Pirates of the Cineplex

Yesterday, I accompanied three 12-year-old boys to the local cineplex to see Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. It's an excellent movie of the pirate genre, thanks largely to Johnny Depp's performance as rascally Captain Jack Sparrow. He played the character as a sort of 18th-century hippie, and it worked. (The film is about 20 minutes too long, but it's a minor quibble.)

In the car on the way home, we were the discussing the question of whether pirates still exist today. I said yes, but not so much on the seven seas anymore. Today's pirates make and sell illegal copies of movies and CDs, I said. Then the boys told me that they had seen a man three rows in front of us at the theater, videotaping the entire movie with his camcorder. How appropriate: a pirate pirating a pirate movie.