6 Degrees of Pirates

A bunch of us went to the premier showing of Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest at the Paseo "yesterday" at 12:01 am. (When I was buying these tickets online, one of the sites listed the show time as "24:01" on Thursday. Dude!)

This was one of those situations where it was necessary (1) to buy the tickets beforehand and (2) to arrive really early. We got there 1.5 hours before the start and finding seats was already starting to become problematic. In preparation, we brought 3 DSes and one PSP, but sadly some of them weren't as recharged as much as we had hoped. We played some Meteos (and Joe played some baseball and some Meteos), and I finally started to get the hang of the game a bit---it really helped that I was actually able to concentrate on playing instead of guarding seats! During desperate moments, I relied on "the wiggling strategy," and it seemed to work quite well (or at least much better than expected). As I explained at the theatre, this strategy is based, in part, on probability theory.

After more and more video game systems needed recharging (or were put down to be able to preserve a saved game before recharging was needed---mine was the only one left at the end), we gradually added more non-video game stuff to our repertoire. (Gazebo: You're about to get your text message fully explained.) For example, Joe and I started playing "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." Unfortunately, none of us had any idea which movies he was in (between all four of us, we could name approximately 0 such movies), and this made playing the game rather hard. After barely escaping becoming stuck in a cycle of kung-fu movies, we decided that maybe we should call Gazebo as a lifeline. (The infamous text message was a result of our not being able to reach him.)

We saw a brief Transformers trailer (more of a teaser, really) that I didn't realize was The Transformers until the very end. I suspect that it premiered with the release of Pirates (the third of which is slated for 2007).

Now let me make some comments about the movie. It was definitely very good and I recommend it very highly, but it falls into the category of "more of the same" in that I enjoyed the first movie much more simply because the whole thing was newer. Had I never seen the first movie, I bet I would rank this one comparably to the first rather than a notch below it because of the feelings of deja vu.

By the way, one of the things from the trailer got changed slightly in a way that made the sequence of lines a bit worse. (It was really cool in the trailer but only ok in the film.)

We can get into some more details about the movie in further discussion, but for those of you who haven't seen it yet, you should definitely stay until the end of the credits. (During a somewhat related part in the movie, I was thinking briefly of a particular scene in Ice Age 2.)

Now, stop reading this and go see the bloody movie, you bugger!