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 discovers the Tholians’ escalating conflict with a race of aliens from outside the Milky Way galaxy called the Neyel.  Parallel to that unfolding story on the Excelsior, Martin & Mangels chronicle the tale of the ill-fated Vanguard colony, one of five L-5 colonies in near-Earth orbit that were constructed in the 21st century.  Beginning in 2053 (about a decade before Zefram Cochrane’s first warp flight, as seen in Star Trek: First Contact) we follow the travails of the men and women aboard Vangaurd… as well as their descendants as their story unfolds over two centuries following a disaster that changes their destinies forever.  No surprise, the story of Vanguard eventually crosses with that of Sulu & co. in 2298.

Telling two stories in parallel is a tricky bit of business.  It can be easy for one story to begin to overshadow the other, with the reader getting more involved in one tale and then resenting time spent away from those characters on the other story.  But Martin & Mangels do an excellent job of keeping the two unfolding narratives in balance, cutting back and forth from one story to the other without upsetting the flow of either tale.  They also take their time in allowing the Vanguard story to come to fruition.  Though attentive readers will certainly begin to guess how the two stories connect long before they actually do, the eventual revelations that Sulu & his crew discover arrive at what feels like a natural point in the story, before one gets impatient for the revelations or annoyed at why the Excelsior crew haven’t figured out what you already have.

The Vanguard storyline in The Sundered is a juicy old-fashioned sci-fi tale, which nicely balances the Excelsior portion of the story that is steeped in Trek lore.  It’s great to learn more about what happened to the featured members of Kirk’s command team after his death, and I also enjoyed Martin & Mangels’ exploration of the bizarre Tholians (a terrific alien species that was only seldom glimpsed during the various TV shows).

The Sundered is a very solid stand-alone Trek adventure story, but it is also a key piece in the ever-growing puzzle of the expanded Star Trek literary universe.  Martin & Mangels will continue exploring Hikaru Sulu’s time as Captain of the U.S.S. Excelsior in their excellent 2008 novel Forged in Fire, and the friendship between Tuvok and Akaar that is presented here plays a key role in their first two Titan novels, as does the Neyel race.

I’ll be back here shortly with my thoughts on the second Titan installment, The Red King, which functions as a direct sequel to The Sundered, even though it takes place about a century later.

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 prosperous) is a thorny one, and perhaps not so simplistic as it is presented here. Still, Moore’s key point, that GM shut down its plants in Flint (throwing tens of thousands of lives into turmoil and devastating Flint) DESPITE THEIR BRINGING IN RECORD PROFITS DURING THOSE YEARS is a hard one to argue against, and Mr. Moore spends much of his film showing us in great detail how hard so many families of Flint had it when the company pulled up stakes.

Mr. Moore has drawn some criticism, over the years, not just for his liberal leanings but also for some of his filmmaking techniques. In 2006, the film Manufacturing Dissent (which I have not seen) accused Moore of dishonesty in the making of Roger & Me. While it does seem that Moore played things a bit fast and loose in his editing of the footage (the eviction scenes intercut at the climax of the film with GM chairman Roger Smith’s cheery Christmas message did not actually take place at the same day), I can’t say that I get terribly worked up about those sorts of editing games. (In that specific example, does it matter if the two events did not actually happen simultaneously? Does that in any way undercut Mr. Moore’s point about General Motors’ uncaring attitude towards the effect of their plant closings on tens of thousands of American workers? Not to me.)

Roger & Me is a tough film to watch (and not just for the did-I-really-just-see-that graphic scene in which a former GM worker, reduced to selling rabbits for meat, kills and skins a rabbit before our eyes). In today’s tough economic climate, the film is more relevant than ever. Whether you agree with Mr. Moore or disagree with him, back in 1989 he was clearly already wrestling with some of the key issues that face our Democratic and Capitalistic society as we move forward into the twenty-first century. Are those two ideas compatible? What sort of nation do we aspire to be? What is stopping us from getting there?

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.

“Don’t Mistake Coincidence for Fate.”

Least-Favorite Episodes:

2.11 “The Hunting Party” — I mentioned this episode yesterday.  It’s a particularly frustrating example of middle-season Lost storytelling, in which our characters’ (and our) desperate quests for answers are continually thwarted.  Making matters worse, in this episode Jack behaves in a completely unhinged manner (notice how his crazy-quotient is always dialed up to 11 in his flashback episodes??).  He pushes Kate away with his arrogant, dismissive attitude.  This is something that has really annoyed me during my re-watch.  Also, if the Others aren’t really “bad guys,” as later seasons seem to suggest, I am beyond confused as to why they are so brutally cruel to our castaways here (and in their kidnapping of Walt in season 1’s finale).

