nixsight

I’m a little behind the curve with my TV watching, which is why, at least a couple of weeks after everybody else, I’m sharing my thoughts about the first few episodes – the double-sized first ep and the one that followed it – of the final season of Lost.

I watched the shows last night, and wrote out my thoughts as I went, which is why what follows starts off reading a little like a running commentary, and ends up becoming a more general Lost-centric ramble.

It’s worth noting that there are spoilers following, if like me, you’ve been tardy when it comes to catching up!

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There was a mysterious statue. Then the mysterious, grumpy dude tells Jacob:

“They come. Fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”

“It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.” Says Jacob, in a blunt contradiction of Battlestar Galactica’s assertion that history and reality are cyclical, the bounder.

Then there’s Locke, looking serious, and telling Benry that “I’m not going to kill Jacob, Ben. You are.” Except it isn’t Locke, it’s whatever is disguised as Locke. Whatever is disguised as Locke, it doesn’t take kindly to people trying to erode BSG’s philosophical foundations.

Course, then Jacob only wants Ben to understand one thing.

“I only want you to understand one thing.” Jacob says. “You have a choice.”

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Two minor TV obsessions this week. I promised someone that I’d watch “Stargate: Universe” so that they didn’t have to, and we’ve been sitting on the first season of Canadian drama “Durham County” for months, and finally got round to that this week, too.

Durham County Season 1

We picked up “Durham County” largely because it stars Hugh Dillon, who impressed the hell out of us with a nuanced and oddly sweet portrayal of the head muscle in SWAT show “Flashpoint”. As it stands, we got into “Flashpoint” largely because it had Veronica Mars’ dad in it. So you start to get a sense of how this works.

The show is notionally a murder mystery. Hugh Dillon is homicide detective Mike Sweeney, who moves his family – including eccentric young daughter in a mask Maddie, morbid teen daughter who wants to follow in her father’s footsteps Sadie, and his wife Audrey, who is trying to come to terms with having barely survived breast cancer – away from the city, and back to the place where he grew up, the titular Durham County. The place itself is billed as a small town, but it presents more like a suburb of the oft mentioned “downtown”, albeit an insular one.

The family move into the area amid a search for two schoolgirls, and Sweeney is eager to start working the case, but then the body of locally beloved English teacher Nathalie Lacroix is found, and when Sweeney sees the body he becomes obsessed, because he has a hidden connection to this new victim.

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… as I was writing an earlier post about “Stargate Universe”, I got major league sidetracked into discussing the notion that it is somehow similar to “Lost” or “Battlestar Galactica”.

It basically muddied the issue on what I thought about the show, so I’m copy/pasting my points right here into a brand-new post. As if this shit wasn’t confusing enough already.

…The comparisons with “Lost” seem to come from the fact that some of the characters have secrets, or at least things about them that we don’t know at the beginning of the pilot, and occasionally, in a sort of non-committal, unstructured way, bits of their past are played out in flashback – though mainly in that first episode. The techniques, very similar to the way most characters in most shows are written, and flashbacks are traditionally used, actually serves to distance the show from “Lost”, which is always rigid about the way it uses the flashbacks – and later flashforwards – within a particular episode, and also goes to great lengths to subvert traditional narratives with them.

(Actually, one of the few things that distract from the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of the pilot episode was the lack of an audio or visual cue when the show was shifting into flashback. It was a little disorienting, and not in an obviously deliberate way.)

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A week of pretty good movies. I’m going to make this as brief as possible because, well…

I always try to make them as brief as possible, don’t I? It almost never works out like that, though.

(Note: It didn’t work out like that.)

As always, I’ve included links to many of these films at Amazon in the write-ups, and though it’s difficult for me to imagine that any of you don’t have either a LoveFilm style thing going on, or your own copy of “Lebowski”, if you do fancy giving any of them a try, it’d help me out if you picked them up via the links. All of the films I’ve mentioned are unnervingly cheap – especially “Fargo”, which is pretty much my favourite film of all time.

And actually, there’s a question – how useful are links to cheap DVD versions of films to you lot? Are most of you strictly Blu-Ray by now? Please do enlighten me in the comments!

