Awesome start.
Quick thoughts:
That stuff on the plane was what I thought the show would end on ages ago. Oh well. Nearly.
I stand by my opinion, if they get Kate and Sawyer together they will have ruined the entire show.
Finally, I hope the Lost Crew get out of the Aztec Zone soon. They only have 2 crystals, that’s just 10 seconds inside the Crystal Dome!
Since the dawn of this new year I have acquired two items of clothing in quick succession that I have not had since I was about 10. I am now the owner of a pair of pajamas and a pair of slippers. Now to anyone who owns said things this may seem inconsequential, but as I pondered this last night they appeared to me as some form of grim reminder of my mortality. For me pajamas and slippers are the uniform of old people, and I now own them, having successfully journeyed through the majority of my twenties without them.
What is more alarming is the relatively rapid speed with which I have acquired them since the year has begun. This has me wondering if I have somehow begun some kind of rapid aging process. By March will I be drinking wine? By August will I find myself becoming increasingly conservative and borderline racist? I already think modern pop music sounds like an Amstrad loading a tape-cassette of the Batman: The Movie game in 1989, but sped up and with someone yammering jibberish over the top.
Don’t be surprised then, to find me shuffling off this mortal coil as a soiled-nappy wearing, toothless skeleton by early December, the victim of some cruel age advancement syndrome.
Friends, I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and he is most definitely snickering.
Occasionally I have to sift through the spam folder and fish out some legitimate comments that get hauled in there. This also affords me the chance to see what kind of guff is being sent my way. For the most part its your usual wang-enhancing-pill fare or just random numbers and figures or just list of the various things people might bee looking for on the internet. (Usually porn).
A new(ish) trend however features a more intelligible kind of gibberish, a sort of three-times-translated garbled attempt at some kind of sense, many of which are delightfully odd. For instance:
Haven’t laughed so unsympathetic benefit of years! That was a verified treat! To regard The Hangover You are common to relish it!! Reminds me my Las vegas
or
Fantabulous I well-grounded be familiar with on yahoo some unified got sued $80 000 per song downloaded ! 24 songs you do the math! I would take home a BILLION in this HOLDER! Run-of-the-mill people! Cause her a train!
Fantabulous, indeed.
Via Mulley, comes this succinct 8 minute summation of everything important that has happened in Lost up until the end of the last series. Narrated by some kind of robot, it less reminds you of everything that happened more lists in frenetic fashion all the things you saw. Still, tis a good way to refresh the brain-matter and stoke the fires of interest ahead of the final season. If, by the way, you left the show around the third series, give this a whirl just to see all the wackyness you missed out on.
I generally don’t watch a lot of television dramas. That is, I don’t sit down and actively follow many such programs. There have been exceptions to this, as a child I was addicted to / terrified by Twin Peaks, a show I revisited as an adult on DVD and enjoyed more than ever. I was also a big fan of The Sopranos, and am currently eagerly awaiting the finale season of Lost.
For the most part, however, I don’t spend a lot of time trawling through DVD boxsets or downloading the latest episodes of whatever from the States. Generally this is due to the fact that I am more interested in doing other things. Also, whilst I am a big fan of films, and I love comedy television, I get a bit distracted when it comes to TV dramas, especially long running serial ones.
The last show I tried getting into was Heroes. I really enjoyed it to begin with, but by the end of the second season I had lost all interest in it. It was a dual case of my gradually losing the will to follow such a sprawling show and a general decline of the shows quality. It should be noted however that my continued love of Lost, with its inherent sprawling-ness, points to Heroes gradual decline as the main reason for my abandoning. Lost, though, I am still a big fan of. For me it has been paced perfectly over its life-time in both revealing and answering enough week after week, season after season. Most other such dramas, however, just don’t do it for me.
Tonight I decided to get back in on the ground floor with a new drama show, FlashForward. I had heard glowing recommendations from friends and it came with an intriguing premise. To sum up the program’s setup; on one afternoon, worldwide, the entire population of the globe have a 2-minute blackout in which they have visions of their lives 6 months into the future. We then follow the fortunes of a number of these characters as they attempt to make sense of what they saw (including a cornucopia of dilemmas from alcoholism, to infidelity, to death) and attempt to find out who or what caused the blackout to happen. So far so good.
The idea, and its unveiling are intriguing. Sadly however the show seems plagued by what I fear is now an endemic characteristic of modern television (and much of modern cinema), namely that of a rapid-fire pacing of the plot, involving clumsy, ham-fisted info-dumping dialogue that aims to ram as much storyline into an hour, spelled out as clearly as possible to keep people from wondering for just one second what is going on. The idea of subtlety, building-of-tension, or any kind of ambiguity seems to be a foreign concept.
