Battlestar Galactica - "Escape Velocity"

Ronald D. Moore, the producer of "Battlestar Galactica" and one of a new breed of showrunners who build their own personal fan cult of personality (I'm thinking of his pop-fantasy brethren Abrams, Whedon, and Lindelof/Cuse, but also lofty HBO showteurs like the Davids Milch, Simon, and Chase), probably decided to release podcast commentaries of the show as a kind of pre-DVD new-media-accessory to feed the kind of rabid techie fans that are attracted to shows about spaceships. The podcasts are a boon to anyone with any interest in any level of television production - most specifically, people who are interested in learning how modern serial television constructs its narratives, finds its footing, and juggles all the different characters and storylines and mysteries. Perhaps most rewarding, Moore is unafraid of admitting mistakes.

In a podcast for season 3, he talked about all the trouble they've had with Lee's character - false starts and blind alleys, like retconning a pregnant girlfriend who died in the attacks, or making him fat then slimming him back down immediately. The character always seemed perpetually trapped between outright rebellion and strict military devotion - he mutinied and went on the run with Laura, but wouldn't sell out his father; he takes command of Pegasus, but only long enough to send it on a suicide mission, and compared to the other commanders we've seen on this show - grizzled Adama, stonefaced Cain - Lee never quite had the gravitas to make you believe he was command material.

Apollo is portrayed by Jaime Bamber, the most babyfaced actor in the cast (he's the one lead actor on the show who wouldn't look out of place in an episode of "Gossip Girl"). His actual English accent will occasionally slip into his dialogue, softening his already sanded edges (especially the way he lilts "Kara" ever so slightly into "Kawra.") He's a fine actor, but nowhere near as feisty as Katee Sackhoff and certainly not as charismatic as Edward James Olmos. In a funny way, Bamber's blankfaced, wounded, often confused nobility makes him the alpha male for the show. Because on BSG, men are all too often less powerful and more naive than women, and the people who seem like they're in charge often know the least of all. So Apollo, who looked like the handsome protagonist on the show, always knows less than anyone about what's actually going on (see: his confused, Marty-McFly-in-the-headlights glance as the Chief stares daggers at his Cylon brethren - "Like, ummm, sooo0o, hey Chief, ummm, what's up?"):


BSG gets alot of attention for the different chances it takes with its plotlines - on gamechanger season-finale viewerbait like shooting Adama, zipping forward one year, and revealing four brand old Cylons. But the reason it's such a great show - for my money, the reason why it's better than "Lost" - is all the chances it keeps taking with its characters. I should say, the lunatic chances they take with their characters.

Consider - on last week's episode, Roslin started wearing a wig to hide her hair loss, and then felt that she had to spell that out for Baltar, as if it wasn't obvious to everybody; Baltar's Jesus allegory hit full-scale xerox homage, when he broke into a Kobol church and wrecked all the Zeus statues; the Chief had not one but two loud tirades that would have been shrill in a bad-TV way if they weren't so painfully shrill in a bad-coping way (his line about Cally - "a shriek with dull, vacant eyes and a cabbage smell" - cut right to the bone, in part because you know he was trying to push away the good memories of her, and in part because you knew that part of him had always thought that about her); Tigh interrogated Caprica Six until she started beating him up until he was bloody and asked her to keep going, at which point she kissed him; Baltar got beaten up by a soldier until Lee escorted him to safety, at which point he gave a rousing speech that would also have been shrill in a bad-TV way if its overall theme - that everyone is perfect - wasn't coming from the most endlessly complicated, often evil, certainly traitorous man in the universe.

Those last two beatings were crosscut between Adama reading Roslin a bedtime story and, apropos of nothing else in the episode, Starbuck sleeping while Anders looks in. That these storylines all had vague thematic links didn't make the crosscutting any less jarring. This whole episode was jarring, bizarrely edited - it wasn't clear, when Adama made his comment about Cally knowing about the Chief's true identity, whether that was a hallucination or not; we knew for a fact that Tigh was hallucinating his dead wife, which gave Six's discussion of hers and Baltar's love a weird everything-is-everything comparison.

This episode was also, at times, incredibly obvious - you knew that the Chief, out of insomniac grief, was going to frack up one of his ships; you knew Adama was going to read Roslin a book with vague references to death and lost love (c'mon, man, she's dying!); and, in what had to be the most obvious deus ex machina in the show's history, who else could save Baltar but Lee Adama, sleeves rolled up like a politician looking casual for the cameras. "Hey everyone, the Presidential order has been rescinded!" Shouldn't a politician have people to make announcements for him?

Yet that meant that Apollo could be there for Baltar's speech, and although some have read the look on his face as worry - anxiety that he may have just rescued a zealot - I read it as something different. Call me crazy, but this philosophy of Baltar's - that everyone, and thus every opinion, is beautiful - holds some serious resonance for Lee, who has always been a balancing factor between his father's militarism (veering towards totalitarianism) and the President's idealism (veering towards blind faith). Can it be that Baltar has found one more follower?

In the second season, during the "Resurrection Ship" duet, there was a strange sequence. Lee, shipwrecked with a torn suit, stops trying to conserve oxygen and gives himself over to death; later, he tells Kara that he wanted to die. It was a strange subplot, given that Apollo hadn't been a focal character for a few episodes, and given that we'd seen no signs of either slight depression or outright. Indeed, when you put "Resurrection Ship" together with "Pegasus," you had one of the most epic tales in the whole "Battlestar" saga - Lee's sudden lack of resolve came out of nowhere, both in the immediate storyline, in the character's story arc, and in the grander sweep of the series.

This is a facet of the show which is rarely remarked upon - the way in which it conjures whole environments and emotional states of being and then asks you to believe that they've been there the whole time. The best example of this was Helo's episode last season, "The Woman King." At the beginning of the episode, Helo is in charge of Dogsville, the refugee camp in the lower decks of Galactica. We didn't know this before - they retconned it into the "Previously On," taking a page from the "Arrested Development" notebook. The commanding officers no longer have faith in Helo can cut it, and there is tension between Helo and Adama, and between Helo and Tigh - We haven't seen any obvious sign of this tension before. Much of the plot hinges on the peculiarities of Sagittaron culture, never mentioned in any detail on the show (Dualla, we learn in the episode, is a Sagittaron.) The plot of the show itself is a classic whodunit, but the whole set-up doesn't so much build on a previous episode as say to the viewer, "By the way, this has been happening the whole time."

This also true of another episode from last season, "Dirty Hands," which, like "The Woman King," featured no Cylon activity and instead focused on a secondary character (although the Chief has now become the bruised heart of the show) experiencing a crisis of conscience with everyone else we know and love (even his wife) standing against him. "Dirty Hands" featured essentially the first mention of a class structure in the show's history, with Baltar as an imprisoned Lenin figure. Many people called these episodes "standalone" because they didn't further the "mythology" of the show (and if any word has been dryhumped into anti-meaning by pop-cultists, it's "mythology").

Yet both feature such a wealth of material - information about Colony culture, ingrained rivalries, the hidden pasts of our characters, allegory charged with testosterone ("Dirty Hands" was maybe the first time since "Norma Rae" and maybe since "October" that going on strike actually seemed dangerous, and thrilling.) Above all, nothing about the way people act in the episodes seems out of character, so much as informing what we've always known. One of the best exchanges in the series comes in "Dirty Hands," when Baltar asked, "Do you really think this ship will ever be run by someone not named Adama?" (Season 3 was full of all kinds of dark allusions like this, which is why nobody liked it then and why it may just age better than any other season.)

What I'm trying to say is that "BSG" isn't just changing how television is written, but it's demanding that the viewer change how they watch television. Little "standalone" episodes like this give you the impression that there really is a whole pulsing environment, an actual community among the fleet. It's a kind of backstage continuity. It locates the story of the show - both an individual episode and the whole series - as just one tiny part of a grander world. "Lost" is certainly like this - we're only just getting a sense of the central conflict for the island. But "Sopranos" was also like this - steadily building characters over seasons at a time, so that Vito seemed to appear almost out of nowhere, except that he'd been there in the background for years.

Lost: "Pilot, Part 2"

God damn, this show used to be hot! While the credits roll on the second half of the series premiere, and the airplane wreckage flames in the background, Shannon soaks up the sun in a neon red bikini. Man candy brother Boone comes over and they quarrel, instigating what would become a season of will-they-or-won't-they ickycest before Boone's flashback revealed that they already had. Cue Claire, or rather, Claire's legs, in a shot that captures everything ridiculous and sublime about this second hour.


Bare legs, washerboard abs, indifferent bikinis, abject devastation. Every member of the female cast shows off a little something. Pregnant Claire mentions to Shannon, in her jovial Australian manner that has always seemed so at odds with her hyperdramatic flashback plots, that she used to have a stomach. Kate takes an ocean bath and gets awkwardly checked out by Sun and even more awkwardly checked out by the camera. Sun, in a fit of demure rebellion, undoes the top button on her shirt.

Nothing about this second hour is subtle. If the first half of the pilot draws its energy from the neat little tease - seeing blood splatter over the windshield, hearing distant roars in dark jungles, what was Charlie doing in the bathroom - the second hour is all about taking it to the limit one, two, five, ten more times. Flashback Charlie gets chased through a plane and Mile-High-Clubs a couple gumrubs of brown sugar heroin; Walt finds a pair of handcuffs, which starts up some Agatha Christie paranoia among the castaways that seems forgotten pretty quickly; Sawyer shoots the first of the show's poorly animated polar bears (although here it's thankfully hidden behind tall grass and quick cuts); Jack tries to pull a piece of shrapnel out of the Marshall's stomach, leading Hurley to pass out right as the Marshal wakes up; and a French chick who's been talking on the radio for almost twenty years gives the show the first iteration of what remains its most powerful subplot - the endless suspicion that our merry band of castaways are not the only people on the island.