2.11 “Fire + Water” — Coming right on the heals of “The Hunting Party,” this is one of the low points of Lost in my opinion.  Charlie takes a walk off the deep end.  Desperate to repair his ralationship with Claire, he’s also haunted by dreams (visions?) that Aaron is in danger. His increasingly manic attempts to convey this to Claire only puts him further on the outs with her and the rest of the castaways. Eventually he becomes convinced that Aaron needs to be baptized, so he starts a fire to lure people away and then grabs Aaron and brings him down to the beach. Locke figures out what’s going on and beats up Charlie. The only thing I hate more than seeing Charlie reduced to such a sad, pathetic state here is the needless cruelty of Locke’s beat-down of him.  I can’t believe none of the other castaways speak up when that happens!!

“So what do you think’s the story with that Libby chick? She’s kind of cute, right? You know, in an I’ve-been-terrorized-by-the-Others-for-40-days kind of way…”

Favorite Moments from the season:

2.1 “Man of Science, Man of Faith” – Jack’s meeting with Desmond as they both jog up and down the stadium steps is one of my very favorite Lost scenes.  It’s fascinating, now, to hear Desmond speak of how he’s training for a race around the world, and the twinkle he gets in his eye when Jack talks about his issues with his female patient (since we now know that Desmond is doing it all for Penny).  Then there’s his parting line: “See you in another life, brother.”  Sure enough!

2.16 “The Whole Truth” — The episode ends with a terrific Ben moment that provides a powerhouse of a cliffhanger.  Having finally been allowed to leave the armory, which has been his prison cell in the hatch, and have breakfast with Jack and Locke, Ben has this to say: “Of course, if I was one of them — these people that you seem to think are your enemies — what would I do? Well, there’d be no balloon, so I’d draw a map to a real secluded place like a cave or some underbrush — good place for a trap — an ambush. And when your friends got there a bunch of my people would be waiting for them. Then they’d use them to trade for me. I guess it’s a good thing I’m not one of them, huh? You guys got any milk?”

2.23 “Live Together, Die Alone” — I will forever love the enigmatic moment, in Desmond’s flashback, in which we see that he met Libby in the past, and that she actually gave him the boat that he used to compete in Charles’ Widmore’s race (and eventually crashed on the island).  But what shoots this scene into the stratosphere is the revelation that Desmond’s boat was named for Libby, something none of our castaways will ever learn.

2.23 “Live Together, Die Alone” — Also from the series finale, I have to mention the final scene, in which we get our first ever present-day glimpse off the island — Penny Widmore’s arctic monitoring station.

“I’ve read everything Mr. Charles Dickens has ever written — every wonderful word. Every book except this one. I’m saving it so it will be the last thing I ever read before I die.”  ”Nice idea, as long as you know when you’re going to die.”

I’ll be back soon with my thoughts on season 3!

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 heck Desmond wound up pushing that button in the hatch!  In both cases, I was out of luck.

I must also comment, here, that I was disappointed that the misbegotten Sayid/Shannon pairing continued into season 2.  I just don’t buy that Sayid’s tough, pragmatic character would fall for vapid, selfish Shannon. (Yes, we learn in her final flashback that she has more depth than that, but nothing in her behavior on the island would have demonstrated that to Sayid.) Plus, Sayid’s two flashbacks to this point have been all about his devotion to his love Nadia. When he declares his love to Shannon in episode 2.6, “Abandoned,” and swears to her that “I’ll never leave you,” I just had to laugh.  Luckily this storyline came to a gruesome end pretty early in the season.  Bravo, brave (and bloodthirsty) writers for your fearlessness in continuing to off main characters, showing us that the death of Boone wasn’t a fluke.

Finally, what makes this season tough to watch in places is the way the castaways (who we have grown to know and love over the course of season 1) are continually stymied — in their efforts to get any concrete answers to anything that is happening on the island, in their efforts to rescue Walt, etc. etc.  Episode 2.11, “The Hunting Party,” is a particularly brutal example, when Tom Friendly refuses to release Walt and insists that there’s a line in the jungle that our people cannot cross.  It’s hard watching our characters continually running into proverbial brick walls — and of course we, the audience, are every bit as disappointed each time that the answers to our questions remain out of reach.

But enough about the negatives!  This is still a terrific season of television, ambitious and challenging, with so much to enjoy.

“Do you not hear me, brother?  I crashed your bloody plane!”

I loved the introduction of the “Tailies” in the beginning of the season, and the way that their stories were slowly integrated with those of the original castaways over the course of the season.  This was a great way in which the writers broadened the canvass of the show, and it allowed us to get to know some phenomenal new characters: Mr. Eko, Libby, Ana Lucia, and Bernard.  There was some dislike, amongst Lost’s fans, of Ana Lucia when she was first introduced (perhaps because of the way that she seemed to be positioned as a new love interest for Jack, in place of Kate), but I always enjoyed her character and did so even more upon the rewatch, when all of her appearances were colored by her tragic end.  (Same goes for Libby, times ten.)

When “Henry Gale” (Benjamin Linus) is introduced in 2.14, “One of Them,” things really kick into high gear, and the show has a great run of episodes leading up to the finale.  Benjamin Linus is one of the great television creations of all time, and he is creepily wonderful right from his first appearance, playing head games with Locke & co. while being locked inside the armory in the hatch.

