Thursday, February 28, 2008

Lost: "The Constant"

One of the peculiarities of filming "Sin City" against a green screen is that many of actors never met each other, even when they were acting together in the same scene. Most people know that pretty much everything in the movie that wasn't a human being was designed on the digital backlot. The monochrome cartoon-noir cityscapes, the back-alleys with the light from the streets causing the shadows to stretch just so, the occasional tar pit: all digital. Far more interestingly, and telling, many of the human interactions (non-visual, subliminal, yet also the foundational basis for just about every great movie ever made) were also assembled in post-production.

You can pick out the scenes like this pretty easily; they're even more stilted than the rest of "Sin City," a waxwork montage of geek-chic desktop wallpapers masquerading as a movie. The exception - the great exception - are the scenes that feature Mickey Rourke as Marv. Mickey Rourke never met Jessica Alba or Rutger Hauer, even though he shares a scene with one and executes the other. But that's all right - Mickey Rourke has said in interviews that he loved working on the movie, spending so many days just by himself, in heavy make-up, walking in front of a green screen without any atmosphere or companionship except for what his demented, punch-drunk, ex-famous razzle-dazzle-addled brain could imagine.

Rourke makes Marv seem like the last man left on earth; somewhere between the perfected human animal and the Piltdown man, a missing link, an imaginary specimen. The other actors in "Sin City" are just playing versions of their own iconic selves (which is why Robert Rodriguez hired them) – Clive Owen doing his dark-yet-noble junior Bond, Bruce Willis gritting his teeth, Jessica Alba dancing as a virginal stripper, and Rosario Dawson playing a dominatrix with a machine gun. Given a few more years, Rodriguez could have just taken their old performances in other movies, run them through his digitalizer, and come up with pretty much the same thing. Mickey Rourke, though, is desperately real. Like your average modern man, he thinks the world's gone batshit crazy; unlike your average modern man, he kind of likes it.

I was thinking about Mickey Rourke and Marv while I watched – with heaving breath intakes at every commercial break, my toes tapping the floor through my shoes, my hands running through my hair trying to massage my pulsating cerebellum – the latest episode of "Lost." As I hoped, it was Desmond episode - like the Sayid episode two weeks ago, you could pick out its lineage right from the first shot. (That picture of Desmond and Penelope seems to accumulate meaning the further along we get in the show.) This was one of those amazing "Lost" episodes - "Confirmed Dead" was the most recent, "Walkabout" the first, "The Man Behind the Curtain" the most flamboyant - where every single moment seemed perfectly choreographed.

This was the first time that our heroes (some of them) (if they are heroes) got off the island in the present (2004), and not only was that not the most amazing revelation of the episode - you had practically forgotten it just a few minutes after it happened - hell, you barely even noticed when it did happen, because Desmond, for at least the second time, TRAVELLED THROUGH FUCKING TIME.

Just before we watched the show, me and my fellow watchers were talking about who "Lost" is really about. There are certain characters who, when their episode rolls around, seem to announce themselves once and for all as the true protagonist, or main character. The obvious choice would be Jack - after his vague presence in season 3, the flashforward finale seemed to re-announce him as the tragic, tortured heart of the show. Certainly, in the sweepstakes of who gets the most consistently screwed, Jack would have to win. Some people might say Locke, but although he is always a forceful presence on the island, his entire storyline is about being in thrall - serving the will of the island, or of Jacob, or whatever malevolent or benevolent force is giving him directions at any given time. A dark horse could be Hurley, who introduced The Numbers and saw Jacob (and, in the future, is haunted by a dead Charlie); or Ben, who may yet be revealed, after all his malevolence and machinations, as the "good guy" he's always claimed to be.

And then there is Desmond, who, by the way, with this episode, officially has the best record of episodes - 4 for 4. It's not just that his episodes - the season 2 finale "Live Together, Die Alone," the time-skip flashback "Flashes Before His Eyes," the boys'-campout slash predestination-meditation that had the gall and wit to call itself "Catch-22," and now this instant classic - press us deeper into our understanding of the island, of the peculiar forces circulating throughout the show. Each episode also shakes up the show's narrative style, and plays with our perception of time and space - flashbacks, flashforwards, flashbetweens.

As such, each episode is entirely unique in structure. "Flashes Before His Eyes" spent most of the show off the island, taking its slow-burning time to lead up to the great tragic-heroic decision of Desmond's life (leaving Penny - either because he was too cowardly to marry her, or because he was brave enough to damn himself to life without her if it meant saving the world, depending on which time continuum you're talking about); "The Constant" was just the opposite, clicking back and forth with past and present at an ever-quickening rate until the perfectly cross-cut finale - Desmond leaving Penny, and Desmond finding her again.

What's funny about Desmond is that he remains a character that is oddly aloof from the others. He hardly ever appears in other people's episodes, and when he does, it's rarely in any kind of active role. Sayid is the go-to heavy when you need to fight some Others; Hurley can always be counted on for some hearty chit-chat; Claire can inevitably provide some kind of emergency subplot (baby! drowning!), but Desmond just kind of hangs about, waiting, pondering.