Three and a half seasons later, we've met the french chick, the others, and the freighter folk, but we still don't really know who's out there. I remember making a bet, back at the start of the season, that the "Natives" from Ben's flashback were going to be this season's answers to the Tailies and the Others - the mysterious new bunch of people we focus on. Well, then the freighter appeared, so I guess there's always season 5.

"Against the Day"

At 10:49 pm on April 27, 2008, I finally finished Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day." I started it in November. At first, I thought it was the best book I had ever read. By the time I decided to finish it today, I thought that it might be the worst. There are stretches of the book that seem designed to punish. There are paragraphs of exquisite beauty. There are silly names. There is something like transcendence, although it may happen towards the start of the book or right at the very end. When I think back on every book that I have read this last year and a half, I will always think of them as tangents away from "Against the Day." Some strange part of my life is over, now. Some kind of passion has been expended. I became more afraid with every word in the last paragraph - afraid that when I finished the book I would die, my own existence a metafictional extra-narrative multimedia subplot dreamed up by Pynchon himself; and maybe afraid that the book would never explain itself, that there would be no final understanding, that the real meaning of "Against the Day" was behind me. That there was something I had missed, starting the book on the plane out to Hawaii (for a Family Christmas reunion), or on a ship sailing along the Mexican Coastline (for Spring Break), or at school when I was a student, or at home when I was a nothing, or here, in San Francisco, living a life I could never have imagined in 2006. "Against the Day" was never just a book, not for me.

Lost: "The Shape of Things To Come"

Tonight's episode was all about Ben, except I think it was also about Sawyer. True, Ben had the more active night: he played the piano, sacrificed his daughter, summoned the smoke monster, woke up in the middle of the Sahara, spent a night in a hotel in Tunisia, traveled through Syria to pre-surge mid-quagmire Tikrit, turned an old enemy into his toy assassin, and lockpicked his way into his worst enemy's lush London penthouse just long enough to swear eye-for-eye revenge. He referred to his adopted daughter as a pawn; it's clear now, more than ever, that Ben is the Queen, more powerful than the King (yet less important), capable of playing the timid time traveler one second and the quick-judo gunman the next. (Who is the King, then? Locke? Jacob?)

But look, also, at Sawyer. He leapfrogged through a suburban war zone to save Claire's life, hiding behind picket fences, firing a pistol at a bazooka, running towards an exploding house. He carried Claire back through the war zone. Later, when Ben and Locke spoke of going into the wilderness to find Jacob, he looked at them both and saw nothing but two kinds of crazy, and decided to take Claire and Hurley back to the beach. When Locke held a gun on him, he held a gun right back. When Hurley said that he'd go without a fight, Sawyer swore that if anything happened to the him - the fat guy who inspired more Sawyeristic nick names than all the foreigners and women combined - he'd kill Locke.

Twice during the episode, Sawyer vocally had absolutely no clue what was going on. He has no idea who Charles Widmore is, and even less idea of who or what Jacob could possibly be. This points out a fact which is simultaneously disturbing and breathtaking - of all the remaining castaways, James "Sawyer" Ford has perhaps the least connection to the mythology, to the hidden swirl of mystery lurking beneath every moment of "Lost," to the Force that motivates Ben and fascinates Locke and torments Jack and reanimates Christian Shepard and haunts the Oceanic Six. Sawyer may not even believe in all of that - certainly, he can see how belief in the mysteries of the Island has driven both Ben and Locke into a specific kind of insanity (what Scrooge McDuck might call Gold Fever - we might remember that Sawyer never pressed the button inside the hatch.)

But this is not the Sawyer who stole a gun out of the wreckage of the plane, who didn't have Shannon's asthma medication but acted like he did just for the hell of it, who constructed a mini-terrorist scare and became, briefly, the island warlord. This is a Sawyer who just wants to save his friends. Sawyer's journey has taken him from nihilism through atheism to a hard-won secular humanism. What I mean to say is that Sawyer, now more than ever, is Han Solo.

Han Solo is such a famous character that it's easy to forget how important he was to the original "Star Wars" trilogy, and it's easy to overlook just how completely George Lucas buried him, and his influence, in "Return of the Jedi" and forever after. The older you get, the more annoying Luke Skywalker becomes. In "A New Hope," he's whiny; in "Empire Strikes Back," he's upstaged in charisma by a muppet with a walking stick; in "Return of the Jedi" he's a narcotized eunuch monk. His importance to the storyline grows as our interest in him shrinks - by the end he's clothed completely in black, which is very slimming, and allows him, in the shadows of the Death Star throne room, to almost fade away completely. You know that old backhanded compliment, that you've got a face for radio? Mark Hamill has a screen presence that's perfect for voice acting. I'm being cruel to be kind.

The real star of the original series - and the dominant presence in its finest chapter - is Han Solo. From the very first moment he appears onscreen, he seems to exist purely to cut through the bullshit. He doesn't want to know why an old man and a cute little farmer boy are fleeing together; mostly, he just wants to get paid and brag about his awesomeness, not necessarily in that order. He shoots Greedo without blinking - doesn't matter who shot first, he was always going to shoot best. Most important of all, he doesn't believe in The Force, which makes him a breath of fresh air.

You know that specific way modern pop-fantasy has of deflating its own pretensions - a well-chosen piece of witticism by Hurley, a devastating line about religious nutcases by Colonel Tigh, or the way that Ron Weasley, on the run from a vast worldwide conspiracy commanded by the Lord of all Darkness, can get jealous that his best friend may be stealing his girl? The way that modern fantasists understand that nothing can make the outlandish more real than human pettiness, human comedy, human anything? So much of that comes from Han Solo - "No mystical field controls my destiny," he says.

And it is important to remember that the first film, although very simple in many ways, does not completely correct this notion. Yes, Luke is in communion with Obi-Wan's ghost - yes, he fires the missiles into the reactor without the guidance system, my, such drama! - but Luke is only able to complete his destiny because Han, the unbeliever, saves his life. Han doesn't believe in the Force, not really - he just wants to help Luke, and maybe snog Leia. Maybe this is a loose reading, but there's never a sense of deus ex machina in Han's decision to come back and save Luke's life. It's a choice he makes, and it changes his life forever.

There follows "Empire Strikes Back," which, it now seems clear, is the Han Solo Show, through and through. His movie-long banter with Leia is the fountain of almost every great line from "Star Wars." He saves Luke again - "That's two you owe me" (and Luke only pays him back once.) While Luke is off carrying Yoda (and the full thematic weight of the film) on his back, Han is zipping through asteroid fields, hiding in the gullet of a giant space eel, meeting up with an old friend who turns out to be his enemy. He gets tortured and gives up nothing. He gets the greatest exit line in the history of movies - "I Love You!" "I know." You can find something new in that last exchange every time. I just watched it, and thought I saw the faintest hint of wearied annoyance - "Duh, figured that out a while ago."

That line was improvised by Harrison Ford. Ford, we remember, was older than George Lucas, and was working as a carpenter when he was cast as Han Solo. He was openly derisive of some of the loftier aspects of the series. He wanted the "I know," where Lucas wanted something deeper, more romantic, simpler, stupider. (There's more romance in that "I know" than in a hundred Naboo sunsets.) There's a bracing lack of bullshit in Ford the actor - he also improvised the great scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" where, with that same bored annoyance, he brings a gun to a knife fight.

Supposedly, Ford wanted Lucas to kill off Han Solo in "Return of the Jedi," to give the movie some genuine emotional heft. It's a genius idea if you're a storyteller and a heretical idea if you're a fanboy kid who loves "Star Wars," and by then George Lucas was very much the latter. Instead of killing Han, he neutered him. Quick - can you remember anything Han Solo does in the third movie? He gets unfrozen, but he's mostly blind. He accidentally kills Boba Fett (this was the beginning of George Lucas's fascination with accidental heroism - see also "The Phantom Menace," where a ten-year-old accidentally flies a spaceship into a bigger spaceship, presses some buttons at random, and thus ends intergalactic war.) He does not once get to fly the Millenium Falcon. He's held captive twice, once by a giant man-slug, once by furry tree dwarves. He wins Leia, but he doesn't get to woo her. In fact, he even tells Leia that he'll happily step aside to make way for Leia and Luke, at which point he becomes the last person to learn that they're brother and sister.

Lucas's sublimation of Han's energy went further. There is no comparable character to Han in the prequel trilogy; no one who is doubtful, even for a second, of the pomp and circumstance. That, much more than the CGI universe and the monotone Jedi and the horrifically miscast actors playing underwritten roles poorly, is why the prequels feel so endless stuffy. There's no one around to playfully poke the movie in the ribs. Lucas went out of his way to work practically every other main character into the prequels, to his own detriment - Chewbacca, Luke, Leia, and Boba Fett all pop in for brief "look, I'm a boring kid!" cameos. Hell, there's even a digital body double of Grand Moff Tarkin, looking sour and digital at the corner of the screen towards the end of episode III. But nowhere does a pesky orphan child named Han race across screen, maybe fresh from picking pockets or losing his virginity to a dancing Twi'lek girl.

You could call this awkward plotting, but allow some rudimentary psychoanalysis. George Lucas hadn't simply lost interest in Han Solo as a character. He had begun to dislike everything Han Solo represented - disbelief, rebellion against fate (as opposed to against "the empire"), a complex human heroism as opposed to a freakishly noble, self-sacrificing Messiah-complex heroism.

In the Expanded Universe books which continued the "Star Wars" story in the 90s, Han is still a main character - he spends four more years wooing Leia, gets married, often gets bored and keeps finding ways to start trouble. Not for Lucas, who, in a 2005 interview, said, "Han and Leia settled down. She became a senator, and they got a nice little house with a white picket fence. Han Solo is out there cooking burgers on the grill." It's enough to make you gag. That image recalls nothing so much as the end of Goodfellas - Ray Liotta, forever cut off from the fun life, staring out at us the viewer, "I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook."

