End Of Season Review - House M.D.

While compiling our weekly views of how the previous seven days of TV had affected us, we noticed that the first half of House's fourth season had often been the highlight. Coming off an appalling third season, with its format badly in need of an overhaul, season four began with an almost clean slate. His usual acolytes scattered to the four winds, House was coerced into finding three new minions, which he did by way of a selection process that took up the first half of the season. It was pure genius, allowing the show to keep its dramatic side confined to disposable subplots (diseases of the week), while allowing the comedic half to flourish with withering putdowns, mischievous gameplaying, and petty squabbling. I think I said at the time that the show had been waiting to find its voice, and finally it had. Forget about the dreary seriousness of season three, with its silly bad cop subplots, and forget the formulaic nature of the show. It had finally found a way to rise above those limitations.

Much criticism is made of the rigid format and how the show cannot escape it, but it can wiggle around within it, which tends to take the attention off House and his machinations. Season four changed a lot, including pushing the medical drama just ever so slightly out of the spotlight, and concentrating more on House and his gameplaying. Plus, he wasn't in danger of being "cured" by his colleagues, and no one had yet another freakout about his drugtaking. It allowed Hugh Laurie to do what he does best; supersnarky misanthropy tempered with flashes of intense humanity. Agonising over how to cure House (which can often waste several episodes of a season) was almost entirely removed, except in an episode in the second half of the season, No More Mr. Nice Guy, in which Kutner suspects House is suffering from neuro-syphilis which could be responsible for his terrible personality. Of course, this is a joke played by House, but much of the episode featured House's colleagues worrying that they would ruin him as a doctor by curing him of his misanthropy, much as the show would be ruined by such a plot development. It was a nice way of acknowledging that they're not going to be messing with House for a while.


At least, they're not going to waste time with the staff of Princeton-Plainsboro trying to figure him out. Instead, in a nice twist, House himself might want to trigger a change in himself, with the two-part finale throwing him into a situation where one of the few things he cares about, Wilson's friendship, is in jeopardy. Due to his irresponsibility, House and Wilson's girlfriend Amber get into a bus crash just after she takes flu pills. With her kidneys damaged in the crash, she cannot process the amantadine in the pills. At the end of the final episode, Amber dies in Wilson's arms after he shuts off her life support, and we sobbed. Seriously. Like, for a long time after the episode ended. Stupid TV show.


Perhaps next season this new antagonism will provide much of the drama, as House tries to win back the friendship of his only friend, perhaps by becoming a better person. The prospect of such an arc is potentially interesting, as change has to come from within, and I'd much rather watch Hugh Laurie battle with his demons instead of putting up with conversations between his colleagues about what to do with him, conversations that are rarely done well and can drastically shift the balance of the show from humour into boring hand-wringing and frustrating contrivance. However, it will almost certainly feature the removal of one of the most appealing features of the show; House and Wilson's mostly good-natured game-playing. As I've said before, their interaction is one of the most entertaining things on TV, and losing that would suck. That change in tone at the start of season four might be temporary, but if Wilson's reaction to the sight of House recovering from the coma he entered while trying to diagnose Amber is anything to go by, we're in for a rough patch. Ingrate!


As I say, the first half of the season was especially good, with House bouncing off a large roomful of well-sketched characters, with his other colleagues stripped of their angst over his personality and becoming entertaining foils for him. They even fixed Foreman, who had previously just been a sulky minion and ended up becoming almost an equal to House. His arc was especially well thought out and depicted, with Omar Epps at first disgusted with himself for becoming the thing he most hated (i.e. an approximation of House), and then becoming reconciled with it.

That the second half of the season, after House had chosen his new team, was not up to the first nine episodes was not that great a surprise, especially with the disease of the week drama becoming more prominent, but there were consolations. Frozen, featuring House diagnosing an snow-bound Mira Sorvino via webcam was particularly entertaining, and Living The Dream, with House kidnapping the star of his favourite daytime soap was funny too. All the while, the tone of the show remained lighter than it has been, and even though the formula of the show reasserted itself in later episodes, I still felt that my support for the show even through its most tedious interludes had more than paid off. As Canyon said prior to watching the finale, even if the show can often feel like it is doing the same thing over and over again, there are very few, if any, shows on TV right now that do this kind of thing so well. The dialogue is better than pretty much anything else on TV. It's funny, it's smart, it's philosophical. If it veers into sentimentality every now and again, that's the price we pay for the rest of the intelligent writing showcased almost every week. The show doesn't get enough credit for that.


Sadly, with the strike shutting the show down for a while, once more we had an arc damaged by not getting enough screentime, as with CSI's Warrick arc. Amber quickly switched from Cutthroat Bitch to Best Girlfriend Ever, and if you had an inkling about what was lying in wait for her in the finale, you would possibly have found the whole thing contrived. Luckily we had no idea what was going to happen, but still, it could have done with more room to breathe. That's not a proper criticism of the show, though, and Canyon's praise still stands. The showrunners did the best they could with little time to properly set up that two-parter.


And boy, did it work out well. Writers Peter Blake, David Foster, Russel Friend, and Garrett Lerner (working from a story by Doris Egan) went all out over the two episodes (called House's Head and Wilson's Heart), treating the viewer to interactive hallucinations, spectacular set-pieces, arc resolutions (poor Thirteen finding out she was positive for Huntington's while we were already upset about Amber was simultaneously cruel and brilliant), and heart-rending goodbyes. It was devastating and amazing and brutal and a million other things. It was easily the best of all the season finales we've seen so far, with Reaper, Ugly Betty, and Lost yet to come (not to mention Battlestar Galactica's mini-season finale and the last episode of Doctor Who).

That said, while I liked the whole finale overall, the first part was, sadly, overdirected to the point of obnoxiousness by Greg Yaitanes (who I have railed against before). If ever there was a TV director who is determined to get noticed enough to win a film career, it's him, filling the episode with annoying Sonnenfeld-esque close-ups, flashy lighting, and Cuddy stripping. Here is a picture of her post-strip. I'm not going to contribute to the uncomfortable memory of poor Lisa Edelstein having to dress like a schoolgirl and rub her butt on a pole.


In contrast, Katie Jacobs, helmer of the second half of the finale, was relatively restrained, which was just what the more emotional episode needed. With more subdued editing and framing, we were treated to an emotional rollercoaster, perfectly judged and beautifully performed (there's a good chance Laurie's usual award nominations will be joined by some for Robert Sean Leonard and Anne Dudek). Okay, I will admit that there was one good sequence by Yaitanes in the first part, namely the dazzling bus crash flashback in the final scene. It's big, scary, and superbly shot, and made me regret grumbling about the rest of the episode. That is, until I realised that the whole sequence was very reminiscent of the plane crash flashback at the end of Peter Weir's underrated drama Fearless, even down to the shots of hands reaching towards each other, a tunnel of light, spinning and debris and carnage, etc. I don't blame Yaitanes from borrowing from that sequence, as it's great. If he didn't borrow, then the guy knows how to create good scenes that just happen to really resemble scenes from a well-known movie. I guess that's a skill too.


Other than the possibility of an organic transition from misanthropic House to a more caring, sharing House (who would still hopefully be enough of a jerk to be entertaining; turning him into Santa would be absurd), I have no idea what to expect of the new season. Will the new team leave? Thirteen now knows her days are short, so there's a possibility she won't be around for long. Will that mean a return for Cameron? That would mean more screentime for Jennifer Morrison, whose only purpose this season seemed to be making sure she stands as far away from ex-fiancee Jesse Spencer as possible while still remaining on the same show (it was as if they were playing hide and seek on set, which was both funny and sad at the same time). All I want to know is, will the show stay funny? Or will this be Tritter-Redux, with House and Wilson at each other's throats? After the awesomeness of season four, that's the last thing we need.

Lost - Via Domus

Going by my usual timetable, I should have written a large post about the first part of the Lost season four finale by now, filled with the usual screencaps of Michael Emerson's face, but as that episode felt so incomplete (with its bizarre catch-up montage at the end), I thought it best to wait until the whole thing had aired. That said, if the tragic event hinted at in the finale preview clip that aired on Sky earlier today is anything to go by, I'm going to be crying for so long I might not ever get around to it.


Still, I feel I should write something about the show to mark the first airdate of the last episode of this amazing season, and it was by pure chance I got a cheap copy of the Ubisoft game Lost: Via Domus last week. Yesterday I started playing it. Today I finished it. Let's just say it's not much of a challenge, game-wise, and it's lacking in a lot of other respects too. Believe me, I would have liked to write something positive today, but it's not to be. Even with the best will in the world, I can't praise what is an ill thought out experience.

The plot revolves around an amnesiac survivor of the Oceanic 815 crash, and his efforts to discover his identity and his past, details of which are portioned out throughout the island sections of the game and, cleverly, within flashbacks. Those sections are the most unusual in the game, starting when you encounter the ghost of your ex-lover and journalistic rival, Lisa, who is hanging around the island in a Christian Shephard stylee. These moments trigger a bleary memory of a ripped-up photograph. To relive the full flashback cutscene you have to figure out what the pieces of photo represent, and then, while seeing a muted version of the cutscene, take that photo, all the while trying to find the right spot (difficult when you also have to get the camera focused properly). It's a lot of fun (and not as complicated as it sounds), as are the little plot Easter Eggs you find afterwards, that link you to a dastardly Hanso Foundation plot involving sarin gas, as well as Hanso employee Thomas Mittelwerk who, in the Lost Experience ARG, showed little remorse in killing large amounts of people in order to change the values of the Valenzetti Equation and thus save humanity.


Sadly, other than the Hanso links and a couple of bizarre inclusions (which I'll list in a moment), the game itself is very little fun. Sad to say it, but other than Henry Ian Cusick (sounding nothing like himself), Yunjin Kin, Daniel Dae Kim, Andrew Divoff, Emilie De Ravin, and the great Michael Emerson, the majority of the voice cast do terrible impressions of the main characters, leading to much immersion-disruption. The voice of Charlie is particularly inept, futilely trying to capture his accent and mangling it in the process. That's not the worst part of it all, though. Interacting with the characters is probably the meat of the game, the rest of it being a repetitious slog, yomping through barely navigable stretches of jungle, getting picked off by tree-bound Other snipers, or getting hunted by Smokey. Hearing its trademark whir and chitter is fun, but getting past it is tedious. It cannot attack you when you hide in banyan tree clumps, which is fine, but navigating the jungle sections is a question of finding markers and hitting A, which will point you in the direction of the next marker.

That's all well and good, but sometimes the marker is hidden behind trees, and walking in circles trying to find them can lead to you getting caught by Smokey. What's worse, coming out of hiding in a banyan tree cluster means your POV changes direction, and you will sometimes find yourself pointing the wrong way. With barely any recognisable landmarks in the jungle, you will lose your way over and over again, meaning you have to go back to the previous marker and find your way again. If you get caught by Smokey, you go back to the previous save point, which can often be a long way back, or be preceded by an unskippable cutscene. Doing that was where most of my morning went. There is a more dynamic version of this kind of level later on, where you race through the jungle toward the sonic fence, leaping over logs and sliding under trees, which is definitely an improvement, but makes the game look like Crash Bandicoot, except with occasional references to 18th Century philosophers.


Even more exasperating, a couple of levels require picking your way through a pitch-black cave with only a torch (or lantern) to guide you. These can be affected by water or bats, which reduce the amount of time they can remain lit. As you cannot pass through these sections without light, at the start of each section you are given the option of trading objects you have found around the island for spare torches, lanterns, or oil canisters. The trade sections, during which you interact with Locke (or Charlie, or Sawyer, in nickname overload), are not badly done, but they take a while to get through. First time around that's not a problem, but if you fall into one of the many crevasses within the caves, you will go back to the previous save point, and have to trade again. Last night I went through the same trading process about 15 times. By the end of it I was utterly pissed. I didn't buy this game just so I could squint at a pitch black screen, or go through the same menu scenes and badly voiced conversations. Big Fat Ugh.

Those sections tend to artificially pad the game out, which runs for about five measly hours. With repeated deaths and replayed cutscenes, it goes on for much longer. There are some fun moments: the episodic structure of the game, with "Previously on Lost" recaps; finding cool Easter Eggs like the Pearl Station and Roger Linus' van (even though it's standing up and in the wrong place on the island); entering the numbers into the Swan Station computer; finding The Turn Of The Screw; the brilliant opening cutscene showing the front of the plane break off, etc. Most startling, though, are the moments that deviate from the show. Lindelof and Cuse have said that the game is not canon, and I would hope so, as we get too see things surely no Lost fan is meant to see.

::Beware game spoilers::

One of the most notable moments in the game is your character discovering a secret doorway under a waterfall that leads to the source of the magnetic anomaly behind the concrete wall in the Swan Station. There you discover what looks like a broken reactor or generator, covered with debris, and controlled by another computer, which you can temporarily shut off after passing an easy IQ test. Of course, this is before The Incident at the end of season two, so it's fair to say at that point the game deviates pretty drastically from the show, if it hadn't already.


In the final "episode" Ben and Juliet, sitting in a conference room inside the Hydra Station (which you explore to find a large underwater complex) persuade you to get Jack to The Black Rock, so he can be captured, thus invalidating the actual season two finale. At that moment it's obvious the game is playing very fast and loose with continuity, which frustrated me (yes, that good old sense of entitlement that rages across the internet has manifested in my soul, sadly). Of course, your character, now flitting like an enormous Gary Stu through a story that has suddenly morphed into an inconsequential piece of Lost fanfic, saves Jack (and Kate), and then races toward a boat, in a less exciting version of the Crash Bandicoot stage. You then have a chat with Locke, before setting sail on 325 degrees heading that Michael went on, and as you leave the island behind, there is the noise of the Swan Station imploding, followed by the sound of Oceanic 815 cracking up. In the sky you see the plane falling apart, and then you find yourself waking up on the beach to find Lisa, now not a ghost, standing over you and trying to revive you, surrounded by wreckage and carnage, right back at the start of the story.

Can you believe that? I spent the whole game bored, and then in the final twenty seconds it goes bonkers batshit McNuts. It was strange. I had an electric thrill run through me, thinking I had just stumbled across an insane clue as to the nature of the island, that perhaps Desmond's ill-fated cruise away from the island (that had taken the majority of the second season, before turning up again, pissed out of his head and belligerent) had been something like that, but when I calmed down, I realised it was just more fan-fic, with a finale that was nothing more than a speculative take on the central mystery of the island (i.e. why no one can get off the island). Either that, or it was all a dream ZOMG! At least, that's what I think. I guess we'll see tonight.

So is anything good about the game? I will say I was thrilled that the magnificent Michael Giacchino delivers another amazing soundtrack, tinkering with established themes to create something new and melancholy especially for this game. Hearing his work during the many boring sections of the game made it almost seem tolerable. The man is a marvel (and hey, Lost fans, the season three soundtrack is out, and it has a second disc containing the entire Through The Looking Glass score). Other than that, it was underwhelming and kinda pointless, unless you want to explore the island, and even then the geography is all wrong. People bitch about Bad Twin by engine-explosion victim and flight attendant-lover Gary Troup, but it was an entertaining enough mystery, even if its relationship to the Lostiverse was tiny. It was certainly better than this "game". Save your pennies, kids, and buy that soundtrack. Unless tonight a character leaves the island and zips back to the first episode. In which case, buy it tomorrow, because it was canon all along and Cuselof lied to us, those mischievous tykes.

And so, with a few hours to go before our minds are hopefully blown, I leave you with the Orchid Station clip featuring Dr. Edgar Halliwax. If you have any interest in the show you've probably seen it already, but considering tonight we will see the station (and maybe two rabbits who are actually the same rabbit except separated by a few seconds), it's worth revisiting it.



Namasté, bitches! See you on the other side of awesomeness (I hope).

Adventures in Heinous: Boycott Turner Classic Movies!

Much to our perpetual amazement, we have found that we actually control TV with nothing more than our brainwaves. All we have to do is discuss a film that one of us hasn't seen, proselytise about it at length, and make vague comments about hiring it out or buying it cheap. Then, voila, it turns up on TV a few days later. It has happened so often we're starting to take our power for granted. Surely this could be harnessed for good somehow? We could move to China and talk about Kundun a lot, so that it magically appears on one of their state-sponsored channels at peak time. That should resolve that human rights catastrophe in time to stop Sharon Stone wrecking what's left of her career because she just can't stop herself from speaking out about injustice.


Re: our superpower, case in point. Just a week ago I went into praise overload about Philip Kaufman's wonderful adaptation of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. I can't remember why I suddenly started on about it; perhaps it had something to do with overdosing on Geoff Johns' brilliant run on Green Lantern, which is currently revisiting the test pilot past of Hal Jordan (calling all comic fans wandering past this blog; buy Green Lantern! It's the easily the best DC title on the shelves right now). Whatever the reason for my rabid wild-eyed praise, I bent poor Canyon's ear about the movie for a loooong time, a filibuster she endured with much stoicism, and said she would watch it if we got in on DVD. And then, as usual, it turned up on Turner Classic Movies a couple of days ago. Huzzah! Last night we watched it, thinking it would be a pleasing experience after a week of watching some really crappy movies, some of which were misguided (Flags Of Our Fathers, Catch and Release), and some of which were just flat-out dreadful (Nell, Pearl Harbor).

For the most part, it was a great antidote to all of the nonsense we have been watching recently, filled with superb performances (especially Ed Harris as John Glenn), beautiful photography by the legendary Caleb Deschanel, and skillful writing and direction by Kaufman at the height of his powers. I loved it when I was young, and it was great seeing it again. At least, up to a point. It seems the movie's length was a problem for the culture-hating jerks at TCM, who removed several moments in order to shoehorn more adverts into it.