The Big Lebowski

I realised midway through watching “The Big Lebowski” the other night, with three people who hadn’t seen it before, that despite knowing it really well, I think I’ve only seen it the once.

It’s an odd film, Lebowski. It’s a very deliberate, tight farce, but with the illusion of shambling chaos. It rolls by with a fairly definitive plot, but it feels like you’re watching an experiment in tone, a refining of the Coen brother’s peculiar approach to making you laugh and care without delivering jokes or sentiment.

And while I knew I enjoyed it, I’ve always been shocked by the pure adoration that the film has received from so many people that I know, above other Coen greats like “The Hudsucker Proxy” and my favourite, “Fargo”.

But I have to admit, watching it through again, with certain touchstones already in place so that I wasn’t coming to it oblivious, it is a truly great film.

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Righto. So, three films in the last week, all of them guns and glory, and not one of them with a properly written title. Excellent.

Rock N Rolla

I’ve got a soft spot for “Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels”, and I recall enjoying “Snatch”, though I’ve never felt the need to watch it again, but Guy Ritchie has become a bit of a figure of fun for the world at large in recent years, and that’s made it hard to see his particular ouvre of mockney gangster movies as having any authenticity any more, if they really had any to

begin with in the first place.

I guess that’s why I hadn’t rushed to see “Rock N Rolla” when it came out. I’d heard only bad things about “Revolver”, and can be suggestible about such things.

It’s a shame, really, because “Rock N Rolla” is quite fun. Granted, it’s got a similar convoluted caper plot to “Lock Stock…” and “Snatch”, and does about as much to realistically represent organised crime in London as “Oceans Eleven” does for career thieves. Or “Finding Nemo” did for sea life.

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I’m a little behind the herd when it comes to Cormac McCarthy’s work. Despite watching and loving “No Country For Old Men“, I was totally oblivious to the fact that it wasn’t a Coen Brothers original until a few days later. Though I’ve heard stories about his mythical, apparently perfect novel “The Road“, I have to admit that the main reason I picked it up is because I heard about the imminent film of the book.

I’ve a standing rule that where possible, I’ll watch the film version of a story before I’ll read the book that it’s based on. Most of the time the, book is the original – and as such the intended, definitive – version, and generally this makes the book the purer, smarter version of the story. Or at least it’s difficult not to see it that way, if you encounter them in chronological order.

However, I think that a film can be a good example of its medium and still be a disappointing adaptation of a book. Knowing this isn’t enough, though – it’s really difficult to seperate the two in your head as you go. Even if you know that intellectually you should enjoy each on its merits, reading is a much more active mental and emotional process than watching a film, and after living a novel for the amount of time it takes to read it, it’s impossible not to have expectations when taking that experience into a cinema.

My feeling is that the effort to process all this while watching a movie is more hassle than it’s worth, so I reason that if I watch the film first, I’ll get to enjoy both. You have to be a certain sort of lunatic to retroactively dis-enjoy a film if when you eventually read the book you find it’s different – why would you do that to yourself? – and as I’m almost immune to plot-twists, it isn’t as if having a plot laid out for me in film is going to ruin my enjoyment of it in text.

(To clarify, I don’t mean that I’m immune to plot-twists because I work them out – I have never understood the desire to outsmart a story that so many people seem to have – it’s a story, people – it’s not a destination, it’s a ride. The way my mind works, it’s constantly ticking over possible places the story can go as I enjoy it, so a film falling in line with one of the vague thoughts I had about it is a pleasant buzz, not a groundbreaker.)

It’s one of hundreds of little tricks I use to make living among your species bearable – this way round, trying to work out why they made certain changes during the adaptation process can be an enjoyable exercise, rather than the disappointment spiral it can become if I’ve already got an emotional relationship with the original when I get to the copy.

So, anyway, that’s why I wasn’t going to read “The Road” before the film came out, but I’d heard so much about it that I put it on my birthday wish-list anyway, because I half expected not to get it till much later anyway.

When it turned up unexpectedly, my resolve held – it sat on the side with “No Country For Old Men” and “Let The Right One In”, waiting till some time in the distant future.

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Despite appearances, “The Hurt Locker” is Kathryn Bigelow’s return to familiar ground – the subject of addiction to adrenaline.