I love that line by George Lucas, and I love that, for a brief stretch this season, that was exactly the life that Sawyer imagined for himself. We should remember that Sawyer's original plotline is finished. He wanted to avenge his parents' death; he did. At the end of last season, it seemed likely that he was regressing - he had just killed Tom, remember, in cold blood, and was last seen sipping a Dharma beer, leaning against a Dharma van. The pumps were primed for the return of Evil Sawyer.

But this season, something very different has happened. His line to Kate at the end of the first episode seemed cold - "I'm doing what I've always done, Kate. Surviving." But it was apologetic. He didn't want to go. And when Kate visited, he revealed his plan: to live a quiet life, in what passes for suburbia, with the woman who he almost loves. Far more important, I think, was his line in the previous episode, referring to Ben: "It's only a matter of time before he gets us, Johnny, and I bet he's already figured out how he's gonna do it. So you walk him."

It's an eerily perceptive line, particularly in light of this episode. Ben did, indeed, get them all. His presence meant the death of everyone else in Locke's little pack - how deeply horrifying, and deeply funny, was that exchange where Sawyer ran into one of the extras, who got shot; then, while Sawyer cowered, another extra ran out, and got shot; and then another. All good comedy follows the rule of three.

The "Lost" producers seem to have a keen sense of what works well on their show, so I'm hopeful that they recognize just what a powerful, and subtle, force Sawyer has become on the island. In some ways, he's the idiot savant - although he knows the least, he seems to give the best advice (IE, "Never listen to Ben.") He has the anarchist's uncanny ability to see the flaw in every argument - because he himself doesn't stand for anything, he can stand against everything. Because he is unencumbered by duty, he is a more complete man than Jack - he doesn't feel any need to be a better man than he can be (whereas Jack strives to be not just a hero, but THE hero.)

Will the creators of "Lost" take Sawyer down the same path as Han Solo? As the show advances towards its endgame, will it become ever more directly a show about Charles Widmore versus Benjamin Linus? Don't get me wrong. I had goosebumps in their scene together - the way Widmore, laying in bed pouring himself some fictitious whiskey, seemed to instantly shrink Ben (it was the way he called him "Boy"). If this was the Death Star throne room scene, it was more vivid than anything Lucas could ever imagine - Widmore makes for a more interesting Emperor.

Yet these scenes are "Lost" at its most lofty - after the show was over, one of my friends asked, "Does this mean that they're immortals?" Whereas James "Sawyer" Ford is feverishly mortal. He could be dead by the end of this season - Sawyer hasn't had his flashback yet. He could stick around for a couple more seasons, hovering in the background. Or he could be a regular Boon Hogganbeck, present at the rapture to murder God Himself for no reason other than to save his friends. That's one thing about Sawyer - when he surprises you, you never see it coming.

"The Hobbit"

This morning when I woke up, I spent my entire shower thinking about "Lord of the Rings." I had just recently seen Ian McKellan's guest-starring bit on "Extras," and that video, like a madeleine in Proust or a hatch implosion on "Lost," suddenly led me on a brief acid flashback recall of watching "Lord of the Rings" for the first time. It's been more than six years since "Fellowship of the Ring" came out, which means it's been more than four years since the trilogy was finished. This was mind boggling for me, because somehow, in my mind, "Lord of the Rings" always seemed a little bit new. Maybe it's because none of the rip-offs ever matched up - the Harry Potter films are good but can't match the epic sweep (the cinematic Hogwarts always feels like a movie set; Middle-Earth felt like a genuine land far away from normal human life, and that's not just a New Zealand joke); other big-budget trilogies (Spider-Man and Pirates) ended with awful whimpers, whereas "Lord of the Rings" gained momentum the more it went along.

The Hollywood cycle has turned - just a little bit, I think, but enough that "Lord of the Rings" can now stand on its own as a magnificent oddity. A movie like "Troy" is unimaginable without "Lord of the Rings" - just look at the trailer, with its obnoxiously large CGI masses, it's uncomfortable wide-angle close-ups, that shot of two armies racing at each other which is taken directly from the very beginning of "The Fellowship of the Ring." Yet "Troy" sucked, just like "The Golden Compass" sucked, and "King Arthur," and now Hollywood is focusing on superheroes. At the same time, epic stories that used to be obvious movie catnip are more and more being funneled to television - HBO has started things moving on an adaption of "A Song of Ice and Fire." It makes sense, really - you can just fit so much more into a TV series. Then again, it's interesting to note that, with the full unabridged director's cuts, "The Lord of the Rings" runs longer than season 5 of "The Wire" - and "The Wire" never had a moment as glorious as the start of "The Two Towers," when the camera swoops down to follow Gandalf battle the Balrog all the way to the center of the earth.

Well, now it's official: Guillermo Del Toro, fantasist auteur du jour (who actually, in this picture at least, bears a striking resemblance to pre-Slimfast Peter Jackson), is directing a duology of "The Hobbit" - one movie based on the book, and one movie that will bridge the 60 years between "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings." God only knows what they're going to do with that second movie, but oddly, that's the one that I'm much more excited for. By the time both films come out, we will have had a genuine decade of Tolkien Chic. Part of me thinks it's crazy that Del Toro is making such a commitment (4 years); part of me is excited, because his vision is just as weird as Peter Jackson, with maybe just a bit more playfulness, appropriate for the more loosey-goosey "Hobbit." Part of me just really, really hopes that Warwick Davis gets a part in the movie.

Lost: Observation as Participation as Artistry

The Onion AV Club has just posted an interview with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the first TV showrunners to be bigger celebrities than their actors. I saw these guys speak at ComicCon, where they had a huge theater space all to themselves and people cheered their every tiny tease and inside joke like they were late-night TV show hosts.

The way people react to these guys reminds me of something Ralph Fiennes says in the almost-forgotten 1995 film "Quiz Show" - he's playing Charles Van Doren, longtime quiz show winner on "Twenty-One" who ended up disgraced because of cheating, and he's talking about how strange and wonderful it is to see young people excited about a guy who's using his big old brain - to see people go crazy over smarts. Lindelof and Cuse are like Van Dorens who never cheated, and their rock-star existence is proof that being feverishly intelligent can be the most fun in the world.

Anyways, their interviews are always fascinating and never reveal anything about "Lost" (the exception being the revelation that Michael was going to be a fulltime cast member on the show this year, though even that was a dodge since he only appeared halfway through the season.) Something Lindelof says in the interview is particular genius: "The way you're watching the show now is incredibly unique... three or four years from now, people who are experiencing the show for the first time will basically only have to wait a day or an hour or minute before they decide to slide in the next DVD." The way we watch "Lost" right now is a genuine "experience," and no close study of the show - of its motifs (which are many), of its steadily evolving visual style, of how its run coincided with the first radical shift in viewing habits since VCRs - will ever quite be able to capture that. It's not just that it's exciting. The way we watch "Lost" - the way we devour its clues, the way an entire community has sprouted up to "figure it all out" - has, at times, radically altered the show itself.

Take Nikki and Paolo. Lindelof and Cuse admit that they mainly invented the characters as a way to answer fan questions about what, exactly, the rest of the castaways are doing while our main characters follow their main plot. In turn, when practically everyone despised Nikki and Paolo right from the start, they killed them off immediately. These characters were generated and murdered at the whim of fans. There's been situations like this in the past. You could compare it to the fan-voted death of Jason Todd (the second Robin), or the return of Hal Jordan as Green Lantern after years of fan appeal. Hell, you could even recall Shakespeare writing a play for Falstaff at the beckoning of Queen Elizabeth; people liked "The Merry Wives of Windsor" even less than Nikki and Paolo. But the speed of fan response, and the creator's response to the fan response, certainly makes this a new benchmark for television.

In a sense, though, I think it's a bit disingenuous of Lindelof/Cuse to foist the whole Nikki & Paolo misadventure entirely on the fans. Everything about the presentation of Nikki & Paolo felt amateurish. Nikki's first appearance, in the closing minutes of Locke's flashback episode at the start of the third season, is absurdly non sequitur - how could she not be distracting, wearing Daisy Dukes, even more ridiculously attractive than glam-girl Shannon? And how could he not be distracting, the ridiculously hot-accented metrosexual from "Love, Actually?" And how could fans not hate them, when, the first time they actually did something, they were literally just tagging along with characters we DID care about (Eko, Locke, and Sayid), and the extent of their dialogue was exchanges like this:

"Why is Eko so sad?"

"His brother is inside the plane."

"Lost" is usually such a fleet-footed show when it comes to introductions - we first met Ben, Desmond, Juliet, and the returned Michael when they were all right in the middle of something big. They all had mystery, right off the bat. With Nikki & Paolo, it was like the camera briefly panned left from the main cast, saw a couple of blank people with blank stares, and then zoomed in for a close-up. Their flashback episode plays with this utter stupidity - they come across many of the island's mysteries before anyone else, but have no interest in them - and then they die. In the process, the Great Dream of Meeting The Other Castaways was over.

This is really too bad. I think the creators took the wrong lesson from the whole misadventure - to them, it meant that they should never bother with the other castaways ever again. This does have the benefit of keeping the focus on the main cast, but it also means that we've lost all sense of survivors of Flight 815 as a concrete mass of people. Instead, whenever there are any big crowd events, we get close-ups on the main cast and an abstract bunch of people in the background. Back in season 1, Hurley could confuse Scott and Steve, and if a random-looking Tom-Cruise cousin like Ethan could turn out to be an Other, then couldn't anybody? Now, there's no real way of knowing how many people went with Locke and how many people stayed with Jack, because the number was almost purposefully vague right from the start.

