From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea.

I know, I know. This ship has sailed, with its filthy hoard of ill-gotten box office lucre already stashed under decks, so get to Knocked Up and Ocean’s Thirteen already. At this point you really don’t need me to tell you that Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World’s End, despite having Johnny Depp and $100 million in special effects at its command, was a bloated, washed-up, and mostly boring two hours of needless exposition and empty spectacle. But, there it is. One might remember that I kinda loathed the second Pirates movie last summer, and that was with a stash of bootlegged spirits and a good woman at my side to help relieve the remorseless tedium. So, why did I even bother seeing At World’s End? Well, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon summed it up perfectly: “[A]t this point, the ‘Pirates’ franchise is essentially collecting a tax from moviegoers: See it and like it, matey, or you’ll be out of step with the whole universe! And who wants that?” Well, I paid my movie-tax tribute, you bottom-line buccaneers and covetous corsairs, now avast with ye.

So, as you may or may not remember if you labored your way through Dead Man’s Chest, this installment of the Pirates franchise begins with Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp) among the recently deceased, or at least trapped in the pirate Underworld that is Davy Jones’ Locker, while the rest of the team (Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightly et al) finds they must band together with first-film villain Capt. Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to break Sparrow out, Jabba’s-palace style. But before that plot resumes, we witness a series of grisly civilian hangings undertaken by the East India Company’s Big Bad (Tom Hollander), who now has the supernatural man-squid Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) in his thrall. (It’s a long story.) These executions happen not only to weed out the pirate insurgency and win the war on (naval) terror but, more ominously, to provoke a particular seafaring ditty in the unwashed masses, one that, once uttered, must provoke a meeting of the Pirate Council, whose nine lords are known by their special Pieces of Eight. But, let’s not forget, there’s also the matter of an enchanted compass on Jack’s person which points the way to one’s heart’s desire, and, for that matter, a magical heart thumping in a special chest that grants power over Davy Jones, and some very important charts on the person of Lando-ish pirate Chow Yun-Fat, and an undead monkey and a scorned sea-goddess and Gareth from The Office and…oh, I give up already. Just go see the movie. Or better yet, don’t.

To be fair, At World’s End isn’t as depressing or disappointing an action-packed threequel as, say, The Matrix: Revolutions, if only because expectations were so much lower heading into these already-muddy waters. And, ’tis true, Pirates of the Caribbean III is a marginally better film than the last outing — Instead of beating you into submission with blunt, numbing spectacle, this film mostly just tries to exposition you to death, which strangely enough I found preferable. Still, this is a bad film. Even Depp, who is an inordinately gifted actor who can make almost anything watchable, starts to grate here (as, alas, does Geoffrey Rush.) In fact, Depp’s once-fresh and funny mannerisms as Jack Sparrow have badly calcified by this point — at times, particularly when the movie steals a page or three from Being John Malkovich, he looks like he’s just phoning in his Hunter schtick. (For their part, Bloom and Knightley, pretty as they are, have no other schtick. It’s Legolas and Love, Actually, all over again.)

Portraits of Urban Decay.

A few recent additions to the trailer bin: Will Smith finds a lot of alone time in New York City in the way-over-the-top teaser for Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend (which looks nothing like the Richard Matheson novella and only slightly more like the last version, Charlton Heston’s The Omega Man); Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, sporting Zodiac-era duds and dos, go mano a mano (again) in the trailer for Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (also with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Carla Gugino, and Josh Brolin); and Jodie Foster gets all Bernie Goetz up in here — much to the dismay of Terrence Howard — in the new trailer for Neil Jordan’s The Brave One. Update: Ok, one more. President William Hurt is shot! (Or is he?) And secret servicemen Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox, along with a Zapruderish Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver, and others, must get to the bottom of it all in the new trailer for Pete Travis’s Vantage Point.

“If you win, you gotta have a hoop.”

“Before Rickey Green, a former NBA all-star, played with Mr. Obama in a 2004 Senate campaign fund-raiser, ‘I didn’t think he could play at all, to be honest with you,’ Mr. Green said. But ‘he’s above average,’ for a pickup player, Mr. Green said. ‘He’s got a nice little left-hand shot and some knowledge of the game.‘” Baracksketball? A NYT piece from last week examines Barack Obama’s fondness for the court. “Mr. Obama is left-handed, and his signature move is to fake right and veer left, surprising players used to guarding right-handed competitors.” Hey, that’s my move!

At any rate, my own appreciation for basketball-playing progressive presidential candidates is well-documented. In fact, this reminded me of a similar discussion about Al Gore on Meet the Press in 1999: “‘What left Gore’s hands and arrived at the basket was quite often, well, a brick, clanging off the rim or ricocheting off the backboard with regularity.’ Jim Hudson, a high school teammate, adds, ‘He tended to like the limelight. If he passed it to him to try and get something going, to get a better shot inside, Al would simply go ahead and shoot. When the ball got to him, that’s as far as it got.‘” Global warming or no, would you really want a chucker in the White House in 2008?

(Who We’re) Watching (As) The Watchmen.

