1. "Once-wayward humpbacks appear to be home free": They like you very much, but they are not the hell "your" whales.
["They came, they wandered, they went. After a 17-day sojourn in Northern California's inland waterways, two wayward humpback whales that caught the attention of the nation appear to have quietly slipped back into the Pacific Ocean."]
2. "Hepburn dress sells for $192,000": From BBC News.
["A pink cocktail dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's has sold at auction for $192,000 (£97,233) - more than six times its estimate."]
3. "'Law & Order' star produces White House buzz": Vice-president Jack McCoy; Secret Service head Lennie Briscoe... from the beyond!
["Former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson will take a major step toward a 2008 run for the White House by "testing the waters" -- beginning to raise money and hire campaign staff as early as Friday, several sources close to Thompson told CNN."]
4. House contributor Kenji Fujishima's summer internship journal, three parts and counting: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3
["Today I walked into the copy desk at the Wall Street Journal office and was asked by the global copy editor: "Do you want to start editing some briefs?" So after two days of worrying about how I was going to handle trying to figure out how to navigate the various computer programs and applications, I was basically pushed into figuring all that out in one fell swoop today. That's another fancy of way of saying: today, I started editing copy."]
5. "Even if that guy was charming and funny, I still wouldn't like him.": Nick Schager proclaims Mr. Brooks a new camp classic, and gets to heart of his distaste for Dane Cook.
["Take this review's one-and-a-half-star grade as a backhanded endorsement: Mr. Brooks is one deliriously ridiculous movie, and a bona fide contender for status as a camp classic."]
Clip of the Day: "Eve, we are going to Greenwich Village!" Lauren Bacall sings, dances, and goes to a rockin' gay bar (god, I wish they'd drop her).
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Links for the Day (May 31st, 2007)
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
The Starter Wife and Army Wives: Two New Series Test the Bonds of Matrimony
By Annie Young Frisbie
Pity the poor TV wife. She thought life post-altar would be a never-ending paradise of Sunday brunches with the newspaper and scones, and adorably clad children clambering onto laps to ask whom Daddy loves best. She’s spent hours in the mirror practicing the blush she’ll flash when she hears her husband’s reply: “Mommy, always and forever.”
Girl, wake up and smell the dirty laundry. You’ve got five minutes until your first catfight.
To read the Time Out New York review, click here. Read more!
Mac and Me Day
By Keith Uhlich
I hereby proclaim, for no good reason, May 30th, 2007 as Mac and Me day. Thank you Walter Chaw for reminding me of this long-lost staple of my youth, which -- if memory serves -- I caught in the theater as part of a friend's birthday celebration (I also believe this to be the only birthday of said "friend" that I ever attended, before or since). All I can recall of that viewing is limber little Mac, lost alien visitor-cum-McDonalds/Coke spokesman, stretching himself into a Silly Putty-like string and screaming like a cat in heat. (Apparently, this was his way of getting past an electric fence -- good thing, I suppose, that he didn't use Ren & Stimpy's method.) But, god bless YouTube, I can now catch up more fully with this cinema classic (from soon-to-unleash Mannequin 2: On the Move autuer Stewart Raffill), and preserve it in digital amber for all future generations.
Of course, after subjecting myself to the following clips, I've determined that Mac and Me might better be titled, per that other masterpiece (for real!) of '88, Die Hard. As in my soul. Is dying. Hard. Ah, the vicissitudes of the intervening years on the formative mind. Let's begin, shall we?
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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door, a staff critic for Slant Magazine, and a contributor to a variety of print and online publications.
Links for the Day (May 30th, 2007)
1. "Hogzilla Part Deux: Alabama Boy Kills 1000 Pound Monster Pig": But is it actually a hoax?
["The original Hogzilla is being made into a horror movie. But Hogzilla Part Duex may have just happened in Alabama as a young boy has shot and killed a 1000-pound Monster Pig with a large caliber handgun. His father says the pig weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9 feet 4, from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail."]
2. "First look: Enter the Joker — in the IMAX format": From USA Today.
["All directors promise that their sequels will be bigger and flashier than the predecessors'. But Christopher Nolan doesn't mess around. The director's sequel to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, will become the first feature film to be partly shot in the IMAX format, an expensive and cumbersome process that typically is the province of documentaries and short films. Nolan will shoot four action sequences — including the introduction of the Joker, played by Heath Ledger — on IMAX."]
3. "A Hell of an Experience": The Reeler's Jamie Stuart interviews Stanley Kubrick's right-hand man Leon Vitali.
["That's right. Absolutely. I worked with all those transfers. We went East/West. You have the whole frame. When he shot through the camera what he would do was compose for 1.33 -- which is the full TV screen -- and also for 1.85. It's not an uncommon thing to do. But he would intentionally have action going on in the top of the frame. In Full Metal Jacket, a really good example, on the TV screen you see it in a really different context. It doesn't lose its power. Suddenly you're seeing tops of buildings. You're seeing how small these people are inside that milieu. And that danger can come from anywhere. The same with The Shining. It has another kind of power on the TV screen. And another kind of power when it's shown theatrically. But there's no doubt about it, when you see a film like Barry Lyndon or 2001 -- and I'd say also The Shining -- theatrically they're a hell of an experience. It's an experience, that's what it is."]
4. "Robert Zoellick to head World Bank": From Moneyweb.
["In selecting Robert Zoellick to lead the World Bank, President Bush is turning to a former top adviser with a reputation as a foreign-policy centrist and a consensus-builder on the international scene. Mr. Bush is expected to announce the nomination today, according to a senior administration official. Mr. Zoellick declined to comment."]
5. "NBC cancels Reilly over poor showing": Phil Rosenthal reports on the ouster of NBC's Entertainment President.
[" Television critics would have shown little mercy to NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly had he canceled "30 Rock" and "Friday Night Lights," a pair of well-written, beautifully acted gems. Instead, Reilly renewed the first-year shows, which averaged a scant 6 million viewers or so per week on the fourth-place network, and NBC showed him the door. The network on Tuesday named "Ugly Betty" and "The Office" producer Ben Silverman co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal Television Studio alongside Marc Graboff, who has been West Coast head of NBC Universal TV for less than four months."]
Clip of the Day: A Fairy Use Tale -- Disney characters explain copyright law, one syllable at a time.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Spring (and Springtime) in a Small Town
By Andrew Chan
Since we know so little in this country about pre-‘80s mainland Chinese cinema, you would think the recently released DVD of Spring in a Small Town—ranked by the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2005 as the greatest Chinese movie ever made—would warrant more coverage from film journalists than it has received. Few in the U.S. had seen Fei Mu’s 1948 classic when Tian Zhuangzhuang’s remake appeared in 2002, but it has been gradually moving out of obscurity ever since. Though there have been screenings in New York and London, an all-region DVD produced out of Guangzhou last December, and full downloads available on YouTube and Internet Archive, this new release marks the first time American cinephiles will be able to find the movie at their local video stores. For the small L.A.-based distribution company Cinema Epoch, which is also presenting seven other rarities as a part of its Chinese Film Classics Collection, the achievement is admittedly far from ideal: there seems to have been no effort made to clean up Spring’s fuzzy images or uneven soundtrack, provide bonus materials for historical context, or sync the English subtitles with the Mandarin dialogue. But at a time when Western access to such films remains limited, any opportunity to discover Fei’s work should earn our attention.
