What a long, strange week it's been. I don't know about you, but I am more than ready for the weekend. It should be fun times, with a few birthday celebrations, and, on Saturday, our annual trip to Wizard World LA, a mecca for all things ain't-it-cool. As always, I try to cap off the day's events with an appropriately geek-friendly movie, so this year it's looking like the crew and I will hit up a free screening of Doomsday, which basically looks like Escape From New York with Lara Croft subbed in for Snake Plissken - aka, a potentially old-school style good ol' fashioned B-movie. Hopefully it's at least decent, we shall see.
Speaking of 1980's classics ... rumor today is that there's talk of remaking ROBOCOP. All I can say is: DO NOT REMAKE THIS MOVIE, perhaps the greatest action movie ever made. Unless they somehow found a way to do a true sequel, WITH Peter Weller, there is no point in a remake. I mean, is no classic sacred? Between this and the long-gestating Escape from NY remake ... I for one have had enough. How about some NEW ideas, people. Leave the good stuff well enough alone.
- One shout-out I have to give is to a really great new website that I have been singing the praises of for a long while now. The site is Hulu.com, and everyone should run to check it out. And not only because it was co-founded by NBCU and my department has had a big hand in shaping the site. Seriously though, I was pretty skeptical about Hulu at first, but when I begin using its beta I was totally won over. In short, the site lets you watch free, streaming episodes of TONS of TV shows from NBC, FOX, SciFi, USA, and many more. From current hits like The Office, 30 Rock, Heroes, Prison Break, The Simpsons, 24, and Chuck, to classics like Arrested Development, Buffy, old-school SNL, and more - you can watch FULL episodes of the shows, for free, and then you can even post them to your blog or MySpace page or email them to your friends. I mean, on my MySpace right now, I have a ton of full episodes posted for all to watch. I even have the entire film of THE BIG LEBOWSKI posted right there. And, what the hell, I'll post it here too. My blog can only be that much cooler for posting the funniest movie ever made directly on it, right? Yer darn skippy. So anyways, check out Hulu, catch up on your favorites or discover something new, and post the Natalie Portman SNL rap, the 90's episode of The Simpsons, or, dammit all, the entire Big Lewbowski on YOUR blog, and be cool like me.
Okay, about last night's LOST ...
- For me, this episode had some great stuff, but overall I came away feeling a bit annoyed at the pointlessness of the Jin flashbacks. To me, the timeline teases are a lot of fun ... when the end reveal actually means something. But here, the Jin cutaways, which seem to have been flashbacks but at first passed themselves off as the now-typical flash-forwards, seemed to exist only to tease us, the viewers, and say "Ha-ha, we got you - they can't be flash-forwards because in the future, Jin is D-E-D dead. Suckers." Now, who knows, at some as-of-yet undetermined time there might be some huge payoff to the whole wonky structure of this episode. But I'm sorry - to me that's weak. Yes, Lost is a serialized show that is increasingly consumed in large chunks on DVD or via download ... but the primary format of the show is still weekly, episodic storytelling. Lost is always at its most frustrating when a random mystery is introduced without the promise of a payoff. If you look at the masterfully done Desmond episode from a few weeks back, what worked so well was that we got some intriguing new questions posed to us, but at the same time, the episode had a central storyarc that culminated in a highly satisfying ending. In this episode, there was ... nothing. Just a random collection of disparate elements. Sun is off the island, one of the Oceanic Six. Okay, cool. She's having her baby. Great. And she visits Jin's grave. Okay, interesting, now all of the Jin flashback (?) scenes we've seen have either been rendered a moot point or else are part of some huge time-anomoly plot point that we can't yet even comprehend. But essentially, nothing really happened that drove the story FORWARD. It's all about forward momentum, people.
But okay, I'm painting a pretty bleak picture here when in fact there was a lot I enjoyed in this episode. Namely, the stuff on the ship was pretty much uber-cool. From Zoe Bell wrapping herself in chains and plunging straight to Davy Jones' locker, to Michael revealed as Kevin Johnson (one of my all-time fave basketball players!), these were the kinds of pulpy-cool mysteries I could sink my teeth into, and most importantly, are intrinsically tied-into the PLOT of the show, rather than seeming to just mess with us for the hell of it (i.e. the whole "Jin is alive, no, just kidding, he's dead!" thing). Everything with Desmond, Sayid, and the freighter seems to really be clicking, and moving at a fast pace. We know Whidmore's involved. We know people on the boat are going crazy, and that Ben seems to be the one who engineered the fake crash site that made the outside world believe that everyone on Oceanic 815 was dead. All good stuff, all very cool - if only we could focus more on this stuff, and not the increasingly tedious "Who are the Oceanic Six" thing. Now next week, the Michael-centric episode looks to be pretty badass, and I think that one will be really satisfying - plus, it's written by BK Vaughan to boot, so you know it won't disappoint.
As for this week's - it had some cool moments, particularly with the ship stuff. And don't get me wrong, there was some real emotion in the Jin-Sun drama, particularly the stuff on the island. Jin's talk with Bernard was great, really compelling stuff. And the intrigue between Juliette and Sun, and her outing of Sun's past affair, was pretty intense, no doubt. It made for, all in all, a pretty great episode of television. My main frustration is the fact that in this episode, the flashes were used less as a means to peel back the layers of the onion, and more as a hype-machine that feeds into the whole fan guessing game of "who lives, who dies, who gets off the island." Personally, it means nothing to me just knowing that Jin is apparently dead. I want to know why, how, when. Without the promise that those answers are forthcoming, I was left with something of a bad taste in my mouth, despite the fact that overall this was a pretty strong episode.
My Grade: B
- So it's not even in the same stratosphere as Lost, but I'll give a lot of credit to last night's episode of SMALLVILLE. We got a really nice, entertaining episode that brought back the Pete Ross character, showed off the darker side of Lex and of his father Lionel, and showcased Chloe, reminding us why she is consistently one of the show's most reliably-interesting characters. I thought the conflict with Pete and Clark was handled pretty well, and it was nice for a character to FINALLY call into question why Clark has been so trusting of Lionel of late. In Lionel, we have a character whose motives have never quite been clear, who at one point seemed to have jumped to the side of good but in the end it was never 100% apparent. Suffice to say, I am glad to finally see Lionel hopefully on the path to once again being flat-out EVIL, especially in light of the fact that Michael Rosenbaum is only scheduled to be on a limited number of episodes next season. My biggest complaint is that after eight years, it's about time that clark actually grows a set and stops doing stupid things in the name of protecting people. When he's now driven two women into the arms of Lex due to not trusting them, it's about time he realize what's up.
And finally ... will this show STOP using the device in which people blatantly walk into other people's high-security homes, offices, or other dwelling places as if they were hopping over to the local McDonalds?!?! I mean can you imagine the conversations at the front gate of the Luthor mansion? "Hey I'm here to see Lex. He's tried to kill me and banned me, but I don't think he'd mind if I storm up to his office and demand to know the secrets behind his latest schemes." "Um, go ahead, Sir."
The show has a ton of inherent flaws in its at times nonsensical logic and conventions, but as far as latter-day episodes of Smallville go, last night's had some good stuff, some good momentum leading into next week's, which looks to be a big one, and some cool twists on the whole Clark / Lex / Lionel dynamic.
My grade: B
Alright, almost time for the weekend, so I'm outta here for now. Back next week for some political discussion, movie news and reviews, and more.
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