As the season draws to a close, we get a lot of intriguing morsels of information about the island and what sorts of strangeness has apparently been going down there for decades.  In “Lockdown,” we see the invisible map.  In “?” we discover The Pearl, a Dharma station designed to monitor the goings-on in the Swan station.  In “Live Together, Die Alone,” we get a glimpse of the ruins of an enormous, four-toed statue.  I love that the season begins and ends with Desmond.  His flashback in the season finale, “Live Together, Die Alone,” is one of the most interesting and perplexing of the show’s run.  As we watch scenes of Desmond’s three years on the island, we are given an overload of hints and references to things we don’t yet understand — mentions of vaccines, infections, Radzinsky, etc, — many of which are a lot clearer upon rewatching, while some remain unexplained.

This is a complex season of television storytelling, and I must applaud the writers and craftspeople behind Lost for their towering ambitions, even if I feel that they occasionally missed the mark in this sophomore year.  It’s fascinating, while rewatching these episodes, to see how brave the writers were to pepper these episodes with story-points that wouldn’t become clear until well into the future of the show.  (If I have an overall complaint about Lost as a series, it’s how many of these questions remain unanswered.  Hopefully by the time we get to the end of season 6 we’ll have a lot more clarity on some of these issues.)

Case in point: I am still bothered, somewhat, by something I mentioned in my lengthy list of Lost’s unanswered questions: I feel like we never really got the true story behind the button in the Swan Station. I suspect the Lost writers think they have adequately explained this, but I’m still left scratching my head.  Was the button-pushing really necessary in order to stop the electromagnetic whatever, originally tapped/unleashed in “The Incident”, from getting out of control and destroying the world?  If so, why such a bizarre method of containment (with the weird numerical code and the Egyptian symbols)?  Or was it just a twisted psychological experiment?  The button was such a major part of this season, I’d really like to see some stronger resolution to these questions.  If we’d gotten those answers, I think I’d have more positive feelings overall about season 2.

C’mon back tomorrow for more of my favorite and least favorite moments from Lost season 2!

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 might sound particularly innovative.  Indeed, change the names and you’d have the plot of about twenty other Woody Allen films.  But, while I still don’t think this film comes anywhere close to the genius of Annie Hall, while re-watching the film I could easily see that there is something special about Manhattan.  The now-familiar elements common to many Woody Allen pictures come together in a particularly successful manner.

Right from the opening moments it is clear that this is a film with more on its mind than one might expect.  Manhattan opens with a series of beautiful shots of Manhattan, taking us on a visual tour of the city set to the entrancing music of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.  We then hear Woody Allen’s opening narration, as Isaac attempts to write the opening sentences of his novel by describing the intense love that his main character feels for the city of New York.  The images are stunning, the music is phenomenal, and the narration is a riot.  This is the way to start a movie!

It’s a fun game to play, when watching a Woody Allen movie, to try to suss out just what is autobiographical and what is not.  While I have no real way of knowing just how similar Mr. Allen is in real life to his standard intellectual, nebbishy film character, it seems clear that the sentiments expressed in this opening montage genuinely belong to Mr. Allen.  As the film progresses, we’re continually brought back to shots of different areas of the city (accompanied by Mr. Gershwin’s melodies).  This fascination with the architecture of New York (along with the film’s title, of course), seems to indicate that Mr. Allen was setting out to give his film a broader scope than just a depiction of the love-lives of a few confused New Yorkers.  In many ways, this movie is a love-letter to the city of New York, and I really engaged with that aspect of the film.  Isaac’s identity as a New Yorker is a central part of who he is, and the thought of leaving the city is inconceivable to him.  I wonder whether Mr. Allen felt that way himself, back in 1979.  Either way, that love of New York is central to the film, and I think is plays an enormous part in the great affection that many feel towards it.

There’s some wonderfully inventive and idiosyncratic filmmaking on display here.  I really can’t heap enough praise on Gordon Willis (the man who shot The Godfather, for goodness sake!!) for his astounding work in the film.  He and Mr. Allen were quite daring with their willingness to, occasionally, let their characters step into total darkness before emerging again into the light (for example, when walking down a city street at night).  They also weren’t afraid to keep their camera steady while characters walk in and out of the frame during the course of a conversation.  (That actually happens so often during the film that it’s probably not enough for me to write that Mr. Willis & Mr. Allen weren’t afraid to allow that to happen — I’d say it represents a conscious stylistic choice.)  Far from being distracting, to me it directs the viewer to focus one’s attention on the words being spoken by the actors.