On a recent trip to China, I spotted Spring in almost every decently well-stocked DVD store I went into, and, at least on college campuses, both the Fei and Tian versions are well-known. This ubiquity is a far cry from the original’s previous life as a discarded “rightist” artifact, condemned by Communists in the late ‘40s as decadent and bourgeois. The film’s rocky history serves as an indicator of China’s conflicted relationship with its own cinema and the roles both political dogma and cultural amnesia have played in the nation’s movie-going. Since the early ‘80s, when the state-run China Film Archive started making new prints of its holdings, China has had the chance to reexamine its cinematic legacy, but despite the ascension of Spring, the attempt to establish a Chinese film canon raises more questions than answers. Social values and aesthetic choices now taken for granted in American art—individuality, realism, provocation—have been discouraged in Chinese filmmaking for most of the twentieth century, to the point where many of the Chinese films regarded as masterpieces in the U.S. have been banned by the government and are often only found on bootlegs.
It was made clear on perhaps the grandest scale yet—when Gao Xingjian (a playwright and novelist exiled from and mostly unread in his homeland) won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature—that China’s artistic reputation on the international scene does not dovetail with the country’s government-sanctioned self-perception. And, according to critic Shelly Kraicer, the China Film Archive still determines which classics are made available, thereby circumscribing the version of Chinese film history eligible for study. Within the blurring borderlines of contemporary cinema, China remains an example of movies’ power to reflect, manipulate, restore, or undermine concepts like national identity. But the modern viewer will probably come away from Fei’s film wondering what all the political fuss is about. Spring is the kind of romantic melodrama not uncommon in Chinese entertainment, and any political sentiments it might express beneath the surface don’t fall along immediately apparent party lines. In the West, the story draws comparisons to paradigms not of protest but of delicate social observation and heartache: Chekhov, Edith Wharton, David Lean’s Brief Encounter.
Fei’s film, which is a faithful rendition of a short story by Li Tianji, subtly places itself in the context of literary tradition; the classical “zhi” in its Chinese title (Xiao cheng zhi chun) evokes a creative history the Cultural Revolution sought to destroy and contrasts with the unifying vernacular Communism promoted. All of the film’s five characters are introduced with a subtitle upon their first appearance, giving the opening scenes the feeling of theater. As is fitting for a film so concerned with the time warp between one era and the next, Fei matches these traditional appearances with modernist techniques. Like Brief Encounter, Spring is narrated by an unhappily married woman on the verge of infidelity. Her wandering, whispery voiceover splits the film into multiple layers: we can hear the wife’s emotions as we see how she tries to suppress them; we witness the present tense turning into the past as her storytelling accompanies the action taking place; and we watch a paradox develop as the narration peters out and our heroine becomes an enigma clouded by coyness and unarticulated desire, a supporting player in her own life. The film is stunning when it lingers quietly on images of her desperation, which often seems not for a person but for all the time—both past and future—she feels is permanently lost to her.
The film’s central love triangle forms when a man she fell in love with years ago stumbles into her courtyard, and she discovers that he was a close friend of her husband. War has dispersed them, and while the friend has become a successful doctor in Shanghai, the woman has been acting as a nurse to her sickly husband, trapped in an inherited home whose attractive interiors remain remarkably preserved amid ruins. The tantalizing suggestion of future possibilities manifests everywhere: in the repeated success the wife and friend have in finding time alone together; in the sympathy with which the husband asks about the nature of their relationship; in the woman’s perky teenage sister-in-law, who becomes a symbol of unfettered youth. But with characters who turn out to be so self-sacrificing, so tangled in their loyalties to past ideals, romance cannot take precedence over family responsibility. Lapses into betrayal are short-lived, and as the insular setting becomes more and more claustrophobic (even the exteriors are locked in by a wall that surrounds the town and obstructs our view of the outside world), the would-be lovers resign themselves to a philosophy of artful passivity, according to which all their bottled-up romantic and erotic disappointments will constitute the poetic core of their lives. In the film’s final shot, the woman stands resolutely beneath an overwhelming stretch of sky, having rejected the love of her choice to stand by the commitments and little kindnesses of her arranged marriage.
Just as Citizen Kane is the intellectual and emotional inferior of many American masterpieces that have followed it, Spring’s meditation on small-town disillusionment proves to be no match for the thematic breadth of a director like Jia Zhangke, who has flourished with the freedoms of being independent of a studio and relying on foreign admirers. But, like Kane, Fei’s film remains a revelation, moving and memorable for its exploration of film vocabulary. The lyricism of its compositions, the languorous pacing of its seasonal story, and the startling flickers of feeling we get from Wei Wei in the lead role gain even greater significance when viewed in conversation with Tian’s lesser Springtime in a Small Town, which bears an opening dedication to China’s master filmmakers.
While China emerged as an important contemporary cinema in the mid-‘80s, its early pioneers—the lineage by which we might connect influences to current artists—are largely unknown to American audiences. New Chinese films come to us with a clear historical and social background, but the aesthetic contexts we are able to recognize don’t extend very far into the past. It has been convenient to compare other Chinese-language directors to European precursors—for instance, to call the Malaysian-Taiwanese Tsai Ming-liang a new Bertolucci and Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai a new Godard—and to be reasonably sure those descriptions approximate their styles. But such analogies are not as easily drawn for the most prominent mainland filmmakers (a group of whom were classmates at the Beijing Film Academy). How does a Chinese filmmaker find inspiration in the cinematic history of his homeland when so much of it is either government-approved propaganda or films that have been condemned in his country? What canon can he turn to? Regardless of its questionable merits, Tian’s Springtime—made ten years after his devastating Blue Kite led the government to ban him from the movie industry—is heartbreaking for the emotions that fueled its production. I can’t name a more fascinating recent example of a director seeking and exploring native influence, and sustaining throughout a film the urgency of such an abstract search.
Springtime’s effectiveness is made possible by its flaws. Tian’s actors, who are all too attractive for their roles, stumble through their performances as if they were in a high school play, and one gets the sense of a younger generation unsure of how to pay tribute to the monumental examples of its predecessors. Even more interesting and pivotal is the contribution of Taiwanese cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bin, a regular Hou Hsiao-hsien collaborator who has recently proved, particularly in this film and last year’s Three Times, how much he was responsible for the sensual palette and movement of In the Mood for Love (the credit for which the press has usually assigned to his genius co-lenser Christopher Doyle). The switch from black-and-white to color has given this restrained material a visual luxuriance, so that Fei’s undivided attention to bodies and faces is replaced by the distractions of lacquer and wood carvings. Tian’s Springtime takes place in Wuzhen, a decidedly unglamorous town that Lee’s camera has taken great pains to prettify; where Fei’s film included shots (similar to Cartier-Bresson’s famous photograph) that peered into the courtyard from a large hole in a wall, Lee glosses over such marks of devastation by saturating them in color.
