"Nobody says anything bad about the dead": Lost, Season 2, Episode 17

"Lockdown"

Synopsis: When Jack leaves Locke and Henry behind in the hatch, the blast doors shut, catching Locke's leg and forcing him to rely on Henry to press the button. Meanwhile, Ana Lucia, Sayid and Charlie find the balloon. Jack and Sawyer play poker. And Locke remembers how his father destroyed his relationship with Helen. It involves his dad faking his own funeral, some laundered money and the mob.

Comments: And then, after that amazing episode with "The Whole Truth", we get a more mixed bag with this one. I don't know if it's the pun in the title or the way the cliffhanger gets squandered or the fact that Locke's daddy issues don't really take any new turns, but this episode falls a little flat for me.

On the plus side, I appreciate the Henry/Locke dynamic that develops, first reluctantly and then blossoming into full-blown trust... until the end. And I also enjoyed the poker game and Jack and Kate's night conversation. We even get some new meta-plot clues (what's that ultraviolet map for? what does the question mark represent? who is dropping supplies?). Finally, the final reveal is well-played. [SPOILER ALERT] The balloon is there, but the grave isn't for Gale's wife. The body buried there belongs to a guy named Henry Gale! [END SPOILERS] Fade out.

On the negative side, the focus on Locke and Henry comes off as Keystone Cops-ish more than claustrophobic. Sure, I buy Locke injuring himself in his eagerness to escape. But stuff like the shelf collapsing... yeesh. I half expected Henry to keep stepping on rakes while he stumbled into the computer room. And Locke's interactions with his father didn't really expand much on the last few episodes. Worst of all, Katey Sagal was wasted, except for that moment at the end during the proposal. Anyone could have said no. But the expression on her face, that mix of pity and sadness, that was great.

I don't mind that the plot-heavy/thriller episodes need to alternate with character development episodes and quieter moments. But when those quieter episodes come up, I want them to actually tell me new things about characters. "Locke is searching for someone who'll stay with him" doesn't cut it.

Grade: B-

Other Comments:

• When Hurley said that the food in the hatch would only last a month for a single man 5 or 6 episodes ago, I wondered how Desmond and his partner had lasted as long as they did. Nice to know that wasn't an error.
• So, did all the Lost writers have daddy issues? Because, between Kate, Jack, Sun, and Locke, we already have a lot of explicitly bad fathers. And I'm not even counting the people whose fathers haven't shown up or are absent. And of course, Michael and Walt's relationship... blarg.
• I became kind of suspicious how Henry knew the numbers after being told once. I've got a pretty good memory, and I can never remember the sequence.
• Two con men in the Lost backstory. You know Locke's dad has to have run into Sawyer at some point. [Older Mr. K retroactive spoiler: Yup, I kinda called this one right. Emphasis on kinda.]

Quotes

- Jack: "When I want the guns, I'll get them."

- Anthony: "Two hundred thousand gets you a great honeymoon."

Locke: "I didn't do it for the money"

Anthony: "I guess some maid's going to get a helluva tip."

Sonic Weapon Fence actually does make a good name for a band

So that post below, the LOST recap, that is one of several orphans from when I planned to do this whole LOST recap-blog-a-thon, since there wasn't much dedicated coverage, episode-by-episode, on the AV Club or my favorite parts of the interweb.

I didn't follow through with the entire thing, but I did write up maybe five or six more episodes, which will also be posted here over the next couple of weeks.

Because (and I know, I'm burying the lede), I have both finished LOST up through season 5 AND just in time too. Season 6 starts February 2nd, and while I'm unsure if I'll be able to watch that night (it's complicated), I am impatient for the chance to see it.

And so my posting might be a little LOST-centric over the next couple of weeks remaining. I've got a LOST drinking game that I joked about on twitter, along with a couple of thoughts on what LOST means to me and TV going into a new decade. And maybe I'll watch the Rifftrax version of the LOST pilot.

Until then, listen to some Sonic Weapon Fence, who are a pretty good band for a novelty, tv-themed band and who I recommend over Previously on Lost.

"Wow, you guys have some real trust issues, don't you?": LOST, season 2, episode 16

"The Whole Truth"

Synopsis: Jin has grown overprotective of Sun following her near-abduction. Sun thinks she is pregnant. In flashback, we learn that Sun was learning English from her former "fiancee" while married to Jin, and that Jin is impotent. Meanwhile, in the present, Locke asks Ana Lucia to interrogate Henry Gale in hopes of finding out if he is an "Other".

