Star Trek Into Darkness (J.J. Abrams, 2013)

I've given J.J. Abrams positive write-ups in the past, but Star Trek Into Darkness is one oversimplification too far. It is not a reimagining of Trek but an un-imagining of it, reducing a naïve, flawed work that nevertheless advanced a unique and idealistic view into a work of cynical fan service by people who clearly could not care less for what Star Trek is. Some might interpret that as irritation that this movie does not simply ape past installments (though in many ways it does, and its cover-up of Khan's identity suggests they realized their laziness), but really I just hate seeing something unique forced into the restrictive blueprint set for blockbusters now. Furthermore, Abrams' direction seems to be getting worse, not better. Then again, I doubt even Orson Welles could have spun gold from a script by Orci-Kurtzman-Lindelof. What a plague those three are.

My full piece is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

Lost — Season 4

[Warning -- Contains spoilers]

At last. After enjoying the first season and suffering through chunks of the subsequent two, I couldn't see what any of the fuss was about over this show. Oh, it was ambitious and mad, all right, more so than any other series ever made. But hype and cliffhangers do not a show make, and with only a few exceptions the show could not compete with even the weakest of Sorkin-era West Wing, Whedonverse TV and certainly The Wire or The Sopranos. The third season in particular wasted so much of my time that when I stumbled across a good episode, I felt it was just the writers' attempt to keep ratings afloat over a quality shift. Nevertheless, the final four or five episodes kicked things into a higher gear than ever before, and the absolutely perfect season finale for once earned a nail-biting frenzy instead of just forcing one on the audience.

But that's nothing compared to the fourth season. When my friends and seemingly the entire Internet stressed the show's brilliance to me, I can only assume the fourth season is what they had in mind. I haven't seen such a turn-around in a series since Angel made up for its dead-end of a fourth season with its transcendent final season, and this may top that as a mea culpa (I'd still pick Angel S5 for quality). The establishment of a concrete end following "Through the Looking Glass" split the proposed final 48 episodes into three seasons of 16 episodes each, though the writer's strike cut this season down to 14. In my review of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I cited the web miniseries as the greatest thing to come out of the 2007-08 WGA Writer's Strike. That proclamation may have been somewhat premature, as this is the only true television series that actually benefited from its truncated length, as each episode sprints forward with great new twists, characters and situations that add more story per episode than the entire second season and most of S3.


The last season ended on an uneasy note, with the promise of rescue from a boat that Charlie -- right before his tragic demise -- discovered had ulterior motives and the knowledge that at least a few characters indeed made it off the island and that the strange little patch of land still exerted a pull on them. It was heady stuff that needed to be tackled as soon as possible, so I was nervous that the writers would do their usual shtick and answer a few questions while raising too many too quickly, only to pull it together in the final stretch.

Not so, as "The Beginning of the End" rivals the preceding finale for rich storytelling and emotionally involving character drama. Chief among the changes it brings are the four characters from the freighter Kahana sent to the island to retrieve their fallen comrade, Naomi, and ostensibly to rescue the survivors. They are physicist Daniel Farady (Jeremy Davies), psychic Miles Straume (Ken Leung), archaeologist Charlotte Lewis (Rebecca Mader) and Frank Lapidus (Jeff Fahey), a pilot who was supposed to be the one flying Oceanic 815 the day of the crash. It's a strange crew to be sure, but they acclimate in no time.

Ben's desperation to keep people on the island last season seemed more borne out of megalomania than concern for the island, but the Kahana crew slowly divulge that their freighter is not here for rescue: they're paid by Charles Widmore, father to Penny (Desmond's on-again off-again girlfriend), and they're on the island to find and capture Benamin Linus. The four who interact with Jack and Locke's branches of the survivors are not there for destruction but research, their reasons for coming to the island explained in the excellent "Confirmed Dead," easily the best flashback episode since "Walkabout."

Not only are these new character given compelling stories, however; for once, the old characters don't fall into their usual tricks while we wait to see more of the new guys. Linus in particular grows from his calmly sadistic self into a sort of tragic figure; he knows the real fight is with Widmore, so he devotes all of his attention to convincing the Oceanic survivors of the impending danger and starts scheming for the inevitable fight.

So, it's wartime yet again for our poor characters, this time against a team of mercenaries led by the ruthless Keamy (Kevin Durand), who actually manages to surprise and even hurt Ben through his disregard for any sense of morality. Jack just wants to get off the island, but now Locke sees that, underneath Ben's selfishness and egoism, he's right to fear the arrival of this freighter (and not just because they're after him). Widmore built a mock-up of Oceanic 815 to place at the bottom of the ocean to make the world believe that all hands were lost, so why would he want any of the actual survivors to make it off the island in his efforts to purge the Others.

Ben could destroy people with mind games, but Keamy prefers a more direct approach.