But Lee’s cinematography does take Fei’s film into the future, suggesting through its modern approach the fulfillment of lineage and influence. Markedly different from the style of Tian’s previous collaborator Hou Yong, Lee’s darkly lit and boldly outlined reimagining of the 1948 Spring establishes a link between Fei’s poetic melodrama and the slow, melancholy mood pieces that have brought Hong Kong and Taiwan to Western audiences: Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, 2046, and The Hand, and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai and Three Times. The affinities between Fei’s classic and these contemporary works are not simply aesthetic. These films are woozy, sometimes fetishistic evocations of love found and lost; all of them mournfully but quietly accept the unfulfilling nature of eros in a tone distinct from European and American means of dramatizing romance, and all of them recognize how vulnerable relationships are to the social restrictions and upheavals that shape Chinese life. Tian’s imperfect tribute helps to further substantiate for Western viewers the retroactive installation of Spring as the greatest work of Chinese cinema. Like any other canonical work, Fei’s film reasserts its beauty and modifies its purpose in the imaginations of the living.
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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.
Afraid to get wet? Plunging into and flipping At World's End.
By Ryland Walker Knight
Given all that surrounds the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, it is hard to believe these movies could be smart films, let alone films this smart. Not only that, the films are hard to believe, period. One's natural impulse is to resist. And there's a lot to resist. They're bloody pirate movies, for one. For another, it's a bloody fantastical pirate movie franchise inspired by a theme park ride and brought to light by Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer. In the third film, At World's End, there is a lot of exposition in the scenes driven by dialogue-as-interrogation and it barrels at the viewer without pause, leading many to think the film is incomprehensible, and dismissible. At first, I resisted, too.
The primary problem that dooms the Pirates sequels in the eyes of most critics is one rooted in their release dates and their commercial genre designation, not their status as pirate genre movies, or their status simply as movies — that is, movies to be read. A similar fate befell both Dead Man’s Chest and Michael Mann’s Miami Vice last summer. What I found in revisiting the films was that they were not uniquely summer blockbusters, but that they were films, plain and simple. Outside the seasonal anticipation brought on by marketing bombardments, I loosened my resistance and let the films show me their logic, and I allowed myself to feel the thrill of their bombastic blockbuster thunder, as well as their hard-lined visual and generic play. This is not to say I whole-heartedly disliked either film initially, nor was I plain dumbfounded. I simply could not properly articulate my resistance. First, I ignored it. But then, curious as I am, I sought and found their logic. And, at last, I had fun.
At a very basic level, like Irvin Kirshner's The Empire Strikes Back and James Cameron's Aliens, Gore Verbinski's two Pirates sequels disrupt everything (the worlds, the narratives, the structures) the first film (in each trilogy) rightly set up at the outset. The Caribbean world of Verbinski's trilogy is, after the first film, one of constant shuffling, of tangential narrative ruptures: the world of the film, like the world we audience members live in, is chaotic. Of course, this Caribbean world is not the world we live in. In our world, there are no giant mythological squids or sea goddesses, but there are, however, pirates — and daily acts of piracy. And there are social dictums, social pacts, that we appropriate and reconstitute on an individual basis, to live with ourselves, to live with the world. The main thrust of this trilogy is that reckoning: How will we live in the world when our autonomous freedom is continually challenged?
At the end of the first film, the world was set right and the answer seemed clear: Jonathan Pryce's Governor Weatherby Swann says, at the close, "Perhaps on the rare occasion pursuing the right course demands an act of piracy -- piracy itself can be the right course?" The sequels only complicate this claim(-as-question). Piracy, in the whole of the trilogy, becomes synonymous with freedom. Except, it is a freedom bound to the sea. There remains a bondage. Piracy is by rights unlawful, yet it may in fact be a more righteous life in these films' mythology. It is a life of freedom, of free will to voyage across a limitless plane, but it is a life kept in check by specific mythic codes that the plane of the sea and her goddess Calypso will allow. There are rules, or laws, but they are more like myths — "more like guidelines," as we are told in the first film (but even this lax “guidelines” stance is called into check in the sequels when the manifest Codex tome is brought to bear late in At World’s End). The primary disruption of the remainder of the trilogy is the manifest exhibition and explanation of those codes and myths that govern a pirate's life, that is, a life at sea.
The sea appears a utopia here, a setting that affords its passengers seemingly limitless boundaries: the horizon stretches ever onward. Yet, this utopia is one not even a pirate can claim dominion over. It is a plane to be sailed across, not penetrated or bent to one's will. This is Davy Jones' failure. Davy Jones (Bill Nighy's eyes, somehow, register emotions poignant and furious under the weight of facial CGI prosthetics) attempted to reject his bondage, his duty, to the sea (to ferry the dead to the beyond) and was subsequently mutated into a tentacle-faced monster who claimed, falsely and delusionally, in Dead Man's Chest, "I am the sea." He not only claims dominion over the sea, he fully claims the sea as his, and as him. By carving out his heart and binding himself to his boat, he has bound himself to the sea, not claimed it.
In At World's End, this bondage and this excavation's origin is revealed. Jones was in love with the sea goddess Calypso and agreed to his ferrying duty to maintain his love of her, and his love of the sea, forever. This eternal love, however, cost him more than his heart could bear. When he arrived at their planned reunion after ten years of upholding his post, primed for his lover, she was not there, in human form, to share the day. So he rejected his heart and his post, and turned cruel. In rejecting his heart, he presumed he would assume control over that which his heart was tied to: the sea. Yet, after confronting Calypso in The Black Pearl's brig (in the middle section of At World's End), he admits, "My heart will always belong to you." For, as she says, "Would you love me if I were anything but as I am?" Calypso is the sea as Davy Jones is tied to the sea. In the climactic battle he snarls, "My freedom was sealed long ago." He rejected not just his heart, he rejected the pirate inside and the pirate life lived outside, in the world, on the sea: a life intended to be led and sailed through all time, forever, past the ocean's end to the ethereal, utopian beyond.
At World's End's title lets us know that this oceanic utopia is finite, or, perhaps, that the precipice is a navigable space. The "end" of the title references not just the end of the world (the ocean, the utopia), but also the end of life and the end of the trilogy. And in the world of Pirates of the Caribbean, all three of these elements are ably transgressed, within the reason of the code. Davy Jones failed the code. At World's End shows how one might perform this able transgression, and live on. Firstly, the premise of this third film's first act is a means to up-end the death of Johnny Depp's iconic Captain Jack Sparrow. Captain Barbossa (the ever growling and charming Geoffrey Rush), who appeared dead at the end of the first film only to be revived at the close of the second film, leads Will Turner (ever-fey Orlando Bloom) and Elisabeth Swann (ever-fierce Keira Knightley) into Davy Jones' Locker -- that is, a land of the dead -- to rescue the lost Captain Jack and return him to the sea -- that is, the land of the living.
Death is surmountable here, given the proper smarts and will and courage to play with and by the code. The final movement from the Locker back to the sea is a literal inversion of the world's end, that plane of the sea. The Black Pearl appears lost, possibly adrift forever in the Locker, until Witty Jack solves their existential riddle in the land of the dead: "Up is down." He must flip the boat, turn the plane of the Locker's sky into the plane of the Caribbean's sea: he must up-end the world. The sunset, from the proper perspective, that is from underneath, is a sunrise. After flipping the boat into the water, with the upside down and the downside up, the sea rushes past the deck, equalizing the space again — righting the world's end, the sea's plane, and exposing the Locker's sunset as the Caribbean's sunrise. Like Jack's newfound lease on life, the day is beginning anew, on the sea.
