Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Deadwood)

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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

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Gendo wrote:I had no idea that Attenborough was a director; let alone the director of a big-name pic like Ghandi; or that my recently acquired “Chaplin" was the same director as Ghandi.
Yeah Attenborough being a director its one of those things that surprise you once you learn it.

It's also probably the reason he even got cast in Jurassic Park. I'm like 99% certain his character is meant to be a stand-in of sorts for Spielberg himself in that first movie, and well who better for that kind of part than another director?
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

RE The Witch discussion; I haven't seen it, but it almost reminds me of the old debate I had with that psycho Harry on the old IMDb about Black Swan. His view was that the film supported the misogynistic notion that women that seek professions are crazy (because the professional female protagonist does, indeed, go crazy). I argued that the real reason she goes crazy had nothing to do with her profession in itself, but the fact that her profession was requiring her to tap into a sexual part of herself that she'd repressed because of a misogynistic society who demanded women be "perfect" and "pure." I'm not saying which is the case for The Witch, but the discussion just made me think back to that.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I wouldn't say Marion Crane was "sexually fucked up" in the same way Marnie is, but it's undoubtedly her sexual relationship that inspires her thievery. I'd agree there's no tie-in in To Catch a Thief, though.
For Marion, are you talking about the thing with her boyfriend's debts? If you want to connect that back to sexuality then I suppose it works, but it just seems more like a "lol we don't have money" thing to me.
It's just the idea that "I love this man so much/am so obsessed with this relationship I'm willing to steal for him/us." Very different than the reason Marnie steals, but still an interesting comparison.
Raxivace wrote:
I didn't hate Alien 3 either. Haven't seen Covenant.
It seems we're among the few in regards to not hating Alien 3. Maybe its a difference in approach? I think of it as "David Fincher's first film" before thinking of it as the contested third entry in a beloved franchise.

Did you see Prometheus? Covenant is basically Prometheus 2.
I think the reason I didn't hate Alien 3 was because Aliens was already so different from Alien that the series already felt more like a ground for "auteur's variations on a theme" then a series with any unified vision/aesthetic/approach. All three films are pretty good and all have their strengths and weaknesses.

I did see Prometheus but didn't care much for it. Seemed like Ridley was trying to turn a series that was more about horror, tension, isolation, claustrophobia, etc. into a mythology and it just didn't work, probably because we're in an age of cinema already steeped in other mythologies so it felt like just another attempt.
Raxivace wrote:I will say discussions about the HBO Watchmen did open up an interesting ambiguity in the original comic though. In the HBO show, white supremacists have appropriated Rorschach's imagery and are basically using copies of his mask as a replacement for traditional Klan hoods. Writer Damon Lindelof insists that he doesn't believe Rorschach was racist in the original comic, and the villain characters are just straight up co-opting his imagery to serve their own ends. Many people disagreed with Lindelof's view on Rorschach in the comics here, saying the character was always intended to be read as a racist.

Thing is, rereading the comic for all of the fucked up shit that Rorschach says in the comic, I'm not sure he does say anything particularly motivated by race. Even in his conversations with his black therapist, Rorschach's disdain for him seems to be more from his class and college education.

And yet, the right-wing magazine that Rorschach is subscribed to is very much racist.

Image

^How much Rorschach buys into specifically racial stereotypes like these I think is debatable, but both sides I think have things to point to.
Interesting. I didn't pay any attention to this in the original comic, so whenever I eventually reread it I'll have to keep this in mind. I'll probably see the HBO series eventually as well.
Raxivace wrote:BTW have you ever read anything that suggested Hitchcock was pushed into making Psycho by seeing Breathles? I heard something on a podcast once that said Hitch saw Breathless, said to himself "Holy shit the French are ahead of us by like 20 years!", and then made Psycho to compete with it.

As amusing as that idea sounds I've never seen anything to substantiate it despite actively looking.
Nope, never heard anything about this either. From everything I've heard/read from/about Hitch, when it comes to other films he didn't say much, and much of what I have heard him saying about other films have come secondhand. Who knows how much, if any of it, is true. I wonder, though, just how much Hitch would've been inspired by Breathless. So much of what made that film different was how much it broke/subverted all the classic rules of Hollywood, especially the studio-bound, carefully shot/edited, storyboarded to the nth-degree, perfectionism that was Hitch's "thing." I guess, perhaps, Hitch might've been inspired in an abstract ways to start thinking about how he could break genre conventions even more, but Psycho is still very much a Hollywood production despite its genre subversiveness.
Raxivace wrote:It didn't really feel that weird to me, though I've seen another show use a similar structure- The Shield...
Interesting. Funnily enough, I have very, very vague memories of watching The Shield with my mom when it was originally on TV. I don't know how far we got (I know we didn't finish it), but it's one of those shows I watched with her (Boston Legal and Ally McBeal were two others) that I now remember almost nothing about.
Raxivace wrote:15. Parasite (2019, Dir. Bong Joon-ho) - Pretty torn on this one. As a genre film in the vein of Hitchcockian thrillers its quite good (In fact on technical level it might match Hitch at his best), but the political themes didn't really work for me in a similar way that they didn't work for me in Snowpiercer.
If Parasite is just as a visually/conceptually imaginative as Snowpiercer I'd be satisfied. Where do you think it ranks among this year's crop of BP nominees so far?
Raxivace wrote:17. A Face in the Crowd (1957, Dir. Elia Kazan)
Yeah, really great film, and definitely one that just seems more relevant as time goes by. Maybe even Kazan's best. Have you seen Splendour in the Grass from him yet? I don't remember it too well, but it's one of my mom's favorite films.
Raxivace wrote:21. Little Women (2019, Dir. Greta Gerwig) - I found this just incomprehensible. Perhaps you had to be familiar with either the original novel or the other film adaptations, but I'm not and had absolutely no idea what was going on most of the time. I can get through Godard at his most opaque and Tomino doing his most baffling horseshit, but this just left me in the dust.
Read the book. It's really good, and one of those where I completely understand the obsession some people have with it. No film has really done it justice, and I've seen a few.
Raxivace wrote:26. Ordinary People (1980, Dir. Robert Redford) - The 1980 Best Picture Winner. This is another case where the film that won is perfectly fine, though IMO inferior to other nominees that year- namely Raging Bull, though I think I like The Elephant Man better as well.
Yeah, Raging Bull and The Elephant Man are better, but Ordinary People sticks out as being one of the more depressing films I saw pretty early in my cinephilia, back when I was probably more focused on acting than directing. Not sure if I'd like it as much now, but I do remember being quite moved by the performances.
Raxivace wrote:27. Paranormal Activity (2007, Dir. Oren Peli) -
I just remember being bored by this. I agree the found footage thing can be interesting, but I still think that, by far, the best usage of that genre/technique is Cloverfield. For whatever reason, I don't think it works as well in horror. I think the idea of why it's supposed to work in horror is that it's supposed to make the audience believe it's real, as if it was a documentary. If the audience aren't idiots, this doesn't work, and then you're just left with whether or not whatever's shown is actually scary. In Cloverfield, though, I think being "stuck" to the POV of a single camera actually helped with scale and immersion. The problem with a lot of monster movies is that the camera is able to be as big as the monsters, but when you only see the monster as you're running from them on the ground, that's a completely different experience.
Raxivace wrote:28. Chariots of Fire (1981, Dir. Hugh Hudson) -
I also remember this one being quite dull, though, again, ages since I've seen it. Your review certainly doesn't inspire a likely rewatch.
Raxivace wrote:29. Gandhi (1982, Dir. Richard Attenborough) -
It's a decent film that I think is made worse by its length. I agree about Kingsley, but, TBH, he's about the only redeeming grace. Attenborough isn't anything special as a director, though my favorite from him is the musical Oh! What a Lovely War, that's all but forgotten these days. It was, I think, his directorial debut (*checks* Yep) and you can see that he was really trying to prove something with how elaborate it was. But it has a sense of fun that's all but gone in Gandhi. Gandhi is Attenborough also trying to impress, but through pure drama this time, and I think it sapped most of whatever directorial talents he had.
Raxivace wrote:30. Out of Africa (1985, Dir. Sydney Pollack) -
I don't remember seeing this one, which probably means I didn't since I tend to at least remember seeing most of the BP winners/nominees I've seen.
Raxivace wrote:31. The Last Emperor (Theatrical Cut, 1987, Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci) -
Interesting, those facts you posted about this one. I remember loving this back when I saw it, which was fairly early in my cinephile days and before I knew who Bertolucci was or had seen anything else. I just remember thinking what a beautiful epic it was. As usual, not sure how I'd feel now, but I've generally been a fan of Bertolluci.
Raxivace wrote:And with that, I have finally finished seeing all of the Best Picture Winners.
Congrats! [clap]
Raxivace wrote:Every now and then though they are surprising. Some of the movies that they award do still end up being genuinely good despite fitting all of those categories to some extent (Amadeus probably being the biggest pleasant surprise to me here), and every now and then they'll completely go against the grain and award something like Parasite or Unforgiven or Silence of the Lambs or No Country For Old Men or even Birdman.
Don't forget The Shape of Water!
Raxivace wrote:...anyone who starts going off about the “worst" Best Picture Winners and then starts mostly listing off stuff made in the last 30 years or so frankly just haven't seen many of these older films. Shakespeare in Love or Crash or Green Book or English Patient or Chicago or whatever else are still quite a bit better than some of the real clunkers from pre-1970 like Broadway Melody (Which at least has the excuse of being an early sound film) or Cavalcade or Cimarron or Gentlemen's Agreement or Gigi or Greatest Show on Earth or All Around the World in 80 Days or Tom freakin' Jones.
100% agree. If anything, the low quality of older BP winners might've turned me off Classic Hollywood for a while in my early cinephile years, which ended up being dominated by more modern stuff and older foreign stuff. It took some time before I caught onto Hitch, Wilder, Hawks, Ford, Sturges, noirs, et al.
Raxivace wrote:It's not very high on it tbh since I wasn't really into Annie Hall or the "Oedipus Wrecks" short in New York Stories. The Woody Allen movies I tend to like best are the ones he's not starring in- something about his persona as an actor just really grates me.
I will say that Manhattan is very different from Annie Hall. TBF, Allen has a pretty diverse filmography in terms of style and tone, even though he also has a lot of films that feel like variations on a similar theme. Like, there's a sense in which Manhattan and Annie Hall are similar in terms of characters (though even there there's some key differences), but the look/feel/style is radically different and that, well, makes a difference!
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:I'm not saying which is the case for The Witch, but the discussion just made me think back to that.
You should watch the film at some point and weigh in on this.
I did see Prometheus but didn't care much for it. Seemed like Ridley was trying to turn a series that was more about horror, tension, isolation, claustrophobia, etc. into a mythology and it just didn't work, probably because we're in an age of cinema already steeped in other mythologies so it felt like just another attempt.
I kind of liked the mythological bent myself. Typically though when I hear people say they don't like Prometheus its because of the illogical way the scientist characters act.
Interesting. I didn't pay any attention to this in the original comic, so whenever I eventually reread it I'll have to keep this in mind. I'll probably see the HBO series eventually as well.
FWIW the HBO series done as of now- apparently they don't have any plans for a second season anyways. As always I'll be curious to know what you think of it, especially since you'd be coming at it from a very different place than me since you haven't seen Lindelof's previous TV in Lost and The Leftovers, and part of what I didn't like about HBO Watchmen was how it reuses plot points from the end of both of those shows that I already didn't like in them (Especially with Lost).
Nope, never heard anything about this either. From everything I've heard/read from/about Hitch, when it comes to other films he didn't say much, and much of what I have heard him saying about other films have come secondhand. Who knows how much, if any of it, is true. I wonder, though, just how much Hitch would've been inspired by Breathless. So much of what made that film different was how much it broke/subverted all the classic rules of Hollywood, especially the studio-bound, carefully shot/edited, storyboarded to the nth-degree, perfectionism that was Hitch's "thing." I guess, perhaps, Hitch might've been inspired in an abstract ways to start thinking about how he could break genre conventions even more, but Psycho is still very much a Hollywood production despite its genre subversiveness.
Yeah. The other thing to check would be when Breathless came out in America in comparison to when Psycho started shooting, but eh I'm too tired to look into that. The dates might not even line up right.
Interesting. Funnily enough, I have very, very vague memories of watching The Shield with my mom when it was originally on TV. I don't know how far we got (I know we didn't finish it), but it's one of those shows I watched with her (Boston Legal and Ally McBeal were two others) that I now remember almost nothing about.
Lol I watched it with my mom too, though we finished the whole thing.
If Parasite is just as a visually/conceptually imaginative as Snowpiercer I'd be satisfied. Where do you think it ranks among this year's crop of BP nominees so far?
It's probably number 3 for me. I preferred Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood and The Irishman to it overall. Depending on my mood I might even say Joker ties with Parasite for me, though a lot of people would skewer me for being that positive about Joker. After that its 1917, then Ford v Ferarri, and then Little Women and Jojo Rabbit tied for last.

BTW, big LOL at the people mad at Joker for taking a lot of inspiration from Taxi Driver as if Taxi Driver itself wasn't basically a remake of The Searchers.
Have you seen Splendour in the Grass from him yet? I don't remember it too well, but it's one of my mom's favorite films.
Haven't seen that one yet.
Read the book. It's really good, and one of those where I completely understand the obsession some people have with it. No film has really done it justice, and I've seen a few.
I probably will at some point, though this shitty film version doesn't exactly have me jumping out of my seat to want to go check it out.
Yeah, Raging Bull and The Elephant Man are better, but Ordinary People sticks out as being one of the more depressing films I saw pretty early in my cinephilia, back when I was probably more focused on acting than directing. Not sure if I'd like it as much now, but I do remember being quite moved by the performances.
The acting is pretty solid all around in Ordinary People. Perhaps its a bit melodramatic compared to how understated a lot of modern acting tries to be, though I find that modern trend a bit annoying anyways.
I just remember being bored by this. I agree the found footage thing can be interesting, but I still think that, by far, the best usage of that genre/technique is Cloverfield. For whatever reason, I don't think it works as well in horror. I think the idea of why it's supposed to work in horror is that it's supposed to make the audience believe it's real, as if it was a documentary. If the audience aren't idiots, this doesn't work, and then you're just left with whether or not whatever's shown is actually scary. In Cloverfield, though, I think being "stuck" to the POV of a single camera actually helped with scale and immersion. The problem with a lot of monster movies is that the camera is able to be as big as the monsters, but when you only see the monster as you're running from them on the ground, that's a completely different experience.
I still maintain to this day that the best found footage horror movie is Grizzly Man. Like seriously, that movie works in like exactly the same way something like Cloverfield or Blair Witch Project does, except its about a guy that actually died.

Beyond that though, I think some of the indie horror stuff on YouTube had some clever ideas about the genre. Like a series like Marble Hornets really embraced the idea that it was being made for YouTube for specifically and did some neat things that kind of get lost if you just watch it on DVD after the fact.
It's a decent film that I think is made worse by its length. I agree about Kingsley, but, TBH, he's about the only redeeming grace. Attenborough isn't anything special as a director, though my favorite from him is the musical Oh! What a Lovely War, that's all but forgotten these days. It was, I think, his directorial debut (*checks* Yep) and you can see that he was really trying to prove something with how elaborate it was. But it has a sense of fun that's all but gone in Gandhi. Gandhi is Attenborough also trying to impress, but through pure drama this time, and I think it sapped most of whatever directorial talents he had.
Should a Gandhi biopic really be fun though? I do agree though that Attenborough does seem to just have a baseline competence as a director.
Interesting, those facts you posted about this one. I remember loving this back when I saw it, which was fairly early in my cinephile days and before I knew who Bertolucci was or had seen anything else. I just remember thinking what a beautiful epic it was. As usual, not sure how I'd feel now, but I've generally been a fan of Bertolluci.
This was my first of Bert's so I dunno how it compares to his other movies.
Congrats! [clap]
Thanks. [smile]

Finally, after all this time, I have a "fun fact" to share about myself at parties...
Don't forget The Shape of Water!
Yeah, that's another one that seems weirder the more you think about it.
100% agree. If anything, the low quality of older BP winners might've turned me off Classic Hollywood for a while in my early cinephile years, which ended up being dominated by more modern stuff and older foreign stuff. It took some time before I caught onto Hitch, Wilder, Hawks, Ford, Sturges, noirs, et al.
Yeah its not hard to imagine a young cinephile thinking to start with movie watching with the Best Picture winners and getting turned off by having seen just the right combination of the lesser winners.

What's kind of funny is that a lot of Hitch, Wilder, Ford etc. films actually did get nominated for Best Picture if you go and look through the lists year by year. Like just today I only found out that Suspicion of all things was up for BP the year that How Green Was My Valley won, alongside Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane.

The year before when Rebecca won, Foreign Correspondent was nominated for BP too which is kind of crazy. You also have two separate Ford films nominated in Grapes of Wrath and Long Voyage Home (The latter of which I haven't seen).

Wilder movies of course won twice with Lost Weekend and The Apartment, though IIRC at least Double Indemnity was nominated the year it came out too.
I will say that Manhattan is very different from Annie Hall. TBF, Allen has a pretty diverse filmography in terms of style and tone, even though he also has a lot of films that feel like variations on a similar theme. Like, there's a sense in which Manhattan and Annie Hall are similar in terms of characters (though even there there's some key differences), but the look/feel/style is radically different and that, well, makes a difference!
Well, I'll give it a chance at some point and what you say is encouraging.

EDIT: Random thought just occurred to me. Have you heard how a lot of Netflix movies are coming to Criterion down the line? Like Irishman, Roma, Other Side of the Wind etc. I kind of wonder now if NGE won't legitimately get a Criterion release now- there's not even any rumors of that or anything of course, but that dumb April Fools Joke I made at IMDb back in the day could theoretically happen now.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

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32. Jason and the Argonauts (1963, Dir. Don Chaffey) - Back in college I read the Argonautica, and while the English translation we received was a bit stiff the story itself was still fairly enjoyable. So between my interest in classical mythology and the fame of this film adaptation (I remember Tom Hanks even once said that he considered this the greatest film of all time), this has been on my radar for a while now even though I'm only just now getting to it.

It may not be one of the greatest films ever made but its pretty good. Ray Harryhausen's special effects are particularly charming still even today, especially the giant statue (Apparently inspired by, of all things, Sergio Leone's The Colossus of Rhodes.) and the skeletons at the end of the film. I don't quite know too much about the Hollywood swords and sandals epics that this fits into, but I suspect it was more or less a last hurrah for the genre considering when it came out.

In general this seems to play up positive qualities of characters even more than the Argonautica does. Jason has even less treacherous qualities, Medea is less murderous etc. Like a lot of these mythological characters, I guess there are a lot of ways to depict and interpret them, which leads me to…

33. Medea (1988, Dir. Lars von Trier) - Yeah that's right, old Lars himself has a spin on the Argonauts story. Sort of. While Jason and the Argonauts is based on the Argonautica specifically, this film is based on a different source- an ancient Greek play written by Euripides called Medea. That was adapted into an unfilmed scripted written by Carl Theodore Dreyer, which was then interpreted and filmed by Las von Trier for this TV movie.

I have to admit I'm not familiar with the specific Euripides play that forms the original basis for this project (This movie is mostly set after the Golden Fleece quest, which I'm guessing is true of the play as well), though through reading about it on Wikipedia it seems that it paints Medea as more of a tragic villain seeking revenge on Jason for wanting to marry a different woman, which stands in contrast to both the Argonautica and Jason and the Argonauts where Medea is a more traditional romantic lead. This just isn't some fun adventure story like those.
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^With a title card like this, you know you're in for something other than classical heroics alright.