Consider how many aspects of island life Desmond has never experienced. He's never met any Others besides Juliet - would Ben, Mr. All-Seeing, have any idea who Desmond Hume is? He's never seen any monster made of smoke, nor any dead relatives walking on the island. He sailed away from the island without noticing the Hydra-Alcatraz island; he'd shrug if you mentioned sonic fences; he could probably build you a shack, but if you asked him to include a half-invisible bearded god who might be Christian Shepard, he'd probably look at you and say "Christian Shepard? There's a name for ya, brotha." Remember - he used to be a monk.

Yet Desmond also, in many ways, combines elements of all the other characters. He's got Jack's hero complex - the need to prove himself that led him on his cross-the-world quest to win his beloved, even though she was right there the whole time. Like Sayid, he used to be a soldier; like Eko, he briefly wore the clothes of a holy man. Like Kate and Sawyer he's a criminal - and why was he dishonorably discharged out of a military prison, anyway? Just in this episode, he experienced amnesia, like Claire. Richard Widmore lurks around his flashbacks the way Anthony Cooper once lurked around John Locke's - a grinning face of disinterested evil (did Desmond start his quest to prove himself to Penny, or to her father?)

It might be that reason that, whenever Desmond takes center stage, the fog that may descend over the show in lesser moments seems to clear, and nothing seems more important in this world or the next than that Desmond Hume - our very own 21st century Odysseus, cast adrift in the sea of time and space - get back to Penelope Widmore - our very own 21st century, well, Penelope, spending a lifetime waiting and searching for her man.

Of course, it helps that the creators always seem to tilt things in Desmond's direction. This episode focused in on a few key characters - Desmond and Daniel Faraday, with Sayid providing moral support (Sayid fixes communication hardware - DRINK!), and mysteriously charcoal-voiced George Minkowski earning himself a double play for walk-on parts, with a great entrance ("It's happening to you, too, isn't it?") and an even better, sadder, weirder exit ("I can't.. get... back..." he says, dyingly). As great a cast as this show has, it works best in lean, mean episodes like this - not a moment spared to dally on a single solitary subplot. Boom, boom, supersonic megaboom.

Focus, focus. "The Constant" leaped between three distinct planes of reality - real time, in 2004, on a boat (which is in the Pacific - any Atlantic, Arctic, and Indian Ocean theory enthusiasts had to groan at that revelation); Island time, now and forever definitively revealed as not quite normal time, on the beach; and past time, in 1996, at Scottish boot camp and Oxford and then, finally, London. Desmond, finally leaving the island that was his prison, flips backwards in time and returns with amnesia. Confused by the ocean, by the muscular Iraqi who claims to know him, by his own disheveled appearance, and most of all at how quickly all of this fades back into what he thinks is reality - in boot camp, in the rain, alone without his girl.

Through a number of plot shenanigans that would be death to explain but that flow smooth onscreen like tears in the rain, past-Desmond finds himself talking to past-Daniel Faraday; with long hair and a long beard, Jeremy Davies looks even smarter, and crazier. Faraday shows Desmond an experiment: using radiation, he can unstick a mouse in time, so that it can find its way through an epic maze, as if it had already tried every wrong way a thousand times and perfected its route (shades of "Groundhog Day.") But the mouse dies. Will this happen to Desmond, Desmond asks? "All of these are variables," says Daniel, waving to his physicist's blackboard that's probably covered in gibberish but which may feature a mathematical proof ending in 4, 8, 15, 16, etc. "You need to find a constant."

You have to smile at this. This is Lost at its finest - the loftiest, swirliest of science-fiction psychobabble (sci-chobabble?), combining with the most postmodern meta-theories, and the answer is true love. The science keeps the storyline from being mawkish; the emotion humanizes the narrative trickery and scientific complexity. How's this for a modern day love story: In a world of variables, You are my Constant. And lest you think it's getting to heady or too softy, then don't stress - the love, like the science, is just a macguffin. Because, you realize, this episode is that oldest of storylines, that DW Griffith perfected back in 1907 - the Race Against Time.

Past Desmond comes to Penny's door and says: I will call you, in eight years, on December 24, 2004, on Christmas Eve, but just tell me your number and keep it. And she gives him his number. And eight years later, Sayid, god bless him, has the communication device working. Desmond picks up the phone. And we are on the edge of our seat, because what is about to happen is more long-awaited than Jack and Kate kissing, more satisfying than watching Sawyer take his bloody vengeance in the belly of a lost slaver ship, and packing more energy than a dozen time-space-continuum-breaching, purple-sky-creating, second-season-ending hatch implosions: Desmond is about to talk to Penelope.

And he does. And she has waited for him. She tells him that she has been searching for him. She says something about researching the island - there is static, of course. They say, in unison, "I love you." And there's a Christmas tree, too. You'd be disappointed if there wasn't.

Alone among the Losties, Desmond doesn't just remember the worst parts of his life - he has had to relive them, in excruciating detail, unstuck in time like one Billy Pilgrim. And here is the show's very own Christmas miracle - a moment of calm perfection, aided by hyper-modern transcontinental telecommunications.

