Jackdaw Posts

The sea is wide, the treasure is buried. And Geena Davis is swinging on a rope like she’s auditioning for Errol Flynn’s understudy in a shampoo commercial. Hollywood thought it had found pirate gold. Instead, it sank a studio, scarred careers, and proved that pirates in mid-90s America were as welcome as a shark at a kiddie pool.     Poster for Cutthroat Island, the $100 million treasure that went down with all hands.  Poster by Drew Struzan The Golden Age of Piracy (or, How to Burn $100 Million on Rum and Gunpowder) By the mid-90s, Hollywood was bored of action heroes with mullets and machine guns. Enter Renny Harlin , the Finnish dynamo who blew up planes ( Die Hard 2 ) and mountains ( Cliffhanger ). His pitch: pirates. Not the grim, scurvy-ridden kind with rotting teeth and syphilis, but Hollywood pirates — swashbuckling, witty, dangerous in a family-friendly way. The problem? Nobody wanted pirate movies in 1995. The last hit was decades earlier. The genr...

Before engines, men moved ships. And to move men, you needed a rhythm. This is the raw, rowdy truth behind sea shanties — the soundtrack of survival.  Picture this: a wooden hulk groaning under salt and sweat, sails snapping in the relentless wind, a dozen bedraggled men pulling ropes like their lives depend on it—because they do. How do you keep that ragged crew from throwing each other overboard or jumping first chance? You don’t just bark orders. You sing. Welcome to the brutal, bawdy, beautiful world of sea shanties. These weren’t quaint folk tunes for your mum’s Sunday choir. No, these were the work-songs of the damned and the determined. The soundtrack of survival, forged by men who had one hell of a job and an even hellier thirst for camaraderie. If the sea was the mistress, the shanty was the coping mechanism. The ropes are slack, the song on pause — tomorrow the work begins again.   Not Born on the Waves, But Dragged from Shore Leave Contrary to what your mate ...

Some men are born for greatness. Some for silence. And some — like 1900 — are born on a piano in the belly of an ocean liner, play like a god, and vanish without ever touching land. Tornatore’s The Legend of 1900 is a strange and solitary film. Too soft for awards season, too long for cult status, too odd for mass appeal — and yet, it sticks. It leans into memory, floats on Morricone’s music, and drifts between tall tale and psychological case study. It shouldn’t work. But somehow, it does.   A Ghost, a Piano, and the Loneliest Genius at Sea. Image credit unsplash/ LauraParaschivescu Roth Knows When to Hold Back Tim Roth plays 1900 like he’s trying not to wake anyone. It’s a quiet, internal performance — not lifeless, just closed off. He doesn’t demand attention. He simply wears the role like a coat he’s had for years. A little worn at the elbows, but it fits. There’s no grand arc. No dramatic transformation. He just plays, watches, listens. It’s one of those rare performan...

How a bastard lawyer from Medellín marched into Mexico and broke the world. He didn’t arrive with permission. He arrived with nerve. In 1519, Hernán Cortés sailed west with 11 ships, 500 men, 16 horses, ten small cannon, a few dozen African and Indigenous slaves—and the sort of militant Catholicism that burns cities into footnotes. He wasn’t authorised by the Crown. In fact, the governor of Cuba had revoked his orders. Cortés simply ignored him. He wasn’t there to follow instructions. He was there to take everything. Empire behind the eyes: The steel mask of civilisation—fitted over greed, faith, and fire. Image credit unplash.com One Man’s Mutiny is Another Man’s Empire Before the gold, before the blood, before the empire collapsed into ash and myth—there was paperwork. Cortés landed on the Gulf Coast, quickly ‘founded’ a town called Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz , and had his loyalists appoint him as Captain-General. Instant legitimacy, courtesy of his own signature. Then he scu...

Some apocalypses arrive with fire, brimstone, and guitar solos. Others show up quietly, like an overdue bill or a phone call at 3 a.m. The Quiet Earth belongs to the second kind. No meteor. No mushroom cloud. Just a science experiment that hiccups the universe and forgets to clean up after itself. Welcome to New Zealand, 1985, where the end of the world comes with a gentle shrug and a rising sense of dread.   Silence is louder when there’s no one left to hear it. Image credit unsplash.com/Karsten Alone with the Lights Still On Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) wakes up to find the world has ghosted him. No people. No traffic. No sound beyond the hum of electricity that hasn't realised its masters have left the chat. He's a scientist. Was. Is? It hardly matters now. Murphy's direction wastes no time. Within minutes, we're deep in the strange hush of post-human civilization. Cities still stand. Radios still play. But there's nobody left to listen. It feels less like the wo...

There are moments in history when everything unravels in style—the time when the fashionable aristocrats of France decided that having their heads attached to their bodies was simply too passé. Yes—the French Revolution. That glorious moment when France turned its powdered nose up at monarchy and said, “Off with their wigs… and while we’re at it, off with their heads.” It was a time of bloodshed, chaos, political upheaval—and couture. A savage catwalk of liberty, equality, fraternity… and beheading. Let’s start at the beginning—when France was already a loaf short of a baguette.   Revolutionary Runway: Fashion Takes the Stage   Pre-Revolution: Cake, Debt, and Denial By the late 1700s, France was broke. Not “tighten your belt” broke— desperately flogging state jewels while Versailles hosted garden parties broke. Centuries of war, reckless spending, and a tax system that squeezed the poor and coddled the nobility left the country in an economic tailspin. Meanwhile, the Fi...

Elvis is alive, and he's not happy about it. He's old, arthritic, abandoned, and wasting away in a rundown nursing home where the pudding’s cold and the bedpans are lukewarm. But somewhere between the bingo nights and the unspeakable indignity of growths “on his pecker,” a greater evil emerges—an ancient Egyptian mummy in cowboy boots, feeding on the souls of the forgotten. This is Bubba Ho-Tep , and if that plot summary sounds insane, congratulations—you’re alive.   He came for souls, not sponge baths. The Plot That Shouldn't Work (But Somehow Does) Directed by Don Coscarelli ( Phantasm , The Beastmaster ) and based on a short story by cult author Joe R. Lansdale, Bubba Ho-Tep is a film about: Elvis Presley, who faked his death and swapped places with an impersonator. JFK, also still alive, though now inexplicably Black, brain-altered, and residing in the same care home. A soul-sucking mummy dressed like a down-and-out rodeo reject. Existential dread, cosmic ...