Really though, it does basically set up the grim mood of the whole movie. And that does seems to be the focus here more than anything, tone and aesthetics, as despite the mythological backbone the plot here is pretty thin, though I suppose it does make Medea finally murdering her own children all the more shocking.

I do have to say the heavily stylized swamp scenes in this film did make me nostalgic for The Kingdom to some extent, since they looked exactly the swamp bits in the opening credits for that show.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:I kind of liked the mythological bent myself. Typically though when I hear people say they don't like Prometheus its because of the illogical way the scientist characters act.
Characters acting irrationally in fiction rarely bothers me unless it's either very much against their character, or I simply couldn't imagine anyone making that decision.
Raxivace wrote:FWIW the HBO series done as of now- apparently they don't have any plans for a second season anyways. As always I'll be curious to know what you think of it, especially since you'd be coming at it from a very different place than me since you haven't seen Lindelof's previous TV in Lost and The Leftovers, and part of what I didn't like about HBO Watchmen was how it reuses plot points from the end of both of those shows that I already didn't like in them (Especially with Lost).
Funnily enough, I just started watching Lost yesterday. I've been wanting to get back into a TV show for a while and I remembered you talking about Lost a lot. I'm through ep. 6 already and digging it. It very much reminds me of an extended Twilight Zone episode, which is a show I loved as a kid. I can tell it's going to be a show where they slowly dole out clues as to what's going on, and I can see how it created a huge following of people trying to figure it out. I'm not going to read any spoilers/theories as I go, though. Right now, so many clues are pointing towards everything being some kind of limbo/afterlife, but I doubt Abrams and co. were so lazy to go down that route. I also really like how each episode has tied in character backstories as well. Really made everyone seem way more human and flawed compared to how they started.
Raxivace wrote:I probably will at some point, though this shitty film version doesn't exactly have me jumping out of my seat to want to go check it out.
I've said this before, but I tend to think that film has trouble adapting stories where characters age from children to adults. I know there are exceptions, but they're rare. Once Upon a Time in America is one of the exceptions, and it does it is by making the children's scenes less about growing up and more about nostalgia and the relationships between characters, so we aren't so concerned about following every detail of their lives as they get older. In literature, we aren't tied to any single "image" of a character the way we are in film, and the fact that film takes place in time generally makes those big leaps a bit harder to swallow. I think this tends to be compounded with the more characters you have and the more their actual "growing up" is crucial to the story. You just need that temporal freedom that literature allows for. I think that's why Little women has been relatively difficult to adapt because it has all those elements that film struggles with.
Raxivace wrote:The acting is pretty solid all around in Ordinary People. Perhaps its a bit melodramatic compared to how understated a lot of modern acting tries to be, though I find that modern trend a bit annoying anyways.
It's funny how acting trends change even in a relatively short period of time. I often catch glimpses of even 80s films on TV where the acting seems strangely stilted by modern standards, and I wonder how much of that is just us not noticing the artifice of modern acting, how much of that is because how people have changed, or some combination of the above.
Raxivace wrote:I still maintain to this day that the best found footage horror movie is Grizzly Man. Like seriously, that movie works in like exactly the same way something like Cloverfield or Blair Witch Project does, except its about a guy that actually died.

Beyond that though, I think some of the indie horror stuff on YouTube had some clever ideas about the genre. Like a series like Marble Hornets really embraced the idea that it was being made for YouTube for specifically and did some neat things that kind of get lost if you just watch it on DVD after the fact.
I still need to see Grizzly Man. I'll try to make it a priority. Is Marble Hornets still on YouTube? I could check it out as well.
Raxivace wrote:Should a Gandhi biopic really be fun though? I do agree though that Attenborough does seem to just have a baseline competence as a director.
Not fun, per say, but I wish he'd brought a similar energy. Think of Scorsese dramas; they're not always fun, but they're brimming with energy. Gandhi just seemed weighed down by how serious it's trying to be. I think you can be serious without constantly having an air of seriousness, if that makes sense. It just tends to weigh things down when films get that long and the best thing going on is the acting.
Raxivace wrote:Yeah its not hard to imagine a young cinephile thinking to start with movie watching with the Best Picture winners and getting turned off by having seen just the right combination of the lesser winners.

What's kind of funny is that a lot of Hitch, Wilder, Ford etc. films actually did get nominated for Best Picture if you go and look through the lists year by year. Like just today I only found out that Suspicion of all things was up for BP the year that How Green Was My Valley won, alongside Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane.

The year before when Rebecca won, Foreign Correspondent was nominated for BP too which is kind of crazy. You also have two separate Ford films nominated in Grapes of Wrath and Long Voyage Home (The latter of which I haven't seen).

Wilder movies of course won twice with Lost Weekend and The Apartment, though IIRC at least Double Indemnity was nominated the year it came out too.
How Green Was My Valley is one of the older BP I saw and was always impressed with. In fact, back then, I probably even preferred it to Citizen Kane. I don't think I saw Rebecca back then because it just wasn't available at my local rental stores, so I don't think I saw it until I got Netflix and got into Hitch. I've always loved Grapes of Wrath, too. The earliest Wilder I remember was Some Like It Hot, which has also always been a favorite. I guess I should've realized back then that the bad older BP winners were more indicative of the Oscars' bad tastes than the badness of classic Hollywood.
Raxivace wrote: Random thought just occurred to me. Have you heard how a lot of Netflix movies are coming to Criterion down the line? Like Irishman, Roma, Other Side of the Wind etc. I kind of wonder now if NGE won't legitimately get a Criterion release now- there's not even any rumors of that or anything of course, but that dumb April Fools Joke I made at IMDb back in the day could theoretically happen now.
There still seems like a big difference between Netflix films released by eminent directors getting Criterion treatment and an anime series getting that treatment. Isn't there only like two animated film, period, on Criterion? (I'm thinking of Fantastic Mr. Fox and Watership Down) If anything, I'd think stuff like Persepolis and/or Waltz With Bashir would get that treatment before NGE, which would be a pretty big gamble. Plus, I'm not sure how licensing works with Netflix VS Criterion, and I'm assuming the former can pay more.
Raxivace wrote:33. Medea (1988, Dir. Lars von Trier) - Yeah that's right, old Lars himself has a spin on the Argonauts story. Sort of. While Jason and the Argonauts is based on the Argonautica specifically, this film is based on a different source- an ancient Greek play written by Euripides called Medea. That was adapted into an unfilmed scripted written by Carl Theodore Dreyer, which was then interpreted and filmed by Las von Trier for this TV movie.

I have to admit I'm not familiar with the specific Euripides play that forms the original basis for this project (This movie is mostly set after the Golden Fleece quest, which I'm guessing is true of the play as well), though through reading about it on Wikipedia it seems that it paints Medea as more of a tragic villain seeking revenge on Jason for wanting to marry a different woman, which stands in contrast to both the Argonautica and Jason and the Argonauts where Medea is a more traditional romantic lead. This just isn't some fun adventure story like those.
medea.mp4_snapshot_00.03.48_[2020.02.17_02.42.13].jpg
^With a title card like this, you know you're in for something other than classical heroics alright.

Really though, it does basically set up the grim mood of the whole movie. And that does seems to be the focus here more than anything, tone and aesthetics, as despite the mythological backbone the plot here is pretty thin, though I suppose it does make Medea finally murdering her own children all the more shocking.

I do have to say the heavily stylized swamp scenes in this film did make me nostalgic for The Kingdom to some extent, since they looked exactly the swamp bits in the opening credits for that show.
I read all the Greek tragedies years ago. Medea was definitely one of the best. It really stuck out for how gruesome it was compared to most stuff back then (as was his Electra and The Bacchaee). Euripides also tended to be the Greek playwright that was, strangely, the most human AND the most melodramatic, especially compared to the lofty tragedies of Sophocles and the poetically dense style of Aeschylus. He was definitely the most Shakespeare-like of that group.

As for von Trier's adaptation, I remember admiring it more than liking it. I think, much like Euripides's style, von Trier tried to create a mix of the melodramatic and stylized and the modern and realistic. I don't think it entirely worked, but like most of von Trier's it was an interesting experiment. I also like how he tried to bring a bit of Dreyer's austere style to the film mixed with his own. It gives the film this very surreal quality of not being so artificial that we're completely distanced from it, but it's also not so natural that we can view it as just a regular "suspension of disbelief" film either.

Still, of von Trier's early stylized films, Europa is by far the best.
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Eva Yojimbo wrote:Funnily enough, I just started watching Lost yesterday. I've been wanting to get back into a TV show for a while and I remembered you talking about Lost a lot. I'm through ep. 6 already and digging it. It very much reminds me of an extended Twilight Zone episode, which is a show I loved as a kid. I can tell it's going to be a show where they slowly dole out clues as to what's going on, and I can see how it created a huge following of people trying to figure it out. I'm not going to read any spoilers/theories as I go, though. Right now, so many clues are pointing towards everything being some kind of limbo/afterlife, but I doubt Abrams and co. were so lazy to go down that route. I also really like how each episode has tied in character backstories as well. Really made everyone seem way more human and flawed compared to how they started.
I'll get to the rest of this post later, but I'll generally say I think Lost starts fairly strong but the deeper you get into it the worse it gets, especially in retrospect where even better parts of the series start making you go "Omfg really?" even in regards to the early parts that you're in now.

Its like you climbed a very tall ladder and looked down once you got to the top only to find that the whole thing was a lot more rickety and unsafe than you noticed before, and then also realized that perhaps your destination wasn't even worth such a dangerous trek.

Still, it became a phenomenon for a reason (Though the context you're receiving the show in now is radically different than when it aired live, since that huge following you mentioned arguably heavily distorted what the show was actually trying to do the whole time) and is legitimately interesting to talk about. Keep me updated with your thoughts as you go.
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Also its worth noting Abrams involvement was pretty limited after the first few episodes. He came up with initial concept of "plane crash on mysterious island" and directed an episode or two, but Lost is mostly the baby of Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

Of course all those Bad Robot guys have similar tastes/style in storytelling anyways, but I think Lindelof has more overt thematic concerns than Abrams does (And probably Cuse too though I haven't seen any solo stuff from him really to compare), and Lindelof's post-Lost stuff reminds me a fuckton of Lost in a way that Abrams' post-Lost stuff doesn't quite evoke as much.
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^ You know what I've often said about preferring interesting failures to uninteresting successes, so even if Lost just ends up being fun to discuss while it degenerates later on, I might end up considering the journey to have been worth it. Good to know about Abrams, btw. One thing I will note is that his directing style certainly evolved some over the years. First couple eps. of Lost relied very heavily on shaky-cam and multi-camera editing (with only a few relatively long-takes), while he seems to have reversed that trend (to an extent) on his later films that seemed much more classically inspired with just touches of these more modern approaches.
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I do think Rise of Skywalker kind of goes back on a lot of that from what I can remember (Even in comparison to something like The Force Awakens), though it sounds like it was a rushed, troubled production anyways from what various people are kind of hinting at.

But yeah, Lost is certainly a thing that you will have an opinion about one way or another by time you're done with it. I'll try not to be too specific about what the things are that really frustrate me about it, because I can't even really talk about it until you're in the final season really.
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Eva Yojimbo wrote:Characters acting irrationally in fiction rarely bothers me unless it's either very much against their character, or I simply couldn't imagine anyone making that decision.
Yeah I tend to fall into this kind of position as I get older too, since it becomes more obvious over time that people are irrational in general.
I've said this before, but I tend to think that film has trouble adapting stories where characters age from children to adults. I know there are exceptions, but they're rare. Once Upon a Time in America is one of the exceptions, and it does it is by making the children's scenes less about growing up and more about nostalgia and the relationships between characters, so we aren't so concerned about following every detail of their lives as they get older. In literature, we aren't tied to any single "image" of a character the way we are in film, and the fact that film takes place in time generally makes those big leaps a bit harder to swallow. I think this tends to be compounded with the more characters you have and the more their actual "growing up" is crucial to the story. You just need that temporal freedom that literature allows for. I think that's why Little women has been relatively difficult to adapt because it has all those elements that film struggles with.
Yeah Once Upon a Time in America is a good counterexample in film.

If you ever get around to Gerwig's Little Women I'll be curious to know what you think of it. Some people seem to really like it, but it left me super cold.
It's funny how acting trends change even in a relatively short period of time. I often catch glimpses of even 80s films on TV where the acting seems strangely stilted by modern standards, and I wonder how much of that is just us not noticing the artifice of modern acting, how much of that is because how people have changed, or some combination of the above.
It's probably a combination, though most modern acting does feel artificial to me these days.
I still need to see Grizzly Man. I'll try to make it a priority. Is Marble Hornets still on YouTube? I could check it out as well.
Yeah Grizzly Man is probably my favorite Herzog doc. Timothy Treadwell is just such a bizarre figure.

Marble Hornets is still on YouTube, but the big conceit of it is that videos were uploaded "in real time". The fact that there even was a YouTube channel was even a part of the plot (One episode even featured a character deciding just to randomly Google who this strange guy with a video camera that's been harrassing him was, and then starting a fight with him after discovering the bizarre YouTube channel that footage of him had been uploaded to without permission), as different people (Including malicious characters) would take it over, and upload strange shit. When YouTube had a "video response" system, there would even be mysterious avant-garde reply videos that would hint at future developments in the plot, have weird puzzles in them to decode etc. There was also a Twitter account too managed by the characters, and that would get used in similar ways too.

Basically, this allowed them to sidestep the weird conceit of found footage horror movies in that there's always a question of "Who is even editing this footage together and why?" in stuff like Blair Witch Project, as the premise of Marble Hornets is that weird shit is happening to the main character and he wants to document it so the world can know and he can get help solving various mysteries about what's going on and such.

Of course it was all an amateur production still and I think it ultimately bit off way more than it can chew, but I dunno I thought it was neat.
Not fun, per say, but I wish he'd brought a similar energy. Think of Scorsese dramas; they're not always fun, but they're brimming with energy. Gandhi just seemed weighed down by how serious it's trying to be. I think you can be serious without constantly having an air of seriousness, if that makes sense. It just tends to weigh things down when films get that long and the best thing going on is the acting.
I suppose I can see that. Last Temptation immediately comes to mind as the kind of a film that I think Gandhi is trying to be but doesn't quite reach the level of.
I guess I should've realized back then that the bad older BP winners were more indicative of the Oscars' bad tastes than the badness of classic Hollywood.
Yeah I know what you mean, but that's also why I was surprised that the Oscar's tastes actually did get quite a bit better over time.
There still seems like a big difference between Netflix films released by eminent directors getting Criterion treatment and an anime series getting that treatment. Isn't there only like two animated film, period, on Criterion? (I'm thinking of Fantastic Mr. Fox and Watership Down) If anything, I'd think stuff like Persepolis and/or Waltz With Bashir would get that treatment before NGE, which would be a pretty big gamble. Plus, I'm not sure how licensing works with Netflix VS Criterion, and I'm assuming the former can pay more.
Well Criterion did release Akira back in the laserdisc days, but I see what you mean.

The lack of animated stuff in Criterion in general is probably my biggest issue with their, uh, curation. I don't think they're necessarily trying to be curators (Insert joke about Armageddon and Chasing Amy being Criterion releases here), but regardless of that there are people that still treat them that way anyways.
Still, of von Trier's early stylized films, Europa is by far the best.
Yeah that's a good way of describing what von Trier is going for in Medea. I think it worked a bit better for me than you, but I agree it may not have entirely worked.

Next von Trier I'll will probably be Europa now.
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34. Kiss the Girls (1997, Dir. Gary Fleder) - Similar to Along Came a Spider which also featured Morgan Freeman playing Alex Cross, this is mostly just a decent mystery/thriller like Hollywood doesn't seem to make very often anymore. Fun for what it is.

35. All Through the Night (1942, Dir. Vincent Sherman) - Bogart is vaguely some kind of gangster who is investigating the death of a local baker at a restraurant he frequents, only to uncover an insidious Nazi plot. Bogie and his gang of friends fight them some Nazis.

Not one of Bogart's better outings but I had fun with it. These thriller movies of the 40's that turn into WWII propaganda are always kind of a trip, though this one doesn't rise to the level of something like Casablanca or Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent.

36. Casino Royale (Rewatch, 2006, Dir. Martin Campbell) - I have to disagree with Jimbo here and say this is still one of the better Bond films. Well shot, well cast (I completely forgot Mads Mikkelsen and Jeffrey Wright were in this!), it's just generally fun

I have to say its pretty interesting to watch after having read the novel though- first entire hour of the movie basically has no basis in this, and the actual goals of the casino section are different. In the movie, Bond is trying to bankrupt Le Chiffre at poker so he'll be forced to come to MI6 for protection; in the book, the plan is to bankrupt Le Chiffre so he'll be assassinated by his own people.

There's also just generally waaaaaay more action in the movie, whereas the book is more in the vein of film noir and old detective pulp novels, but that's to be expected from a modern Bond film adaptation.

37. Frozen II (2019, Dir. Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee) - The songs weren't as ear-wormy as Frozen 1 (I legitimately like “Let It Go" though), but I was honestly surprised by the direction this story took into what's basically fairy tale about how colonialism is bad. I didn't really expect something kind of darker like that from a Frozen sequel (Granted it still a children's movie), and maybe that's why it doesn't seem like Frozen II had quite as much a cultural impact as the first movie.

38. Olaf's Frozen Adventure (2015, Dir. Kevin Deters & Stevie Wermers) - Olaf goes on a Christmas adventure. It was cute.

39. Knives Out (2019, Dir. Rian Johnson) - A throwback to Agatha Christie-style whodunits. I really, really enjoyed this. Also, damn between this and Logan Lucky I really do think Daniel Craig is good at characters with “Southern drawl".

40. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019, Dir. Kevin Smith) - This movie injured me.

------------------------------------

Serial Experiments Lain (1998) - This is a pretty awesome, moody little show. In a way its plot revolving around the blending of real life and "The Wired" seem to predict what Kojima would go on to explore in Metal Gear Solid 2 (Maybe it was an influence?), with how confusing reality will become when you can distinguish between real life and the internet.

Still, it feels like its missing something, some factor that quite puts it in the pantheon for me in the way that something like Texhnolyze is, but I can't quite put my finger on what that is.
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I finished Season 1 of Lost yesterday, probably stayed up way too late doing it. In a way, the series reminds me a lot of Twin Peaks in that you have this balance of character-driven, soap-opera-ish melodrama and the weird, supernatural-ish, mystery element. Much like Twin Peaks, it seems to get worse the more it just focuses on the former rather than the latter. By the latter half of the season I got the feeling they were stretching some of the character back stories a bit thin to just pad out the season, but it wasn't egregious. Anyway, I'll probably start S2 tonight and am excited to see what they find in the hatch and how the hell Michael, Sawyer, and Jin get back to the Island... or get anywhere.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Characters acting irrationally in fiction rarely bothers me unless it's either very much against their character, or I simply couldn't imagine anyone making that decision.
Yeah I tend to fall into this kind of position as I get older too, since it becomes more obvious over time that people are irrational in general.
Plus, I'd also say that most films tend to feature characters in pretty stressful circumstances where they wouldn't be thinking clearly/rationally all the time anyway. People are going to make some stupid decisions under stress and pressure.
Raxivace wrote:Marble Hornets is still on YouTube, but the big conceit of it is that videos were uploaded "in real time". The fact that there even was a YouTube channel was even a part of the plot (One episode even featured a character deciding just to randomly Google who this strange guy with a video camera that's been harrassing him was, and then starting a fight with him after discovering the bizarre YouTube channel that footage of him had been uploaded to without permission), as different people (Including malicious characters) would take it over, and upload strange shit. When YouTube had a "video response" system, there would even be mysterious avant-garde reply videos that would hint at future developments in the plot, have weird puzzles in them to decode etc. There was also a Twitter account too managed by the characters, and that would get used in similar ways too.