"Lost" may not be all about Desmond. But it sure feels like it, tonight.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Lost: "Eggtown"

The show's track record with female characters is spotty at best. Claire was only really important when she was pregnant, back when Aaron was the anti-christ or something - despite the fact that she was the first castaway kidnapped by the Others, and that she's JACK'S FREAKING HALF-SISTER, she's had practically nothing to do in two seasons but hang around on the beach and carry Aaron. Sun is a more complex character (slightly), but the Sun/Jin story was also way more interesting back in season one, when it was filled with tension, distrust, years of pent-up anger and frustration, like every good TV marriage. Don't you kind of wish that Jin could find out about Sun's bald english-teaching lover, just so they'd something to be angry about, again?

Oh, and Sun is also pregnant now, and for a few minutes last night, we all thought that Kate was, too. A Pregnancy plotline is usually a show-killer (see - "Friends," "Mad About You," "The X-Files," more and more and more) - perhaps because, much more so than when two romantic protagonists finally get together, it so completely upsets the balance of the show - adding in a baby just makes everything just a little bit less fun - and, more to the point, makes it more difficult on the writers to do anything. You have to give the "Lost" writers credit - they not only have one pregnant chick, but thanks to the odd properties of the island, practically every woman might be pregnant. (Did Ana Lucia die carrying Sawyer's two-hour-old baby?)

So Kate's not pregnant, but you had to agree with Sawyer (with the best line of the night): Kate asks him, "Would having a baby really have been the worst thing?" "YES!" says our favorite con man, "It WOULD'VE!" Kate's not made to be a mother, at least not yet. Her marriage flashback episode last season was, in many respects, somewhat lame, but it also shaded an intriguing new layer into her personality. Before, Kate was always on the run because the evil Marshall was only a few steps behind her - but in that episode, she was married, clearly happily, to a policeman, and the evil Marshall had no idea where she was. The episode, predictably, ended with her having to leave again - nominally, because her husband had booked an international vacation, for which she would need a valid passport, so he would find out the truth about her eventually, etc, etc.

That was the APPARENT reason (also the one that Lostpedia uses). But I think it was something subtler. Throughout that flashback, Kate seemed settled into a nice, boring suburban life - taco nights, shopping for her man, in-laws who liked her, a husband with a steady job who wasn't abusive and who was played by Nathan Fillion, awesomest guest star in the universe. The Marshall (grinningly evil though he was) called it - Kate just had to keep moving. For no real reason. At some base level, she just doesn't want that normal little life.

More and more, I think this episode may hold a key to one of the slowly dawning revelations of the show's overall course. The flashbacks in the first two seasons established what we thought was the common thematic link among the characters - that they were all, in small ways and large, seeking some kind of redemption. Charlie the heroin addict, Sayid the torturer, Kate the criminal, Sawyer the con man, Jin the gangster - all people with shady histories who would be tested on the island. This was also back when we thought the island was Purgatory, and that all the castaways were "sinners," etc, etc. Call it the Eko theory, since that character came to view his existence as a constant penance for past crimes.

But we know what happened to Eko, and since his death, if you look closely, the overall thematic arc of the show no longer seems to be "redemption" per se, so much as Acceptance (and, dare I say it, self-realization). We now know that at least 6 people get off the island, but it doesn't make their lives better - far, far from it. So it makes sense that, in last night's episode, Kate jumps at the chance to be trapped in California for 10 years - she wants to hunker down, build a family, raise her (adopted) child. She wants to just stay in one place, just like Sawyer and Locke want to just stay on the island. In the process, "Lost" may be morphing from an essentially Catholic show (Confession of past sins and Penance leading to a state of grace) to something more zen.

All of this theorizing is actually more interesting than most of last night's episode, the least action-packed so far this season. That's actually not a bad thing - because we're so deep into the show, and because there are so few episodes this year, everyone seems to think that every episode needs to answer everything. But "Lost" was great, first and foremost, for its little character moments. Sure, last night was slow-moving, but how perfect was the scene where Sawyer and Hurley re-enact the Odd Couple - Sawyer, wearing those hilarious glasses they built for him a couple season ago, trying to read, while Hurley tries to watch "Xanadu." Kate comes in, and Hurley gives Sawyer his patented "Dude, You're Gettin' Some!" thumbs up, and just when the scene can't get more perfect, Sawyer pulls out a box of official Dharma Initiative Franzia wine.

Hilarious. At times like this, the show makes up for all the times when the mysteries get too overly oblique - you could see practically an entire series (or at least a full episode) made out of Sawyer and Hurley, living in the former barracks of the Dharma Initiative, in the middle of a mysteries island. With crazy Wilson-esque neighbor John Locke and occasional guest star, The Black Smoke Monster.

What else happened yesterday? Miles cemented his status as this year's Eko/Juliet, the new character who steals every scene. Ben proved yet again that he's never more powerful than when he's locked up, and everyone is swirling around him - just how did he go from an awkward kid with coke bottle glasses to the master schemer he is today? Locke had the scene of the episode, feeding Miles a grenade and instructing him to be careful with it. Good old Locke: just when you're starting to like him, he does something like that, and you love to hate him even more.

