Category: Audio Visual

Heroes Season 1, NBC, 2006-2007.

I’ve written about Heroes before, late last year when I was fed up with Lost and ready to abandon it in favor of Heroes. Lost turned itself around when it returned to the air this spring, so it’s back in my good graces, but Heroes never fell – the show continued to improve, delivering on all of its promises, and ended the season with a slam dunk that resolved every active storyline… in addition to setting up a few new ones for next season. Normally, I write my reviews assuming that the person in question either has already seen (or read) the work in question, or is reading the review with an eye towards watching (or reading) it regardless. In other words, I don’t concern myself with warning about spoilers.

However, in this case, I know for certain that at least some of my friends and readers (Don Norton and Frank Anderson, to name two specifically) have not seen any episodes of Heroes, but plan on watching the entire season on DVD when it comes out on August 28th. Therefore, I’m taking care to make sure that this review doesn’t give away anything important about the plot. So guys, read away, I will not spoil it for you.

This show is everything that a serial drama should be. Interesting and entertaining characters, a high-concept plot, a fast moving story. Whereas Lost is overly cerebral and sometimes drags almost completely to a halt, Heroes is bright and shiny and moves like a young racehorse. It’s good guys versus bad guys, just like a good comic book, only sometimes you’re not completely sure who is good and who is bad – also like a good comic book. Some characters get on your nerves, some you like right away. Some live and some die. Some grow on you as the story develops. Some that you wished would die at the beginning, you find yourself rooting for at the end. And vice versa.

Throughout the season, the story has been evolving and changing as we’ve been introduced to all the characters. For the first half of the season, we watched as it built up to Chapter Eleven, where we discovered what it would actually take to Save the Cheerleader. But what about Saving the World? Well, that’s what the rest of the season was about. And in doing so, we found out lots more about everyone involved, and the story wound tighter and tighter, as all the players were finally brought together for the conclusion.

Really, the last three episodes taken together comprise the end of the story, with the final episode providing the climatic moment that we’ve been preparing for since the very first episode. If you’re going to watch the season on DVD, I would highly recommend watching the final three episodes in one sitting. Think of it as a two-hour movie split up into three 42-minute parts. From all appearances, it seems to have been shot that way, and each episode in the final three continues immediately into the next.

This season closer was the only one I’ve seen that actually brought a tear to my eye. I felt the next-to-final scene – and the final sacrifice – was touching, well done, and fit perfectly with the tone of the series. Yes, we could argue about the practicality of it – surely all of those gathered could have figured some other, less drastic solution – but it worked. It fit the characters, it fit the story… damn it, it worked.

Both Frank and I were moved and pleased. We found out exactly why saving the cheerleader allowed them to save the world. The bad guys got what was coming to them (well, mostly) and the good guys saved the day (well… mostly).

And to cap it off, the episode ends with a credit: “End of Volume One”, and fades to black. And then? It fades up again, says “Volume Two”, and we’re given a teaser: the first two minutes of next season. I, for one, cannot wait.

American Idol Season 6, Fox, 2007. Winner Jordan Sparks.

Well, thank god that’s over with at long last.

The country’s cheesiest reality show wraps up another season. This one, as I have said before, was very clearly the worst ever. After watching the bloated and wrong-headed finale last week, I have now concluded that the reason Season 6 sucked so badly was not the contestants – it was the show itself. I blame the judges, and most of all, the producers.

Ten Minutes Too Long. Wake up, you morons. This is the age of TiVo. Since we got our first Tivo eight or nine years ago, I almost never watch a show in actual real time. Even if I watch it “at the same time” – as I almost always do with American Idol – I’m still anywhere from a half an hour to a full hour behind, due to dinner, bathroom breaks, phone calls, etc. So it wasn’t until about 10:45 that we caught up to the 10pm time on American Idol – and the recording simply ended, no winner yet announced. Frank and I were furious. After putting up with 2 hours of dreck, only to find that the show went over time by 10 minutes. We found out that Jordan won by watching the 11pm news (I didn’t want to check on the Internet, it seemed to go against the spirit of the thing).