It's common knowledge that TCM was once in the habit of tinkering with recognised classics, such as colorising black and white films, a practise satirised by Joe Dante in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (in which Daniel Clamp's movie channel shows Casablanca "in colour, with new happy ending!"). I had hoped that with the cancellation of the colorisation project that that would mean the end of any future tinkering, but sadly not. While the US TCM has no adverts, UK TCM has a surfeit of the goddamn things (broadcast at a predictably earsplitting volume in comparison to the muted film), and as a result they think it's fine to hack away at the movies being shown. I honestly thought we had moved past this kind of behaviour, considering the success of the ad-free, uncut Sky Movies channels.

Sadly, no. While the meat of The Right Stuff remained in the film, an early shot of Yuri Gagarin's flight was hacked out, leaving behind a sliver of music in the next scene. Warning bells began to sound in my head. Later on, John Glenn's flight over Australia is truncated, missing out the moment where his arrival is heralded by sparks seemingly flying into space from a fire lit by Aboriginal magicians. While the movie doesn't seem damaged by that moment, the tone of the film shifts, something that is cemented by the appalling, ire-inducing decision to remove all of the cross-cutting from Chuck Yeager's final flight. In the original, while he risks his life and almost dies, we cut back and forth from his peril to scenes of the astronauts enjoying a reception meal to commemorate the opening if NASA's new HQ in Houston. While watching an ethereal dancer on stage, they seemingly become linked by a premonition that something important is happening elsewhere, that the man they most admire is still risking his life to push the envelope while they eat steak and shmooze. To have taken out every shot of the astronauts while leaving in the shots of Yeager's perilous flight must have taken a lot of effort and thought.


Or should I say lack of thought. When the movie ended and I began to calm down, Canyon asked me what I liked so much about the film (she enjoyed it, though she was as pissed as I was that it had been edited). Other than the sheer quality and intelligence of it, what I like most is that while it is a celebration of human spirit and courage, it is also a satire of such, puncturing the cockiness of the astronauts with broad comedic moments while never fully making them look like fools. There is still a nobility to them and their desire to become pioneers and explorers of a new frontier, even if there is, for a long period of the movie, a lot of egotistical behaviour and preening before the ever-present, chittering paparazzi. What helps get that across is the poetic nature of the movie, mostly conveyed during the two latter scenes that had been removed. By introducing a spiritual aspect to the movie (with the beautiful shots of Glenn's capsule being buzzed by mysterious embers being particularly important), the tone of the film is lightened of its machismo and broad comedy, becoming way more than the sum of its parts. Once those scenes are removed, it runs like a straight biopic about macho men trying to outdo each other with acts of derring-do and laddish one-up-manship.

So, basically, fuck Turner Classic Movies for wrecking one of my favorite movies. It's the very last time I will be watching anything on there, and now I'm wondering how many movies I've seen on there for the first time that might have been altered as well. I'm aware I'm probably a long way behind common knowledge of TCM's scissor-happy escapades, but I really thought these kinds of practises had been stopped by now, but apparently not. If you love movies, and want to ensure they are treated with respect as works of art, then you'll avoid the channel too. Bad TCM! Shades of Caruso most certainly doesn't approve.

RIP Tootsie's Agent / Michael Clayton's Boss

A little while ago Canyon and I were discussing Sydney Pollack, and if I recall correctly I went on at length about a documentary I had seen broadcast on BBC2 (it might have been an installment of Naked Hollywood, though that doesn't sound quite right). Sydney Pollack was interviewed about his directorial method, along with Joe Dante and John Sayles. I told Canyon about how I had come away from it with far more respect for Dante and Sayles, as the former was hilarious and unpretentious, and the latter was stoic even while seemingly exhausted by his attempts to create difficult and politically distinct movies outside a studio system that would never let his movies get released. They were inspiring, talking about low-budget filmmaking and how hard it was to get funding, but Pollack seemed to be a bad fit for that show, being part of the system that Dante and Sayles had railed against.


It was weird hearing the other two talk about their troubles while Pollack chatted amiably about how he had edited scenes in Havana, the boring, bloated, and pricey Robert Redford vehicle he had been working on at the time, seemingly taking for granted that he was in a position to make films that were expensive award-baiting prestige projects while other artists were struggling to get films made to the extent that Dante had to don scuba-diving gear for a shot in Piranha even though he had had no training with it. I came away thinking ill of Pollack.

It wasn't really fair of me to do that, and I feel pretty crappy for not giving him the benefit of the doubt already, and even more so now that he has sadly passed away. I doubted him for not having the political commitment of John Sayles, but even if I never could understand why something as slick and empty as Havana needed to be made, this is the guy who directed Three Days of the Condor, one of my favourite thrillers, which has a paranoid plot that, when I rewatched it recently, amazed me with its accidental topicality (CIA ineptitude, oil wars, assassinations, etc.). He also directed Absence of Malice, a terrific drama about journalistic ethics. I could only have thought of him as being a glossy Hollywood director if I decided to ignore the more challenging films in his filmography, instead focusing on his bland dramas, like Random Hearts and Sabrina.


That said, as a director I sometimes found his choices perplexing. Why make Havana? Why remake Sabrina? Why bother adapting The Firm? I remember the film critic for The Mirror once referring to that movie as "Two hours of Tom Cruise running towards the camera while looking worried", which sums it up perfectly. Also, why did he get Dave Grusin to do the soundtrack? It needed more than tinkly pianos to create tension in that most flaccid and uninvolving of legal dramas (I place the blame at John Grisham's feet, not Pollack's. He did his best with some dreadful material). It was all very peculiar.

Perhaps those movies are other reasons why I had my silly preconceptions, but I should have been more forgiving. While he was directing movies that seemed worlds away from his early, challenging work (e.g. Jeremiah Johnson, Castle Keep, They Shoot Horses, Don't They), he was also one of Hollywood's most interesting producers. Just this week HBO showed Recount, the dramatisation of the theft of an entire country (figuratively speaking) that he had produced. In recent years he had teamed up with Anthony Minghella to produce a series of interesting (or potentially interesting) films; Minghella's own post-English Patient movies, Philip Noyce's Catch A Fire and The Quiet American, Kenneth Lonergan's forthcoming Margaret, and Tom Tykwer's Heaven, not to mention his solo work on Ira Sachs' Forty Shades of Blue and George Clooney's Leatherheads. His support for outsider movies made within the studio system (or rather their "independent" production houses) was commendable. How many of these unorthodox projects would have been made without his clout behind them?


Even while being foolishly dismissive of his fascinating work as a producer, I still derived pleasure from his acting work, especially when playing seemingly approachable authority figures who have a sinister heart, as in Eyes Wide Shut, Changing Lanes, and Michael Clayton. As shown in those movies, his forte was the role of the pragmatic, seemingly down-to-earth managerial type who would eventually stab you in the front and then passionately explain why he was in no way responsible for your death, blaming it instead on your inability to understand the corporate line. That said, my favourite performance is from his most entertaining movie, Tootsie, which is one of those movies I would include on my "Perfect" list. Here is his funniest moment, tearing a strip off pre-drag Dustin Hoffman.



It's a testament to his gift for comedy that he had several guest roles on sitcoms to his name. So what am I saying here? That I feel really really bad for not giving the guy the benefit of the doubt while he was alive. Good director with a fascinating filmography, terrific and likeable actor, defender of offbeat "independent" cinema. It's a shame I'm only just realising that now. RIP, Sydney Pollack. You shall be missed.

End Of Season Review - CSI

A while back we got into the habit of reviewing the shows of the previous week, at first in depth, and then, when it became apparent that it was cutting into my eating and sleeping time, with a bunch of quick comments. I was enjoying doing it, before the strike came and threw everything into total disarray, thus making such a project untenable. When shows slowly dribbled back onto the screen, we barely even noticed. Ugly Betty returned with such little fanfare (in the UK, that is) that we have only just caught up with it. Same with Reaper. Some shows didn't bother coming back (Pushing Daisies, Heroes), the showrunners deciding to start afresh next year, and some will never come back at all (Bionical Woman, the unfairly cancelled Journeyman). Of those that came back, many of them had lost whatever momentum they had prior to the strike. A pity, but still, over the last couple of weeks, the season finales made up for some of those missteps. We intend to have a look at the state of these shows at the end of the season, but please bear in mind, the quality of the shows was damaged by the strike, and nothing managed to escape losing energy as a result (even my beloved Lost has struggled to cope with the disruption to its schedule). We accept that judging them too harshly would be unfair.

CSI returned with some not so great episodes, much to our disappointment. Though my love for the show remains, I think they've passed their high-water mark, which for me would be season six, which featured the aftermath of the amazing Tarantino-helmed season five finale, the introduction of the evil Hannah West, and the incredible two-parter A Bullet Runs Through It, which I maintain is better than almost all crime films I've seen in the past ten years. Season seven memorably featured the brilliant Miniature Killer arc (and my personal favourite CSI episode ever, Monster In The Box), and Greg's ongoing woes after killing a mugger, which fitted in perfectly with his growth as a CSI; everyone else on the team acted like his difficulties were just part of the job, and no worse than anything they had gone through themselves. It also featured the intriguing mid-season Liev Shrieber arc, which was marred only by the actual presence of Shrieber himself. However, on a week-to-week basis, I thought season six was stronger. Perhaps if I rewatch I will disagree with myself, but for now I'll rely on my memory of that slight deflation I felt as season seven progressed.


This season was weaker still, with some very strong episodes scattered throughout. The best was probably Sara's departure, Goodbye and Good Luck, which featured the return of Hannah West at her creepiest. Brilliantly directed by Kenneth Fink, it was moving and gripping in perfect balance, and since then hardly anything on the show has matched up (again, bear in mind we're aware the show was damaged by the strike, and are just glad it came back at all this year). Post-strike, we saw the return of Method Man as Drops, in his most entertaining episode yet, though that's not saying much as his previous appearances were in the horrible Big Shots and Poppin' Tags, memorable only because of the running joke with Brass ineptly talking like a rapper and not getting laughed off the screen by everyone around him. It's kind of embarrassing, and while I'm all for more Method Man, I wish his episodes were stronger.

There was also the classy A Thousand Days On Earth, which saw the team investigate a child death, with some of the team jumping to conclusions and investigating someone on the child sex register, only to find that every one of their assumptions was incorrect. By the time they realise their mistakes, lives have been destroyed everywhere, and Catherine ends up with a new enemy. It was a brilliant examination of how disparate facts do not count as evidence of guilt, no matter how completely those facts apply to the crime in question, and how assumptions make an "ass" out of "u" and "mption". (A non-Chim Chim Cookie to the firsts person who names the film I just quoted!)

Another highlight was the peculiar The Theory of Everything, with a teleplay from David Rambo and Buffy ace Douglas Petrie that felt like a semi-comedic X-Files episode. Only a tenuous grasp of physics let it down, trying to link the connectivity of a series of crimes with string theory, and including characters called Bohr and Planck. Other than that it was a well-paced head-scratcher, quirky but funny, and not "funny" as many comedy episodes end up being. Speaking of that, following on from the half-comedic/half-serious The Chick Chop Flick Shop, which I thought would be the low point of the season, CBS foolishly came up with a writers-swap plan, with Evan Dunsky, Sarah Goldfinger, Carol Mendelsohn, and Naren Shankar writing an episode of the nigh-unwatchable Two and a Half Men, and Chuck Lorre and Lee Aronsohn derailing a beautiful procedural just so they could settle some old scores with an underwritten parody poking fun at their time spent working on Roseanne, Grace Under Fire and Cybill.


Just to make things worse, they cast the awful Katey Sagal as the screeching, egotistical sitcom lead, and her yokel-voiced double, which was an early warning sign the episode was going to be full of silly trickery and ineptly handled nods at the more melodramatic end of the whodunnit spectrum. Sagal seems fine as a dramatic actress (though at the moment I think my only experience of her playing a role straight is in Lost, as Locke's lost love Helen, where she was terrific), but as a comedic actress she is appalling. Her flat, joke-killing line-readings in Futurama destroyed the show almost every week, and to see her continually cast in comedies amazes me. Why do people think she can do funny? She has no idea of how to tell a joke, and what's worse is that her crappy timing is matched with eye-rolling hammery that Zero Mostel would have envied. Dear God, I hated this episode so completely. When the Shades of Caruso End of Season Awards are handed out, this is gonna be high on the horror list.

Luckily, the season ended strongly with For Gedda, at the end of which we lost another CSI, as trouble-laden Warrick's involvement with the evil Lou Gedda came to a bloody head (literally!). Framed for Gedda's murder and suffering from amnesia (a device I could normally do without, and yet was used well in this finale and that of House), the CSI team work to clear their colleague, which happens with uncharacteristic ease (and with a little help from the usually officious Ecklie. Obviously getting killed on Lost made his mood-swings more manageable). Of course, this being a season finale, it wasn't going to end without a big event, and knowing that we were expecting something extra to happen, Warrick is cleared with several minutes of show left to go, and the pace slows right down so that we, the viewer, are left to agonise over what is going to happen. There's the moment he is cleared, and a discussion with Gil, and a bit of team bonding over dinner, and a farewell to Nick, and a walk to his car... By this point we were in pieces, knowing that he would be leaving the show in a much more dramatic fashion than we'd previously thought, our nerves stretched to breaking point. For Warrick, there was no decision to quit, no suspension over his recklessness. Instead he got a bullet in the neck from the under-sheriff, revealed to have been complicit in Gedda's criminal activity all along. It was a truly bleak and upsetting end to the season.


We've said it many times before; CSI is a rare show where we like every character, and it's always hard to see them go. Jorja Fox has her fans and detractors, but even if she was our least-favourite character, we liked her enough to be sad to see her go (and seeing her relationship with Gil suffer made us sad too). This was even worse, though Dustin Lee Abraham and Richard Catalani were smart to put Warrick's woes into perspective by referencing his gambling addiction and culpability in the death of Holly Griggs, who was killed in the very first episode. He's always been heading towards this final tragedy, which maybe is what made it so hard to watch. To be honest, the denouement of his arc needed a bit more time spent on it prior to the final episode, but as with many shows, having a truncated season meant some plots got given short-shrift (I gather that, in particular, the final episode of Bones has enraged people for rushing a big development with one of the cast). We can't hate on the show because of that.

Though it wasn't the best season finale ever, it did feature some of the best filmmaking. Director Kenneth Fink (having a good year) and director of photography Nelson Cragg pulled out all the stops. This episode some of the most luminous and beautiful visual work of the whole season, with some gorgeous backlighting and bounced light giving everything a soft edge when not filling the frame with stark colour contrasts. It was a joy to look at. Most movies don't look this good. Kudos to the crew and production staff for making such a gorgeous show.


So what next? According to Michael Ausiello, Jorja Fox and the real-life-naughty-man Dourdan will both be in the next season opener, though I doubt they'll be around for long after that. Though I'm sorry to see those characters go, this season hinted that the format has been going without changes for too long. Though the ambition of the show has increased, it has strayed too closely to gimmickry this year, what with the Two and a Half Men project, the Without A Trace crossover, Hodges and the murder game (an episode I liked, but still thought was a jokey episode too far), and the other shenanigans listed above. Next season will feature at least one new character, Bryce Adams, played by Lauren Lee Smith, an actress who is utterly alien to me. I'm still happy about it, as the first choice for that role was Katee Sackhoff, who is utterly alien to everyone on planet Earth. As a Starbuck hater who thought Sackhoff was beyond laughable on Bionical Woman, I'm thrilled she won't be stinking up this show.

The only other question is, will Ronnie Lake return? She got some screentime earlier this year and has yet to come back. Another Louise Lombard moment for the show? A quick IMDb check shows she's been jinxed by taking centre stage in The Chick Chop Flick Shop and is now appearing almost exclusively in slasher flicks. I guess we'll just have to hope the shake-up to the series extends to something more than just a cast change, and we'll see an intelligent continuation of this murder plot, now that we have a bona fide sneaky asshole villain on the show. As Jon Stewart would say, just as he reflexively does in almost every edition of The Daily Show, Damn you, Undersheriff McKeen! Damn you all to hell!!!!

Yes, Yes, I'm Aware I Never Shut Up About Guitar Hero...

...But Activision just announced that they're taking the fight to MTV and Harmonix with Guitar Hero World Tour.

Activision Inc (ATVI.O) is adding drums, bass guitar, and microphone to its popular "Guitar Hero" video game, a move aimed at winning away fans of MTV's rival musical title "Rock Band."

"Guitar Hero World Tour" will include the ability for two groups of four people each to compete online, as well as let players compose and play their own music.

That's just super-duper, and I love that they've done that. Okay, so it's derivative, and they remain in the shadow of Harmonix and their incredible innovations, but it's the only logical move they could make. Of course, this means nothing unless the music choices are incredible.

The game will feature songs from bands such as Van Halen, The Eagles, Linkin Park and Sublime...

Bollocks.

Actually, that is something that can change over time, though I really do hope the song packs come down in price. I resented having to spend literally billions of Microsoft Points (this is a lie) to buy three songs in the fourth Guitar Hero II pack when all I wanted was I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones (and OMG, I got 100% on it third time I played it on Medium setting, which makes it the first song I've got 100% on! Bless you, you three-chord-playing heroes). Still, there could well be some great finds on there. I've been enjoying playing the bonus tracks Mr. Fix-It by The Amazing Crowns, Soy Bomb by Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, and Thunderhorse by Dethklok, though worryingly they were all on Guitar Hero II (i.e. the Harmonix game). Guitar Hero III's bonus tracks are nowhere near as interesting, but then I was less impressed with the track listing on that game already.