Basically, this allowed them to sidestep the weird conceit of found footage horror movies in that there's always a question of "Who is even editing this footage together and why?" in stuff like Blair Witch Project, as the premise of Marble Hornets is that weird shit is happening to the main character and he wants to document it so the world can know and he can get help solving various mysteries about what's going on and such.

Of course it was all an amateur production still and I think it ultimately bit off way more than it can chew, but I dunno I thought it was neat.
Sounds interesting at least. How long is the entire thing?
Raxivace wrote:
I guess I should've realized back then that the bad older BP winners were more indicative of the Oscars' bad tastes than the badness of classic Hollywood.
Yeah I know what you mean, but that's also why I was surprised that the Oscar's tastes actually did get quite a bit better over time.
Of course it's possible that many of the modern BP winners won't hold up any better over time. It's possible in another 50 years that people will think Spotlight is just as awful as Gentleman's Agreement.
Raxivace wrote:The lack of animated stuff in Criterion in general is probably my biggest issue with their, uh, curation. I don't think they're necessarily trying to be curators (Insert joke about Armageddon and Chasing Amy being Criterion releases here), but regardless of that there are people that still treat them that way anyways.
Agree, but I think that tends to reflect a general disinterest among most cinephiles in animation, sadly.
Raxivace wrote:Next von Trier I'll will probably be Europa now.
Cool. It's actually the third part of a supposed trilogy, but whatever connections there are/were supposed to be between the films it's so loose that I don't think watching them out of chronological order would matter much.
Raxivace wrote:Serial Experiments Lain (1998) - This is a pretty awesome, moody little show. In a way its plot revolving around the blending of real life and "The Wired" seem to predict what Kojima would go on to explore in Metal Gear Solid 2 (Maybe it was an influence?), with how confusing reality will become when you can distinguish between real life and the internet.

Still, it feels like its missing something, some factor that quite puts it in the pantheon for me in the way that something like Texhnolyze is, but I can't quite put my finger on what that is.
I know what you mean by saying Lain's "missing something," though I liked it for the same reasons you did as well. If I had to try to guess, I might say that it's a rather cold series that's lacking in some real human interest. Texhnolyze was rather chilly too, but it still had compelling characters. Lain just seams to drift rather dream-like through its weird world, which makes it really cool aesthetically, but by the climax I don't think it's built up enough emotional cache to really make the impact that Texhnolyze does.
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Eva Yojimbo wrote:I finished Season 1 of Lost yesterday, probably stayed up way too late doing it. In a way, the series reminds me a lot of Twin Peaks in that you have this balance of character-driven, soap-opera-ish melodrama and the weird, supernatural-ish, mystery element. Much like Twin Peaks, it seems to get worse the more it just focuses on the former rather than the latter. By the latter half of the season I got the feeling they were stretching some of the character back stories a bit thin to just pad out the season, but it wasn't egregious. Anyway, I'll probably start S2 tonight and am excited to see what they find in the hatch and how the hell Michael, Sawyer, and Jin get back to the Island... or get anywhere.
Oh believe me, the stretching out gets worse. Some of that is just because its a network show and one that started 15+ years ago at this point (And things were certainly changing often in these early stages behind the scenes. Hell Jack was supposed to be played by Michael Keaton originally and was supposed to die in the pilot with Kate becoming the main character, but Keaton dropped out once it was decided to have Jack survive), but there are definitely much lower points to come.

BTW I'd be curious to know what you think of all the major characters at this point, what you think of the Island etc.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Plus, I'd also say that most films tend to feature characters in pretty stressful circumstances where they wouldn't be thinking clearly/rationally all the time anyway. People are going to make some stupid decisions under stress and pressure.
Reality TV and game shows make this pretty obvious too, especially on one like Survivor where you're sometimes under pretty brutal conditions. Turns out its much easier to come up with the smart choice in any given situation when you're at home on your couch and not starving on an island or even on stage at Jeopardy! or whatever.
Sounds interesting at least. How long is the entire thing?
With just the videos it looks like its about 9 hours if compilation videos on YouTube are any indication.

I should perhaps say for full disclosure that I'm Facebook friends with several of the guys that made Marble Hornets, and well as I'm sure you're aware being Facebook friends is the highest form of camaraderie possible among humans.
Of course it's possible that many of the modern BP winners won't hold up any better over time. It's possible in another 50 years that people will think Spotlight is just as awful as Gentleman's Agreement.
If you me and me are already saying that now, I'd hope in 50 years people will have caught up to us. [laugh]
Agree, but I think that tends to reflect a general disinterest among most cinephiles in animation, sadly.
I remember I used to listen to a podcast where they would pick a single auteur and then watch every film from them, and then do an episode on each film. They did big names like Hitchcock (Though they only got through Jamaica Inn before the podcast ended), PTA, David Lynch, Billy Wilder, the James Bond series (With the argument being the producers were the auteurs) etc. They even did a series on Satoshi Kon, though one of the hosts was an older guy who, despite being incredibly bright otherwise, just could not conceive of a reason why someone like Kon would tell his stories in animation and not just live action. To him, animation was Disney and Looney Tunes still- just had no idea how to process someone like Kon.

That's stuck with me for years now, especially because this is a guy who could accept people like Godard and such but somehow couldn't wrap his mind around Kon.
I know what you mean by saying Lain's "missing something," though I liked it for the same reasons you did as well. If I had to try to guess, I might say that it's a rather cold series that's lacking in some real human interest. Texhnolyze was rather chilly too, but it still had compelling characters. Lain just seams to drift rather dream-like through its weird world, which makes it really cool aesthetically, but by the climax I don't think it's built up enough emotional cache to really make the impact that Texhnolyze does.
Yeah this is about as good an explanation as any.

I suppose you could argue the lack of humanity is supposed to reflect the dehumanizing nature of technology/the internet, but eh.
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Lain is great; been many years since I've seen it, but definitely one of my favorite anime.

Eva's never seen Lost before now?? Whaa?
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Yeah, I've been trying to trick Jimbo into watching Lost for years now and I've finally succeeded. You might even call it a long con of sorts.
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Gendo wrote:Eva's never seen Lost before now?? Whaa?
I don't watch much TV, unless it's stuff that happens to be on when I eat, and then it's mostly just sit-coms.
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Raxivace wrote:Oh believe me, the stretching out gets worse. Some of that is just because its a network show and one that started 15+ years ago at this point (And things were certainly changing often in these early stages behind the scenes. Hell Jack was supposed to be played by Michael Keaton originally and was supposed to die in the pilot with Kate becoming the main character, but Keaton dropped out once it was decided to have Jack survive), but there are definitely much lower points to come.

BTW I'd be curious to know what you think of all the major characters at this point, what you think of the Island etc.
25 episodes per season of a 40-minute show also just seems like too much in principle to me. I think I realized that one problem I have with TV dramas like this is that it almost becomes like a vehicle for fanfiction where guest writers/directors get to come in and put their own spin on the characters/situation, and eventually it just feels like a hodgepodge of various ideas... the "too many cooks" syndrome, I guess. Interesting about Keaton.

Thoughts so far... I'm actually really liking the characters, more so than I though I would. It's a pretty diverse range of personalities and they've done a good job integrating the back stories to make them all flawed and interesting while playing those personalities against each other for drama on the island. Though from ep. 1 I thought Boone and/or Shannon would be the first to go as they just seemed ripe for killing off, and their Porn-inspired step-sibling love-hate thing was really the only rather silly back story. Of the rest of the cast I'd say Locke and Kate are my favorites; Locke because he's had the most radical transformation from his backstory, and Kate because she's the most mysterious/inscrutable in terms of her motivations/feelings (never quite sure if she's genuine or scheming). I think most of the other characters have been well-done, if a bit more standard-fare: Jack with his daddy issues, Charlie with his drug problem, etc. The most interesting dynamic (and one of the continued themes) is between Jack's "rationality" and Locke's "faith," which, given the setting, is giving me strong Tarkovsky/Stalker vibes.

As for the Island and what's going on, I don't have any solid ideas at this point. Frankly, I thought Jack had the best idea about the whole thing being a kind of experiment being run by Dharma, but that doesn't seem to explain the more "supernatural" elements very well. Certainly there's a running theme of light/dark going on, introduced early on by Locke with the Backgammon game (where two pieces were found on the corpses in the cave) and now we have the contrast between the white polar bears and the black horse. It would make sense if they're after the children simply because they're too young/innocent to be making moral choices. The video itself mentioned BF Skinner, who I know was famous for his ideas about behaviorism and how people can be programmed due to past experiences, and the entire series seems to be about these characters either repeating or trying to overcome their past decisions. I also can't help but notice that two characters (John Locke and Rousseau) seem named after two famous philosophers; the first popularized the notion that the mind started as a blank slate and was ultimate determined by experience (appropriate given that that seems to be Locke's approach to the Island; starting again as a blank slate). Rousseau popularized the "social contract" theory, but I'm not too familiar with him otherwise.

Without spoiling anything, can you just tell me, one, if the numbers have any special significance and, two, if anyone actually figured them out before the series ended? So far, I haven't found any significance with them, other than Kate saying 23 had some significance to her. I don't know if that's a red herring or perhaps the start of a series of clues about how they have significance to the characters. I did notice, though, that when they first explored the bunker/hatch that the total was written in graffiti on the walls (I actually did notice this before the reveal of the clock thing).
Raxivace wrote:With just the videos it looks like its about 9 hours if compilation videos on YouTube are any indication.

I should perhaps say for full disclosure that I'm Facebook friends with several of the guys that made Marble Hornets, and well as I'm sure you're aware being Facebook friends is the highest form of camaraderie possible among humans.
[laugh] Well, it's short enough so I may check it out after Lost, though I was also wanting to get to S3 of Twin Peaks.
Raxivace wrote:I remember I used to listen to a podcast where they would pick a single auteur and then watch every film from them, and then do an episode on each film. They did big names like Hitchcock (Though they only got through Jamaica Inn before the podcast ended), PTA, David Lynch, Billy Wilder, the James Bond series (With the argument being the producers were the auteurs) etc. They even did a series on Satoshi Kon, though one of the hosts was an older guy who, despite being incredibly bright otherwise, just could not conceive of a reason why someone like Kon would tell his stories in animation and not just live action. To him, animation was Disney and Looney Tunes still- just had no idea how to process someone like Kon.

That's stuck with me for years now, especially because this is a guy who could accept people like Godard and such but somehow couldn't wrap his mind around Kon.
It's amazing how life-long associations can so strongly bias people against certain things, even when the bias makes no sense. You'd think cinephiles familiar with auteur theory would see the appeal of a medium where the creator has complete freedom in terms of their vision and complete control in terms of creativity, far more so than in film where you're limited to what you can photograph (unless you have access to CGI, but even that's, essentially, a form of animation) and far more reliant on the talents of others to bring that vision to life; and then it's just a matter of realizing that there's no reason why someone couldn't use that medium for drama (or horror, or whatever) rather than comedy.
Raxivace wrote:Yeah this is about as good an explanation as any.

I suppose you could argue the lack of humanity is supposed to reflect the dehumanizing nature of technology/the internet, but eh.
Texhnolyze did something similar, I think, but its characters still ended up being compelling enough so that the ending wasn't completely bereft of emotional substance. Have you seen Haibane Renmei yet? Pretty sure I've mentioned how I consider those three to be the Divine Comedy of anime.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." -- Carl Jung
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:25 episodes per season of a 40-minute show also just seems like too much in principle to me. I think I realized that one problem I have with TV dramas like this is that it almost becomes like a vehicle for fanfiction where guest writers/directors get to come in and put their own spin on the characters/situation, and eventually it just feels like a hodgepodge of various ideas... the "too many cooks" syndrome, I guess. Interesting about Keaton.
Seasons 4, 5, and 6 do get shorter episode counts FWIW, but rather bizarrely some of the meandering issues don't actually disappear with them (At least in 5 and 6. Season 4 is pretty tightly paced all things considered).

There's even more behind the scenes stuff going on that really changes the direction of the story BTW, and you're going to come up with a major one of those again in season 2. Once you've finished season 2 I'll fill you in on it, because its both a bit silly and a bit weird. There's another major one that happens in season 3, and then while season 4 is airing the Writer's Strike of 2008 happens (Though I'll have to actually read up again on what exactly that changed in the long term).
Thoughts so far... I'm actually really liking the characters, more so than I though I would. It's a pretty diverse range of personalities and they've done a good job integrating the back stories to make them all flawed and interesting while playing those personalities against each other for drama on the island. Though from ep. 1 I thought Boone and/or Shannon would be the first to go as they just seemed ripe for killing off, and their Porn-inspired step-sibling love-hate thing was really the only rather silly back story. Of the rest of the cast I'd say Locke and Kate are my favorites; Locke because he's had the most radical transformation from his backstory, and Kate because she's the most mysterious/inscrutable in terms of her motivations/feelings (never quite sure if she's genuine or scheming). I think most of the other characters have been well-done, if a bit more standard-fare: Jack with his daddy issues, Charlie with his drug problem, etc. The most interesting dynamic (and one of the continued themes) is between Jack's "rationality" and Locke's "faith," which, given the setting, is giving me strong Tarkovsky/Stalker vibes.
I'm surprised you're so positive on Kate, I never quite thought her character worked very well and I thought Evangline Lily got kind of a raw deal with playing her. Locke is pretty interesting though, yeah.

Jack's another character I find frustrating because he's intended to be the "man of science/rationality", but in a lot of ways I feel like he ends up as a sort of strawman of those ideas.
As for the Island and what's going on, I don't have any solid ideas at this point. Frankly, I thought Jack had the best idea about the whole thing being a kind of experiment being run by Dharma, but that doesn't seem to explain the more "supernatural" elements very well. Certainly there's a running theme of light/dark going on, introduced early on by Locke with the Backgammon game (where two pieces were found on the corpses in the cave) and now we have the contrast between the white polar bears and the black horse. It would make sense if they're after the children simply because they're too young/innocent to be making moral choices. The video itself mentioned BF Skinner, who I know was famous for his ideas about behaviorism and how people can be programmed due to past experiences, and the entire series seems to be about these characters either repeating or trying to overcome their past decisions. I also can't help but notice that two characters (John Locke and Rousseau) seem named after two famous philosophers; the first popularized the notion that the mind started as a blank slate and was ultimate determined by experience (appropriate given that that seems to be Locke's approach to the Island; starting again as a blank slate). Rousseau popularized the "social contract" theory, but I'm not too familiar with him otherwise.
Yeah Lost loves its namedropping of philosophers, classic literature etc., though I'm not quite sure that it all amounts to much (Dharma being named, well, Dharma is a religious reference of course). It reminds me though, I always thought it was weird that that first Kate episode (IIRC) was the one called "Tabula Rasa" and not the first one about Locke.

IIRC the black horse is supposed to be a shoutout to Twin Peaks, to that time Sarah Palmer has that vision of a horse.
Without spoiling anything, can you just tell me, one, if the numbers have any special significance and, two, if anyone actually figured them out before the series ended? So far, I haven't found any significance with them, other than Kate saying 23 had some significance to her. I don't know if that's a red herring or perhaps the start of a series of clues about how they have significance to the characters. I did notice, though, that when they first explored the bunker/hatch that the total was written in graffiti on the walls (I actually did notice this before the reveal of the clock thing).
I don't think anyone figured out the numbers, though I think that's because I'm not sure there was anything to even figure out.

They're probably best thought of as just a recurring motif in the story, and not something that will lead you to figure out the ending in advance if you plug them into Bayes' Theorem or something.
It's amazing how life-long associations can so strongly bias people against certain things, even when the bias makes no sense. You'd think cinephiles familiar with auteur theory would see the appeal of a medium where the creator has complete freedom in terms of their vision and complete control in terms of creativity, far more so than in film where you're limited to what you can photograph (unless you have access to CGI, but even that's, essentially, a form of animation) and far more reliant on the talents of others to bring that vision to life; and then it's just a matter of realizing that there's no reason why someone couldn't use that medium for drama (or horror, or whatever) rather than comedy.
Yeah. IIRC even Eisenstein said he thought animation might actually be the form of film with the most potential because of that freedom.
Texhnolyze did something similar, I think, but its characters still ended up being compelling enough so that the ending wasn't completely bereft of emotional substance. Have you seen Haibane Renmei yet? Pretty sure I've mentioned how I consider those three to be the Divine Comedy of anime.
Yeah Texhnolyze actually was kind of similar in that aspect, now you mention it.

I haven't seen Haibane Renmei quite yet but it'll be coming up here relatively soon. Right now I'm finishing up something else on Netflix, and then either Wednesday or Thursday season 3 of Castlevania drops so I'll power through that pretty quickly, but after those Haibane will be the next show I watch.

It might get delayed though for me. I dunno if you've seen the Literature forum here, but I've been powering through a lot of audiobooks lately and that's been taking up a lot of my free time. Right now I'm listening to The Count of Monte Cristo and that shit's pretty addicting, its like the 1800's version of Breaking Bad or something (And about as long too!).
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Lord_Lyndon »

I haven't seen Haibane Renmei quite yet but it'll be coming up here relatively soon.
Eva said many times that Haibane is the closest anime has ever gotten to Ozu. Just like he said Texhnolyze is the closest anime has ever gotten to Tarkovsky.
I hope you will enjoy Haibane, Rax.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

I finished Season 2. I think overall I liked it better than S1. I liked the narrative switch early on with the new cast members and the interesting plotting of several episodes where they jumped around in time. I also think they kept the main storyline thread progressing in every episode instead of meandering off course like they did around the middle of S1. There were several good suspense and surprise moments as well that kept me either anxious to see the next episode, or really surprised about the direction they took (especially making Michael a killer.

I also feel like by now they've dropped hints at just about every possible interpretation of what's going on: they're in limbo, they're part of an experiment, it's all a dream (Hurley's episode; which reminded me of a similar one in Buffy where she starts imagining the entire series is a dream of her while she's in a mental institution), there's some super-deadly virus, the "others" are really the good guys/just like them, etc. I almost feel like the series is doing its damndest to make the viewer as "lost" as the characters. Maybe that's the whole point, about being "lost" metaphorically/mentally as much as physically.
Raxivace wrote:There's even more behind the scenes stuff going on that really changes the direction of the story BTW, and you're going to come up with a major one of those again in season 2. Once you've finished season 2 I'll fill you in on it, because its both a bit silly and a bit weird. There's another major one that happens in season 3, and then while season 4 is airing the Writer's Strike of 2008 happens (Though I'll have to actually read up again on what exactly that changed in the long term).
Go ahead and fill me in. I'm guessing it has to do with "the others" business?
Raxivace wrote:I'm surprised you're so positive on Kate, I never quite thought her character worked very well and I thought Evangline Lily got kind of a raw deal with playing her. Locke is pretty interesting though, yeah.

Jack's another character I find frustrating because he's intended to be the "man of science/rationality", but in a lot of ways I feel like he ends up as a sort of strawman of those ideas.
I think I like Kate less now after S2. The reason I liked her was that, of all the cast, she's the one I felt like I hadn't really figured out. The problem with those types of characters is that it's difficult to maintain the ambiguity while keeping them interesting and keeping their story progressing and it's easy to just leave them in limbo. I kinda feel that's what's happened to her. Other than revealing why she originally went on the run, I don't think her character was given much of anything this season other than the slowly developing triangle between Jack and Sawyer. In S1 I felt like, of all the cast, she was the one that might end up betraying them or doing something surprising, and now she just seems kinda... there.