Imagine, for a second, that Nikki & Paolo had never happened - that, rather than Meeting the Other Castaways by plugging them awkwardly into the main cast with nothing to do, everything was just a little bit different. Maybe midway through season 3 - maybe right after Jack's awful episode, about the kooky Asian tattoo artist - there was an episode which started, as so many episodes of "Lost" do, with an eye opening. Except that there's no sonic boom on the soundtrack, no eerie music. The eye opens slowly, woozily, and then closes again. The sound of waves and a bit of wind, and voices. We pull back and see someone we've never seen before - except that we're not really sure, because the face that we're looking at is so bland that we could have seen it a billion times and still not remember it. The actor is someone we vaguely remember from small guest starring roles in other TV shows - might be Zeljko Ivanek (the multi-accented wonder from "24" and "Damages"), or Nicole Burdette (Tony's sister from "The Sopranos" who wasn't Janice). Because this is "Lost," let's assume it's a non-white actor, and because making the character an everyman seems obvious, let's make it a woman: Luciana Carro (who played Kat on "Battlestar Galactica"), cute enough to get past central casting but normal-looking enough that she'd work well in this kind of role.

She gets up. She steps outside her tent. She's on castaway beach, where she's been for over two months now. She walks over to the breakfast nook. Pours herself some Dharma cereal. Sayid walks up. Nods at her. She nods back. They hear Aaron crying. Not crying. Shrieking. We can see Claire and Charlie trying to calm the baby down. Charlie is being ineffectual, Claire is telling him not to worry. Our girl (let's call her Amanda) rolls her eyes. Sayid does too. Amanda smiles a little.

Amanda walks away down the beach, sits down, and starts digging in. The camera sets down right in front of her while she eats. Someone else - equally normal looking, let's say a bit more recognizable, a middle-aged woman, an actress who hasn't had work in awhile - Rene Russo, maybe, or (even better), Debra Winger - sits down next to her. Also has cereal. They eat in silence for awhile. You can still hear the baby shrieking from here. Debra-Rene, completely deadpan (let's call her Norma), mouth full of cereal, says "If I have to hear that god damn baby cry one more second, I'm going to move."

Amanda says, "You can't move. If you move, I have to move. And I can't move, I'm in love."

Norma: "Oh, who is it this week? Let me guess, he's wearing a tank top, he's got short trim military hair, and he's got the same tattoos every tourist gets when they get too drunk and walk into a tattoo parlor in Bangkok."

Amanda: "I like Jack's tattoos. And no, I'm not in love with Jack. That cute Indian guy winked at me today. You know, the quiet one?"

Norma: "I thought he was Iranian. You just like guys who show off their biceps."

They go back and forth like this. A few more people come over - all people we've never seen before. They have a loose back and forth. Maybe this isn't as interesting as a normal episode, but isn't this kind of introduction more subtle than Nikki & Paolo? They're not asking to be brought up to speed on things we already know. They've just been trying to live as normal a life as possible, and now they're bored. They're like every fan of the show in the middle of season 3.

Someone proposes that they go on vacation - without telling Jack, who, it's clear, everyone thinks is a bit of a stuffed shirt. A few people are nervous - they've heard all these rumors about what's in the jungle. It's like that scene from an old Simpsons - "I've heard a witch lives there! I've heard a Frankenstein lives there!" But these people have been on this island for a long time, and they're excited about finally doing something, and they don't really worry about the danger anymore. (Remember back at the start of season 1, when people would run into the monster practically every time they ran into the jungle? Now think about the end of season 3, when Jack had no qualms about leading EVERYONE into the jungle.) It comes out that everyone has a different idea about what, exactly, the monster is.

They agree to talk to somebody in the know about just what, exactly, is in the jungle before they go in there. Our girls go and have a chit chat with Locke. Amanda is a bit intimidated by Locke, and acts nervous. Norma, a high school teacher, just asks him bluntly - "What's out there in the woods?"

Locke says, "No one really knows."

Norma, quick as a shot: "You're in there all the time. Have you seen it?"

Locke smiles his bullshit smile: "I've seen it, but I couldn't quite tell you what it looks like."

Norma: "What's it look like when you see it?"

Locke: "Sometimes it's light. Sometimes it's... smoke."

Norma: "Smoke."

Locke: "Take my advice: don't go into the jungle."

Norma: "Or the smoke will get us."

Locke: "Of course, I can't stop you."

Norma and Amanda both nod their heads. Locke stares at them. They stare back at Locke. Cut to them walking back down the camp. They're very quiet. They look at each other.

Norma, quiet, speaking out the side of her mouth: "Is he gone?"

Amanda turns around and looks: "Yeah."

They break down laughing. Cut to a few minutes later - they lead their little crew of 5 or 6 into the jungle.

You could argue that this kind of treatment would be too much for the show - that it would upset the flow, it would be too talky or too in-jokey - but I think it would've been much more palatable, and certainly more interesting, to treat the new characters more in the Dr. Arzt mode, where they're a bit confused and even bemused by the main cast, then in the Nikki & Paolo, "Hey look, it's our friend Poochie!!" mold.

The rest of the episode (this could all be before the first commercial break) could go in any number of directions - they could go back to one of the old places we haven't seen in awhile (the Caves, Henry Gale's balloon, the station where the Tailies made camp for so long); or, even better, they could find something new. Perhaps they could even have a mini-reenactment of the Henry Gale subplot, when they manage to capture a mysterious person. Except that here, the whole thing is played for absurd comic effect. "He could be from the tail section!" "No, they all died!" "They SAID they all died!" "Maybe he's an Other!" "What's an Other?" "Maybe HE'S the Monster!" "Well, he DOES have some Dharma brand cigarettes."

You could take this episode in ANY direction, and the lesson is the same as the Nikki & Paolo fiasco - the other people haven't been doing much of anything, actually, fans! - except that, by the end, it turns that idea on its side, because whereas Nikki & Paolo never actually wanted to do anything, these humble new people, like Dr. Arzt, badly want to do something.

That was an incredibly long tangent which nevertheless proves, I think, just how radically different it is to watch the show while it's on, as opposed to years later. Something else from the AV Club pops into memory - a quotation by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiorastami: "I make one film as a filmmaker, but the audience, based on that film, makes 100 movies in my mind." This is an abstraction when it comes to movies, but while a TV show is on, it's as concrete as subjective thought process can be - we're all in the process of finishing "Lost," and we have been for four years now. The above imaginary episode could have only happened in season 3, when the show was still wide open. It's unimaginable now, because after Nikki & Paolo, suddenly "Lost" had an end date - it became a story with a genuine ending on its way, whereas before it was a story without any real ending. You could imagine it going on for a thousand years. Now, you know it's only going to last another two.

Battlestar Galactica - "The Ties That Bind"

Two weeks ago was the first time I've ever watched "Battlestar Galactica" on television. My roommate in Los Angeles, summer 2005, turned me on to the season 1 DVD - we watched two or three per night, usually with a quick puff before, after, and (when the square marrieds in the duplex room were on vacation), during. A fanboy engineer in my abroad program hooked up me with the whole second season - I was avoiding studying for finals, lurking in the computer cluster in the Berlin study center, when I saw the gamechanging invasion of New Caprica. I didn't have a television in LA or Berlin, but even when I had one sitting in my room all during third season, I never thought to actually figure out which day of the week BSG actually aired. Hell, even that term, "aired," didn't have any meaning for me. Somewhere around midweek, the new episode would suddenly appear, like out of the ether or some planetary mist, on the FTP site that was my purveyor.

My preferred method of watching hasn't really changed since then - same computer, albeit with a slightly dustier screen, usually on my lap (sometimes turned on its side so I can watch with my head in my pillow.) As grand as BSG is, my relationship to it is private, almost intimate. It's not like "Lost," where everybody I know talks about it, and I have to plan out weeks in advance who I'll be watching it with, and there is some odd charge from watching it when it debuts, on Thursday night.

But I watched the rerun of the season premiere on television - on the Sci-Fi channel, which was a laughable obscurity before BSG and will be again very soon. It was weird. I couldn't make the screen smaller; I couldn't pull the tiny little pointer forward or backwards; yet the picture was also clearer, there was less distortion during kinetic sequences (and with the shaky camera, that's all the time); it felt like I was watching television, not just watching BSG. Weird.

I was thinking about this today while I was watching "The Ties that Bind." It was just after noon, I was on my couch, and there was this awful glare on the screen. No matter which way I turned it, if I refocused my eyes just a little bit, I could see myself seeing the screen. I tried wearing a dark shirt. I tried moving all around the room. But we don't have blinds in my apartment, so my only options were watching from inside the bathroom, or squinting a little bit whenever the screen was predominantly dark. I lived with the squint. And realized - man, this show is dark.

I don't mean thematically - although this episode, which started with a marriage on life support and ended with spousal abuse, attempted suicide, and plot-twist space homicide, was maybe the darkest yet. I mean dark like they need to get some better fracking lighting onboard. The happy band of distrustful searchers onboard Starbuck's sewage ship look like they're hanging out in a Turkish prison (right down to the catwalk that runs right over the dining table); the sick bay feels like a morgue-in-waiting; and, inside the tiny little dorm room that is (was) Chief and Cally's humble home, their kid's night light casts shadowlights of stars across the dark, sad walls. The show has had some great visuals - nuclear missiles cutting through space just moments after a Battlestar warps away; Cylon copies hanging out on New Caprica, wearing the same clothes and saying hello in exactly the same way - but I can't think of any image more poetic than Cally, always the most overlooked of the show's cast by the show's cast, trying to sleep while the stars pass by her, over her.

By the end of the episode, of course, she's out among the real stars - floating forever, frozen in a moment of realization, of horror, of infinite loss. One of the best things about the show is how threatening space is. In "Star Wars," space was where you had space battles - you could imagine living comfortably onboard the Millenium Falcon, or joy riding in an X-Wing. Space itself was never really threatening, no more than a highway is threatening - its the other cars that you have to worry about. "Star Trek" was pretty much the same way - for all the times that various engineers fretted over hull breaches, space felt almost abstract - viewed on a monitor, with an energy shield of nebulous physics protecting the ship from harm.