I can understand how an actual awards show like The Academy Awards goes overtime – but American Idol? Puh-lease. For christ’s sake, they have exactly one thing to announce, and they have two hours to do it in. It should be trivial to have the program end on time. That’s why I’m pretty sure that Fox padded the show on purpose by an additional 10 minutes at the last minute. Why? I have no idea. My best guess would be it was an attempt to win the Nielsens for the 10pm hour as well. Or maybe they were actively trying to piss off DVR owners. If so, congratulations, Fox! You definitely succeeded in pissing me off.

Where Were the Finalists? Uh… guys? This show, it’s called “American Idol“. So how about, you know, showing us the frigging American Idol finalists once in a while? By my count (and of course I’m not counting the missing 10 minutes at the end), Blake Lewis and Jordan Sparks were on-screen for all of about 11 minutes during the entire 2 hour show. Each had one duet with a somewhat lame celebrity, and they did one duet together. I expect – and I am now formally demanding – a finale that is a celebration of all things Idol, with a smattering of celebrity guests here and there where and when they support the Idol contestants.

Celebrities with No Connection. Now, I forgave last season’s Prince performance because… well, because it was Prince. Last season, he was the only guest who performed solo, having no interaction with the Idols. But this time? That was the rule. Bette Midler, Tony Bennett – they just appeared and sang their songs. Gwen Stefani, who was not even at the event, “phoned in” a performance (which very frankly had all the earmarks of being pre-taped) from a concert stage somewhere else entirely. What the hell do any of these people or performances have to do with American Idol? At least Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight, and Joe Perry actually performed on stage with appropriate matching Idol contestants.

The Golden Idol Awards. These were sad, pathetic, and squirm-inducing last year. It’s like shoving a few minutes of “The Office” in a light and frothy romantic comedy. It Does Not Work. Bringing clueless losers from the auditions on stage to give them fake “awards” is just plain uncomfortable, and takes away completely from the spirit of the evening. We’re here to celebrate the winners, not to engage in another round of schadenfreude from the auditions. I wish very much we had fast-forwarded through these segments… seeing these people the first time during the auditions was bad enough. Seeing them a second time, still clueless and now being openly mocked on live TV, was excruciating. And I cannot say enough times how wrong in tone this was for the whole event.

It Was Forty Years Ago Today… What was with the Sgt. Pepper’s thing? What the hell do The Beatles and/or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band have to do with American Idol? The only thing I can figure is that Idol was able to use songs from the Beatles catalogue for the first time ever on this episode, so they decided to go for broke. Maybe when they paid for “I Saw Her Standing There” at the beginning, they got a two-fer if they paid for all the songs from Sgt. Pepper at the same time? That’s the only thing that I can figure. And if they had the rights to use Beatles songs, why on god’s green earth didn’t they use them during British Invasion Week earlier in the season?

Where Were the Judges? No interviews. No funny little skits. No “digital shorts”. Hardly a peep from them at all, other than a few “yo yo dogs” and “you’re all winners”. In years past, we’ve had mock rock videos, man on the street interviews, and many other opportunities for the judges to be seamlessly woven into the finale. This year… they just sat there and stared.

And All the Rest. Several mentions of the horrifying heinousitry (hat tip to Tim Graf for coining that term, by the way) that was Idol Gives Back, including bringing an African children’s choir on stage to sing (once again, by themselves, with nary an Idol contestant to be seen). 75-year-old Clive Davis rambling on and on about the “American Idol Franchise” and how much money it is making him and his partners, with a few snide jabs at Kelly Clarkson and Taylor Hicks thrown in for good measure.

All in all, this was a painful, bloated, and depressing affair. Which leads me to my conclusion…

Idol Resolutions for Next Year. Six years of devoted watching is enough. I will probably still watch American Idol next year, but I will no longer make it a “must see” event. I resolve the following:

• I will skip all of the audition shows entirely. I’ll start watching once “Hollywood Week” begins. The auditions are painful, no longer funny, and stretch on for way too long. The first season, the auditions took up one week. Now, they take up an entire month. And the producers only show the bad “funny” auditions nowadays.
• I will skip the finale. This season made it painfully clear that the days of the finale being the “ultimate Idol” are long gone. The last show I watch will be final performance episode. I’ll just watch the news to see the winner, which is apparently what Fox wanted me to do anyway.
• I will fast-forward religiously.
• I will not watch any Idol-themed charity events or charity announcements.
• I will not vote for or cheer on any “bad” candidates solely for their humor value.