By the close of At Worlds End, each of these primary heroic characters has once more begun anew and claimed his or her freedom of choice as a pirate, as one bound to the code of the sea. For our no-way lovers Will and Elisabeth this is the rudest denial: they live on, as does their love, yet their union is denied save for a single-day re-union anniversary every ten years. We are led to believe they will succeed where Davy Jones and his mistress Calypso failed because Will honors his promises and his debts alike — and he accepts his bondage to this code, to his place as a pirate, and as a captain of a pirate vessel bound, first and foremost, to the sea and to the beyond. He will not neglect his duty. In honoring this duty, he will honor his love of, for, and with Elisabeth. His freedom — like his love, his piracy and his utopia — is complicated, and bounded, despite its apparent endless horizons. For Captain Jack, this is a similar conundrum: he is free to sail the seas at his leisure again, yet his boat, The Black Pearl, is gone, stolen once more by Captain Barbossa, as it was in the beginning of the series. And so, Jack, too, ends this trilogy as he began it: in a dinghy. Yet he is ruled by none other than himself and the sea.
I know what you're thinking. Really, I do. It’s a summer movie. A summer movie should be fun and easy to grasp. And here I have to agree. But it’s more complicated than that. For one, we are dealing with sequels. In that I have claimed the second and third Pirates films as good sequels, I should also like to claim that any good sequel disrupts and up-ends its predecessor, as well as its preceding film’s logic. It is for this reason the Pirates sequels are so routinely railed against: they sure-handedly undo the first film’s utopian logic. They complicate that film’s utopia just as the trilogy, on the whole, complicates the utopia of the sea, and one’s freedom upon it, and within the world.
The first film, The Curse of The Black Pearl, had a complicated story in its own right, but its structure was sound and its ending was a tidy, fun resolution. The sequels are anything but tidy, as many critics have pointed out. What these critics miss is how the sequels re-appropriate the first film’s signature tropes to re-cast and re-write the trilogy’s narrative, and the pirate genre in general. From the start of the second film, the resolution of the first is put in check: the marriage that seemed so imminent at the close of The Curse of the Black Pearl is literally arrested and barred from happening in Dead Man’s Chest’s opening sequence. At the start of At World’s End, Dead Man's Chest's thrilling dénouement revelation of the revived Barbossa is flipped into a hanging sequence: pirates are being sent to death, not brought back from the dead. Then, to actually pick up the thread of rescuing Captain Jack from Davy Jones’ Locker, the crew has to surrender themselves and their lives to the great plunge into death, over the world’s end.
During the climax of At World's End, the sea opens into a seemingly bottomless (endless) vortex created by Calypso. The Flying Dutchman and The Black Pearl proceed to enter the swirl, to battle to the death. Aboard The Dutchman, a timid East India Trading Company stooge alerts Davy Jones to this danger. Jones, all raged excitement, grabs the wheel from the stooge and spews, "What? Afraid to get wet?" To really watch these films for what they are, one has to risk getting wet. That is, diving in and playing with the images — submitting to the fun. And this should be fun. It’s a bloody pirate movie.
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House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight is the infrequent publisher of the blog Vinyl Is Heavy.
Links for the Day (May 29th, 2007)
1. "Silver Surfer quarter makes U.S. Mint flip": Get me Rex Kramer!
["A Marvel Comics hero is giving George Washington some company on the quarter, but the U.S. Mint doesn't think the stunt is so super."]
2. "007 in '007: Moonraker": Bond and Drax and Jaws, oh my.
["Bond navigates his way sans ‘chute towards Evil Pilot. The pair scuffle for considerably longer this time, in mid-air, as Bond relentlessly fights to remove Evil Pilot’s parachute. (Does the bizarre shot of Bond’s nose nestled in Evil Pilot’s crotch tell us more about James than we ever wanted to know?) This entire fight is a beauty to behold and the jewel in the Bond stunt crown."]
3. "Demme’s Tales of Ordinary Heroes in New Orleans": From The New York Times.
["Victims and despair were what Jonathan Demme expected to find when he headed to New Orleans with his camera. Instead, he said, he discovered tough-minded heroes, who became the stars of his unadorned film “Right to Return: New Home Movies from the Lower Ninth Ward.”"]
4. "Anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan gives up her protest": Read the full letter here.
["But in Monday's 1,200-word letter, titled, "Good Riddance Attention Whore," Sheehan announced that her son "did indeed die for nothing. ... I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful," she wrote. "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. "It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years, and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.""]
5. "Ailing 'Dr. Death' to leave prison": Get me Rex Kramer!
["For nearly a decade, Dr. Jack Kevorkian waged a defiant campaign to help other people kill themselves. The retired pathologist left bodies at hospital emergency rooms and motels and videotaped a death that was broadcast on CBS' "60 Minutes." His actions prompted battles over assisted suicide in many states. But as he prepares to leave prison June 1 after serving more than eight years of a 10- to 25-year sentence in the death of a Michigan man, Kevorkian will find that there's still only one state that has a law allowing physician-assisted suicide -- Oregon."]
Clip of the Day: Bruce Campbell is hungry like the wolf. Thanks to sound man extraordinaire Kevin Seaman for sending the link.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Links for the Day (May 28th, 2007)
1. "R.I.P. Charles Nelson Reilly": Now departed his mortal encumbrance to pursue his selfosophical research in another dimension. See also our "Clip of the Day".
["People always think I'm exaggerating when I say something like "Charles Nelson Reilly taught me to read," but believe me, it was true."]
2. "Best way to Honor": Gary Kamiya for Salon on Memorial Day.
["For me, like most other Americans, Memorial Day is a time for barbecuing, playing Frisbee, loading up coolers with iced beer, and getting out of town. I usually don't think about America's war dead on the last weekend of May any more than I think about our nation's independence on the Fourth of July, or about the birth of Jesus on Christmas."]
3. "Cannes Report: Mike's Drive-Bys": Mike D'Angelo wraps up his Cannes experience.
["Before I get to handicapping the awards (in a separate post to follow), a few regrettably quick notes on the Competition films I didn't have the time/stamina/inclination to address earlier, mostly because none of them exactly blew me away."]
4. "U.S., Iran hold first formal talks in 27 years": From CNN.
["The United States told Iran on Monday its support for militias fighting in Iraq needs to cease, said Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Crocker spoke at a news conference after a meeting with Iranian diplomats in Baghdad -- the first public and formal meeting between U.S. and Iranian representatives since the United States cut off diplomatic relations 27 years ago."]
5. ""It Takes a Thief to Catch a Thief": Crime and the American genre film": First part of a three-part interview with Chris Fujiwara & Mark Roberts. Via Girish Shambu.
