Oh Sawyer, why dost thou do such evil things? I guess he says it all himself: A tiger don’t change his stripes. I’m a bit weary of Sawyer’s seemingly anarchistic approach to this, but I guess it makes sense: Sawyer needs stuff to feel good.
This episode was another in-betweener: good if you can continue watching, but hell if you have to wait for a week to see how things unroll. You have to admit, nothing really happened other than Sawyer taking the Island Prick award from Charlie.
He basically fooled everyone – especially Jack and Locke. And somehow I can accept Jack being gullible, but Locke? Locke’s pissing me off this season – where’s the boar-hunting, knife-hurling Locke we met in Season One? It’s like the revived Locke withered away when the hatch was opened. Really frustrating.
My favourite moment this episode was when Hurley and Sayid tried out the walkie and were met with… “moonlight serenade” playing on a radio station. There was something really interesting in that scene, I think. And not just the characters or the absurdity of it all.
An interesting in-between episode. It’s nice to get to know Sawyer a little better – there’s more to him than it seems. He really did like Cassidy, even though he tricked her. He felt really bad about it. And that’s something interesting for a con man. Something Anthony Cooper will never have.
Favourite Quote:
Hurley: “Or any time. …Just kidding, dude.”
When the writers said they wanted a little “silence before the storm” moment, a little humour in their show before they start building up to the dramatic season five cliffhanger duly named The Incident, I was worried. The last time there was an intermezzo in LOST, it came in the form of an apendicitis, and that was not what I was waiting for. Thank God I was wrong: this episode was rock solid and delivered a lot of that typical Lost
air. It was emotional, and it wasn’t about Kate, Jack or Sawyer. Well what do you know – pigs CAN fly.
I like Miles. I love how he hides his soul underneath a gooey layer of sarcasm; you know there’s something shiny in there but you just can’t seem to get it out. I think this is the closest we’ve ever been to the season 1 feeling where the flashbacks introduce a new layer to the character. I think the opening scene with little Miles was the thing that ultimately did it (even if it came first): for the first time ever we saw Miles as a human being capable of… fear. For the first time ever, you felt for this kid. You really did.
Pairing Miles with Hurley for this episode introduced us to a link some of us had not yet considered: both Hurley and Miles can speak to dead people. Both characters have some sort of “power”, powers with a defined ruleset (something very important in this show – everything has rules), but those rules are not the same. These characters are linked, but we are still missing some pieces of the puzzle. Somehow, I figured the whole Hurley-plays-chess-with-Eko thing wouldn’t be important. Seems I was wrong.
The Questions…
It took a while, but we finally got our first real freighter people flashback. Now we know why Miles was going to the island (money), why he was willing to help Ben out (more money) and why he wanted a precise amount of money for it. Oh, and the fact that all the money in the world just can’t fill the gaping hole in his chest that is Pierre Chang.
This episode also did a great job in answering some other questions about mysteries back in season 2 (questions I didn’t bother to ask at the start of season five). The numbers apparently are a serial number. Or, as a second one, that the plane really crashed because of the Swan station. I know they already cleared this up back in Season 2, but a lot of people didn’t believe it back then. They’re sticking with this story, and I love it.
In All…
This was en episode filled with oohs and ahs on my behalf. I oohed when we saw the Swan and the Orchid being built (in the case of the Orchid, it was at the same state it was in back in the first scene of season 1, so I guess the Faraday thing is yet to happen), and awed when Pierre Change, the Dharma Asshole, read “me and my polar bear” to baby Miles. That was a brilliant scene, by the way. Kudos to Ken Leung for portraing these emotions in Miles. The adult one. Not the baby.
Favourite Quote:
Dr. Chang: I need you to take me to Radzinsky at the work site. Immediately. You… Hurley – you say a word…
Hurley: Polar bear poop. Got it.