This gripping new conflict splits old factions and joins new ones, and it's juxtaposed wonderfully with the new flashforwards, which make episodes like "The Economist" and "Ji Yeon" all the more interesting. The writers know how confusing it can all get, and that's why they made their trippiest (and greatest) episode yet, "The Constant." The island is still the great mystery of the show, with no explorations of what is is, only what it can do. One of those things is apparently bending the time-space continuum, as Frank must be very careful to follow an exact bearing as he pilots his helicopter to and from the island. When he goes slightly off-course, Desmond, already the victim of some temporal displacement, becomes "unstuck in time." Upon reaching the freighter with Frank and Sayid, he alternates between the 2004 present and his '96 past in the Royal Scots Regiment.

The result is some truly inspired storytelling that makes the best sense of time travel as any other show or film you're likely to see: he vacillates bewildered from a freighter full of potential hostiles to basic training where he inadvertently earns the ire of the drill sergeant, much to the chagrin of his buddy Billy -- and if that isn't a reference to Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-Five, I'll eat my hat. For a show that spent much of the last season adrift in terms of internal logic, seemingly at the mercy of the writers' imaginations, it's impressive how this episode can leap into that death trap that is time travel and emerge unscathed. I didn't think "Through the Looking Glass" could ever be topped, and certainly not by an innocuously placed episode in the early section of the season.

For the first time, I really have to struggle to come up with anything solid to critique on the show, and anything I can pinpoint generally only applies to one episode and is not some thematic or character flaw that runs through the season. The flashforward of Kate's trial in "Eggtown" and her subsequent relationship with Jack in that episode and "Something Nice Back Home" only show the worst aspects of those characters -- Kate's uselessness as a character, Jack's need to be in control -- that we've seen time and again. Still, the latter episode is worth watching for the subplot involving Jack's appendicitis and makeshift operation, giving the show its first real survival scenario since the first season.

The only episode that stands out as truly weak is "Meet Kevin Johnson," which brings back Michael at the expense of all continuity. In an episode comprised mostly of flashbacks, we see Michael and Walt get off the island after the events of S2, only for Michael to go mad with guilt and try to kill himself. The island won't allow him, however, so he begins taking orders from Ben via off-island communications by a then-alive Tom. Ben assigns him to the Kahana, where he plays mind games because, well, I guess it's the old story about the frog and the scorpion, innit? The problem with this episode is that it crams all of Michael's inner turmoil into about slightly more than a week, and it sullies a once-interesting character. Michael's guilt could (and should) have been a fascinating arc, but it's instead relegated to this episode that shows, not tells -- and not well, at that.

Lindelof responded to the criticisms of this episode by mocking "nitpicking" fanboys and defending the script thusly: "it's television." That is everything that was wrong about Lost at its worst moments in the second and third seasons: a total lack of effort in making the show obey its own logic in favor of simply doing things the writers think are cool. It's that mindset that kept me from fully investing in the series for so long, and to see an episode obeying this half-assed notion of screenwriting in the middle of such brilliance is grating.

Hey, the insanity is actually cool for once!

Happily, that's the one episode that falters in an otherwise outstanding season of television. The three-part finale, "No Place Like Home," does not reach the same heights as the previous season ender in terms of future plot implications and character moments, but it makes up for it in pure craziness that, in contrast to some of the stranger elements of the previous season, works. I mean, you can move the damn island? For such a revelation not to mean jumping the shark in a lead-lined fridge that survived a nuclear detonation takes finesse, and the writers pull it off with style.

Of the 14 episodes, (or 8, depending on how you count multi-part episodes) -- the first three episodes, "The Constant," "The Shape of Things to Come" (which will likely land Michael Emerson an Emmy) and the finale -- are on the short list of the series' finest moments. With the exception of "Meet Kevin Johnson," the rest are all high-quality.

Apart from Cuse and Lindelof, who are on fire this season, the best writers are mainstay Drew Goddard and comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan, author of several of the best comic series of the decade. Vaughan came aboard last season as a story editor and wrote the solid "Catch-22," but his scripts with Goddard demonstrate the best character exploration the show has to offer. With Vaughan producing, the lines seem sharper, the characters more defined outside of their ubiquitous father issues and the plots don't get ahead of themselves, even as they take some of the boldest steps yet seen. Showing us who got off the island might have robbed a lesser series of the intrigue of the increasingly apparent evil of the Kahana, yet the show is structured in a way that makes it obvious that the "Oceanic Six" aren't the only people who lived through the ordeal, and that those people must return to the island to save the ones left behind.

As much as I'm a fan of Vaughan, though, it would be a disservice to pin the upswing in quality entirely or even mostly on him: the deadline might have been a stunt to convince wavering viewers that the writers had a plan, but Cuse, Lindelof and their team of writers clearly display a set goal with these episodes, and the show excels because of it. Lost's fourth season, quite frankly, belongs on any sensible list of the greatest seasons of television of the last 20 years and, given the proliferation of ambitious, cinematic TV in that time, in the medium's entire history.