["I have a problem with the phrase "film noir," for I'm not sure what it really is. Maybe in Japan and France, people can talk about this genre more precisely, but in America film noir became more of a marketing tool — and a very important one — because it was one of the ways that repertory movie theaters in the United States managed to stay alive. They found that audiences were drawn to these so-called film noir, crime or mystery thrillers, films with actors like Humphrey Bogart. Actually, Bogart was one of the stars most strongly associated with the American repertory-theater movement, since the Brattle Theater in Cambridge was the place where they revived "Casablanca" in the 1960s and thereby helped that film become well known again. So, for me as an American, the phrase "film noir" has a certain association with marketing."]
Clip of the Day: In honor of Charles Nelson Reilly, the opening sequence to the Millennium episode "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense".
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
The 2007 Cannes Film Festival Awards
The 60th edition of the Cannes Film Festival has come to a close. indieWIRE has a complete wrap-up. See after the break for the complete list of winners in the Competition Section.
COMPETITION
Palme d'Or: "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," directed by Cristian Mungiu
Grand Prix (runner-up): "The Mourning Forest" (Mogari No Mori), directed by Naomi Kawase
Prix de la Mise en Scene (Best Director): Julian Schnabel for "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon)
Prix du 60th Anniversaire: Gus Van Sant, director of "Paranoid Park"
Prix du Scenario (Best Screenplay Award): Fatih Akin for "The Edge of Heaven" (Auf Der Anderen Siete)
Camera d'Or (For best first feature): "Meduzot," directred by Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen
Camera d'Or Special Mention: "Control," directed by Anton Corbijn
Prix du Jury (Jury Prize) (tie): "Persepolis," directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud; and "Stellet Licht," directed by Carlos Reygadas
Prix d'interpretation feminine (Best Actress): Jeon Do-yeon for "Secret Sunshine" by Lee Chang-dong
Prix d'interpretation masculine (Best Actor): Constantine Lavronenko for "Izgnanie" by Andrei Zviaguintsev
Palme d'Or (short film): "Ver Llover," directed by Elisa Miller
Special Mention (short):"Run," directed by Mark Albiston
Special Mention (short): "Ah Ma," directed by Anthony Chen
Links for the Day (May 27th, 2007)
1. "All Entertainment All the Time ": Ray Carney dedicates Page 74 of his website's "Letters" section to a fascinating essay excerpt by Mark Edmundson.
["More and more, we Americans like to watch (and not to do). In fact watching is our ultimate addiction. My students were the progeny of two hundred available cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. They grew up with their noses pressed against the window of that second spectral world that spins parallel to our own, the World Wide Web. There they met life at second or third hand, peering eagerly, taking in the passing show, but staying remote, apparently untouched by it. So conditioned, they found it almost natural to come at the rest of life with a sense of aristocratic expectation: “What have you to show me that I haven’t yet seen?”…. The classroom atmosphere they most treasured was relaxed, laid-back, cool. The teacher should never get exercised about anything, on pain of being written off as a buffoon. Nor should she create an atmosphere of vital contention, where students lost their composure, spoke out, became passionate, expressed their deeper thoughts and fears, or did anything that might cause embarrassment. Embarrassment was the worst thing that could befall one; it must be avoided at whatever cost."]
2. "Paul Newman says he’s given up acting": More time to focus on Newman's Own Lemonade.
["Paul Newman says he’s given up acting. “I’m not able to work anymore as an actor at the level I would want to,” Newman, 82, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday. “You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So that’s pretty much a closed book for me.” Newman, star of films such as “Hud,” “Cool Hand Luke” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” added: “I’ve been doing it for 50 years. That’s enough.”"]
3. "Celine & Julie: the typeface": Pat Graham's first encounter with a Jacques Rivette masterpiece.
["Sometimes it helps not to know anything . . . Coming to Celine and Julie Go Boating at the Film Center two weeks ago with "fresh eyes," so to speak (see post and comments for May 15), I wondered what I could possibly find there that hadn't already been analyzed to death—written about, pontificated on, etc. Obviously not a lot, since if someone like yours truly can come up with an idea, then somebody else already has. So surprise, surprise, from the very first frame: that art nouveau lettering in the titles and credits. Where's it coming from, what's it all about?"]
4. "Dreamgirls (USA, 2006, Bill Condon) and Blood Diamond (USA, 2006, Ed Zwick) are given the old one-two one-two, snicker-snack, and then we all go galumphing back": Dan Jardine and Ben Livant suffer for their art.
["I am postponing the cooking of supper to be followed by the watching of... Dreamgirls... sigh; goddamn wife hit the video store. She also brought home Blood Diamond, about which I am considerably more enthusiastic. Seen it?"]
5. "Plug-Ugly": Andrew Tracy on 28 Weeks Later and the state of cinema.
["The smugness that emanates from these films is only fitting considering that they’ve appointed themselves de facto textbooks of twisted civic duty, of moral instruction in the “realities” of an ugly world. Watching these films, it is implied, is good for you, the “bleaker” and “darker” the better. It’s the kind of mindset that leads reviewers to praise children being hung and limbs being hacked off in kiddie studio fare like Pirates of the Caribbean 3 for being “uncompromising” (uncompromising of what?). Ugliness, pointless and unrevealing ugliness, is the coin of this new realm, and like currency, it simply circulates around and around on its mercenary way. The unnerving and terrifying cinematic power of the original Chainsaws and Living Deads transcended their generic packaging and filtered into the world at large; their inheritors package an unnerving and terrifying world and serve it back in consumable portions. 28 Weeks Later and its ilk do not make one reflect on the ugliness of the world, but on the needless ugliness of the far narrower film world. To look away from this garbage is not to refuse to face reality, but to look towards more rewarding films."]
Clip of the Day: Paul Martin points us to our Clip of the Day, a more than brief profile of filmmaker Errol Morris.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Staying on the reservation: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
By Matt Zoller Seitz
You might think HBO would be the right venue for a drama based on Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown’s 1970 counterhistory about Native Americans’ last stand against late-19th-century attempts to subjugate and reeducate them. Unfortunately, this film by Yves Simoneau is as dry and expository as the official textbooks that Brown’s fiery book aimed to refute.
To read the review, click here. Read more!
Links for the Day (May 26th, 2007)
1. "The #54 War Movie of the Last 50 Years." A Memo from the Department of Heresy: Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is maudlin, simplistic, illogical and derivative; it's also a tacit justification of U.S. war crimes. By Sean Gilman of The End of Cinema.
["I'd always remembered that it was [Jeremy] Davies' [character] at the end of the film who shoots the POW, committing the film's major war crime. Watching it again, I was surprised at how often these murders occur. In fact, the film can easily be interpreted as a coming-of age story in which we learn how necessary it is to execute POWs because they shot at us first. After the Omaha Beach sequence, the Americans shoot defenseless Germans in a trench and murder surrendering Germans with their hands raised in the air. The emotional power (and graphic bloodinesss) of the preceding beach landing is apparently supposed to justify the murdering of these POWs, just as the death of the medic is later supposed to justify the murder of the German that Burns causes so much trouble over. These crimes reach their culmination when Davies, after cowering throughout the final stages of the final battle, assassinates the German soldier he let kill Crazy Eddie, as that soldier's telling his compatriots what a coward Davies is. Davies, of course, had been the one stridently protesting Burns's attempts to murder the other POW. Thus the audience member, after being shown their own cowardice, is asserted to be a murderer as well. It's one of the most insulting things I've ever seen on film, and I can't believe how many people are willing to let Spielberg get away with it."]