So far with Jack my biggest frustration is that there seems to be a disconnect between his personal backstory and him on the island. Maybe part of that is just because daddy problems and failed marriages/relationships don't have a lot to do with surviving on an island. About the only character element that's been relevant is his inability to let go of things and refuse to move on... but, hey, it was that stubbornness that saved Charlie, so it's not like that kind of attitude is always a negative. As for the rationality stuff, that's mostly come up in his conflicts with Locke, but I feel like that fell by the wayside as this season progressed, largely because Locke had his own crisis of faith.
Raxivace wrote:Yeah Lost loves its namedropping of philosophers, classic literature etc., though I'm not quite sure that it all amounts to much (Dharma being named, well, Dharma is a religious reference of course). It reminds me though, I always thought it was weird that that first Kate episode (IIRC) was the one called "Tabula Rasa" and not the first one about Locke.

IIRC the black horse is supposed to be a shoutout to Twin Peaks, to that time Sarah Palmer has that vision of a horse.
I just recently had the eps. where Desmond's full name was given as David Hume. I couldn't help but LOL. I'm not even sure how Hume's central ideas would have any relevance to the series... I guess maybe his problem of induction and how the notion that the future will resemble the past is just an assumption, but I kinda feel that could apply to any movie/TV series!

I'd forgotten about the black horse in TP. I was also thinking Stalker and the black dog, perhaps in part because the series' whole main premise is very Stalker-ish.
Raxivace wrote:They're probably best thought of as just a recurring motif in the story, and not something that will lead you to figure out the ending in advance if you plug them into Bayes' Theorem or something.
LOL, wasn't thinking about Bayes or anything, was just curious if maybe they had some hidden significance.
Raxivace wrote:Yeah Texhnolyze actually was kind of similar in that aspect, now you mention it.

I haven't seen Haibane Renmei quite yet but it'll be coming up here relatively soon. Right now I'm finishing up something else on Netflix, and then either Wednesday or Thursday season 3 of Castlevania drops so I'll power through that pretty quickly, but after those Haibane will be the next show I watch.

It might get delayed though for me. I dunno if you've seen the Literature forum here, but I've been powering through a lot of audiobooks lately and that's been taking up a lot of my free time. Right now I'm listening to The Count of Monte Cristo and that shit's pretty addicting, its like the 1800's version of Breaking Bad or something (And about as long too!).
Cool, can't wait to see what you think of Haibane, especially given how different it is from Lain and Tex.

I hadn't noticed the Lit forum. I'll check it out, but, yeah, many of the classics are very addicting. Never read The Count of Monte Cristo, but the novel I had the hardest time putting down was War & Peace, so I know what it's like to get sucked into long classics!
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:Michael a killer.
The biggest surprise to me about this was Libby walking in and getting gunned down too. Its a rare example where I think that kind of piling on actually works.
I almost feel like the series is doing its damndest to make the viewer as "lost" as the characters. Maybe that's the whole point, about being "lost" metaphorically/mentally as much as physically.
Yeah, pretty much.
Go ahead and fill me in. I'm guessing it has to do with "the others" business?
I goofed, actually. The first thing I was thinking of is in regards to Episode 5 of Season 3.

DO NOT READ THIS UNTIL YOU HAVE SEEN SEASON 3 EPISODE 5: Basically, Eko's actor got tired of living in Hawaii and that's why he gets killed off so early here. Apparently, he was planned to be much, much more important later on (And there's a lot of speculation about where his character would have gone, based on the final seasons of the show), but well shit happens I guess.

A more general thing about season 3 is that while this was airing, Lindelof and Cuse negotiated for an end date for the series with ABC. They were able to get that end date, and in like 2007 when S3 was airing the air date of the finale was decided for mid 2010. Here's a recent quote from Lindelof about it:
Damon Lindelof wrote:It was a battle for two years to basically get them to end the show. They said to Carlton [Cuse, Lindelof's co-showrunner on Lost] and I, “We're not going to do it."

We went all the way down the road of letting our contracts expire. We had a succession plan in place. Only midway through the third season, when finally the audience and the critical community started saying, “Good God, I don't know how much longer I can take this," ABC did a calculation where they were like, “How long do we think the show would survive without Cuse and Lindelof, and how long can we talk them into doing it?"

And their opening salvo, midway through season three, was, “We're going to let you end the show" — huge relief — “after 10 years." We're like, “No. We want to end it after the fourth season." They were like, “Nine years." We were like, “Five years?" They were like, “Eight years!" So six years was a huge victory for us.
Also, the first six episodes of season 3 aired something like 12 weeks before the rest of the season did (I think this is also the period that Lindelof is referring to when he talks about "midway through the third season" above). I'm not entirely sure why this split I mentioned happened, and if it was because of the negotiations I mentioned or not, even if the reception of them lead to the end date.
now she just seems kinda... there.
Yeah that's basically all that she's going to be for long stretches of the show from now on.
So far with Jack my biggest frustration is that there seems to be a disconnect between his personal backstory and him on the island. Maybe part of that is just because daddy problems and failed marriages/relationships don't have a lot to do with surviving on an island.
I think the idea is supposed to be that like with the other flashbacks, its supposed to inform why he makes the decisions he does as a leader and such, but yeah sometimes the connections seem tenuous. He gets an especially silly flashback in season 3.
About the only character element that's been relevant is his inability to let go of things and refuse to move on... but, hey, it was that stubbornness that saved Charlie, so it's not like that kind of attitude is always a negative.
Yeah I feel like there are a lot of things in Lost that the show tries to paint as intrinsically negative that just...aren't. Like god forbid a doctor try and save lives.
I just recently had the eps. where Desmond's full name was given as David Hume. I couldn't help but LOL. I'm not even sure how Hume's central ideas would have any relevance to the series... I guess maybe his problem of induction and how the notion that the future will resemble the past is just an assumption, but I kinda feel that could apply to any movie/TV series!
Lol I couldn't remember how long they held out on revealing that one but yeah.

A lot of these references feel like postmodernism to me- not in the fun Tarantino hodgepodge mix of high and low culture sense (Though that's there in the show too), but in the "these are all empty signifiers that signify nothing" sense.

Anyways going back to Desmond, the whole "pushing the button to save the world" thing is probably my favorite idea in Lost. Specifically because its such a mundane, tedious task in a lot of ways, yet if what we're told about it is to be believed its also a vitally important job. You might relate to this with what you've told me about helping with your family, but it really reminds me of that kind of caregiving- no action we have to do in regards to it is particularly difficult on its own, just like pushing the button is well, just pushing a button, but fucking up even once can be apocalyptic (Even if for me or you it might only be on a personal level).

At the very least the older I get the more I feel like Desmond down in that hatch for years.
I hadn't noticed the Lit forum. I'll check it out, but, yeah, many of the classics are very addicting. Never read The Count of Monte Cristo, but the novel I had the hardest time putting down was War & Peace, so I know what it's like to get sucked into long classics!
War & Peace is one I'll probably get to at some point.

Monte Cristo is pretty awesome though. The main character kind of reminds me a lot of "Henry Gale" actually, if he was the most bitter son of a bitch on the planet anyways (Though with fairly good reason).
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

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Lord_Lyndon wrote:
I haven't seen Haibane Renmei quite yet but it'll be coming up here relatively soon.
Eva said many times that Haibane is the closest anime has ever gotten to Ozu. Just like he said Texhnolyze is the closest anime has ever gotten to Tarkovsky.
I hope you will enjoy Haibane, Rax.
Yeah I probably will at least like Haibane since I liked Texh and Lain a lot. I had somehow forgotten about Jimbo's comparison to Ozu though, which has me curious again.
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Oh btw Jimbo, make sure to watch the "Lost: Missing Pieces" shorts in between seasons 3 and 4.

If you're watching Season 3 on a blu-ray or something, they should be included among the special features.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

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OH btw Jimbo one thing I forgot to tell you...

Image

This exists, and is supposedly very, very bad. So bad that I'm not going to even bother to resize that image.

In honor of your watchthrough of the show, I'll be downloading and playing it.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Finished Season 3. It was a pretty manic season. I'd say it probably had more highlights and lowlights compared to S1 and S2. As soon as they split the group I felt like they had real trouble balancing the different storylines, and in particular the stuff with Jack/Kate/Sawyer and The Others just overshadowed everything else. However, once they finally resolved that initial split, things got a bit better, until some really meandering bits around the middle of the season (including a completely worthless filler episode with the TV star and the paralyzing spiders... was anyone surprised by the reveal?), then it got better again towards the end. So really mixed bag.

Among the highlights, though, were probably some of the most emotional moments both within the backstories and the present timeline. Of the backstories, I especially liked Sayid's where he got kidnapped by one of his former torture victims. From the main storyline, the moment where Kate remembers/recites the story Jack told her when they first got to the Island really got to me for some reason. I also think they had some of the best "integration" bits this season where the backstories played off well against the main story. I was pleasantly surprised by the Kate one where she sees her mother again, and her mother tells her that she did what she did for her (Kate's) sake, not her (her mother's) sake; and then in the present storyline Kate basically makes the same "mistake" by coming back for Jack... at least, that's the implication I got from it. I might've even spoke too soon about Hume's "future resembling the past" not being terribly relevant given that that literally happens with Desmond's storyline where he gets a second chance at marrying Penny and not leaving, and still screws it up.

Beyond the stories I also really liked Ben's character, much for the same reason I initially liked Kate, but in Ben's case I feel like he's given much more development without ever really losing that ambiguity. I loved how they played him as this creepy, slimy, mastermind, yet he never comes off as just a cartoony supervillain. There's also something weak and vulnerable about him, and very little that he does, once you learn more of the backstory, seems purely evil, even when his methods seem to be. Still, you have to wonder why in the world they went through the trouble of kidnapping and all that when they could've simply met with the crash survivors, told them the truth, and I'm sure Jack would've helped him and "the others" could've helped (AMAP anyway) with Sun's and Claire's pregnancies.

Theme-wise this season was also all over the place, but lots of interesting stuff. One thing I liked was the small little motifs, like the theme of being worthy that was symbolized by the bottle of expensive scotch (I think it was) that you see in several eps. of different backstories and the main story (IIRC, one was in the Desmond backstory, and another in Locke's when he confronts his father). The conflict between Jack and co. and The Others gave me a strong colonialism VS immigration vibe, where The Others are the colonials that have claimed the island for themselves, "civilized it," and are now looking to either eradicate or take advantage of the "immigrants" who are just trying to co-exist and survive in peace. There was also the age-old notion that civilization can corrupt human nature, with the idea that everyone on the island heals faster, no cancer, until they step into civilization and suddenly Ben gets cancer.

Anyway, definitely an interesting season. There was more I thought about as I was watching it but have forgotten about between then and now. One of the things I didn't like about this season was the silly Final Destination shit with Charlie, which just cheapened his death IMO. One other thing I did like was the surprise "flash forward," which was a nice little change given all the flashbacks.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Michael a killer.
The biggest surprise to me about this was Libby walking in and getting gunned down too. Its a rare example where I think that kind of piling on actually works.
The only thing that bugged me about Libby's death was the same thing that bugged me about Shannon's death, in that in both cases they tried to introduce a "relationship" at the last minute just to give their deaths a more emotional punch. At least with Shannon they'd set it up beforehand (though they'd seemingly abandoned it for several episodes until right before her death), but the Libby/Hugo thing seemed to only be there to make her death sadder.
Raxivace wrote:I goofed, actually. The first thing I was thinking of is in regards to Episode 5 of Season 3.

DO NOT READ THIS UNTIL YOU HAVE SEEN SEASON 3 EPISODE 5: Basically, Eko's actor got tired of living in Hawaii and that's why he gets killed off so early here. Apparently, he was planned to be much, much more important later on (And there's a lot of speculation about where his character would have gone, based on the final seasons of the show), but well shit happens I guess.

A more general thing about season 3 is that while this was airing, Lindelof and Cuse negotiated for an end date for the series with ABC. They were able to get that end date, and in like 2007 when S3 was airing the air date of the finale was decided for mid 2010. Here's a recent quote from Lindelof about it:

Also, the first six episodes of season 3 aired something like 12 weeks before the rest of the season did (I think this is also the period that Lindelof is referring to when he talks about "midway through the third season" above). I'm not entirely sure why this split I mentioned happened, and if it was because of the negotiations I mentioned or not, even if the reception of them lead to the end date.
Interesting. TBH, I didn't think Eko's death seemed out of place when I watched it, though I guess I thought it was odd that the shadow monster ignored him the first time and killed him the second time. I'm not sure where his character would've gone, but I got the feeling he mostly seemed there to get Locke back on track. Also interesting that ABC wanted to keep the show running for so long. I guess they knew they had a hit and could probably stretch it out for a long time, but, damn, shows with a central mystery need resolution or else you just turn it into a soap opera/melodrama. That's exactly what sunk Twin Peaks during its second season, and I'd say it's threatened to sink Lost at times as well.
Raxivace wrote:I think the idea is supposed to be that like with the other flashbacks, its supposed to inform why he makes the decisions he does as a leader and such, but yeah sometimes the connections seem tenuous. He gets an especially silly flashback in season 3.
Sometimes I see those connections and sometimes I don't. EG, Locke's backstory seems to make a lot of sense of his character because, given what his father did to him, he's searching for a meaning and purpose and has a strong sense that it's there on the island. So he's constantly trying to "commune" with the island to find what he's supposed to be doing. Sawyer hates himself for what he did, so he tries to get everyone else to hate him as well, even while finding moments where he finds himself caring for others. With Jack, the central idea just seems to be him striving to be perfect/good because his father told him he would never be good enough... but especially after Sawyer told him what his dad said before he died, it seems as if his character wouldn't have much more to resolve in terms of that. If anything, I think the most relevant aspect of Jack's story is that his need to "fix things" is what he does to cover up the need for him to fix himself and learn to let some things be. That seems to be one of the conflicts between Jack and John beyond the "faith VS rationality" one; the need to solve problems/fix things VS the ability to let things be and happen. Control VS the ability to give up control, I guess you could say.
Raxivace wrote:A lot of these references feel like postmodernism to me- not in the fun Tarantino hodgepodge mix of high and low culture sense (Though that's there in the show too), but in the "these are all empty signifiers that signify nothing" sense.

Anyways going back to Desmond, the whole "pushing the button to save the world" thing is probably my favorite idea in Lost. Specifically because its such a mundane, tedious task in a lot of ways, yet if what we're told about it is to be believed its also a vitally important job. You might relate to this with what you've told me about helping with your family, but it really reminds me of that kind of caregiving- no action we have to do in regards to it is particularly difficult on its own, just like pushing the button is well, just pushing a button, but fucking up even once can be apocalyptic (Even if for me or you it might only be on a personal level).

At the very least the older I get the more I feel like Desmond down in that hatch for years.
It's also quite postmodern in how many ideas at throws at you while refusing to resolve them, develop them, or try to consolidate them into some kind of sensible whole. I guess that's where something like NGE seemed more Modern by comparison. While NGE did have its share of "references for references sake" that didn't have any deep meaning, it also most certainly had some key themes that much of its motifs and symbolism was there to support. By comparison, Lost seems to broach a ton of different ideas, but hasn't (yet at least) tried to find any "center of mass," I guess you could say, that they all revolve around like NGE did.

The stuff about pushing the button kinda reminded me of the Sisyphus myth, though with a more contemporary twist where the task is mundane by comparison. I think the thing that struck me the most about that was the debate over whether there was any real purpose or not, and how the impulse to do the task itself could easily cloud that question. That seems to be how most people live their lives in general. They often start out with some goal or dream, and they do things to achieve that, but after a while the thing they're doing becomes the point itself, so much so that you completely lose perspective on why you started doing it in the first place. There's some of that in Jin's/Sun's storyline about how the reason Jin started working for Sun's father was to be worthy of her, but after a while it's that very task that drives a wedge between them and turns him into someone she can't even recognize. So, yeah, the "pushing the button" is a pretty damn good metaphor for that thing we do in life out of habit so much that we've forgotten the reason/purpose why we're doing it. What you say about the apocalyptic consequences is true is well. I'm reminded of one of the central themes in Hamlet, that the mindless doing of things (he speaks of this when he sees the soldiers marching to fight "over a straw" IIRC) is often the thing that keeps us alive, while if we stop to question and doubt then that's what sows the seeds of death and destruction.
Raxivace wrote:
I hadn't noticed the Lit forum. I'll check it out, but, yeah, many of the classics are very addicting. Never read The Count of Monte Cristo, but the novel I had the hardest time putting down was War & Peace, so I know what it's like to get sucked into long classics!
War & Peace is one I'll probably get to at some point.

Monte Cristo is pretty awesome though. The main character kind of reminds me a lot of "Henry Gale" actually, if he was the most bitter son of a bitch on the planet anyways (Though with fairly good reason).
One thing I'll say about War & Peace: I'd recommend trying to familiarize yourself with the main characters/families before you start, or else you'll spend the first ~100 pages just trying to keep up with who's who. It's a ridiculously huge cast of characters. I'd also recommend finding a version (even if an audiobook) that maintains or notes when the characters are speaking in French, because Russians choosing to speak French (as well as what they say) has thematic significance.

I might check out Monte Cristo myself. I've been wanting to get back into fiction for a while but haven't been sure what to start with. There's some major classics I never got to, and several favorite authors who I didn't finish reading.
Raxivace wrote:OH btw Jimbo one thing I forgot to tell you...

This exists, and is supposedly very, very bad. So bad that I'm not going to even bother to resize that image.

In honor of your watchthrough of the show, I'll be downloading and playing it.
LOL, why would you want to torture yourself just because I'm watching the series? [gonemad]
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:(including a completely worthless filler episode with the TV star and the paralyzing spiders... was anyone surprised by the reveal?), then it got better again towards the end. So really mixed bag.
Aw, you didn't like Expose? I kind of liked it since it felt like a parody of Lost almost.

But yeah while there are some high points S3 is kind of all over the place.
I might've even spoke too soon about Hume's "future resembling the past" not being terribly relevant given that that literally happens with Desmond's storyline where he gets a second chance at marrying Penny and not leaving, and still screws it up.
Good point.
Beyond the stories I also really liked Ben's character, much for the same reason I initially liked Kate, but in Ben's case I feel like he's given much more development without ever really losing that ambiguity. I loved how they played him as this creepy, slimy, mastermind, yet he never comes off as just a cartoony supervillain. There's also something weak and vulnerable about him, and very little that he does, once you learn more of the backstory, seems purely evil, even when his methods seem to be.
This is probably the part of the series that I like Ben the most, though he gets involved in some weird plotlines later on.
Still, you have to wonder why in the world they went through the trouble of kidnapping and all that when they could've simply met with the crash survivors, told them the truth, and I'm sure Jack would've helped him and "the others" could've helped (AMAP anyway) with Sun's and Claire's pregnancies.
This is something that bugged me a lot at the time and still kind of does. I will say later on there is some stuff that you can kind of retroactively read into past seasons to somewhat justify what The Others do, but at best its messy as hell especially because The Others seem to be okay with incorporating some of the survivors of the crash but seemingly arbitrarily not others.
Theme-wise this season was also all over the place, but lots of interesting stuff. One thing I liked was the small little motifs, like the theme of being worthy that was symbolized by the bottle of expensive scotch (I think it was) that you see in several eps. of different backstories and the main story (IIRC, one was in the Desmond backstory, and another in Locke's when he confronts his father).
The Desmond one is one of the most memorable parts of the show to me.
The conflict between Jack and co. and The Others gave me a strong colonialism VS immigration vibe, where The Others are the colonials that have claimed the island for themselves, "civilized it," and are now looking to either eradicate or take advantage of the "immigrants" who are just trying to co-exist and survive in peace. There was also the age-old notion that civilization can corrupt human nature, with the idea that everyone on the island heals faster, no cancer, until they step into civilization and suddenly Ben gets cancer.
The colonialism read is a real interesting one I never considered before.