Not on Battlestar. You can feel the blackness of space pressing in at all times. Cylons and traitors have been blown out of the airlock - the most horrific punishment imaginable, some awful combination of hanging, drowning and freezing to death, with full knowledge that you will never be buried, nor even have some place marked in ground to remember you. Your own body is your memorial, unless you're fortunate enough to hit a comet or fly into a supernova or float away over the edge of this universe, where matter is antimatter and the dead dance away.

Poor Cally. Because she was such a small character, and such a small girl, it was always great when she appeared on the show, because you'd always be expecting a meek little lamb and instead you'd get a hard-charging toaster-hating big-mama wolf. I can remember Ronald D. Moore and his writers laughing in one of the commentaries about how unexpectedly violent, and fierce, she'd turned out as a character. When a prisoner in "Bastille Day" tries to rape her, she bites off his ear and gets shot for the effort. She Jack Ruby'd Boomer, without remorse, with a look of utter hatred in her big doe eyes; she made sure Boomer knew that she'd do it again. A restless wife, she pushed the Chief into igniting a socialist revolution - wives on this show, from Ellen Tigh to Starbuck to the dearly departed Mrs. Adama, are always much stronger than their husbands. And in last night's episode, Cally proved she had no shame when it came to her husband and her family - sleep-deprived, pumped full of antidepressants, carrying her half-Cylon baby through a bar, she felt no qualms about running over to her seemingly cheating husband, screaming in his face, then vomiting right on the floor.

Cally - her fitful story arc, her short and unhappy life - epitomizes what's great about the show. Although it gets longer, it never seems to get bigger. Look at how other shows swell in cast size, and how new story arcs always seem based on addition. Each season of "The Wire" added in an entire new cast of characters (the docks, the government, the schools, the newspaper.) Each season of "Lost" adds in a new group of ambiguous antagonists - the tailies, the Others, the freighter folk. On old Star Treks, each week would bring a new bunch of aliens, a new planet.

BSG just excavates what's already there. So much of the show is less about moving us forward than moving us sideways towards a different point of view. You could see that in the subplot about Lee's first day in the Quorum. How fascinating to see Roslin in her role as Commander in Chief, obfuscating to help Adama, dodging questions from the people who represent all humanity in what should be a democratic system. What's nice is that this view of her - as a somewhat callous, potentially monomanical, certainly secretive benevolent tyrant - doesn't feel forced, or like some dramatic personality shift. You can absolutely see how the fierce defender of democracy who battled against Adam's military regime (and the utterly lovely romantic who lay next to Adama one lovely New Caprican night) is also the Nixonian president seemingly despised by nearly every other politician at her table.

And you can also see how Cally, who has always loved the Chief - who has lived most of her adult life in service to him, first as a workman and then as a wife - could have no qualms about knocking him in the head and almost killing his half-breed child. You could see that stern resolve in that magnificent shot, with the Chief out of focus and his voice dialed down, robotic.


Gotta love the ending of this episode. First that point of view shot as the landing bay fades quickly away. Then the tiny, ridiculous human body floating through space, not even struggling (we remember that this is Cally's second uncovered excursion into space; second time's the charm.) Then the close-up on her cold, dead face. Then the long tracking shot back, from the Chief's face. Adama is there, no doubt giving him some kind words. She hadn't been sleeping well. She had been depressed. It's important to go on, Chief, for your son. She would have wanted you to go on.

Except she wouldn't have. Cally was a soldier. Cally had all the stones that the Chief has never had. If the Chief wanted to honor her death, he'd put a bullet through the synthetic brain of his newfound Cylon friends, then one in his baby's head, then one in his own. Cally believed in humanity. Cally hated Cylons. Poor Cally. Poor "Battlestar Galactica." You can tell it's not going to end well.

On "Southland Tales" and the Cult of the Overreaching Idiot Infant Auteur

There are exactly three things that make Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" worth watching:

1) Sarah Michelle Gellar. As porn star political activist Krista Now, Gellar finally gets to flex all the funny-serious acting muscles that made her such a cult national treasure in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." None of the dialogue in the movie makes any sense, and all of it is supposed to be simultaneously uproariously funny and meaningfully allegorical (just like the movie itself), and Gellar is the only person onscreen who seems to know exactly the right note to strike. What a pro this girl is! What a travesty that this is the only good movie role she's ever had!

2) Justin Timberlake singing The Killers. Playing an Iraq War veteran with scars that look more like Mike Tyson tattoos, Timberlake narrates the entire movie. The narration is god-awful exposition, like he's reading the italicized portions of Kelly's shitty, overwritten screenplay. If I tell you that Timberlake spends most of the movie hanging out on a gun turret on the Santa Monica Pier, I have to stress that he doesn't just hang out. He never moves. Whenever we see him, he always swivels the gun from right to left in the exact same motion - it might be the exact same shot, repeated over and over throughout the movie. (At least Ed Wood was using stock footage.) At some point in the movie - I feel like it was towards the end, although the movie never seems to actually begin - he suddenly isn't on the turret, but is instead in a video arcade, selling an existential injection drug called liquid karma to character we've never met before who will suddenly became the main character in the final five minutes. He gives then injects himself with the drug.

And then, in what may be a dream sequence but what feels much more alive than anything else in this mediocre acid trip of a movie, Timberlake lipsyncs to The Killers' unclassic single "All These Things That I've Done." He chugs a can of cheap booze and stumbles through the whole dance number, but it's delightfully choreographed stumbling, and we remember that Timberlake has been a performer his whole life. Descriptions of the movie inevitably make it sound more interesting than it actually is, because it sounds madcap but plays dreary and stonefaced. This is one of the few moments that seems to really hit on what Kelly was hoping for - it's the end of the world, and all I want to do is dance, dance, dance. And then, just as the song is cresting with dancing peroxide blondes, Timberlake gets a melancholy look on his face, and the film shifts to slow motion, and the Killers fade into Moby, and we're back into shitty existential land.

3) The look on the Rock's face when he watches Sarah Michelle Gellar dance. At the end of the film, there is quite a lot happening. Marx's vision of an underclass revolution has come true. The Messiah is rising into the air holding hands with his time travel duplicate, in an overturned ice cream truck. A mega-zeppelin is flying over Los Angeles. There are lots of fireworks. There is so much happening, and it is utterly impossible to care about any of it. But onboard the mega-zeppelin, apropos of nothing, Sarah Michelle Gellar and her porn star girlfriends step onstage and perform a dance number set to Moby. In the audience, the Rock, whose role in the movie never even makes sense to his character, looks at Gellar, the way that Gregory Peck used to look at Audrey Hepburn. He takes off his jacket, steps onstage, and wonderfully, they begin dancing together. It is an incandescent, beautiful moment.

"Southland Tales" is the latest entry in a new canon of young auteur post-masterwork shittiness. Put it next to "The Life Aquatic" and "The Fountain" - it resembles the former in its style (funny names! wide angles!), the latter in its define-the-universe time-tripping storyline. All three should stand as cautionary tales to young filmmakers everywhere. When you make a great movie - and "Donnie Darko," "The Royal Tenenbaums," and "Requiem for a Dream," back at the start of the decade, were great enough to get people talking about a new era in cinema - you will have alot of people willing to give you money and alot of good actors willing to work for you. But the people giving you money only want you for your golden-boy fame, and actors are exceedingly poor judges of which scripts can make a good movie, and no amount of money will save a shitty script, and guys, believe me, few scripts are as shitty as "Southland Tales," "The Life Aquatic," and "The Fountain."

The fact that all three have moments of searing brilliance is not an excuse. Moments like that deserve better movies. These films just do not cohere in any meaningful way - and they don't even try to. They are about incoherence. And you can find plenty of reviews online for all three by critics who try to make that incoherence sound genius. (Nathan Lee, formerly of The Village Voice, said that "Southland Tales" "looks and feels more like life in 2007 than Juno, In the Valley of Elah, and Michael Clayton combined." Only if you believe that life in 2007 is defined by "The Hills," by porno, and by the Ashlee Simpson dregs of pop culture - that is, if you still believe that life in Los Angeles has anything to do with life anywhere else. Here's a satire in which the main forces arrayed against the government are "Neo-Marxists." Ooo, topical! How do you claim to make any kind of satire of the modern age without a single Middle Eastern character, or indeed, any non-Caucasian actors besides The Rock?)

People who defend these films - and that includes the directors - do not argue that they make sense, but rather, that the fact that they make no sense makes lots of sense, deep sense, absolute sense. Bullshit. People sometimes relate "The Fountain" to "2001," but "2001," as a narrative, is almost painfully straightforward. It's a long movie which should be boring, because almost nothing happens in it - lots of scenes watch people talking without really listening, as if observing an animal making animal noises. It's only at the end that "2001" turns into a head trip. "The Fountain," "The Life Aquatic," and "Southland Tales" are the wormhole sequence in "2001" without the actual movie behind it. In their mock-independent way, they represent the same filming instinct as Jerry Bruckheimer - "Let's just get to the good stuff already! Wormholes! Religious stuff! Weird mystery!" Remember at the end of "2001," when Dave Bowman watches himself age in an elaborately designed set? What better metaphor for these movies, which are all aesthetically beautiful and utterly mind-numbing.

Defending these movies because they have something on their mind does no one any good - not the directors, who get encouraged to think of themselves as hidden geniuses (it's the George W. Bush/Fidel Castro argument - "history will absolve me"); not the critics, who could be defending tiny movies that are actually good; not young people, who discover the movie on DVD and, in a fit of high-school drug-induced miasma, start thinking that the key to making a great work of art is thin plotting and TS Eliot quotes. Ever since the 1960s, and especially since the 1990s, the defining image of the film director is less and less that of Alfred Hitchcock - dressed like he has a job, always working, never forgetting that "cinema" is just a word for where people go to watch movies - and more and more that of Peter Fonda directing "Easy Rider" - a young director with great connections trying to make some deeper point about all of humanity, ideally using all male characters with maybe a few angelic whores thrown in.