Lost — Season 2

[Warning - contains major spoilers]

The first season of Lost exceeded my expectations, mixing suspense with character development without getting too loopy nor too dense. While the flashbacks started to get repetitive near the end, and the decision to keep ever major character but one alive through the entire season not only prevented some characters from getting the development they needed but was just ridiculous, period: how, on an island full of polar bears, mysterious and hostile inhabitants and some sort of monster, could they all survive? Nevertheless, it maintained a high quality throughout the season, warts 'n' all.

The first season finale ended in disaster, with the raft expedition running into a boat full of Others, who shot Sawyer, took Walt, then blew up the impossibly well-crafted vessel, leaving the men to die. Meanwhile, Locke secured some dynamite from an old shipwreck to blow up the hatch, at the expense of poor Dr. Arzt (played by Daniel Roebuck, which made me wistfully imagine Jay Leno when he exploded). Despite the mishap, Locke got the TNT back to the hatch and successfully blew it up, leading to what I would learn be the first of many major teases as the episode ended with the gang looking down into opened hatch to see only darkness.

Before I move into the second season, I have to warn you: as much as I tried to avoid the more major spoilers (save a few) of the first season, the second is such a dense web of interconnecting plots and endless cliffhangers and reveals, so I'm just going to discuss everything that pops into my head.

After ending on such a cheap cliffhanger, the season premiere needed to prove to fans that the wait was worth it as well as moving the characters forward. Fortunately, that's exactly what it does: Locke makes his way down the vast access tube of the hatch and finds a man inside named Desmond whom, we learn in a flashback, once met Jack back in the "real world." Desmond guards a dilapidated computer, on which he must enter the ubiquitous "numbers" that keep popping up everywhere every 108 minutes (the sum of the numbers) or else. Or else what? The world ends, Desmond claims. Okey-dokey. Obviously, the stress of having to be awake every 108 minutes to input a code to prevent the world from caving in on itself or some such has taken its toll on the man, and he sticks around just long enough to foist responsibility for the situation onto Locke before high-tailing it for his schooner. Aside from the computer, the survivors find an orientation film made by something called the "DHARMA Initiative" – who apparently funded the hatch for the purposes of research free of restrictive laws – as well as a trove of food.

But the most interesting aspect of the first part of the season is surprisingly not the reveal of the insides of the hatch but of the discovery of other Oceanic 815 survivors on the far side of the island. We meet them when Michael, Sawyer and Jin wash up on shore and we assume that they're the Others, but recall a radio communication Boone made right before his death last season, where he told an unidentified voice, "We are the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815," only to hear in response, "No, we are the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815." These survivors were located in the tail section and, we learn, have had a much more difficult time than the group we spent a whole season with already.

The Tailies' story feels more believable than the other survivors', and they've got a hatch too.

Sadly, the introduction of these survivors is handled somewhat haphazardly. The first five episodes tease us at first with the idea that these people might be Others, as they are notably hardened and their leader, Ana Lucia Cortez (Michelle Rodriguez) is downright violent and cruel. When we do find out, they don't tell us anything about the "Tailies" for another few episodes. Back with the main survivors, we get the same old flashbacks that really just flesh out other flashbacks and not the characters themselves. They also start setting up strands that loosely tie characters into others' arcs for seemingly no other purpose than to make the audience say, "Wow! Would ya look at that?"

Things come together when the two factions meet, and tragedy immediately ensues. Shannon was always a terrible character who was useful in the pilot and only grated from then on, so I confess I was overjoyed to see her go. However, when my emotions cooled and I approached the situation with a slightly more level head, I must say I think it's weak writing: Boone's death naturally shook her up, and, even though most of her subsequent scenes simply featured her stone-faced and mourning, she had the potential to become a better person and a more interesting character.

But rather than flesh out her character and make her someone you might care about, the writers kill her off after a pathetic attempt to get us to sympathize with her: not only is she finding comfort in Sayid but her flashbacks reveal that she had an evil stepmother who ruined her dreams and left her with nothing after daddy died. That's just lazy, people. For the writers to have only killed off two major characters in a cast in the dozens and a lead cast of 14 – and for them to have been the only two that were widely disliked – shows how deep a hole they're digging for themselves.

Shannon dies when Ana Lucia mistakes her for an Other and shoots her, cementing that character as someone we're meant to hate even though it makes perfect sense that she would shoot first and ask questions later, especially when we finally get to see the Tailies side of the story. Oh, but they only get one episode to cram in their experiences over the last 48 days, even though they've clearly had a more interesting time. Whereas the fuselage survivors spent 48 days worrying about the unknowns of the island, the Tailies faced them head-on. They immediately fall under attack from the Others, who eventually seize several adults as well as all the children of the group and kill all those who try and stop them.


"The Other 48 Days" does an excellent job of showing how good the fuselage passengers have it, as well as introducing some interesting characters, presumably because the writers were afraid that the loss of a whopping two leads in such a large cast needed to be filled; nay, it needed even more people. What I liked about the episode is, frankly, that we see the Tailies' numbers significantly thinned after the crash. Nevertheless, if they're not going to start killing off main characters for reasons other than being useless (sometimes you just have to break our hearts, Lindelof), at least adding more characters gives us the chance to see some new flashbacks instead of retreading the other characters'.

