It’s true that summer blockbusters get to be summer blockbusters because of shmucks like me: we enthusiastic masses who toss sacks of money - or at least Loews gift certificates - at the theaters to see a particular film not just once - once being perfectly acceptable and nothing anyone can be faulted for - but twice, three times even. But it’s also true that seeing a film more than once is fun in more than one way, because not only do you get to pay attention to different bits of the plot or subplot or Johnny Depp, but you also get to compare the audience to other audiences. A given crowd will often laugh or refrain from laughing as one body, which is weird - how can Jack Sparrow peeking at a statue’s ass be funny to everyone in one audience and nobody in another? And if it’s a herd mentality sort of thing, how do we know what we’re all going to laugh at this time, and what we’ll let pass without reaction? I understand that Geoffrey Rush’s ARRRRR was more inescapably hilarious to the group already prone to making pirate noises, but it elicited not so much as a tee-hee from last night’s group (which did like the statue-ass thing).

And speaking of Pirates (which I suppose I have been rather a lot lately), Scott and I tried briefly today to pin down when exactly it’s supposed to be set. They’ve left it carefully unspecified in the film, which was probably wise given its already tenuous hold on historical accuracy, but I’m curious as to the general era. The best guess I could come up with was circa 1820 (at the latest), but I won’t tell you why (yet). Who can do better? I don’t want random stabs at everything pre-twentieth century, but if you’ve got a reason to think it’s earlier or later than I’ve supposed, do let me know.

Best guess yet: A reader at Disney wrote in to suggest that the reason I’ve heard good guesses ranging from 1720 to 1820 has much to do with the following: “We tried not to place it in a specific year, the idea was to convey a sense of the era. Although the story is on a grand, ambitious scale that you’d expect from, say, the Golden Age, there was also the sense that Jack was the last of his kind, and indeed he does refer to the Black Pearl as ‘the last real pirate threat.’ The tale is really more of a pirate myth brought to life than it is a period piece, that’s why there’s the blurring of uniform items your Navy Nerd noticed.”

Previous best guess: 1817, as pegged by self-proclaimed Royal Navy nerd Sean, who seems to have spent the entire movie staring at Norrington’s uniform. He would like me to note, however, that his second guess would be somewhere between 1790 and 1794 - the confusion arising from difficulties in gleaning details from the uniform of a non-existant rank. We’re pretending for these purposes that Norrington is actually a post-captain of relative seniority.

Very worst guess: “Sometime in the 1600s,” says an (American) reader who goes on to explain that Britain didn’t have a navy after the Revolutionary war.