I did some painting on the garage over the weekend, and in between caught a few movies on DVD, and one actually in a theater.

You’ll marvel, I am sure, to learn that I was the only person in the country who hadn’t yet seen Pirates of the Caribbean. I’ve remedied that omission now.

There were some sword fights, which is (it goes without saying) always good. Having been watching Douglas Fairbanks movies recently, it was interesting to note that movie sword fights are basically what they were back then, except that Fairbanks’ old tricks are passé now, so that the choreographers have to come up with increasingly improbable new tricks.

Someday somebody may want to try a realistic fight. Just for the novelty of the thing.

Nah, that’ll never happen.

They cast Orlando Bloom as a blacksmith, both in this film (I assume the sequels, too) and in Kingdom of Heaven (which I’ve also never seen, and don’t plan to). This makes no sense.

Orlando Bloom makes a fine elf, because he’s built slender, and one assumes that the strength of elves comes from their magic and the elemental balance of their physical composition, not from anything as crude as actual big muscles.

I don’t think there’s ever been a slender blacksmith in the history of the world. They lift weights for a living.

I also must confess I don’t care greatly for Johnny Depp’s stoned pirate routine. It’s original and idiosyncratic, but it took me out of the story—“Oh look! That’s Depp being iconoclastic again.”



Also, I felt the ships weren’t used to good effect. I wrote last week about the “tall ships thing” that moves me so much, and here the ships seemed to be just staging.

But what really irked me was the business about Johnny Depp’s flintlock pistol. They make it a point that he doesn’t want to use it, because he’s saving the charge in it—this particular charge—for Captain Barossa.

So he’s been carrying this pistol around unfired, for what? Ten years? In the Caribbean humidity and a ship’s sea spray? And then it gets dumped in the ocean, and yet it still fires?

In a cartoon, maybe.

I also went to see Hellboy II. Hellboy, in case you’re not aware and are wondering what happened to all my Christian scruples, is a comic book hero who (in his imaginary world) is a demon from hell. But he was rescued and raised by a Christian scholar, who baptized him and enlisted him in the fight against supernatural evil. He grinds down his horns to look less scary, chafes at his separation from society, and loves cigars, Baby Ruth candy bars, and cats (I don’t mean he likes the cats in the same way as he likes cigars and candy bars. He has affection for cats).

Sure, it doesn’t stand up theologically. And I found this film less satisfying from a Christian point of view than the first (for instance, Hellboy and his girlfriend, the pyrokinetic Liz, are clearly cohabiting now). And a check of Hellboy’s Wikipedia page warns me that worse things may be to come, if the series continues.

But for now I’m pretty much OK with it, because the movies are fun. This one had the benefit of a pretty decent sword fight with an elf prince (who must be related to Tolkien’s elves, because his sword was definitely inspired by the ones in the Lord of the Rings movies).

The most delightful scene, though, was one where Hellboy and his friend, the fish-man Abe Sapiens, get drunk together, commiserating over their woman troubles to the sound of Barry Manilow music.

It should be noted that Ron Perlman’s performance as Hellboy deserves consideration for an Oscar nomination. When you remember the layers of foam rubber and silicone prosthetic makeup he has to work through, nobody is better at getting real human emotions out of a monster mask. That training in Beauty and the Beast wasn’t wasted.