The advantage of living in a big city is that big cities have big things. Case in point: IMAX. Seeing how I’m a small town guy, I’d never ever visited an IMAX cinema before. So now that something mildly interesting was actually playing there, I figured I’d check things out. So I got treated by Monsters vs Aliens, Dreamworks’s new animation. In glorious 3D!
Let me confess to you: I’m actually not a big fan of Dreamworks animation. Sure, the technology is there, but their movies always feel soulless. This movie was not an exception to the rule: the hair looked realistic, and so did the skin… but then they put those realistic technologies into the most creepy animated human ever. Ew.
On the other hand, though, the story told in this movie is a lot better than the past few that had the Dreamworks name on them. No more endless sequels (seriously guys, the first Shrek wasn’t exactly the greatest movie of all times, so what’s with all the sequels?) or crazy movies moving at lightning speed (squirrel from Over the Hedge, my eyes are on you). I’d like an unpretentious movie, a bit of entertainment and a laugh here and there. And that’s exactly what I’ve got.
This movie is not great. It is never great. Nor – in my opinion – does it try to be. The main character has the staleness of a Dreamworks main character, there is another character for comic relief, and all of the characters – all of them – wander through the plot being underused. Except for the main character. You know, the boring one.
But hey, you’re watching Dreamworks. You don’t get to be picky. You opted for a good, two-hour laugh. And that’s what you get. Loads of movie references (Men in Black, Indepedence Day, Godzilla…), some awesome-looking characters (the cockroach-o-saurus and the egg-robot-thing, for example – just never the humans, never the humans)…
I just can’t write anything else about this movie. It’s not bad and it’s not good either. The 3D was cool. But without 3D? Not worth paying a cinema ticket for. Wait for the DVD. And then rent it. It’s like fast food: you gulp it down and forget you ever had it.
Let me get this out of the way first: this episode rocked my brains out. While the past few episodes were really awesome, you can feel they’re just building up to something extravagant: the incident – which “incidently” is the title of the season five finale. This episode was less like that and more like a big, crunchy meal to sink your teeth in.
As per usual in Ben-centric episodes, we got to know a bit more of the creepy man’s sensitive side. He happens to like children – in the normal way. He couldn’t bring himself to shoot Penny when little Charlie was looking, nor could he kill Danielle when he found out she had a baby of her own. We also found out he really, really regrets how things came to pass. A sad state of affairs, it was.
This episode is almost religious in the sense that we returned to the whole “religion versus science” debate that was so predominant in the first two seasons. Apparently, the monster “judges” you, and if you regret your sins then you can live. That’s why Eko died. I’m very happy his death – a very arbitrary and unexpected one – now makes sense.
Let’s return to a scene in Walkabout back in season 1: where Locke looked at the monster (“into the eye of the island”, he would later say). Did Locke get confronted with his past? Did he finally see how silly he was in not being able to let go of his father? Did the island offer him a new perspective and make him into a new, improved man? I think that scene gets more and more significant with every passing “monster-centric” episode.
The Questions…
We found out a bit more about Charles versus Benjamin. It appears Charles was not a very good or nice leader. But then again, that might just be one side of the coin. He did break the rules in that he had an affair with an outsider. But something tells me we’re not seeing the complete picture just yet. We found out something more about the smoke monster, too. Where it lives, for example. The other stuff was basically things we already knew shown in big: the
ashes of the past inside the monster, the judgement… It was very interesting though.
In All…
I can’t stop saying how wonderfully done this episode was. I focused on the mythological facts above, but let’s not forget the great evolution and power shift the characters went through – Ben and Locke practically switched sides, and it’s all confirmed by the sentence below.
Favourite Quote:
Ben: You may want to go inside.
Sun: Why?
Ben: Because what’s about to come out of that jungle is something I can’t control.
There you have it. Again. For those who hadn’t quite got it yet, in this episode you have it again black on white: “whatever happened, happened”. Ben became the person he was because Sayid shot him, because Kate and Sawyer handed him to Alpert, because Juliet couldn’t save him and because Jack refused to operate on him. Way to go, Jack. Way to go.
