I cannot recommend strongly enough that readers of this site check out Esquire‘s recent profile of film-critic Roger Ebert. I knew that medical issues had robbed Mr. Ebert of the use of his voice, but I had no idea just how much he has been though over these past 3-4 years. It is staggering. Mr. Ebert is undeniably one of the giants of film criticism, and this piece is a must-read.
When you’re done, I encourage you to check out Mr. Ebert’s vibrant web-site, which is filled to the brim with his marvelous film-reviews and other writings (including his reaction to the Esquire piece).
Back in 2003-2004, Pocket Books released a terrific series of novels entitled The Lost Era that chronicled the approximately seventy-five years between Captain Kirk’s death in Star Trek: Generations and the launch of the Enterprise-D in “Encounter at Farpoint,” the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I thoroughly enjoyed this series when it was initially released, and I’ve been wanting to re-read these novels for several years now. Since the cliffhanger at the end of Taking Wing (the first novel in Pocket Book’s Star Trek Titan series — read my review here — following the exploits of Captain William T. Riker’s new ship) referred directly to the events of the first Lost Era novel, The Sundered, I decided to go back and re-read that novel before proceeding on to Titan book 2, The Red King.
Set in 2298, five years after Star Trek: Generations, The Sundered presents us with an adventure of Captain Sulu and the U.S.S. Excelsior. Star Trek VI introduced the idea that former U.S.S. Enterprise helmsman Hikaru Sulu had been promoted to captain of the Excelsior, and The Sundered picks up his story as the veteran master of that vessel. Also aboard the Excelsior are several familiar faces: Pavel Chekov is Sulu’s first officer, Janice Rand is his communications officer, and Christine Chapel is his chief medical officer. As established in the Voyager episode “Flashback,” the young Vulcan Tuvok is also on-board, though struggling to deal with the illogical nature of all of the non-Vulcans in Starfleet. We also learn that a young Leonard James Akaar (born in the Original Series episode “Friday’s Child” and re-introduced in the last several years of Star Trek novels as a stern elderly admiral in the post-Nemesis Next Gen era) is on board as well, and had at the time a close friendship with Tuvok.
At the risk of repeating what I have written in previous Trek novel reviews ad nauseum, I am continually delighted by the interconnectedness of the last decade’s worth of Pocket Book’s Trek novels. Though set almost a hundred years earlier, The Sundered fits in perfectly with the current batch of post-Nemesis Next Gen novels and with the new Titan series, providing a number of interesting pieces of backstory for characters featured in those other novels. (It of course helps that The Sundered was written by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels, who also wrote the first two Titan novels, Taking Wing and The Red King.)
I haven’t even mentioned the main thrust of The Sundered‘s story yet. Tenuous peace talks with the violent, xenophobic Tholians (enigmatic aliens first introduced in the classic Original Series episode “The Tholian Web”) are imperiled when the Excelsior crew… [continued]
After watching Michael Moore’s latest (and last?) film, Capitalism: A Love Story (read my review here), I started thinking about his previous movies. Despite my enjoyment of his work, I realized that I’d never actually seen his very first film: Roger & Me.
Hello, Netflix!
Released in 1989 (though Mr. Moore was working on the film for several years prior to that), Roger & Me is an unflinching look at the devastating effect that the shutdown of several General Motors factories (eventually resulting in the firing of approx. 80,000 workers) had on Moore’s home-town of Flint, Michigan.
As Mr. Moore admits on the DVD’s commentary track, he not only had never made a movie before Roger & Me, but he knew very little about what went into making movies. But he (and a small team of partners) taught themselves everything they needed to know (about filming, sound, editing, etc.) over the course of assembling their film. This gives Roger & Me a raw, unpolished, feel which, to my mind, wound up working in Mr. Moore’s favor in enhancing the film’s effectiveness. This isn’t a slick-looking documentary. This feels like a film put together by a bunch of average folks, trying to address a situation that they felt passionately about. That passion is another key to the film’s strength.
Right from the beginning, Mr. Moore is a major (perhaps THE major) character in his film. Roger & Me opens with a montage of Mr. Moore’s home-movies, as he introduces himself in voice-over and describes his early years growing up in Flint. Mr. Moore’s on-screen involvement in his films has by now grown tiresome to some, but here his presence helps ground the film as a whole. Moore grew up in Flint, his father (and, it turns out, many other members of his extended family) worked for GM. At one point in the film, following a sheriff’s deputy evicting people from their homes who couldn’t pay their rent after having been laid off by GM, Moore discovers that one of the young men being evicted is someone he went to high school with. This is a personal story for Mr. Moore, about HIS community, and his anger and frustration at the way GM abandoned Flint underline every frame of the film. This lends the over-all film a gravity that a more polished but less-personal film would have lacked, I think.