I'm not saying that young film directors shouldn't reach for awesomeness. Todd Haynes took half a decade to make "I'm Not There," a movie far more overstuffed with ideas and embedded culture references than all three of the above movies combined, yet he never once forgot that he was making a movie about human beings with emotions. There are subjects, predicates, and objects in "I'm Not There." Things are done by people.

People never do stuff in "The Fountain," in "Life Aquatic," and certainly not in "Southland Tales." They talk about doing things. They discuss how many things were going on, before the movie started. In "Life Aquatic," people never stop talking about how great Steve Zissou used to be. In the three separate time periods of "The Fountain," the Spanish Inquisition has been going on, Rachel Weisz has been dying of cancer, and spaceman Hugh Jackman has been traveling through space in a gigantic bubble. In "Southland Tales," so many things happen before the movie that Richard Kelly wrote three prequel comics to fill in the backstory. However, at least one and maybe several of the elements of the backstory are structured in the film as a surprise. Although maybe I'm giving Kelly too much credit. Toward the end of the film, a few characters explain the backstory all in one quick jumble, and although it plays like a surprise, much of the movie is about explaining the movie, so maybe it's just reminding you to remember that you're watching.

Yes, "Southland Tales" is trying to strike a difficult tone - spoof satire apocalypse drama sci-fi messianic pulp noir thriller Marxist-Socialist revolution - but is it a tone that should ever be struck? There are some funny parts in the film, but so many of them are played so slowly, sometimes with slow-motion music scenes. Slow-motion music scenes are never going to be funny. They used to seem deep, back when Kelly shot this scene in "Donnie Darko." Now that everyone can make a movie, we all know how easy a scene like that actually is. Get a bunch of people. Move the camera around them. Set it to slow motion. Turn off the volume and throw in a Tears for Fears song. Depth!

This movie makes me angry. It makes me angry because the three things that I like about it - Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake's dance number, and the look on the Rock's face - are almost enough to make me want to like the movie. They are so good but so unearned. The dance number would be just as effective if it were as a two minute youtube video. Sarah Michelle Gellar's performance could be cut down to five minutes and packaged as a trailer, "Krista Now: Porn Star Activist!" and everyone would want to see that movie. The few things that are great about this film have nothing to do with it being a film. There's never a moment, like at the end of "There Will Be Blood," or hell, "Donnie Darko," where you can feel the full weight of all that has come before pressing through your eyes into your soul. There's no moment that makes you believe this movie actually happened.

"Southland Tales" isn't a film. It's a great soundtrack with some cool album artwork and a shitty name. Richard Kelly must be a genius, because a lobotomized chimpanzee couldn't make a movie this bad.

Battlestar Galactica - "Six of One"

What makes movies better than television? Or rather, what is it that makes the best movies so much better than the best television? Everyone knows now that television is the buzzier, more experimental, more professional, more rewarding, less teen-baiting popular audio-visual medium (sorry, slideshows), but just when everyone is ready to write off the cinema, along comes fall of 2007, which had such a rack of instant masterpieces ("There Will Be Blood," "No Country For Old Men," "The Assassination of Jesse James," "In the Valley of Elah," "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," "Eastern Promises") that it was easy to miss just how revitalized Hollywood's genre films were.

What I mean is that the great films were so great that they almost obscured how good the good films were. "3:10 to Yuma" was the first western since before "Unforgiven" to feel less like an anti-western and more like a genuine pulp western (the former deconstructs the genre; the latter uses the genre to deconstruct humanity.) "Gone, Baby, Gone" was a topdown exploration of modern American class, masquerading as a mystery. Comedies that could have been shrill quirkfests – "Juno" and "Dan in Real Life," both filled with eccentric families and twisted romance – were simultaneously funnier than we thought and wiser than anyone expected.

The ringmaster of this whole spontaneous circus - call it the return of the B-movies, films perpetually at 4 or 5 on your Netflix queue - was Tony Gilroy, who used the international espionage thriller and the Grisham-ish courtroom drama to tell basically the same story about demented bureaucracy, corrosive all-American power, and one man's desperate, simple urge to find himself - the first was called "The Bourne Ultimatum," the second was called "Michael Clayton."

A western, a Boston noir-fest, a pregnant-teen sensation, a family-reunion romance, a threequel blockbuster, and a corporate thriller - what's the common link? More to the point, what is it that makes these very good movies just a little bit more powerful than the best television? Why isn't "3:10 to Yuma" just warmed-over "Deadwood"; what makes "Gone, Baby, Gone" feel different from a couple "Wire" hours; how come one "Bourne" chater has more thrills than four seasons of "Alias"? "Eli Stone" is similar in outline to "Michael Clayton" - a formerly heartless corporate lawyer starts standing up for the little guy (just like in "Shark" and "The Guardian.")

In a sense, this question is simple - why are movies different than TV - but I think it's more complex than it used to be. With bigger budgets and HD, television essentially looks as good as movies do (Michael Mann, ever the subtle innovator, was the first filmmaker to make a movie with a modern TV aesthetic - "Collateral," shot in burnished digital video, feels more like sequel to Mann's TV show "Robbery Homicide Division" than his earlier LA noir "Heat" - making him the spiritual successor to Alfred Hitchcock, who shot "Psycho" with a TV crew and made movie history.) But television still has to be fast - even HBO shows film episodes in under two weeks, about six post-edit minutes per day versus movie's general ratio of 2.5 minutes per day.

That's why TV shows have so many writers - and why the cast size of TV shows keeps on swelling. (When you're out of ideas, pull one lever and the pregnant chick goes into labor; if that's not enough, pull the other lever and Mom's cancer relapses.) And that's also, really, what still separates a great film scene from a great television scene. Each of the very good films mentioned above turn, in one way or another, on one long back-and-forth dialogue scene between two people, in which every line is laced with meaning, without any time for window dressing. (The great films are full of these scenes - is there a line wasted in "No Country for Old Men?")

In "3:10 To Yuma," it's Christian Bale and Russell Crowe's last scene together before the final run for the train - in a way, the whole movie is about paring itself down to these two men, very different characters played by very different actors (Bale tends to play calculating characters - he has secret identities, in one form or another, in "Batman," "The Prestige," "American Psycho"; Crowe plays simple characters helplessly addicted to their own fate, which is why he's so good at playing losers and even better at playing heroes.) In "Gone, Baby, Gone," it's the scene between Amy Ryan and Casey Affleck, when she, the most neglectful drug-addict mother Boston has ever seen, begs him to save her child.

It's the scene in "Bourne" where Matt Damon talks to Julia Stiles, over a table in quiet little European bar. Its maybe the only time in the movie Bourne has a real conversation. He thinks they're talking about his lost love, but they're actually talking about hers. And it's that last scene in "Michael Clayton" between Tilda Swinton and George Clooney, where all of her lies finally catch up with her - its like that penultimate scene from "The Maltese Falcon" between Bogart and the Dame, the moment when a film built on secrets finally runs into brutal truth (except not even Tony Gilroy could write a line like "I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck.")

These are scenes of deep connection between two people. They all seem to run just a little long, and they are all built on decisive twists, not of plot but of character. It doesn't really matter how Bale's farmer lost his leg; we learn that Stiles' character was in love with Bourne right before she departs the series; Amy Ryan's mama is a bitch before this scene and a bitch after this scene. The characters don't really develop in scenes like this, so much as, for one quick second, come into sharp microscopic Blu-Ray focus. In this way, these scenes don't just change our mind about characters we thought we knew - they seem to carry the entire hidden meaning of their entire film, hovering in the silence between words.

In the last decade, television has grown up in a lot of ways, but making a scene like this is still relatively elusive - it takes rehearsal time, and writing time, and an understanding by the creators of just what, exactly, is the central idea of their narrative. Really, most great television nowadays is great because it's so good at keeping the viewer's attention away from this kind of scene - at creating endless tangents from the main point. "24," "Lost," "Battlestar Galactica," "Rome," the underrated "The Nine" - these are all shows whose plots would have once been considered better fodder for movies than for television shows, because they are based on immediacy - terrorists are attacking and the clock is ticking, we have to get off the island, we have to find Earth, we're battling for control of Rome, the bank is being robbed, etc. The joy of these shows is that they can stretch out the immediacy, shade in the characters and the detail, discover new rhythms and even create an entirely new self-realized thesis (can you imagine "Lost" without Benjamin Linus?)

Yet with this stretching out, there is also an endless symphony of distraction. Probably the main complaint that dogs any serial drama is that the characters never talk about what we want them to talk about. Take "Battlestar Galactica." Secretly, we've all been waiting for a conversation like this since the first episode of the series:

(Main cast sit around a table. Baltar smokes a cigarillo. Tigh sips from his flask.)

Baltar: I've got a confession to make. You know how sometimes I'll kind of stare into space when you're talking to me and then respond to what you say awkwardly, as if I was following instructions from someone you can't see? Well, ever since the hot blonde Cylon - the one without the accent - seduced me into accidentally helping destroy humanity, I've been seeing her in my head. For awhile there I thought she was a holographic projection of a chip in my head. Then I thought I was crazy. Now I think she's an angel.

Caprica Six: That's so funny! Ever since I seduced you into destroying humanity, I've been seeing and talking to an invisible version of YOU. Except that the you in my head has a slightly different accent from the you in reality.

Starbuck: Speaking of invisible people, I kept seeing visions of Leoben, right before I blew up, disappeared for two months, and then somehow found earth, maybe. He made me talk to my dead mother. It was dramatic.

Roslin: Visions? Sometimes I'll have visions about being in an opera house.

Baltar: Wait, an opera house? I've been to that opera house! I had a dream about Boomer's child being there! Back then, the Six in my head was saying it was our child, but hey, she was vague about it.

Boomer: Maybe this has something to do with the hybrid. She's the human/cylon creature who always talks nonsensically, except in a way that seems secretly full of meaning. She lives in a neon futuristicky pool.

Adama: Wait, a pool, you say? I remember seeing one of those pools when I was just a young lad fighting in the war! Damn, I hate those Cylons.

Chief: Hey, I'm a Cylon!