It’s an interesting way of looking at time travel, and I think this is exactly where the series is going in its final run: the question of determinism versus free will. The writers are trying so hard to lure us into this determinism thinking, but I expect that before this season is over, we’ll be confronted with the other side of the coin. At least something will change.
Endless speculation aside, this episode itself was quite the treat – for a Kate episode. It shall be no secret that I don’t like Kate, but her talk with sandwich making Jack he gave her a tiny piece of his mind with which I wholeheartedly agreed, and that was good. As if the writers were confirming to me that, yes, she is an annoying little thing.
Roger, Ben’s dad, did show sympathy when he heard “his boy” got shot. So maybe we’ve been seeing things in the wrong perspective during The Man behind the Curtain? I’m not so sure, but seeing how Ben will be a changed kid after his visit to the temple, we definitely know we’ve had a big gaping hole in our story so far. Maybe Ben’s dad tried to change things over after Ben came back? Maybe Ben wouldn’t listen anymore?
That being said, I kind of worry about Ben at the moment. I don’t think he’ll make it to the end of the season. He’s kind of evolved into Lost’s own evil Dumbledore, and once the beans have been spilled on our creepy bastard… it’s down and out for Linus. But who knows? I’m probably out of my mind for saying this.
The Questions
So kate gave Aaron to his grandmother. It was kind of the obvious (and fair) thing to do. Connected to that, we now know what Sawyer whispered to Kate. I was right – he wanted her to take care of his daughter and her mother. And I also was right in assuming this was going to be not important at all. The most interesting question in my little list is undoubtedly the last: “What is the smoke monster?”
Now this may sound crazy, but could it be that Ben Linus is – in part – the smoke monster? He could summon it, and Charles knew who and WHAT Ben was at the end of “A Shape of Things to Come” in season 4. Interesting thought worth pondering or just crazy? The next episode might just give us the answer.
In all…
Quite a nice episode. The “bye bye baby” line was unbelievably corny, but that aside I could feel a mother giving away her child. Not that I know what that feels like. Does this all mean that Aaron is out of the picture? Is this the end of the “raised by another” saga? I guess only time will tell – but I don’t think the island is done with Aaron…
Favourite Quote:
Hurley: “Back to the Future,” man. We came back in time to the island and changed stuff. So if little Ben dies, he’ll never grow up to be big Ben, who’s the one who made us come back here in the first place. Which means we can’t be here. And therefore, dude? We don’t exist.
Reviewing The Reader is not going to be easy. In fact, I wonder why I even bother. Maybe it’s because The Reader managed to touch all my strings and I have the feeling I need to write something about it just to be able to get said strings unstrung. Maybe. Hopefully.
One day in Europe
Before I let myself get carried away in the morality-versus-law discussion lying at the core of the movie, I have to say something else: the fifties and sixties Europe created in The Reader is reason enough to go see this movie. It’s right to the very toothbrushes, houses and bikinis. It’s breathtaking how they pulled off a two hour feature without breaking the illusion of Europe once. I’ve never seen an American production do this – the fact that a German production team, along with a bunch of Germany’s most talented actors, was involved, really helped.
With that out of the way, time to get lost in endless tirades about… other stuff. Like Kate Winslet winning an oscar. An Oscar that was well-deserved if you ask me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female actor pull off these kinds of performances. Before you jump on me and eat me alive, allow me to elaborate. A common tendency in Hollywood is the fact that most big actors and especially actresses seem to spend more time trying to make themselves look good than actually act properly. The Reader is somehow different: never is Hanna, Kate’s character, truly sexy or pretty. She’s always small and jagged around the edges. She walks like an old woman torn apart by guilt. This is simply beautiful. And it makes her beautiful. And sexy. If that makes sense. Doing something like this as an actress takes a lot of nerve and confidence. And lo and behold, it worked: it made the sexual tension between Michael and Hanna very… human-like. Very credible. Very recognizable.