What I really want from Activision is to make robust peripherals that don't cost the earth, thus crushing MTV Games and forcing them to bring the price of the game down so I can get that too. This is the dream, anyway. I have more faith in Harmonix and their skills, and suspect I would prefer Rock Band (especially as you can buy single songs instead of packs full of boring songs you don't want), but what do I know? I can't afford Rock Band. Because it is horribly overpriced. And I'm still pissed about it.


Even if Santa ignores my pleas and the price war doesn't materialise, Guitar Hero World Tour does a bunch of stuff I really like the sound of. Not only does the drum kit look awesome, it does cool things too.

In addition to a newly designed more responsive guitar controller and microphone, Guitar Hero World Tour will deliver the most realistic drum experience ever in a video game with an authentic electronic drum kit. Featuring three drum pads, two raised cymbals and a bass kick pedal, the drum controller combines larger and quieter, velocity-sensitive drum heads with soft rubber construction to deliver authentic bounce back and is easy to set up, move, break down and store.

Even better than that, Activision have responded to one of the pissiest complaints about Guitar Hero and Rock Band; that playing the game is a pale imitation of genuine creation, that mimicking the playing of music is no substitute for making something yourself. I don't think Guitar Hero and Rock Band stop people from branching out and doing that on their own, and in fact think it would inspire people to try playing instruments themselves (I've said this before; please forgive me). Anyway, it's slightly more moot now.

The game's innovative new Music Studio lets players express their musical creativity by giving them access to a full compliment [sic] of tools to create digital music from scratch, utilizing all of the instruments, and then play their compositions in the game. Music creators will also be able to share their recordings with their friends online through GHTunes where other gamers can download their unique compositions and play them.

I'm outrageously excited about that, even though I expect any compositions would be pretty unadventurous just because of the limitations of the soft/hardware, but it still appeals to me.


It links in to something I've been planning on blogging about for a while now, which touches on Be Kind Rewind, Video Sniffing, Rocky III, and Lewis Hyde's The Gift (a frustrating book that killed my enthusiasm 20 pages in, but still applies). In time I will, I'm sure. Before that, we hope to have a look at the various season finales that have been piling up over the last couple of weeks, if we can ever get this goddamn laptop to work long enough to write anything substantial. Apologies for any future Blog Slowdowns.

Good News For Whovians

Stephen Moffat has been named Doctor Who showrunner starting with the fifth series, following next year's short series of longer episodes, giving David Tennant a break from all the gurning, grinning, and relentless flappy-legged running (I say this with affection). Cheekily the BBC had been saying Piers Wenger (who produced Ballet Shoes and little else) was going to be Executive Producer, but he'll be sharing that job with Moffat. I've been going around the internet being a killjoy saying Moffat would never take on the job, as he never seemed interested in the job, and is currently working with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. Seems I was horribly horribly wrong, and not for the first time. Still, it's the best news possible. His Who episodes have been not just the best on that show, but possibly the best dramas on BBC One for years.


Of course, this means the fans will have to start hating him whenever the Doctor does anything that might contradict something that happened twenty-five years ago, or for maintaining the current tone instead of pretending Russell T. Davies' run never happened and returning the show to its Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker "glory days" (in quotes because even though I'm fond of that Who-era, I like this version of the show even more). RTD gets blamed for everything on the show that doesn't work and ignored for everything that does. If people realised how much work he does on the show, including major rewrites on episodes that fans love and use as ammunition in their war against his writing (a fact that makes me laugh and laugh and laugh), they'd back off. I'll be sad to see him go, as he's done an amazing job, but maybe now he'll get to write shows that will be praised as good drama and not just dismissed as bad fan-fic by Whovians (who, of course, think their fan-fic is superior).


As for the current season, I'm enjoying it (though we've yet to get a stone-classic episode), and liking Catherine Tate as Donna about a thousand times more than I thought I would, and not just because she doesn't worship the Doctor. Talkbacks about the show are almost unreadable as all that fans seem to want to say, other than "RTD is the worst thing to happen to this show since John Nathan-Turner even though without him the show would never have come back but I don't care because all I want are my Horror of Fang Rock DVDs!!!", is that Rose and (especially) MARTHA JONES are crap because they loved The Doctor. For crying out loud, if you're going to fall for someone, I think it's fair to say you're going to fall for someone who is handsome (apparently), sexy (equally apparently), brave, dashing, honourable, funny, intelligent, gallant, and has his own time machine. How is falling for that guy a bad thing? And didn't MARTHA turn her back on him in the end? (That's a rhetorical question, because she totally did, you haters!) Shut up, stupid talkbackers. Go away and re-read your Patrick Troughton-era novelisations.

Even more good news for us fans; the next two-parter is written by Moffat!



It could turn out to be poo, but I doubt it. The only bad thing about that is that Doctor Who is off for a week because of the fucking Eurovision Song Contest, now rendered utterly unwatchable with the removal of Ireland's entry, Dustin the Turkey.



I'm hypnotised by the revolving glitterboobs on the front of Dustin's trolley.

BBC Breakfast Watch! Wii Insults Child Shocker!

I've got to stop watching this show. Isn't the whole idea that it's supposed to be a mental Valium for people getting up and going to work? Forget it. It's like a dose of adrenaline to the heart muscle for me. Or having an electrode jammed into my brain like in the amazing season finale of House.

I'm skewing my complaints about it toward the treatment of technology, which goes along the lines of, "Oh teh noes! We don't understand what this gadget does but it will probably be deadly!" (if this show had its way, we'd all be sitting in swamps eating mud and grunting with animal-like terror every time the moon appears in the sky). As that means I'm also watching them deal with children (because technology will turn our children into cyborgs or corpses of mass-murderers), I'm also judging them on what could be called a Daily Mail Quotient (DMQ), which measures the volume of their terrified screams of, "What about the children? Please, think of the children?!?!?!". That almost means Marvin Gaye should be judged for his DMQ, but I'll give him a pass, because, you know, it's Marvin Gaye, people.


The recent Grand Theft Auto IV panic would get a DMQ score of about 89%, as it posited the end of civilisation if kids kept playing it (which they shouldn't be anyway). Their total misunderstanding of what texting is, and their worry that it will make all children everywhere forget how to speak the English language got about an 84% DMQ, and probably would have been higher if they hadn't been shown up by the level-headed fifteen year old in their midst. Funnily enough, the news piece that annoyed me today was covered by the Daily Mail last week; a ten year old girl used a Wii Fit machine belonging to her friends and was referred to as technically obese according to the BMI.

Breakfast had a mother, the daughter in question, and another daughter for no apparent reason, and the Street Doctor, the improbably named Dr. Jonty Heaversedge. It was your standard nonsense, with Bill asking the girl what had happened and terrifying her into silence, Dr. Jonty saying kids shouldn't be measured according to the BMI, and the mother agreeing with that and being mortified because her daughter (who is obviously not obese or overweight) wanted to go on a diet.


There are a few things about the feature that annoyed me. Firstly, Bill terrorising the young girl by asking how muscular she is. Bad Pervert Bill! Secondly, the possibility that the machine was just broken or calibrated wrong. This seemed so self-evident to me that I was shocked no one brought it up until halfway through the interview, when Bill suggested it might have been knackered. Good Perceptive Bill! Boing Boing came to the same conclusion. Of course, the mother had never considered that and wasn't there when her daughter got on the machine, so it's possible her friends messed it and got the set-up wrong, or even worse, manipulated it to make it seem like she was overweight. It's possible, but no one wanted to consider that, because if that was the case, no one gets to get their Righteous Outrage on, send complaint emails to Nintendo, and get interviewed on TV and by the Daily Mail.

Even if the machine was working correctly, I'm still pissed, as the whole point of this "campaign" seems to be caused more by the fact that the parents had complained to Nintendo, demanding a warning be placed on the game, and Nintendo refused, issuing this statement instead.

Nintendo would like to apologise to any customers offended by the in-game terminology used to classify a player's current BMI status, as part of the BMI measurement system integrated into Wii Fit.

Wii Fit is still capable of measuring the BMI for people aged between two and 20 but the resulting figures may not be entirely accurate for younger age groups due to varying levels of development.

The fact that it measures kids from the age of two seemed to drive Susannah Reid (subbing for Sian) into paroxysms of outraged disbelief, which amused me. However, Dr. Jonty dissed the use of BMI for kids, as kids change size so often it's hard to quantify it, and the mother was probably pissed she didn't get a free Wii for her troubles upset that there wasn't a warning on the machine saying that the machine might inaccurately judge a child's weight to be problematic.

Dr. Jonty is right that if we use standard BMI calculations for children we would be silly billies, but BMI for children and teens is calculated differently, and even though it takes into account as many different variables as it can, it must still be used in conjunction with common sense, and the guidance of professional medical expert and parents who spend enough time with their children to know what their dietary habits and daily exercise regimes are like (and by "regimes" I mean as little as running around or using a bike, not pumping iron and running mini-marathons). Also, I don't own a Wii Fit, and haven't seen the instruction manuals, but these things are often really exhaustive, as Nintendo know all it takes is one mistake on these things and they will get hit with a million lawsuits. I wonder if the possible inaccuracies of the BMI is mentioned in it. I'll do some digging, if possible. (Don't count on it. A knackered ankle has laid me out for the day.)


I understand that telling a child they are obese when they are obviously not might damage the child's self-image so badly they might develop an eating disorder, but as it is not a function of a child's internal assessment of what the world considers acceptable (which, it has been argued, can be distorted by exposure to images of size zero models and skinny actresses on TV and in film), surely it's easily caught. If a responsible parent (who should surely be around when their kids are playing an exercise-intensive game like Wii Fit anyway) notices that their child has been told by a game that they are obese, then they can tell their child this is not the case. And that's exactly what happened. The young girl was informed by her parents that the machine made a mistake, and Susannah, having questioned her with more tact than Buffalo-Mouth Bill, managed to glean from the girl that she's fine now and doesn't consider herself obese or overweight. Have there been more cases of this happening? None that we've heard. Crisis probably averted.

There are multiple interesting and crucial debates to be had about children, weight, and self-image to be had, and I'd be crazy to suggest that any of that was trivial, but the paranoia about the Wii Fit is missing the point and confusing people about a machine that will be far more beneficial in the long run than any number of angry letters and outraged newspaper articles. This is the same whenever there is a launch of new hardware or software. People wonder how it will negatively impact on their lives and kick up a stink.

Remember when the Wii came out and everyone broke their living rooms because they weren't putting the wrist-strap on? Everyone was pissed at the Wii for a fortnight, complaining to Nintendo instead of just putting the strap on (that's what she said). It's the same here. New technology arrives that could change the way the world lives, and journalists have been waiting for a reason to demonise it. And here it is. And it's wrong. The Wii Fit is a good thing, and this one glitch, which might have been caused by any number of things and is easily resolved using common sense, should not overshadow the good that it can do. Try telling that to journalists and the panicky parents they leave in their wake, though.


Anyway, it wasn't all technophobia this morning. They had Genesis on the show, as BBC Four are wasting a night of programming on the one-time prog heroes turned unadventurous noodlers. That meant they had a particularly aloof Phil Collins in the studio. Quick! Someone tax him before he gets away!

Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week: "When You Were Young" by The Killers

So this month's week's recommendation isn't exactly a sensitive, mopey up-and-coming indie outfit, I admit. I think you lose claim to that label when you're signed to Island in the US (though, admittedly, signed to an indie label in the UK), your albums have sold 12 million copies worldwide, and one of your songs has been lip-synched by Justin Timberlake in a mind-bendingly awful movie by a hipster director. And while the band may be too big to be liked by hipster douchebags anymore, they certainly are hipster douchebags -- Brandon Flowers (the lead singer) in particular. Though he's apparently a devout Mormon, he's got a tendency to boast, and the jury's out whether he's an asshole or not. Though Rufus Wainwright mentioned how much he loves him at the concert we went to last year (and even wrote "Tulsa" about him -- apparently he tastes like potato chips in the morning. Mm, potato chips), so he's already close to having a free pass. And he's right about Fall Out Boy. Fucking Fall Out Boy. Thanks for ruining that episode of The Simpsons for the rest of us, Wentz.


But really, none of that matters. I love The Killers. Many have pegged them as just another trendy It Band like the Arctic Monkeys or the Kaiser Chiefs (sorry, Masticator), but they are at least a step (perhaps half a flight, give or take) above their cohorts. (It's interesting to note that most of their sonic influences are British -- in fact for awhile I had a vague idea they were British -- but the band's actually from Vegas.)

The difference with the Killers is that they aren't all pose and flash, and their music isn't just of the era. They have a gift for melody -- what initially may tick along like a standard rock track suddenly swells into an irresistibly catchy, hummable tune with a hook that won't leave your brain for days. "Bones," from their second album, Sam's Town, is a kind of 80s synth-pop tune, complete with reverb-y vocals and grinding guitars, but it's the brass section's repeating arpeggio that wriggles into your mind like an earwig. "Change Your Mind," off Hot Fuss, begins with a sing-songy guitar hook that never lets up and backing vocals that push the song into a beautiful, ecstatic climax. What makes the song for me, though, is the moment 2 minutes and 46 seconds in, when Flowers' voice goes up on the word "no," and for that second the song is absolutely sublime. Sometimes it's enough for one note to make an entire song, and if I had any shred of musical knowledge, I would praise that note now. "Mr. Brightside" is a riff on the kind of glam-rock nonsense I hate, but the gorgeous hook of the chorus transcends the same-y muddiness of the genre and becomes something both propulsive and beautiful.

I'm hard-pressed to find much filler on either album. "Why Do I Keep Counting" is a bit of a silly one-off -- it's apparently about Flowers' fear of flying -- but for a throwaway song it is quirky but also big and anthemic and feels serious and playful at the same time. "This River Is Wild," besides being (I like to imagine) an homage to a movie I secretly love, starts out fairly conventional but becomes more lighthearted as it develops (particularly with Flowers' delivery of lines like "Sometimes I'm nervous / when I talk I shake a little"). With most albums, even if I really like the band, I usually only love about 3 or 4 songs. With The Killers, I love or at least really like at least 6 or 7 songs on both albums, which is a testament to how catchy most of them are.

One of the Killers' biggest hits has been the silly gender-bending tale "Somebody Told Me," which is one of their more conventional-sounding songs, but it's a good example of a tune that will most likely grab your internal iPod and set it to "endless repeat," at least until a Moonpig ad comes on TV. (Warning: I do not take responsibility for any lasting after-effects of Moonpig ads. Do not hold sharp instruments while watching.) "Smile Like You Mean It" is quite nice as well -- again, the "da-DAH-dah" through the chorus is musical heroin -- though it doesn't get really interesting until the last 20 seconds or so, with the funky drum-and-guitar thing that's over way too soon.

But to me, their best tracks are two of their biggest hits -- "All These Things That I've Done" and "When You Were Young." I'm surprising exactly no one with this analysis, and I'm not even championing songs that weren't released as singles. Everyone's heard these two songs. But that doesn't lessen their power one jot, and it provides a useful platform for the difference between the two albums.

Hot Fuss, as I mentioned, was The Killers' debut album, and critics fell over each other attempting to be the first to throw accolades at the hot new band and crown them the new kings of indie rock. Their take on glam-rock and 80s and 90s British sounds was a brilliant debut; I certainly won't dispute that. As I said, they're a cut above many other bands with a similar sound. But I can't help feeling that the fact that that sound is trendy is the reason they became critics' darlings in the first place. They did that sound, and they did it well, but deviation was not allowed. When Sam's Town came out two years later, suddenly critics were declaring a sophomore slump. The band had -- gasp! -- changed their sound so that they could grow musically. My God what did those little punks think they were playing at? They didn't even ask for permission! And who were they moving towards sonically? Bruce Springsteen! The nerve! Didn't they get the memo? Arcade Fire and The Hold Steady were already filling that slot! How dare The Killers move out of their allotted indie ghetto?

It really puzzles me why The Killers got so much shit for sounding more like intelligent arena rock when other bands were being slavishly praised for sounding like intelligent arena rock. Ugh. Well, if this flaw is what's keeping me away from reading more Pitchfork, then really it's a virtue in disguise.

All right, enough preamble. On to the good stuff. Amazingly, I managed to miss "When You Were Young"'s chart dominance, and I only noticed it because it was a song on Guitar Hero III. Obviously this means it's a rock classic already and doesn't need any defense from me, but I loved it so much that I kept playing it over and over, even though the song's pretty easy and I'd already gotten five stars on the first try (okay, on Medium, not Expert). Meet me after the somewhat bizarre video and I'll explain why.



The appeal of the shimmering guitar is obvious in the first few seconds -- and the first progression up the scale after the first verse is one of the most addictive hooks I've ever heard. I can't describe how satisfying it is to actually feel like you're playing those notes in the game, to feel as if you actually have a part in creating this stunning piece of pop perfection. The song's lyrics are full of sadness and longing, but it fills you with such joy that it's hard not to want to simply get lost in the music.

The song is definitely reminiscent of Springsteen, but for all the right reasons -- the propulsive, driving guitars, the swelling anthemic chorus, the emotional vocals, the shimmering little bells you can hear at the very top of the song that make the whole thing, make it feel big and magical and epic. Lines like "We're burning down the highway skyline on the back of a hurricane / that started turning when you were young" are very Springsteen-esque (Springsteinian?), but that's no flaw -- they too make the song feel epic and grand. They make the lives of a few small, ordinary people feel like the grand sweep of tragic and beautiful Americana.

It's a coin toss whether I prefer this one to "All These Things That I've Done" -- right now I think the latter is winning, but only because I haven't listened to it quite as much and I think it's a little fresher in my mind. But ask me another day and I'll have reconsidered. At any rate, here's the UK video, which was made earlier (the US one is here; it can't be embedded because of evil corporate grumblegrumble).



