I had the misfortune

to go and see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on Saturday evening. The fine art of the summer blockbuster has recently been reconciled to me, after about a decade of continuous disappointments, by The Da Vinci Code and X-Men 3, and so I was anticipating said nautical antics with enthusiasm.

Boy, was I wrong about that. This is the most calculatedly evil film ever made. Had it had the decency to be outright bad I might have written it off as a poor choice of movie and immediately forgotten about it. No, this was a film which somehow, astonishingly, managed to burn $1.7 million per minute and yet be relentlessly, stupefyingly boring. 'Disjointed', 'incoherent' and 'terminally dull' are terms which would adequately describe this film only if accompanied by repeated blows with a baseball bat to the head of the listener.

"It's dis-" <thwack> "-join-" <thwack> "-ted!"
"Ah, I understand now."

Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is nothing less than a perfectly encapsulated explanation of all that is wrong with the western world. It presents irrefutable proof that there is no God. In short, this film is a horrifying cultural singularity the likes from which civilisation is unlikely to recover.

Ach, what the hell. I'll give it 3/5.

In other news, Jeff and Devon are back from the States; post-viva, Jeff is now a PhD (excellent stuff!), and during a thought-experiment this afternoon I invented a cocktail called "Optimus Prime". Good times!