The lady with the dog
And that’s what this movie is about. Humans. Not illiteracy, not sex, not the holocaust… humans. And how humans make mistakes, even if they know they’re making them. It’s a tragic fact that Hanna joined the SS because she was trying to hide her illiteracy, a tragic fact that lead to the destruction of her life. Every event that followed during the Second World War was a mistake in the past.
That’s one side of the coin. The other side is the story we actually experience during the movie. Michael and his decision not to help Hanna by exposing her secret is a mistake of him in the present. A mistake he can only face at the very end of Hanna’s life.
That’s it. Humans. No more, no less. Humans making mistakes and paying for them dearly. Interesting. There’s not a single hero in this movie – not even the judge that convicted the ex-SS women. It was obvious that these verdicts were only there to appoint blame and to get the trauma over with. To forget. Something we can all see for a great part in this day and age, but something that was blasphemy when you said it in the sixties.
It’s not just about you
But should Michael have saved Hanna? Is Hanna a poor woman in need of saving? The movie does a great job trying to tackle and avoid this question. You see, the thing is: we don’t seem to know this Hanna character at all. Other than two things (the fact that she’s illiterate and that she needs order) she’s kept relatively open. We can’t actually determine whether “saving” her would have been right or wrong. An interesting thought worth pondering.
That being said, however, this movie does go to the bone… and beyond. When Michael changes his mind on whether he should visit her it just takes your breath away. It’s so sad. But then again: you don’t know whether it’s the right thing to do or not. And neither does he. He’s only human; he can’t deal with it.
In All…
This is a movie about life, love and dealing with mistakes. In that way, it’s a movie about learning. And, in that way, this movie isn’t all that special; in fact it’s what we expect to see in a movie. We want our characters to learn. But the way in which our main characters learn throughout the movie is not through one another, it’s next to one another. And that’s what makes this story so special and so tragic: because it’s – unlike what movies tell us nowadays – the way in which learning seems to happen.
Favourite Quote:
Teacher: What we feel isn’t important. It’s utterly unimportant. The only question is
what we do. If people like you don’t learn from what happened to people like me, then what the hell is the point of anything?
You can see that before the Oscars, people didn’t exactly know what to do with Slumdog Millionaire. Sure, it was heavily marketed, but it appears they just couldn’t wrap their brains around how exactly they would market it. Was it bollywood? Was it drama? Was it a comedy? Something more alternative? The (final) answer to that question: it’s a little bit of both, but at the same time something else altogether. The chaiwalah has done it again!
A thousand billion million Rupees
Jamal and his brother Salem are two sides of the same coin. But still throughout their lives two things are predominant: money and love. Jamal leans towards the love side of things, whilst Salem craves money. We start our journey with Jamal – our main character, a low-payed tea servant at a callcenter, who by chance enters the Indian “who wants to be a millionaire”. Whether by luck or not, he appears to know the right answer to just about every question. That’s the reason he got arrested and tells his interrogators his life story, and how he managed to know all of those answers (and wishes he didn’t).
The premise is a stroke of unconscious genius: as unknown the country of India might be for us westerners (and believe me: once you see this movie you’ll notice you know nothing of the place), the show “who wants to be a millionaire” is an international standard up to the point where you can actually compare the chairs and the lighting and see it’s all the same. I don’t think this was done on purpose, but it is an interesting idea that makes your head spin and broadens your mind.
Is that your final answer?
The story is undoubtedly one of the strong factors in this movie: it constantly rushes around between past and present, takes twists and turns you can’t always see coming. And once you get the idea of what the movie is about and what the storytelling rules are, the fun changes from seeing what is being told to how it’s being told. You can never predict the relationship between the questions and the answers in advance. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time.