As always, it can be hard to separate a discussion of one of Mr. Moore’s films from a discussion of his politics. The central question of what sort of responsibility a corporation has to its employees (and the communities in which the corporation grew… [continued]
Hope you enjoyed my thoughts about season 2 of Lost! Here are some of my favorite and least-favorite moments:
“Boy when you say beginning, you mean beginning.”
Favorite Episodes:
2.3 “Orientation” — What a wonderfully bizarre and perplexing episode. While the opening courts my annoyance by showing us (for the THIRD time!) the held-at-gunpoint scene between Jack, Locke, and Desmond, we finally get some tantalizing new pieces of the story of the hatch and the larger back-story of the show. We get to watch our first Dharma video (the Swan Station Orientation video) which is a tour-de-force of hints and questions. We learn that the Swan is only one of several Dharma stations on the island. We learn that the Dharma Iniviative was funded by Danish Indistrialist Alvar Hanso. We see the model of the swan station that we’ll see Radzinsky building in season 5. We hear about “an incident” that lead to the button-pushing being necessary. Awesome.
2.7 “The Other 48 Days” — A genius episode, in which we follow the Tailies from the crash of the plane right up through Ana Lucia’s shooting of Shannon. We get lots of information on what happened to this group of survivors (who had it a lot tougher than our castaways), who they are and what makes them tick, and also some intriguing hints about the mysteries of the island and the Others. (I love that they find an old-style army knife on the body of one of the two Others killed by Mr. Eko. A souvenir of the army team supervising Jughead, I presume?) I also love that we learn that Bernard was on the other side of Boone’s radio call from the Nigerian plane. Didn’t see that one coming!
2.10 “The 23rd Psalm” – I love this episode. It blows my mind. Eko gets a flashback and we discover how he used to be a violent mercenary, and it was his brother who was a priest. Eko gets his brother killed and, when he’s then mistaken for a priest, steps into that role. We learn that the plane carrying drugs in Virgin Mary statues that crashed on the island was actually sent by Eko (though his intention wasn’t for the plan to crash on any mysterious island, of course!!), and his brother’s dead body is aboard. Crazy. In this episode we also get our first full glimpse of the monster, and see it’s black-smoke-like nature. Eko stares it down, and as he does the camera passes tantalizingly THROUGH the monster, thus giving a work-out to the pause button on DVDs world-wide.
Last week I began my look back at Lost with my thoughts on Season 1. Time now to move on to season 2!
“This is not your island. This is OUR island.”
There’s a whole heck of a lot to enjoy in season 2 of Lost. I had a great time revisiting this season during my rewatch project, but I strongly remember how tough this season was to watch, at times, when I first saw it week-to-week on TV. There are a number of reasons for this, I think.
Season 2 of Lost goes to some dark places. Many of the characters find themselves regressing and forced to continue struggling with the demons that we might have thought they’d conquered in season 1. This is realistic storytelling, in which one’s issues can’t necessarily be put to bed so easily, but it also lent season 2 a feeling that we were treading water, narratively.
The same held true for the flashbacks. This innovative storytelling device (that is so easy, looking back now, to take for granted), is a big part of what gave season 1 its narrative power. But in many of the season 2 flashbacks, I didn’t feel that we learned much new about our castaways. (For example, what did we learn in “Adrift” about Michael and his wife that we hadn’t already learned in “Special” from season 1? What did we learn in “Everybody Hates Hugo” about Hurley that we hadn’t already learned in “Numbers” from season 1?)
Also, in this season the writers expanded on the fractured story-telling style they had played with at times during season 1, in which often they would only give us one piece of what was happening, making us wait to get the rest of the pieces until later episodes. This is in evidence right from the start of the season, in which, for instance, in each of the first 3 episodes we get a different character’s perspective on what happened down in the hatch after Locke and the gang went down. Re-watching the show now on DVD, this splitting up of the narrative makes a certain amount of sense, as it enables each episode to have a focus, as opposed to feeling the need to jam updates on every single character into every single episode. However, I clearly remember watching these episodes when they aired weekly on TV, and this storytelling style was TORTUROUS. I was desperate throughout the season premiere, “Man of Science, Man of Faith,” to learn what happened to the folks on the raft, and I was desperate throughout the second episode, “Adrift” (and, frankly, throughout the entire rest of the season) to learn more about just how the… [continued]
I’ve been reading Drew McWeeny’s writings about film for, oh, probably a decade now. I first found his work when he wrote for Aintitcoolnews.com, though these days he has a terrific blog over at Hitfix.com. The dude has some sharp opinions, and while I’m not always in agreement with him, I can always count on his pieces being interesting & insightful, to say the least. I’m a big fan. Drew recently started a series called “The Basics,” in which he writes about a film that he considers one of the “essentials” — a film that anyone who takes film seriously should see — and then another, younger writer, William Goss, writes a response. To read more about this series, click here and then here.
