Went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest at the weekend. Pretty enjoyable, but a bit baffling in places if you’ve not seen the first film – or, as in my case, you’ve seen the first film but forgotten much of it in the three years since.

The CGI was so good in most parts that I didn’t even think about it – there were just one or two Kraken shots which gave the game away. Johnny Depp steals the film, acting everyone else off the screen; poor Orlando Bloom is left looking, if not wet, then a little moist. Bill Nighy plays a very convincing Davy Jones, although I don’t understand why he was Scottish, and I’m sure he didn’t look like that when he was in The Monkees. Keira Knightley surprises by being quite good in a few scenes, but is pretty ropey at times. I can’t help remembering that awful Domino movie – one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen in the cinema, and I only saw the trailer.

At points, Dead Man’s Chest was exciting and had great snippets of dialogue. But, at two-and-a-half hours, it’s too damn long and some sequences dragged. The scene Alex describes as “exhilarating swashbuckling” I’m afraid I found overlong – you know no-one is going to win the swordfight, and, because the MacGuffin in being fought over is elsewhere, the action feels ilke a sideshow. Plus, the rolling water wheel was a retread of the rolling cage on the island early on – part of an entire section which could have been dropped to make the film a more manageable length without any impact on the plot.

Finally, I felt cheated by the end: yes, I enjoyed most of the film, but I expected to be rewarded for sitting through it. Instead, it stuck up two fingers and put out its hand for the ticket price to the second sequel. The Empire Strikes Back might have got away with it, but Dead Man’s Chest doesn’t.

For other views: Ryan, Gordon.

Lord Levy, Blair’s chief fundraiser (and, let’s not forget, former manager of Alvin Stardust when he was plain old Michael Levy) has been bailed by the police investgating “cash for honours” claims.

Regardless of Levy’s guilt or otherwise, it’s good to see the police taking the investigation serious. Selling honours is bad enough and an abuse of power – gaining party political benefit from elected office – but the “loans for peerages” scandal is all the more serious because it potential involves party donors being rewarded not with a simple gong but with a seat in the national legislature. It makes a farce of claims that an appointed House of Lords is about providing expertise to complement the House of Commons: it’s something for the government of the day to use to lever money out of businessmen tempted by ermine and a title (and who could probably care less about legislating).

I hope the police are investigating the Tories as seriously – they nominate plenty of wealthy backers for the upper chamber. And lest this seem too partisan, I’ll stress that if any LibDems are caught at this (and I think it’s fair to say we’re the least likely culprits of the three main parties), they too should be banged up.

Finally, some decency from the US Administration:

All US military detainees, including those at Guantanamo Bay, are to be treated in line with the minimum standards of the Geneva Conventions.

The White House announced the shift in policy on Tuesday, almost two weeks after the US Supreme Court ruled that the conventions applied to detainees.

Just a shame that it’s not so much that they’ve seen sense on the issue as that they’ve had to accept the need to comply with the Supreme Court.

In an article about political bloggers (via Lynne Featherstone), The Observer this Sunday slipped in this short paragraph:

In the US, the Connecticut Senator and former vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman has seen his yawning lead in opinion polls suddenly slashed in the run-up to November’s elections by support from anti-war political bloggers for his little-known Republican challenger.

As I was planning to blog this anyway, I noticed the obvious clanger: I have no idea whether the Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger, is anti-war (there would be nothing new in a local candidate distancing himself from his party leader’s stance to gain electoral benefit), but left-wing political bloggers are not backing him against the Lieberman. Rather, they are are pushing an alternative Democrat candidate, Ned Lamont, in the primary to be held next month. They have labelled Lieberman a de facto Republican and cited exchanges such as this one:

Harwood: He used the old Ronald Reagan line, “There you go again,” to Ned Lamont and he used the strategy that George W. Bush used against John Kerry in 2004…

Noron: Is that going to work for him, adopting these Republican strategies when in many ways the heart of this debate is that Lieberman is too much like Bush…

These bloggers insist that Lieberman’s pro-war stance is only one of their complaints. One of the issues on which he has riled Democrat activists was Bush’s plans for social security reform:

I lost faith in Lieberman during the social security debate, when he was the last Democrat to fall in line with the rest of the entire caucus (including people like Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu), and only did so when it was painfully obvious that the president’s efforts to destroy social security where completely dead.

I even told that to a Time reporter, but of course that didn’t make the story because it didn’t fit the narrative that Lieberman’s problems stem only from his war stance.

Lamont himself, from the little I’ve read, doesn’t seem a particularly impressive candidate, but a lack of polish is quickly identified as “anti-politician” appeal, and it’s much more about getting Lieberman out:

I don’t think Lamont was good enough to help himself, but Lieberman may have been bad enough to hurt himself. This debate was all about the undecided voter and the indecisively-committed-to-Lieberman voter. Lamont’s performance would not have moved many of those people into his column, but Lieberman’s sneering, how-dare-you-challenge-me style might move a few voters away from him.

You can read more about how Lieberman has offended the self-proclaimed “netroots” of the party here.

Lieberman, for his part, has added fuel to the fire by insisting that he will run in the general election regardless of the result of the primary – as an independent (or, in his words, a “petitioning Democrat“) if necessary. Some fellow Democrats who support Lieberman, such as Hilary Clinton, have covered themselves by promising to back whoever gets the Democrat nomination; others are loyal to Lieberman, and it’s becoming divisive:

It is the breaking into the open of a war between establishment insiders and the base of the party. This war is beyond ideology, it features progressive darlings such as Boxer going out for Lieberman, not merely pro forma supporting him. It featured a month long weasel word fest from Senator Chuck Schumer about whether the DSCC would back Lieberman if he ran as an independent.

It is, so the left-wing bloggers tell us, the top of the party versus the activist base, the mainstream media versus the new medium.

It will be an interesting primary (and subsequent election) to watch, and a really test of the online community, which has successfully raised thousands for Lamont’s campaign. Are those Democrat voters who will take part in the primary as switched on to the debate as the activist bloggers? And do the rest of the voters in Connecticut actually like having a right-wing Democrat as senator? It could be a hard lesson for Lieberman about the importance of not neglecting your activist base – something the Tories and Labour in particularly need to attend to, although it’s important for the LibDems to bear in mind too – or it could turn out that the bloggers represent only a small, vocal minority.

Update: Via the Daily Kos, a self-deprecating ad from Ned Lamont.