For example, we finally see what crime Kate committed in the episode called, wait for it, "What Kate Did," but the writers do everything to soften a crime that you'd be willing to forgive anyway – Kate killing her abusive father to protect her submissive mother – that I just didn't care. It didn't shock me, it didn't give me pause; I just sat there bored stiff waiting to get to the next episode.

Eko and Ana, on the other hand, have some of the most intriguing backstories of the series so far, even if Ana's is so transparently meant to win some sympathy. A cop for the LAPD, Ana was shot on duty while pregnant and lost her baby. This helps explain her harshness towards Michael, Jin and Sawyer and her hatred of the Others, as she lost not only her own child before the crash but failed to protect those surrogates on the island. Lost really starts to get too on-the-nose with the character stuff this season, but this is a wonderfully understated development that actually makes a character more engaging without begging us to care. As for Mr. Eko, well, the more you learn about him, the more he becomes the most fascinating character since Locke wiggled his toes on the beach.

The first season was all about the fear of the unknown, and that's true to an extent this season as well; yet the introduction of these new, toughened, paranoid characters as well as the emergence of the Others narrows the scope of that fear. It's still not, thankfully, a post-9/11 commentary, and the more we learn about the hatches and the DHARMA Initiative the more the vastness of the actual island and its machinations increase, but now mistrust is at a fever pitch.

The show bogs down in the middle, seemingly going out of its way to make Claire, who should be given some leeway as a mother to a newborn she never even wanted, and Charlie two-dimensional and annoying (Boone and Shannon's shoes must be filled, people!). Charlie takes some Virgin Mary statues from a crashed plane full of heroin –which also has the corpse Eko's brother; yeah, it's like that during this stretch – leading to what is meant to an agonizing self-conflict but instead plays out like the most unintentionally hilarious "will they won't they?" relationship on television. And Claire just whines and gets easily outraged, and when she finds out about the heroin she stops associating with Charlie even though he's the only one who ever speaks to her – though Locke steps in for this, because someone has to humor her.

Things pick up in the end run, however, when Henry Gale arrives on the scene. Danielle finds him in the jungle and alerts the survivors, who take him back to the hatch for interrogation. Gale claims to be a wealthy balloonist who crashed several months ago, but Sayid sees the holes in the story immediately. Michael Emerson is wonderful as the increasingly unsettling Gale, mixing a certain doe-eyed innocence with the sort of look in his eye that suggests sociopathy. His best moment is his not-so-subtle confession to Jack and Locke when he hypothesizes that an Other might use Sayid's expedition to confirm his story to lead survivors to capture in order for a prisoner exchange, all before asking if they have any milk to go with his cereal.


Gale is indeed an Other, and he mainly tries to get under Locke's skin by claiming not to have entered the numbers into the computer when Locke was trapped by a blast door that came out of nowhere; this causes Locke to doubt his faith in the island for the first time. When Locke and Eko discover another hatch that was built to monitor the other hatches on the island, he doubts the importance of the button even more, and Locke angrily pledges to let the timer run out to see if his belief was manipulated.

There are many loose threads in the season, and I must say that the finale does an excellent job of consolidating them and addressing many of the more glaring questions. We see in a brilliant, gut-twisting moment that it is the monitor hatch that's the ringer, not the Swan. Desmond, who initially agrees to help Locke with his plan to run down the clock, discovers with horror that the logs Locke holds as proof of the hatch's lies actually prove that there is a massive patch of electromagnetic energy and that, the one time Desmond didn't press the button, the release of energy is what forced Oceanic Flight 815 to crash. We also see Michael further betray his friends after killing Ana Lucia and Libby, who was forming a relationship with Hurley, to free Gale. His treachery earns him back his son as well as a boat off the island, but you can see in his eyes that Michael will never really be saved for what he's done.

Yeah, I have no clue what all of this is supposed to mean.

Yet for every thread tied up, the finale asks us several more, deeply intriguing questions: if there really is that level of energy on the island, what do the other hatches contain? If the DHARMA Initiative isn't receiving the logs from the Pearl, are the monitoring these things at all? If so, how? Either way, their purpose remains a mystery. And what's up with Desmond's love appearing in the final shot being informed of the energy discharge. is she monitoring the island because she heads the initiative? Is this her way of tracking down Desmond? Who knows, but I'm eager to find out.

The second season of Lost is, unfortunately, a step down from the first: the flashbacks, already a cheap tool for character insight, become little more than an excuse to try and surprise us and to hammer home the idea that these people were destined to end up here. There are also some big plot holes, notably: if Desmond knew that not pressing the button resulted in some terrible stuff happening (even if he doesn't find out about the plane until the 11th hour), why would he go along with Locke's plan? Why didn't he tell Locke about it earlier? It also thins the Tailies to manageable numbers, only to focus on about 4 of them for any appreciable length of time while we still have to put up with a cast the writers already can't keep track of.