Great, another Elizabeth Sarnoff-written episode. Or co-written, I should say. I have fond memories of her work on Deadwood, where she wrote "Amalgamations and Capital" and "Here Was a Man" (among others), in addition to co-producing the entire second season (the strongest season, I'd say).

And her work on "Abandoned" was quite good, finally giving Shannon (Maggie Grace's character) some interesting backstory that wasn't predicated around Boone's obsession with her or another character's tragedy. Of course, that was also the episode that killed off Shannon. So, plot-wise, a bit of a draw.

This season she also wrote "The Hunting Party", which was also good, though not quite as much of a stand-out. It was notable for giving us a Christian Shepard who was right and not responsible for what went wrong.

And now "The Whole Truth". This is an episode obsessed with the way people lie to others and deceive themselves and the difficulties they face in setting things right. Sometimes it can be funny, such as when Hurley gets caught with his private food stash while Sun is trying to covertly take a pregnancy test. Both fail to catch the other's suspicious actions as they try to conceal their own.

But it has much more serious consequences both individually and in the group. Our title for the recap comes from Henry Gale, but it echoes the comment that Libby said to Michael a couple episodes back about Ana Lucia and the rest of the Tailies. If Ana Lucia was complaining earlier about the camp being too trusting, they're now reversing courses, to their detriment.

Everyone's own lies and self-deceptions seem poised to endanger at least three of the survivors by the end. Jin and Sun's story resolves somewhat happily, with Jin accepting both that Sun is pregnant and that she has been faithful to him, whispering in awe that it is a miracle. And the Island is a place for miracles, it's true. On the other hand, that wonderful shot of Sun's lengthening expression as Jin holds her suggests this might just be another lie.

And as for dealing with Henry Gale, we get perhaps the most concrete expression of his possible malignity in this episode, but he is only as effective as he is because everyone else helps him.

Locke and Jack are now locked in mind games with each other. Locke brings Ana Lucia in to interrogate Henry, it seems, as much out of a desire to annoy Jack as to figure this out. And we're not sure if Jack is concerned for what Ana Lucia will do to Henry or what Henry will do to Ana Lucia.

For her part, Ana Lucia decides to resolve this simply, by just getting Henry to draw a map of where the balloon is. She sets out without telling Jack or Locke, presumably so she has an extra bargaining chip to draw Henry out with, or maybe just because she's afraid of Jack & Locke jumping to conclusions.

It makes less sense to me that Ana Lucia's group ends up being Sayid and Charlie. They are all united by their hatred of the Others. But needless to say, Ana Lucia and Sayid have plenty of reasons to distrust each other, while Ana Lucia seems a likely candidate to expose Charlie as the false Other attacker. When she stares at Charlie's profile, I worried that she might recognize the fabric of Charlie's clothes matching that of the cloth used to bind Sun. Instead, she just notices that Charlie's got a gun. Which, given the events of the previous few episodes and the current AWOL status of the gun cache, must certainly bring up some troubling questions for Sayid and Ana Lucia. But they don't get asked yet.

The problem doesn't end up being with the group, though. Because [SPOILER ALERT!] in a really nice final scene, when Locke and Jack decide to be nice to Henry by letting him out for breakfast, he reveals that he drew a map for Ana Lucia and speculates that, if he were one of the Others, he'd just draw a map to a place where the Others would be sure to ambush the survivors and trade for him. And then he asks for milk. FADE OUT.

This episode had a well-balanced mix of character moments and plot advancement. Jin and Sun were really the emotional heart of the episode, but I especially applaud the less-common character combinations that rubbed up against each other in awkward or tense ways. It is really easy to build chemistry or drama out of the same love triangles or friendships. But everyone is still living in the same small space and they have to work together on everything from picnic tables to exploration.

Episode Grade: A-

Other Thoughts

• I really like the way they establish Jin's own difficulty in, even at this point, understanding what everyone is saying: they blur the English into gibberish. This episode, he basically admits that everyone except Sun is an "other". It's suggested that he's holding onto Sun in part because she's the only one who understands him. What a scary thought, for him and her.
• I love the way that final moment is shot. It totally eschews the now cliche "look at what the other character is looking at, audience" shot that LOST uses way too much for commercial breaks, opening credits and cliffhangers. Just a brightly-lit, cheery room that we know isn't going to stay cheery for long.
• Sayid doesn't even want to admit the possibility that Henry is who he says he is. And even Ana Lucia is put off by that. That's not a good sign.
• It's a nice touch that Bernard and Rose, after being reunited, still have arguments. I'm glad they weren't tempted to let them be boring perfect people and write them out.
• Geronimo Jackson sighting: Locke looks at their album cover and record while talking with Jack.
• Speaking of Deadwood, good alternate title for this episode would be "A Lie Agreed Upon".