Breaking a few weeks ago now, AICN claims to have the skinny on the initial casting of Zach Snyder’s version of Watchmen. Rumored as the Nite-Owl, Patrick Wilson of The Alamo and Little Children. (He’s a bit buff for the role, frankly. I’d expected someone a little more gone to seed, like John Cusack or even Tom Hulce.) As Doctor Manhattan, Neo himself, Keanu Reeves. (Um, ok. I don’t really see that working. Then again, I don’t really see anyone else working either, this side of Gollum-style CGI) And, as Ozymandias, much-avowed Watchmen fan Jude Law. (That’s pretty good, although somebody like Aaron Eckhart would be even better.) That’s it so far, other than that Snyder — who won’t deny these casting rumors — has promised he’d get Gerard Butler of 300 in there somewhere. (Why bother? I don’t remember any character who’s supposed to YELL…ALL…THE…TIME.) At any rate, that means Simon Pegg as Rorschach is still a possibility, if one that is very, very remote.

Not Dark Yet.

“The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from bein’ seen, but that’s just because he doesn’t want to turn into some machine.” Or something like that. Obviously, I’ve been taking a break from the Ghost for a few weeks (although, as per the norm, that didn’t much upset the thousands of comment spammers — they still love the site, want to borrow my templates, have their own sites about infinitis, pr0n, prescription drugs, etc. etc.) And, since I’m off to my ten-year college reunion this weekend, I won’t be posting much for the next few days yet. But, I figured I should pop my head in and say hello. So, hello. Hope everyone else is having a grand summer thus far. For what it’s worth, I do hope to return to a normal schedule around here at some point…we’ll see.

Full of Passionate Intensity.

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” (Well, except in the Sopranos’ pool, since AJ can’t even tie a cinder block properly.) With last week’s murder, a war with Phil Leotardo breaking out over slights to Meadow, AJ’s botched suicide attempt, and only two episodes to go, The Sopranos moves into progressively darker territory.

Griswold Goes Gotham.

“It’s really a great role. I’m in throughout the whole movie, and I’m really looking forward to working with Christian and Morgan and all these real Hollywood heavy hitters.” Um, who is Anthony Michael Hall playing in The Dark Knight? “‘I signed a confidentiality agreement, and I can’t say which part I’m playing because it affects the story,’ says Hall.‘” Some sites have suggested he’s [spoilers] playing a vigilante Batman, likely one who gets snared by the Joker, although that wouldn’t explain why his scenes seem to involve Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox).

TheLeft.com

“What was once seen as a liability for Democrats and progressives in the past — they couldn’t get 20 people to agree to the same thing, they could never finish anything, they couldn’t stay on message — is now an asset,’ Leyden said. ‘All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone, involves everyone, and gets people totally into it.‘” The WP’s Jose Antonio Vargas examines why the Dems are winning the Web War. “‘For Republicans, the Internet is where bad things happen. Take [former U.S. senator] George Allen and his ‘macaca’ moment…You can kind of understand why Republicans have this almost instinctive fear of the Internet, where the mob rules.”

Coming Up for Air.

Also not noted here this past week, another school year ended here at Columbia. Since I’ve been on a research fellowship the past few seasons, I haven’t been teaching, and I rarely have reason these days to leave my home and/or the campus libraries, other than the occasional trip to the movies, the pub, or the dog park, I’ve pretty much fallen out of the usual academic rhythms of campus…but, nonetheless, another year has passed, so it seems like a good time for an update.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I did less well than hoped — as in multiple rejections, some expected, some quite surprising — in the grant-and-fellowship-securing department for the coming year. But, those disappointments notwithstanding, I have secured enough funding to offset my usual freelance writing projects, and I expect to spend at least one more academic year here at my current New York City apartment, during which quite a bit more dissertation-writing will (and, indeed, will have to) happen. From there, with dissertation presumably in hand, it’s either moving on in academia, at some university or another (one likely not of my choosing) or moving back into the political-speechwriting world…these days, well, it’s still a toss-up, but I feel it’s becoming less so. My future will depend a lot on the well-documented vagaries of the job market, of course, and if, miracle upon miracles, an academic job is available at a university that feels like a good fit, and they actually offer it to me out of the hundreds of qualified candidates, of course I may very well take it. But I’ve found myself increasingly thinking that I’d probably be happier back in Washington regardless, either in speechwriting or at a progressive foundation/think-tank type place, where there’s some sense of being involved in both the unfolding of current events and the daily struggle to make this world a happier, more progressive-minded place.

This is not to say I’m closing any doors. I do enjoy working on my dissertation, and can still lose myself for extended periods of time delving into the past. But, for varied reasons, be they the usual late-term graduate student blues, the often maddeningly parochial nature of many academic conversations, the sheer social isolation of dissertation-writing, or something else (and I can’t discount last fall’s awful romantic implosion, which cast a pall over the whole year and — still, beyond any recourse — wearies and depresses me pretty much daily), I’ve spent most of the past year feeling profoundly dissatisfied with my current circumstances, so much so that I find it increasingly hard to imagine a life along these lines.

But, we’ll see — as I said, there’s still one more year to go. I only mention it here as [a] between the graduates in baby-blue robes everywhere and my impending ten-year college reunion, it’s felt like nigh time for a state-of-life update and [b] the disconnect between my everyday state of mind and my GitM-blog voice has been feeling increasingly untenable. I really have no desire to see this site degenerate into weekly whimpering and moaning about woe-is-me grad student angst. (There’s enough of that online already and, besides, think grad school is tough? Try Iraq, buddy. Or, for that matter, working minimum wage.) So, I’m getting it out of the way now, in the hopes that voicing my existential discontent once and for all will free me to go back to blogging as normal.

Still, I don’t yet know what it is, or what form it will take, but, doggone it, something has to change in my life. Several great trips and the always pleasant company of l’il Berk notwithstanding, another year unfolding like the last one did is really just too depressing to contemplate.