We still haven't seen the freighter, but next episode looks promising - what is the helicopter going to see, as it gets further from the island? Please be a Desmond episode. Pleasepleaseplease. Desmond is 3 for 3 so far on awesome episodes - one more and he beats Eko's record. (Also with perfect records: Juliet (2 for 2), Ben (1 for mesmerizing 1, "The Man Behind the Curtain" - although that may just be because all three of these characters always offer some tantalizing glimpse of the Truth, as "The X-Files" used to call it. For my money, of the original castaways, Claire has the best record - perhaps just because she's had so few. Hurley's episodes are almost always interesting, Sawyer always guarantees a few twists and an added dosage of brilliant Sawyerisms, Jack's are either brilliant or revolting, and Locke's, besides the pot-farm hippie episode, are about as fun as Greek tragedy.)

Monday, February 18, 2008

Lost: The Allegory's Allegory

Jeff Jensen, a writer from Entertainment Weekly, might be the first writer to turn TV criticism into an art form unto itself. Kids have been hip to movie-critic badassity for decades - James Agee made it chic, Pauline Kael made it sexy, Ebert brought it to the masses and Anthony Lane brought it back to the cocktail party. Now Jensen, with a twice-weekly column (one preview for the episode and one exhaustive review/analysis) is making reading about TV almost as much fun (and twice as intelligent) as watching it.

Jensen came up with the idea - both ludicrous and brilliant - that Lost is an allegory for itself - that the castaways' confusion and pursuit of answers (about their own past, and about the island) mirrors the audience; the Others (or the Natives, or whatever we want to call those mysterious locals who have thankfully returned to the shadows), with their elaborate conspiracies, their constant dress-up (recall that we used to think they were primitive tribalists with torches and Van Winkle bears), their bizarre ability to know everything about the castaways, are the writers, laying more mysteries in our path at every turn; that the island is a metaphor for TV land, with its endless supply of ghosts and guns and girls and boys.

Part of the fun of this theory is that it is utterly simplistic - you could argue (as a Film Studies major, I often did) that something can mean anything while meaning the exact opposite and deconstructing everything else. But it's important to remember that "Lost," despite its outlandish genre trappings, is ultimately one of the most straightforward narratives in TV history - its just a bunch of people on a strange island, and we have seen pretty much every day of their lives for over three months now (from what Jack said in the last episode, it's been exactly 100 days).

That simplicity is, paradoxically, what may give the show so much metaphorical force - just like "Lord of the Flies" imagined an island society where all of modern culture was stripped to its straightforward animal basics, so the Lost island cuts the whole medium of television down to its bare essentials. This does not excuse the show when it goes wrong, but it does present an interesting prism through which we can see that, even at its worst, "Lost" has something interesting to say about itself and about television.

Take, for example, the "Hydra" storyline which began season 3. That would be: Jack trapped in a dungeon behind clear plexiglass, Kate and Sawyer trapped in polar bear cages, Ben staring at them on remote monitors behind big Peter Parker glasses, Juliet looking hotly mysterious and non sequiturly tense, and a bunch of Others generally acting like dull, thoughtless assholes (like Danny Pickett, the most unnecessarily angry human being in the history of the modern world). This storyline was, without a doubt, one of the least successful in the show's history, but in its own strange way, "The Hydra" cycle is a fascinating portrayal of just how television shows go wrong - an analysis of why the old open-ended narrative is slowly being evolved out of television (or at least, why a show like "Lost" needs to have an end date).

Remember that old episode of "The Simpsons," where Itchy and Scratchy, in an effort to juice ratings and public interest, add in the character "Poochie," who adds absolutely nothing to the show and, indeed, takes away from the mayhem of the original cat and mouse? That's what "The Hydra" was. "Lost" is a show about people trapped on an island, so what could be a more bizarrely appropriate idiotic twist than adding in ANOTHER island? You could see it going on this way indefinitely - why not have a whole row of mysterious islands, one after the other?

So maybe the "Hydra" storyline is, in a way, a self-portrait of writers' block, of rehashing old ideas - "Say, why not another island?" Is it any coincidence that all three main characters in the plotline are quite literally trapped? Jack overhears the occasional piece of wisdom from the old intercom, but it might just be his imagination (or one last bit of creative inspiration), and meantime all he can do is sit in the dark and wait for someone else to come save him. Kate and Sawyer have nothing to do all day, except when the Others come and make them help with building... something.

Except they aren't really building anything, they're just moving stuff around, and vaguely digging into the ground, as if in preparation for building something. Apropos of nothing, the Others give Kate a dress - you can almost hear them, using producer voices, whispering to each other, "She's a cutie. Can't we put her in something nicer than jeans and a tank top?" (I can't help but believe that just one of the "Lost" writers wasn't a little in on the joke here). Ben, meanwhile, watches all of them, and seems just about ready to maybe do something... or maybe just watch, and wait. And lest you think this was all some complex mind game that was building to some major revelation, it turns out that Ben planned everything - this whole strange cages-within-cages plotline - so Jack would cure his cancer. You'd think that, when you had a terminal illness, you might think of something more direct. Like asking nicely. Or not putting your doctor in a cage.

"The Hydra" storyline is all about stasis, but it is a particular kind of stasis - you can feel the writers wrestling themselves into unnecessary permutations, just like Ben makes the whole "please cure my cancer" needlessly complicated. Even the mythological reference indicates a certain frustration. Cut off one of the Hydra's head and another takes its place. Answer one mystery on "Lost" and three more spring up. We don't really learn anything in "The Hydra" saga, even though we see more of the Others than we ever thought was possible.