And what a fine cast of actors this is.  The women are particularly notable.  Mariel Hemingway is quiet and wise, not to mention stunningly beautiful, as the young object of Isaac’s affection (though he spends much of the film trying to convince her that they’re no good together).  Diane Keaton is equally engaging (to Isaac, and to the audience) as the older woman (though younger than Isaac, he’s quick to remind us!) who is, in many ways, the exact opposite of Tracy.  Keaton’s Mary is outgoing and chatty, and possesses the life-experience that young Tracy has not yet acquired — she’s been involved in a number of failed relationships, and while those experiences clearly left some scars, Mary hasn’t allowed herself to get too beaten down by life.  Then there’s Isaac’s ex-wife Jill, brought to wonderful life by a young, gorgeous Meryl Streep.  Jill is a dynamo, one who apparently grew quite weary of Isaac’s neuroses and peculiarities.  (So weary, in fact, that she left him for another woman!)

What I really enjoyed about this story is that all three of those women — each of whom represent a powerful place in Isaac’s life — are all presented as fairly well-rounded and complex individuals.  Readers of this blog might recall my profound hatred for Mr. Allen’s most recent film, Whatever Works, primarily because of the disdain he seemed to show to all the women in the film, each one of whom was depicted as essentially brainless.  In both Manhattan and Whatever Works, the central character has entered into a relationship with a very young girl.  But whereas Evan Rachel Woods’ character Melody (in Whatever Works) was depicted as a brainless, gullible fool, Tracy seems to have quite a good head on her shoulders.  She’s infatuated with a much older man, true, but she seems to be able to hold her own quite well with Isaac and his friends, and her reaction to Isaac in the film’s climactic scene is measured and intelligent.  When we first meet Diane Keaton’s Mary, she is presented as having the exact opposite opinions as Isaac does.  But the film doesn’t make fun of those opinions (well, not too much, anyways), and it doesn’t mock her as an over-intellectual know-nothing.  In fact, in some ways, we start to see Isaac come around to some of her ways of thinking by the end of the film.  Then there is Jill.  As Isaac’s ex-wife, we could easily expect her character to be depicted as a cold shrew played simply for laughs.  And while she is quite firm towards Isaac (and doesn’t hesitate to spill the beans on their failed relationship in the book she authored), she also seems pretty tolerant of some of his crazy behavior (she’s pretty chill, for example, that he may or may not have tried to run her and her new partner over with a car!), and the two of them seem to be on decent terms with one another, willing to cooperate in the raising of their son.  It is a delightful thing when a comedic film is able to craft real characters, rather than one-dimensional, one-note caricatures.

OK, so far I have been pretty much singing Manhattan’s praises!  I’m really glad that I gave it another try.  But while I have come around somewhat on this film, I still wouldn’t consider it in the very top-tier if Mr. Allen’s large body of work.  It’s hard to compare it to his comedic romps like Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Play it Again Sam, and What’s Up Tiger Lily? (a ludicrously magnificent and under-loved film!!), all of which have much dearer places in my heart than does Manhattan.  It makes a bit more sense, perhaps, to compare Manhattan to Crimes and Misdemeanors and Annie Hall, two films that, as I wrote above, I consider among Mr. Allen’s very best.  All three are films that are very very funny, while also telling deeper, honest stories.  Annie Hall in particular stands out for me because I feel it contains the very best aspects of Mr. Allen’s work — tremendous humor (tell me that Marshall McLuhan scene isn’t a killer), innovative cinematic techniques (the split-screen scene that contrasts a meal at the Halls versus a meal at the Singers; or the moment when Annie & Alvy’s thoughts are suddenly spelled out for us on the bottom of the screen), and an honest, rich story that doesn’t fall into any hollywood ending cliche traps where boy and girl live happily ever after.

Manhattan possesses all of those aspects — just, for me, a bit less successfully than does Annie Hall, a film where I found myself laughing harder and engaging more deeply with the central relationships.  One aspect of Manhattan that gives me a bit of pause is Isaac’s sexual relationship in the film with a girl who is only 17 years-old.  That’s a bit unsettling even without taking into account any other aspects of Mr. Allen’s personal life.  I’m a liberal guy, but my feeling that Isaac and Tracy’s relationship isn’t the right thing for either of them lingers throughout the film, and that prevents me from really investing in their storyline.

That objection aside, I can nevertheless comfortably state that Manhattan is a tremendously potent film that has aged incredibly well.  It’s the forebearer of so many “romantic comedies” that came after — films that, as Drew puts it so well in his review of Manhattan, are far too-often neither romantic nor comedic.  Just painful.  (I love a good romance, but my wife can tell you how bitterly I’ll resist going to see any of today’s agonizingly unfunny so-called “romantic comedies.”)  Manhattan is a film cut from a different cloth, and I wish more filmmakers (including Mr. Allen himself!) were making films like this today.  (But let’s just make the young girl in the film 21 next time, OK?)

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 the song “Out There” is used in countless montages as it represents some of the most astounding examples of traditional hand animation.

While this film was part of Disney’s great animated feature run of the late 80’s through the 90’s, its not frequently found in most homes. If it’s been awhile, or if you’ve never seen it… do yourself a favor and re-watch the film. Brilliant!

Editorial Note: It occurred to me, as I was writing this post, that I first saw this film in western Massachusetts. That same summer, I was a Camp Counselor at Camp Ramah in New England. And I believe our MotionPicturesComics.com host, Josh Edelglass, was with me, chaperoning our 8 and 9 year old campers to see this movie!