2. "Critics Week Grand Prize to XXY." By Rebecca Leffler of The Hollywood Reporter.
["CANNES -- Lucia Puenzo's 'XXY' will take home the grand prize for the Festival de Cannes' Critics Week sidebar, organizers announced Friday night. The Argentine-Spanish-French co-production, which explores the psychological challenges of an adolescent hermaphrodite, was voted upon by journalists and film critics after each screening. First-time helmer Puenzo will receive €5,000 ($6,726) and an invite to the Moulin d'Ande to hone her writing and directing skills."]
3. "Pictures of You: If every film is a reflector, Magic Mirror says you don't make any sense." Nathan Lee of The Village Voice on Manoel de Oliveira's comedy about spirituality and class. Related: Michael J. Anderson of Tativille and MZS in The New York Times
["Academic theologians with a taste for obdurate Brechtian aesthetics, say hello to your new favorite film! Civilians, even those versed in Oliveira at his most extreme, may find their patience pushed to the limit. Thick with mirrors and breaches of the fourth wall, Magic Mirror is avidly aware of being watched, even as it rejects every avenue of accessibility. "]
4. ""Cannes: We Own The Night." Premiere's Glenn Kenny on the new feature by James Gray, director of Little Odessa and The Yards. The trailer is here.
["To call this film a noble failure is only to apt, since its nobility actually contributes to its failure."]
5. "Sony touts tiny, film-thin TV screen that bends." From the Associated Press.
["TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- In the race for ever-thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all -- a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-color video."]
Clip of the Day:
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Princess in chains: Leia's Jedi bikini
A contribution to Edward Copeland's Star Wars blogathon.
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By Justine Elias
Take a look at Princess Leia on the posters for Star Wars movies IV through VI. If you didn't know better, you might think that the role had re-cast – and in a way it was. The original poster looks like pulp sci fi/fantasy novel book jacket: a futuristic yet retro illustration of an anonymous, muscular blond hero wielding a gleaming sword (or something) while a leggy heroine, cocks her hip (and a pistol) in the foreground. This galactic bombshell doesn't look much like Carrie Fisher. Only the signature bagel-braids identify this heroine as Princess Leia. Her shredded low-cut frock looks nothing like the mostly practical and un-revealing costumes Leia favors throughout the series – with one glaring exception we see in Return of the Jedi.
Leia's most memorable getup – according to the readers of Empire Magazine and most of the males who saw the movie in their formative years – is the metal bikini ensemble she wore as the prisoner of sluglord Jabba the Hutt. No, the bikini wasn't Leia's idea. With her main man Han Solo kidnapped by bounty hunters at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, Leia makes a decidedly butch, near-incognito entrance at the start of Jedi as a commando on a rescue mission. But she's immediately caught, and for no reason whatever, she's made over into a Vegas version of an Egyptian belly dancer, chained to her captor. (Jabba is a testy slug – her predecessor, a green-skinned alien girl, got tossed into a pit for resisting his slimy advances.)
No surprise: Leia in her metal bikini, not Leia the commando chief, landed on the Jedi poster. A troubled-looking, black clad Luke wields a light saber, Han Solo strikes a James Bond/gunslinger pose aiming straight at us, but Leia, onetime Senator and rebel leader, ignores the fuzzy Ewok over her left shoulder, aims a come hither gaze at the viewer. Like one of those bronze-age Barbarian babes of a pulp fantasy novel, Leia looks seriously naked.
Like many girls who'd thrilled to Leia's heroism and defiance, my heart sank when I saw the poster and the whole Jabba the Hutt scene. She'd been the forthright, unglamorous, smart-mouthed antidote to the fairytale princesses. Was she going to be stuck in the damsel-in-distress role again?
Not for long. During the movie's best sequence, she rescues herself, turning part of that skimpy costume – the chain – into a deadly weapon. Frankly, she's a bit frightening as she goes after Jabba. I wonder: when all those Star Wars fanboys fantasize over a bikini-clad Leia, are they remembering the beautiful, vulnerable, subdued princess – or the one who's been biding her time, seething, measuring the strength of that chain?
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House contributor Justine Elias blogs as Film Fatale at Movie City News. Her writing on film and television has appeared in The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix and other publications.
Links for the Day (May 25th, 2007)
1. Let the Star Wars Blog-a-thon Begin. Time to start geeking out! And what better place to start than Ed Copeland's blog.
["I have a confession: the photo above tells you all you need to know about what it would take to get me to join the Dark Side of the Force. The ability to fire lightning from your fingers? Sign me up. I can just imagine the joy it would bring the next time I'm in a theater and some yammering idiot won't shut up or takes a cell phone call. "]
2. Star Wars' Libertarian Mission. The Spectator looks at George's cutting room floor.
[Biggs: "What good's all your uncle's work if the Empire takes it over? You know they've already started to nationalize commerce in the central systems? It won't be long before your uncle is just a tenant, slaving for the greater glory of the Empire."]
3.Shamus on the Duke at 100 – Part 9. It's Big Jake, Jake.
["It's time to take this Duke-a-thon into the sunset. Here is where it all began 100 years ago this Saturday, when Marion Morrison was born in this tiny house in Winterset, Iowa."]
4. Put It Out, Shweetheart. Hollywood to snuff butts.
["Depictions of smoking in movies will now be a factor when deciding what a film's rating will be, possibly making a PG-13 movie R-rated, the Motion Picture Association of America said yesterday. The policy affects only new movies."]
5. Mick Jagger Almost Got Clockwork Role. The Rolling Stones owned the rights to the story at the time and Jagger had his heart on playing the lead.
[ Malcolm McDowell: "Thank God no one ever gave the Stones the money to make it because Mick Jagger had set his heart on playing Alex the rapist and murderer and the rest of the band were going to be his hit squad The Droogs. Can you believe it?"]
Clip of the Day:
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Mala, Itchy, Lumpy and Bea: The Star Wars Holiday Special
A contribution to Edward Copeland's Star Wars blogathon.
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By Robert Humanick
and I just have to live with it.”
To write a meaningful review of The Star Wars Holiday Special – that is, to go beyond detailing the misery induced by its atrocious mise-en-scene and bizarre musical set pieces – seems about as easy a task as explaining the themes of Eraserhead to a preschooler using only one-syllable words. Merely imparting the experience of watching it is a daunting task; words tend to fail in expressing an experience that is at once so entertaining and agonizing. If ever a television program defined “so bad, it’s good," this is it, as if the initial pain of having one’s brain cells killed off is followed the euphoria that accompanies their absence. Were I somehow able to tap into my subconscious and conjure up my soul's undiluted feelings on this matter, the resulting verbal tangent would probably be comprised of gnarly groans and the occasional squawking noise.