And so ends the worst season of American Idol yet, and the first of my 2007 Season End blog entries. Next up will be “Lost” and “Heroes“, both of which had excellent finales. Henderson… Out!

Idiocracy (2006). 84 minutes, 20th Century Fox. Directed by Mike Judge. This is the smartest dumb comedy I have seen in ages. When I wasn’t laughing, I was at least smiling real wide. I’d say this movie was brilliant if not for the fact that an awful lot of it is basically jokes about handjobs and blowing shit up… which, of course, is the whole point. From the mind of Mike Judge – who brought us Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, and Office Space – this movie is basically a lowbrow comedy take on Cyril M. Kornbluth’s classic short story “The Marching Morons“. Thanks to the nonstop reproduction of the dumbest people on earth – while the smart people wait until later to have children, or don’t have children at all – each successive generation becomes less intelligent than the previous one. And so, in the distant future, the population has become so stupid that people don’t even know what you’re supposed to put on crops to make them grow.

The protagonist here is a completely average Joe named… Joe (Luke Wilson). As a subject in an Army experiment, Joe is placed into suspended animation for a “one year test”. His fellow subject is civilian female Rita (Maya Rudolph), who is partaking in the experiment in order to get away from her pimp for the one-year duration of the experiment. But, in a humorous twist of events, the experiment is forgotten, and Joe and Rita pass away the centuries in their suspension cocoons…

…until the Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505 drops their hibernation coffins back into the world, engaging the “unthaw” process automatically. After a series of discoveries, including a revealing tour through the penitentiary system of 26th century America, Joe (the most average man alive in our time) is revealed to be the smartest man in the world after taking an IQ test. (sample question: “If you have one bucket that holds two gallons, and another bucket that holds five gallons – how many buckets do you have?”)

Joe and Rita, having been told there is a time machine that can return them to their past, spend most of the film trying to find it. In the course of events, Joe solves the country’s food shortage (he tells them to stop irrigating plants with Gatorade and use water instead) and ends up bringing new life to the… idiocracy… of the future.

The brilliance of this movie is almost entirely in the set gags and jokes. Imagine a future populated only by the dumbest of the dumb, and that’s what Idiocracy depicts. “Fuddrucker’s” has become “Buttfucker’s”. The most popular show on television is called “Ow! My Balls!” and consists of a single character getting kicked in the nuts over and over. The President of the United States is the world wrestling champ, and also a porn star. Cabinet posts are filled by lottery. Congress is now the “House of Representin'”, and the President keeps order by blowing up things on stage.

A lot of the humor also comes from the fact that Joe and Rita are so much smarter than everyone else around them. Rita gets money from a horny guy by promising she’ll have sex with him “in a few days”, and that she charges by the hour – so the guy starts paying her immediately. Joe’s sidekick is an attorney, Frito (Dax Shepard), who got his law license from Costco. He’s dumber than a bag of rocks – and yet in this future, he’s considered pretty bright.

This is one of those movies that just doesn’t come across very well in the written word. You really have to see it to get the joke. Trust me, this is one very funny film. See it, laugh your ass off, and then pray to whatever God you believe in that the world never ends up like Idiocracy.

The Apprentice: Los Angeles, Sunday January 21, 2007, 9:00pm, ABC

One of the contestants tells The Donald just where he can stick his apprenticeship and walks out, giving a jaunty wave to the film crew as she exits. I love it!

Even if you’ve never watched an episode of The Apprentice, you probably know the basics. Donald Trump runs a bunch of yuppies through a 15-week “job interview”, eliminating one person a week until the last one standing is the “apprentice”. I’ve watched this show since the first season, and while formulaic, it’s always been entertaining, especially if you work in corporate America. I’ve come to recognize many archetypical co-workers as portrayed by cast members on The Apprentice.