Tigh: Me too!

Anders/Tory: Yeah, and us!

Lee: (reacting to everyone at once) Wait, what?

(Curtain falls, applause rings out, curtain rises. Cast takes a bow and points to the orchestra pit. Bear McCreary bows and then murders a Taiko drum)

"Lost" fans can imagine something similar to the above - all the main characters (including dead people, with Miles as a medium) hang out and figure out all the strange ways their lives intersected before they reached the island. ("That's so funny, I met your father when I was in Iraq right after I tortured my superior officer!" "Wait, YOUR dad was in that car accident that almost paralyzed my later ex-wife?") Yet for so much of modern television, the central thesis seems to be that such moments never occur - that no one person can ever know everything there is to know about the show. Think about "The Wire" - which single character could ever fathom the entirety of that show's portrayal of Baltimore? Isn't it strange, but totally natural, that Tommy Carcetti and Jimmy McNulty never actually meet?

Yet there are moments when serial dramas tap into the spirit of the imaginary scene above. It's Locke asking Ben, point blank, "What is the monster?" But it's also little moments, like AJ Soprano, in the final moments of his series, reminding his father that he once said "Try to remember the times that were good." Tony doesn't remember this, but we do - he said it in the first season finale. Moments like these - you might call them fan service, but really it's just explicit continuity - work so well, because, for brief little moments, characters on TV shows seem to know exactly as much about their own lives as we do.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting around to a scene from last week's "Battlestar Galactica" which was simultaneously the least mythological scene in the whole episode (and on the Cylon plot side, this episode had more going on than any episode since season 2's brainfuck gamechanger "Downloaded") and just about the best scene that the show has ever produced.

Roslin is sitting at Adama's desk. Adama, still wearing last night's uniform and looking for all the world like an old man waking up from a bad fraternity flashback, pours himself a glass of space whiskey. "Enjoying that more than usual," says the President of the Human Race. "Hair a the dog. Lee's party," explain the Commanding Officer and Savior of Humanity. There's a deep undercurrent here - her concern masked by sarcasm, his casual air masking a slight embarassment.

She snorts. Not even a laugh. And she changes the subject. She's always so direct. "What do we do now? Put her on trial? Find (her voice turns) Romo Lampkin? Take a show of hands?" Stephen Jenkins, a media creator, often discuss how, in modern superhero comics, the heroes talk to each other the way that kids used to playact them in backyards - a bit more sarcastic, more self-aware. The sneering way she says "Romo Lampkin" is exactly in that spirit - as much a comment on the show itself as on previous events.

"I don't know," he says.

"Follow her into an ambush?" She's not asking it like it's a question.

"She's driven," he tries. He's pacing, trying to get away.

"You gonna keep waltzing or you gonna sit down and talk?" She's angry at him, in a way that's both maternal and something more romantic. "What's going on. Sit." Like a cowed child he comes back.

"What if she's telling the truth?" he says. "She was supposed to die out there. She didn't. I can't explain it. What if she was meant to help us. And this is, um..." he trails off, realizing how completely the two of them have reversed themselves, over the course of their sad little life together. (Because "Battlestar Galactica" is about sad little lives, with group bathrooms and bad food and no sun and reprocessed air.)

"A what?" she says, and she smiles. "A Miracle?" She knows that she has won a point, but in the wrong place, at the wrong time. "Is that what you want to call this? Go ahead, say it. Grab your piece of the golden arrow. I want to hear Admiral Atheist say that a miracle happened." What a marvelously subtle actress Mary McDonnell is! Look at all the emotion she can pack into a line like "Go ahead, say it." Excitement, and teasing sarcasm, but also hope, and disbelief.

"You shot at her and you missed at close range." There's a look on Edward James Olmos' face here that he wears very often - that tough, squinty-eyed, almost Eastwoodian growl. Like Eastwood, Olmos' greatest skill as an actor is the mesmerizing quietude of his voice - like a purr from a grizzly bear. But there's something different in his bearing, now, than when the show started. Maybe it's because he wears his glasses less. Maybe it's because he finds himself more willing to believe in people. Maybe he's in love.

"Duloxin fracks with your aim," she says.

"So does doubt."

This is the point in a bad show where the characters might begin to back away. But she won't. "I pulled the trigger and I'd do it again. She put her life in front of a bullet as if it had no meaning. You drop an egg, you reach for another."

"Maybe convincing you meant more to her than her own life." He's struggling, and he knows it. It's hard to argue with a sober, intelligent, powerful, well-rested dying woman when you're half-drunk, barely conscious, unshowered and starting the weekend early.

"Is that your miracle?" she asks. "You want to talk about miracles? On the very same day that a very pale doctor informed me that I had terminal cancer, most of humanity was annihilated, and I survived. And by some mathematical absurdity, I became president." This is a conversation with more on its mind than just the latest plot twist. This is, we're starting to realize, somehow about the entirety of the show. He wants to believe; she can't allow herself to.

"And then," she continues, "my cancer disappeared, long enough for us to find a way to earth. You can call it whatever you want. And now, I'm dying."

"Don't talk that way," he says. Is there anything sadder than when a manly man tries to confront cancer? It reminds one of Tony Soprano way back in season 1, talking about how his best friend was gonna beat the cancer, same way he could beat up a kid and steal his lunch money.

"Bill, you gotta face this," she says. Roslin has always been a fierce realist, but only because she has so much faith. "My life is coming to an end soon enough, and I am not gonna apologize to you for not trusting her, and I am not, I am not gonna trust her with the fate of this fleet."

And here, something interesting happens - she moves from matters cosmic to matters deeply personal. "You are so buckled up inside. You can't take anymore loss. Your son's leaving, this, me, I know it."

"No one's going anywhere," he says.

"Okay. Here's the truth. This is what's going on. You want to believe Kara. you would rather be wrong about her and face your own demise than risk losing her again." She knows him.

He knows it. "You can say in the room, but get out of my head." He stands up for a refill. It's a good last line for a good scene.

But it's not over. "You're so afraid to live alone," she says.

"And you're afraid to die that way." It's an amazing line. It's tough. It's passive aggressive. But it's also true. She smiles, but there's nothing funny about it.

"You're afraid," he continues, "that you may not be the dying leader you thought you were. Or that your death may be as meaningless as everyone else's." She deconstructed him, but he deconstructed her right back. And it hurt both of them. You have to really love someone to hurt them this bad.

He walks away. She smiles even wider - maybe laughing at the joke of existence, maybe laughing at this funny little man she's inextricably linked to, maybe holding back tears - and puts her glasses back on. She pulls aimlessly at her hair, and finds that it's coming out. She smiles even wider, and cries.

Battlestar Galactica - "He That Believeth In Me"

There are several reasons to not be excited about "The X-Files" movie coming out this summer. The main reason is its writer-director, Chris Carter, who created the original series, but whose follow-up shows were so much weekend afternoon Sci-Fi channel flotsam, trying and failing tried to bite off some of the "X-Files" magic. "Millenium" got the dark visual tone, "Harsh Realm" the endless paranoia, "The Lone Gunmen" the mordant humor, but they all ended up as tiny, mostly tasteless morsels. ("Millenium" - like Clear Pepsi and Clarence Thomas's political ideology - has a few rare, sad fans.)

You could watch one episode of each of those later series and pretty much get the whole idea - whereas "The X-Files" was endlessly changing smorgasboard television. People always point to shows with lavish sci-fi mythology like "Lost" to illustrate the influence of "The X-Files," but really, a decade later, who wants to watch a random "mythology" episode? Sure, the alien plot led to some great bizarro bits - the fetus, the black oil, the faceless aliens - but the whole thing was an aimless tease. More and more, it seems obvious that the real legacy of "The X-Files" was its ability to basically become a different show each week.

It's all the one-offs – the black-and-white "Post-Modern Prometheus," the all-in-long-shots "Triangle," the banned-from-broadcast incest fun-fest "Home," and seven years of weird creatures – that remain inspired. That's why "Sopranos" is the real inheritor of Chris Carter's mojo - "The Test Dream," with Tony lost in a vivid Felliniesque dream (complete with Annette Bening!), is right on the same wavelength as "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," a vivid gonzo panorama (complete with Alex Trebek!)

Other cop shows like CSI feature a crime-of-the-week plot type; with "The X-Files," it was more like genre-of-the-week; now horror, now black comedy, now relationship drama, now eye-popping visual treat. (That kaleidiscope style was what made the series so enjoyable. How can a movie ever capture that?)

So Chris Carter is a genius for creating the show, but he's that peculiar style of genius invented and epitomized by George Lucas - the one-hit wonder in the multimedia age, dry-humping his lone great creation across decades of television, movies, video games, tie-in paperbacks, annual coffee table books, shitty comic books licensed by Dark Horse Comics, and the occasional reunion special, except that nowadays franchises are so important that "reunion specials" get called "prequels" or "sequels" and get big screen deals. And don't forget, the last two seasons of "The X-Files" make Lucas's prequel trilogy look good, or at least not bad.

There's more reasons why "The X-Files" movie might suck. Neither David Duchovny nor Gillian Anderson have done much with their post-show career. Anderson may just be choosy (her roles in "The Last King of Scotland" and "A Cock and Bull Story" are memorable, if tiny), but Duchovny has appeared solely in much-despised indie films (messy auteuristerbation from directors who should know better, like Soderbergh's "Full Frontal" or Freundlich's "Trust the Man") and a vaguely-enjoyed Showtime TV show that's getting sued by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The original series ended with Mulder and Scully on the run from the law, but the whole appeal of "The X-Files" was their FBI partnership, so either the movie is a supernatural version of Bonnie and Clyde or we just agree, Hulk-style, to a healthy dose of continuity amnesia.