With their latest installment, Drew opened the door for others to chime in with their opinion. Since the film in question is Woody Allen’s 1979 film Manhattan, I jumped at the chance to share my two cents!
I am an enormous Woody Allen fan. I have seen every one of his films (with one exception, Interiors, a situation that I’m sure I’ll remedy someday, but I must confess to not being in any rush), and many of them I have seen too many times to count. But while I recognize that Manhattan is one of Woody’s most well thought-of films, I’ve actually only seen it one time, about 15 years ago. I remember enjoying it, but I didn’t think it was of the level with what I would consider to be Mr. Allen’s masterpieces, films like Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Bananas, etc. (It probably didn’t help that I watched Manhattan less than a month after first seeing Annie Hall, a film that absolutely blew me away and that remains easily one of my top ten favorite films of all time.)
So, prompted by this “The Basics” series, I was excited to go back and re-watch Manhattan. Would my opinion of the film change?
Filmed in gloriously beautiful black and white, Manhattan follows several good-natured but lost urbanites as they try to find some measure of love and happiness. Woody Allen plays Isaac, a television comedy writer unhappy with his job who dreams of writing a novel. When we meet Isaac, he’s involved with a much, much younger woman: the 17 year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway). Meanwhile, his married best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) is having an affair with Mary (Diane Keaton). While Isaac and Mary strongly dislike one another when they first meet (at an awkward encounter in a museum), they gradually strike up a friendship and ultimately start seeing each other.
None of the elements of that plot… [continued]
When I first read, a year or two ago, that a spin-off of Forgetting Sarah Marshall was in the works, featuring Russell Brand’s break-out character of rock-star Aldous Snow in a starring role, I was dubious. I absolutely adored Forgetting Sarah Marshall (read my brief review here), and there’s no question that Russell Brand was phenomenal. But it just sounded like one of those projects that would never actually happen. How many times have I read about studio executives proposing spin-off projects for popular side-characters from successful movies? (How’s that Magneto origins movie coming along? Or the Venom film?) Plus, while I think that Forgetting Sarah Marshall was well-thought of by critics and fans, it wasn’t exactly a comedy blockbuster like The 40 Year-Old Virgin. I was convinced the “in-development” Aldous Snow movie was never going to happen.
Well, friends, guess I was wrong, because a few days ago Universal unveiled their trailer for Get Him to the Greek, starring Russell Brand and Jonah Hill. Check it out here!
The trailer looks great, so consider me excited. (And how weird is it that Jonah Hill is again partnered with Russell Brand, as he was so memorably in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, yet while Brand is playing the same character, Hill is not? Weird. And gutsy!)
Hey, while I’m laying new trailers on you, check out this new preview for Toy Story 3! Nice ascot!
Below is a contribution from guest blogger Jeremy Myerson, in which he discusses his favorite Disney movie.
Everyone remembers the villain in the Scream films asking, “What’s your favorite scary movie?” just before he claims a victim. Easy enough question, as everyone can answer it. As a former employee of the Walt Disney Company (where I worked for 7 years), I’m often asked “What’s your favorite Disney movie?” And it seems that everyone has an answer to this one, too…
My answer is easily The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Granted, this film hit the theaters the same week as my high school graduation, and I was hardly a ‘kid’ when I saw it. Perhaps it’s this reason why I enjoy the film. To me, this animated classic had some really deep themes that spoke to me.
Many of you, I’m sure, remember the summer between the end of High School and the start of College. I was a young idealist who believed in ‘equality for all.’ And Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame shared this ideal. Like much of Victor Hugo’s fiction, the story is about the hypocrisy and dichotomy of the authoritative Church versus the will of the people.
This film dives into the theme with contradicting songs… the Church appointed Law Enforcement authority of Frollo tells his ward, Quasimodo, that the world is cruel and its safest if he stays “In Here” (referring to the bell tower of the Parisian Cathedral). Upon his departure, the song sung by Quasimodo is “Out There.” One lyric in particular has always had a profound impact on me. As Quasimodo is a prisoner of the bell tower, he sings of the townspeople below:
“Everyday they shout and scold and go about their lives,
Heedless of the gift it is to be them!”