This season, however, it’s changed. tippmix eredmények mai foci I guess The Donald ran out of apprentices. This time, rather than an actual job, the last person “wins a one-year apprenticeship in the Trump organization” – a prize which, no matter how you look at it, is a far cry from the original season’s promise of finding Donald Trump’s new, personal apprentice. In addition, this season added a bunch of weirdness that seems lifted directly from Survivor or The Amazing Race or other shows like that. Example: the losing team has to sleep outdoors in tents, basically camping out on the lawn. And, instead of good old Carolyn and George, crusty veterans of real estate might operating as The Donald’s right and left hands, we have… his two adult children.

So, this ain’t The Apprentice we’re used to. The producers tried to alert viewers to this by slightly changing the title to “The Apprentice: Los Angeles“. I’d be willing to bet, however, that the contestants weren’t aware of the changes, and most likely thought they were in for more or less the same thing as depicted over the past five seasons of The Apprentice.

Frank and I both think the new version is downright weird; it’s still somewhat interesting, but a lot of the fun has gone out of the show. Which brings me to this week’s episode. tegnapi tippmix eredmények Michelle was a typical Apprentice type: the ever-questioning perfectionist who gets on everybody’s nerves by never making a decision and constantly looking for positive reinforcement. When her team lost the task, veteran watchers knew damn well she’d be getting the axe. And, not being a very likable candidate, probably deservingly so.

But wait just a minute! What’s this? Michelle does a “Oh no you didn’t”! Before Trump can even ask for a list of heads for his chopping block, Michelle interrupts with “Can I say something?” and quits. Not just quits, but tells him this “is not what I signed up for”, never stops smiling, and seems quite sure that she’s making the right decision, thank you very much, and walks off the show. The last shot is her walking away, pulling her suitcase, giving a jaunty wave. No doubt thinking, “screw you losers, I’m sleeping in a real bed tonight”.

Michelle’s departure had us both clapping. Frank said the only thing that could have made it better would have been if she’d really popped Trump’s balloon when he was trying to convince her that quitting his little game show would be something she’d regret the rest of her life. “Oh really? Quitting your silly little TV show contest – I’m gonna regret that for the rest of my life? Uh… I don’t think so. See ya”.

I predict she will have a long and fruitful career and will never, ever regret her decision to walk off the set of this turkey.

So, my hat’s off to Michelle. Let her smiling departure be a lesson to all of us: When you’re stuck in a bad situation surrounded by idiots who enjoy playing head games, sometimes the best thing to do is to just say “Fuck you very much”, and walk away with your dignity intact, and your head held high.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006). 101 minutes, Fox Searchlight Pictures. Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.

A delightfully twisted comedy about the world’s most dysfunctional family on the road trip from hell.

I love dark comedies. The first one I can remember watching over and over was Eating Raoul back in 1982, at a late show in Chicago. I remember thinking, “I can’t believe they made a comedy about killing people and serving them up as food, but man is this funny”. Since then, I’ve come to love the genre. Good John Waters films like Polyester and Female Trouble. The much under-appreciated Heathers. And more recently, Bad Santa.

Little Miss Sunshine is not “sick” in the sense that the above mentioned films are, but I’d definitely say it’s on the “twisted” end of the scale. What’s unique about Little Miss Sunshine is that it is exceptionally well-done. Every main performance in this film is literally Academy Award worthy. The script is top-notch, with eminently quotable lines and memorable scenes. The look of the film is crisp, sharp, colorful, and beautifully composed and photographed.

The opening five minutes of this movie are great. Students of storytelling – study this film’s first five minutes. Now, this is how you introduce characters. We see each character in a brief, one minute or so scene. Each scene occurs after the other. By the time we get to the last character (suicidal brother Frank, played by Steve Carrell), we already know what these people are about. It’s a perfect combination of script, acting, and filmmaking.