By comparison, consider a similar behind-the-curtain twist on "Battlestar Galactica," where the Cylons - who, like the Others, spent most of the first and second season lurking out of view - suddenly became main characters on the show. You could argue that aspects of Cylon culture were hokey (I don't), but dammit, we at least learned a hell of a lot about them. With the Others, you could sense the writers stretching the characters' dialogue so as to reveal as little as possible - rarely have so many practically omniscient, seemingly evil, one-would-hope-intelligent people spoken so obliquely among themselves.

Take another example of this self-allegory - the death of Mr. Eko. The characters' first two flashback episodes made it clear that, like everyone else on the island, he was seeking redemption - for past sins, for the men he had murdered, for the loss of his brother. He was building a church; he was hitting the button and doing God's work; he was the voice of reason on the island, even when (as usually happens on "Lost") that reason could shade delicately into madness.

But Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje wasn't satisfied with the character. He had been told that he was playing a priest, and although Mr. Eko was one of the more impeccably drawn characters on the show, it must have worn on the actor (recently seen playing an evil drug dealer on "Oz") to be playing another drug dealer. Akinnuouye-Agbaje was a fan-favorite character on one of the highest-rated shows on TV. He was supposed to be happy, but he wanted out. Akinnuouye-Agbaje to the writers: "I'm not playing your game."

In "The Cost of Living," we watched Eko's fall from grace - moreover, we saw that it might have always been there. We thought that, after he became a priest, he tried to live a good life - but no, even taking his brother's place, he was a murderer, killing men (bad men, but even so) in his brother's old church. Okay fine, we think - one more reason why he's seeking redemption.

But no! Eko faces down the man/thing/smoke-monster-made-flesh that looks like his brother and refutes the whole notion of redemption - refutes the entire good/evil balance which seems to recur so often on the island and on the show (Ben's statement that he and his friends are "the good guys," the black/white dichotomy), argues that he only ever did what he thought he had to do, and that his first murder (his original sin) was justified, because he did it to save his brother's life. It's an argument for moral relativism - it's a fuck-you to every ideal Eko had tried to force himself into living. Eko to the island: "I'm not playing your game." Eko is the only main character (besides Nikki/Paolo, who are their own allegorical meta-story, and Libby, who will return someday...) to die without some kind of redemptive final episode - whereas Ana Lucia, Charlie, Boone, and even Shannon all went to their death having gained some sort of grace, Eko went down kicking and screaming, ignobly (yet awesomely) killed by a giant smoke fist. And, we might note, he is one of the few people to die without ever coming back (Ana Lucia, Boone, Shannon, Charlie, Libby - they all appeared, in dreams, sweat-lodge-acid trips, flashbacks, or flashforwards), and
Akinnuouye-Agbaje is the one former actor who seems uniquely opposed to appearing on the show again.

Everything is everything. You all everybody. You know?

Friday, February 15, 2008

Lost: "The Economist"

Sayid, we can all agree, was the most instantly fascinating character when the show first came on. It's easy to forget nowadays, when the floodgates have been opened to highbrow warsploitation flicks ("Rendition," "In the Valley of Elah," MTV Film's upcoming teenybop-veteran mash "Stop-Loss"), that back in 2004, it was genuinely transgressive to have an Iraqi main character on network TV. Hell, it was transgressive to say "Iraq" or reference anything about anything in the modern world. So Sayid - the quiet-voiced, wifebeater-preferring, tortured-romantic torturer late of the Republican Guard - stuck out immediately. And the writers gave him plenty to do - he found the crazy French lady, he kept trying to fix the radio, he was INVOLVED.

Then, in what may have been the single most foolhardy use of a truly original character on network television, the writers decided to hook him up with Shannon, the bikini goddess of season 1, perhaps out of vain hope that his reflected glory would add some narrative oomph to the show's first utterly useless main character. Maggie Grace was, it seems clear now, a sacrificial lamb for the show - sticking around in the background as hot eye candy just long enough to reel in the LCD demographic, promptly killed off when commercial success led to artistic freedom (the cast's attractiveness quotient has gone down, in reverse parallel to the higher quality of actors that keep swooping in - see our new friends, the Fantastic Freighter Four.) Their romance was interesting in outline - former Iraqi soldier falls for bleached blond heiress, what's not to like about that? - but the actors had zip chemistry, and the whole thing seemed to undercut Sayid's essentially serious side.

TV's favorite Muslim had some great moments in season 2 - a speech to Ana Lucia about the vengeance he hoped to take on the Others was mesmerizing, and his interrogation/beating of B(H)en(ry Gale) was a dark high point - and he was always a motivating factor in the castaways' adventures. But in season 3 he was practically nonexistent. Like Charlie, a character who was central to the entire dynamic of "Lost" when the show began, he seemed to get lost in the shuffle of new characters and an ever-expanding mythos.

Like, who would you rather see an episode about: someone whose flashback will directly impact our understanding of the island (Ben, Juliet, Rousseau), someone whose flashbacks never fail to draw a deeper understanding of the hidden implications of the island (Desmond, Jack when his father's involved, Hurley), or a story with vague thematic implications of how "lost" the castaways were before the plane crash (Jin + Sun, Sawyer, Kate). It's not that the last kind is particularly bad - Mr. Eko's flashbacks never had much to do with anything, and they were three of the best episodes in the show's history. But Eko had the backstory to end all backstories - when else do you see an African drugrunner disguised as a Catholic priest walk out of a church with a gore-stained machete? By season 3, if your backstory wasn't going to give us some gimme-gimme about the island, it damn well better give us a fantastic story.