Quotes:

-"Locke and Jack are only thinking about Jack and Locke." - Ana Lucia

-Sun: [in Korean] "I love you."

Jin: [in English] "I love you."

- "Breakfast is ready! We've got papaya, papaya and papaya." - Charlie

On top of the world, looking down on creation...

Yarrrr....

Up In the Air does such a good job wrapping a hetero-normative, pro-nuclear family message in a charming package for 3/4 of the film, before throwing it away with a stupid twist and a botched ending.

Still, kudos for at least letting Clooney give a convincing argument for his beliefs. And for being a film that acknowledges the economy and the definition of the American dream as having changed.

...

Actually, just reading that last part is a sad statement on film-making these days. Merry Christmas, people!

"Stories that will last into history, long after you and me are gone": REDACTED

Redacted, d. Brian DePalma, 2007

Starring: A bunch of people you've never heard of or seen before and probably won't see again

"You don't want to hear a war story," says one of the main characters to a group of civilian friends at the end of the movie. And unfortunately, Brian DePalma spends most of the movie trying to prove that character right.

Now, conventional wisdom on Redacted, when it came out, was that Brian DePalma had turned in a shrill and ridiculously one-sided anti-war film with very little of his usual skill. And this is what even relatively sympathetic film critics said. In this case, conventional wisdom is right.

The plot, so far as there is one, is that it follows a few Marines serving in Samarra in 2006. Eventually, a couple of particularly awful Marines rape a 15 year old Iraqi girl and kill most of her family, claiming at various points that they were fighting insurgents, that it was a Sunni revenge killing, and that is was a Shiite revenge killing. This is all shown through various sources, including one Marine's video-recordings of his unit (in hopes of using it for a reality tv show or film school), a French documentary team, various blogs & youtube videos, security cameras and news footage.

The idea of the film, I think, is an interesting one. Trying to replicate the chopped-up news cycle & the multiplicity of viewpoints emerging around the Iraq War is a noble and interesting idea. In how many previous wars could civilians, with a minimum of effort, see the reaction of the occupied people without any intermediating authority. And when DePalma is merely presenting the contrast between Al-Jazeera, the French documentary team and a CNN stand-in's approaches deadpan, he gets across the problematic nature of the occupation and the way America's own POV prevents it from seeing those problems.

Unfortunately, most of the film is populated with one-note shrill stereotypes of Americans spouting on-the-nose dialogue when they're not doing horrible things. This is the kind of film where, six minutes in, one person says, "the camera never lies" and another person immediately responds, "the camera always lies". To a tiny extent, there might be moments when DePalma could have been arguing about the self-performative nature people develop when they know they're being recorded. But the fact so much of the Marine's documentary footage happens when the others don't know they're being recorded takes away that argument.

You'll notice I haven't really named any of the characters. That's because, with maybe one exception, all the characters make the space marines in Aliens seem complex and multi-faceted. It doesn't help that one character is unironically named Vasquez. One redneck soldier even calls himself a "wildcard", sparking images of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie's hilariously pointless idiocy.

Every moment is so heavy-handed that even the documented incident that inspired this film starts to feel false. DePalma even compromises the (relative) integrity of his approach at the end by giving home video footage of the hero Lawyer McCoy (Robb DeVaney) giving an impassioned (if creaky) speech about the horrors of war and underlining it WITH A PROFESSIONAL HOLLYWOOD SOUNDTRACK! It's like DePalma is taking his stylistic cues from The Notebook!

Now, you can make a movie about horrible people doing awful things and make it interesting, but you have to display some empathy. But DePalma has our war criminals be the most brain-dead, racist sons-of-bitches you'll ever see. Robb DeVaney's character, the nominative good guy, is given some good moments and he rises to the occasion. But everyone else is given clunky dialogue, nonsensical motivations and the mostly non-professional actors respond by turning in awful performances.

Weirdly enough, the people playing Iraqis are really good, when they are given any screen-time. It might help that DePalma plays those moments unaffected and keeps the language simple.