The story is basically a darker version of Vacation. The number of family members is the same: Father Richard (Greg Kinnear), mother Sheryl (Toni Collette), teenage son Dwayne (Paul Dano), younger sister Olive (Abigail Breslin), Sheryl’s suicidal older brother Frank (Steve Carell), and Grandpa (Alan Arkin). The entire family piles into a breaking-down bright yellow VW bus to drive little Olive from their home in New Mexico to the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant in Los Angeles. This is a family that should not spend five minutes together, much less two entire days crammed in a van.

My favorite character is 15-year-old Dwayne, who has taken a vow of silence until he is old enough to leave and join the Air Force. He counts down the time, in days, on his wall every day. He communicates only by writing on cards. When Uncle Frank, brought home by his sister from the hospital after his latest suicide attempt, asks Dwayne why he doesn’t speak, he writes “I hate everyone” on a card and shows it to Frank. Later, when Frank is bedding down for the night, Dwayne writes, “Welcome to Hell”, before turning out the lights. The scene late in the movie where Dwayne is finally forced to break his vow of silence had me spitting up soda. I had to back up the DVD to watch the scene again, I was laughing so hard. I’d nominate Paul Dano for Best Supporting Actor for that scene alone.

Another great moment is when the van’s horn decides to malfunction at a very inopportune time for the whole family. The little VW bus gives out a never-ending stream of pathetic mini-honks, which causes the car to get pulled over by a particularly foul cop. The fact that the van keeps making little mewing sounds with its horn during the entire scene made tears roll down my cheeks.

And the beauty pageant at the end… oh my god. I saw a special on HBO some years ago called Living Dolls, which went behind the scenes at several real beauty pageants for little girls like the one portrayed in this movie. Little Miss Sunshine does a very accurate spin on those things, and makes fun of them exactly the way they should be made fun of.

I actually thought the finale of this movie was very touching… how this bizarre family that shouldn’t even be together in the first place nevertheless comes together whole-heartedly in unabashed support for little Olive. It’s a very funny scene that is surprisingly heartwarming. That’s a tough thing to do in a dark comedy, but Little Miss Sunshine manages to pull it off.

So far, this is my favorite film of 2006. If you like your comedy nice and clean and silly, then do not see this movie. If, like me, you find humor in things that other people think are sick… if you sometimes feel guilty for laughing at things you know you shouldn’t laugh at… then go see Little Miss Sunshine.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006). 110 minutes, 20th Century Fox. Directed by David Frankel.

This an unpleasant, annoying movie about unpleasant, annoying people.

Apparently I’m not the target for this movie. I thought it would be a fun film about people working for a “boss from hell” and how the hell-boss eventually gets their comeuppance. Instead, it’s a movie about a boss from hell and how everyone else who works for her is also a person from hell, and how someone you think might be a halfway decent person turns out to just be another denizen of hell.

I know nothing about the world of fashion. I’ve read that the character Miranda, played by Meryl Streep, is loosely based on some actual real-world person. If that’s true, whoever that real person is must be the most miserable, pointless excuse for human existence the world has ever known. Why… why… would anyone, anywhere, live or work in such an environment? The first second I was treated the way anyone in this film is treated, I would’ve said, “You can shove this job right up your ass. See ya”, and walked out the door. In any organization I’ve ever worked for, “Miranda” would’ve lasted about 3 days before everyone who worked for her would’ve sabotaged her every move.

At least half a dozen times, some character or another says something along the lines of “millions of people would kill for this job”, etc. Really? I find that really, really hard to believe. I found this whole movie hard to believe – and I like science fiction and comic book super heroes!

Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Watching this movie was an unpleasant and grating experience. I actually tossed this DVD into the trash after we finished watching it. It was not funny, not enlightening, not… anything. Avoid this. And for god’s sake, if anyone out their works in the field of fashion, and if it actually is anything remotely like what is portrayed in this film… then may I suggest you please find a more uplifting line of employment, such as working in a slaughterhouse or dissecting human cadavers.

The Grudge (2004). 98 minutes, Columbia/Sony Pictures. Directed by Takashi Shimizu

This is one goddamn creepy ass movie.