Sayid's lone flashback of season 3, "Enter 77," was not that. Like many other episodes in the declining flashback era, it felt like it was rehashing old topics - his guilt about being a torturer, his grasping for redemption, etc. So when I sat down with my buddy Carlos to watch "Lost" last night, I said, "I really, really, really hope that Sayid is one of the Oceanic 6 because he hasn't had shit to do since the French lady took him hostage."

Boom on the money. How many other shows get you applauding right from the first shot? The camera slowly tracks back from Sayid, praying in the general direction of where Mecca would be if there were any directions on the island. Instant shrieking from the audience - it's a Sayid episode, and if it's a flashforward, then all is right with the world.

"The Economist" was a little bit less fleet-footed than last week's entry - this was an episode more focused on dark portents of things to come than on thrill-juicing insta-twists. Sayid is now a hitman - we see him kill an asshole-icly rich Italian on a gorgeous golf course, recalling the one Hurley built in season 1 (will there ever be a plotline that innocent on "Lost" again?) For a second, I thought maybe, just maybe, the island had been turned into a tourist trap... but no, it was in the Seychelles. Next thing we see, Sayid is in Berlin - my, this show does get around - looking prettier than Pierce Brosnan and twice as charming, picking up a sweet German girl in a cafe. Sweet German girl informs Sayid/us that she works for a man, "an economist," who is only in town once or twice a year - she carries his beeper everywhere, just in case. Duh-alert: Sayid wants this guy, whoever he is.

We never find out who "the economist" is - most of the flashforwards focused on Sayid getting closer to Ms. Prussia '07. Not the most exciting story ever - until the classic "Lost" double reversal, where Sayid reveals that he's an assassin to his German girl, and then SHE shoots him in the arm. This might be the greatest strength of the "Lost" writers - they set up a plotline with an obvious surprise, spring that surprise, and then spring the NEXT surprise that you didn't see coming. On other shows, this kind of storytelling can seem to be grasping at straws (on season 2 of "Heroes," it seemed like every other episode, there was a new family member stepping through the door). On "Lost," it can work like a charm.

Meanwhile, back on the island, Sayid leads Miles and Kate to the Others' barracks and gets tricked by, of all people, Hurley. Sayid gets thrown into the brig with Ben, in the exact same room where Kate was held last season. Ben, who never looks more majestic than when he's covered in blood and hovering in the shadows of a cell, chatted it up with Sayid, who utterly hates him. Sayid even said, about Ben, "the moment I start trusting him is the moment I lose my soul," which made it all the more poignant and shocking when we see that in the future, Sayid is WORKING FOR BEN! OMG ROFLMAO! Sayid is officially an important character again, everybody!

The present-day island part of the episode ended with Sayid and Desmond leaving the island, on a helicopter flown by Frank (who would be my new favorite character, if Charlotte, Miles, and Daniel weren't so equally awesome so far.) It also ended with Kate, who was briefly Jack's best buddy, back with Sawyer in Otherland, playing house on the island - because, as Sawyer rightfully pointed out, neither of them have anything waiting for them on the outside world. Now HERE is something interesting - we've known all along that Locke loves the island because he's mister mysticism, but now here's Sawyer, Mr. No-bullshit himself, deciding that he'd rather stay on the island than leave. This was such a small part of the episode that it's easy to miss just what a striking shift this is in the narrative - we don't want to get off the island, we don't even want to understand the island, we just want to live here.

One final note - even though we've known pretty much from the very first episode that Kate and Jack are meant to be together, the writers just get better and better at portraying their relationship. Maybe it's because they're scenes together, one-on-one, have gotten so rare in the last couple of seasons, but every time they do get some time alone, you can just feel the desperate yearning - Kate's apologetic flirtation ("sorry I'm a criminal, sorry I bonked Sawyer, sorry, sorry"), Jack's noble self-effacement("I love you, I always have loved you, and I will show you that, just as soon as I get me and you and everyone we know off this damn island"). How great was the look on Jack's face at the end of the episode, when Sayid told him that Kate decided to stay... and how wonderful, and unforgiving, was the camera, following Sayid toward the plane while we saw Jack in the background, staring blankly into the distance, begging Kate to appear over that hill.

Stuff I anticipate:

With Kate gone, Jack is going to get closer to Juliet. They will have sex. They may even have something akin to a relationship. But Jack is always going to be thinking about Kate, and Juliet will know that, and that will be one of the many tragedies that Jack seems to accrue to himself. (Please, writers, please? Juliet is, far and away, the most interesting female character on the show - give this girl something to do, and by something, I mean some doctor)

That's 4 of the Oceanic 6 that have been revealed (plus Ben) - who's left? I suppose that one of them could be Michael, if we assume that he eventually makes it off the island, but my bet is on Jin (because him and Sun desperately need some added relevance to the show) and Claire (ditto.) Locke might be the guy in the coffin - it would make a certain amount of ironic narrative sense, that future-bearded-Jack is so cut up over the guy who used to be his nemesis - but I'm betting that he ends up staying behind on the island, as a regular Colonel Kurtz, or a regular Benjamin Linus (iced tea, anyone?)