Jeremy Myerson is the Training Manager for Holiday Inn Club Vacations at Orange Lake Resort in Orlando, Florida.  He performs regularly with SAK Comedy Lab, Orlando’s longest running comedy venue, and suffers continually as a fan of the New York Metropolitans. You can read his previous guest blog for Motion Pictures, in which he discusses his favorite movie of all time, The Sandlot, by clicking here.

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 moments in this episode, as Michael prepares to launch the raft. I was impressed by what a nice job the writers did, here at the end of season 1, of bringing a lot of their story arcs to a good end-of-the-year conclusion. Sawyer begins to soften, going into the woods on his own to chop down a bamboo stalk large enough to serve as a mast for the raft (to help repair the damage that happened when they tried to move the raft into the water). Sun and Jin reconcile, and we see Jin being more accepted by the other castaways. Michael and Walt seem to have found a comfortable understanding of one another. Meanwhile, Walt gives Vincent to Shannon, as he can see she is still struggling with Boone’s death, because he says Vincent was able to help him after his mother died. It’s all very nice stuff. Then there’s the dramatic reveal at the episode’s end, in which we learn that the Black Rock is no rock at all – but the name of an old galleon slave-ship that is somehow washed up in the middle of the island. Awesome. I remember being so delighted by that clever twist when first seeing this episode.

“We’re in Hell, huh?”  ”Don’t let the air conditioning fool you, son.  You are here, too.”

Episodes that could have used another rewrite:

1.6  ”The Moth” — Charlie’s flashback (dealing with the corruption that comes from fame and fortune) is overly-simplistic, and all the goings-on with Jack trapped by a cave-in interested me not at all.  The whole thing felt like a writerly device (we need something to keep Jack and the gang busy this week while Kate/Sayid/Sawyer work on triangulating the Frenchwoman’s signal) as opposed to the natural unfolding of the story.  I’m also not clear on why Jack, whose body was entirely pinned by the boulders that piled on top of him when the cave collapsed, wasn’t crippled, with his bones broken in ten million places…

1.11  ”All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues” — This episode contains my least-favorite moment in season 1: the fake-out with the death of Charlie.  Kate and Jack find Charlie “dead” — complete with sad music and a long camera pull-back, which are clearly meant to convey to the viewers that he’s deceased — before learning that, hey guess what, he’s just mostly dead and Jack is able to revive him.  This is an annoying narrative trick that I hate when shows do.  (The Lost writers will do the very same thing to us a few episodes later, in “Hearts and Minds,” when Boone watches Shannon die in his arms before realizing it’s just a hallucination.)  Luckily by the end of this season the show will actually start killing off castaways, thus restoring important “you never know WHAT could happen” tension to the series.  In this episode, though, it’s just annoying.

1.15 — “Homecoming” — Charlie Pace has always been one of my very favorite characters on the show, but for some reason I rarely found myself at all interested in his flashbacks (with the exception being the superlative “Greatest Hits” in season 3).  Here we see Charlie being a total jerk to a woman he gets into a relationship with as a means of ripping off her rich father in order to get money for drugs. Sawyer he is not, and his con blows up in his face and everyone winds up feeling terrible. Yuck.  (Really the only thing I liked in the flashbacks was the joke in which Charlie’s girlfriend Lucy mentions that her dad is looking into purchasing a paper company in Slough. Hello, Ricky Gervais’ The Office!)  But what really lands this episode on this list is that Claire reappears and we discover that she has amnesia.  Ugh.  If there’s a lazier, more overused TV plot device out there, I don’t know of it.  OK, the writers aren’t yet ready to spill all the beans on what Ethan was up to with Claire, but using amnesia as a means of keeping the castaways (and the viewers) in the light is just dumb dumb dumb, and I have little patience for it.

1.21  ”The Greater Good” – In Sayid’s flashback, we learn how he allowed himself to betray a former friend (now a lost soul preparing to be a suicide bomber) in Sydney in order to get information from government agents about the location of his lost love, Nadia.  On the one-hand, it’s one more heartbreaking flashback as we continue to see just how screwed up all of the castaways were before landing on the island.  On the other hand, while I have sympathy for Sayid – who is emotionally lost at this point – it’s hard to muster up too much sympathy for his buddy Asam who, despite the tragedy of losing the woman he loved, is, after all, plotting to blow up innocent civilians.  I also find it a bit hard to square the Sayid we see in this flashback (which takes place RIGHT before his boarding the ill-fated Oceanic flight, as he gets his tickets at the very end of the episode) who is willing to do ANYTHING for even a hint at the location of the love of his life, Nadia, with the Sayid that we see on the island who is mooning over Shannon.  While I’m picking apart this storyline, let me say that my eyebrows raised at just how much the CIA seemed to know about Sayid.  How on Earth did they know that Nadia was the lost love that he’d been searching for??  I am dubious about this plot-point.

