Remember when I predicted my grades?

Well, here’s what actually I got:

History of the English Language — C+
Film & Literature — B
Introduction to Classical Mythology — B+
Tradition & Form Western Fiction — A

Semester GPA: 3.165

(No snark about getting a B in Film & Lit, neither. It wasn’t reading books then watching the movies based on ‘em. It was very abstract — Shakespearean comedies and romantic comedies from the 1930s and 40s. Very abstract.)

I remember my first thought when I heard that a movie was being made based on the Disneyworld/land/whatever attraction “Pirates of the Carribean.” To put it briefly, I thought, “Wow, that’s going to suck.” I didn’t understand how a movie based on a ride like that could be anything but craptastic. As you might imagine, I didn’t see it in theaters, but did get around to watching it when it came out on DVD, where, much to my incredible surprise, I found the movie to be smart, fun, and incredibly enjoyable.

Last year some time, before the sequel came out, I was driving back to drop a friend off at her office after we’d gone out to lunch. She asked if I thought the sequel would be as good as the original. Nope, I sure didn’t. And, once I got out to see it, I found myself agreeing with my own opinion.

So, beginning at 8pm, people (”lemmings”) will be able to get in line to see the third Pirates of the Carribean movie: “At World’s Fart.” Or something. Anyway, the movie is being panned in the press (big shocker):

The entire franchise seems on the verge of collapse, propelled to construct ever more grandiose flights of fancy. Without those sequences, there would be nothing there — but a movie cannot exist on rollick alone (not by the second sequel anyway). I kept flashing to the image of a doomed mariner furiously bailing out his boat as it sinks inexorably beneath the waves.

The problem is not so much that the energy — or the invention — flags. But the audience may. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have been working overtime. Having fabricated an entire supernatural pirate mythology from odds and ends (a theme park here, a Flying Dutchman there), they now feel duty-bound to lay it all out for us as they go…

…We critics routinely shortchange such wonders, but blockbusters thrive on spectacle, and any movie that can produce a 50-foot woman almost as an afterthought has no worries on that score.

At the same time, it’s easier to warm to the vaudevillian Hope-and-Crosby-style comedy director Gore Verbinski keeps trying to smuggle in under the radar, in dozens of throwaway sight gags, madcap verbal non-sequiturs, and slapstick set pieces. Depp is his principal ally, of course, the agent of chaos swanning his way through the heart of the whole shebang.

It’s really too bad this wonderful anarchy is swamped by the movie’s noisy inconsequence. Fully an hour too long — 2 3/4 hours! — and emotionally frigid, “Pirates” is scuppered by nothing so much as its own inflated self-importance.

While I try not to place too much emphasis in what a “critic” thinks, my own experience with this franchise seems to support the notion that this film is gonna blow. Pirates — the original — was one of many movies which should never had any sequels because there was no way possible for the sequel to be better than, as good as, or only marginally “not worse” then the original. And now, what we have, is a great film dragged down by sucky ones.

Bah! I say, bah!

You know Apple has dominated the world when you go to breakfast at International House of Pancakes and abbreviate it “iHOP.”