Nevertheless, it is a captivating season, if for no other reason than the producers and writers are shamelessly manipulating us into caring more than we should. Eko and Ana Lucia are great characters for entirely different reasons, and Locke and Hurley benefit from their flashbacks. Ana Lucia's death shows the writers are willing to be a bit bolder with the characters, even if most people would be glad to see her go, and Libby's death was the only genuinely emotional one of the show so far. Gale is a great villain already despite doing very little that could be described as "villainous." And when the show deigns to reward your patience with an explanation (usually found in a hatch), it feels satisfactory, unlike that damn smoke thing that's supposed to be the island's monster.

In the end, it may not live up to the first season, but it's almost as good in its own way. It can't find the right balance between character and mystery, which makes some episodes feel plodding and others full of empty thrills. It's also getting ahead of itself with some of its loose ends, several of which need to be addressed quickly in the next season. But, hey, I still liked it, so what can I say?

Lost — Season 1

I must admit, I'm not the biggest fan of J.J. Abrams. Odd, since I'm always game for geeky, cult television and, though I've not seen many episodes, I adore Alias. In fact, I seem to be split right down the middle when it comes to his projects, liking about half of them and detesting the rest. One of the items in the latter was actually Lost, Abrams' biggest hit and the cult show of the new millennium. I only saw a few episodes, smack in the middle of either its second or third season. Naturally, this gave me an unfairly biased opinion, but what little I watched smacked uncomfortably of the sort of thing I detest about Abrams' more out-there work: the incessant build-up with no payoff, with a mythology that's admirably huge but too big to fit in the medium, resulting in canonical comic books and whatnot that I simply refuse to read -- seriously, if I have to read something to understand the point of Cloverfield, it's a crap film.

But I resolved to give the series a fair chance, and start from the beginning, if for no other reason than to have something to talk about with my friends on Wednesday nights. I also liked the idea of such a simple premise going in such bizarre directions, and maybe if I stuck with a whole season I wouldn't be so damn baffled by it. I also genuinely like Abrams' weirder side, even if that's usually the part that undoes his best efforts. So, I bummed the seasons off a friend, and sat down to follow the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815.


As it turns out, the first season of Lost is truly captivating. It's bursting at the seams with character development, with the kind of trippy horror/mystery that made Twin Peaks so engrossing (I wouldn't call it Lynchian, mind you). Supposedly the series was originally planned as a fairly straightforward drama that the network essentially wanted to play like a dramatized version of Survivor. Mercifully, someone realized what a terrible notion this was, and they brought aboard J.J. Now, with a show this strange, and with such visual and verbal symbolism and foreshadowing, I cannot be sure if some things I mention might end up spoilers for the next season, so I'm just throwing up my hands and discussing the show; while I will try to avoid as many major surprises as I can, I will at the very least explicitly mention spoilers in the first few episodes.. You've been warned.

Now, I've always been critical of Abrams' direction, and I knew he was the man behind the camera of the pilot immediately because of its clumsy style. Nevertheless, I would be lying just to look cynical and iconoclastic if I didn't say that the pilot is reason enough to stick with the show for at least its entire first season. Even if the camera movement and placement is borderline terrible, the lighting and location look magnificent, and many of the characters are instantlyintriguing . The first character we meet is Jack (Matthew Fox), a surgeon who stirs from unconsciousness to find himself on an island as plane wreckage burns around him. As soon as he gets his bearings, he sets about helping the wounded. As he moves along the beach, we meet more characters.

The plane in question had been traveling to America from Sydney before crashing. Jack, along with a woman named Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Charlie (DominicMonaghan ), a bassist in a little-known rock band, search the cockpit to find the pilot still alive. Before they can get much information out of him, however, an unseen monster rips him out of the cockpit and a spurt of blood splashes across the windows. Later, they find his mangled corpse hanging from a tree. A group of survivors go exploring and must fight off a polar bear(!), eventually picking up a radio message in French that's been broadcast for 16 years. Someone translates it as an SOS from the last of her group.

Of the characters who receive any substantive screen time, a few leads emerge: besides Jack and Kate, whom a U.S. Marshal warns Jack not to trust, there's Sawyer (Josh Holloway), a selfish pig who hoards supplies simply to play games with people, and Hurley (Jorge Garcia), clearly serving as the fat comic relief, at least for the time being.Sayid (Naveen Andrews), a former communications officer in the Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, is also established as a prominent figure.But the most interesting of the characters in the early episodes, and indeed the season as a whole, is John Locke (TerryO'Quinn ). Locke makes passing references to having experienced a miracle in the crash, and immediately forms a bond with the island. In the early highlight "Walkabout," we discover what he meant by "miracle:" in some of the first of many, many flashbacks, we see how and why Locke came to Australia, with the shocking reveal that he was a paraplegic who regained his ability to walk after the crash.


