Scooter's Goin' to the Hoosegow!!

Yes, that's right. I. Lewis Libby -- right hand to that master of malevolence Dick Cheney -- is going to jail! The Big House! The clink! The pen! The slammer! I think you get the idea. Yes! There are others as if not more deserving of incarceration (I'm talking to you Chucklehead and Darth Cheney!), but I'll take it. My favorite judge in the whole wide world (Hi, Judge Walton!) has seen fit to have good old Scooter start serving his sentence while the lawyers appeal his conviction. I may have to TiVo the footage of him entering the prison so I can watch it over and over again.

Believe me, I know that there's little chance that Libby will spend much of his sentence in jail where he belongs. I'm sure that Chucklehead already has his pardon pen at the ready. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me that on his way out the White House door for the last time that he would give blanket pardons to everyone who's ever served in his administration.

But until then, I intend to enjoy each and every minute of this.

Summer Movie Review - Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Sigh… I wish I had better news, but unfortunately, the third (and hopefully last) Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is a mess -- a colossal, confusing, uninvolving and incomprehensible mess. I had been told by several people that it was superior to the last film, but I think it’s the worst of the three. Sadly, there is actually a potentially compelling story buried under the weight of the special effects, the blur of sword fights and bad teeth, but the director seems to have been incapable of bringing it to the fore. At the end of the day, he seemed more interested in the cool special effects and not so much interested in how those technological tricks could serve the story.

I saw Pirates last Saturday at an employee screening. Disney took over the AMC 16 theater in Burbank, and the movie was to show on every screen beginning at 8am. I knew that they had at least one screen with DLP (digital projection), and I was determined to see it in that format. Maybe not a big deal to most, but I figured as long as I had a choice, I might as well go for it. I arrived about 7:30 and one of the volunteers handed me a slip of paper that said ‘theater #14.’ When I asked if I had to go to that theater and was told yes, I asked if that was one with DLP. He said no, and that they had instructions to fill the each theater before sending people to another. They weren’t to open one of the DLP theaters for a while, so I asked if I could wait and they said sure. I think they were a little taken aback by my request, but nevertheless, they acquiesced without any problem. So I went to the ladies’ room and when I returned to the door, they sent me to theater #13, one of the DLP theaters. And here’s the best part – I was all by myself in the theater for the next 20 minutes. Then the lights went down and the new Walt Disney Pictures opening played, and I’m still all by myself. Yes! Private screening.

Uh, no, not so much. Just as the movie started, other people started to come in, about 20-30 over the next ten minutes. Oh, well. So much for my private screening!

The first hour of the movie revolved around the attempt to help Jack Sparrow escape from Davy Jones’ locker, where he and his ship the Black Pearl had been banished at the end of the second movie. Captain Barbossa (Jack’s nemesis from Pirates 1, recently raised from the dead), Elizabeth, Will and the rest of the crew traveled to Singapore to get a ship (I presume they got there by ship, so why they’d need another was never explained. But I digress.) from another pirate, Captain Sao Feng. It turns out that Barbossa wants Feng to go to a meeting of the nine heads of the pirate factions so that together they can defeat the corporate interests of the East India Trading Company (EITC). After some dealings and double-dealings, our gang secures the ship and sails off the end of the world (literally) to find Jack and bring him back.

As usual, Jack is less interested in the greater good and more interested in his own goals, whatever they might be. I’m not sure that was ever really explained. Or maybe it was divulged after I’d stopped really paying attention. Lots more meaningless stuff happens and there’s an anti-climactic battle between the pirates and the EITC, who also have Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman and her crew assisting in their efforts to destroy all the pirates. Believe me, it’s much more complicated and convoluted than what I’ve described, but if you were able to follow along with that at all, a round of applause for you.

There are too many storylines without an emotional payoff. Keith Richards’ ballyhooed cameo as Jack’s father is a complete bust. Either he has no screen presence at all or the filmmakers couldn’t figure out an interesting way to use him. You can see the fine actors (Johnny Deep, Keira Knightley, Geoffory Rush in particular) working very hard to try to bring some life and energy to this thing, but to no avail. Obviously, no one sets out to make a bad film, and it’s clear that these filmmakers were trying. Sadly, either through incompetence or by overreaching they failed miserably.

One other thing: if you do see the movie and have some level of enjoyment, I’d suggest that you stay through the end credits. There’s a little coda to the story that they threw onto the end of that you should see.