Later in the film, as both Frollo and Quasimodo find themselves enchanted by the gypsy Esmerelda, Quasimodo refers to his infatuation as “Heaven’s Light.” Frollo calls it “Hell’s Fire,” in a song that remains one of the most creepy and villainous songs of all Disney animation.
Aside from the deep messages, this film has some great humor to it! Seinfeld star Jason Alexander voices Hugo, one of the comical gargoyles. Kevin Kline, who seems to be in some of the funniest movies ever (A Fish Called Wanda), brings life to Phoebus, the gallant hero. And Paul Kandel, who has done little else, is brilliant as my favorite Disney character… Clopin, the gypsy leader and unofficial storyteller.
Disney’s animation was a great storytelling medium for these characters. And as always, the work is masterful. The bird’s eye views of Paris are breathtaking. The animation during… [continued]
Yesterday I gave my over-all impressions on Season 1 of Lost. Today I’m going to get a bit more specific about some of my favorite and least favorite episodes and moments of the season!
“There’s a fine line between faith and denial. And it’s much better on my side.”
Standout Episodes:
1.3 ”Walkabout” — Our first spotlight on John Locke. The ending, in which we learn the truth about his “condition,” still packs an emotional wallop even knowing what’s coming (and totally blew me away the first time I saw it).
1.14 ”Special” – Michael and Walt get their flashback and it is HEARTBREAKING. It’s one of the strongest, most poignant flashbacks the show ever did, in my mind. Poor Michael gets screwed over by the cold, cold Susan (Walt’s mom) who leaves him, taking Walt and moving out of the country and eventually shacking up with her boss. Contrary to what we had assumed so far, we learn that Michael desperately wanted to be a part of Walt’s life but that Susan shut him out, going to the point of not even giving young Walt all the letters that Michael wrote him over the years. Then there’s the scene in which Charlie wrestles with himself over whether or not to read Claire’s diary — this is comic gold, and a terrific example of what a brilliant performer Dominic Monaghan is.
1.18 — “Numbers” – At last, a Hurley flashback!! And it rocks. If the purpose of the flashbacks is for us to learn things about the castaways that we wouldn’t otherwise expect, and to set the stories on the island in a dramatically different light, then this episode succeeds in spades. The whole scene in the insane asylum (when Hurley goes to visit the fellow, Lenny, who gave him the numbers) plays a whole lot differently now that we know that Hurley was an inmate there. (That also explains Hurley’s angry reaction here when Charlie tells him that he’s acting like a lunatic.) It’s great to see Hurley succeed in finding Rousseau (and getting her to give them a battery to use for a radio in Michael’s raft) despite everyone’s disbelief that he could do so. Hurley can charm anyone!!
1.23 “Exodus” Part I – A terrific, terrific episode. Through a series of flashbacks we get intriguing glimpses of each of the castaways (including Boone, back for this episode!) in the hours before Oceanic flight 815 launched. We also meet Ana Lucia (who will be such a key character in season 2) for the first time! (It was very clever of the writers to introduce her here, at the end of season 1.) There are a ton of great character… [continued]
As I’ve mentioned in my recent posts about Lost (my discussion of the implications of Desmond’s time-traveling in the season 3′s “Flashes Before Your Eyes” and my voluminous list of the burning unanswered questions still hanging at the end of season 5), my wife & I have been engaged for several months now in a massive (and massively entertaining) project of re-watching the entire series in preparation for the beginning of the show’s final year. (I am pleased to say that we just made it in under the wire, finishing the season 5 finale mere hours before the airing of the season 6 premiere!!) Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the series, in a season-by-season run-down.
As with all of my Lost posts, these articles will be replete with spoilers — there’s just no way to discuss the series without mentioning some of its plot twists — so anyone who hasn’t seen the show should read on at their own peril.
OK, here we go!
“Guys… Where are we?”