It's an accurate representation of the progression of a typical Saturday night in London, albeit with 50% less stabbing. It was obviously made on the cheap, and is meant to make the band seem like hip indie kids who are too cool to make a real video. Or it's incredibly lazy, as it was clearly made in a couple of hours before a concert. (I must mention, though, how nice it is to be writing about a band that's actually popular enough to have videos. The way forward.)

The standout section of this song is obvious -- the repetition of the line "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier" has already become iconic, and deservedly so. It's so iconic that, as I mentioned, Justin Timberlake somewhat creepily lip-synchs it here. I don't know whether to be impressed with Richard Kelly for such a bold move or disgusted with him for appropriating a popular song in a bizarre context -- but then I haven't seen what by all accounts is a hot mess of a movie, so I shouldn't judge (yet). [The lipsynch scene is the non-Rock highlight of that awful awful awful awful awful movie, but it's little more than a video slotted into the movie for no reason. - Neck] I am, however, pissed off with the crappy TV series Jericho for using this song over the first few minutes of its first episode, thus making me like it instantly, then hate it even more in subsequent minutes when I realized that The Killers were by far the best writers on the show.

The Hot Fuss post-punk glam-rock sound is evident in this track as it starts, with a wash of guitars and cymbals and distorted vocals. I love the initial lolloping flow of the lyrics -- the quick rhymes of "Another head aches / another heart breaks / I'm so / much ol / der than I can take" (I love the way Flowers places an odd emphasis on every other word -- "so" and "older," sliding the latter from one line to the next with an oddly syncopated rhythm), and then the relief of the chorus, with more odd rhythm in the line "Don't you put me on the back burner."

Then we have the bridge, which just begs to be sung by thousands of people yelling their lungs out in a concert. It's one of those electrifying moments that gives you chills when you're listening to it alone (it's one of my favorite songs to listen to as I'm walking around London) but would be absolutely transcendent when sung in a chorus with thousands of other people. This, I think, is the Killers' real talent -- creating songs that are at once personal and anthemic, songs that are just as much fun to listen to by yourself, even as they have such scope and power that you know seeing them performed live would be like seeing them achieve the musical equivalent of self-actualization.

I find it hard to believe that anyone could not like this song, though I'm sure there are plenty out there who can't stand it. But it's a galvanizing tune, and it's irresistibly danceable -- I defy you not to start dancing a little in your chair as you listen. The Killers are playing in England soon, but unfortunately only in festivals in Reading and Leeds and not in London (as much as I like the idea of hearing The Killers in concert, festivals are not my bag, baby). But I'm sure they'll be around soon enough, and then my hipster douchebag fantasies will be complete.

BBC Breakfast Watch! LOL = Laughing All Over

I really don't want to keep kicking BBC Breakfast whenever it does something stupid, as there aren't enough hours in the day to catalogue the horror, but when they go after ver yoof ov 2day, I feel compelled to bring it up. This morning the Z-team of Charlie Stayt and Susannah Reid reported on a study from the University of Toronto claiming that, contrary to popular belief (i.e. panicky, ill-thought-out guesswork), teenagers using text speak to communicate with each other are, get this, able to switch back and forth between normal English and the abbreviations they use in texts. I know! Crazy.


To discuss this they brought in the typical opposing viewpoints, a teenager, Lucy Van Amerongen, who has just written The A-Z of Teen Talk, and Marie Clair from the Plain English Society. After an embarrassing animation showing some text speak (containing such mind-bending arcane symbology as "cya 2nite"), Susannah claimed it was like a different language, and then asked Lucy if she started writing like it when not texting. Lucy, who seemed like a normal person and not a drooling imbecile, said that had never happened, pointing out that it's only used in texting because it's more efficient. Not to be dissuaded from her "different language" point, Susannah asked if she had to learn a new language, which Lucy pointed out was not necessary. Any abbreviation that got the point across was fine. I can't believe I'm writing a post about a news show that revealed this fact as if it was revelatory. Do these people live in a commune or something? I know White City is a bit far from civilisation, but it's not sealed off from the rest of the world.

Plain English Marie then joined in, stating she doesn't want to be seen as a fuddy-duddy, and then proceeded to say there was a problem with people using text speak in other contexts (Charlie seemed very worried that people would use the word "fink" instead of "think", poor guy). It was here that my ire rose, because again we were discussing a hypothetical idiot who would be compelled by the march of progress to ignore the English language entirely and revert to symbols and probably grunts to communicate, probably while mugging people with copies of Grand Theft Auto IV. The Hypothetical Idiot is a useful tool when getting into a panic over modernity. "But will this drive the Hypothetical Idiot I just imagined in my head to go crazy hotwiring cars and driving them into crowds of grandparents?" "Will Facebook make some Hypothetical Idiots I just conjured up in my imagination have sex with billions of people?" "Will the Wii make Hypothetical Idiots break nice vases while indulging in silly pastimes that have no educational value not unlike BBC Breakfast?"

If we're going to worry about what a Hypothetical Idiot might get up to, we might as well stop creating anything or doing anything that might inspire people to potentially harm themselves, providing that person has an IQ of -59. Who needs progress? We can just sit around listening to Test Match Special, drinking weak tea and making polite conversation about the weather. ::breaks object in anger:: Hey, here's a thought. Let's not worry about the Hypothetical Idiots, people. They only exist in your fear-encrusted mind! They are merely doing your bidding; you're the only ones making them jump off buildings after smoking a spliff or drinking Red Bull. Let my hypothetical people go!!!


A quick caveat. I'm sure kids have started to write text speak in exams, and the stories we hear about such things are not apocryphal. It would be crazy of me to think otherwise. I frequent talkbacks on the internet, for god's sake. I've seen spelling errors, grammatical foul-ups, syntactical snafus that would turn Marie Clair's hair white. The internet can often be a place where language goes to die, and it is shocking. But there are checks and balances in real life, and if people are growing up and still making mistakes like these in situations where they will be judged harshly for it, then there's a good chance they might have been incompetent anyway. People have had trouble with language before texting came along. It's not like we were all Kingsley Amis/Margaret Atwood until twelve years ago and now we're all grunting at each other, burning our dictionaries, and using numbers or letters instead of words (Prince and his fans are exempt from criticism on the last one). Idiocracy is one of my favourite movies of the past few years, but I don't think it's coming to pass. People can switch from lazy text speak and back to normal Plain English at will. If I can do it, anyone can.


Of course, none of this mattered to the BBC Breakfast guys. Susannah had already asked Lucy if she slipped into text speak while writing, but asked her again just a minute later, "I mean, Lucy, imagine an exam situation. Can you honestly say you've never written any of those abbreviations, or in fact had letters from friends or notes where they've started to let these words slip into their normal way of writing?" She was like a dog with a bone. Except stupider.

Sadly Lucy admitted she has used the abbreviation "cuz" instead of "because", but only in her revision notes (instead of saying, "No, in the imaginary exam you just asked me to create in my head, I didn't do that. And I got an A+. And then I left school and applied for your job. And got it. And did it better than you"). As a result of that admission all of the adults ganged up on her and started claiming it proved their point and it was a slippery slope and the next step was practically illiteracy. Dear God, it made me so mad.

Charlie won the stupidity trophy, though, by saying to Lucy (who I would, probably rudely, assume to be upper middle class) "you're very well spoken, and clearly have good use of language, and in a way you're not part of the problem as you have proved that you can do these two things, but the problem is what happens with other people." People from a different economic background, perhaps? Lucy looked suitably embarrassed by the whole thing. Marie then compounded the idiocy by proving she knew nothing about text abbreviations by saying LOL stood for Laughing All Over.

After that Susannah interrogated Lucy for a while about how many hours a day she texts (I wish she'd said "ALL DAY LONG AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME OR THE CODE THAT IS USED TO USURP YOUR AUTHORITY!!! LOL!!!!"), and Marie hilariously admitted she abbreviated in texts as well, but used that to prove that she was allowed to because she was a responsible adult who could switch between text speak and Plain English (which was the point of the Canadian study, not to mention what Lucy had been trying to explain earlier). Basically she was convinced, using Hypothetical Idiots as her study group, that young kids would grow up only knowing text speak. The only thing that could stop this, she said, is teaching them a standard version of English that everyone agrees on. A radical idea! I think we should have already been teaching people this universally agreed-upon standard of English all along. I have even invented a name for these places where children can learn this language. I shall call them "schools".

It was absolute nonsense, yet more of the oldsters panicking because their kids are developing a culture and mode of communication that they cannot possibly understand, thus bringing them closer to oblivion and obsolescence. I can imagine parents must be freaking out that their kids have developed a code that they use to confound authority, and so we hear horror stories about children and teenagers losing the ability to use syllables or words of more than four letters and probably starving as a result, so don't do it, kids!!! I remember a colleague commenting on how superb Pixar's Monsters Inc. was as it perfectly captured the fear and ambivalence parents have toward their children (mingled with much stronger love, obviously), either that they would hurt themselves or develop a life of their own, leaving them alone and confused. Well, Charlie and Susannah were Mike and Sully this morning, and Lucy was Boo. Best of all, she totally PWNed the adults. Kudos.


Oh, and if you check out the review of the book I linked to before, skater girl can get bent. She's obviously just a jellus hata. (And no, I'm not proud of myself for picking on a fifteen-year old.)

Lost - Cabin Fever

It's hard out here for a Lost fan. For a start, we don't really have a name, like Star Trek fans are called Trekkers, X-Files fans are confusingly known as X-Philes, and Babylon 5 fans are called Babies. I think. Are we called Losties? It's not much of a tag, and it's already used to describe a lot of the characters on the show. I think we should be called Searchers For Truth, or Crusaders of Quality, because when this show is on form, it's better than everything else in the history of the cosmos.


Which brings me to my point. Last week I bitched about the Jack-centric episode Something Nice Back Home, saying it didn't really hold my attention. It felt like the kind of piece-moving episode needed every now and then before the real fireworks kick off, and though these episodes don't have much in the way of spectacle, they often have their incidental pleasures (Foxy's performance, Cort Fey's gorgeous photography).


I've also had a pop at Locke this season, finding many of his actions scarcely believable. He's my favourite of the original characters, but had started to irk since killing Naomi, an act I'm still not certain was a good move to make by the showrunners, though my traditional faith in their vision means I'm still waiting to pass final judgement on it.


This episode may have partially addressed that act, and that's one of the reasons I'm in such an apologetic mood. If Something Nice Back Home was a bit underwhelming, Cabin Fever was incredible, so filled with revelation, shock, humour, and obfuscation that my head spun throughout. I'll sit through any number of set-up episodes if they give the showrunners room to make something as entertaining and thought-provoking as this every so often.


One of the things I liked most about it was that it fulfilled my prediction that writer Elizabeth Sarnoff would bounce back from the disappointment of Eggtown. The script sparkled this week, which I attribute not just to her but to new writer Kyle Pennington, who has an almost totally empty IMDb page but has something now to point at and be proud of. Perhaps the dialogue was occasionally a little too light, but I still laughed when Hurley woke with the word, "Mallomars", and especially when Ben, Locke and Hurley realised they had been following each other in circles for a day, which was also a funny way of addressing the timeline issue, that a day/episode has passed but we didn't get to see them do anything last week.


I don't even know what my favourite moment was. Was it Locke digging around in the Dharma grave for a map?


Or Ben sitting on the edge of it like a kid dipping his feet in a swimming pool?


A lot of AICN talkbackers seem to agree that their best moment together was probably Hurley sharing an Apollo bar with Ben, proving that Hurley is capable of treating anyone with respect even after finding out they were involved in a mass murder. I love Hurley.


Maybe it was the dream featuring Horace Goodspeed, showing up to finally give some advice to poor Locke, much needed after a season of frustrating inactivity.


I love how the nature of the dream echoed some of the theories about the show, that they are all dead and in hell (chopping down the same tree for all eternity certainly qualifies), that they are stuck in a time-loop, that no one can die on the island, etc. It was a terrific, creepy moment, and great to see Doug "Tombs the Stretchy Man" Hutchinson back again. Cuselof had promised he would return, as he is a crucial character, but where's his wife Olivia? Did she somehow survive The Purge?


Though even that moment was treated lightly, there was plenty of drama and intrigue. The most perplexing events of the episode were Richard Alpert's appearances throughout Locke's life, signalling that just as he had suspected, Locke really was meant for greater things. Weirdest of all was the Dalai Lama test, with Alpert turning up at one of Locke's foster homes with a group of objects, asking the young boy which of them already belonged to him.


If my understanding of the Dalai Lama is correct, the next Lama candidate will know which objects are his as he has some memory of his previous life. So are we adding reincarnation to the list of theories? The fact that he already knows about the smoke monster tends to suggest he has somehow experienced life on the island before.


However, Alpert's line about the objects already belonging to Locke might have been a consequence of him time-travelling. If you're able to hop back and forth through time, you're going to think of time not as a line, but in the same way Doctor Manhattan does in Watchmen, as a crystal that can be observed as a whole from a position of omnipotence outside it. It's the same ability I suggested Ben had in The Shape Of Things To Come, and links to the Sirens of Titan theory I went on about there. Perhaps Alpert expects Locke to see time in the same way, and is asking him about the objects that will belong to him in what we mere mortals would think of as the future.


Even more intriguing, Locke gets it wrong and picks a knife, which many have taken to mean Locke decided to stupidly pick something he wanted and not something he was meant to have, which certainly ties into his continual avoidance of his destiny. It makes sense, but it could also have something to do with the future that he sees (hence the picture of Smokey), which is somehow different from the one Alpert expects to happen. The picture of Smokey, the vial of sand (which is either normal beach sand, or the powder found surrounding Jacob's shack), and the compass, tend to suggest they belong to someone who not only will turn up on the island but will be a leader and protector. However, it has to be a passive protector; someone who will take up arms against his enemies is not the right man. Perhaps the comic was the right choice, as it features enough comments about a lost world on the cover to be pretty significant.


So why does he pick wrongly, causing Alpert to have a little tantrum? Is it just his childhood sadness and wish to fight back against his circumstances? Or is it because his future is being manipulated by time agents trying to stop him coming to the island, or to come to the island and do something different than they had thought? It certainly seems like Abaddon is providing different ideas about Locke and the way of the knife, which might account for why he kills Naomi, which seems so out of character for him. Maybe he then chooses the knife because his future has been altered. Wouldn't it be great if it turns out Locke makes bad choices as a child because his future has been altered, thus throwing his entire timeline out of whack, leaving him vulnerable to manipulation by Abaddon. Perhaps he was always meant to go to the island as a child, but a change in the future influences him in the past, creating a need to choose the knife instead of another artifact, thus making him ineligible for messiah status?


::brain melts:: Of course, that is assuming Abaddon is evil and Alpert isn't. I only say that because even though Alpert seemed to be heavily involved in The Purge before, now that's been thrown into doubt by his actions in this episode. Maybe now he can be seen to be more of a pacifist, or at least concerned about bringing to the island a saviour who might end up with blood on his hands (too late, as he has already killed Naomi and several chickens and rabbits). Remember Ben's efforts to get Locke to kill his father? Now I wonder if he was trying to taint this potential messiah, only to be thwarted by Alpert, who showed Locke that Sawyer's life was also ruined by Anthony Cooper, thus giving Locke a way to off his father without having to do it himself. So why is Locke still in the island's good graces? Is even Alpert ignorant of the island's wishes?


The Sirens of Titan theory keeps coming to mind when watching these mythos-expanding episodes, and makes me wonder how much of Locke's life has been shaped in this way. It seems to have happened at birth, with his mother Emily being hit by a car. By now she's about the billionth person hit by a car (though not by the mysterious Golden Pontiac, due to it being the ancient past), and it's becoming clear these things aren't accidents. The future is being shaped, either by testing the unborn baby's ability to survive adversity (which tends to suggest Emily was knocked over by someone working for Alpert), or by someone trying to kill her and her baby (which means... something. It's hard to draw lines when you don't know who the good guys and bad guys are).


For all we know, Locke was pushed into a locker (surely the only place to store a Locke) by some time agent trying to ruin his life, making him hate himself and being a nerd, thus convincing him to shun the interest of Mittelos Biosciences, the big stupid fool. I have to say, the scene where his teacher ineptly tries to convince him that he is destined to be a nerd forever rang very true. I know I hated being a booky loser when I was young, and wished I was anything but. Thank Jacob for becoming older and wiser, and embracing my nerdiness. Now where's my Mittelos flyer?


Of course, Locke was also visited by Matthew Abaddon, played with muted intensity by Lance "Muted Intensity" Reddick, who managed to plant the seed that got Locke to the island. I think if I met Lance Reddick and he told me to go on a walkabout, I would with a quickness. That is one intense motherfucker, even when said intensity is muted.


But what is this? Okay, so he is pretending to be an orderly in order to get close to our hero, but his sneakers caught my eye, especially as Christian is seen later in hiking boots.



Which brings me nicely to the other crazy moment toward the end of the episode. The only other scene that really rivalled the Abaddon/Alpert time-moulding peculiarity was Locke's chat with Christian, now acting as a proxy for Jacob. Was this because it was important that Locke meet Christian instead of Jacob? Or is it because the actor who is Jacob is currently unavailable and this was a workaround?


Surprising as it was to see Christian without his trademark sneakers (and dressing like Locke, which is surely significant), even more amazing is Claire's appearance. Not that she's in the shack (and apparently "with him", which tends to suggest she really did die in the attack on the Barracks), but that she's smiling.


I don't think she's ever looked so relaxed on this show. It suits her. I will add here that the episode is directed by Paul Edwards, whose previous experience on Lost was helming Par Avion, the episode where Claire met her father for the first time. And now she's (probably) dead and hanging out with him in the Not-Love Shack. It's nicely symmetrical.