“Dude, you got some Arzt on you.”

Favorite Moments from the season:

1.16. “Outlaws” — The mind-bending scene in which we see that Sawyer met Christian Shephard at a bar in Australia.

1.17 “In Translation” — The scene at the end of Jin’s flashback, when he goes to see his father (who is NOT dead as Jin has been telling everyone, even Sun).  Without any boring exposition, the dynamic is clear: Jin has been ashamed of his poor fisherman father.  Yet this man has great dignity, and a heck of a lot of common sense.  His comment to his son: “It IS a good world” is such a simple, heart-felt declaration, that effected me powerfully (as it does Jin in the episode).  What a wonderful moment.

1.22 “Born to Run” — Kate’s reunion with her dying mother doesn’t quite go the way she’d planned when, instead of a tearful reconciliation, Kate’s mom calls the cops the moment she sees her daughter.  It’s a stunning, tragic moment that really surprised me (in the best possible way) when I first saw this episode.

1.22 “Born to Run” — In one of my favorite Lost moments, ever, we see that Charlie is working on a new album and that he has named track two “Monster eats the Pilot.”

1.23 — “Exodus” Part 1 – I also absolutely adore the “I guess this is goodbye” scene between Jack and Sawyer in the jungle. Jack gives Sawyer a gun to take on the raft, “just in case,” an extraordinary gesture of trust on the good doctor’s part. Sawyer responds by finally telling Jack that he met his father in Sydney before he died, and that Christian loved and respected his son. After Sawyer chose not to reveal that to Jack back in “Outlaws,” I had assumed that story point would never be referred to again, that it was another of the enigmatic connections that the castaways all had with one another prior to boarding Oceanic flight 815 that they’d never know about. So I was really, really happy to see this brought up again here, and the scene is a lovely burying-the-hatchet moment between Jack and Sawyer. The two actors have never been better.

1.24 - “Exodus” Part 2 — Arzt blows up.

I’ll see you back here soon with my thoughts on season 2!

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 SHOULD focus on surviving as opposed to waiting around for a rescue.  Charlie SHOULD face up to his drug addiction.  Etc.)

But the character who has changed the most is without question Sawyer.  Whereas Jack, the purported “hero of the show,” has seemed unable to shake his core issues (still claiming desperately to Kate “I can fix this” even in season 5), Sawyer has really grown from the angry, closed-off person we see in the pilot.  But what’s also fascinating to me upon rewatching the show is how much my opinion of Sawyer has changed.  Like most people, I hated Sawyer when I first watched season 1 — I thought he was a big jerk, selfish and insensitive.  But when watching these episodes a second time I find myself thinking MUCH more favorably of his actions.  Yes he is selfish, and yes he can be mean (with his nicknames and his biting comments).  But Sawyer in many ways is also the most HONEST character on the show (except maybe for Hurley).  He’s one of the only castaways who doesn’t seem to play games, and who really says what he thinks.  (Could you really say the same about Jack, Kate, Locke, or Sayid?)  I also think that Jack and Kate really act like pricks towards him, constantly ransacking his stuff and always walking up to him to angrily demand that he do this or give them that.  (As an example, check out episode 12, “Whatever the Case May Be.”  Both Kate and Jack, at various points during this episode, DEMAND that Sawyer give them the case, without even bothering to ask nicely.)  I can’t really say I blame Sawyer for not usually wanting to help them out.

Meanwhile, I find Jack to be much less heroic upon this rewatch than I did the first time around.  Though he seems like a totally centered, altruistic guy in the pilot, it isn’t long before he slips into frantic, assholish behavior.  (See episode 11, “All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues,” in which Jack frantically rushes headlong through the jungle trying to find Claire and Charlie and basically acts like a total jerk to Locke, Kate, and everyone else.)  He’s also extraordinarily condescending to Kate. His behavior is inconsistent – at first it seemed like he didn’t care about Kate’s past (in episode 2, “Tabula Rasa,” he told her not to tell him what she did), but by episode 12 (”Whatever the Case May Be”) he gets totally pissy with her for not spilling her guts to him about everything she’s ever done. It makes Jack surprisingly unlikable to me during the rewatch.

The other character who I really thought differently of during the rewatch was Boone.  When I first watched this show I remember thinking that Boone was a nice guy who tried his best, but upon re-watching these episodes I find his incompetence to be STAGGERING.  Take “Homecoming,” for example, in which Boone falls asleep on guard duty, which allows Ethan (or another Other) to sneak in and kill one of the castaways.  Nice going dude.  What a maroon.

“If you guys are finished verbally copulating, we should get a move on.”

Some of Lost’s central questions are introduced right away (like what the heck is the monster?).  But for a show renowned for its mysteries, it’s sort of amusing how quickly we got an answer to the question raised by the pilot of who on the plane was in the hand-cuffs.  (We get our answer in the very second episode, “Tabula Rasa.”)

