Box Office Treasure Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides [breaking news musing]

Despite my hopes for humanity, the fourth installment of the Pirates franchise managed to bring in $90.1 million on opening weekend. I'd really been hoping that people would be able to tell this would be a stinker, but what can you do. The temptation of 3D is partly at play here, as well as high hopes from the quality of the past three films. I'm surprised people still haven't realised that the pattern with Pirates of the Caribbean has been a decline in quality. The Curse of the Black Pearl has been able to maintain a respectable 8.0 rating on IMDB, Dead Man's Chest has a 7.3, and At World's End has a 7.0. As you can see, the movies have gotten successively worse.

If you check out IMDB right now, On Stranger Tides will have something like a 7.2 rating. If you're unfamiliar with how IMDB works, don't get excited. Ratings always start really high with a new blockbuster, and drop really low with time if the movie doesn't hold up against harsher critics. At the time of writing, it only has 11,000 votes, as opposed to CotBP with 268k.

Why am I smashing the new Pirates movie without writing a full-on review? Come on, I'm not made of money. I can't go buy movie tickets for every p.o.s. movie that comes out. The reviews I've heard are mixed, the highest praise being that it continues to deliver juicy fan-fair, and the lowest being that it was a convoluted piece of garbage. Don't be surprised when On Stranger Tides sinks over the next few weeks.

I've read Twilight. [review time]

Good cover design. Bad writing.

That's right. I went to a bookstore, stood in line, paid close to $13, and spent a couple precious hours of my life turning the pages of the first book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series. And I was not disappointed. It was exactly what I expected it to be. A page turner that creates an ideal soap-opera love interest, often described as perfect and god-like, who falls desperately in love with a normal, nothing special whiney teenage girl. And of course he’s so enraptured by this pathetic nobody that he can barely keep himself from eating her. She just smells so good.

As a Fantasy reader I really have to comment of the gimmicky-ness of the use of the Vampire in this story. Sure, Meyer is using the tradition of the sex predator consuming an innocent young woman, but she’s also destroying the legend for no reason other than to tell a sappy love story. He’s a vegetarian. Please give me one good reason why a soulless being that thrives off sucking human blood would just decide that it’s ‘wrong’.

Vampire Objection - Twilight by Stephenie Meyer [review time]

I have not read the Twilight series, but my objection is that Meyer has altered the Vampire fiction genre without contributing anything to the meaning. The idea of vampirism has long been a comment on humanity’s quest for immortality and the cost of such a quest. It is similar to the Faustian bargain of selling one’s soul, but in this case the soulless become a prey upon their former race. By altering this trope, Meyer destroys the idea of the cost of immortality in order to create a new class of bad boy for teens to swoon over. I much prefer Joss Whedon’s creation of a soulless, demonic race that cannot experience desire, love or empathy, to demonstrate the cost of immortality and the undesirable condition of vampirism. Anne Rice deviates from this with the character of Lestat, who regrets his disconnection with his humanity, giving a foil to the character of Louis, who revels in his condition.