That being said, there is one lone reason why "The X-Files" sequel could be the movie of the summer: the show's central concern, the eternal maddening quest for "truth," has never been more timely. In the 1990s, the days of Clinton I and the End of History, "The X-Files" was pretty much the only popular narrative built on skepticism, a lonely gunman sniping at the government in a time when the worst it seemed the government could come up with was furtive office blowjobs and the occasional vague bombing of vaguely-defined nations. In the span of one year, "Independence Day" showed the American President getting in a fighter plane on the fourth of July to shoot down aliens, and "Air Force One" showed us the American President, played by Indiana Jones, wrestling evil Russians. At the time, this played like escapism; post-Iraq II and "Mission Accomplished," it plays like ingenius spoof, if not chic Stalinist jingo.

Now might be the perfect time for the return of "The X-Files," because we've finally caught up with its conspiracy-flavored, "trust-no-one" theme. The Atlantic monthly has a great article about the return of the 70's style of paranoid cinema; "The Wire" just rounded out five glorious years of exposing the miserable machinations of the upper levels of every political, economic, and heroin-dealing organization in the modern American city; and now comes the final season "Battlestar Galactica," the most consistently suspicious television show in history. It's a mesmerizing hallmark of post-"Sopranos" television that you can never be quite sure about who is good or evil, but "Battlestar Galactica" is the first show to actually ponder whether humanity is worth saving.

The show has never been popular --- (Although really, do we even really know what's popular anymore? If the top-rated show on television gets 30 million out of a possible 300 million documented citizens to watch, does that still count as popular? Some of the best and least-watched shows on television are also probably the most illegally-downloaded – I knew several people in college who would always download a high-quality foreign rip of "Lost," because the ones they were putting up on iTunes were full-screen and iPod quality – so is it even possible to remotely guess how many people actually watch what they watch? One of the biggest subtle jokes on Stuff White People Like is that just about every pop culture item it mentions – Wes Anderson films, "Arrested Development," "The Daily Show," Michel Gondry, indie music – is actually incredibly overexposed in the media, and only really popular among people who used to be tastemakers, and in an era when a movie critic loses his job ever two seconds, who's even trying to make taste anymore? What is popularity?)

Anyway, "Battlestar Galactica" has never had very many viewers - a function of its crappy channel, its shitty time slot, its off-putting-yet-secretly-kickass title. The show is expensive to make, and even with two channels co-producing it, you can feel the producers constantly stretching the cash as far as it can go (and you can hear them talk about it on the endlessly illuminating podcasts.) Unlike its compatriots in the new mytho-pop fantasy TV canon, "Heroes" and "Lost," "BSG" has never had a brush with success, and films out of Vancouver, a town synonymous with "cut-rate production" (though also, tellingly, the same place they shot the first four seasons of "The X-Files," and the new movie.)

That lack of excess cash forces the show cut the fat out of its own genre. Shaky close-ups hide tiny sets; long dialogue scenes replace zap-zap space battles; the original series' robots, here computer-animated and never quite convincing, steadily fade into the background to make way for the fascinating human-ish android overseers.

That central conceit of making big somethings out of just a little bit more than nothing, also applies to its central storytelling style: the endless layering of mystery on mystery. In a typical "Battlestar Galactica" scene, three people will be talking about the Cylons. One person, an authority figure (Admiral Adama, President Roslin), will be discussing the need to figure out who is and isn't a Cylon. One of the people they are speaking to will actually be a Cylon, although that person may or may not know this. The other person will not be a Cylon, but will be talking to the invisible Cylon in his head that may be a computer implant, an angel, or a figment of his imagination. The show lost the whole "Who is a Cylon?" thread in season 3, which may, I think, explain the general viewer ennui - now, with the revelation that four of the main cast is Cylons, it's been brought back and supercharged, one last surge towards the series finale.

"Battlestar" never lets us quite believe anyone. The military authorities once declared martial law; the president is a fundamentalist who lets scripture dictate the course of all humanity; and even scrappy underdog characters might turn into sleeper-cell robots, or may be driven mad with homicidal rage, or both. Most post-9/11 narratives address the new fundamental fear that attacks can come from anywhere at anytime - that there are villains everywhere. "Battlestar" pushes this one step further into near-madness, pondering a fear that You are the villain, that You could attack at any time, that a time bomb is waiting to go off in Your mind which could destroy Yourself and everyone around You. Call it Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

And the show never lets us believe in anything, by specifically making the very act of believing one of its ongoing plot points. The two factions on the show - the humans and the Cylons - have very different religions. The humans, our protagonists and the people who are most like us (wearing ties, watching tabloid television, mostly ugly and swearing all the time), are loony polytheists (you will never get tired of hearing old badasses like Edward James Olmos cutely throw in that extra "s," as in "oh my gods" or "Gods damn it") who happen to believe in the Greek pantheon.

The Cylons, the antagonists and the people who are least like us (wearing designer clothes, hanging out with duplicates of themselves, all model-perfect and monotone-speaking), believe in one God and do their best to spread His word everywhere they go. The central genius of the show is that both religions pay off in big dividends - the fleet follows a track mapped out in their bible to earth, and the Cylon God keeps sending people crazy dreams - but you never really trust either one.

The show has the same narrative directness as "Lost" - a cast of ethno-diverse castaways in close quarters on a series-length search, replace "island" with "spaceship" and "getting home" with "finding earth" - but is at once more straightforward and more grandly conceived. "Lost" is littered with references and easter eggs; a single episode will reference a whole host of movies, books, theoretical physicists, and philosophers. "Battlestar" has teasing links with its crap-tastic progenitor and ended season 3 with a version of "All Along the Watchtower," but besides that it's in a pop culture vacuum. Yet it also directly tackles plenty of modern topics - abortion, suicide bombs, political dynasties - with a mixture of the purposefully shrill allegory of "South Park" and the pinpoint dramatization of "The Wire."

"Stop-Loss": Impassioned Awfulness and Bludgeoned Subtlety

"Stop-Loss" is like a sexy 90s-era WB TV show about the least sexy, least 90s topic imaginable It's a morality tale about the death of morality, a movie that's dreadfully sentimental when it comes to personal relationships but endlessly skeptical about everything else - the government, the war, patriotism, Texas pride. It only really figures out its central conflict later in the film, after trying out several different genres like so many clothes in a dressing room - it's a war movie, it's a vacation movie, it's a road movie, it's a buddy movie, it's a romance. The pieces don't fit together one bit. This is the kind of movie that casts Ciarin Hinds - who might be the greatest character actor working right now (he was Julius Caesar in "Rome," a Putin-ish Russian Prez in "The Sum of All Fears," an Israeli hitman in "Munich," and the silent partner in "There Will Be Blood") - as the main character's father, and then scarcely finds any use for him. But it's also the kind of movie that casts a bunch of attractively beefcake actors, and just when you're ready to write this off as "Varsity Blues" with PTSD, you watch them give the most heartbreaking performances in years.

That's the main thing about "Stop-Loss" - it's one of those rare movies ("Juno" was another one) that gets better and better as it goes along. After a horrifying battle sequence set in Iraq, the movie shifts forward in time, and we see soldiers coming home to Texas - some for leave, some for good. For what is probably just about twenty minutes but plays like five hours, we see the soldiers readjusting to life back home. That their anxiety-prone actions are disturbing (excess drinking, spousal abuse, battle flashbacks) doesn't make them any less cliché. But then Ryan Phillippe returns his gear, only to find out that he's being sent back to Iraq against his will - "Stop-Lossed," in the army's legalese-inflected jargon. He goes AWOL and decides to drive to Washington DC to plead his case to a senator. He's taking his time though - visiting a dead soldier's family, stopping by a military hospital to say hi to a particularly FUBAR'd compatriot, and more.

The road trip is the heart of the movie, and although most of the tension seeps out of it quickly, it's an unbroken stretch of brilliance. At one point, Phillippe meets another Stop-Lossed soldier on the run, living off the grid in shitty motels, so fearful of discovery that he can't even take his sick child to a hospital. It's like a demented horror film vision of modern day America - a man and his family on the run, for the crime of fighting an enemy who wasn't even attacking us.

In a sense, the road trip section of the film is almost like an updated version of "Apocalypse Now" - episodic scenes of devastation (emotional rather than physical) - except that Pierce's open-ended conclusion can't quite discover the near-mystical horror of Coppola's film. The film, despite a powerful set-piece in a graveyard, trails off, but you can't really imagine it any other way. This is a bravura B-picture that's more important, more vividly about the here and now, than practically any other film made since 9/11. Give it some props.

"Friday Night Lights" Gets Its Third Second Chance

Give this to the moneymen - they recognize how important closure can be to viewers of even the lowest-rated television show (if only to better package that show on the eventual DVD.) Used to be that shows would just kind of disappear, or end in midsentence - nothing was worse, for a TV fan in the primordial age of serial television, for a show to end with a cliffhanger.

There is something particularly thrilling about a last episode that knows it's a last episode but that was conceived in the trenches, quickly - particularly if it happens early in the season, with the studio cutting their losses due to low ratings. (This is a feeling particular to network television, since the series finales of "Sopranos" and "The Wire" and "Six Feet Under" could conceive of their endings from ten, even twenty episodes out.) Look at the series finales for "Arrested Development" and "The O.C." - there is something rushed about both of them, yet in a way that makes them all the more enjoyable. There's no "Seinfeld"-style excess, and the sensation of hastily forming an ending sends both shows off with a fleet-footed exclamation point.

So thank god that "Friday Night Lights" is getting a third season. The show was all over the map this year, but every episode had at least three extraordinary moments, and you could feel the show finding its footing in the last couple of episodes (in strike-emptied gray January, before "Lost" and "The Wire" returned, "Friday Night Lights" was practically the only thing keeping television worth watching.)

There's some crazy new deal involved in the third season which will see the show broadcast on DirectTV first, which could mean that it's safer than ever or that it's halfway through the door. I don't think the show will get any more viewers than it has right now, and I'm almost positive this will be the last season, but you get the feeling that, having renewed it for a third go-round, and lacking a writer's strike as an exit strategy, NBC will at least have the common decency to let the show die gracefully.