We also begin to see many of the show’s central narrative themes.  One that comes to mind is the idea that the emotional baggage of most of the characters comes down to their struggling with having become the thing they most loathed.  The young boy whose life was ruined by a confidence man named “Sawyer” eventually becomes Sawyer.  Charlie becomes the drug addict he hated his brother from being.  Sayid is drawn to torture despite having sworn never to do so again.  Jack will eventually become an alcoholic like his father.  I love this about the show — I like that the writers clearly have something they want to say, and themes they want to explore, above and beyond just telling a story about island castaways and monsters.

These early episodes also quickly introduce Lost’s greatest narrative weakness: the consistent and annoying tendency of all the characters to withhold information from one another, for no clear reason.  In “Walkabout,” the third episode of the show, Sayid expresses frustration that he can’t tell anyone what he’s working on (his devices to triangulate the Frenchwoman’s signal).  Well, why the heck not?  Then there’s Locke, who in that same episode lies about having seen the monster.  Why exactly?  Usually these sorts of things happen because the writers aren’t yet ready to reveal certain key pieces of information — but I found this as annoying on the rewatch as I did when initially viewing these episodes.

I also find myself wondering, as I did upon my initial viewings, why the castaways don’t spend more time having to deal with the basic needs of surviving on a desert island.  We see Locke kill a couple of boars, and Jin do some fishing, but just what are they all eating all the time?  No one seems at all hungry, and we see Sayid walk off into the jungle seemingly never to return (in “Solitary”) without a mite of food on him.

“You’re a man of science. I’m a man of faith. Do you really think all this is an accident? That we, a group of strangers, survived, many of us with just superficial injuries? You think we crashed on this place by coincidence?  Especially this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason — all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason.”

Overall, season 1 is a terrific season, one of the best of the show’s run.  One can clearly see, right from the beginning, why this show got such attention and acclaim when it first aired.  The extraordinarily level of craft on display (from the writing to the acting to the incredible sets, costumes, visual effects, etc.) is staggering.

I was really surprised and impressed by how great the first batch of episodes were.  Things get a bit wobbly towards the middle of the season, as the writers seemed to struggle a bit with how the keep the story moving forward while also keeping us in the dark about various mysteries and pieces of the characters’ back-stories until later seasons.  Sometimes there were episodes that seemed like time-wasters.  I had also forgotten just how much time was spent, in the second half of the season, on the forced Sayid/Shannon pairing.  Blech.  I found that just as ridiculous a storyline on the rewatch as I had originally.  Things really pick up, though, towards the end of the year, as Locke’s discovery of the hatch began opening up a whole new aspect of the “world” of the show.  The death of Boone was shocking, and seemed to free the writers to embrace an “anything can happen” mantra on the show in which even beloved characters weren’t safe (sniff, Charlie).  This brought a terrific intensity to the show, and created a sense of danger and dramatic heft which made the show so engaging to me.

C’mon back tomorrow for more specific thoughts on some of my favorite and least favorite moments from Lost season 1!

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 that the central character in this sci-fi story is a woman, and I love that she is as complex and interesting a character as we see here.

The ensemble that surrounds Ms. Foster is also top-notch.  David Morse (The Negotiator) is very tender as Ellie’s father, and he steals the few scenes that he is in.  I love David Morse, and it’s terrific to see him in this sort of role (as opposed to the scary bad-guys he usually plays).  William Fichtner (a face I guarantee you recognize, even if you don’t know his name — he’s been in a ton of TV and film roles, and recently he was the bank manager menaced by the Joker in The Dark Knight) brings an interesting spin to what could easily have been a boring role as Ellie’s friend and fellow scientist, Kent.  Tom Skerritt (Picket Fences) is terrifically smarmy as David Drumlin, Ellie’s superior who is convinced that she’s wasting her life.  Then there’s James Woods and Angela Bassett as members of President Clinton’s cabinet, Jake Busey as a menacing preacher, John Hurt as an enigmatic multi-billionaire… I could go on.  The cast is a delight, and every one of these skilled actors brings a lot of life to their characters (many of whom only appear in a few scenes and so have a very short time in which to make an impact).

Then there’s Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss.  Joss is a man with whom Ellie finds herself continually entwined over the course of the years chronicled in the film.  The two have an undeniable connection, right from their first meeting.  They have a great many similarities, but an entirely different set of belief systems:  Joss is a man of God, while Ellie is a woman of science.  This might seem like the plot for a dumb “opposites attract” story, but thankfully Contact is a much more interesting film than that.  Yes, Ellie & Joss are opposites who do attract one another, but what is really of interest is the contrasting of their two philosophies and ways of looking at the universe, from which most of the emotional energy of the film comes.  While Ellie is the central character of the film, I very much appreciate the filmmakers’ efforts to give Joss’ philosophies equal weight and merit in the story.  I know that some people think of McConaughey as the film’s weak link, and without question Jodie Foster is a far superior actor than he is.  But I must say, I quite enjoy McConaughey in this role.  His surfer-boy good looks and lackadaisical manner make Palmer Joss a much more interesting fella than a lot of the spiritual folks we usually see on film, and I think he has a nice energy with Ms. Foster.  It’s an unusual role, but I buy it.

