  Back on the Covenant, a xenomorph has burst from one of the survivors and starts killing the remnants of the crew.  It is left to Dany, Tennessee, and 'Walter' to kill it.  At the end, Dany has just put Tennessee in his stasis pod and climbs into her own.  Walter is just activating it when she asks a question that Walter should be able to answer but isn't.  Oh no!  You're not Walter!  Gee, how did you not see that coming?  How did you not have some means of confirming that you came back with the correct android?  Heck, even if you did come back with the right android, it probably would have been wise to jettison him into space just to be certain.

 

In a flashback scene, we are shown that David hovered over the Engineer city and unleashed the plague that was meant for Earth.  The whole planet was swept of all animal life.  But this doesn't fit what we have seen previously.  We are led to believe that the Engineers abandoned LV-223 - the planet from Prometheus - hundreds of years ago but we have the Engineer homeworld in range of a comparatively ancient ship.  Huh?  Also, if David only committed planet-wide genocide in the last decade, where are all the cities and ruins?  Even from space, the Covenant should have been able to see that a vast and highly advanced civilization had lived here.  Why no satellites in orbit?  This spacefaring race seems to live primitively.  Surely, David didn't arrive on the only spaceship on the planet and their must be some means of traveling from population center to population center.  Or did this one dinky city constitute the whole of Engineer population?

 

Walter observes that David is insane.  Sure, he is a nutter but he's also stupid.  His goal is to get off the planet with his 'children.'  He practically danced with glee when he heard there were 2,000 colonists on the Covenant.  The last thing he should be doing is infecting the crew that might get him off the planet.  Heck, with every infected individual, that is one more mark against Tennessee launching a rescue.

 

If Tennessee had any sense, he would have set course for Origae-6 as soon as he learned his wife had died when the lander exploded.  Even if he does rescue the survivors, they absolutely, positively must been in quarantined, not mingling with the 3 crewmen who didn't set foot on the death planet.

 

It was enjoyable while watching it but collapsed under the weight of its stupidity when I had an opportunity to think about it.  Leave your brain behind - most of the Covenant crew did - and enjoy the popcorn fun.

Spinning the Portland Stabbings

On Friday, Jeremy Christian started ranting at a pair of Muslim women on a train.  Several men attempted to intervene, at which point Christian stabbed them, killing two and injuring one.  This story in the Washington Post offers a lot of added information that was first filtered through other sources.  For example, The Portland Mercury states that he was a "known right wing extremist and white supremacist."  Right-wing?  Are they saying he is a Republican?  That is the implication.  Of course, there is also a picture of him giving a Nazi salute and Nazis are invariably described as right wing despite being National Socialists.  Reading further, some information about Christian's Facebook page - provided by the notorious Southern Poverty Law Center - exposes him as a racist, white supremacist who hails Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, as a hero and a patriot.  However, SPLC fails to reveal that the Facebook page shows Christian was a supporter of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, a couple of Socialists.  Huh.  I'm sure that was unintentional.

 

On Twitter, Jill Stein complained that this was a "tragedy in Trump's America."  If she only read the Washington Post, her conclusion that Christian is a Trump supporter is not unreasonable.  However, another post that the SLPC didn't provide declared Christian's opposition to pipelines (presumably Keystone XL and Dakota Access) and the prison/military industrial complex, both popular left-wing views.  As for white supremacists, the KKK was founded by Democrats.

Yes, Voter Fraud does Exist

According to this story, there really were fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.  No, not millions but certainly hundreds, maybe thousands.  In the case of North Carolina, about 500 fraudulent votes have been discovered.  Of course, since Trump's margin in the state was over 100,000 votes, it made no difference.  However, sometimes 500 votes make all the difference.

In 2000, George W Bush won the presidency by 537 votes in Florida.

In 2004, Christine Gregoire lost with the initial count (by 261 votes) and lost again in the mandatory recount (by 42 votes).  However, she was declared the winner of the Washington gubernatorial race after a SECOND recount put her 129 votes ahead of Dino Rossi.