The civilization corrupting theme is definitely there, I just have always found the idea itself extremely silly especially when Lost tries to bring its mystical healing BS into it. Civilization can corrupt of course, but in reality nature won't magically heal Locke's legs, it will send a puma or wolf or some other animal to kill him.

This doesn't mean rampant pollution, deforestation, excessive hunting, destruction of nature etc. is good of course but deification of nature just doesn't sit well with me. It almost feels like a variation of just world theory or something to me, I dunno.
Anyway, definitely an interesting season. There was more I thought about as I was watching it but have forgotten about between then and now. One of the things I didn't like about this season was the silly Final Destination shit with Charlie, which just cheapened his death IMO. One other thing I did like was the surprise "flash forward," which was a nice little change given all the flashbacks.
The flashforward was neat at first glance though again (And I'm sorry to say this a lot), in retrospect I don't know that I like the idea of Jack and co. leaving the Island. But we'll get more into that later.

As far Charlie, even though he's fucking dead now there's stuff about his Final Destination shit that still doesn't even make sense to me with some stuff you learn eventually.
The only thing that bugged me about Libby's death was the same thing that bugged me about Shannon's death, in that in both cases they tried to introduce a "relationship" at the last minute just to give their deaths a more emotional punch. At least with Shannon they'd set it up beforehand (though they'd seemingly abandoned it for several episodes until right before her death), but the Libby/Hugo thing seemed to only be there to make her death sadder.
Tbh I had completely forgotten about the Libby/Hugo thing.

BTW I hope you never wanted to learn more about why Libby was in the mental institution because IIRC you've gotten all you're going to get on that at this point.

EDIT: Also, IIRC season 2 also has the episode where Hurley destroys all that food because he's feeling guilty about his weight. I think that's where his character first really started to irritate me- like, you live on a damn island and you're destroying food like that?
Interesting. TBH, I didn't think Eko's death seemed out of place when I watched it, though I guess I thought it was odd that the shadow monster ignored him the first time and killed him the second time. I'm not sure where his character would've gone, but I got the feeling he mostly seemed there to get Locke back on track. Also interesting that ABC wanted to keep the show running for so long.
Again, once you're done with the show I can tell what the speculation I've heard was, but its just half-remembered speculation of course.
I guess they knew they had a hit and could probably stretch it out for a long time, but, damn, shows with a central mystery need resolution or else you just turn it into a soap opera/melodrama. That's exactly what sunk Twin Peaks during its second season, and I'd say it's threatened to sink Lost at times as well.
That word "resolution" as opposed to, say, "answer" is key here I feel.
With Jack, the central idea just seems to be him striving to be perfect/good because his father told him he would never be good enough... but especially after Sawyer told him what his dad said before he died, it seems as if his character wouldn't have much more to resolve in terms of that.
It's kind of annoying too because that's a good moment for Sawyer as well, that his heart of gold comes out for a moment to actually say something nice to Jack like that.

I guess its "realistic" that Jack would still have dad issues if they were really deep-seated, but eh.
If anything, I think the most relevant aspect of Jack's story is that his need to "fix things" is what he does to cover up the need for him to fix himself and learn to let some things be. That seems to be one of the conflicts between Jack and John beyond the "faith VS rationality" one; the need to solve problems/fix things VS the ability to let things be and happen. Control VS the ability to give up control, I guess you could say.
I feel through Jack, the show conflates all these separate ideas together- rationality, empiricism, the need to control, to fix, science, etc. into a single worldview more than individual aspects of a single character. I'm just not sure much self-awareness from the writers that Jack is ultimately written with.
It's also quite postmodern in how many ideas at throws at you while refusing to resolve them, develop them, or try to consolidate them into some kind of sensible whole. I guess that's where something like NGE seemed more Modern by comparison. While NGE did have its share of "references for references sake" that didn't have any deep meaning, it also most certainly had some key themes that much of its motifs and symbolism was there to support. By comparison, Lost seems to broach a ton of different ideas, but hasn't (yet at least) tried to find any "center of mass," I guess you could say, that they all revolve around like NGE did.
I feel like Lost does have a central thesis it finds in the last season at least, its just one I find really dumb at best, immoral and repugnant at worst.

Of course, if there's anyone in this world who can convince me I'm wrong about this after a decade I believe it to be you.
The stuff about pushing the button kinda reminded me of the Sisyphus myth, though with a more contemporary twist where the task is mundane by comparison. I
This is all real good stuff- the comparison between pushing the button and Jin/Sun is one I'd never considered before.
One thing I'll say about War & Peace: I'd recommend trying to familiarize yourself with the main characters/families before you start, or else you'll spend the first ~100 pages just trying to keep up with who's who. It's a ridiculously huge cast of characters. I'd also recommend finding a version (even if an audiobook) that maintains or notes when the characters are speaking in French, because Russians choosing to speak French (as well as what they say) has thematic significance.
Good to know. That is one flaw about audiobooks I've noticed myself, that puns and wordplay meant to be read and not spoken don't seem to work as well.
I might check out Monte Cristo myself. I've been wanting to get back into fiction for a while but haven't been sure what to start with. There's some major classics I never got to, and several favorite authors who I didn't finish reading.
If you do check out Monte Cristo be prepared to spend a fair amount of time with it. I'm not sure how many pages the print version has but the audiobook version is over 50 hours in length.
LOL, why would you want to torture yourself just because I'm watching the series? [gonemad]
I was always kind of curious about it but just never had a way to actually play it back in the day. By time Lost ended and I could have gotten around to it I was so bitter about the last season that I just forgot about it.

Who knows, it might actually not be so bad. Besides even longest game time estimates put it at something like 7 hours in length.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

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RIP Max von Sydow. :(
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Finished Season 4. I think compared to the previous seasons, S4 was the most streamlined and focused in that it was mostly about the suspense generated by the situation. It seemed far less theme-heavy than the previous seasons and mostly there to setup the ending. Despite the less theme-heavy approach, I still find the switch from flashbacks to flash-forwards interesting. I honestly can't think of another TV series that's ever done something quite this, and though it makes for some confusion in terms of where in the timeline stuff is happening, I also think it adds some unusual intrigue. For one thing, it allows us to know (in some cases) who's going to die, so instead of worrying about that aspect we're instead curious as to how it's going to happen.

My biggest concern about the direction the series is taking is that in the process of this streamlining it seems to be losing some of the mystery elements that made the early seasons so compelling. Still, I think the substance it generates from the developed character drama makes up for it enough to where I'm not bored by it. I continue to be impressed with Ben's character and how they've struck such a delicate balance with him on multiple levels, and most of my favorite moments this season involved him. I was especially moved when his daughter was murdered, and even her mother/lover before her.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:(including a completely worthless filler episode with the TV star and the paralyzing spiders... was anyone surprised by the reveal?), then it got better again towards the end. So really mixed bag.
Aw, you didn't like Expose? I kind of liked it since it felt like a parody of Lost almost.
I might've liked it better if I had viewed it as a parody, TBH.
Raxivace wrote:This is something that bugged me a lot at the time and still kind of does. I will say later on there is some stuff that you can kind of retroactively read into past seasons to somewhat justify what The Others do, but at best its messy as hell especially because The Others seem to be okay with incorporating some of the survivors of the crash but seemingly arbitrarily not others.
Can you say what this "retroactive reading" is without spoiling anything?
Raxivace wrote:The Desmond one is one of the most memorable parts of the show to me.
Yeah, despite that he has one of the "simpler" backstories in terms of just being about a lost love/opportunity, there's something about his story I find quite moving. His reuniting with Penny was also one of my favorite moments of S4.
Raxivace wrote:The civilization corrupting theme is definitely there, I just have always found the idea itself extremely silly especially when Lost tries to bring its mystical healing BS into it. Civilization can corrupt of course, but in reality nature won't magically heal Locke's legs, it will send a puma or wolf or some other animal to kill him.

This doesn't mean rampant pollution, deforestation, excessive hunting, destruction of nature etc. is good of course but deification of nature just doesn't sit well with me. It almost feels like a variation of just world theory or something to me, I dunno.
I think one can read it as allegory, though, and the literal manifestations are just due to the fictional supernatural nature of the island. Kinda like how NGE embodies the Hedgehog's Dilemma theme into the sci-fi/fictional AT Field and whatnot. As far as the theme of corrupting civilization, I'm reminded of the Jung quote: “Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal." One way to read Lost is an attempt at finding that balance. While the survivors are returning to nature, they are also bringing some element of civilization to it as well (it's not like they're living as our oldest ancestors did; they still have fire and tents and tools and some technology); but they haven't gone as far as The Others who have, in a sense, shut out most of the nature surrounding them.

So I guess while I'd agree that if you just take it literally the theme can come off as a bit silly, I think read as allegory it's not so bad. We don't have to look at, eg, Locke's healed legs as the series saying that nature will magically heal such wounds; we can just think of it as a physical allegorical manifestation of the notion that some reintegration with nature can be healing. I do think there's some truth to that. Afterall, humans spent millions of years evolving as very much a part of nature, and so many of our modern ills, especially psychologically, is due to us being not well adapted to how far away from that we've gotten. Even though fighting that evolutionary programming has lead to most of our advancements, it's certainly not without its costs. I think this is one thing I love about the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul as I've never seen anyone tap into into the kind of primal, "mystical" feeling/intuition that we tend to have about nature, merely because we spent so much time as a species surviving there.
Raxivace wrote:BTW I hope you never wanted to learn more about why Libby was in the mental institution because IIRC you've gotten all you're going to get on that at this point.

EDIT: Also, IIRC season 2 also has the episode where Hurley destroys all that food because he's feeling guilty about his weight. I think that's where his character first really started to irritate me- like, you live on a damn island and you're destroying food like that?
Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten that I was curious when she died about her backstory in the mental institution, but I guess like a lot of other thoughts I had I'd forgotten by the time I got to the end of the season. Are there no theories about what the significance of that was?

Yeah, the moment with Hurley destroying the food irritated me somewhat, but I guess I was able to let it go because there was never any indication that the group was hurting for food. There did seem to be lots of fruits and fish, which TBH probably made for a better diet than the crap Dharma was dropping for them!
Raxivace wrote:
I guess they knew they had a hit and could probably stretch it out for a long time, but, damn, shows with a central mystery need resolution or else you just turn it into a soap opera/melodrama. That's exactly what sunk Twin Peaks during its second season, and I'd say it's threatened to sink Lost at times as well.
That word "resolution" as opposed to, say, "answer" is key here I feel.
Yeah, especially after watching stuff like 2001 and NGE and Twin Peaks (and other Lynch) I don't demand that everything be answered, but resolutions are good. In fact, resolutions with lingering mysteries are generally preferred because that leaves room for discussion.
Raxivace wrote:I feel through Jack, the show conflates all these separate ideas together- rationality, empiricism, the need to control, to fix, science, etc. into a single worldview more than individual aspects of a single character. I'm just not sure much self-awareness from the writers that Jack is ultimately written with.
Yeah, I get what you're saying. He does at times seem to be more of a representation of these ideas rather than a fully individualized character. Still, I've seen worse examples of those kinds of characters before, and I think the fact that he's in an ensemble full of characters who are otherwise quite interesting and individualized helps, so however flawed the handling of him was it's not too distracting.
Raxivace wrote:I feel like Lost does have a central thesis it finds in the last season at least, its just one I find really dumb at best, immoral and repugnant at worst.

Of course, if there's anyone in this world who can convince me I'm wrong about this after a decade I believe it to be you.
Well you've certainly got me interested to see what they are when I get there! I also feel like you're putting way to much pressure on me to convince you otherwise! [laugh]
Raxivace wrote:Good to know. That is one flaw about audiobooks I've noticed myself, that puns and wordplay meant to be read and not spoken don't seem to work as well.
It's also a problem with works you're reading in translations in general. Of course, some authors translate better than others. Someone like Pushkin I've heard is nearly impossible to translate because so much of his genius was in how he used the Russian language. Dostoevsky seems to translate better because he was more about themes/character/drama. Tolstoy seems more in the middle. He can be poetic/linguistically nuanced at times, but even reading him in translation I loved it.
Raxivace wrote:If you do check out Monte Cristo be prepared to spend a fair amount of time with it. I'm not sure how many pages the print version has but the audiobook version is over 50 hours in length.
Wonder how long War & Peace would be in audiobook form... *checks* 61 hours, give or take it seems. I guess Monte Cristo is longer than I thought!
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Finished Season 4. I think compared to the previous seasons, S4 was the most streamlined and focused in that it was mostly about the suspense generated by the situation. It seemed far less theme-heavy than the previous seasons and mostly there to setup the ending. Despite the less theme-heavy approach, I still find the switch from flashbacks to flash-forwards interesting. I honestly can't think of another TV series that's ever done something quite this, and though it makes for some confusion in terms of where in the timeline stuff is happening, I also think it adds some unusual intrigue. For one thing, it allows us to know (in some cases) who's going to die, so instead of worrying about that aspect we're instead curious as to how it's going to happen.
I think at their best the flash-forwards do generate some good suspense, and even some mystery about who the Oceanic 6 are. The worst is probably the Jin/Sun combo flashback/forward, since Jin's ends up being kind just a silly way to hide the twist ending.

Still, in the grand scheme of things I have to wonder what this entire idea of leaving the Island actually adds to Lost as a story, especially because it takes up a fairly large portion of the show for what IMO essentially feels like a video game sidequest. (EDIT: Or perhaps you could say its the show...spinning its wheels lololololololololol)

BTW what do you think of the new Freighter characters? Also has there every been a sillier name of an episode of TV than "Eggtown"?
My biggest concern about the direction the series is taking is that in the process of this streamlining it seems to be losing some of the mystery elements that made the early seasons so compelling. Still, I think the substance it generates from the developed character drama makes up for it enough to where I'm not bored by it. I continue to be impressed with Ben's character and how they've struck such a delicate balance with him on multiple levels, and most of my favorite moments this season involved him. I was especially moved when his daughter was murdered, and even her mother/lover before her.
I liked that moment because its one of the few instances at this point in the series where Ben is just utterly called on his bluffs and bullshit and can't actually talk his way out of something.

Still, I feel like its harmed because Keemy kind of sucks as a villain and feels like he belongs in like a Die Hard movie or something. More controversially I think Widmore is even worse as a character and I think kind of less interesting than when he was just that rich asshole dad that hated Desmond. But we'll get to more on that later on.
I might've liked it better if I had viewed it as a parody, TBH.
Yeah, basically I read that episode as "This is the story of people who aren't the main characters. lol fuck 'em, fuck you for not being important!".
Can you say what this "retroactive reading" is without spoiling anything?
I cannot, since it revolves around season 6 revelations. I think there are a few breadcrumbs in season 3 and season 4 toward them though (And well more to come in season 5).
Yeah, despite that he has one of the "simpler" backstories in terms of just being about a lost love/opportunity, there's something about his story I find quite moving. His reuniting with Penny was also one of my favorite moments of S4.
I think its because Desmond is one of the few characters with like, active, specific goals. A lot of other characters are either too secretive, kept at a distance, or just kind of wallowing around from event to event.

Desmond wants to find Penny again, has a cool catchphrase in "See you in another life, brother", and has cool mystery shit attached to him. It helps that his S4 episode is one of the better individual ones of the entire series too, even if its pretty atypical of Lost in someways.
I think one can read it as allegory, though, and the literal manifestations are just due to the fictional supernatural nature of the island. Kinda like how NGE embodies the Hedgehog's Dilemma theme into the sci-fi/fictional AT Field and whatnot. As far as the theme of corrupting civilization, I'm reminded of the Jung quote: “Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal." One way to read Lost is an attempt at finding that balance. While the survivors are returning to nature, they are also bringing some element of civilization to it as well (it's not like they're living as our oldest ancestors did; they still have fire and tents and tools and some technology); but they haven't gone as far as The Others who have, in a sense, shut out most of the nature surrounding them.
I'd say the difference to me is that the entire idea of the AT Field is just kind of inherently more abstract even on a plot level than the healing is to me. Something like magical Island healing just maps onto real world things far more easily IMO- like it makes me think of hippie-ish claims of "natural" medicine, "alternative" medicine, anti-GMO rhetoric etc. At least in this kind of reading of the show where we focus on civilization vs. nature.

That Jung quote is interesting though. Like I agree ideally there needs to be a balance, I just don't find the problem with the Others to be that they had houses and book clubs and occupied the Dharma stations like they were Wall Street, as opposed to the kidnappings, murders, bad taste in novels (Juliet lost points with me for liking Stephen King). There are also some spoiler-y issues I have with the argument too.
So I guess while I'd agree that if you just take it literally the theme can come off as a bit silly, I think read as allegory it's not so bad. We don't have to look at, eg, Locke's healed legs as the series saying that nature will magically heal such wounds; we can just think of it as a physical allegorical manifestation of the notion that some reintegration with nature can be healing.
You know part of me wonders now if the pregnancy issues were meant to be a negative attribute of living in nature now that I think about it (Perhaps as juxtaposition to Locke's legs, Rose's cancer etc.), but frankly I still don't understand that plotline and I'm not sure it ever actually gets a real resolution.
I do think there's some truth to that. Afterall, humans spent millions of years evolving as very much a part of nature, and so many of our modern ills, especially psychologically, is due to us being not well adapted to how far away from that we've gotten. Even though fighting that evolutionary programming has lead to most of our advancements, it's certainly not without its costs. I think this is one thing I love about the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul as I've never seen anyone tap into into the kind of primal, "mystical" feeling/intuition that we tend to have about nature, merely because we spent so much time as a species surviving there.
Yeah I dunno, that primal feeling you mention has just never been a thing for me. I just don't relate to it at all, even if I can enjoy a forest or canyon or whatever as an aesthetic thing. Like I can understand the intellectual arguments you make about the benefits of nature, but there just isn't any kind of spiritual thing it evokes in me really.

I need to see more Apichatpong at some point. Mysterious Object at Noon is still the only one of his I've watched.
Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten that I was curious when she died about her backstory in the mental institution, but I guess like a lot of other thoughts I had I'd forgotten by the time I got to the end of the season. Are there no theories about what the significance of that was?
In terms of why she was there, I think people assume her husband's death drove Libby over the edge. The timeline is...weird on that though, since it goes something like this:

Libby's husband dies > One month later, Libby gives her boat to Desmond > Libby, for some reason, enters Hurley's mental institution in Los Angeles > Libby, somehow, gets out of mental institution, goes to Australia, plans to go back to America on Oceanic 815 > The plane crashes

I guess its possible that Libby being in the mental institution happened in the month between her husband's death and giving her boat to Desmond, but that would just be...odd, considering how bad she looked in that one episode where she crazy stares at Hurley.

Of course, the real conspiracy theory here is that Libby says her husband is named David. Hurley's imaginary friend that haunts him is named Dave. Some people go as far as suggesting Dave is an early example of Hurley seeing ghosts, a la him seeing Charlie in S4, but IIRC (And I'd really have to double check on this) Lindelof/Cuse shot that idea down.

