Saturday, May 26, 2007

Third Time's Fatal

This is the year of the thirds. Spiderman 3, Shrek the Third, Pirates 3. I have now seen all three of these third movies. Here is my one sentence summary of each one.

Spiderman 3: Sadly not as good as the second one; too many badguys, too much unneccessary plot development.

Shrek the Third: They did not try to make it better than the first or second, thus it fulfilled its vision and was good in and of itself.

Pirates 3: Just plain awesome, the third movie that can remind us all why trilogies work so well.

I saw Pirates 3 last night. You must go and see it for yourself. It was amazing. Barbosa is the ultimate badguy and the ultimate badass. I think Geoffrey Rush may have topped my list of favorite actors.

Now, I have a little trivia game relating to the Pirate movies. I want you to participate. You are not allowed to look any of the answers up on any internet search engine or Wikipedia. You are allowed to remember them from literature and look them up in books if you want. These questions pertain to the Pirate movies only because the Pirate movies took from other mythos to create their fantasy world. It's a spectacular fantasy world and well done, but obviously got everything wrong. Not that it matters, I had too much fun to care. I just have this thing about knowing where your story comes from. It's weird, but I want people to have some understanding that a story can be created from other stories and still be good, but that it may not be true to the stories it came from. It's good to know where it came from even though it's not real history. There are reasons why people write stories. Actually, I really just want to say that if one more person insists to me that in nautical lore Davy Jones was the captain of The Flying Dutchman I am going to scream. Here are the questions:

1. Who was Calypso in Greek mythology?
2. Who was the actual goddess of the sea in Greek mythology?
3. Who/what was Davy Jones (hint: that's not a Dutch name)?
4. What does the term "Davy Jones locker" actually mean?
5. Who was the real captain of The Flying Dutchman (hint: he had a Dutch name)?
6. What was the captain of The Flying Dutchman famous for?
7. What was the significance of seeing The Flying Dutchman?
8. Who really ferried dead souls to the Underworld in Greek mythology?
9. What do pirates do?
10. Why is that cool?

The last two are jokes because I wanted a total of ten questions. I will probably post the answers at some point.

4 comments:

MattA said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
MattA said...

1. Calypso is featured in The Odyssey, and delayed Odysseus on the island of Oyigia with her feminine wiles.
2. Tethys, a titaness, original sea goddess

8. Charon, as featured in the Aeneid
9. Loot and Plunder (Captain Planet...)
10. Because you rob from the rich... to become rich!

Tracy said...

Esther did you like Pirates 2? I thought that movie was so awful...please tell me it's better than 2.

Esther said...

I did like Pirates 2, not as much, but I did like it. I think it was the ending that I really liked. Having Barbosa back made the third one more promising and made me forget some of the wrongs of the second one.

Pirates 3 was better than 2. The beginning is slow and kind of awful. I had a hard time getting into it. But the fun starts after that. It's rather convoluted with most of the characters plotting behind other people's backs etc, etc for much of the movie. Johnny Depp was brilliant and they had a new twist on his character that really worked. The lines are a lot better than in 2. In fact, the script was really good. It was a little long overall.

I would say yes, it is better than 2. Mainly because Barbosa is back full force and in my book, he really made the first one good. But also because the third one attempted to be its own movie instead of relying entirely on the previous (like the second one did).