It’s extraordinarily impressive to me just how well the show’s pilot and early episodes fit with the show today. Those early installments all “feel” like true Lost episodes, unlike many shows whose first season episodes bear little resemblance to what their shows ultimately became. The biggest difference, of course, is the amount of time spent with characters who are no longer around: Michael, Walt, Charlie, Boone, Shannon, Claire (though hopefully she’ll be back in season 6!). Also surprising is just how little screen time John Locke has in the pilot – though his “do you want to know a secret” line to Walt remains a powerful and mysterious introduction to that compelling fellow. I am also impressed how nothing that we’ve learned about any of the characters in the subsequent seasons makes anything in the pilot not work (because the writers hadn’t figured out “x” aspect of any character’s back-story yet). Rather, the iconic character traits of many of the castaways are established right from the beginning — Jack’s desire to always fix things, Kate’s instinct to run away, Locke’s mantra of “don’t tell me what I can’t do,” etc.
It is interesting, though to see how far John Locke has strayed from the person he was when he first crashed on the island. I really like the Locke that we see in the first half of season 1 — I miss him! This Locke has great moral certainty, he’s very helpful (keeping his cool when Charlie stumbles onto the hornets’ nest; trapping, killing, and cooking boar for everyone to eat) and I find myself agreeing with him a LOT in these early episodes. (The castaways… [continued]
I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Zemeskis’ Contact when it was first released in 1997. For years now, it’s been a movie that I’ve been eager to add to my DVD collection, but I was holding off for a better special edition than the bare-bones DVD release from ’97. It’s been a long wait, but when Contact was finally re-released on disc in a jazzed-up new edition — and on blu-ray, no less — I eagerly snatched it up.
Based on Carl Sagan’s novel, Contact tells the story of Ellie, a young girl whose interest in science and astronomy are fanned by her father. Through much of the early parts of the film, we follow Ellie’s development as a scientist and her growing fascination with the search for signs of extra-terrestrial life. It’s a search that increasingly comes to seem like a fool’s errand as, over the years, all of the sources of funding for that research dry up. If that was the end of the story, of course, there wouldn’t be much of a movie. Needless top say, Ellie and her team do eventually discover a signal that appears to be extra-terrestrial in origin, and their quest to unlock its meaning leads Ellie on an astounding journey and brings mankind to an incredible turning point.
I’ll stop my summary there, even though I have really only covered the first thirty-or-so minutes of the film. For me, the most compelling aspect of Contact is watching the story unfold and gradually become bigger and bigger. I still remember my pleasure in seeing the film for the first time and thinking to myself, with great delight, “just how far are they going to take this??” Even having seen the film and knowing what’s coming coming, I still find the story to be terrifically engaging.
I am an enormous sci-fi fan. Sadly, the vast majority of sci-fi films seem to revolve around menacing aliens and action-adventure hi-jinks. Now, I’m all for a good action movie, and there have certainly been plenty of action/adventure sci-fi films that I have thoroughly enjoyed. But I love that Contact is a much more cerebral story, one in which the science of the tale is just as important as the narrative’s twists and turns. It’s also a story that is centered by the character of Ellie’s emotional journey, and that is what gives the film its power.
Jodie Foster is quite compelling as Dr. Ellie Arroway. She brings a fierce commitment and intensity to the role. Foster is an actor who always seems to be thinking — you can see it in her eyes — and that is key for her performance as this brilliant and driven woman. I love… [continued]
OK, enough looking back on 2009. Let’s look forward to 2010!
Quite a number of intriguing new previews for 2010 movies have recently appeared. Let’s take a look…
Let’s start with one of the greatest things I have seen in a long time. It’s the trailer for Ricky Gervais’ next film, Cemetary Junction.
Bring on the Schindler’s List jokes! Oh my.
Hot on the heels of that, in terms of unbridled awesomeness, is the fantastic new trailer for Kick Ass. Click here to check it out. Kick Ass is a terrific comic book (click here for my thoughts on the series), and I am overjoyed at the way that trailer indicates that directer Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust) and his team have brought the book to life. Can’t wait.
Another film that I can’t wait for is Christopher Nolan’s Inception:
I don’t have any more of a clue of what the film is about, after watching that second trailer, than I had after watching the first. But who cares. I relish not having the entire film spoiled by the trailer. And Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight) can pretty much do no wrong in my book.
Next, in the “does this REALLY exist??” category — Disney has actually made a movie version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice?? And it stars Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel (who I will follow pretty much anywhere after his terrific work in Judd Apatow’s short-lived TV series Undeclared)? And it also stars Monica Belluccia and Alfred Molina??? Is there any hope that this could actually be any good? Sigh, probably not. Take a look and judge for yourself:
Speaking of Jay Baruchel, click here to check out the new red-band trailer for She’s Out of My League, a comedy in which he’s starring. Don’t know much about this flick, but it looks like it might be amusing.