Chances are, if you’ve heard of the special, or if you’re even reading this now, you know the general plot, but here are a few points for the uninitiated. With Star Wars taking a long time ago, yada yada, there was no Christmas – instead, we have the Wookie holiday “Life Day.” What exactly this celebration commemorates, I could not tell you, but it seems to involve walking in out space without any sort of breathing apparatus, in what appear to be red Ku Klux Klan uniforms. Han Solo is rushing to get Chewie back home on Kashyyyk in time, where his wife Mala (who wears lipstick – creepy), father Itchy (just plain creepy), and son Lumpy (who sounds as if he’s swallowed a kazoo) await his return. Distilled to its relevant scenes, this plot would warrant about eleven, maybe twelve minutes of screen time, so it is no surprise that this much-hyped (and, at the time, widely seen) special is bloated to an absurd 90 minutes thanks to numerous guest star appearances, a padded subplot involving Stormtroopers on Kashyyyk, pointless dramatic cul-de-sacs involving famous Star Wars characters, and some of the most nonsensical scenes of intended humor ever known to man. Drug use is highly recommended.
By all traditional standards, “The Star Wars Holiday Special” is bad. It’s wretchedly, unwatchably, mind-numbingly bad (or, as Ed Gonzalez put it, “It certainly was special”). One needn’t more than a moment to understand why George Lucas would like to personally hunt down every bootlegged copy of the special and smash it with a sledgehammer. That it even goes so far as to include recognized elements of the Star Wars canon (the result of an initially-approving Lucas having penned the original script before no less than five rewrites resulting in the final version) as well as the original actors from A New Hope resuming their character’s parts, makes it all the more offensive to those who hold sacred all things long, long ago and far, far away (and yes, it even features the Wilhelm scream). Truly, this should be required viewing for everyone who’s ever sent Lucas a death threat for creating Jar-Jar Binks, if only for the sake of perspective.
Nonetheless, “The Star Wars Holiday Special” is so astounding in its lack of anything that could be considered reasonably watchable that it achieves something of an unintended, surrealist nightmare vision. Responses I’ve heard to the special -- most of them made within the first five to ten minutes -- include the following: “My mind is bleeding.” “There is no God.” “I just had a stroke.” “Correction: There is a God, and he hates me.” Yet, by the time all is said and done with, everyone for whom I've screened the special has found it to be surprisingly enjoyable, even if it requires a complete realignment of what we consider to be “good” and “bad.” Certain moments achieve the hallucinatory tunnel-vision that defines such films as Apocalypse Now, Come and See, and Manos: The Hands of Fate (here, I think I officially began palpitating at the moment Bea Arthur began singing to a giant rat in the Cantina).
With apologies to the pre-2007 released of Killer of Sheep, this may be the most famous film ever to have been available only in bootleg form, and it is this cult-like status that it has reached amongst Star Wars fans that leads me to believe my genuinely liking it isn’t such a minority status after all. Suicidal thoughts during and immediately after one’s initial viewing are understandable, but few images in the cinema have ever been more uproarious than Harvey Corman’s bit as a four-armed, extra-terrestrial Julia Child rip-off (Stir, whip! Stir, whip! Whip, whip, stir!). Things only get weirder when Itchy partakes in what can only be described as PG-rated Wookie porn (starring Oscar-nominee Diahann Carroll, no less), or when the lead singer of Jefferson Starship sings into a lightsaber microphone-cum-dildo, or when a wide-eyed Carrie Fisher sings specially written lyrics to a slightly reworked version of the Star Wars theme. The actress claims to have no memory of working on the special whatsoever; one look at her eyes – which remain unusually dilated even in the midst of the beaming stage lights – explains why.
My twisted adoration for this thing rests on the belief that the best of cinematic experiences absorb the mind and body in a way that temporarily dissolve us from our perceived realities, allowing us to perceive the world in ways anew after they’ve concluded. The pitfall here is that this description also fits some of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in a theater (although Bad Boys II doesn’t so much absorb the mind as it does assault it like a roller coaster gone awry). Yet, somehow, the The Star Wars Holiday Special miraculously straddles the line between the two, its countless sins too innocent to offend, and its unwavering bottom-of-the-barrel aesthetic something of a wonder to behold. Unsurprisingly, the animated sequence – the only portion of the special’s production that Lucas had a direct hand in, famous for featuring the first appearance of Boba Fett in the Star Wars universe (riding what looks like Gertie the Dinsoaur) – is the only sequence with any deliberate sense of style to it, and thus feels strangely out of place. That some fans are unable to bring themselves to enjoy, or even watch, this oh-so-bizarre 90 minutes is understandable, but if you think you're up to the challenge, I urge you to experience it, if only for experience's sake. It is far more entertaining than it has any right to be.___________________________________________________
House contributor Robert Humanick's writings have appeared in Slant Magazine and on his blog The Projection Booth. He also works sporadically with fellow Slant critic Paul Schrodt at The Stranger Song. Read more!
Lost Thursdays: Season Three, Ep. 22: "Through the Looking Glass"
By Andrew Dignan
Those looking for definitive answers from their television viewing have probably long given up on Lost. No show seems to derive more satisfaction out of turning even the most innocuous of plot points into a Möbius strip of contradictory evidence; the most indisputable of truths into bold-faced lies. If I’ve learned in my year-plus in service of chronicling the show it’s that there’s no quicker way to be made to look foolish than to take something on this show at face value or declare anything as fact.
So, having laid that groundwork and hopefully covered my back end, Lost’s third season finale, the self-referentially titled “Through the Looking Glass,” would seem to have dropped a heck of a bombshell into the laps of viewers just in time for the show’s planned nine month hiatus. We find the survivors of Oceanic 815 on the precipice of rescue, having made contact with Naomi’s boat through a multi-tiered plan to disable the island’s jamming mechanisms. We learn that the rescue itself is steeped in misdirection and ulterior motives with Ben warning that Naomi is not whom she claims to be (something Charlie later confirms in his dying moments). The very fate of every single person on the island hangs in the balance in a way we’ve never seen before on Lost. Yet the bombshell arrives in a place we’ve become least conditioned to expect it: in the show’s character-building flashbacks set in the real world. That’s because this week’s flashback isn’t a flashback at all. 
Set in an unspecified number of years in the future (long enough for him to have grown a truly horrendous Serpico beard), we find Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and untold others living their lives after escaping the island and simply trying to cope with readjusting (some more successfully than others). It would appear that no matter what happens between now and May of 2010, somehow, someway, some of these people will return to the lives they once knew. Whether their lives are any better for it, is yet to be seen.
There’s been a lot of discussion online about the possibility of time travel and parallel universes coming into play in the Lost mythology and watching “Through the Looking Glass,” with its shocking leap into the future and Jack’s rueful claims that they all made a mistake and never should have left the island at times left me wondering if we weren’t watching a Twilight Zone-like alternate reality. One possible clue: while in the throws of a prescription-drug freak-out, future Jack refers to his father, Christian, as though he were alive. Is this a version of the universe where his father didn’t die while on a bender in Australia, or his Jack himself too far gone to differentiate between the events of the past and the present?
With all the talk of the island as purgatory, could the show truly be as cynical to posit that life outside the island is actually hell, a destination these characters are on a collision course with as a result of their actions in the present? Pre-determination being such a predominant theme on Lost, is the future set in stone with the very idea which gives them hope ultimately what tears them apart? Throughout the hour we see Jack emotionally distraught after reading of the death of an unidentified person in the newspaper (based on fleeting evidence picked up upon with my freeze frame and the reaction of the characters, specifically Kate, I’m going to begin the speculation that the deceased is Locke) to the point where he’s self-medicating and contemplating suicide. Now that they’re free of their island prison has the oft-quoted “live together, die alone” become more relevant than ever? With the shared experience of life on the island safely in the rearview mirror, have their lives lost all meaning? At least when Adam & Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden they knew they were leaving paradise.