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Roy Scheider Is Dead

Little moments like this are what keep us coming back to watch more. I can remember being a very young child and realizing that the captain from "SeaQuest" was the same guy who battled the shark in "Jaws." That is the moment I realized the magic of pop culture, that you could be a scrappy young Sheriff and a stately elder adventurer at the same time, on different channels. That may have been the first moment I grasped the passage of time as something physical and true. Certainly, for the span of perhaps three and a half weeks, I understood that Roy Scheider was the greatest actor in movie history.

"In Bruges"

Just a few months after his "Daredevil" costar erased almost a decade of cinematic badwill by directing his baby brother in the underrated actor's-feast "Gone, Baby, Gone," here is Colin Farrell starting his very own second act. Few actors have ever ascended to stardom so quickly and flamed out so magnificently and bloated so obnoxiously as Farrell, who wowed Hollywood with "Tigerland," was the guy inside the "Phone Booth," played it like an action star in "SWAT," then became a tabloid mainstay (he snogged Britney!) and an overexposed joke onscreen - showing his wang in "A Home at the End of the World," and being "Alexander." That movie was a cancer for every career it touched - Jared Leto, who decided to focus on his crappy band; Val Kilmer, soon to be the voice of KITT on the new "Knight Rider"; Angelina Jolie, who had a good accent in "A Mighty Heart" then decided to phone in a refurbished "Alexander" Eurotrash-lilt for "Beowulf"; poor Oliver Stone, who's released two director's cuts of the movie in between making an impossibly sappy "World Trade Center"; and poorer Colin Farrell.

He followed "Alexander" with another historical epic, "The New World," which was remarkable, but Farrell had the Richard Gere role, playing more of an archetype of wounded heroism (and sad-eyed romanticism) than a real character - and worse, he had all that anachronistic beer weight, sticking out like a sore thumb among all the starving Virginians.

"Miami Vice" was even worse - an utterly joyless performance in an equally joyless movie, lacking both the fun of the original series and the gravitas it desperately desired. It is the strange calculus of Hollywood's star-making machine that an actor who rose to acclaim for his quirky Irish charm should be so often cast as a stonefaced Yank - who else can lay claim to playing a two soldiers (one World War II, one Vietnam), an FBI agent, John Smith, Jesse James, and Sonny Crockett in six years or less?

Buried right in between "Alexander" and "The New World" was practically the only real acting Farrell did the first half of this decade - in a guest appearance on "Scrubs," playing a rascal Irish laddie, Farrell was fast, loose, roguish, gleefully misguided but not without a moral compass (after he injured a man in a bar fight, he brought him to the hospital).

There's quite a bit of that spirit in his performance in "In Bruges." There's a wonderful moment early in the film where Farrell, playing an Irish hitman trapped in the titular well-preserved Belgian city, tries to convince his older partner (played by Brendan Gleeson, effortlessly) to go to the pub. Ken, the elder, is having none of it - he's here for the culture, not for the beer. Farrell's Ray scrunches against the window, looking like a jilted puppy. A glint enters his eye - you can see it, as Ray smiles and then stops himself from smiling, and looks from side to side as if afraid someone might see the lightbulb over his head. "Let's go see the medieval buildings," he tells Ken. "They probably look much different... at night."

"In Bruges" is a grand kind of movie - intimate, yet with far-reaching interests (Christ's blood makes an appearance; the finale includes an homage to Hieronymus Bosch), with a cast stocked with excellent actors cast perfectly. Gleeson's Ken is the sort of character you rarely see anymore - an old, quiet, infinitely fascinated and fascinating fellow - really, the kind of man for whom the word "fellow" was invented. Also stellar is Clemence Poesy, who makes up for her nearly wordless part in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" with a teasing wit that goes splendidly with her impossible beauty.

This is a British gangster film in the best tradition of "The Long Good Friday" and "Get Carter" - Ralph Fiennes shows up near the end of the film in a blazingly hilarious, horrifically evil performance that recalls Ben Kingsley in "Sexy Beast," with an added dose of good humor and an oddly touching apologetic madness ("I'm sorry I called you an inanimate object," he tells his wife after a fight.) Yet "In Bruges" is also a wonderful portrait of a little-known European city. I have a desperate affection for movies about foreigners abroad in strange cities - "The Third Man" and "Before Sunrise" might be my favorite movies, as much for their dual portraits of Vienna (as a bombed-out underworld and a picturesque lovescape, respectively) as for their lacerating wit and swoony romanticism.

"There's never been a great movie made in Bruges," Poesy says midway through the movie, at which point she's already been proven wrong. Not bad, February - we can almost forgive you for "Fool's Gold," and "The Eye," and "Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins," and (probably) "Vantage Point."

Lost: "Confirmed Dead"

"Lost" is the best argument for escapism as artistry and the most consistently convincing evidence that, just as football has overtaken baseball as the American pastime, so television has replaced the movies as the primary pop culture medium. It's not just that a season of "Lost" is more expansive, more dark, more funny, more skeptical, more generous to slow-burning plot developments and more wry with its treatment of a huge cast than most big screen movies. It's that practically every EPISODE of "Lost" is all those things, and beautiful enough to justify an HD TV but not so concerned with aesthetic surfaces that it can't be devoured, like an impeccable desert or digestif, on your iPod Nano.