Red Riding is a trilogy of films based upon the true man-hunt for the “Yorkshire Killer” who terrorized England in the ’70s & ’80s. I am fascinated by this project — a trilogy of interlocking films, all being released at once? Wild! I hope this plays here in Boston. Check out the trailers for all three films, each named for the year in which they take place: 1974, 1980, and 1983.
Finally, you all know that Robert Rodriguez is actually making a full-length movie of Machete (one of the fake trailers from Grindhouse), right? Check out that original Grindhouse trailer once again in all its NSFW glory, and ponder the potential wonder of the feature version.
Burt and Verona (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) are expecting their first child. When they learn that Burt’s parents are moving away, they realize that they have nothing tying them to Denver any longer. (Verona’s parents have passed away.) So Burt & Verona decide to travel around the country, visiting various friends and family-members in an attempt to find a new place to live that they think will be a good place to raise their baby. What at first seems like a fun adventure turns dispiriting rapidly as they discover that everyone they visit has fairly crazy ideas about parenting.
Written by Dave Eggers (author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) & his wife Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, The Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road), Away We Go is a quirky film filled with quirky characters. Your tolerance for that approach to creating characters will determine how annoying you find this to be as the movie progresses. The characters are, for the most part, painted in pretty broad, caricature-esque strokes. They are funny and painful and sad, but not all that deep. I really enjoyed the individual performances of the actors playing the various folks who Burt & Verona visit – Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton, Chris Messina, and Melanie Lynskey (who, by the way, had a heck of a year in 2009 with this film along with her roles in The Informant! and Up in the Air) — so much that this trend didn’t really bother me too much until I sat back and thought about the film afterwards.
In my review of Woody Allen’s 2009 film, Whatever Works, I described my frustration at the enormous condescension that Mr. Allen’s screenplay seemed to be showing towards every character in the film with the exception of the Woody Allen stand-in character played by Larry David. I felt the same sort of condescension here. Burt and Verona are presented as the only sane characters in an entirely insane world. Burt’s parents (played by Catherine O’Hara & Jeff Daniels) might be hysterical (I’d like to see a whole movie about these two!), but they and are jaw-droppingly self-centered and, shockingly, have no apparent interest in their grandchild-on-the-way. Verona’s friend Lily (Janney) is crass and her husband (Gaffigan) is a buffoon. Burt’s cousin LN (that’s not a typo) and her husband Roderick are bizarre hippie-intellectuals who have sex in the same bed where their children sleep and breastfeed other people’s babies. Burt & Verona’s friends Tom & Munch are by far the most normal of the bunch, but even they have their problems (which I won’t spoil here). I understand the point that Eggers… [continued]
Lots of great Lost analysis out there. Click here for EW‘s Jeff Jensen’s in-depth write-up of the season 6 premiere. I’m a big fan of “Doc” Jensen’s weekly Lost write-ups — they’re always insightful and ridiculously detailed. Click here for Mr. Jensen’s interview with Lost masterminds Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindeloff, and click here for collider.com‘s interview with Mr. Lindeloff. Both contain some tasty morsels of hints about what awaits us in season 6. (And here’s a great interview with Mr. Jensen himself in which he discusses Lost‘s final season.) On a less serious note, check out this very funny (and also super-detailed) review of the season 6 premiere from bestweekever.tv. (The graphic of Jacob’s note to the Temple-Others is phenomenal.) Lastly, this review of the premiere from chud.com is worth your time. This dude has a Lost re-watch blog that I often checked out while conducting my own Lost re-watch project. I hope you all enjoyed my extraordinarily lengthy list of the burning questions left hanging after Lost‘s first five seasons. Can’t wait for tonight’s episode!
Click here for a terrific interview with comedian Patton Oswalt. Click here for the Onion A.V. Club‘s interview with Aziz Ansari. Both are great conversations with two very smart and funny individuals.
Speaking of interviews, for anyone out there who loved A Serious Man as much as I did (read my review here), you MUST read this phenomenal interview with Fred Melamed. Mr. Melamed is the actor who portrayed Sy Ableman, one of the my favorite new characters that I saw created on screen in 2009. The interview is a hoot, particularly when Mr. Melamed declares his effort to “bring the pompous, Jewish, overweight, rabbinic figure back to the center of American sexuality.”
Bill Waterson, the amazingly talented creator of Calvin & Hobbes, is well-known for having pretty much disappeared from planet Earth following the end of his beloved comic strip. He hasn’t granted interviews, he hasn’t appeared at conventions or other gatherings of comic strip artists, and he hasn’t allowed any licensing of his characters. So die-hard Calvin & Hobbes fans like myself took notice when he agreed to an e-mail conversation with a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Click here for the question-and-answer exchange!