Of course, this led to possibly the best final line in the history of the show, as Locke reveals Christian has told him to move the island. There was a thundering cry of, "WTF?" in our house as the Lost logo came up at the end. While many are wondering if the island is going to be moved in time instead of in space, I'm thinking both will apply, and (bear with me on this), we've already seen past and future islands co-existing at the same time. Remember the prison island from the first six episodes of season three, and how Cuselof said those episodes were very important? I think they were a set up for this, and that all the characters were hopping back and forth from the present island to one from the future that had been sent back in time. For all we know, Room 23, the bear cages, the medical complex, and the Others camp (with hastily constructed runway) are just on the other side of the island from the beach (though nowhere near where the Tailies crashed), and those locations on the island from the future were being used by the Others as a base camp for some mysterious reason. If this is the case, I take my hat off to them all. If not, then I take my hat off to myself, because if that isn't the case, it damn well should be.


It wasn't all Locke-stuff this week. We got to see a couple of seconds of Jack and Juliet together, chatting about the hole in Jack's side, while he improbably ate some Dharma-cereal. Surely he should be nil-by-mouth for a while. I know the island tends to cure people, but this is ridiculous. Of course Jack manages to out-stupid even that decision, when the helicopter arrives bringing death, evil, Lawnmower men, and a bag with a time-travelling Sat phone in it. Yes, he thinks he should follow the helicopter, and we can only hope he has figured out that if he's going to do that, he should at least bring every gun possible. Still, in the midst of that daftness, I did like the shot of the beach-dwellers looking out over the ocean, barely visible in the moonlight, a single dot in the distance.


Compare that to the shot of Ben, Hurley and Locke facing Jacob's shack. Similar shot, but whereas the helicopter brings doom, the shack brings hope. For now at least, Locke's "group" has the upper hand.


Usually when writing these posts I like to talk about the visual theme of the episode, but this week I didn't get a sense of one. Perhaps it has a lot to with with how much was going on this week. It moved at such a pace that it seems like about two episodes had been condensed into one, which is probable considering the way the season has been sadly truncated. All we were left with, instead of a cohesive visual thread, was lots of pretty shots. I particularly liked this scary shot of Locke at the top of a flight of stairs.


What's great about this is that we have no idea what Abaddon's motive is, but we're getting a very strong hint (in that Locke is terrified of falling, and Abaddon seems not to be worried about it) that he's not connected to Alpert, who might have had a strop earlier but is nowhere near as ominous as Abaddon, with his talk of a Walkabout miracle changing him (which tends to suggest that, as Hurley said during their game of Risk, that Australia really is the key to everything), and how Locke will owe him a favour. Actually, Alpert did have one scary moment. Empty window...


...and scary window ZOMG!


I have no idea why this composition works so well, but it gave me the fear. Well done, Paul Edwards and cinematographer John Bartley. Another shot I really liked came when Omar received the morse code message from Faraday asking about the Doc, and in the background we see the man who is dead and not yet dead.


And yes, it bent my head out of shape. This week Keamy went apeshit, and the result was pure terror. The man is obviously a total maniac, threatening his captain (who doesn't seem in much of a mood to resist at first)...


...smacking him around (which at least spurs Gault into helping Sayid and Desmond out)...


...killing the Doc in order to crush Frank's rebellion...


...and then killing Gault after he tries to save the day.


Best thing about that? Keamy kills the Doc (and apologises, which was blackly funny), and then tells Frank he will kill someone every thirty seconds if he doesn't get in the helicopter. Gault turns up firing off warning shots in order to stop Keamy, but it doesn't change anything. Keamy gets a chance to take a shot, and kills the captain. Time elapsed between deaths: thirty-two seconds (I timed it). Coincidence? The man is a horrible psychopath, but a methodical one (and possibly also able to predict the future, even if it is unconsciously). My heart bleeds for lovely Frank, who may have gotten involved in something he has no hope of resolving happily.


Sayid wasn't around much this week, but even with not much screentime this most hectic of episodes found plenty of time to use him to maximum effect. First time we see him he's like the Angel of Death. If I was Desmond and got woken up by this fearsome sight I would have pooped my pants and started crying for Penny to come hold me.


But then, you want a badass on your side, and it amused me no end to see tiny Sayid holding his own against Keamy, who towers over him. Sayid's deadly ankles are more than a match for some guy who practises his shooting skills on clay pigeons.


He was also seen speeding from the Kahana, curly hair blowing in the ocean wind as he powers towards the island to save everyone single-handed. What a hero!


That said, I did think it amusing that Sayid suffered massive guilt pangs about outing Michael as Ben's mole, what with Keamy on the rampage. In an episode where Sayid came off pretty well, this was a bit of a low point for him. I'd suggest anger management classes, but I think it's too late for the guy.


Right, late as usual doing this. Tonight, we get the first part of the three part finale, and hopefully we'll get a few answers to some questions. Where is Frank going with Michael?


It's fair to say Keamy's device is connected to his heart, and is thus a way of ensuring his survival, but what else is it connected to? Is it like the nuke attached to Dmitri Ravinoff's brain in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash?


Will Desmond stop being so soppy over his chat with Penny and do something now that the Kahana is littered with dead bodies?


Will Locke's slow bonding with Ben fall apart when he realises he has been played again (because really, who is buying his lost prophet story)?


Seriously, I'm not buying it.

Adventures In Awesome: Want! Now! (2)

And no, I'm not talking about Kablamo (1) again, and I'm not talking about the obscenely expensive Rock Band (2). I'm talking about this.


I've gone on about The Matrix a lot lately, and my love of the Wachowskis (3), but I never go on about Alex Proyas' Dark City, mostly because I keep forgetting about it. The Matrix, which shared some similarities with Dark City, came later but was so unlike everything I'd seen before that it eclipsed the previous film. Plus, you know, the fighting. The wonderful, wonderful fighting.

It's a shame, as Dark City is excellent, dealing as it does with issues of memory and identity, and features at least two things I've always wanted to see (4) for every one thing I didn't (5). Plus, lots of pre-Jack-Bauer panting from Keifer Sutherland. It's a corker, and an interesting companion piece to writer Lem Dobbs' other forgotten mindbender, Kafka, which I always felt was given a hard time for no other reason that Steven Soderbergh was due a kicking from critics (6).


Alex Proyas is one of those directors I also tend to forget exists, but he's three for three in my book (7), and I'll always be interested in his work, even when it looks like he's put Nicolas Cage in another movie about knowing the future, which worked out really badly last time (8). That this is a director's cut intrigues me. I think it's a fine movie, but the first hour moves at such a hectic clip (compared to the perfectly judged final hour) that I often wondered if there had been some tinkering done to get us to the really crazy stuff. It goes so fast Graeme Revell's music doesn't pause for a second. It makes the first forty minutes or so feel like a single scene. Very odd. Perhaps that might be different with a new cut. We shall see.

So, anyway, we want this. On Blu-Ray. Which would mean we would have to buy a Blu-Ray player. And then re-buy my entire DVD collection on the new format. ::cries:: Please consider this installments 2-145 of Want! Now! Or maybe I'll just wait for holo-players and/or cortex downloads.


------------------------

(1) Not to be confused with the popular Psychlo beverage Kerbango.

(2) Okay, I do want it, but unless I find a competition I can enter soon, I'm going to have to forget about it. If anyone hears of any UK competitions to win it, please leave a comment directing me to it so I can win it and ease my pangs.

(3) I've talked Canyon into seeing it at the IMAX this Friday. Yes, I am personally committed to saving this movie from oblivion/infamy!

(4) Richard O'Brien as a bad guy! Exciting psychic thinkoffs between floating people!

(5) Rufus Sewell with an unconvincing American accent.

(6) Turns out I was on the right track, and Soderbergh knew it. In Down and Dirty Pictures (which is essential reading for anyone interested in movies), Soderbergh says (on p.79):

I was going to get my head handed to me on my second film, pretty much no matter what I did. That's what I was prepared for. In a way I decided I would go out in flames by making a movie that had a really big bull's-eye on its chest.

That's probably his low self-esteem talking, because otherwise it's a bit of a smack in the mouth to Dobbs. Anyway, there are some mild similarities between the two, and I recommend you catch it if you get a chance, though apologies if the presence of Keith Allen gives you nightmares or episodes of nausea.

(7) Yes yes yes, I, Robot is not perfect, but it features some amazing set-pieces, and it bludgeoned me into acquiescence inspired me to buy some black leather Converse sneakers that I love, so it gets a free pass.

(8) He's also rumoured to be the number one pick to direct a Silver Surfer movie. Shades of Caruso approves!

A Disturbing Curio

A while back I took a trip down Memory Lane on a Nostalgia Segway while drinking a Recollection Smoothie, and wrote a billion words (or thereabouts) on my childhood love of Role-Playing Games, and the sad passing of Gary Gygax. While "researching" that post, I came across some archives with pictures and information about old RPGs and board games, and spent some time reminiscing about the old Games Workshop games (Judge Dredd, Talisman, the Risk-knock off Apocalypse), the Dune board game (a lot of fun, but I once won it in one move, so perhaps it's not the most thoroughly play-tested game ever), Steve Jackson's Illuminati (I would have enjoyed it more if I'd actually read Illuminatus, though I would think a 10 year old reading that would be enwrongened for life), etc. It was fun. Until I stumbled across this board game from several years ago.

The United States is in economic turmoil contributed to by droughts, bank failures, and the loans the Third World has defaulted on. Lately, there has been an emergence of radical grass-roots political groups. The whole nation seems to be polarized. Overseas, relations between the United States and the Pan-Arab Coalition, an Anti-American alliance of nations, have continued to deteriorate.
The President and Congress have decided that a war against the Pan-Arab Coalition will pull together the divided United States. However, Britain is refusing to support the move, completely isolating the United States. Congress has called a joint session, asking all Congressmen, governors of the fifty states, the President, and the Supreme Court Justices to attend to help make the crucial decisions that will decide the fate of the nation.
At this momentous meeting, five brothers bring together the parts to a small nuclear bomb. They know it has just enough force to eradicate the leaders of the Great Satan and turn the United States into the Shattered Slates.

Oh boy. A bit more research, and I found out it was co-written by a Karsten Engelmann, who also wrote the suspicious sounding Objective force representation (U.S. Army War College strategy research project). I have no idea what it would contain, but I assume it's like a dissertation on warfare. I also have no idea what you can learn at the U.S. Army War College, or what the courses would be like. Sun Tsu 101? Advanced von Clausewitz? Film Studies and Semiotics (course studies Patton, Rules of Engagement, and The Green Berets)?

What made me squirm is the thought that it appeals to the kind of Islamophobic warmongering mindset that has become especially rabid over the past decade or so, but then I guess people who live in that kind of world need a gaming outlet just like the rest of us normal, well-adjusted, not-actually-hate-filled people. If the nerds of the world, those who have been picked on by bullies, gain a release by playing a level or two of Call of Duty 4 or Gears of War, thus making them feel more confident, I'll wager that old-time military enthusiasts would play re-enactments of Waterloo, modern espionage experts would play something like Twilight Struggle - The Cold War, and xenophobic US survivalists would get a kick out of being given free reign to fly in the face of reason and go apeshit on some Muslims (either that, or Leo Strauss played it a lot).

What troubles me more is that the game was published in 1990, while the "Free World" was meant to be focusing on the USSR, and before the first Gulf War. Call me naive, but I guess this woke me up to the fact that Islam has been considered a threat to Freedom for a lot longer than I thought. No seriously, call me naive, because it did surprise me a little. I'd put that kind of revelation into the folder marked, "Things I Kinda Knew But Never Really Put At The Front Of My Mind." Still, we've come a long way since then. Now we can laugh about the oncoming Clash of Civilisations (C) Samuel Huntington.

The goal is to liberate the world, ending fear and terrorism forever. Not likely in this day and age, so you can also play as the terrorists, fighting for a world without empires. The politics of the game can become complicated but nothing that a little neighborly aggression can't solve. There's political kidnappings, suicide bombers, nasty propaganda, and some intercontinental war thrown in for good measure. The Axis of Evil spinner on the game board comes into play to dole out Terrorist cards which can be used against your opponents to stop development of a country or, even worse, flow of it's [sic] oil revenue! It won't be long before somebody gets nuked. But that's okay. It's just War on Terror - The Boargame [sic], right? Ages: 14 and up. Manufacturer: Terrorbull Games [again, sic]

The Daily Mail [sick] hated it with their customary blustery rage, but at least interviewed the developers, which was unusually generous of them. I recommend reading that article, it's unintentionally funny. That said, it's not the weirdest or most tasteless concept for a game I've read today. Please please please, someone buy me a copy of Kablamo.

It’s the year 1918, and being part of the Russian nobility shortly after the revolution is no picnic. The Bolsheviks have confiscated your land and belongings, you risk ending up facing a firing squad for being an enemy of the state, and your fancy title is no more than an insult to most common people. There are a few upsides, though. Your noble friends in misery are now more than willing to try your own favorite version of the nation’s number one roulette game, and life couldn’t possibly get any worse.

At least not for a short while…

Kablamo is a fast-paced board game of Russian roulette, where a good memory, improvisation skills and a keen sense of humor all come in handy. The object of the game is to be the last man standing. Every player has a revolver loaded with six bullets lying in front of them. The bullets lie face down and may not be looked at once loaded into the revolver, forcing players to memorize everything. Each turn, players simultaneously fire one bullet. If a player fires a live bullet -- tough luck, that player is out. Fortunately, most bullets aren't live, but allow players to use various effects such as Greased Cylinder, Trigger Happy and Bolshevik Rules. To survive, players must use the effects cleverly and at the right moment. But most important of all, they must keep track of the live bullets since they constantly trade places between the chambers of different revolvers. In the end, the player who manages to dodge all live bullets and outwit every opponent will be victorious.

Contents: 5 Revolver boards
20 Live Bullet tiles
67 Action Bullet tiles
13 High Velocity Bullet tiles
1 Ammunition bag
1 Rules folder

Next to Eve Online (once we get a more powerful computer, that is), that's the game I want most. Kablamo, bitches! KABLAMO!!!

Speed Racer Vs. Total Critical And Popular Apathy

Perhaps it was always going to be a hard sell. With the fanboys turning their noses up at what looked like a candy-coloured movie for babies, critics followed their cue, leaving a handful of cinema-goers excited about the film and feeling like pariahs (yes, poor me). Genre movies (by which I mean sci fi, fantasy, or horror) always get a hard time from critics, and while I'm not crazy enough to suggest that any film that fits the category is automatically worthy of praise (there's a lot of genuine shit out there), I would hope critics realise they are all worthy of serious attention. I get that it's hard for a critic to really give all of their attention to every movie released each week, but even so, any movie that fits the bill described above (and often any movie that can easily be sneeringly dismissed as "typically Hollywood") will be the one to fall by the wayside.


That I expected. The UK reviews of Speed Racer have been horrible, a litany of horrified complaint about the subject matter, the performances, the plot, the running time, and most often, the visual style. "A movie of such garishness and impenetrability as to test the stoicism of any audience member older than 14," says The Independent's Anthony Quinn! "I can’t begin to describe how creepy this futuristic movie is," says James Christopher of The Times! "You have to be 12 to like it, and I have to say there is little or nothing here to remind us why we were all quite so excited about The Matrix," says Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, who also describes Lost as "interminable," and as a result is removed from my Love List and placed on my Shit List (he was already on probation for that appalling Iron Man review last week).

In fact, the only mainstream critic who liked it was Sukhdev Sandhu of the Telegraph, who still had reservations but seemed to get that it was for kids and not think this was a terrible strike against it. James Christopher seemed to think that it was a kids' film by accident. I won't even begin to point out the laziness of Anthony Quinn's review, which led me to believe he had lost his press pack and couldn't be bothered to even Wikipedia the source material; he also missed vital plot points that were not that hard to spot and then bitched about subsequent "illogicalities" (his comments about Speed's race up a cliff-face are the ones that made me mad, if you're curious).


I would have liked to have seen Nigel Andrew's review, as he usually responds positively to films that are a bit out there, but he appears to be missing in action at the moment. The most positive review I've read so far is from Moriarty from Ain't It Cool News, and he did what the "respectable" critics couldn't be bothered to do: forget his prejudices and watch the movie on its own terms. You could say he only gave it a chance because he's a nerd critic, but even now, with the film about to be released, nerd opinion is massively critical of it. "It's too garish, it's too childish, it looks stupid, I hated the cartoon, it's got a chimp in it, it's too colourful, it's too fast, it's too weird, it's not violent enough, it's not The Matrix." The Wachowskis seem to have made a movie that no one wanted to see. And they say Hollywood only panders to its audience.


From all of that it should be apparent that I have a huge chip on my shoulder about this, and not just because I regularly get annoyed when critics dismiss genre movies, an annoyance that has been exacerbated by my current reading material, Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures. It's a hugely entertaining read, and Biskind is a terrific writer, but it is laced with snobbery about Hollywood product, even -- at one point in the introduction -- claiming that its subject matter, independent film, appeals to "real people" in contrast to mainstream populist fare. So is the usual mass audience not made up of people? What are they then, figments of his imagination? Pod people? Androids?

Ridiculous. And insulting. There are millions of people out there (REAL people, even), that will happily watch a movie as transcendently beautiful and moving as Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring one day, and then watch Pirates of the Caribbean the next day and have a different experience but one that is no more or less real than the previous one. One isn't better than the other because it does certain things that the other doesn't even attempt. If one has to be judged better than the other, let it be by internal criteria. Which one of them succeeds best at doing what it was made to do? Otherwise we're just going to be bitching at every movie that isn't Citizen Kane for not doing the things Citizen Kane does. That way lies misery and madness.