So, tonight we decided to watch something we’d never seen before in our newly-completed theater room (I’m working on a full-on entry about that, coming soon). We had bought four DVDs for Halloween that we hadn’t watched yet. I voted for The Frighteners, but Frank chose The Grudge, since a friend of his (hi, Allison!) had told us to watch it. “It’s really good and scary”, she told us. She wasn’t lying.

We popped the film in, dimmed the lights, closed the door, and secluded ourselves away in our completely dark, windowless theater room. A few nights back, we watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as the first feature in the new room, but watching this newer movie was quite a different experience. The Grudge is a well-done creep fest. I mean, I seriously had chills running up and down my arms, and got goosebumps at least three times. I yelled out loud at the screen on cue, and almost spilled my soda twice. Lying in bed typing this, I’m still vaguely creeped out by it. That face… the hair… ick.

The film stars Sarah Michelle Gellar (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame) as Karen, an American exchange student living in Tokyo. Karen works part-time for a nursing home care facility, and is sent out to substitute for a co-worker who didn’t show up for work that day. Little does she know, but the house she goes to is haunted. And not just plain old “haunted house” haunted, but haunted by a spirit that follows it victims around, and never gives up until they’re dead – usually in a particularly gruesome way.

That’s about all the plot there is, honestly. The film doesn’t have a lot of twists or turns; this is no M. Night Shyamalan script by any means. What The Grudge does have is hands-down excellent cinematography combined with a perfect soundscape. The fleeting (and not so fleeting) images of the various ghosts are just about the scariest things I’ve seen in a long time. And that creepy little Japanese boy with the cat… *shudder*

The version I watched is the 98-minute Director’s Cut. Since I’ve never seen the film before, I can’t comment on what is different from the original theatrical version. The DVD transfer is gorgeous, a perfect picture. The soundtrack, played through my Yamaha receiver over my Focal Cub speakers, is rich and detailed without being overly loud. A first-rate disc that looks like it was probably mastered in HD and then downconverted.

If you haven’t seen this before, don’t watch it alone. Seriously, this one will scare the shit out of you. Hats off to everyone involved. If you’d like to give up an evening to be frightened out of your wits, pick this one up and give it a spin. And don’t expect to fall asleep right afterwards, believe me.

Lost, ABC Wednesdays 9:00 pm

Heroes, NBC Mondays 9:00 pm

I was not an immediate fan of Lost. I watched the first episode when it aired in 2004, and while I thought there might be something to it, I didn’t watch it anymore that season. However, after having so many colleagues at my office say how good it was, I bought the Season 1 DVD last year when it came out. Frank and I watched the first two episodes in one sitting, and we were hooked. We went through the entire first season in about 10 days of viewing.

We watched all of the 2nd season as it aired, and while it was not as good as the first, it still held our attention. I got awfully tired of the hatch, and of Locke being so willing to push that damn button. While Season 1 set forward a cool mystery, Season 2 just seemed to add confusion. I got the feeling the writers, having hooked people on a nifty premise, just went nuts and threw in anything that tickled their fancy, figuring they’d tie it all up later – or maybe not. The season ended with a bang (literally) of a cliffhanger, with a ton of new questions to answer. And really, only one question was actually answered the entire season: What made the plane crash? And even that wasn’t a real answer; we know the person who is sort of responsible (Desmond), but that’s about it.

Before Lost picked up again this year with Season 3, I decided to preview another series, Heroes, that began on NBC this year. Like Lost, Heroes is a serial drama with science fiction underpinnings. Unlike Lost, however, I was intrigued by Heroes from the first episode, and both Frank and I have watched every episode without fail so far this year.

Also like Lost, Heroes is going along with the idea of a “mini-season” this year – back-to-back new episodes, then a break, then continuing back-to-back episodes. As of this writing, there have been 8 episodes of Heroes, and 6 of Lost. Heroes will end its miniseason in two weeks, and will pick up again in late February of 2007; Lost ended its miniseason last week, and will also pick up again in late February of next year. Am I looking forward to both equally? Nope.