This is very disturbing. Back to the Future Part III is officially ruined for me forever.
That’s all for today!
Before seeing his latest film, The Lovely Bones, I thought it fitting to seek out a gaping hole in my Peter Jackson viewing filmography: his 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures. I’ve been hearing/reading about this film since the lengthy pre-release build-up to The Fellowship of the Ring. (By the way: Wow! It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since Fellowship, which was released in 2001!!) Heavenly Creatures seems to be rather well thought-of, and since the Lord of the Rings films have made me a life-long Pater Jackson fan, it seemed crazy that I had never seen this movie. It’s a situation I was happy to remedy last month.
Heavenly Creatures tells the true-life story of the friendship between two young New Zealand girls in 1953/4. Melanie Lynskey plays Pauline. An artistic, shy introvert, she is friendless and miserable at the Catholic school which she attends. Her world changes, though, when Juliet Hulme, played by Kate Winslet, arrives at her school. Juliet is from a wealthy family, and her travels with (and without) her parents make her seem extraordinarily worldly to Pauline. Like Pauline, she is artistic and bucks authority, but Juliet more outgoing and brazen. The two bond almost instantly. Deep friendships like these happen between schoolgirls all the time across the globe, with less tragic outcomes. But here, the increasingly unhappy home lives of each of the girls pushes them to become more dependent upon one another’s company, and they begin to withdraw more and more deeply into their shared fantasies. Feeding off one another, those escapist fantasies soon take a terrible turn.
Heavenly Creatures is the first screen role of both Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet. It’s no surprise that this proved to be a star-making turn for Ms. Winslet, as she displays terrific abilities and assurance for such a young actress (not to mention great beauty). As for Ms. Lynskey, I was delighted to realize that this was her first screen role as well. She’s nowhere near as well-known as Kate Winslet, but if you were an avid movie-goer in 2009 then I’d wager you’ve enjoyed her work. (She had key roles in Away We Go, The Informant!, and Up in the Air.)
Heavenly Creatures is an interesting film. I found it to be a bit hard to get into, at first. There was something about the first 45 minutes that kept me, as a viewer, from being sucked in to the story. I wasn’t sure if it was the script, the acting, or the directing, but everything seemed a bit “stagey” and over-wrought (filled with dramatic zooms and music that didn’t seem to quite fit the proceedings). With a based-on-a-true-story like this one, I… [continued]
I’ve written a lot on this site about Pocket Books’ series of post-finale Deep Space Nine novels, as well as the series of post-Nemesis Next Generation novels. But I haven’t made much mention of another top-notch series of novels that has been a big part of Pocket Books’ exciting efforts to move the Star Trek universe forward: the continuing adventures of Captain William T. Riker and the starship Titan.
There have been six Titan novels published so far, with more on the way. Before beginning the latest novel (set after the cataclysmic events of David Mack’s Destiny trilogy, which I reviewed here), I decided to go back and re-read the series in its entirety. Over the next few weeks (hopefully it will be weeks, and not months!) I’ll be bringing you my thoughts on all the novels in the series.
Today, we’ll start with Taking Wing, the novel that kicked everything off, by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels.
After almost a decade of near-constant conflict with alien races such as the Borg, the Cardassians, the Klingons, and, of course, the Dominion, it seems that the United Federation of Planets has finally returned to a state of peace. As such, Starfleet decides to return to its central mission of peaceful exploration and commissions the construction of a new class of starships, the Luna class, to be sent out into the unexplored regions of the galaxy to seek out new life and new civilizations.
Newly-promoted Captain William Riker (whose promotion to captaincy was one of the only decent story-points to be found in the final Next Gen film, Star Trek: Nemesis) is filled with excitement for this new mission of exploration, and he sets out to assemble the most biologically and culturally diverse crew in Starfleet history. (More on the Titan’s crew in just a moment.) Unfortunately, the events of Star Trek: Nemesis (in which the clone Shinzon led a Reman plot to murder the Romulan Praetor and every member of the Senate and usurp control of the Romulan Empire for himself, before he too perished in conflict with the U.S.S. Enterprise) have left the Romulan Empire fractured and in chaos. Titan‘s mission of exploration is postponed so that Riker and his crew can travel to Romulus in the hopes of mediating some sort of power-sharing agreement and stave off a catastrophic civil war.