Sorry, I digressed. As I was saying, I do have an inherent bias towards Speed Racer that makes me touchy about it, and that's down to my love of The Matrix. It's my favourite film, one I can watch over and over again and never get bored of. I still remember the first time I saw it, and the shellshock I felt. I've heard the criticisms of it, and the carping about the sequels (one of which I liked), and I'm not interested. If a movie or book or song is meant to touch the viewer and move them, that's exactly what The Matrix did to me. It was as if the film I had been waiting all my life to see had finally arrived, and it was better than I had hoped for.

So I'm defensive about the Wachowski siblings, and get tetchy when their work is criticised, especially because experience has taught me that film critics will happily dismiss genre work rather than engage with it, as if by dint of its mere existence it is not worthy of the effort. The reviews have focused on two things that are cardinal sins of that enemy of quality that is glossy Hollywood product: how little the story matters, and how emotionally empty the movie is because of the technology used to create the film.


I'll grant that these can be valid criticisms, but only if they are used against films that fail in those respects (and many do; I'm not crazy!), and not just as a kneejerk response against that nasty Hollywood product. Well, I risked breaking my own brain with fatigue and sensory-overload by seeing Speed Racer yesterday, and I can give you my opinion on these most pressing of questions. Does Speed Racer fail in telling a story? No. Is it emotionally empty? No. Here are some other questions that are less important than those, but need answering nonetheless. Is it perfect? No. Does it matter? No. Is it impossible to follow what is going on during the races? As long as you're not sitting in row H of the London Waterloo IMAX or lower, no. Will it make any money at the box office? Probably not, no. Should it? Unequivocally, yes.

Here's a litmus test for anyone watching the movie, and that includes critics. The film starts pretty much in the middle of a race, during which we flash back and forth between the race and Speed Racer's childhood, where he bonds with his brother and idol, Rex, played by Scott "Whiny Jason on FNL" Porter.



The race continues for a little while past that clip, with Speed attempting to break the record set by his brother, who we learn died in disgrace many years later, an event that shaped the lives of the entire Racer family, who are gathered together in the stands watching Speed racing. It's a busy few minutes, setting up the bizarre palette (which you will grow accustomed to much quicker than you might expect), the otherworldly future physics of the race cars (all impossible spins, leaps, and crazy drifting), the family dynamic, the history of the Racer family, their triumphs and failures, and the sadness that haunts them.

If you've gone in expecting a garish, empty movie for kids, the sophistication of the criss-cross narrative format might throw you (there's a particularly bold time-shifting moment in the middle of the film I liked), but there's nothing there to convince you of any emotional depth, until the very end of the race. What Speed does as he's about to cross the finish line is a marker for whether the film is for you. If you don't notice or care about his decision, you're not going to care enough about the characters to give the film a fair shot, and you might as well walk out of the room. If Speed's decision makes you grin, and you understand exactly what his motivation is and admire the character for making that choice, then you might end up liking the movie a lot more than you would have expected.


And I did. A lot. For the majority of the movie I was very happy, if not overjoyed, by what I was experiencing. After a few minutes of discombobulation, the visuals made a lot more sense to me once I had figured out what the Wachowskis were trying to do with them -- i.e., they weren't building a multitude of 3D environments to place the green-screened actors in, and they chose instead to create a number of photographic backgrounds and use them the same way backdrops in animation are used, to slide past each other in a parallax effect.

The only time the environments look fully rendered is during the race scenes, with the tracks featuring a more conventional perspective. The other trick used throughout is the scrolling of talky-heads across the screen, just as in anime. I made my peace with that a lot faster, as it's a technique used so often in Japanese animation that I've become inured to it, though I had a moment of WTF, simply because I'd not seen it used in live-action before. It's a terrific effect, carrying us through expositional dialogue (of which there is quite a bit) without sacrificing pace.


In fact, the dialogue delivered during races, often as a form of flashback, barely alters the pace of the action, so completely does it add energy to what would normally be dreary. A lot of people have said the races are confusing, but I thought they were pretty clean and edited with plenty of clarity, though perhaps if you're not used to the floaty heads it might cause problems (plus, if you're invested in the narrative, they carry plenty of dramatic kick, contrary to the opinion of the critics, at least IMHO).

Those races would mean nothing if they were not surrounded by solid performances and a carefully crafted narrative, and the one we get, concerning the struggle of the little man to succeed in a world where the monolithic nature of The Market stands in the way of artistic expression or freedom of the spirit, as well as the value of teamwork and learning from your mistakes, is immensely satisfying, so much so that the final race, which is already overwhelmingly filmed, achieves a kind of emotional warp factor as dialogue from the previous two hours slides past the camera, and you see just how important it is that Speed wins that race.


The hapless Christopher Tookey of the Daily HateMail stated that the film is meaningless and soulless, but if you've been sucked in by the carefully constructed narrative, the committed, irony-free performances, and the emotionally resonant conflicts and tribulations of our heroes (all of which he missed, instead carping about not knowing what was going on and hating the commercialism of it), the final ten minutes are filled with significance. As I said earlier, for the majority of the film I thought it was very very good. However, my final verdict was boosted by the brilliant, resonant, and totally satisfying finale, where my "overall grade" leapt up about three notches. All of this is code for "I cried at the end." Laugh, you doubters! I don't care.


And yes, it is resolutely a kids' movie. The majority of the humour lies in the actions of Spritle, played by Paulie Litt, who has annoyed some critics but cracked me up consistently, and his simian buddy Chim Chim. They pretty much spend the whole film eating candy, getting into trouble, and throwing Chim Chim cookies around (and I'll let you see the movie and discover what they are). Maybe it's not as "sophisticated" as Jacques Tati and his pipe-smoking japery, but it works and fits the tone of the movie perfectly. However, the plot itself, though featuring a manichean battle between a big corporate scumbag (played to perfection by Roger Allam) and the innocent small guy Speed, is filled with corporate intrigue, reflections on achieving an almost artistic perfection through sport, and what it is to be free to do what you want. That it touches on some of the themes of The Matrix (purpose, free will, self-belief) came as a surprise even to a fan like me. There's even a shot of stock-market notations scrolling across the screen that echoed Matrix Code, a nice little touch that made me smile.


One of the criticisms I saw thrown around (particularly in Bradshaw's review and the AV Club's withering dismissal) is that the film is anti-corporate and yet, hypocritically, is a heavily marketed and expensive big-budget money-making machine unleashed by the Warner Brothers monolith. I'll be honest, I was very worried about that, and reckoned I might have trouble reconciling it with any possible enthusiasm I might have for all the whiz-bang. Again, the Wachowskis surprised me. Roger Allam's Royalton is obviously an unscrupulous bounder and cad, uninterested in racing as sport (or art) and only concerned about how he can gain a monopoly over the production of a revolutionary engine by manipulating the outcomes of races. However, his enthusiasm for the machinations of The Market (revealed in a brilliantly demented monologue about share values) is just as complete and almost childlike as Speed's obsession with racing, even if it does involve ruining the tiny, independent Racer family. Other CEOs featured in the movie do unscrupulous things too, but end up siding with Speed at the end, realising that he is blessed with true talent and artistry in a way that moves them.

Glenn Kenny of Premiere says in his review that, "the narrative of Speed Racer, such as it is, is one of the more blatantly anti-capitalist storylines to come down the cinematic pike since, I dunno, Bertolucci's 1900," which is not what I took from it at all. It's made clear that the Racer family is a business, one that thrives on making cars that will be used by Speed to win races, mostly for the love of the game. But as long as they are allowed to participate on a small level within the financial framework of their world, keeping their aims low, and not worrying about being swallowed up by big business, then they're fine. They don't opt out of the capitalist system at all. They just want to play the game on their own terms, using their talent and ingenuity to make a living. Surely that's at the heart of the capitalist message, something Anthony Lane should keep in mind as he delivers paranoid and inaccurate comments about the film being nothing more than "Pop fascism" (because it features crowds cheering at a sport, for crying out loud). Why doesn't he rail against actual crowds cheering actual sport? Why is it only bad in the context of a movie? Gah!!!


If anything, the film is merely anti-monopoly, anti-greed and anti-corruption, showing how a single spanner in the works of The Market can crush those who abuse their position of power, thus turning the pursuit of prosperity into a game on a level playing field, with room for monoliths and minnows, both aiding each other and prospering from that cooperation and mutual respect. Isn't that what Thomas Friedman naively thinks The Market already is? Of course, we're meant to side with the Racer family exclusively, but it's clear that, just as The Matrix Revolutions ended with a detente between the machines and the humans, Speed Racer finishes with a respectful distance left between his family's independent company and the almost benign Togokhan Racing. At least, that's how I saw it. I will admit I was more interested in the story as parable about one man chasing his dream, doing what he is built to do, and not letting anyone talk him down, but that's just where my head is at right now.


But enough of this. I want to lavish more praise on it. I've never really been a huge fan of John Goodman unless he's in a Coen Brothers film, but this is my favourite non-Lebowski performance by him. His sincerity won me over totally, as he screws up with one son and is given a chance to get it right with Speed. It's a testament to the skill of the Wachowskis that the scene where he attempts to bond with Speed at his lowest ebb is one of the best in the whole film, a finger in the eye of the doubters who insist the film is hollow.


Even better than Goodman (and I know Canyon will be pissed at me for saying it again [You are right. Foxy must be destroyed! -- Canyon]), Foxy is terrific as Racer X, playing it cool and mysterious for the most part, before opening up in two scenes towards the end that rank as my favourites in the whole film. He's come on in leaps and bounds over the past couple of years, and here he's in top form. Plus, he gets to beat up ninjas! Seeing him do some Neo moves on a bad guy made my nerd chip overheat. Also, much love to Owen Paterson, whose production design is a delight from start to finish, and Michael Giacchino, who delivers yet another wonderful soundtrack.

So yes, since seeing it, I've had images from the film popping up in my field of vision like a fever dream; the undulating desert landscape rolling behind Speed, the Eadweard Muybridge homage in the final race, cars exploding into flame and glitter, camera flashbulbs changing into love hearts, highways seen from a distance as glowing ribbons of light, oversaturated colours glowing during the single shootout, and, best of all, a Chim Chim cookie in a bad man's face. Even though I've been happy to rail against what I see as a dismissive critical attitude to it, at least some writers have been eager to point out how gorgeous the whole thing, and it is. It's new. It's something you've seen before done in a completely new way, and as such is a triumph of design, vision, and uncompromising chutzpah. I'd hesitate to recommend it wholeheartedly, because it's obvious it's not going to be for everyone (and I have a terrible feeling it will lose out at the box office to both Iron Man and What Happens In Vegas, which would hurt my feelings as I cannot stand Kutcher or Diaz), but try it out, and maybe apply that litmus test. It might surprise you. Bravo, Wachowskis! Bravo!

Lost - Something Nice Back Home

For the first time since starting this Lost-recapping side project I find myself with very little to say. I mentioned this to Canyon this morning and she said that she had had a similar experience to mine, that upon going over this episode with a colleague she found she could barely remember any of it. While going through to find screencaps I got to the part where Jack asked Kate if she would marry him and was shocked to find I had forgotten it had happened. Surely this was a big event, but as soon as it had happened it fled from my mind.


I think I know why Canyon was less likely to recall the episode; she hates Jack. To her (with apologies for speaking for her), he's whiny, he cries, he has no backbone, he looks doofy, and his bottomless islandy sadness and infinite father issues bore her to tears. Many times she has cried, "Oh shut up!" while he has his 19,000th nervous breakdown, or exhorted him to man up (I'm paraphrasing here). Even now we've switched to flashforwards she remains unswayed, especially as it seems the depression we saw him suffer in the season three finale is borne of pretty much the same failings he had prior to crashing on the island, except now with added drug addiction and booziness problems, as well as rageaholism.


For all its emotional sturm and drang, hardly any questions were answered, and I'm not sure we know wnough about his breakdown to link his Beginning of the End denial with his Through The Looking Glass suicidal despair. The episode didn't show why he wants to get back to the island so badly, but then that's the same with Hurley, I guess. The apparition of Charlie told him he had to go back, but there seems to be no internal reason he should want to Though it's obvious he has definitely gone a little crazy in the hospital he has exiled himself to, thinking that the Oceanic Six are dead and in hell, his need to go back has yet to be shown as a compulsion. Same with Jack.


I wonder if their reasons are more to do with their ever-present mental problems than any influence the island might have on them. So far Kate has expressed no interest in going back, and as we're not yet being told what's up with Jin, we don't know if Sun wants to go back to the island. If she did, it's fair to say we'll know right away that Jin is alive. I'm beginning to think Hurley and Jack are just (wait for it) lost in the outside world and only want to go back because they feel better off there. Or because of the time-travelling. Who knows?


To be honest, there was very little Lost arcana to pick over this week. Other than the twin appearances by the mysterious Christian Shephard not much else happened. That's not to say it was actually a bad episode. There was a lot to like, which I'll get to in a moment. It was just a little slack, especially after the fireworks of The Shape of Things to Come. I'm not going to bitch about that, though. If we treat Lost like a novel, it has to have ebbs and flows, and the fact that the cast, crew, and showrunners manage to control that modulation of pace when outside influences jeopardise the shoot is incredible. Even so, it was not the best, and I'm concerned that the writing team of Kitsis and Horowitz have been responsible for this and Ji Yeon, which I was also no crazy about.


That said, there was stuff to admire. This week saw the return of ace director Stephen Williams and ace cinematographer Cort Fey on photography duties, who lit the episode beautifully. Not just the gorgoeus vistas of the island, but also with regards to Jack. Obviously we see his bleak journey once more, and as ever, he is shot in shadow for almost the entire episode. Even on the beach, the shadows of the trees play across him as he stumbles around, while everyone else seems to be lit uniformly.


Throughout the episode, while many are lit starkly, with light and dark present on their faces...


...Jack is shot with a muted uniform darkness across his whole face.


While everyone else straddles the line between light and dark, Jack is slowly being swallowed whole. In the saddest moments of the episode, in the hospital visiting Hurley, his darkness either contrasts against the background...


...or he finally shares the murkiness with his similarly depressed friend Hurley.


By the end of the episode, popping pills, boozing it up, and alienating Kate and Aaron, he has been swallowed whole. From here on out it's Foghat beards, obsessive flying, and the now famous scene of him screaming about going back to the island. Poor bastard.


Yes, while Canyon remains immune to the charms of Foxy, I am, as I've said before, consistently impressed. Having a main character be such a basket case is one of the boldest moves of the show, when the norm is a sprinkling of angst over a smooth, creamy heroism topping. Even a notorious, pained anti-hero like House gets to save the day almost every week. Jack, on the other hand, barely gets to get anything right nowadays.

This feeds into one of the show's main themes; the battle between free will and determinism, which is of paramount importance to a control freak like Jack. Even during surgery he tries to take over, only to be overruled by Juliet and anaesthetised by Bernard (in a moment hugely reminiscent of Paul Bettany operating on himself in Master and Commander).


In the flashforward he is trying to do his job, but is interrupted by the beeping of a smoke alarm (which is an echo of the disruption his survival mission endured during the Swan-bound season two). He can do something about that, though, and removes the battery. (Love the lighting here.)


However, even a tiny success like that is marred by the sudden appearance of Christian, reminding Jack that he is still being toyed with by fate, or ghosts, or sentient islands like in Giant X-Men #1, or space aliens from outer space, or about a million other possibilities that will eventually fall away like flakes of skin from a heavily sunburnt forehead. [Ouch!]


Again this tends to suggest I might be on the right track with the Sirens of Titan theory I expounded upon in my previous Lost post, that Jack is on a course that can only end in disaster and can do nothing about it. So, does he want to get back to the island to use its time-warping qualities to change everything? I must say, if the theory is right, there are some satisfying stories to be told about shaping the narrative that we currently know by seeing how their pasts are manipulated by either the island or "Time agents" like Ms. Hawking, but what would be even better than that is seeing the old flashbacks distorted by crazed miserabilists like Jack using the island's time-travelling properties to go back into the past to improve their lot in life, thus ruining the space/time continuum. I doubt we're going to get anything so crazy as that, but it would be cool. I can imagine there is already a big fanfic community telling exactly those stories already.

Anyway, I digress. Yet again I want to praise Foxy and his brave choices, such as his attempts to stop sobbing after seeing Christian in the hospital waiting room...


...and the look of doubt on his face after proposing to Kate.


I'm sure that doubt has a lot to do with his general fear of fucking everything up (and his weird fear of Aaron, perhaps rooted in his father issues), but it's notable that at the start of the episode he was having a Proust moment while staring at a razor...


...which meant nothing until we saw Juliet shaving his stomach prior to hacking out his appendix. Oh, if only that appendix was filled with his troubles!


So what does this mean? He regrets not being with Juliet? Or was it just a wistful moment, a memory of the road not taken? This will probably be one of the many questions posed by the show that never gets answered. I wouldn't expect Cuselof to worry about that when they've got more important things to show us, such as WTF Jacob is, though hopefully tonight will reveal more on that subject (and yes, I'm shaking with anticipation), as well as a lot of backstory for Locke. We're talking about childhood, if this cast list is anything to go by, though no sight of Kevin Tighe as Anthony Cooper, sadly. Hopefully this episode will allow us all to re-bond with that other great Lostie failure after all of his knife-throwing, rabbit-eviscerating, grenade-happy craziness at the start of the season.

Right, with time a-running out for me (as usual), here are the random moments that affected me throughout. Most importantly, yay Rose! I was worried that she was never going to come back, but here she is, mouthing off at CS Lewis (and where is the hairstylist on the island? This is definitely a new look for her).


I must admit, my antipathy toward Charlotte waned a little this week, firstly because her response to Rose's remark was priceless...


...and secondly because her affection for Faraday goes a long way to humanising her.