Locke forms a nice foil to de facto leader Jack, a man of science and reason. Locke, though not specifically religious, offers the survivors a spiritual leader, and his knowledge of hunting and wilderness survival makes him an invaluable asset. There is no schism between the two, at least at first, but some characters align with each leader more than the other. In a conversation with Jack, Charlie says that Locke is completely mad, but that he'd trust him with his life. But when Locke uncovers a mysterious hatch that cannot be opened with the help of fellow survivor Boone, things begin to take a turn. Locke's efforts to open the hatch grow increasingly obsessive and eventually lead to the death of the first major character, which drives a wedge in his previously harmonious relationship with Jack.

It all leads to a thrilling conclusion in which several of the survivors attempt to launch a raft to seek out the rescue that's yet to come for them, while the rest prepare for the arrival of a group that Danielle Rousseau, the lone survivor of an expedition 16 years ago and the person behind the SOS signal, refers to only as "The Others." Despite the utter letdown/"are they kidding?"-inspiring reveal of the dreaded monster and the cheap cliffhanger, it's a gripping finale with a load of revealing flashbacks that leaves you more than anxious to see where it all goes from here.


As much as Lost owes its success to J.J. Abrams' annoying tendency to over-hype his projects to the point that you watch his stuff just to feel in the loop, it very much earned itself a second season with this exceptionally strong offering. It mixes the mystery and intrigue of the island with an impressive level of character development and only rarely has to drastically shift gears to do so. Even when an episode doesn't excel it makes you want to know what happens next immediately. The flashbacks offer interesting juxtapositions between the "past lives" of these characters and the people they've become under these extraordinary conditions, particularly Locke,Sayid and Sawyer. And as dark and ominous as the show's tone is, it's not without humor: Hurley offers constant comic relief, and there's a great moment late in the season where Charlie and Hurley attempt to calm Claire's newborn baby, only to find that the only that soothes it is Sawyer's accent.

Abrams also has an eye for casting, and many of the actors are perfect for their parts. Harold Perrineau is believable as a father who wanted so badly to see his son that, when he finally received full custody years later, didn't know what to do with the kid. Reyes makes the most of his fairly static character with his formidable yet lovable frame. The two best actors are, naturally, the ones at the center of it all: Terry O'Quinn, no stranger to cult shows (Millennium), is completely absorbing and compelling as the faith-based Locke, while Matthew Fox deftly mixes Jack's capacity for leadership and stoic heroism with his humanistic side that just can't take it when he loses a patient.


Yet as engaging as Lost is, this first season is not without flaws. Though it's a great deal more straightforward than I would have guessed -- no doubt because it had the Herculean task of setting up such a strange story with such a large main cast -- it still opens up a great many mysteries simply to string us along. While some of them (the numbers, the hatch, the skeletons in the cave) deservedly remain unanswered by the season's end, others (Kate's past, the inexplicable damn polar bears) are just there to keep up interest.

Also, despite the high level of character development, the show relies too much on its flashbacks to tell us about these people when we should learn about them through their actions on the island. They also create the illusion that some characters are layered, when really all they do is add some fluff to otherwise two-dimensional people. Take Kate: all she seems to do this season is flirt with Sawyer and lead Jack on, but because we see her rob some banks in the past suddenly we're supposed to give a damn about her. For such a central character, we really learn nothing about her that applies to her island life in any meaningful way.

It also doesn't help that some characters don't get the time that others do, and they appear flat in comparison. While Hurley works as a two-dimensional piece of comic relief, the barely-evolving relationship between Michael and his estranged son Walt (though it does have its moments) could have been more interesting with a bit more time to shine. Sun andJin Kwoon , on the other hand, work better for their lack of screen time, as they have a mysterious edge that slowly erodes into a level of uneasy trust with the others. But there's no salvaging Boone and Shannon, the self-important, never-growing siblings with a disturbing hint of incest. Boone isn't completely horrible, but Shannon is a flat-out bad character; even when she seeks revenge in one episode she can't manage to be interesting.

Frankly, the show needed to kill off more than one major character, and sooner, to devote more time to the rest. And with the arrival of The Others seemingly on the horizon for the next season, the writers better do something quick that will allow them to handle all these characters. There's also the problem that there are over 40 survivors and only 14 main characters, which means a whole bunch of people show up every now and then and know about the other characters even though we have no clue who they are; it's hard to tell if a fresh face is supposed to be villainous or just another survivor who apparently contributes nothing as the 14 leads do everything. They point this out in the finale, but they joke about it rather than do anything to address it. Now, I love it when writers are willing to identify their mistakes and joke about them, but this is a serious flaw; the people at Mutant Enemy, by contrast, tend to find their major weak spots and do something to fix them, and only joke about the small stuff. And every time something bad happens on the island: the same three people (Sawyer,Jin , Kate) are always suspected. It gets tiresome quickly, to the point that, when it actually is one of these characters is responsible, it's less a shocking moment and more a "'bout time!" one.