And sadly, DePalma does have some good visual moments. Whether it's the echo of blood-spatter from an early checkpoint shoot-out in a Jihadi execution, or a flowing, surreal long-take of the checkpoint screening that highlights the incomprehensibility of the process, DePalma hasn't lost his touch with mise-en-scene. One of the early heavy-handed moments (a reading from Appointment in Samarra) is nicely undercut by the presence, right behind the reader, of cut-outs from pin-up magazines. In fact, the movie might play better left on mute.

In some ways, this movie is the opposite of another War on Terror flop, Richard Kelley's Southland Tales. Where Kelly's movie was sprawling and needlessly complex, DePalma's is shrill and to-the-point. Where Kelly stranded brilliant performances by actors in a go-nowhere plot, DePalma weds beautiful imagery to headache-inducing performances.

The most effective moment of the film is the closing "Collateral Damage" sequence, where DePalma presents a series of bloody photographs showing the civilians injured or killed by Iraq War violence. A movie about the innocents trying to survive both insurgents and the U.S. military could be effective, moving and reach across partisan talking points. Too bad no one's interested in making that film.

Grade: C-

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Blogger

So my project of liveblogging In Praise of Commercial Culture has gone on hiatus because I'm running out of things to say about it. As Cowen has moved to visual art and classical music, he's moved out of my comfort zone, though I keep getting suspicious that he's not grappling with the complex nature of "capitalism", which is frequently a mix of corporatism, nationalism and other weird beliefs that sort of simulate a free market. Instead, frequently, he seems content to say, "hey, everyone, as time passes, great composers/artists/writers get have earned comparatively more money and more freedom. I'd say that's pretty good."

He makes some good points about changing cultural practices and ideas that partially shape our vision of artistic golden ages as golden and how those practices and ideas blind us to the richness of our own age. But he's all too willing to wash his hands of modern composers who are increasingly exiled from both the classical and mainstream community, for example. He regrets it, and then just says, that's capitalism too. It's pretty easy to praise capitalism when capitalism is some weird omnipotent and perfect god. If you don't like capitalism (or a certain expression of capitalism), you just don't understand the Invisible Hand's ultimate design.

And then too, Cowen's approach to people and psychology seems hilarious. I seem to recall him admitting he possesses a somewhat autistic view of how people tick and that seems borne out in the book. Take this howler:

"Kurt Cobain of Nirvana committed suicide after only four albums, secure in his expectations of artistic immortality" (147).

That seems like a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of Cobain's emotional state and his feelings about his popularity. Or a misunderstanding of depression in general.

Or this, from a section entitled, "The Musical Revolution in Africa":

"Slavery was a disaster for its victims, but it revolutionized world music." (155)

...

And I know it is easy to take quotes out of context and make them seem ridiculous, but the paragraph weirdly equates slavery with some kind of "cultural interchange" and that the "barbaric form" of slave-based "cultural contact" paved the way for "later, more beneficial voluntary contacts". Cowen's not trying to be offensive, but he's refusing to grapple with the serious moral issue at stake here. He's even ignoring the fact that pro-capitalist economists were one of the first groups to see the problems with slavery.

It's like something Monty Python or Mr. Show would put in the mouth of a well-meaning buffoon.

In the next re-release, I will shoot first...

I didn't think I was the first one to think of Lucas as a skilled craftsman with a very limited toolbox, but it's great to find something like this in Robin Wood's Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan:

"If we are to continue using the term 'imagination' to apply to a William Blake, we have no business using it of a George Lucas. Imagination and what is popularly referred to as pure fantasy (actually there is no such thing) are fundamentally incompatible. Imaginatin is a force that strives to graps and transform the world, not restore "the good old values". What we can justly credit Lucas with (I use the name, be it understood, to stand for his whole production team) is facility of invention, especially on the level of special effects and makeup and the creation of a range of cute or sinister or grotesque fauna (human and non-human)." (166-167) [emphasis mine]

So far, in skimming Wood, I'm quite impressed by his evaluation of Larry Cohen as well. I'm not so impressed by his hedging on Marxism (though I do agree that there's something weird about how reluctant people are to consider discussing something different from capitalism on a basic level in a free country such as ours).

E.T.A. Although Wood seems to think James Earl Jones is British and white. And he claims Lando Calrissian offers no prospect of revolution or subversion. Even though his first appearance in the cycle shows him betraying the white American hero? I won't argue totally with Wood's general claims about the handling of race in the Star Wars trilogy, but Lando seems to be one of Lucas & Co.'s few attempts at moral complexity (more so than Han, at least, after the first movie).