If she liked him, she's doing something right. And yes, I take back a lot of the carping I directed at Jeremy Davies, who has been great on this show, though seriously, he really did wreck Solaris and nothing is going to change that. My slowly changing opinion of CS was also prodded by her confrontation with a scary Jin, who made her promise to save Sun if possible, using her affection for Faraday as the lever. She stood her ground against him, but as he passed, her terror flashed across her face. I felt really bad for her right then. Good work, Rebecca Mader. I might end up slightly liking CS Lewis after all.


Two things struck me about Faraday this week. One, which isn't much of a stretch, is that he admits to conducting animal autopsies in the past, which is standard for many scientists though surely not physicists. It's not a big reveal for us; we know about the rats and the pink laser, after all, but didn't Juliet think it was a bit odd?


Two, he goes to the medical station with CS, Jin and Sun, and comments on the power being on. But wasn't the Tempest station the power source for the whole island? They didn't shut the place down, as shown by the fact that the lights were still on at the end of The Other Woman. I don't know what the hell he was talking about here. But, as with Rose's query about the significance of Jack's illness flaring up just before he is to leave the island, it's obviously meant to be something we're pondering. So I'll ponder it.


Remember I said I loved Stephen Williams and Cort Fey's visuals? Check it out.


Lovely. Their wide shots were great, from the exodus from the Barracks (which looks like it takes place in the same area where the polar bear first attacked the Losties)...


...to Miles ogling Claire (and thus feeding the suspicion that she is already dead somehow)...


...to Sawyer hunting Claire down once she has disappeared with Christian. OMG Sawyer's so heroic!


I also liked how they framed Christian's appearance through the flame. It was a wonderfully creepy moment, and echoed Hurley's comments about hell.


I also liked how we got to see Claire's tearful response to the discovery of Rousseau...


..echoed later in the episode with Kate's response to Jack's drug-addled, jealous fury.


Of course, his anger over Kate's "infidelity" was silly, and that's even taking his ambiguous wistfulness at the start of the episode out of the equation. Besides, who can resist Sawyer when he's being all heroic and sad upon seeing Karl's corpse?


Of course, that wasn't the only corpse there. I guess I can stop hoping for the Rousseau flashback about now, right? ::pouts::


Still, this episode did feature a return appearance by a very harassed Frank, who saved Sawyer, Claire and Aaron. Yay Frank! That made me very happy.


However, what the fuck is this? Smokey is a pretty shit monster if he can't even kill a bunch of soldiers.


A couple of sprains and some blood. Pitiful. I honestly thought the jungle would have been painted red with mercenary guts, but obviously not. This really pissed me off. Still, it does mean one thing. The odious Keamy is still around, and hopefully his demise will be shown onscreen, preferably at the hands of badass Ben.


Ooooh, I love to hate you, Keamy. On the opposite end of the like/dislike scale, poor Juliet had a rough day. The first time we see her is in a POV shot as Jack wakes up, possibly the first shot of this kind in the history of the show.


At that point perhaps Juliet was feeling good about her relationship with Jack, but as he proceeded to collapse a lot and start to let slip his desire for Kate to stay around, Juliet attempts to resolve the situation by telling Kate all about their kiss right after saving his life with the emergency appendectomy, thus breaking Kate's heart.


Then, just to be extra-vengeful, she reveals that she knows Jack is awake, ensuring he can't get off the hook for his fickleness. At this point Juliet is side on, as she attempts to extricate herself from Jack's uncertain clutches.


Perhaps there is a theory out there that none of the Losties are that old, that somehow their young minds are trapped inside their adult bodies. At times they sure act like children. Maybe that's another key to the mysteries of the show, that these psychological problems are all rooted in the fact that, just as no babies can leave the womb on the island, no one can move beyond their ridiculous childish personality failings. Oooh, I need to think about this one a bit more. Considering the wait I might have for the next episode, Cabin Fever, I might have plenty of time to do it.

The Wahlberg Awards - The Bourne Supremacy

While waiting for Jon Favreau's excellent Iron Man to begin, we were treated to a newer, more polished version of the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's The Eventening (aka The Happening), and were treated to Mark Wahlberg's Oh Shit face on the big screen.


It's even more suspense-ruining than we first thought, and I'm sure I heard titters of disbelief around the room. Anyway, in honour of the forthcoming publicity blitz that will hopefully turn more people on to the ridiculousness, here's another award, this time for Joan Allen, commemorating the Best Response To Getting A Non-Booty Call From A Kickass Assassin While At Work, in Paul Greengrass' magnificent The Bourne Supremacy.




Jason Bourne really is one of those guys who just loves to catch people out. Even before being turned into a spy/assassin hybrid he probably used to put whoopee cushions on chairs and squirted people in the face with fake flowers. Sadly, meeting Albert Finney robbed us of a great clown, and what did we gain instead? Nothing but efficient death, pro-hands-free propaganda, and some very intense running. Thanks for that, Albert Finney.

Stephen Colbert, You Complete UK TV

Tonight, UK TV became 1000% better than it was yesterday. We have The Daily Show With Jon Stewart on More4, The Late Show with David Letterman on Diva TV, Late Night With Conan O'Brien on CNBC (though sadly only at weekends), and now we can thank FX (of all the channels) for bringing us The Colbert Report. At last! Extra bonus, while Letterman and Conan are delayed by a week or two, both Daily Show and Colbert Report are only delayed by a day. Finally we get to recreate the experience of watching late night Comedy Central, though hopefully no one will bring Mind of Mencia over too. That would just be cruel.


Tonight's show (last night's, if you're an American) was great. Alpha Dog of the Week, a dance-off with Korean superstar Rain, and Colbert pimping out Speed Racer, slowly accruing more critical praise but sadly not winning over the nerds who think it looks stupid. Here's what Colbert thought:

If you want a feel for what this movie is like, here's all you do. Put 80lbs of fireworks into an industrial dryer, crawl right in there, turn it on, and light the fuse. It'll give you a good idea of the visual onslaught you'll be enduring. It's a good movie, I enjoyed myself. It's the classic story of boy meets seizure-inducing lights.

Friday afternoon I'm gonna endure that on IMAX, baby! Oh yeah! Colbert, Downey Jr. and Wachowskis all in the same week. I'm officially a happy man.

Iron Man FTW!!!

This morning, prior to seeing Iron Man, we caught a Sky Movies preview show that featured Robert Downey Jr. (who we love) commenting on how bloggers can wreck a $165m movie if they disapprove of how comic characters are portrayed. Well, luckily for Marvel Studios, this is merely one of many blogs that adored Iron Man, not only for its fealty to the subject matter, either introducing elements straight from the comics or cleverly redefining them, as with Jarvis (wonderfully voiced by Paul Bettany) or the Ten Rings of The Mandarin, and not only because the cast was uniformly wonderful, and yes, not only because it was an absolute hard-rocking blast of an action movie, perfectly mixing humour and drama, but also for making something both light and dark, entertaining and serious, and all of it based around the main character arc and laced with real-world relevance.


I was impressed that the film is set in a world where the War On Terror has occurred but the conflict is something that informs the overarching story, is an element that is a fact of life and not a metaphorical touchstone in place of a story (which is something that has threatened to overwhelm a lot of recent fiction). We've finally moved on from pointing out that we are in a new century with a new kind of war and then patting ourselves on the back for it, and are now telling stories that are set in that world without making a big deal about it. It's a lot easier to swallow and, even though this film touches on serious issues, is a lot more fun as well.


Though it might seem like these newly unpretentious storytellers have become blasé about the war, I see it as artists now attempting to figure out ways to live in this world instead of trying to figure out what went wrong and who we should blame, which gets us nowhere. Iron Man concerns one man willing to take responsibility for the way the world is, and tries to right that wrong. It's fair to say Ayn Rand would be disgusted with it.


All of this would mean nothing if the film was trying to address these issues metaphorically, so we're lucky that Jon Favreau and his team of writers are willing to do that old school trick of making the surface story and character arc reinforce each other, which all stories should do, but often don't nowadays, and yes I realise that makes me sound like David Thompson or Leslie Halliwell or something. Sorry.


The core of the story is something universal: coming to a realisation of what it is to be heroic, and then flying in the face of universal disapproval in order to be a hero when all around you are threatened by your idealism. In the face of values so distorted that expansion of territory, exploitation of resources, and dominance of worldview can be spun until they appear to be heroic endeavours, Iron Man dares to say that's bullshit. It can be something as simple as saving people from murderous bullies, especially when they are empowered by the byproducts of our society, and if we don't even do that, then we really are lost.


As I've said before, in superhero movies there is not enough heroics, with heroes fighting supervillains because of some disagreement between them instead of being super-citizens improving our world. In Iron Man Stark sets out to improve the whole world, to right a wrong that he had never noticed before, and for which he felt a responsibility. It's a character story brilliantly realised on a global scale, a fight to save a soul that, as the opposite of collateral damage, might save the world.


I loved one small scene in the middle of the film, with Stark flying to Afghanistan to save the village of his own saviour, Yinsen (played by Shaun Toub, given much better material here than in that most mealy-mouthed of worthy movies, Paul Haggis' Crash). His interest is in destroying his own weaponry, which has fallen into the hands of the Ten Rings terrorists, but while doing that he saves the villagers from forcible relocation and murder and repays his debt to his murdered ally. In one of the few moments that might be seen as being a message related to the War on Terror, Stark disarms one of the Ten Rings lieutenants, and instead of dealing with him himself, leaves him to the villagers and flies away.


Certainly that could be seen as a comment on the Iraq situation, but it's also a moment that originates in who Stark is. He won't kill an unarmed man, and the outcome of that stance is that he will leave the situation to be dealt with by those who should deal with it. Perhaps once the playing field is levelled by taking away the weaponry made by the powerful who have a vested interest in maintaining conflict, then we might be able to truly step back from these international conflicts instead of making them worse. That said, I really don't think the Ten Rings terrorist was easily forgiven for his sins and then let go. Which sucks, but apparently freedom is messy! (And yes, hopefully that's the last time I'll ever quote Donald Rumsfeld.)


Not only does he save the villagers, but he also saves a pilot endangered by his own clumsy mid-air antics, again taking responsibility for what he does (another great visualisation of the arc Tony moves along). I'd have liked more of that random heroism, but there's a lot to get through, and the point is made. He is a real hero trying to help everyone. Marc Guggenheim and Paul Gulacy's excellent Squadron Supreme: Hyperion vs. Nighthawk mini set in the Sudan might have been a more realistic portrayal of what happens when superheroes get involved in real world troubles (in that complex geopolitical issues cannot be resolved by people who merely have the ability to punch things very hard), but Iron Man is smart enough to avoid having our hero attempt to stop the war altogether. He can only deal with the terrifying weaponry he has built, which, as I said above, might be good enough, certainly for his own redemption. And yes, in our world that might seem idealistic and naïve, but in the world of the film, it echoes and reinforces that character arc from ignorance and arrogance to humility and responsibility, which is very satisfying.


Peter Bradshaw, in a review I think was written moments after he stubbed his toe, so needlessly dismissive is it, carps that...

Iron Man, for all its disposability, makes a cheerful and unpretentious change to the current crop of war movies. At least at first. But I am sorry to say that it is guilty of the sneaky chauvinist trick of making the ultimate villain an American: a mannerism common to many Hollywood movies that cannot quite bring themselves to accord foreigners the status of effective enmity.

But the whole point of the movie is that Stark is responsible for the warfare he grows to despise, and that is dramatised in the conflict with his other half, Obadiah Stane. Making the villain an outsider would dilute the arc to pointlessness. Besides, the scene is set for blowback in the second movie, with The Mandarin seeking revenge for his betrayal by Stane. Maybe then Bradshaw will be happy.


Of course, this is all well and good, and is merely my way of saying how pleased I was that the film feels like it was crafted from the ground up and not just cobbled together. Marvel Studios doesn't need my praise, as figures just in show that the film is an enormous hit, earning $200m worldwide since Thursday. That it didn't earn as much as the appalling Spider-Man 3 is the only bad thing about that, but then let's hope that this marks the beginning of a trend, with superhero movies made by people who understand how the genre works and funded by those same people. Or course, Iron Man's huge box office is good news for the studio, but this Financial Times interview with Marvel Studios chairman David Maisel shows that this hopefully fruitful period of nerdvana might still not last long.

Most studios in Hollywood have offset the risks of film production by raising money from private equity groups and hedge funds. Marvel has taken a different route, using the film rights to its characters as collateral for a loan without forsaking any equity in its films.

Since Marvel tends to be a “fiscally conservative company”, Mr Maisel had to work hard to come up with a financing package that did not expose the comics group to undue risk. After convincing Marvel to launch the studio in 2003, he spent two years structuring a $525m loan financing deal, which was underwritten by Merrill Lynch and secured against the theatrical rights to films that would be produced by the studio.

The financing covers Marvel’s releases until 2012 but does not give the banks any equity in the films. Instead, the banks will receive the capital plus interest and will have the right to make future films using the 12 comic-book characters included in the deal in the event of the company defaulting on its payments. The financing structure guarantees the release of Marvel’s first four films and will be followed by an evaluation period. Assuming the films have performed well, Marvel will retain the theatrical rights to the 12 characters.

The message is, even if the trailer for The Incredible Hulk looks really boring, we fans have a duty to see it at the cinema. Why? Because if you've not yet seen the film, the final pre-credits line of the film and the post-credits cameo appearance by Sam Jackson will make your head explode with pure nerd joy. At our screening, the nerds who stayed behind for that final scene burst into applause at it, even though they knew what was coming. Marvel Studios must succeed, and keep hold of those twelve characters. Our nerd dreams depend on it.

I'm Suffering From Poll Addiction

Yes, it's another goddamn poll, and it's a nerdy one again. I can't stop myself! Blame Iron Man. Following its preview release yesterday, the whole world has gone exo-skeleton crazy. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it's the best reviewed film of the year so far, which boggles the mind. Whether moviegoers will boycott the movie following the shocking news that Jon Favreau was horribly sceptical over Gwyneth Paltrow's on set injury is something we will find out over the long weekend. It's alright for him. Does he have to wax his legs? I don't think so. [Disclaimer: speaking solely for this third of Shades of Caruso, I'm a fan of both Favreau and, yes, controversially, the widely disliked Paltrow, who I think is talented and y'all jus jellus. I have no opinion about Chris Martin, though. Other than that he needs a drastic haircut and shave.]

I'm really hoping this turns out to be the movie that shuts people up about Robert Downey Jr.'s talent. In a perfect world he would be earning the same plaudits and $$$s that Johnny Depp does, and yet before this weekend there has been some doubt over his abilities, possibly because of his reputation as a drug-absorbing disaster area. His casting as Tony Stark seemed to cause some consternation among the fans, which baffles me. I can't think of anyone else who is more suited to the role (well, other than Ghostface Killah, obviously), and early reports about his performance seem to show popular opinion has moved in that direction. Yay! He's talented, he's smart, he's funny, he's charming, and he's hott. Get in line, people!


Plus, now that he's sorted his shit out and seems to have accepted that his notorious hellraising was not on, he's just fully en-awesomed. This is his weekend to bask in critical acclaim and hopefully public acceptance of such magnitude that it crushes Made Of Honour, starring that charmless shyster Patrick "Damp"sey, aka Dr. Drake Remoray sans laughs. However, if people are offended by Downey Jr.'s Tropic Thunder performance (which I'm staying agnostic on until I've seen the film, though it is something that makes me uncomfortable), it could be short-lived. Let's hope it works out. We need more awesome movie stars. (More than we need food or water!!!)

Anyway, enough about that. This here is a poll announcement. What is your favourite superhero casting of the last few years? I'm going to go with the most recent incarnations of these characters, so apologies for not including Christopher Reeve as Superman. That was a sad loss, but I didn't want to clog up the selection with multiple Batmen. Also, I've chosen to ignore all of the X-Men who are not equipped with deadly sideburns, or members of the Fantastic Four that don't have outrageous pecs, again for brevity's sake. Now vote! BTW, next poll won't be nerdy. I promise. Shades of Caruso has other interests, you'll be amazed to know.

Lost - The Shape Of Things To Come

Rather embarrassingly, last Thursday morning Canyon had to remind me that my beloved Lost was returning after a short hiatus, much to my surprise. I had been thinking that the gap between episodes that the strike had caused would be much larger, so when she told me I was wrong, it made me a) doubt that my love is as strong as I make out (surely I would have known it was coming back if I cared as much as I say), and b) scream for joy because it was back early yay! It was like waking up on the 16th of December to find Christmas had been moved up a week.

After seeing it, I was unsure what I could write about it, other than the words, "HOLY SHIT!" several thousand times. Cuse and Lindelof had said that the truncated season necessitated an increase in pace, but I don't think anyone expected something as hectic and shocking as this. Story beats that would have carried over for weeks are being dealt with in no time at all. Who would have thought we would find out how Sayid joined forces with Ben so soon? (N.B. How great was Naveen Andrews again this week? Yet more of his patented vulnerability and badassery, just the way I like it.)


The hostage situation with Alex would have previously lasted half a season. Here it barely lasted half an episode, and was resolved in the most sudden and upsetting fashion.


There was barely any time for the setups for the next episode, with the death of Doctor Ecklie and Jack's appendicitis, which made him grouchier and more pathetic than ever (again, kudos to Foxy for being willing to play someone so easily crushed by fate).


What is most apparent from all of the excitement is that even with a hectic shooting schedule and on-set frustration at the time spent hanging around waiting for the strike to finish, Michael Emerson still managed to crack out a performance that, seriously, has got to be recognised at the Emmys later this year.