Nevertheless, Lost could have so easily been some god-awful forced commentary on a post-9/11 world, but Abrams, Jeffrey Lieber, Damon Lindelof and their team of excellent writers are more concerned with crafting a sort of makeshift civilization and a whole heap of mythology. They seem to realize how close they might have come to taking such a direction and let a few characters briefly blameSayid for the crash, only to set him up quickly as one of the most trustworthy characters on the show. I like to bandy about the term 'ambitious' when describing the scope and scale of a television series (i.e. the all-encompassing grandness of Firefly and The Wire, the risk-taking of Dollhouse), but Lost puts them all to shame. For once, Abrams' hype machine is necessary, because the show needs its impressive viewing figures to balance out what must be an astronomical budget.

When you get right down to it, Lost, at least at this junction, is not the masterful piece of television so many assure it to be. It is, however, damn good, at that's all you can ever really ask of a program. It's deep but not self-absorbed, and one hell of a ride. I am not ready to full recant my earlier position that the show was a bunch of garbled nonsense, as I have yet to move with the series past its foundations and into uncharted territory, but I am happy to recommend this season to anyone with a taste for the unexpected and a desire for bold dramatic programming.

Top Five Disappointments of 2008

Every year there is a slew of bad films. The latest entry in the Saw franchise. Whatever Seltzer and Friedberg cooked up just by watching trailers. The new Kirk Cameron movie. All guaranteed bad. But what about the movies that promise something more? That hook you and draw you in until you can't possibly do anything but love it... only to thoroughly shortchange you. Isn't it the worst feeling in the world to line up for a sequel to a movie you loved, or the new film from one of your favorite directors, only to walk out hating it? Well, I'm here to open those barely healed wounds and bleed my nerdy bile anew for the films that betrayed me this year (some spoilers):

5. Be Kind Rewind

You have now seen the only enjoyable moment of the film. You're welcome.

Granted, I didn't expect too much from this based on the premise (anyone remember the Blockbleester sketch from The Amanda Show?), and as much as I enjoy Jack Black (yeah, you heard me, go watch High Fidelity or Tropic Thunder if you don't agree) he and Mos Def didn't exactly sell me. But when I saw that Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep) was directing, I couldn't help but get excited. However, when I sat down to watch my rented DVD (yeah, I never did get excited enough to go to a theater for it), I was crushed: all the scenes from the trailer that made the movie look somewhat promising? Those clips were the only good parts of the goddamn movie. The rest was a clichéd story about saving the little store that no one likes because The Man wants to tear it down.

As much as I hate the retail giant system (I firmly believe that every Wal-Mart is a Hellmouth), sometimes old crap needs to be torn down. And then the FBI tries to bust the guys for copyright violation for making their own versions (even though I'm pretty sure parody is allowed in the Copyright Act of 1975), but relents when the whole town comes together to watch a film about a random jazzbo that Danny Glover won't shut up about. You know, because togetherness is so rare these days. The story doesn't allow Gondry to get up to his usual tricks, and he just costs through this. Here's hoping he rebounds nicely.

4. Quantum of Solace

"I'm saving the most elaborate torture for my agent."

I remember growing to loathe the Bond franchise right about the time I hit 16 (in 2005). Funny, considering that teenagers (or grown men who never aged mentally past 16) are Bond's primary audience. But I found his increasingly self-parodying, misogynistic formula tiring. Imagine my surprise then, when Casino Royale hit the scene. Mixing a liberal dash of Bourne into a back-to-basics Bond, it was an absolute blast that edged Bond in the direction of realism whilst still remaining a pure romp. It also gave us to date the only well-rounded female character of the series. Then came Quantum of Solace, which demonstrates the classic Hollwood sequels mantra "If it ain't broke, screw it up."

Whereas CR operated in a more realistic world and remained fun, Quantum decided to push things over the edge into the dreaded realm of "Paul Haggis' Real World. PHRW is a recent epidemic that has turned many a potentially fun and/or deep film into a exaggerated, self-aggrandizing dungheap that loves to scribble the words "GRITTY REALISM" all over the place without ever showing anything remotely realistic. It tries to take on real world issues (the environment, the shadiness of businesses), which is so un-Bond that even I, someone who has no love for the franchise, must call foul. Amalric tries his best, but in many ways he's too talented to be a Bond villain; if I want nuance I'll watch something besides the biggest man-child fantasy in cinematic history. Even Jonathan Pryce set aside his chops to drool and twirl his imaginary moustache over the prospects of controlling the media. The Bond here can't decide if he wants to be the fun old Bond of yore or Agent Serious Business, and the film never finds a footing because of it. Oh, and we won't even talk about the direction.