Even ignoring the David/Dave thing, Libby's backstory just feels kind of sloppy to me, because even if we accept the idea of that her husband's death drove her insane for a while, I have no idea what the significance of this even being in the show is. I would have way less questions if they just never had the institution reveal at all, but with that information it makes that character so bizarre. With David/Dave theory thrown in, its even more weird and baffling.

Its a pretty minor example in the grand scheme of things, because Libby is ultimately a minor supporting character, but I feel like its also emblematic of how Lost will go on to treat much more significant plotlines later on (Stuff that even rivals infamous NGE 24 Kaworu "plot hole"), where when you go back to look through them they just have a ton of weird gaps and holes in them like Libby's backstory does.

Even with all of the pieces in place after Season 6, the more questions you ask, and I mean even basic questions about certain character motivations, the less sense things really make again on even basic storytelling level.
Yeah, the moment with Hurley destroying the food irritated me somewhat, but I guess I was able to let it go because there was never any indication that the group was hurting for food. There did seem to be lots of fruits and fish, which TBH probably made for a better diet than the crap Dharma was dropping for them!
Probably, but it just stands out to me since once upon a time practical concerns of food/shelter sort of were significant on the show.

Also I'd imagine eating only fruits and fish would get old after a while!
Yeah, especially after watching stuff like 2001 and NGE and Twin Peaks (and other Lynch) I don't demand that everything be answered, but resolutions are good. In fact, resolutions with lingering mysteries are generally preferred because that leaves room for discussion.
I'd say biggest difference to me is that in 2001/NGE/Twin Peaks I think Kubrick/Anno/Lynch for the most part had an idea as to why they would leave something ambiguous in their stories, whereas I feel like Lindelof always places ambiguity in either really weird areas of plot that don't seem improved by it, or he makes it into a really blunt, ending-of-Inception boring binary where you just don't get the reveal of whether DiCaprio's totem stops spinning or not.

The latter in particular Lindelof pretty liberally lifts into the endings of Leftovers season 3 and Watchmen, and Libby is an example of the former.
Yeah, I get what you're saying. He does at times seem to be more of a representation of these ideas rather than a fully individualized character. Still, I've seen worse examples of those kinds of characters before, and I think the fact that he's in an ensemble full of characters who are otherwise quite interesting and individualized helps, so however flawed the handling of him was it's not too distracting.
Yeah its not as bad as it could be I guess (Though I think he gets some weird shifts in season 5), though if any one character of Lost is the main character its Jack.
Well you've certainly got me interested to see what they are when I get there! I also feel like you're putting way to much pressure on me to convince you otherwise! [laugh]
This was my plan all along Jimbo! I spent years on this con! Lost broke my mind, and now you're going to unbroke it! [laugh]
It's also a problem with works you're reading in translations in general. Of course, some authors translate better than others. Someone like Pushkin I've heard is nearly impossible to translate because so much of his genius was in how he used the Russian language. Dostoevsky seems to translate better because he was more about themes/character/drama. Tolstoy seems more in the middle. He can be poetic/linguistically nuanced at times, but even reading him in translation I loved it.
I've heard people say this about Dante as well, though I still found Inferno enjoyable when I read it back in the day anyways.
Wonder how long War & Peace would be in audiobook form... *checks* 61 hours, give or take it seems. I guess Monte Cristo is longer than I thought!
Oh dear, that would take me a long time too! [laugh]
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Raxivace »

41. The Invisible Man (2020, Dir. Leigh Whannell) - Pretty awesome reimaging. My favorite type of remakes are the ones that find a new spin on the original story, and I feel like this is one of them since unlike, say, the Universal films the Invisible Man is not the lead character, but rather the POV belongs to a woman he's stalking throughout the film. Like Apollo was saying in his thread, this adds a psychological thriller element to the movie where its as much about Moss trying to convince people she isn't crazy, that there really is some invisible asshole chasing her (Not hard to see the relevance to modern day discussions on feminism, believing victims etc.), and then trying to actually deal with the guy herself anyways.

Moss kills it as a the lead, and while it's a simply trick the way the camera just lingers in a room sometimes after Moss or another character leaves it to make you wonder if he's there or not is a remarkably effective. Sometimes you'll even get a weird dutch angle that you're not sure is a POV shot or not of Moss and her friends being watched. Its very similar to what Paranormal Activity was going for stylistically in some ways, but waaaaaaaaaayy more effective here.

Basically this is a just a solid horror/thriller all around. Good fun.

42. Uncut Gems (2019, Dir. Benny Safdie & Josh Safdie) - This is sort of like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Basically, Adam Sandler is a jeweler with a gambling addiction who gets into some bad debts with shady people, and tries to pay them off through betting big that Kevin Garnett (Playing himself, surprisingly) can do well in a basketball game. A stone that may or may not be magical is involved.

Its hard for me to explain what the appeal of this film is (Or why I liked this when I didn't like Killing of a Chinese Bookie), but I found it enjoyable. Some of that may be that its just enjoyable to see Adam Sandler actually try in a movie, because when he's not sleepwalking through a role he can be a legitimately good actor, especially in something like this where his manic energy is really central to the character.

43. The Last Thing He Wanted (2020, Dir. Dee Rees) - A very bad thriller about Anne Hatahway trying to find…something out about weapons smuggling or something, I have no idea. There's like seven twists too many in this movie and it just kind of killed my ability to follow what was going on. Hathway, Willem DaFoe, and Ben Affleck are just completely wasted here.

I'm not familiar with this director, but apparently she interned under Spike Lee, and even worked on Inside Man and the documentary miniseries When the Levees Broke in some capacity. How to go from those to this…I dunno.

--------------

Fate/EXTRA: Last Encore (2018) - The second Fate anime that Netflix distributed themselves (I can't quite tell if they were involved in producing though), following Fate/Apocrypha. I thought this was meant to be an adaptation of the video game Fate/EXTRA, but it turns out its a distant sequel instead that ignores the actual video game sequels made to Fate/EXTRA like the Extella games.

Basically, the premise here is "What if the player character just completely got his ass whupped so hard by the last boss at the end of Fate/EXTRA that 1000 years of terror reigned over the Anime Matrix (Which let me remind you all is on the Moon) while on the Earth the human population has dwindled to the thousands? What if the protagonist tried to come back from that?"

This anime has a pretty bad reputation, but to be honest I kind of liked it. It does rely on you being familiar with the plot of the original PSP game, as a lot of character relationships here only have meaning as a contrast to how they were like in that game, but I'm not opposed to that in a sequel, and I do like how Studio Shaft brings some of their surreal imagery here (The Madoka-eseque stuff in the Nursery Rhyme episodes particularly stood out as good).

This isn't actually an unassailable masterpiece or anything (One flaw is that the main character in the game not being particularly defined works okay for a video game where a lot of the emphasis is instead on dungeon crawling, your chosen Servant who is basically the game's co-lead, and the actual NPC's you encounter, but works less well for a TV show even if they try to add heavy elements of rage to the character), but I think there's elements of it that work well enough. Only a niche of a niche audience was ever going to like this (Seriously, the only thing weirder than doing a sequel to a fairly obscure PSP game might be that Netflix funded an adaptation of a 30 year old NES game in Castlevania), but I was into it

Castlevania (Season 3, 2020) - I was kind of mixed on season 1 and liked season 2 better, but season 3 is just bizarre in a bad way. Trevor and Sypha are just kind of fucking around in a village with some weird cultists that end up basically owning them, Alucard gets trolled into having a threesome only to almost get killed (And apparently turn evil?), and also Hector from season 2 also gets trolled hard the whole season in the most obvious scheme ever. I guess Isaac's journey was kind of neat, but even that isn't resolved here.

I dunno, this was the worst of the three seasons but not bad enough that I'm not curious about season 4.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Finished Season 5. TBH, I got a bit lost with all the time-traveling stuff, which is not unusual given that time travel, even in the best of cases, is completely absurd. Still, the more the season wound on the more I liked how it was using the time travel element to play with notions of fate VS free-will. Of course, being a materialistic determinist I'm firmly in the camp that if we were to rewind time and reset all the particles in the universe exactly how they were then things would play out the same; but there's a twist when you're able to go back in time with some kind of knowledge of what happened in the future.

Other than this, perhaps the thing that struck me most about this season is how it incorporated that element into the series' seeming overall strategy of keeping the audience in suspense about what the truth was. In previous seasons it was typically withheld information about characters and situations to do this, so in S3 it's the nature of The Others and Ben's trustworthiness (or lack thereof); in S4 it was the nature of those on the boat (and still more Ben, I guess); but S5 was basically all about not knowing whether or not what's happening is what was destined to happen, or whether the cast can take some actions to change things.

I also started S6 (just a couple eps. in), and the first thing I thought of with the introduction of Jacob and his rival was the Book of Job, as if the "rules" are some kind of "bet" made between good and evil to test certain people.

Anyway, I think despite the time travel silliness and the fact that the cast and plot get a bit scattershot I preferred S5 to S4. S4 was all suspense that seemed to drop a lot of thematic/metaphoric substance, while S5 kept the suspense but brought back just enough of those elements to make it interesting beyond that. I also rather liked the skipping record metaphor for the time element, especially given how putting on records had kinda been a motif throughout the series already.
Raxivace wrote:I think at their best the flash-forwards do generate some good suspense, and even some mystery about who the Oceanic 6 are. The worst is probably the Jin/Sun combo flashback/forward, since Jin's ends up being kind just a silly way to hide the twist ending.

Still, in the grand scheme of things I have to wonder what this entire idea of leaving the Island actually adds to Lost as a story, especially because it takes up a fairly large portion of the show for what IMO essentially feels like a video game sidequest. (EDIT: Or perhaps you could say its the show...spinning its wheels lololololololololol)

BTW what do you think of the new Freighter characters? Also has there every been a sillier name of an episode of TV than "Eggtown"?
This series does love its twists, but I guess I didn't mind the Jin one too much since it doesn't seem like a device it's overusing. We haven't crossed into Shyamalan territory yet, as these twists just seem to be ways to keep things surprising/interesting on a more milder level (IE, it's not like the entire series is riding on these twists).

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what them leaving substantially added to the series other than as a means to stretch things out. Maybe you could say that them leaving is a metaphor for trying to escape one's destiny or whatever you're supposed to do, and that while you can leave/run away for a while you inevitably end up miserable if you ignore that purpose. Not sure I really buy that, though, because it's not like in a "normal" situation a freak crash landing on an island would be how one would find their destiny/purpose. Maybe the idea is that they're supposed to sense the "magic of the island" and use that to find what they're looking for; or, maybe to take it further, the island is a source for self-reflection and them leaving is just trying to run away from whatever it is they needed to confront there. I don't know if any of this makes sense or is really even supported within the series, but I'm just throwing out possible justifications beyond them needing to stretch out the story to get to make it to 6 seasons.

As for the freighter characters, I really liked Daniel, probably because that nerdy/nervous/scientific personality was one type that was really missing from the island. I also liked how they tied him in with the time travel/physics element. Though I don't think his backstory was developed too well beyond that... like, I think there's something there with the girl he "paralyzed," but it was never really specific about it. Miles seemed mostly like a... less substantial Sawyer/James, and I really don't think the Sixth Sense stuff added much to the series. Charlotte was just... there. Why is it that the females seem to constantly get the short straw in terms of characterizations? Too often they seem to only be there to be love interests so we sympathize for their male partners when they die. Kate and Juliette are the most developed and even they seem less 3-dimensional than the male stars...
Raxivace wrote:I liked that moment because its one of the few instances at this point in the series where Ben is just utterly called on his bluffs and bullshit and can't actually talk his way out of something.

Still, I feel like its harmed because Keemy kind of sucks as a villain and feels like he belongs in like a Die Hard movie or something. More controversially I think Widmore is even worse as a character and I think kind of less interesting than when he was just that rich asshole dad that hated Desmond. But we'll get to more on that later on.
Yeah, I can see both of these complaints. Still, I'm not sure if the moment's hurt too bad just because Keemy is a superficial villain. He's one of those characters whose primary purpose just seems to be the response he elicits from the other characters, and none more so than Ben. Widmore seems much the same. Both of them seem to be character versions of MacGuffins.
Raxivace wrote:
Yeah, despite that he has one of the "simpler" backstories in terms of just being about a lost love/opportunity, there's something about his story I find quite moving. His reuniting with Penny was also one of my favorite moments of S4.
I think its because Desmond is one of the few characters with like, active, specific goals. A lot of other characters are either too secretive, kept at a distance, or just kind of wallowing around from event to event.

Desmond wants to find Penny again, has a cool catchphrase in "See you in another life, brother", and has cool mystery shit attached to him. It helps that his S4 episode is one of the better individual ones of the entire series too, even if its pretty atypical of Lost in someways.
Good points that I agree with. Though I might sugges that the characters "wallowing around" kinda fits with the "lost" theme in general, I do like that Desmond is a counterpoint to that, another kind of "lost" if you will.
Raxivace wrote:I'd say the difference to me is that the entire idea of the AT Field is just kind of inherently more abstract even on a plot level than the healing is to me. Something like magical Island healing just maps onto real world things far more easily IMO- like it makes me think of hippie-ish claims of "natural" medicine, "alternative" medicine, anti-GMO rhetoric etc. At least in this kind of reading of the show where we focus on civilization vs. nature.

That Jung quote is interesting though. Like I agree ideally there needs to be a balance, I just don't find the problem with the Others to be that they had houses and book clubs and occupied the Dharma stations like they were Wall Street, as opposed to the kidnappings, murders, bad taste in novels (Juliet lost points with me for liking Stephen King). There are also some spoiler-y issues I have with the argument too.
That's generally the problem with allegory when you move out of the realm of fantasy and sci-fi. In fantasy and sci-fi you can invent your own fictional universe where abstract concepts/ideas map on to fictional elements within those worlds that, in themselves, don't have real-world analogs (or, if they do, they're very different; like "the ring" in Nibelungen). Lost is, well, a bit lost in some kind of middle ground between realism and fantasy. Like, there's definitely some obvious fantasy elements--the smoke monster, time travel--but other stuff, like island healing, can easily be taken more literally than metaphoric. I guess I'm just in the camp that if the literal reading doesn't make sense or seems pretty absurd/stupid, go with the metaphoric one, even if it doesn't make perfect sense.

Yeah, I would agree that the problem with The Others isn't just the civilization, but maybe it's more that, as they've become civilized, they've also cut themselves off from the rest of the island/nature. I actually wondered at one point if those giant sonic gates weren't symbolic of that; that they needed protection from nature, or even from the "immigrants" who were learning how to live in/with nature. There also might be the notion that, just like the Dharma Initiative before them, The Others essentially became the people who were just using the island to benefit themselves and only themselves. More abstractly, there's the general idea that as civilization increases and we cut ourselves off from nature and only look at nature as something to be manipulated for our benefit, we start seeing ourselves as essentially gods and not a part of nature anymore. It makes sense historically as well, given how religion evolved from imagining nature as gods (the sun, eg), to imagining human-like beings controlling nature as gods, to imagining abstract human ideals (omnipotence, omniscience, perfectly good, etc.) as being god. It's also why something like Darwin hit so many so hard, because trying to re-imagine ourselves as part of nature was a shock to our collective egos.
Raxivace wrote:Yeah I dunno, that primal feeling you mention has just never been a thing for me. I just don't relate to it at all, even if I can enjoy a forest or canyon or whatever as an aesthetic thing. Like I can understand the intellectual arguments you make about the benefits of nature, but there just isn't any kind of spiritual thing it evokes in me really.

I need to see more Apichatpong at some point. Mysterious Object at Noon is still the only one of his I've watched.
Well that's a shame because I know I've always felt that way about nature, even if it was something as simple as sitting out on my back porch.

FWIW, Mysterious Object is nothing like his other films. I'd start with either Tropical Malady or Uncle Boonmee, both of which I think represent what he does well.
Raxivace wrote:In terms of why she was there, I think people assume her husband's death drove Libby over the edge. The timeline is...weird on that though, since it goes something like this:
I guess I either didn't catch the timeline and/or had (half-)forgotten much of that.
Raxivace wrote:Its a pretty minor example in the grand scheme of things, because Libby is ultimately a minor supporting character, but I feel like its also emblematic of how Lost will go on to treat much more significant plotlines later on (Stuff that even rivals infamous NGE 24 Kaworu "plot hole"), where when you go back to look through them they just have a ton of weird gaps and holes in them like Libby's backstory does.

Even with all of the pieces in place after Season 6, the more questions you ask, and I mean even basic questions about certain character motivations, the less sense things really make again on even basic storytelling level.
TBH, I'm not even surprised this is the case given how many characters, stories, and themes the series is trying to juggle. Unless someone had worked all of this out beforehand as like a novel and had had months to go over and edit it, I'm not sure there's any way to write a show like that week to week and avoid those gaps and holes. Perhaps depending on how big they are there's an argument to made that they probably should've had some of the more major stuff down beforehand, but it's worth keeping in mind that even Anno said he didn't know where he was going with NGE until about mid-way through. I wonder how long it took the Lost creators to figure out where they wanted to go?
Raxivace wrote:I'd say biggest difference to me is that in 2001/NGE/Twin Peaks I think Kubrick/Anno/Lynch for the most part had an idea as to why they would leave something ambiguous in their stories, whereas I feel like Lindelof always places ambiguity in either really weird areas of plot that don't seem improved by it, or he makes it into a really blunt, ending-of-Inception boring binary where you just don't get the reveal of whether DiCaprio's totem stops spinning or not.

The latter in particular Lindelof pretty liberally lifts into the endings of Leftovers season 3 and Watchmen, and Libby is an example of the former.
I can definitely see that. Kubrick, especially, seemed extremely cognizant about what elements he left ambiguous and why he was doing it (comparing Clarke's 2001 with Kubrick's makes it crystal clear what elements Kubrick left out, and the reasons why are, IMO, fairly obvious). Lynch seems fond, especially after Lost Highway, of creating these psychological narrative puzzles, so I tend to think he has it worked out what his films "mean," for the most part, even if there are red herrings here and there. NGE is probably the closest to Lost, because we know Anno didn't know himself where the series was going to go until about midway through, and there are huge chunks of its fictional universe that are just never explained. But NGE was also obviously always meant as an allegory, so those mythological elements are less crucial to understanding the series than the themes its exploring (and the way it's exploring them through various story/character elements).

If Lost ends up being more like NGE I'd probably say that it's a shame they forced it into 6 seasons because the downside of stretching out the story that long is precisely that you inevitably put most of the focus on that story--and the characters, and the world--rather than whatever themes are being explored through it. NGE is short enough and its themes integrated into its story elements well enough that it never really had this problem, while there are long stretches of Lost where I don't feel like any themes are really being explored/developed and the entire focus is just on the action/suspense/drama generated by the situation and characters.
Raxivace wrote:This was my plan all along Jimbo! I spent years on this con! Lost broke my mind, and now you're going to unbroke it! [laugh]
Ha! Well, I'll do my best.
Raxivace wrote:I've heard people say this about Dante as well, though I still found Inferno enjoyable when I read it back in the day anyways.
The problem with authors like Dante is that it's nearly impossible to render both the story and the poetry. Divine Comedy was written in terza rima, which sounds fantastic in Italian, but is nearly impossible to render in English while retaining the meaning and without sounding archaic/stilted. Reading Dante in English is probably like listening to a remake of a song compared to the original.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." -- Carl Jung
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Raxivace's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Finished Season 5. TBH, I got a bit lost with all the time-traveling stuff, which is not unusual given that time travel, even in the best of cases, is completely absurd. Still, the more the season wound on the more I liked how it was using the time travel element to play with notions of fate VS free-will. Of course, being a materialistic determinist I'm firmly in the camp that if we were to rewind time and reset all the particles in the universe exactly how they were then things would play out the same; but there's a twist when you're able to go back in time with some kind of knowledge of what happened in the future.
Yeah the time travel stuff is a bit confusing. I'm not sure whether "whatever happened, happened" as a rule exists to clarify or confuse the plot, especially if you try and think out something like the Locke/Richard compass scene and how that damn compass basically has no point of origin (Shouldn't it also eventually decay into nothingness going through the infinite loop? What happens then?).