But story aside, even if you don’t like jumping through time the way I do and find the whole premise too absurd for words, you can just go see this movie as well. Reason? It looks very, very good. In fact, it has a style to itself I have never seen in a movie before – but I have seen it. I’ve seen it in animation, but never in a live action movie. The way the kids run through the city in the opening scene is simply breathtaking: it’s alive with colours and the camera shakes, pans and zooms like there’s no tomorrow, treating us to a piece of visual poetry.
In All…
This is a movie you will want to see. It’s pretty, it’s well-written (if you can ignore the corniness of the dialogues) and it just drags you in. It never drags or gets boring, but always keeps the pace
flowing. And: if you came to see it expecting to see Bollywood… let’s just say there’s a little surprise somewhere in there. It’s not very subtle. You can’t miss it.
Favourite Quote:
Jamal: The guide book was written by a bunch of lazy good-for-nothing Indian beggars!
I had been wanting to see In Bruges for quite a while, but you know how it goes with some movies: they’re always the third on your priority list, and never seem to get up to the first place. So when you finally get it, a lot of time may have passed. This time, though, seeing how the store was empty and had no copies of “Aanrijding in Moskou” (which seems to be doing a better job in Germany than in Belgium) left, it was finally time for “In Bruges”.
It’s in Belgium
As I expected, this movie is filled to the brim with insults towards Belgium. These are just like the ones we used to see in Monty Python: silly mockeries that make little to no sense – a fact acknowledged by the writers themselves. I guess it’s the fact that it’s a small place with no identity (even after the government crisis and the whole molesting children thing) – like a rural town. A rural town much like Bruges. So that means: you’ve got a rural town inside a rural town. Are there any larger shitholes left than Bruges? Not for the British.
The movie had a lot more than just touristic antitourism though. It had brilliant acting too: it was wonderful to see Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes (of Voldemort fame) perform such lovable assholes. The moment where Harry (Fiennes’s character) apologizes to his wife for calling his children “fucking cunt kids” is a good example of this, as is the chat he has with Ken (Gleeson) whilst drinking a beer. You love to hate them. They’re cuddly motherfuckers.
Maybe that’s what hell is
What really struck me though, was the solidness of the script. I was expecting a lot of swearing, a lot of anti-belgianism and loads of black humour, but I got so much more: the movie slowly but certainly delved into this “night of the living dead” kind of feeling: Bruges is a place where you go to die, sort of the like the river Styx: when you’re inside you’re not quite dead yet, but you’re certainly not alive. Only in Bruges, there’s cocaine. And midgets.
I love it when a movie has a defined style, and sticks with it. You can tell when you look at In Bruges that the director (Martin McDonagh) wrote the script himself and chose to make this movie something of his own. A product he loved and nurtured like a child, if you may. It has this incredible sense of stylistic oneness, this absurdism which sticks by its own set of rules, almost like poetry. This story has not been conceived by ten semi-gifted people sitting around a table shoehorning semi-good ideas into a semi-good script. This story has been written by someone who knew where he was going.
He was going to fucking Belgium.
Favourite Quote:
Ken: Harry, let’s face it. And I’m not being funny. I mean no disrespect, but you’re a cunt. You’re a
cunt now, and you’ve always been a cunt. And the only thing that’s going to change is that you’re going
to be an even bigger cunt. Maybe have some more cunt kids.
Harry: Leave my kids fucking out of it! What have they done? You fucking retract that bit about my
cunt fucking kids!
Ken: I retract that bit about your cunt fucking kids.
I was getting kind of disappointed and tired of waiting, but just like it goes with LOST: the waiting did not disappoint. Not one bit. The fact that Sayid shot Ben – I saw it coming but was still shocked – was brilliant, and will have viewers scratching their heads for an entire week.
The reason for this is of course that people believe that this means the end of Benjamin Linus. In Doc Brown fahsion, Sayid should have created an alternate universe in which Ben Linus does not live past 1977. Now, this obviously does not make sense. LOST boasts a thing called “self-consistent time travel”, meaning that whatever happened, happened. It has always been like this. Ben has always gotten shot by Sayid and always will. Which means that this might possibly be the thing Ben has against our Losties. Maybe it’s the thing that turned him into Ben as we know him?