What differentiates this film from “Point Break“, however, is that where that film is a big, daft action movie, made for ease of use rather than use of brain, this one is a much more solemn and intense affair. Set in Iraq, the film follows a squad of bomb disposal experts, as they do their best to keep the streets, if not exactly danger free, at least free of planted explosives.

The film opens as tragedy hits the team, and are joined by a new team leader – Sergeant First Class William James, played by Jeremy Renner, who brings a sardonic edge to the over-confident and super-competent bomb disposal expert.

We’re trained by movies to expect certain things at this point – conflict between him and his new team as his maverick attitude puts them in danger, high-octane action set-pieces, bonding moments, and ultimately resolution as he proves himself to team-mates and audience alike.

Bigelow’s movie totally subverts everything we expect from it, almost wilfully daring the viewer to bitch about their thwarted expectations. Which is kind of mean when you consider how much her earlier work has done to create the expected modes in the first place!

What we get instead is a naturalistic, political or social agenda-free movie that follows its characters around as they do their jobs, in admittedly emotionally heightened conditions, rather than have them explain their actions.

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Old School/The Hangover

We watched “Old School” based on the enthusiastic recommendations of our friends. These friends, it’s worth mentioning, are the ones who recommended “Euro Trip” all those months back, and despite the various movie triumphs we’ve had based on their suggestions since, the old wound runs deep!

“Old School” doesn’t clear up the scar tissue, but it at least alleviates the remnant pain a little.

Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughan shamble their way through a mildly raucous movie that isn’t quite shocking enough to be a screwball romp, but isn’t sharp enough to be an insightful relationship comedy.

There are a few pretty good laughs scattered through the movie, and Wilson and Ferrell give likeable performances… Even Vaughan’s totally amoral oiliness has it’s charm.

The film is a little all over the place, though, never sure which of its plot threads or elements are really the point, and as such it doesn’t hold together all that well as a movie – there are plenty of decent quotable moments, but the sketchy pacing makes the whole thing fall a little flat.

“The Hangover” features an almost identical character dynamic to “Old School” – and if we go back further I guess we’d find similar archetypes at play in Todd Phillips’ earlier “Road Trip” – but with the newer movie the writer and director have a clearer sense of where the movie’s strengths are than they did with “Old School”, and the rolling motion of the plot – the search for the impending groom through the fog of a devastating (read “awesome!”) stag party – gives it a pace and clarity lacking in the earlier one.

It also has frankly more impressive talent in the reluctant-straight-fall-guy and out-of-control man-child roles – Wilson and Ferrell do good work, but Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis shine in “The Hangover”. If doing a sterling job at playing a handicapped or mentally ill character can usually be considered a fast track to award recognition, it seems a shame that Galifianakis will probably not get consideration for his lovably perverse and broken odd-ball here. His performance is what makes the movie stand apart from other similar romps, giving it most of its shocks, as well as any pathos present.

Mind you, as fun as “The Hangover” is, it’s not a classic, and the above observation could easily be said of the brilliant Bobcat Goldthwait in the not so brilliant “Police Academy” movies.

“Old School” is available at Amazon on DVD for £4, or packaged with “Anchorman” for £5!

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I’ve been playing a lot of games when I should have been writing, this week.I don’t always write about the games I’ve been playing, but my PC activities are about to complete a mini loop, as a recent re-install of Windows utterly wiped my several hours of “Empire Total War” saves, and so I’ve fired it up again.

Half Life 2 – Episodes 1 and 2

Speaking of closing a loop on some video gaming, I must have been one of only a handful of people who loved “Half Life 2”, and never played the subsequent Episodes 1 and 2 that Valve followed it up with. I finally addressed that this week – The Orange Box has been sitting there waiting for months, now, and it was about time.

And they’re good… the same good, solid, addictive gameplay that we saw in the exemplary main game, with some truly awesome set-pieces in each.

Episode 2 has more scenario variation than it’s predecessor, and a final running battle with some hardcore opponents that’s a lot of fun, but both progress the story of Gordon Freeman and the invasion of earth from another dimension in a way that feels like it covers a lot of ground, for such short installments.

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