Another time travel question that bothers me is how how "Christian Shepherd" was able to meet Locke down in the well, which opens a lot of can of worms. Like I can't even say for certain whether this is part of the loophole that Man in Black (What internet people call "Jacob's rival") mentioned or not.
Other than this, perhaps the thing that struck me most about this season is how it incorporated that element into the series' seeming overall strategy of keeping the audience in suspense about what the truth was. In previous seasons it was typically withheld information about characters and situations to do this, so in S3 it's the nature of The Others and Ben's trustworthiness (or lack thereof); in S4 it was the nature of those on the boat (and still more Ben, I guess); but S5 was basically all about not knowing whether or not what's happening is what was destined to happen, or whether the cast can take some actions to change things.
Its something that continues into S6 too, about whether the bomb worked or not and what exactly detonating it did. People still debate this!
I also started S6 (just a couple eps. in), and the first thing I thought of with the introduction of Jacob and his rival was the Book of Job, as if the "rules" are some kind of "bet" made between good and evil to test certain people.
I think the "rules" and the "bet" are separate things based on some later season 6 information, though whether the rules between Jacob/MiB are the same "rules" as between Ben and Widmore is something that has driven me crazy for years. I think Jacob's and Ben's are ultimately separate, but its a bit annoying that the same key word is used.
Anyway, I think despite the time travel silliness and the fact that the cast and plot get a bit scattershot I preferred S5 to S4. S4 was all suspense that seemed to drop a lot of thematic/metaphoric substance, while S5 kept the suspense but brought back just enough of those elements to make it interesting beyond that. I also rather liked the skipping record metaphor for the time element, especially given how putting on records had kinda been a motif throughout the series already.
When I first watched the show I preferred s5 to s4, but going back I just find a lot of S5 to continue that "video game sidequest" feel I mentioned. The mission to get back to the island just kind of takes forever, the DHARMA stuff itself drags for a while (The episode about Sayid in particular was a low point. What S5 and S6 do to Sayid's character is just sad), DHARMA just being another set of characters in a long of line of them in Lost that don't actually know anything was disappointing etc.

The high point, other than finale, was probably the time skipping though in the first half of the season. The way they introduce the metaphor in the first episode with the Willie Nelson song was good (Reminded me a lot of season 2 with MAKE YOUR OWN KIND OF MUSIC).

Speaking of that first S5 episode, I'm not sure I like how they introduce Dan during the DHARMA times in the cold open.
This series does love its twists, but I guess I didn't mind the Jin one too much since it doesn't seem like a device it's overusing. We haven't crossed into Shyamalan territory yet, as these twists just seem to be ways to keep things surprising/interesting on a more milder level (IE, it's not like the entire series is riding on these twists).
Uh.

Hmmm.

You might want to come back to me on this one when you're done. [laugh]
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what them leaving substantially added to the series other than as a means to stretch things out. Maybe you could say that them leaving is a metaphor for trying to escape one's destiny or whatever you're supposed to do, and that while you can leave/run away for a while you inevitably end up miserable if you ignore that purpose.
Its just weird because we get like several different explanations about why they even needed to go back on a plot level. There's the idea about them being "lost" without the island still, but then there's what Locke supposedly says, which the show is inconsistent about.

It comes down to what Jack says "Jeremy Bentham" told him and what actually got being different things- namely, in the S4 finale Jack says that Bentham told him that very bad things happened to the people still on the Island because Jack left (Which doesn't seem to track with the actual events of S4/early s5 to begin with. Presumably we're meant to think Locke is referring to the time skipping, but Jack had little to do with that), but in the S5 episode where we actually get to that conversation Locke says nothing of the sort.

To me at least, at first it seems like this is what causes Jack to feel guilty for escaping because of bad things happening to survivors still on the Island (Which would fit with Jack as hero, as leader, even as doctor etc.) and is what drives him to drink, but the S5 version of the conversation makes it seem more vague mysticism/spiritual stuff from Locke that drives Jack over the edge for a while, with Locke's death being what finally drives him to actually get everyone to return to the Island.

Of course once Jack actually returns, he flashes in time to the 70's (Why this happens still isn't clear to me, other than non-answer of "whatever happened happened"), where he goes with the flow and doesn't do anything (Doesn't even seem to care about the redshirts that died. Like I don't expect him to be torn up over Charlotte Staples Lewis (She's C.S. Lewis, get it?) since Jack barely knew her, but you'd think he'd have thoughts on other characters perhaps) until deciding to detonate Jughead.

Moving on to thematic reasons...
Not sure I really buy that, though, because it's not like in a "normal" situation a freak crash landing on an island would be how one would find their destiny/purpose. Maybe the idea is that they're supposed to sense the "magic of the island" and use that to find what they're looking for; or, maybe to take it further, the island is a source for self-reflection and them leaving is just trying to run away from whatever it is they needed to confront there. I don't know if any of this makes sense or is really even supported within the series, but I'm just throwing out possible justifications beyond them needing to stretch out the story to get to make it to 6 seasons.
I thought the thing about self-reflection was the intent too, but then its weird how Jack goes from chill go-with-the-flow Jack to "I'm detonating a damn hydrogen bomb" which is like the ultimate form of Jack's worst tendencies in the show to control, to do a vaguely science-y thing, to run away from his problems by resetting time etc.

And that's just with Jack. Sayid goes from assassin to attempted child murderer. Kate doesn't get to find Claire yet for returning, Sun, seemingly arbitrarily, ISN'T flashed to the 70's where Jin is etc.

Again, everything about the return journey is just odd, especially when its setup so far in advance in the S3 finale. It really does seem like it was all just to setup Jughead detonating in S5, to setup the flashsideways in S6.
As for the freighter characters, I really liked Daniel, probably because that nerdy/nervous/scientific personality was one type that was really missing from the island. I also liked how they tied him in with the time travel/physics element. Though I don't think his backstory was developed too well beyond that... like, I think there's something there with the girl he "paralyzed," but it was never really specific about it.
Yeah he's the one guy you hope might actually be able to figure out just what the hell the Island is. And then he dies.

Also, I often forget that he's Widmore's son, and therefore Penny's brother. A bunch of weird connections to add onto his character, in addition to weird mad science backstory stuff you mentioned.
Miles seemed mostly like a... less substantial Sawyer/James, and I really don't think the Sixth Sense stuff added much to the series.
Yeah. He's such a weird character too because like, Hurley already sort of had a version of his power. Its weird to have two different variations of "talking to dead people" as characters on what is essentially the good guy team.

Also he's Pierre Chang's son I guess. It was a popular fan theory before season 5 came out that he would be Chang's son, and tbh I thought the theory was kind of racist at the time because the evidence seemed to amount to "Both characters are Asian". Welp, I ended up being wrong about that.
Charlotte was just... there. Why is it that the females seem to constantly get the short straw in terms of characterizations? Too often they seem to only be there to be love interests so we sympathize for their male partners when they die. Kate and Juliette are the most developed and even they seem less 3-dimensional than the male stars...
Yeah I've wondered the same thing (Which makes that Kate was supposed to be lead all the more bizarre in retrospect).

If I were to hazard a guess, and this is me getting into psychoanalytical bullshit about the author who is still alive a bit, I think its because Damon Lindelof has very large unresolved daddy issues (If the open letter he released before Watchmen came out is any indication). The dude is very concerned with sons and fathers, the legacy of fathers etc. and its all over Lost and comes up again and again in Leftovers and Watchmen (Well at least in Watchmen the female characters get to have daddy issues).

Because he's so focused in on sons/fathers, I think that's why the female characters get kind of shafted as a result. Jack has his dad issues, Locke has his dad issues, even Locke's dad is a negative father figure in Sawyer's life, Desmond has a father in law in Widmore, Ben has his dad issues etc. Jacob even becomes the ultimate dad of the show.

I think this is also why, and this is where I admittedly start to lose people if I haven't already, that Lost season 6 starts getting very authoritarian themes about the need to both have and submit to an ultimate father figure, because Jacob becomes the ultimate dad and anyone who threatens dad is clearly a monster that needs to be stopped.
Yeah, I can see both of these complaints. Still, I'm not sure if the moment's hurt too bad just because Keemy is a superficial villain. He's one of those characters whose primary purpose just seems to be the response he elicits from the other characters, and none more so than Ben. Widmore seems much the same. Both of them seem to be character versions of MacGuffins.
Keemy totally is that, its just a bit disappointing to see such a cartoonish guy when every other villain character has some kind of characteristic to at least complicate them. Like even Mr. Friendly had a little more going on.

Keemy makes good eggs I guess? I can't help but notice you ignored my question about Eggtown, which was the most important part of this whole post!!!!!

With Widmore, it bothers me more because it always seems like there's supposed to be more to him that just never seems to quite come. Like you may have noticed by this point he never actually shares a scene with his own daughter Penny in the entire series, which is just weird (Though because this is Lost, he gets on with Dan of course).
Good points that I agree with. Though I might sugges that the characters "wallowing around" kinda fits with the "lost" theme in general, I do like that Desmond is a counterpoint to that, another kind of "lost" if you will.
Yeah. I don't say "wallowing around" as a complaint necessarily (Well it is at times when it just feels like stalling both plot and character development/exploration), but that the Desmond character is just fundamentally different from the others.
That's generally the problem with allegory when you move out of the realm of fantasy and sci-fi. In fantasy and sci-fi you can invent your own fictional universe where abstract concepts/ideas map on to fictional elements within those worlds that, in themselves, don't have real-world analogs (or, if they do, they're very different; like "the ring" in Nibelungen). Lost is, well, a bit lost in some kind of middle ground between realism and fantasy. Like, there's definitely some obvious fantasy elements--the smoke monster, time travel--but other stuff, like island healing, can easily be taken more literally than metaphoric. I guess I'm just in the camp that if the literal reading doesn't make sense or seems pretty absurd/stupid, go with the metaphoric one, even if it doesn't make perfect sense.
For me, I'm just too far down the rabbit hole in knowing about Lindelof's view of the world from interviews, his other shows/movies etc. that I'm just way less likely to give his work the benefit of the doubt on these shakier elements. Like if you ever get around to watching Watchmen, I'll have things to say on his very bizarre takeaways about what he thinks Alan Moore was doing with the original comic.

Look, the last decade has been very, very long. [laugh]
Yeah, I would agree that the problem with The Others isn't just the civilization, but maybe it's more that, as they've become civilized, they've also cut themselves off from the rest of the island/nature. I actually wondered at one point if those giant sonic gates weren't symbolic of that; that they needed protection from nature, or even from the "immigrants" who were learning how to live in/with nature. There also might be the notion that, just like the Dharma Initiative before them, The Others essentially became the people who were just using the island to benefit themselves and only themselves. More abstractly, there's the general idea that as civilization increases and we cut ourselves off from nature and only look at nature as something to be manipulated for our benefit, we start seeing ourselves as essentially gods and not a part of nature anymore. It makes sense historically as well, given how religion evolved from imagining nature as gods (the sun, eg), to imagining human-like beings controlling nature as gods, to imagining abstract human ideals (omnipotence, omniscience, perfectly good, etc.) as being god. It's also why something like Darwin hit so many so hard, because trying to re-imagine ourselves as part of nature was a shock to our collective egos.
Since you're early S6 now, the problem with this reading is the Temple Others, who do seem to be more in tune with nature, less reliant on modern technology (Though I guess they have their weird test for evil, though I'm still not sure if that's supposed to be mysticism bullshit or science bullshit), and those guys freakin' suck too. They even have their own version of the sonic gates with the ash (Which has come up through the series a few times in past seasons actually).

They're also kind of weird because IIRC, they're not actually a separate faction from Ben's Others even though it would probably make more sense that way, and would point more to what you're saying about the lure of civilization corrupting Ben's people.
Well that's a shame because I know I've always felt that way about nature, even if it was something as simple as sitting out on my back porch.
I mean, I can enjoy sitting on a porch too, that's just not the kind of feeling it gets out of me.
FWIW, Mysterious Object is nothing like his other films. I'd start with either Tropical Malady or Uncle Boonmee, both of which I think represent what he does well.
Yeah I will get to more at some point. I might start with Uncle Boonmee since now that I'm done with the Oscar Best Picture Winners, I do want to move on to the Palme d'Or winners too as the next long term watching project.
I guess I either didn't catch the timeline and/or had (half-)forgotten much of that.
Lost just throws so much at you that its easy to forget details when you're just binging it.

When the show was airing we had months and months between seasons. There was something like an eight month wait between seasons 5 and 6 for example. That gives you a long time to stew on details. A lot of us noticed contradictions and unexplained elements back in the day, and we foolishly thought season 6 would clear these some of these up lmao.
TBH, I'm not even surprised this is the case given how many characters, stories, and themes the series is trying to juggle. Unless someone had worked all of this out beforehand as like a novel and had had months to go over and edit it, I'm not sure there's any way to write a show like that week to week and avoid those gaps and holes. Perhaps depending on how big they are there's an argument to made that they probably should've had some of the more major stuff down beforehand, but it's worth keeping in mind that even Anno said he didn't know where he was going with NGE until about mid-way through. I wonder how long it took the Lost creators to figure out where they wanted to go?
I think the core plan with Lost honestly changed between seasons. Like the Jacob stuff is not at all consistent between seasons 3, 4, 5, and 6- the Cabin plotline alone is enough evidence for that, just try and make sense of it sometime.

But yeah my main criticism is this bigger picture stuff (Mainly Jacob and MiB, everything about them) that doesn't make sense and should have been thought out more- especially once they got that end date so many years in advance. They had time to get big picture stuff right at least. Minor characters like Libby being whatever are one thing, the characters the entire final season revolves around is a different thing entirely.

Like even in NGE there's a level of plot and thematic consistently that I just don't think exists in Lost, Anno at least is building on core ideas that are still present in early episodes like hedgehog's dilemma and the like. Breaking Bad is another show written on the fly that just holds together way better.

I guess it frustrates me too because I do feel, for some reason, Lindelof could actually make something that good as NGE on a writing level, but just hasn't seemed to pull it off.
I can definitely see that. Kubrick, especially, seemed extremely cognizant about what elements he left ambiguous and why he was doing it (comparing Clarke's 2001 with Kubrick's makes it crystal clear what elements Kubrick left out, and the reasons why are, IMO, fairly obvious). Lynch seems fond, especially after Lost Highway, of creating these psychological narrative puzzles, so I tend to think he has it worked out what his films "mean," for the most part, even if there are red herrings here and there. NGE is probably the closest to lost, because we know Anno didn't know himself where the series was going to go until about midway through, and there are huge chunks of its fictional universe that are just never explained. But NGE was also obviously always meant as an allegory, so those mythological elements are less crucial to understanding the series than the themes its exploring (and the way it's exploring them through various story/character elements).
Yeah.

NGE might also benefit from have a clear basic plot even if deeper details are mysterious. Angels appear, EVA's must defeat them to prevent the apocalypse.

In Lost, they never even give a real explanation as to why Man in Black can't leave the Island, you're supposed to take Jacob's warning that it would just be bad, maaaaan, on faith which I think reveals a lot about how Lindelof views the world. You're supposed to believe in the patriarch, whereas Anno makes mysterious patriarchs the villains.
If Lost ends up being more like NGE I'd probably say that it's a shame they forced it into 6 seasons because the downside of stretching out the story that long is precisely that you inevitably put most of the focus on that story--and the characters, and the world--rather than whatever themes are being explored through it. NGE is short enough and its themes integrated into its story elements well enough that it never really had this problem, while there are long stretches of Lost where I don't feel like any themes are really being explored/developed and the entire focus is just on the action/suspense/drama generated by the situation and characters.
Yeah despite years of bitching and whining from me about Lost, at least some of its problems are because it was forced into 6 seasons in addition to general network TV limitations. While they have their own problems, Leftovers and Watchmen's plots don't quite have the same kind of problems that Lost does in terms of just basic coherence, and do allow more focus on thematic concerns (Too bad the themes in Watchmen are dumb. Things get kind of shaky in Leftovers after season 1 too, though I'll still stand by season 1 as Lindelof's best work).
The problem with authors like Dante is that it's nearly impossible to render both the story and the poetry. Divine Comedy was written in terza rima, which sounds fantastic in Italian, but is nearly impossible to render in English while retaining the meaning and without sounding archaic/stilted. Reading Dante in English is probably like listening to a remake of a song compared to the original.
In that case the remake is pretty fucking good in its own right, so I can only imagine how great the original must be.

I should mention I did try Purgatorio back in the day, though I couldn't get through it. Its true what they say about all of the cool people being in Hell! [laugh]
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Gendo »

To me, the reason for leaving (plot-wise) is pretty simple... it's just "absence makes the heart grow fonder" or "you never know what you had until it's gone"... a reason for the characters to realize that they need the island.

Man I love Daniel as a character. The way he talks is so much fun to listen to.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

I finished Lost. I should be in bed now but so many ideas are tumbling around in my noggin I thought I'd just drop in to mention this. I don't expect to be making coherent sense of everything (or anything, really) by tomorrow, or maybe ever. I also really think that a second watch is almost necessary to try to form any even semi-coherent interpretation or ideas because there's just so many ideas and details and contradictions that it's impossible to keep track of after a single viewing. I will say that the last time I remember being this overwhelmed by something was probably NGE... maybe I could say Metal Gear Solid 2, but I think this experience is closer to the former just because of the sheer amount of ideas and content. Although with Lost I'm not sure if I'm optimistic about being to make it all cohere, but I do have some ideas that looking to see how they pan out.

For now I'll just leave these thoughts about Jacob/MIB and the final twist:

Perhaps the thing that struck me most about the Jacob/MIB relationship/backstory is how much it frustrated the good/bad and light/dark dichotomy the series had set up. Jacob's set up to be the good/light side. He listens to his mother, and follows his "purpose" that he doesn't understand. MIB is set up to be the bad/dark side. He questions his mother, and searches out the others for answers. In the end, the MIB is right though about their mother, and the Cain/Abel parallel is turned on its head when Jacob actually "murders" him. I think this episode, more than any, made me think that the series is almost setting up these dichotomies just so they can frustrate our classic, pardon the pun, black-and-white interpretations of them. I had inklings of this earlier when they'd set up Locke and Jack as the faith VS science dichotomy, but creating situations where both were (at times) right and wrong; the idea being that maybe neither approach was an answer to everything.

So if Jacob and MIB aren't really good and evil, what other dichotomies could they be? One that comes to mind is order/chaos. There is a truth to the idea that the order created by societies and the "purpose" that creates is often blindly accepted by people, often to the point of an unquestioning acceptance of their culture's morals. Questioning that purpose is, essentially, introducing chaos into that order. That chaos can be destructive, but confronting it also often gives us the means of improving society/ourselves and moving on. I think I touched on this in my review of MGS2, but this theme seems quite prevalent to Lost as well. I'm not sure how or if this can tie in with the Island's "magic" that must be protected, or the theme of the MIB (and some others) wanting to leave, but I'm wondering if perhaps this "social" metaphor can be mapped onto a more psychological one as well.