How can I join? Is there a People' Choice award for Most Awesome Actor Ever? Can I vote a million times? He's been great prior to this, but the range of his performance in this episode was staggering. Though this week saw action, explosions, death, time-travel twists, revelation and (its natural twin on Lost) deepening confusion, spending time on the internets looking at popular opinion about The Shape Of Things To Come shows everyone is pretty much in agreement; the highlight of this most incredible of weeks was Ben staring out of a window for about a minute. It was heart-breaking, devastating, confusing. That it gave way to one of the most exhilarating moments in Lost history was the cherry on top.


Of course, Ben was the focus of the episode, and ace director Jack Bender knew this, using the visual template employed by Stephen Williams a few weeks back, placing Ben in the centre of the frame as often as possible.


It's probably redundant of me to say it, but I'll go ahead anyway; the directors are working together to establish a consistent tone and visual language from episode to episode, and Ben is the most obvious example of that. For example, in these two shots Ben is like the apex of a triangle of people, the focus of their attention and the one in control of the situation even when, in the second picture especially, he seems not to be.



We've become accustomed to the fact that Ben is always in control no matter what happens, and that is shown via his location within the frame. This week went a little further, and sometimes had him in the foreground while other characters bickered in the back. They were out of focus, and therefore superfluous, while the real drama lay in what Ben would do next.


There were only two obvious moments when this was not the case. Firstly, when he shares the frame with Locke in this shot. It's not because Locke is his equal; he's pretty much following along and pretending to be in control of events, something that he seems to come to terms with as the episode goes along.


The other times were, of course, during his attempts to save his daughter from the evil Keamy. As the scene progresses the camera closes in on his face as he struggles to contain his emotions, swearing to his daughter that everything will be alright for no other reason that somehow he knows that nothing bad will happen.


We have no way of knowing what he knows, but we (I speak for most people, sadly without proof, but I know how we felt) think that everything will be alright. Ben has been a thousand steps ahead of everyone else this season, and so it seemed logical to assume that he had some plan to save her.


We were all wrong, though. When Alex is shot (by a seemingly reluctant Keamy), he falls out of the centre of the frame (knocked from his moorings by shock!)...


...and then sits in the shadow of the curtain, his face fixed as a mask of horror, while Sawyer and Locke run around off camera, yelling at each other in panic.


The camera closes in on Ben, keeping him to the side, but as he comes to and realises his nemesis has "changed the rules", he makes up his mind about his next course of action, and stands, towering over us, back in the middle of the frame.


He is even more imposing when entering his Incredible Closet of Secrets, in which he summons Smokey.


From then on he remains in front of everyone, right in the centre. Of course, this is during the incredible scenes of carnage as Smokey goes apeshit on a bunch of mercenary asses, as shown in this YouTube clip, which also features Michael Emerson's Emmy reel.



In contrast to Ben's isolation within the frame, when scenes focus mainly on him, the other characters appear either in the background or, if Ben is not included, paired up (perhaps this is a visual representation of their solidarity).


It gets more complicated back on the beach, where we got some lovely group shots, either when fishing mysterious time-lost corpses out of the ocean...


...sending a message using morse code (with Desmond's lightning rod acting as an antenna)...


...or, in one of my favourite shots of the episode, standing around chatting.


Jack Bender's compositions are superb, some of the best on TV right now, pretty much single-handedly putting an end to this nonsense about TV shows not being a valid art form. If something as complex, through-provoking, and visually arresting as this doesn't count as art, then art can go fuck itself. If you'll excuse my language.

A lot of speculation has surrounded Ben's comment about "the rules", and whether the antagonism between him and the dastardly Charles Widmore is nothing more than a game they are playing against each other. Certainly Ben has been manipulating people like chess pieces throughout the season. Games have been a common motif throughout the show; this week started off with a game of Risk. There's not much else to do on a island while hiding from murderous mercenaries, I guess.


This theory certainly makes sense, and within this episode we saw Ben expertly playing Sayid, now grief-stricken with the death of his wife, Nadia, who has been popping up as an Easter Egg for a few seasons now (I feel a bit bad referring to someone as an Easter Egg, but you all know what I mean). Was she really killed by one of Widmore's men? We don't know enough of his machinations yet to come up with a proper plan, but it's possible it was just Ben playing games. I mean, look at the smirk on this guy! I will confess, this made me giggle like a baby, even taking into account the dramatic power of that moment.


The only proof he had, after all, was a photo of Bakir driving away from the scene of the crime, but there was nothing on that photo that made it seem like he was in the US. For all we know, Ben took a photo of him driving around Tikrit a couple of hours before. He does like taking photos from rooftops, after all.


Whatever Bakir and Widmore's involvement was, Ben certainly manipulated poor Sayid into joining his cause, but what's most interesting is that, even acting on information that might have been compromised or false, Sayid chose to join Ben. It's like an initiation ceremony, similar to Locke's. To join Ben's group he had to kill his father, though that might just have been Ben putting an obstacle in Locke's way that he couldn't surmount. Here, Sayid kills, and chooses to work with Ben. Oh, and can I say it one more time? Sayid is such a badass!


Of course, that's all very ironic considering how much he hates Ben and is angry at Michael for doing something similar, but the key thing is that it's important to Ben that Sayid makes the decision himself. Perhaps because that puts him in a stronger position, or possibly because Ben is all-knowing and is concerned with maintaining the illusion of free will in a world where there is no such thing.

I think Widmore is the same. He puts obstacles in Desmond's way, stopping him from getting together with Penny for what seemed to be a very empty reason. His obstruction made Desmond choose to sail around the world, and we know that was important on a cosmic level as knowledge of the future made him consider changing his choice, which was enough to get the mysterious Timecop Ms. Hawking to intervene, thus causing much talk of free will and predestination. So, from the shocking finale of this episode we see a vengeful Ben setting his sights on Widmore's daughter Penny (cue many outbursts of shock and awe from us), which would be horrible, obviously. The tragic possibilities are too much to contemplate. Even more tragic than this horrid haircut.


However, we're spending so much time dealing with Ben's amazing ability to prepare for whatever happens next that we have yet to consider whether Widmore is the same. He may not have control over the island, but he too might be able to predict what is gooing to happen, and plan accordingly. The only thing we have seen him do on this show before now is obstruct Desmond in a way that makes him act out by sailing around the world, bringing him to the island and servitude within the Swan station. It was his choice to do that, but only because his most desired option is withheld from him. Now I'm wondering if Widmore maneuvered Desmond to get him to the island in order to protect Penny, knowing that Ben would eventually target her. All of that seemingly pointless nastiness was just to get that chess piece onto the board, and perhaps stop Ben from fulfilling what he now sees as his mission. Bear in mind, Ben and Desmond have yet to meet. When they do, perhaps Desmond will change the rules of the game once more and off our anti-hero. Oh God, I'm hyperventilating at the thought of it!


The reason I'm so stuck on the idea of Ben and Widmore manipulating events to serve their own ends is that I recently read The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, the first book of his that I've tried. Though the shows have referenced Slaughterhouse 5 in recent weeks, I haven't got a copy of that lying around, so in the midst of a terrible mania recently during which I could only read sci fi, I figured I should at least read something by him.

I got lucky. While many try to add Slaughterhouse 5's plot to the Lost theory pile, The Sirens of Titan provides just as much food for thought. It concerns a space-faring multimillionaire, Winston Miles Rumfoord, who has been spread throughout time and space after flying into an astronomical anomaly called a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. He simultaneously exists as a wave phenomenon on a spiral vector traversing our solar system, meaning he appears on Earth every 59 days for one hour only,while existing on Titan as a constant presence, accompanied only by his faithful dog Kazak and a shipwrecked alien called Salo, who is originally from the planet Tralfamadore.

Rumfoord's peculiar condition also allows him to know everything that happens in the cosmos, and as a result of his omniscience sees that many of the events that shape the future are the result of his actions. Over a period of years he manipulates the actions of thousands of people in order to shape history, merely to get three people to Titan; his wife, a trust-fund industrialist, and their child, who has in his possession a piece of metal that allows the Tralfamadorian to fix his vessel. Oh, and the name of the industrialist? Malachi Constant. I think it's fair to say the book is an essential part of Lost lore. OMG! Miles is as astonished as I am.


Though I wasn't crazy about Vonnegut's prose style, the book is, nevertheless, amazing. Addressing the problems surrounding the issue of free will, Vonnegut's absurdist take satirises the military, religion, inheritance, and humanity's inability to see beyond its own solipsism. That lack of perspective is often what dooms us, though of course even omniscience doesn't free Rumfoord, instead trapping him even more in the role of world-shaper. Even without its apparent connection to the world of Lost, it's a superb, thought-provoking read, and comes highly recommended.

It was only after finishing it that I became convinced that it holds the key to what Lost will ultimately be about. I'm not the only person who thinks that the show will ultimately be about how history is being shaped either by the island or someone connected to the island, but it was only after finishing Sirens that I saw how well that theory fits the show.


From Ben's startling arrival in Tunisia, as well as his curiosity about the date, it seems obvious he has travelled directly from one part of the world to another, and almost certainly through time as well. Also consider Desmond's mindtrips and the presence of the doctor's corpse; it's beyond question that somehow the island exists outside time as we know it.

Once you add time travel into the equation, even if it is constricted by rules, we can then accept that Ben's seeming omnipotence and ability to manipulate every circumstance to his benefit is a consequence of his travels through time. He knows more than anyone on the planet (except maybe Widmore), and is either using that knowledge to alter events to his own advantage, or is operating as a time agent in the same way that Ms. Hawking is.


There are arguments for either theory. Certainly Widmore's statements that the island belongs to him suggest a petty squabble over power between him and Ben, and if he is little more than an aggrieved power-hungry jerk then, if the visual coding linking him and Ben together is anything to go by (see following images for incontrovertible proof), Ben is probably the same. Note their faces are lit in opposite ways, but the background lighting in is in the same place, meaning they are opposite sides of the same coin.



That said, Ben has often acted as if he is fighting for a greater good, so perhaps he is trying to save the world from the machinations of an unscrupulous asshole who would use the immense power of the island for his own petty ends. However, we've seen Ben's youth, and his stunted emotional development. He may be an absolute badass and all-round Macchiavellian genius, but omniscience doesn't equal moral perfection. For all we know he was chosen by the island because he was able to help it rid itself of the threat posed by the Dharma Initiative and not because he was in any way blessed. His insistence that he is the good guy might just be him framing his role in the game from his point of view, and not because of some higher calling.


Of course, though Ben and possibly Widmore have been manipulating those around them to do their bidding on the "gameboard", there is also the possibility that the island itself has been manipulating everyone for years. The format of the show, featuring flashbacks to events prior to the arrival of the Losties, has long been criticised by insane haters who think the meat of the show has long been the island moments, and the flashbacks are a distraction from that. According to Cuselof, next season will feature another perspective change, perhaps on the same scale as last season's flash forward introduction, and I'm beginning to believe we will see the flashbacks return, but this time we will see those events from the point of view of the island or the agents of the island who have pushed our heroes' lives until they end up on Oceanic 815. There is a rumour the island is already intervening more than we thought. Claire may have been saved from this explosion, as a deleted scene apparently features her hallucinating, which is a sure sign the island is showing an interest in her.


For the island to survive the machinations of Widmore (and possibly Ben), it needs "players" to get to the island in a certain frame of mind and with particular types of psychological baggage, which means they will be easily manipulated into doing what is necessary to help whatever the island is, in much the same way that Rumfoord and the Tralfamadorians manipulate humanity in order to help Salo get that part for his ship. Of course, Vonnegut's novel shows that all of human history is based around an absurd alien goal (Salo needs to deliver a pointless message from Tralfamadore to another race, and we humans exist only in order to facilitate that), but the ultimate goal of Lost will almost certainly not be something so trivial, unless it has an absurdist streak we have not yet witnessed. That said, it's odd that Doc Jensen's latest theory in EW mentions that he believes Smokey is an alien who is trying to leave Earth. Perhaps he's finally caught up with Sirens, and is being influenced by it.


Of course, I could be very wrong, but this is the first theory of the show that I've come up with that I'm really really confident about. The format of the show suggests the history of the characters is not only interesting in a narrative sense, but is crucial to understanding the ultimate destination of the show. Everything these people has done in their lives has led them to the island, and though Cuselof have said in interviews that the connections between the characters are mere coincidences, I don't believe them at all. It's the whole point of the show.

Okay, I doubt I've said anything new, but I feel better for putting my cards on the table. Time will show if I am on the right track, and hopefully the imminent introduction of the Orchid Station with its time machine (maybe) will answer more questions (prior to posing about fifty more). Time to make random comments about the episode in general, as is my way. Firstly, who is Kate fooling?


Her come hither looks were hilariously inept and obvious. And no, that's not just my pro-Kawyer/Jackliet, anti-Jate bias talking. She was just being really crap at it. It was quite endearing, actually.


Way to hit on a guy while his appendix tries to explode, Kate! I guess it was inevitable she would make a move soon, and I'm not actually upset about it, no matter how often I go on about it. I've seen how Jim/Pam fans lose their minds and ruthlessly slander innocent daughters of Quincy Jones when talking about The Office. The troubles of fictional lovers interest me solely as fictional characters. I am able to maintain some perspective, even when talking about Lost.


Speaking of Juliet, she keeps hanging around in the background looking bored. It's very odd. She got one line of dialogue this week, asking Faraday about his sat-phone project. Also getting one line was CS Lewis, who similarly hangs around looking annoyed whenever the Losties figure out their evil plans. I'm still pissed at her for beating up Juliet (again with the proviso that yes, they are fictional, and I'm not crazy, okay?


Holy shit! Sayid might not actually be the show's top badass! All along it was Ben, either whipping out a shotgun at the mere mention of a weird code denoting imminent invasion...


...or using someone else's AK-47 to blast some brigand off his horse. I guess he doesn't have qualms about getting his hands dirty after all.


What pleased me most about his desert encounter is that it was a perfect example of him using his feeble exterior to hide a warrior heart. His sneaky ploy to draw in his prey was brilliant (note the collapsible baton, possibly a nod to writer Brian K. Vaughan's also-badass Y-The Last Man character 355, as many internet commenters have noted).


Good to see Miles turning up again, though his arrogant demeanour has obviously taken a knock not just from Keamy's brutality but also the arrival of Smokey. It's a shame he didn't go to Jacob's Moving Shack with Locke, Ben and Hurley, as it would have been interesting to see what he thought of that ghostly figure.


One of the things I enjoyed most in this episode was the number of random heroic moments littered throughout. The Losties have often seemed morally compromised and eager to follow their own shady motivations at the expense of others, but this week, with death and 'splodey and gunfire all over the place, their altruism shone through. Most notably, Sawyer ran through lots of picket-fence-shredding gunfire...


...all to save Claire from certain death. His efforts to do the right thing without cynicism are all the more appealing knowing that once he was the jerk who barely ever did the right thing, but has been cured of that failing since killing Anthony Cooper. I'm not suggesting everyone will become a better person after throttling someone, but it obviously works for some.


Hurley has continued to be the moral centre of the show, looking after Aaron and standing up to Locke in order to stop the crazy violence, even if it means he has to go Jacob-hunting.


Even though Locke turned into a bit of a dick at that point, he pre-redeemed himself with his expression of sympathy over Alex's death. He might still hate Ben, but he has enough humanity to understand his tormentor's pain.


It was a small moment, but it might have been my favourite of the episode (next to Michael Emerson's aforementioned award-worthy scene at the window). Locke's quiet nobility was more charming than anything else he's done this season, and seems to suggest he is coming to terms with his place on the island. Or maybe it's because his frustration after finding out that Ben's seeming lack of knowledge about Smokey was in fact yet more subterfuge. Perhaps Locke knows he is closer to the answers he seeks than ever.

Speaking of answers, remember when the snotty psychiatrist Harper commented that Ben was interested in Juliet because she "looks just like her," leading many to assume she was talking about either Annie or his mother? Is this a picture of his mother (which seems likely, considering the likeness)?


That looks as much like Juliet as anyone else. It's a bit murky so I can't tell, but the similarity to Elizabeth Mitchell struck me as notable.

Is this the most exciting non-pr0n swing set in history?


It's seen gunfire, death, captivity, ghost hauntings etc. I guess now the Barracks have become a charnel house for the millionth time in its history, we won't be going back there, at least for a time. Bye, Swings of Excitement!

Check it out! Ben was in London! The actual real London, according to reports.


Jack Bender and Michael Emerson flew over here just for one scene? That's dedication to the cause. Or maybe there is more to come. Who knows?


Of all the revelations of the episode, my favourite might have been the news that Doctor Ecklie is alive on the boat while dead on the island. That said, how is the sat-phone working? The time differential stuff is already making my brain hurt trying to understand it all without that complicating matters. Though it's a useful bit of gear to keep the show going, I really hope they don't fluff the reveal of how it works, though I can't imagine they will spend too long explaining it. I do expect to find out it was designed by Faraday, though.

It's a pity we didn't get to see more of the amusingly named Ishmael Bakir, played by Faran Tahir, soon to be seen in Iron Man. Perhaps we will get to see whether he was indeed responsible for Nadia's death in future. Or perhaps I'm just blowing smoke out of my ass.


Speaking of actors departing the show, sad to see Tania Raymonde leave in such an unpleasant manner. I was never really sure what to make of her character, but her final scenes were heartbreaking, and not just because Michael Emerson really acted the shit out of them. Raymonde was great too, really selling her fear.


I was glad we didn't get to see her face as Ben told Keamy he wasn't her father. The scene was already too raw for me to have coped with the sight of her hearing that information.

Right, time to wrap this up, with the next episode about to air in the US. I'll leave you with this, Sawyer in full on action effect bitches! Check out the multiple redshirt deaths, and Sawyer's hilarious efforts to save them.