In 2008, Al Franken defeated incumbent Norm Colemen and secured a 60 seat supermajority in the United States Senate by 255 votes.  These 255 votes allowed for the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

It is a virtual certainty that there is voter fraud in every election and that, in the vast majority of cases, it makes no difference because of the margin.  However, in some cases, the payoff can be huge.  Was there fraud in the examples given?  Perhaps.  Whether there was or wasn't, the case of North Carolina shows that fraud does occur and is large enough to change the outcome in close elections.  This is why making sure that the people who vote are allowed to vote and don't vote multiple times is important.  One can argue about how to keep fraud out of voting but everyone ought to agree that it should be done.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

The crew of the Milano have been hired by the Sovereign race to protect some powerful batteries from a transdimensional squid monster.  Their battle with the beast happens during the opening credits where Baby Groot's antics are the center of attention while the action is background.  No sooner have they defeated the monster and secured payment - a very unhappy Nebula (Karen Gillan) - than Rocket (Bradley Cooper) steals some of the batteries and provokes a space battle from the irate Sovereign.  They are rescued from their peril by Ego (Kurt Russell), who proves to be Peter's (Chris Pratt) father and pretty much a god.  The Sovereign hire Yondu (Michael Rooker) to capture the Starlord and his crew.  In the aftermath of the space battle, the Milano is a crippled wreck.  Rocket and Groot work on repairing it and keep an eye on the captive Nebula while Peter, Gamora, and Drax go with Ego for a family reunion on Ego's planet.  This splits the narrative between the two groups.

 

All the characters get further development along the lines one expects and new ones are added to the mix.  The sibling rivalry between Gamora and Nebula explodes, the sexual tension between Peter and Gamora advances, Rocket's self-pity parade continues, Drax's mourning for his family is further explored but he also develops into a somewhat more comical figure than last movie.  Of course, Baby Groot is just hilarious and adorable.  All that aside, the big character arc is that of Yondu.  His banishment from the larger Ravager community, his association with the original Guardians - led by Stakar Ogord (Sylvester Stallone), and his contentious father-son relationship with Peter are all explained.  He also gets the best line of the movie: "I'm Mary Poppins, Y'all!"

 

The movie is very enjoyable but the pacing is not as good as the last one.  The movie gets slow and clunky when Peter and Ego have their father-son bonding.  I did not particularly like Yondu's magic whistle arrow in the last movie (why didn't one of those idiots shoot him rather than just stand baffled as he whistled left-right-up-down-zig-zag?) and it is even worse this time around.  Perhaps that was for comedic effect but raining bodies was over the top.  There are 5 mid and post-credit scenes that setup future installments and provide laughs.  Go see it and stay all the way to the end.

Moore, Roger Moore

Roger Moore (1927-2017) has died.  I saw my first James Bond movie in 1977, Roger Moore's best outing as the character in The Spy Who Loved Me.  I became a Bond fanatic and Moore was instantly my favorite Bond.  In fact, he was probably my favorite actor at the time, which is funny when you consider his very narrow range.  While he was Bond, he was a hot commodity and had plenty of work.  When video stores arose with VHS, I always kept an eye out for Roger Moore movies.  Shout at the Devil, Sherlock Holmes in New York, The Naked Face, The Sea Wolves, ffolkes, The Wild Geese, and more.  I watched reruns of The Saint, his British TV series that was the basis of the disappointing Val Kilmer version which featured the saddest excuse ever for a cameo for Moore.  When I became more discerning, my preferences changed but Moore remains the first Bond to me despite following Connery in the role.  After he left the Bond franchise, at least 2 films too late, he vanished.  The last movie I saw of his in the theaters was The Quest, a Jean-Claude Van Damme stinker in which Moore played a dodgy aristocrat.

 

As Bond, Moore was the most humorous of the bunch and brought a tongue in cheek quality to the series.  My favorite of his Bond films is For Your Eyes Only.  It played like a Cold War thriller rather than a fantasy spy movie.  It was a nice return to earth after Moonraker.

 

RIP