Taking Wing is an absolutely phenomenal novel — probably the strongest of the Titan series, and one of my favorite Trek novels from the past several years. I really loved the Romulan storyline. I enjoyed the way Mr. Martin & Mr. Mangels picked up the pieces from Nemesis — they really considered things that the filmmakers did… [continued]
Yesterday I began listing a variety of burning questions that I’d really like to see answered in Lost‘s sixth and final season (which begins tonight!). Here are several more:
What is Walt’s special destiny and what are his special abilities? In “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues,” Walt tells Hurley: “My Dad said I was the luckiest person he ever knew.” In “Special,” we see Walt apparently summoning or creating an obscure bird just by thinking about it, and then his stepfather Brian insists that Michael raise Walt after his mother’s death because “he’s different.” (Brian almost seems frightened of Walt.) We also see Walt demonstrating incredible skills with a knife, and then telling Locke “I actually saw it, like in my mind or something” (as if he were a Jedi Knight) to explain how he threw the blade so accurately. In season 2′s “The Hunting Party,” Tom Friendly calls Walt “a very special boy.” In season 5′s “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,” Walt tells Locke that he’s not surprised to see him because he dreamed that Locke would come visit him. So what is it about Walt that makes him special? Does he really have supernatural abilities? Why did the Others kidnap Walt (in the season 1 finale, “Exodus”)? How did Walt communicate with Michael through the computer in the hatch (in “What Kate Did”)? (Or was that Walt at all? In season 3′s “Expose,” Paulo overhears Ben talking to Juliet about how he plans on using Michael to bring Jack to them. Since we know that the computers in the Dharma stations are connected to one another, does this imply that it was Ben on the computer, pretending to be Walt??) What of the other times that characters on the show have seen visions of Walt, such as Shannon before her death (in season 2′s “Abandoned”), and Locke after being shot by Ben (in season 4′s finale, “Through the Looking Glass”)? Was Walt responsible for those visions, or were they sent by the island (or Jacob, or the M.I.B., or the smoke monster, etc…)?
What is Aaron’s special destiny? What is the danger surrounding Aaron that the psychic warned Claire about in “Raised by Another”? What dangerous event would happen if Aaron were raised by someone other than Claire? Is this why Jack is later warned (by Hurley, speaking on behalf of the ghost of Charlie in season 4′s “Something Nice Back Home”) that he is not supposed to raise Aaron? How does this connect to Kate’s raising Aaron for the three years that she spent off the island in season 4? Why isn’t that a problem? Why does Claire warn Kate (in Kate’s dream… [continued]
Since early October, my wife and I have been engaged in our Great Lost Re-Watch Project! We started with the pilot episode, and have been slowly re-watching the entire run of Lost, all five seasons. With the exception of the first handful of episodes, I had only seen most episodes of the show one time. For a show as complex and inter-connected as Lost, that seemed crazy! To prepare ourselves for the sixth and final season of the show, Steph and I thought it would be a fun idea to revisit the show from the very beginning.
Boy, has it been a blast!! We have thoroughly enjoyed our trip back through Lost. I’ll have lots more to say about the first five seasons of Lost in the coming weeks, but for now (in anticipation of tomorrow’s season 6 premiere) I thought I’d list the burning mysteries of Lost that are really weighing on me. Lost is a show whose cup runneth over with mysteries. In re-watching the show, it became clear that practically every episode of the series raised fascinating questions, an enormous number of which remain unanswered. I certainly recognize that there is no way that the final season is going to answer each and every hanging question, nor would I expect it to. However, there are a large number of burning questions that I feel really demand answers. Here are the ones that come to mind:
(Obviously, SPOILERS ARE AHEAD for the first five seasons of the show!!)
What is the smoke monster? Described as the island’s security system, the creature referred to as Cerberus (on the map of the island found in the hatch, as seen in “Lockdown”) has been one of the most confounding mysteries of the show since the pilot episode. We have seen the creature kill brutally (the fate which befell the pilot of Oceanic 815 in the pilot episode, the mercenaries in “The Shape of Things to Come,” as well as Mr. Eko in “The Cost of Living”), but we’ve also seen the monster confront certain characters and then let them live (Locke in “Walkabout,” Ben Linus in “Dead is Dead,” and Mr. Eko — at least at first — in “The 23rd Psalm”). What is this creature? Who created it? Is it alive? What is it protecting, exactly? Is part of its role to somehow judge the people on the island? If so, by what criteria does it evaluate people? (I remain confused as to why Eko was able to stare down the monster in “The 23rd Psalm” only to later be brutally murdered by the creature in “The Cost of Living.”)
“The Cost of Living” also contains the fascinating exchange in… [continued]