I’m left to wonder though, now that they’ve introduced the gimmick of jumping forward to life post-island (After L*O*S*T?) as a storytelling device how can they not return to it in subsequent seasons? In a strange twist, the events of the island would serve as character development, informing the future and would be, in essence, back-story of the events yet to come. The trials of grappling with polar bears and underwater layers could lay the groundwork for the comparatively quotidian events of life in the future, with each week’s drama come from the crippling depression in the wake of whatever tragedy that collectively will befall the castaways sometime between now and their eventual rescue. How did Kate beat her murder wrap and become legit? Can Locke (Terry O’Quinn) still walk off the island? Is Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) still the most intimidating soccer mom in history now that she’s back in suburbia? Forget 42 more episodes; with this in its back pocket the show could sustain itself for another decade.
As a critic of the show’s reliance on flashbacks as rudimentary psycho-analysis and as a means to pad-out its episode count, I applaud any attempt by Lost’s writers to break apart their own design, kicking aside the dogmatic structure which has long served as a crutch. In that spirit, I recognize the boldness of last night’s gambit even if I found the execution somewhat lacking. The reveal, which became easier to predict as the episode went along, came after an unbearably prolonged (and stretched out to fill two hours) trip down Jack’s self destructive path, mirroring the downward spiral we saw him on in the season premiere. Drinking too much, raging at innocent bystanders, sporting mangy facial hair; we’ve been here before, regardless of what date is on the calendar. Life on the island may have changed him but it seems that future Jack is just as dull as past and present Jack. 
Furthermore, is there a more depressing development than learning no matter how hard we collectively pray there’s no way they’re ever going to kill off Jack (or for that matter Kate)? I’d always held out hope that the show would come to the realization that the character had run its course long ago and might best be served as a sacrificial offering to the island during sweeps. I’ve seen the future (literally), and it’s sure to include three Jack flashbacks a year for the next three years; each one returning to that oh so fertile ground of his raging insecurities and god-complex. Truth be told, I find that infinitely more terrifying than the Others, smoke monsters and Ben Linus’ (Michael Emerson) crazy eyes.
Befitting not only a two-hour episode but a season finale, “Through the Looking Glass” is an exceedingly busy installment, with several full-scale (for this show) action sequences and a death count which I placed at over a dozen, including the first assault with a spear-gun I can remember since Friday the 13th Part III. Yet the episode struck me as lurching and unable to build any real sense of momentum, with the action largely perfunctory and the plot ratcheting forward in all manners expected. It doesn’t require Desmond’s gift for clairvoyance to predict that the show was not going to kill of two of its most popular characters (Jin and Sayid) and a third who probably helps steal away some of the CBS demos (Bernard) off-screen just because Ben ordered their execution, no matter how much drama the show tries to wring from the situation. Similarly, as rewarding as it was to see Hurley (Jorge Garcia) defy his critics and prove his value by riding in like the cavalry, flattening the Others with his VW bus (as well as lending relevance to the largely criticized events of “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”) the moment seemed to have been airlifted out of an old A-Team episode. And in a development predicted by almost everyone (except for…ahem…me) reports of Locke’s death on the island have been greatly exaggerated as the great bald one crawls out of his own grave after seeing a vision of the long absent Walt (Malcolm David Kelley having visibly aged and sprouted up about a foot and a half) who seemingly wills Locke into living. Locke works through the pain of a gut shot to show up just in time to kill Naomi—which to the uninformed castaways must have come across as inexplicably savage and unforgivable, making their muted response rather bizarre—and beg Jack to not call her boat with the satellite phone before slinking back into the jungle (I suspect this moment in history eats at future Jack with both Ben and Locke correctly pleading for him to not radio for help).
“Through the Looking Glass” lacked the grandeur of last week’s “Greatest Hits” a near-masterpiece of pacing, tension and emotional heft, and nor does it compare favorably with last season’s Desmond-centric 2-hour finale. Episode for episode, Lost is often only as good as its flashbacks (flash-forward/flash-sideways, whatever) and this week’s was brutal. Devoid of any urgency or connection to other human beings, the off-island sequences served as stand-alone speed-bumps, bringing the episode to a screeching halt every time we cut away (and it bears repeating that Jack’s beard may be the funniest joke the show’s ever played), having the adverse effect of making a 120-minute installment feel twice as long. In years to come, I suspect fans will remember fondly the episode’s stunning, closing moments reveal while forgetting just how lethargic and derivative it was getting there.
The one part of the episode that did hold up its end of the bargain was Charlie (and later Desmond) aboard the underwater station. Held captive by two ornery female Others, Charlie does his best to channel Bruce Willis’ Joe Hallenbeck from The Last Boy Scout, joking, taunting and even singing as he’s pistol-whipped while tied to a chair. Emboldened with the knowledge that he’s destined to die, but in the process will accomplish what he’s set out to do (disable the island’s jamming frequency), the character is freed of all anxieties of both physical harm and failure, at one point cheerfully informing the women that he has no idea how he’ll shut the machine down, only that he somehow will. What follows is two shooting deaths (the show continues its disconcerting trend of killing off attractive young women in sudden, random flurries of gunfire), the aforementioned spear-gun attack, fleeting contact with the outside world (in the form of Penny) an underwater grenade explosion and the sad, heroic death of Charlie Pace.
It’s a testament to how compelling the show can be that Charlie’s death, the details of which we’ve known for weeks now, is still shocking and sufficiently heart-tugging. Dominic Monaghan is a fine actor who’s been given nothing to do for a season and a half besides mope around like a troll. I certainly lent my voice to the “Kill Charlie” chorus at one point but I now feel strangely guilty considering how the show chose to write-out the character. Unwittingly an instrument in the castaways “downfall” (again, if we’re to believe the show’s flash-forward), Charlie flicks the switch under the prophesized blinking yellow light and has a teleconference conversation with Desmond’s philanthropist girlfriend Penny (Sonya Walger), where he learns the truth about Naomi. Seemingly having survived his fatal quest, Charlie hears a tapping at the window where he sees Bakunin (Andrew Divoff) detonating a hand grenade outside, causing the chamber to flood. Even in his dying moments, Charlie plays the hero, warning Desmond that it’s not Penny’s boat out there looking for them.
The characters on Lost are all pawns in an elaborately constructed chess game, with the viewer often a helpless bystander. “Through the Looking Glass” offers a glimpse at the show’s checkmate: the mystery no longer being “will they escape” but rather “why they shouldn’t.” The producers of Lost have been boasting about a “game changing” development in the season finale and I suspect this is it. Will this forever change the way we watch the show? With a destination firmly in place the suspense is derived not from what will happen but how they’ll be rescued, and when and why it was (according to Jack) the worst mistake they ever made. We all have a very long time to chew this over; we’re like the castaways in that way. We know where we’re going, but we have no idea how we’re getting there.
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