I’m sorry to say that while my interest in Heroes has grown, my interest in Lost has declined. It has become painfully obvious in this 3rd season that there is no overall mystery behind Lost; like The X-Files, they’re just making it up as they go along, and so far, they aren’t doing a very good job of making it up. Six episodes in a row with our top 3 characters all locked up in cells. Jack, ostensibly the lead character, spent nearly the entire miniseason in the same cell. I actually wonder if Matthew Fox shot all his scenes in one week? It sure looked like it.

No questions of any merit have been answered. More “mysteries” have arisen. And frankly, it doesn’t even make sense anymore. No one’s actions seem even vaguely real. Let’s recap some inanities of Season 3 of Lost to date:

• Sun kills a woman and escapes, only to lose the boat to The Others. We never see the boat again, and we haven’t seen Sun again either. Nor does anyone back at “our” camp seem to even be aware of what happened. In the mini-finale, Sayid makes no mention of it, or of anything that happened.
• Why in hell didn’t Ben just plain ask Jack to remove his tumor? He could’ve walked up to him the day after the crash, said “Hi, would you operate on me please?” and I’m sure Jack would’ve done it. How is locking a doctor in a cell and “breaking him” going to accomplish the goal of having surgery done?
• What are Sawyer and Kate working on? Breaking rocks? Kate says they’re working on “something big”, but all I’ve seen is chain-gang make work, breaking some rocks apart. What possible good is that?
• There is another island right next door? And “our” castaways never saw it? Desmond never saw it in his boat? Sayid never saw it in his treks? None of the tailies ever saw it? Come on. I’ve been to Hawaii many times, and it looks like Ben was looking over at Maui from either Molakai or Lanai. Those islands are visible for miles and miles along the coast. No one could possibly miss an island that close to “our” island.
• Uh…. so why didn’t Kate run away? And even if they are on another island… why would she sleep in Sawyer’s cage all night long, just waiting to be captured again?
• Why does every flashback now try to re-do every character? So apparently now Kate is a loving bride, instead of a cold hearted felon; Jack is a cuckolded spouse with an Oedipal complex; Sun is a pathological liar; Mr. Eko did not actually take over his brother’s church after all (well, that one I can buy), and Locke apparently went through a pot-growing hippy phase? Huh???
• Why wouldn’t Sayid have immediately, the very first time, sorted through the machines in the 2nd hatch (“the Pearl“). In Season 1, he spent entire episodes struggling to make a working radio. Now, he just ignore roomfuls of technology?

In short, Lost is …. lost. It’s jumped the shark, it’s flown the coop, it’s become like the last pathetic 2 seasons of The X-Files. I’m just not interested anymore, and I don’t believe there is ever going to be an explanation for 90% of what has been shown. But my main gripe is that nothing any of the characters do makes sense anymore. No one asks questions, no one volunteers information, no one does anything at all that any real, normal, halfway-sensible person would do in the same circumstances. I don’t care how depressed or “broken” I might feel, I’d sure as hell want some damn answers if I were them!

And I hate this new batch of Others. If the writers pull a switcheroo and make it so that these sadists really are “The Good Guys” (as they have said half a dozen times now), I’ll drop this show forever. The tone of this show is becoming way too Republican for my tastes. Apparently, if you’re ever in a mysterious situation, you should immediately resort to torture – no matter which side you’re on. That appears to be the lesson of Lost. Well, they’ve lost me.

Heroes, on the other hand, is doing exactly what I had hoped Lost would’ve done. Questions and mysteries are set up – and explained a few episodes later. Characters act, for the most part, the way you or I would act if we were in the same situations. Here we are, eight episodes in, and we’re already getting a framework for how everything fits together. I also understand from reading interviews with Tim Kring that he intends for this show to be self-contained within each season, sort of how 24 is done. He has also said – and it appears to be happening – that this show will not just pose mysteries and questions, but will actually answer them.

Since Heroes hasn’t been around for as long as Lost, I’m not going to go into details. If you’re not watching it, or if you haven’t seen any episodes yet, buy them on iTunes or catch up with the season so far once they start re-running it in December. And remember:

Save the Cheerleader. Save the World.