Visually, Contact is a stunner — and the film looks positively GORGEOUS on blu-ray.  Robert Zemeckis’ affection for visual effects serves him quite well in helming this large-scale, epic story.  Contact is a film whose scope just grows and grows as the narrative progresses, and Zemeckis and his team bring the sci-fi aspects of the tale to believable life.  The man knows how to tell an adventure story with a sci-fi bent (Back to the Future), and he does a great job at balancing the script’s philosophical underpinnings and strong focus on character with the story’s exciting suspense and, eventually, adventure aspects.  He’s assisted by a smart script (adapted from Mr. Sagan’s novel), but it’s his sure hand as a director that keeps everything together.  (Watching this film again makes me sad that Mr. Zemeckis’ latest movies, in which he has been exploring the world of motion-capture technology – The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol – have left me so disinterested.)

Contact is a great film, and it was a delight to revisit it again after so many years.  This sits proudly on my DVD/Blu-ray shelf.

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 & Vida were going for, that new parents need to find their own way in the world and not try to mimic anyone else’s parenting techniques or lifestyles, but I think Away We Go would have been a much deeper film if it hadn’t been so quick to go for the laugh at the expense of the characters who Burt & Verona meet.

What saves the film for me are the understated, heartfelt performances that Krasinski and Rudolph turn in.  Both have proven themselves to be extraordinarily funny TV comedians (on The Office and SNL), but I was quite pleasantly surprised by what fine actors they both show themselves to be in this film.  Rather than going for broad comedic performances, both actors keep themselves reined in, using subtlety as opposed to over-the-top exaggeration.  At the same time, both Krasinski and Rudolph bring a lot of warmth and humanity to their characters.  Burt and Verona are both flawed and very human, but we really feel their love for one another and their fervent desire to do right for their child on the way.  Although they’re in their thirties, there’s a sense of immaturity to Burt and Verona.  Not frat-boy behavior like you’d see in The Hangover, it’s more a sense that they haven’t quite figured out what they want their lives to be yet.  That journey is at the heart of Away We Go.

I saw this movie a few months ago, when my wife and I were at a similar point in life as Burt and Verona: on the cusp of becoming first-time parents.  This gave me a connection with Away We Go that I might not otherwise have felt.  Even trying to separate that emotional connection out from my judgment, I can still say that there is a lot to enjoy in Away We Go.  There is some terrific humor to be found, and the core of the story is compelling.  And any movie that contains the unique scene in which Burt begins to suspect that Verona is pregnant is A-OK in my book.  I just wish that the characters surrounding Burt & Verona on their journey had been given more complexity.  I’m a big fan of Sam Mendes’ work, but with Revolutionary Road (read my review here) and now Away We Go, I can’t say I’ve felt nearly as engaged by his films lately as I was by American Beauty and The Road to Perdition.  But I do still respect him as a potent creative force, and I look forward to seeing what he does next.  (James Bond???)

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 was expecting a more naturalistic tone.  But as the film progressed, I realized that Heavenly Creatures is not only Pauline & Juliet’s story, in many respects the film is crafted so as to be from their viewpoint.  So of course things seemed overly-dramatic — EVERYTHING is overly dramatic to a pair of 14 year-old girls!

As the film progresses, we see Pauline & Juliet’s fantasy life grow and deepen, and in several inventive sequences we, the audience, are included in their fantasies.  It is here where one can begin to suspect what might have drawn Peter Jackson — the man who would go on to direct The Frighteners, The Lord of the Rings, and King Kong — to this film.  That’s not to say that Heavenly Creatures is a visual effects extravaganza!  Oh no, the effects are very low-key, and confined to a few scenes.  But these effects sequences are handled with great skill, and are an inventive and effective visual way at allowing us to understand Pauline & Juliet’s developing fantasy world.

I found myself most engaged with the film during it’s brutal final 20-or-so minutes.  Once the girls decide on their horrifying course of action, Mr. Jackson takes us step-by-step through their preparations, their anticipation, and finally through the terrible moment itself.  This is an agonizing sequence to watch unfold, and it is finally here where we see Mr. Jackson’s skills as a filmmaker on full display.  The suspense and growing dread at what one knows is coming was positively painful to bear, and I found myself almost begging the movie to cut away!  Powerful stuff.

I can’t say that I was thoroughly taken by Heavenly Creatures.  Perhaps the film had been built up a bit too much in my mind.  There is, without a doubt, a lot to enjoy: Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey’s first screen performances, the fantasy sequences, and those tense final 20-or-so minutes.  The film is perhaps most interesting as a peek at several great talents (Winslet, Lynskey, and Mr., Jackson himself) that were about to emerge than it is a fully successful motion picture in its own right.

Still, I’m glad to have finally seen it, and it proved to be an interesting point of comparison with Peter Jackson’s 2009 film, The Lovely Bones.