What if God, knowing that in creating the world He had also unleashed so much suffering that it would prove too terrible for His creatures to contend with, decided to designate one person upon whom all the world's opprobrium would be heaped, one pitiful receptacle for all of the jealousy and hatred and envy and general distemper, one poor penitent who, by bearing the brunt of all the petty prejudice, allowed the rest of us to empty ourselves enough of such debilitating disgust that we would be able to otherwise carry on with our miserable lives? If you knew that this were the case, would you still [...]

They came slowly, the franchise films, the grandchildren of the serials. The other night I was in the theater trying to see The Green Hornet for the second time (the first time, the theater started to burn down 30 minutes in, so I had to, like, evacuate (evacuate the theater, I mean, not like, in my pants), and then the next day sit through act one twice, which wasn't really the worst thing), and there was the omnipresent trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides. And it suddenly occurred to me that we were on the fourth movie of a franchise built around a really rather [...]