Other than that, I loved how Sayid honestly told the Dharma Initiative about himself. Yes, I am from the future. And I know those hatches in past tense even though you haven’t built them yet. Powerful stuff. In fact, it was the second time since the Pilot where we saw Sayid laugh (the first time being when he picked up the French distress call way back when). A creepy laugh, almost like the devil. Speaking of confessions and hatches: I want to see more of Stuart Radzinsky. He is simply awesome.
Concerning the flashbacks, it was nice to see Sayid’s story finally be tied together. His reasons for helping Ben, his reason for helping Hurley and finally his reason for being on the plane: none whatsoever. This places the ball in Ilana’s court: did she know they weren’t going to Guam? Or was she hired by someone else? Interesting questions…
The Questions…
Now we know why Sayid came back. Or was forced to come back. I loved seeing the dread in his face. It looked kind of like Franks, but way funnier. Other than that, I don’t see any clues for other questions.
In all…
As I already said, this episode was nice: as always it was solidly written, but this time it actually moved the story forward. Maybe we were taking baby steps towards the first part, but by the time Ben got shot at the end we were leaping. I do start getting annoyed by the fact that we see so little of some of my favourite characters: Locke, Faraday and Desmond. When will they be incorporated in the story again? I know how they’re trying to tell this story as coherently as possible and with as little time flashes as possible, but seriously: no Desmond since episode 7? That’s pretty damn harsh.
Favourite Quote:
Sawyer: “Three years no burning buses. Y’all are back for one day…”
Okay guys, it’s gone far enough. I’ve been with you for five seasons, rooting for you, cheering you on, hoping something good would come of it. In fact: I still do, don’t doubt that. But seriously: when you’ve only got one and a half season of your show left, the clock is ticking. So… how do you keep the story at a standstill for three consecutive episodes? Namaste, together with the previous episode LaFleur, have “Deathly Hallows” written all over them: in need of serious cutting. Not because of youn Ben. Not at all.
Now I’m not saying those two episodes were bad – they were clever, funny and well-written, the things I have come to expect from a LOST episode. But: they reeked of filler. And I can handle one filler episode, but two in a row when I know there’s only going to be that many episodes? That stinks.
I loved one part though, but only time can tell if it has been deliberate. When Christian is talking to Frank and Sun at the reception, all of a sudden the door opens. Obviously our good old island smoke monster. When the camera cuts back to Sun, however, we can see the shadow of a girl moving in the background. Who was that? Claire? And why? Why didn’t Sun notice her? There are so many cool possibilities, so I hope we get to explore one fast. Oh, and I also hope Lapidus grows his beard back. He looks too much like a pedophile now.
We finally got our first look at the fabled Radzinsky. So he’s the one that designed the Swan station? Does this mean the numbers originated from him (seeing how he is at a communication station at the moment and will brand the numbers on the side of the hatch)? I like how he seems like the perfect Dharma-trooper at the moment. I hope to see him grow into this deranged maniac that drew the blast door map and shot himself through the head. But don’t show us the shooting through the head please. Nobody wants to see that.
The Questions…
Interesting point to raise: Sun and Lapidus did not end up in 1977. Why is that? Did the island not take Sun because Jin wasn’t there? Did Lapidus not fit the part of Seth Norris, our original captain? I kind of get the feeling they’re all part of some game at the moment, a game played by either Jacob or the whispers. Interesting, no?
In All…
LOST, I know that you’ll get your act together. I know this all just a big set-up towards the next big thing. But it better start next week. These episodes will be awesome on DVD, but when you’ve got to wait in between? Not so much. Let’s hope a Sayid episode can stir things up a bit.
Favourite Quote:
Hurley: Dude your English is awesome.