3. Miracle at St. Anna

Clockwise from left: Bashful, Dopey, Doc, Grumpy, and Asshat

To say that Spike Lee is a polarizing figure is like saying the sun is bright or orgasms feel good, but I think he's one of the most talented filmmakers of his generation. He (quite rightly) complained that there were no films being made about the contribution of blacks to the war effort in World War II by (quite wrongly) taking it out on Clint Eastwood. Then he puts his money where his big mouth is and made Miracle at St. Anna, which comes so close to being a great war movie (and the last thing in the world you'd think could be made by the maker of Crooklyn) that to see it play up every stereotype in the book AND add some ridiculous deus ex marble head that saves the day is just heartbreaking.

Race is a hard subject to get right on film and even Lee, who is the only person of the last 20 years to realistically portray, is uneven in his successes. But Miracle is an all new low; it stereotypes blacks, whites, Italians, Germans without ever examining and breaking down those stereotypes like Lee does in his best films. The flashback scene in the ice cream parlor is ridiculous: do you honestly think that a squad of black soldiers who drew their guns on a white American shopowner would not be immediately court-martialed and probably lynched? Miracle works neither as a war movie (because of that effing miracle head) nor a comment on race relations.

2. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

"I can only hope that this fridge can protect me from the seismic force of everyone's childhood shattering."

OK, I knew it was going to suck. As heavily involved as Lucas was to the creative process (as opposed to just letting him add the explosions in in post-production), it couldn't have possibly been great. What I didn't know is that it was going to completely destroy one of the most iconic action heroes in film history. Look, I'm not stupid; I know damn well that Spielberg would never kill the character, but when you watch Raiders you fear for Indy. Here, well we all know about the fridge. That fridge scene almost made me leave the theater. Action films must contain a certain amount of suspense; yes, the hero will live 99.9999999999% of the time, but you need to make us feel for at least a moment that he or she could snuff it. When Harrison Ford just sort of stumbles out of his bomb shelter-to-go there's no reason to stay tuned.

But it gets worse. Cate Blanchett and John Hurt, two magnificent actors, are forcced into these one-note roles that are excruciating in their blandness while Shia LaBeouf, a fun enough up-and-comer with a pretty good wit about him, has nothing to do. And of course, there's the aliens. In a way, it makes sense, but only if you think about it from the point of view of an emotionally stunted grown up who still has train sets and still puts little action figures on the rails and runs them over. In other words, it's great if you're George Lucas.



And the number one biggest letdown of the year for me waaaassss:



1. Cloverfield

"I heard you liek Mudkips."

I know, a lot of people love it. And it's certainly not the worst film on my list (Indy 4, remember?), but I believed in this. For months I was caught up in the JJ Abrams hype and I'm not big on the man. Sure, out of the few episodes I've seen I liked Alias, and Mission Impossible III was the only good installment of the franchise (mainly thanks to Phillip Seymour Hoffman), but Abrams strikes me as the sort of person more concerned with getting people excited than delivering on the promises he makes. But that didn't matter, cause this was going to be great. Even when my friends got sick of the hype, I was there waving the Clovy flag. I popped into the theater the Saturday after it came out and...I hated it.

Not only was it achingly predictable, not only was it completely devoid of tension, but the characters were completely unrealistic. I could maybe buy a dude running into Ground Zero while it's still being torn up to save his not-girlfriend who he slept with once and suddenly he like, totally loves her, but there is no way on God's green Earth that his friends would follow him. Even as they drop one by one, they stick by their dumbass frat boy buddy because someone has to carry the camera. And that's the downfall of these first-person stories; why would I believe that someone would continue to carry a camera (and keep holding the thing up) while he's running from a monster and its weird killer lice. Yeah, I don't care that he keeps saying he's filming so "the people can know what happened;" you don't shove a camera in your friend's face or sit across from him and zoom into his face to see the tears as he mourns the death of a loved one to document a monster rampage. And when they do find his special lady friend, she has sustained an injury that would surely kill her, only for her to get up and, with the power of love, run just as fast as the uninjured people. It's insane.

I can hear the Cloverfans now: "Well, eccuuuuuussse meeeee, Mr. Hard-to-Please. I'm sorry that you had to suspend disbelief for a MONSTER movie." Yes, it is a monster movie, but that does not excuse the filmmakers from the responsibility of making your human characters act like actual humans. They are cookie-cutter yuppie trash who have no real personalities to win us over. Hud is the guy who cracks unfunny jokes, Rob is so focused on saving Beth that he stops only to squirt a few tears for the friends and family he loses along the way before they all suck it up and keep going for no reason, and Marlena is the person who knows none of them and tags along, and I won't go any further into that for my own sanity. The monster is ridiculous too; again, I know it's a monster film, but why would you make a creature that has lived in the seas for thousands of years a creature clearly designed to live on land (and it's NOT an alien. If you think it is you're not enough of a fan to read what Abrams has to say on it)? Ultimately Drew Goddard's weak script ensures that you want the characters to be offed, but you can't root for the monster either because it's a background figure. This rivals Spider-Man 3 as the biggest cinematic letdown of my life (the prequels are excluded from the competition).




Well, there you have it: the five films that stuck with me far more than the cream of the crap. I was let down by a few other movies this year, but none came close to the disappointment I had with these.