An episode of "Lost" is satisfying in a different way than an episode of "The Sopranos," because you know, as the "Previously On" fades out, that in under an hour a storyline will have reached some kind of climax, that there will be a catharsis, and that out of that catharsis will spring more mystery. Every episode of "Lost" takes a cue from Scherazade - it always ends right in the middle of something, daring you not to keep watching.

In its second and third seasons, "Lost" started off slowly - finale cliffhangers had left our castaway gang scattered across the island, and Lindelof and Cuse usually took three or four episodes to map everyone out. Many fans didn't like this, particularly in season 3, which started off with six episodes of Jack, Sawyer, and Kate - three of the most dynamic characters, trapped in a love triangle that demands proximity - in separate cages, with the other characters across the island, with no bare attempt at an explanation for what happened to the hatch. (Almost two years later, all we know is that 'the sky turned purple.') One of those six episodes, "The Cost of Living," was one of the series' best, yet its telling that it focused entirely on a character, Eko, who had barely appeared in the season so far (being attacked by a poorly-animated polar bear does not count as an appearance), and who would never appear again - his unexpected death was the first castaway death that really hurt.

Things are different now. Lindelof and Cuse have, with "Confirmed Dead," the second episode of a fourth season which god willing will not be cut off midway, vindicated those of us who admired the slowering rhythms of seasons 2 and 3 - with this episode, even moreso than in the nimble premiere, you can sense just how splendidly all the pieces have fallen into place. You know right from the opening scene - we are underwater, staring through a camera, hearing voices we have probably never heard before. Is any other show on television so consistently willing to utterly confuse its audience? And yet it's not confusing, because we have faith in the writers - we know that, if we are in a submarine under the sea, then what we are about to see is not just important, but explosive. Sure enough, there is a plane in the ocean - flight 815. Funny, we thought it crashed on that island.

Skip scene - we are watching Flight 815 on television. A man is crying. He doesn't know why. Skip scene. That man is inside a helicopter, and three people we have never seen before are throwing him out into an electrical storm. We parachute down from his POV - we look up at the helicopter, and we look down at the island, and it is like we are seeing it for the first time. The man hits ground. He hides a gun. Jack and Kate run over to him. "Are you Jack?" he asks.

It is an archetypal "Lost" opening - shattering what you thought you knew, conjuring entire characters and storylines out of thin air; there is instant mystery, and the possibility of violence. What follows is very nearly a perfect episode of "Lost" - the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Lindelof, Cuse, et al, are at the absolutely height of their storytelling powers here. Four new characters introduced in the span of an hour - we know them all without knowing anything about them, suspect them all but have already begun to love them.

Their arrival makes us look at our old favorite characters in strange new ways. The best scene is almost certainly Charlotte's sit-down with Locke's rebel-breakaway group. Here we have a scene that would have been unthinkable back in season one, when we were all convinced that the island was purgatory or a dream or some other mesmerizing cop-out - someone from off the island sitting around with our castaway friends, promising escape. And that is the last thing they want, because they believe - the know - that she is lying.

Another great thing about this episode - whereas the overall outlines of season 2 and 3 only became clear over time (season 2 was all about the Hatch; season 3 was all about the Others), it now seems clear that season 4 is going to be all about Jack's team versus Locke's team. This can only be good news. Another difficult thing about season 3 was how often important overarching themes like the Jack/Locke split got lost in the shuffle of new characters - how strange to think that Jack and Locke only actually shared screen time in two scenes last season. (This is the blessing and the curse of huge casts - so many expansive options, but also so many potential potholes.)

Good god, though, such scenes! Locke blowing up the submarine and ruining Jack's chances at going home; Jack phoning the ship and ruining Locke's chances at staying on the island. When, at the end of season 3, Jack said, angrily, "You're done keeping me on this island," you could feel the show finding its footing all over again. Jack and Locke, man of science and man of faith. Amazing, that even three and a half years after the premiere it's still not clear which one is the hero - or, indeed, if there is anyone on the island we can truly root for (aside: obviously, we can all root for Desmond, because he is the greatest character in TV history.)

Well, everything has changed. "Lost" knows where it is going, or if not, it knows how it is going to get there. No other show has ever inspired so much conversation - not just admiring "did you see that," but genuine, rambling, meanderous chit-chat. "Lost" is where Smart meets Fun, falls in love, and decides to never part ways again. Haters can hate - years from now, when all the questions have been answered and the long wait between weeks is far behind us, the world be divided into those who watched "Lost" and those sad pugs who didn't.

Jesus-Fucking-Christ moment of the week: the discovery of a fossilized Dharma polar bear

Best Line: Everything Michael Emerson says is golden, but you have to love the derisive joy in his voice as he admonished his daughter's boytoy, "Carrrrl! If you're going to be sleeping with my daughter, please, call me Ben!"

Best Flashback juxtaposition: Naomi assures shadowy Matthew Abaddon that she'll make sure no one dies, and we cut to... DEAD NAOMI!