This is not to say that the show is not enjoyable. The concept behind it is strong enough to keep me interested for now, and its pretty well acted and generally well put together. The first episode in particular ended with a humdinger of a cliff hanger. But even then I can’t help but think to myself that in the olden days of yore, a cliff-hanger like that would have come in episode 4 or 5, or (God forbid) at the end of the first season. Alas, it seems TV executives and the public at large just don’t wanna wait anymore. Everything must be spelled out and hinted to within 5 minutes or we will simply switch away and the show will be cancelled before the first episode ends.
This need to move things forward eventually caught up with Twin Peaks. David Lynch was forced eventually to reveal Laura Palmers killer much earlier than he had planned (Indeed he had planned to never reveal her killer). It saddens me to think that TV executives just won’t trust audiences to stick with something which doesn’t reveal its hand straight away.
The result of this breath-neck pacing is not just a lack of tension, but also results in the unfortunate clunky dialogue that necessitates such box-ticking story telling. (See Heroes eventual fate). I fear this will also happen with FlashForward.
I’ll stick with it for now though, its plus points are just about out-weighing the negatives. But for how long? Ironically, it will be this attention-deficit-style that will possibly bore me and drive me away.
I have an annoying (to some) habit of going onto Wikipedia and reading about anything I have just come into contact with. I often bother my girlfriend after we have seen a film “based on a true story”, by trying to determine the accuracy of what had just seen and informing her of the deviations from reality. But this activity pretty much extends to any film or television show I have watched.
So the other day, after I enjoyed a festive showing of the classic 1984 film “The Karate Kid”, I duly fired it up and began reading about the film I had just viewed (and have done about one hundred times).
There’s a scene in the film when Daniel goes through some belongings of Mr. Miyagi. One of the artefacts is a letter informing Mr. Miyagi that his wife has died during child-birth whilst she was in an internment camp. Then Daniel finds Miyagi’s war medals. I had always found this odd, as the idea of a US Officer having his own wife imprisoned in an internment camp whilst at the same time serving in the Army of that country just impossible.
Wikipedia confirmed however, that he was indeed a member of the US Armed Forces, and the article speculates as to whether Miyagi had been a member of the (real) 442nd Infantry Regiment. And as is also my want when on Wikipedia I duly clicked on the hyperlink to a page dedicated to the 442nd.
I was amazed with what I read.
The 442nd Infantry, formerly the 442nd Regimental Combat Team of the United States Army, was an Asian American unit composed of mostly Japanese Americans who fought in Europe during the Second World War.[2] The families of many of its soldiers were subject to internment. The 442nd was a self-sufficient fighting force, and fought with uncommon distinction in Italy, southern France, and Germany. The unit became the most highly decorated regiment in the history of the United States Armed Forces, including 21 Medal of Honor recipients.
Not only did Japanese-Americans fight for a country who at the same time had imprisoned their families, but they did so with unrivaled bravery and honour. Mind-boggling. I guess it speaks volumes about the utter madness that is war.
Check it out for yourself, the 442nd Infantry Regiment on Wikipedia.
In 2009 they took Michael Jackson, and the Black Eyed Peas released “I Gotta Feeling”. If any year in recorded history deserves the title of” worst year ever” its this one.
Party on brothers and sisters, I hope next year is a rocking one for you. Let’s get the party started.
Being a big fan of both David Lynch and meditation, I’ve been keen to read his book “Catching the Big Fish”, in which he discribes how Transcendental Meditation has helped him foster creativity in his work.
So today, I went on to Amazon.co.uk to order the book. And, as is the case on all Amazon product pages, there is the Product Description. As this, folks, as of December 26th, 2009, is the text for the product description of David Lynch’s “Catching The Big Fish”
Musical verse accompanies a milkman and his cranky kitty as they make their morning rounds. The milkman knows his hometown; he knows who needs ice cream for a birthday party, who just broke a leg, and who has a new baby. He even helps return a lost dog that’s hiding along his route. This pitch-perfect, retro read-aloud’s gentle sensibility is ideally matched with beautiful art that powerfully evokes an era of classic illustration.
For the life of me, I cannot tell whether that is intentional, which wouldn’t really be surprising at all, or the most appropriate mix-up I’ve ever seen.
Or if, indeed, that is an internally accurate description of the books contents. When it arrives I’ll let you know.
Them fuck heads in Copenhagen might have condemned us to a slow-painful death by melting, but it makes me feel better knowing the Helicopter Boyz are out there, doing their thing.
