Today's review is <strong>Pirates of the Caribbean 3 - At World's End</strong> starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, and Keira Knightley. I know the DVD just came out this week and I should probably be careful, but there are a few points I'd like to discuss, so <strong>there will be spoilers!</strong> Stop reading here if you want to be surprised.

I wanted to love this movie--I really did. I loved the first one (Curse of the Black Pearl) so much and everyone had been assuring me that World's End was better than Dead Man's Chest, that I expected to enjoy this one even if it wasn't quite as good as the first. I've been waiting for World's End for weeks and made sure I had my last movie in on the right day at NetFlix in order to get this one for the weekend. I <em>did</em> like this movie, but I didn't love it.

Basic plot synopsis is that Jack (Depp) is in Davy Jones' locker and a rescue is launched to bring him back. Each of the major participants has his or her own reason for going, part of a larger agenda that plays out in the film. Rescuing Jack, though, is just the beginning because there's still the evil Lord Beckett to deal with. Because Beckett has the chest containing Davy Jones' heart, he controls Jones and his ship and he's ruthless about using them.

I thought the start of the movie was very slow. It begins with a scene of people marching to the gallows, hanged without trial because the evil Lord Beckett has suspended all rights and basically taken over. There are two things I didn't get about the scene. The first was the part where the prisoners start singing, led by a little boy on the gallows who's holding a piece of eight. When the British soldier reports this to Beckett, he says, "At last." Or words similar to that. Um, why did he want them to sing? It made no sense to me since it had absolutely no bearing on anything in the movie as far as I could see.

My second question about the opening scene is why have it at all? It served no real purpose in the movie at all except to show that Lord Beckett is evil, something that we could have figured out on our own from other scenes if we needed to know it at all. After all, we already love Jack, Will and Elizabeth and we're going to be rooting for them no matter what anyway. This opening scene just seemed completely unnecessary on every level.

You know, I just had a flash of insight come in. I'm looking at this movie as a writer, picking apart scenes, goals, motivations, etc. I don't think I can help myself because when I write or critique for my writing buddies, I'm always analyzing things like this. When it comes to scenes, each one should serve multiple purposes and the opening of POTC3 didn't IMO.

The movie continues to drag as Elizabeth and Barbossa go to Singapore. Things briefly pick up during the fight scene, and I totally loved the monkey and the parrot and their actions, but overall, was finding my attention wandering. I thought it was because I was waiting for Johnny Depp to come on screen.

When Jack finally does appear, it's in the midst of a hallucination where there are many Captain Jack Sparrows aboard the Pearl. This was another scene that dragged on far too long and something much shorter would have sufficed. Again, I found myself asking what's the point of this?

Other problems I had involve characterization. Will Turner was the biggest issue for me. In the first movie, Will possesses honor to an extreme degree. As he works with Jack to rescue Elizabeth, he learns that the real world, particularly the pirate world, doesn't have that same kind of code. At the end of Curse of the Black Pearl, he frees Jack to his own detriment because it's the honorable thing to do. That's a far cry from the Will we see in World's End. This Will is as conniving and duplicitous as any pirate. What happened to his sense of honor? I don't remember anything from Dead Man's Chest that would make me believe such a drastic cha

I received a great review from Romantic Times BOOK Reviews for In the Midnight Hour!

"O'Shea ratchets up the paranormal thrills with this inventive and clever new tale. In book after book, she's has been proving why she's destined to be a significant player in the paranormal genre. Rich with action, drama and passion, this is pure paranormal pleasure!"

How cool is this???

My favorite parts are where Midnight Hour was called "inventive and clever" and the line where it says that I'm "destined to be a significant player in the paranormal genre."

The only downside is that something was revealed in the review that I wish wasn't. I knew it would happen and that it will probably occur in most of the reviews the book gets because the event happens in the first three chapters. Reviewers generally consider anything in that area as fair game to be mentioned.

When I was writing this book, I didn't give my writing buddy any warning about what I had planned, and her reaction when she read the scene that revealed the information was priceless. I was hoping all the readers would be able to have that kind of delighted surprise, but I knew the odds were against it. Ah, well.

In other news, revisions went well yesterday and I made really good progress. Of course, I still have a couple of the bigger changes left to handle, but I'm cruising through the littler ones. Yea!

I talked to a woman at work about my poor flowers being sheared off and she thought it might be a cut worm. She recommended some powder stuff that won't hurt the plants or any animals, yet keeps the bugs away. I now have a bag of it and my dad volunteered to put it on for me this morning. Hopefully, the protection will save the rest of my flowers.

Revision work started out a little slow yesterday. I struggled with out to fix one of the problems, but once I got through that, I was able to power through a lot of chapters. Today, though, I hit the scenes requiring the most work, so it's going to be a long day.

Yesterday evening, I walked down to the tree ring to check on my flowers and something had ruined three more of my starfighter lilies! They appeared as if they'd been bitten through and a fourth had the leaf edges chewed off the top. Do rabbits do this? We have a lot of them around this area. I talked to my dad and I'm hoping he's going to put up some kind of wire fence to protect my beautiful flowers. If it's insects that did it, though, I guess I'm SOL. :-( I was not happy to see the destruction.

I managed to have an all day baseball extravaganza while I revised. I love having a game on, with the sound muted, while I'm writing. I was able to go from a noon game, to a 3pm game, to a 6pm game. I wish every day I write was like that. :-)

I also had a new character come in yesterday while I was revising. She did interfere with my revising, so I wasn't thrilled. I also wasn't thrilled because this puts me at like five projects now that I might/will tackle when I finish revisions and work on getting proposals together. I'm not sure if I'll do this new character's story, although it is intriguing. It's just a pretty bleak world she lives in and I was hearing her story in first person. Ugh! I hate first person.