These comments of Antares’ so perfectly express my own feelings, that I must reiterate them in order to express my complete agreement. 
Mmmm, swishy-drunken pirate mannerisms…
And, um, Poysyn? The theater caught on fire? Do I want to know the story behind that?
Kn(But… Why’s the rum gone?!)ckers
**About Jack’s apparent “drunkenness” – **
I read that Johnny Depp adopted the “drunken” walk and movements because he thought that Cap’n Jack would have spent many years out in the sun and it had fried his brain.
Now, where the HECK did I read that?!?!
MY favorite line (well, one of them, there were soooo many!) was when Jack ripped off Elizabeth’s corset to save her from drowning and one of the Brits said something like “I wouldn’t have known how to do that” and Jack replies “Clearly, you’ve never been to Singapore.” Hee!
I like the sealegs/sunfriedbrain theories, but…
(if in real life) it would’ve just been an affectation.
Consider: He was able to walk on narrow beams during the blacksmithshop swordfight. Right before the swordfight, he was able to figure a Disneylandridelike way to get out of the shackles. He was savvy enough to put Bloom in his place on board Intrepid and was prepared to pilot the ship all by him lonesims (Bootstrap Jr wasn’t much help anyways, being a smithy til that point.) The complicated reasoning behind staeling a piece of gold himself so he would survive the climatic swordfight. The climatic swordfight itself. Keeping his balance on top of the thrown sword at the attempted execution at the end.
“You cheated!”
“Pirate! (?)”
He cheated all the time. The affectation of swishyoddness gave him the upper hand in situations where he wasn’t personally known, just known by reputation.
My God, I’ve over analyzed this.
Soitanly.
One thing I didn’t heard clearly was the reason he let Will Turner accompany him, instead of letting him fall into the ocean…
Leverage.
?
Well, what he told Will at the time was that he needed help sailing the ship, since he couldn’t do it himself (that would be the line that AntaresJB quoted above).
In truth he needed Will (as Archernar said) for leverage. Will gave Jack the upper hand, because Barbossa needed Will (or, more properly, his blood) to lift the curse.
Savez?
Jack promised to take Will to the Black Pearl in exchange for Will’s busting him out of jail. While this is true, the real reason is that Jack knew Barbossa wanted Will, so Jack was going to try to trade Will for the Black Pearl.
What I thought was funny was when Jack was captured by the pirates, he almost talked Barbossa into trading the name of Will Turner’s child for the Pearl. “You intend to leave me, with naught but a name, on a beach, watching you sail away in my ship?” “No, I intend to leave you, on a beach, with no name, watching me sail away in my ship, and I shout the name back to you.”
Can you picture what that would have been like? Jack sails away and yells back at him, “Will Turner, Jr.! Sucker!”
I got the leverage part, later on in the movie. I was just curious as to what exactly he said to Will was the reason. The question mark was because I don’t remember Sparrow telling Will “Leverage!”.
Sparrow didn’t tell Will he needed him for leverage; he told Drunk-on-Pigs pirate that the boy was leverage.
KarlGrenze, I don’t think it was said specifically, but I do recall Will exclaiming to Jack “I will not be your leverage,” just before he conked him with the oar in the cave. It doesn’t necessarily say that’s actually why Jack took him. As for “instead of dropping him into the ocean,” may I assume you are referring to when he had Will dangling off the sail when they were on the…was it the Interceptor? I believe the reason Jack didn’t drop him then was just as he said: He couldn’t sail the ship alone. There could be more to it, but I don’t think there was.
Do correct me if I’m off my onion, here.
Okay, look. The whole sidelining Will off the edge of the Interceptor thing was not a threat on his life. It was just to make Will shut up, drop his sword, and listen for a second. If you recall, just before that, Will was ready to start a fight for what he thought was an insult against his father.
OK, know that we’ve entered full spoilage mode, I’ve got some questions about the curse.
During the Sparrow/Barbossa swordfight, Jack looks like a skeleton when the moonlight hits him. But he’s only had a coin a short time. Barbossa and the others didn’t realize the curse was real until they had already scattered their coins. I took that to mean they didn’t turn into skeletons right away. So is it different for Jack – why?
Jack shoots Barbossa before Will drops the bloody coin into the chest, while Barbossa is still undead. So why does Barbossa die from the wound, but Jack suffers no effect from being run through with a sword?
I know undead pirate movies don’t have to make perfect sense, but I wondered if there was something I missed that would explain things. And a wizard did NOT do any of it.
BuckleberryFerry, thanks, yea, that’s what I was wondering, I couldn’t understand (ie, decipher) what Sparrow said to Will in that scene. I realize he was not going to abandon him, but I was wondering what he said to him.
Duke: 1. Perhaps they never went out of in the moonlight until after they scattered the coins… or didn’t know about how to break the curse until some time passed.
Duke: Jack doesn’t still have the sword wound, because he took out the sword. Barbossa is flesh from when he’s shot to when the curse breaks, and so the bullet is still in there when he becomes human again. I don’t know why the hole didn’t bleed a bit when he was initally shot, my story is that it did bleed a bit and we just didn’t see it, and I’m sticking to it.
I don’t think there’s a good explanation as to why Jack was obviously undead minutes after taking the coin, whereas the Pearl’s crew didn’t know they were cursed for awhile. I guess it’s possible that (as KarlGrenze said) they never happened to be in moonlight until after they’d traded the coins, but that seems a stretch. Especially since they seem to do most of their pillaging and whatnot at night. You’d think someone would have noticed that his mates were all skeleton-looking.
I was about to suggest that maybe the cursed still see themselves/each other as flesh, even in moonlight, but I think Jack could see his own transformation. If I recall correctly, he wiggled his finger bones and said “that’s interesting…”. So I guess I shouldn’t even have bothered bringing that little theory up. Never mind.
Kn(Squawk! Dead men tell no tales!)ckers
If they had originally pillaged the gold during a waning crescent, there could have been a period of a good 10 days without direct moonlight hitting them, without any strange periods of overcast nights. Appropriately, though, the action in the film takes place during a full moon.
But this doesn’t answer the question. Remember, the real bitch of the curse isn’t that you look disgusting in moonlight, it’s that you can’t feel or taste anything. The pirates would have known something was amiss the first time one of them bit into an apple.
Ok… perhaps they knew they were cursed, but didn’t know how to break the curse… Will Turner sent the coin to his son, they send him to the bottom of the ocean, and afterwards discovered how to break the curse (oops! Too late!).
And now something comes up… Perhaps that’s it, they were cursed from the first time. It would have been much easier to just kill Bill Turner, but if he was cursed like the rest, the only way to get rid of him (in the minds of pirates), would be to send him to the bottom of the ocean. They were knew to the curse, they may not have known that Bill would still survive being at the bottom of the sea (unless a fish decided to have him for dinner, somehow I think the parts wouldn’t have survived the digestive tract of an animal).