Apologies on the delays – Snow Kill 2010 threw me off my game and I nearly forgot to keep tabs on the pirates of the world.

For the modern start of serious piracy, we now know one of the newer pirate hunters of the world – the Danes.

In modern pirates of a baseball nature, it looks like Mario Lemieux is aiming to buy the Pittsburgh Pirates, despite them not actually being for sale. I figure that since he already owns the Penguins, he’s just looking to snap up all things of value in Pittsburgh. Only, he’s trying to buy the Pirates, so he’s probably taken a few too many checks into the glass.

In a weird twist of cinematic piracy, we can look to Johnny Depp. Remember how he based Captain Jack Sparrow off of Keith Richards, and then Keith showed up as his dad in the third PotC movie? Eh, it’s a stretch, I know. But yeah, Depp is looking to direct a documentary on Richards.

It’s probably less of a stretch to go with a story about a pirate broadcast. Murdoc Niccals, the not-real bassist for the meta-fictional band Gorillaz, took over AOL Radio for 40 minutes. This was fairly clear to be not much more than a publicity stunt instead of real piracy … but I’m really looking forward to Plastic Beach coming out, so I say it counts as pirate news.

Because of the snow delays, I did ignore a lot of the news that rolled out in the past couple days – so swing back here on Friday, because there’s some good stuff in the works.

There are movies that are good. There are movies that are bad. Then there’re movies that are so bad that they can double back around to epically good.
I confess – I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for those epic bad movies.
I used to write reviews for B movies – not classy indie street-cred movies, but the VHS fare that was only a notch above what shows up on Showtime and Cinemax late at night.
Of those movies that are epically “awesome,” few actually intentionally try to steer into that direction. Often, they’re the result of a movie that seriously thought it was going to achieve awesomeness in a normal fashion. But not The Ice Pirates.
Debuting in 1984, they were forging out into a sci-fi space wasteland already defined by all three of the Original Trilogy. Battlestar Galactica had already made its television impact. Heck, The Last Starfighter was showing up in previews for the summer of ‘84.
Through it all, this movie is pure camp. The setting is in a universe that is running out of water, so gallons have become the main currency. Those in control of the water – the Space Templars – ship it in ice form. And a plucky band of swashbuckling pirates do a complete Han Solo arc, first trying to steal the ice, then getting wrapped up in a plot with a princess, and finally saving the universe.
But the key here is the details. They cleverly play up the use of the word space as an adjective – space herpes, Space Templars, and space amazons riding on unicorns.
Let me recap one key detail – space amazons riding on unicorns. Seriously, you can base your entire desire to see this movie based on whether or not you need to see that on film.
Taking into account the cast of this flick, and it just gets more bizarre. The lead is Robert Ulrich, he who would later go on to be Spenser for Hire. There’s Ron Perlman in his third-ever acting role (as I write this, he’s made 170 movies or tv shows, including Hellboy, Vincent from the Beauty and the Beast tv series, and the Sons of Anarchy. For comparison, Samuel L. Jackson has only gotten in 126 acting roles (including seven still in development). And Jackson has had a seven-year head start. There’s also a young Anjelica Huston, and, well, an acting attempt by Bruce Vilanch. You know, Bruce Vilanch, that guy that writes really bad jokes for the Oscars. Yeah, um… that guy.
So how does it do in terms of piracy?
Not bad, actually. Their standard attack move is one of a faster, lighter ship outrunning a bigger, more heavily armed protection fleet, which would have been a standard “sloop attack” in the buccaneer days. They operate mostly out of an outlaw city similar to Port Royal in its heyday. And only briefly show some pirate trappings like peg legs and eye patches, while completely skipping tropes like walking the plank or looking for buried treasure. From a purely pirate point of view, Ice Pirates is disturbingly accurate.
Also, I will note, Ice Pirates was a favorite film of wee lil dern growing up, so I’m not really likely able to remove my sense of nostalgia from this movie. The space special effects haven’t aged well, and some of the timing is a little sluggish compared to a modern, post-MTV style of storytelling. But overall, it holds up as a campy piece of goofball.

Ahoy and avast ye, it’s time for This Week in Piracy:

First, a treat for my readers near Florida: This Saturday is Gasparilla, a pirate invasion of Tampla, Fla. Somehow this includes a concert by Collective Soul.

In other news, Collective Soul is still together.

Also part of Gasparilla is the 30-year-old Happy Pirate Float, which apparently got a nice refurbishment for the festivities.

Meanwhile, Orlando Bloom has decided that he doesn’t want to be back for PoTC 4, because William Turner “is dead to him.” I wonder if he made that decision just before shooting PoTC 2?
Seriously, not to completely throw the cat under the bus, but I’m a bit surpised that he’s being picky about the roles he’s taking right now. Because if it’s a concern about being type-cast, why on earth is he lobbying for Peter Jackson to insert Legolas into a story that is Legolas free?

In the land of Digital Piracy, this site has an interesting set of numbers and points about music pirates. It’s really not surprising to me that music pirates also tend to be the biggest purchasers of digital music, the legal way. They’re not stealing digital music just to try and destroy the music industry – they’re stealing it because they love music. A lot. Enough to break laws over it.
Meanwhile, when they do get some extra scratch, they’re throwing it down on the artists that they love, which they might not have grown to love if they didn’t download the songs illegally in the first place.

And we’ll wrap it up with a nice, feel-good story about modern pirates – their victims are generally idiots that are not doing anything to protect themselves.