As for the twist (and consider this a huge spoiler warning if anyone who hasn't seen Lost is reading this) of them all being dead--man, my "not Shyamalan" comment is startlingly ironic in hindsight!--I'm undecided how I feel about it right now. Again, much like the Island's magical healing abilities, I think it's a bit silly if taken literally, but as an emotional send-off to the characters I thought most of it worked well. I found myself in tears several times when the characters were "remembering" their relationships from the island with the various reunions. I guess what I'd conclude is that, right now, I'm not sure how I feel about it as fiction--though I guess, in a way, like much of the series it's rather appropriate how all the suspense/action it set up ended on a kind of twist--but as a kind of meta-fictional (not literally) goodbye to the characters I think it works at least emotionally.

Funnily enough, if I had one complaint about the series it would be that, despite the location, it was visually pretty bland (and this is one thing that will eternally separate it from something like NGE); one exception, though, is that final scene between Jack and his father with the glowing stained glass window behind him with so many of the relevant symbols of the series--the wheel, the yin/yang, the cross... though I'm not sure what the moon/star, big star, and Asian(?) writing were about. One of the awesome things about NGE as a work of allegorical art was how it was able to imbue all of its fictional devices with these metaphoric meanings so that by the time we reach EOE we're able to have this apocalypse (and post-apocalypse) play out almost entirely visually, with so much being said without words. I feel like Lost, by comparison, relied almost exclusive on the "classical" language of literature, and what symbolic motifs exist were less visual and more literary, not to mention occasional.

Anyway, I've typed way too much already given how late it is and how addled my brain is. I think I'll at least take a day off and then decide whether or not I want to give the series an immediate rewatch or do something else as a break. I'll also try to respond to Raxi's last post once my brain stops vibrating.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Gendo »

As for the "twist", I never really saw it as a big twist... it's not like we thought that the "flash-sideways" world was just a normal part of their normal reality... it was always going to be an alternate dimension, or an after-life, or a different timeline, etc. We didn't know that it was afterlife, but we didn't think it was just reality either. Not like the Sixth Sense twist where you are assuming that he's just a normal living person throughout the movie.

For clarity, you didn't get the idea that they were dead the whole time, did you? "They" being all the characters on the island; all the events we saw from seasons 1-5 and the events on the island during season 6, etc? The "they were dead" thing is only the flash-sideways characters in that weird alternate world. But apparently it's a somewhat common misconception that the finale revealed that they were actually dead the whole time.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

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One thing I've never know what to do with with the flashsideways is Charlie. He seems "woke" when Hurley talks to him in season 4, but its hard to tell when/how ghost Charlie exists in relationship with the Flashsideways.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:So if Jacob and MIB aren't really good and evil, what other dichotomies could they be? One that comes to mind is order/chaos. There is a truth to the idea that the order created by societies and the "purpose" that creates is often blindly accepted by people, often to the point of an unquestioning acceptance of their culture's morals. Questioning that purpose is, essentially, introducing chaos into that order. That chaos can be destructive, but confronting it also often gives us the means of improving society/ourselves and moving on.
I think this is pretty close, however I do think Lindelof as author thinks maintaining order/status quo is ultimately good thing and that upsetting that for whatever reason is bad.

Like regardless of what we think he represents, Man in Black is still painted as a villain that needs to be stopped, through trying to come up with any actual reason for that gets very shakey very quickly.

I personally find MiB more sympathetic, though I suspect this probably has a lot to do with my political views and Lindelof's being very different. Lindelof strikes me a centrist who thinks maintaining that social order you mentioned is important above all else, and when there's something about that order that is fundamentally broken I think it absolutely needs to be shaken up.

Like I personally see MiB analogous to a character like, say, Django in Django Unchained, with there being little difference between say DiCaprio's character in that movie and Jacob.

Man I can't really begin to go on about how much I hate Jacob. He's the real villain in Lost IMHO. Everything bad goes back to him or his "mother" that he continues the fucked up policies of anyways.
I guess what I'd conclude is that, right now, I'm not sure how I feel about it as fiction--though I guess, in a way, like much of the series it's rather appropriate how all the suspense/action it set up ended on a kind of twist--but as a kind of meta-fictional (not literally) goodbye to the characters I think it works at least emotionally.
Yeah like its hard not to feel emotional when everyone is saying goodbye, though the flashsideways plot as a whole I don't really like. It really does feel like a less effective version of Instrumentality to me, though one that ends with characters going even deeper into into it instead of rejecting it.
glass window behind him with so many of the relevant symbols of the series--the wheel, the yin/yang, the cross... though I'm not sure what the moon/star, big star, and Asian(?) writing were about.
They're all symbols of different religions.
Lostpedia wrote:The stained glass window in the church shows symbols of the following faiths: the star and crescent of Islam, the Star of David (Judaism), the Aum (widely used as a symbol of Hinduism, but also present in Buddhism and Jainism), the Christian cross, the Dharmacakra (Buddhism) and the Yin/Yang disk (Taoism).
The Aum is that Asian writing you mentioned.

I took this to mean that like, all religions lead to the same truth, maaaaaaaan. Its basically that "coexist" bumper sticker that was popular a decade ago.

Image

Of course its all still set in a Church, which perhaps undermines any sense of religious unity the scene is intending to suggest... I almost wish that final scene was set in an airport or something instead, that was more significant to both all of the characters but even the story of Lost as a whole.
I feel like Lost, by comparison, relied almost exclusive on the "classical" language of literature, and what symbolic motifs exist were less visual and more literary, not to mention occasional.
It does, and this is American TV in general outside of like what Lynch makes.
Anyway, I've typed way too much already given how late it is and how addled my brain is. I think I'll at least take a day off and then decide whether or not I want to give the series an immediate rewatch or do something else as a break. I'll also try to respond to Raxi's last post once my brain stops vibrating.
Yeah the best and worst thing about Lost is that it throw a lot at you. I'm just not sure how much it ultimately adds up to.

I hope you can at least get why I was pretty cagey about saying too much about the series before now, because the Jacob/MiB/Candidates etc. stuff really does reframe a lot of the series, and for me its in a way I don't particularly like.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Gendo wrote:As for the "twist", I never really saw it as a big twist... it's not like we thought that the "flash-sideways" world was just a normal part of their normal reality... it was always going to be an alternate dimension, or an after-life, or a different timeline, etc. We didn't know that it was afterlife, but we didn't think it was just reality either. Not like the Sixth Sense twist where you are assuming that he's just a normal living person throughout the movie.

For clarity, you didn't get the idea that they were dead the whole time, did you? "They" being all the characters on the island; all the events we saw from seasons 1-5 and the events on the island during season 6, etc? The "they were dead" thing is only the flash-sideways characters in that weird alternate world. But apparently it's a somewhat common misconception that the finale revealed that they were actually dead the whole time.
My first thought was that the FS was either the world that had changed after the detonation of the atom bomb, or it was the world that could've been if they had changed things... I guess "different timelines" was my guess of your options.

No, I didn't think the FS meant they were always dead; I actually floated that idea when the series first started and said the entire Island thing could be a kind of purgatory.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:So if Jacob and MIB aren't really good and evil, what other dichotomies could they be? One that comes to mind is order/chaos. There is a truth to the idea that the order created by societies and the "purpose" that creates is often blindly accepted by people, often to the point of an unquestioning acceptance of their culture's morals. Questioning that purpose is, essentially, introducing chaos into that order. That chaos can be destructive, but confronting it also often gives us the means of improving society/ourselves and moving on.
I think this is pretty close, however I do think Lindelof as author thinks maintaining order/status quo is ultimately good thing and that upsetting that for whatever reason is bad.

Like regardless of what we think he represents, Man in Black is still painted as a villain that needs to be stopped, through trying to come up with any actual reason for that gets very shakey very quickly.

I personally find MiB more sympathetic, though I suspect this probably has a lot to do with my political views and Lindelof's being very different. Lindelof strikes me a centrist who thinks maintaining that social order you mentioned is important above all else, and when there's something about that order that is fundamentally broken I think it absolutely needs to be shaken up.

Like I personally see MiB analogous to a character like, say, Django in Django Unchained, with there being little difference between say DiCaprio's character in that movie and Jacob.

Man I can't really begin to go on about how much I hate Jacob. He's the real villain in Lost IMHO. Everything bad goes back to him or his "mother" that he continues the fucked up policies of anyways.
I sense this might be where our views could start to diverge, and I almost feel tentative about arguing too strongly against this without another viewing to put more pieces/evidence together. But, what the hell, I've always been one to jump in the fire and put salve on the burns later.

My thoughts right now is that the series seems to stress a balance between the two extremes. The power of order is that provides purpose, a reason to live and act in the service of some goal. The downside of blindly accepting that, however, is in the classic phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." If Jacob and his (foster) mother are the faith/purpose side, we must also realize that they're the side that brutally murders both the children's (birth) mother and sibling. Think back in history to all the great "ordered" empires and how many they killed in the name of their purpose/goal.

Then let's say the MIB is the "chaos" side that can't simply/blindly accept the "order/purpose." He ventures out into humanity, he helps them discover the "power" of the island and investigates it (this seems to feed into the faith VS reason dichotomy), he's the one that discovers the truth (and the lie) about their mother... but because of all this, he's also the one that sees the "badness" in humanity and, lacking in any purpose, feels like he should just use/manipulate them for his own selfish goals.

It seems to me that that episode doesn't really paint either side as innately villainous, but rather represents both the positives and negatives of both extremes and the struggle for balance between them. I think viewed metaphorically, the reason the MIB can't leave is because it would be the equivalent of releasing nihilism into the world, into all of humanity. The reason the MIB becomes the "bad guy" that must be stopped is for that reason, because we have to confront the chaos, take what we need, but without letting it out, without letting it control us.

I actually think it makes sense that Hurley ends up becoming the Island's "protector." It's revealed at one point that the MIB could take the forms of those who died on the island, which means that Hurley had been regularly conversing with the MIB all along. But Hurley was also one who'd regularly put his faith in others (like Jack). So is there any character that struck a better balance between the two sides? I also forget, but one character tells Hurley (about not leaving the island) that "that's the way Jacob did it, maybe you can do better" (or something like that). What this suggests is not that we should just blindly trust/follow the status quo/order, but that we can, indeed, use our confrontations with chaos--the questioning, the curiosity, the unconscious, etc.--to, indeed, "do better," without slipping into nihilism.

Really, Lindelof isn't wrong that social order must be maintained: but "WHAT social order?" is the question. I think there's two kinds of naivety on this issue: one being that we can just have a "revolution," get rid of everything, start over, and do better. That seems to ignore the progress that's been made, which means that much good has already been done. The other naivety is that since much good has already been done, any change will just make things worse. This seems to ignore that all the progress that's been made has come through change, and there's no reason to think we can't always do better.

So, in the world of Lost, yes, the order must be maintained, but is it Jacob's order? I don't think so. Jacob blindly followed his mother, ended up killing his brother and feeling immense guilt over it, yet he still carried on his mother's tradition. The cast comes to the island, lead there by Jacob, but are confronted by the MIB, who undoubtedly is a major force that (often) helps them to survive (thinking back, it was even Jack chasing the MIB in the form of his dad that lead them to the caves/water).

I understand why you find the MIB more sympathetic. In a sense, I do as well. I think that probably has to do with the fact that we both lean liberal, which makes us psychologically more inclined to embrace the "chaos" of questioning, change, and whatnot; but I think that is, indeed, a psychological bias rather than a, let's say, complete rational analysis. Though, again, I say this tentatively given that it's only been a single viewing and I'm basing most of it on the episode that shows Jacob's/MIB's backstory. I'm interested to comb through the rest of the series to see how it handles this dichotomy elsewhere.

This is perhaps tangential, but I wonder if one of the reasons the series turns the MIB into the "villain" is because it sees that the seeds of that selfish nihilism can be what turns into toxic orders. Is not the Ben-lead Others the perfect example of that? Ben is the Dharma kid who never buys into their mission/purpose, in large part because of his father. So he embraces The Others (the "chaos" in this scenario), kills the Dharma people, and sets up his own society/order, but one based entirely on his thirst for power born from his sense of inadequacy thanks to his abusive father. This seems to map onto regimes like, say, the Nazis, where order is built on top of this chaotic/evil seed whose real purpose is for the glory of their leader (which often takes the illusion of being glory for the nation).

I feel like when I watch the series again I need to put all of this into an essay titled "The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me." LOL
Raxivace wrote:
I guess what I'd conclude is that, right now, I'm not sure how I feel about it as fiction--though I guess, in a way, like much of the series it's rather appropriate how all the suspense/action it set up ended on a kind of twist--but as a kind of meta-fictional (not literally) goodbye to the characters I think it works at least emotionally.
Yeah like its hard not to feel emotional when everyone is saying goodbye, though the flashsideways plot as a whole I don't really like. It really does feel like a less effective version of Instrumentality to me, though one that ends with characters going even deeper into into it instead of rejecting it.
Instrumentality is an interesting comparison. If anything, my biggest problem is that as fiction it just doesn't make much sense. So afterlife is basically just life on earth where you can (eg) kill/run from the mob, but in the end you realize you're dead, meet in a church, and then move on? Weird.
Raxivace wrote:
glass window behind him with so many of the relevant symbols of the series--the wheel, the yin/yang, the cross... though I'm not sure what the moon/star, big star, and Asian(?) writing were about.
They're all symbols of different religions.
Ah, I feel stupid for not realizing the one was the Star of David. I actually thought the wheel was just a reference to the wheel that turned the island. Never actually heard of the Dharmacakra but the Wiki page is interesting:
Sanskrit: "Wheel of the Law." The Sanskrit noun dharma is a derivation from the root dhṛ, which has a meaning of "to hold, maintain, keep",[note 1] and takes a meaning of "what is established or firm" and hence "law". It is derived from the Vedic Sanskrit n-stem dharman- with the meaning "bearer, supporter" in the historical Vedic religion conceived of as an aspect of Ṛta.[4]
Interesting, you'd think a wheel would be used to represent change given it's common association with time, and that time is what creates change. But here it's a symbol of the law/order that's meant to be kept/maintained.
Raxivace wrote:Of course its all still set in a Church, which perhaps undermines any sense of religious unity the scene is intending to suggest... I almost wish that final scene was set in an airport or something instead, that was more significant to both all of the characters but even the story of Lost as a whole.
Yeah, I can sympathize with this complaint.
Raxivace wrote:
I feel like Lost, by comparison, relied almost exclusive on the "classical" language of literature, and what symbolic motifs exist were less visual and more literary, not to mention occasional.
It does, and this is American TV in general outside of like what Lynch makes.
Which is probably why I'll always feel like something is fundamentally missing from American TV. While I do think the elongation of series makes TV more novel-like in comparison with film, it's still working in the audio-visual-temporal medium and without utilizing those fundamental elements to the fullest artistically there is always going to be something lacking that the best of film (or even the best of auteur-driven TV) has.
Raxivace wrote:
Anyway, I've typed way too much already given how late it is and how addled my brain is. I think I'll at least take a day off and then decide whether or not I want to give the series an immediate rewatch or do something else as a break. I'll also try to respond to Raxi's last post once my brain stops vibrating.
Yeah the best and worst thing about Lost is that it throw a lot at you. I'm just not sure how much it ultimately adds up to.

I hope you can at least get why I was pretty cagey about saying too much about the series before now, because the Jacob/MiB/Candidates etc. stuff really does reframe a lot of the series, and for me its in a way I don't particularly like.
I think it adds up to quite a lot; my concern is more with the execution than the substance.

Oh, I realized there was a lot you couldn't tell me because of how twisty the series was. TBH, I was almost relieved when they introduced the Jacob/MIB stuff because throughout the series it kept hinting at these kind of allegorical dualities, but every time a mystery was revealed it was just another ordinary fictional character or device. I was kinda feeling like it would be a shame if the series just kept it to that fictional level and never went anywhere--for lack of a better term--"beyond" with it, but they did, and I finally felt like all of the hints of that kind of stuff was paid off. As to whether or not it was integrated well into the fiction is another matter that I'm still wrestling with.

BTW, you said that S5/S6 kinda explained why The Others in S3 were so espionage-y about confronting the survivors, and I'm not sure I ever quite picked up on that. All I really got was that Ben kept expecting Widmore to stage some kind of island coup so he was cautious about that, but the fact that they literally see the plane blow up in mid-air would seem to suggest it couldn't have been some Widmore-planned trap... unless I'm missing something. I'm also really clueless as to what Widmore was actually ever trying to do, other than to get back to the island (did it ever say why he left?) and take over from Ben. Then in S6 it seems he's had a completely random change of heart that we never see either. He seems to be the most obvious character-as-plot-device in the entire show, even more so than Keemy (at least he's a consistent mob-styled psycho/villain).
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:My thoughts right now is that the series seems to stress a balance between the two extremes. The power of order is that provides purpose, a reason to live and act in the service of some goal. The downside of blindly accepting that, however, is in the classic phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." If Jacob and his (foster) mother are the faith/purpose side, we must also realize that they're the side that brutally murders both the children's (birth) mother and sibling. Think back in history to all the great "ordered" empires and how many they killed in the name of their purpose/goal.
Sure. I would even argue the possibility that Jacob was actually worse than Mother since he was the one people brought to the Island over and over and over again to the Island over 2000 years or whatever it was. How many thousands did he set up to die?
Then let's say the MIB is the "chaos" side that can't simply/blindly accept the "order/purpose." He ventures out into humanity, he helps them discover the "power" of the island and investigates it (this seems to feed into the faith VS reason dichotomy), he's the one that discovers the truth (and the lie) about their mother... but because of all this, he's also the one that sees the "badness" in humanity and, lacking in any purpose, feels like he should just use/manipulate them for his own selfish goals.
Eh, he's only manipulating and killing them because of the arbitrary rules and systems that Mother and/or Jacob have put in place. I don't think killing itself is a goal, its a means to the ends of freedom.

Like I think of that moment in the series finale where he has a choice between killing Jack and running to his boat. He chooses the boat.
It seems to me that that episode doesn't really paint either side as innately villainous, but rather represents both the positives and negatives of both extremes and the struggle for balance between them. I think viewed metaphorically, the reason the MIB can't leave is because it would be the equivalent of releasing nihilism into the world, into all of humanity. The reason the MIB becomes the "bad guy" that must be stopped is for that reason, because we have to confront the chaos, take what we need, but without letting it out, without letting it control us.
Yeah I just don't see MiB as particularly nihilistic per se. Particularly as a young man where he pretty clearly represents Enlightenment Values to some extent (Which perhaps makes him later taking on the guise of "John Locke" appropriate, even if we say he's gone too far by that point and its an ironic transformation in nature). He wants to learn things, gain knowledge, stand up to injustice etc. Even though he doesn't personally like the villagers he lives with, he's still willing to live and worth with them- that's tolerance. And of course, he wants freedom.

Yes MiB manipulated and killed people (Though I also think if he could have just floated off the Island he would have done so. I think he actually may have said this at one point? In that case the only person who prevents him from doing that is Jacob.), but I can't really damn him too harshly when other characters like Ben Linus did the same kinds of shit for much less sympathetic reasons, and aren't equated with the Devil or whatever by the end. Like there's no actual reason that I can see that MiB will kill all humanity or whatever it is that's implied.

Like if he's supposed to be nihilism, it doesn't seem like killing him is a thematically appropriate ending (If its meant to be a happy ending anyways). It would be making peace with him in some fashion, or getting him to admit the errors of his ways, or learn to accept nature of the world, or something along those lines.
I actually think it makes sense that Hurley ends up becoming the Island's "protector." It's revealed at one point that the MIB could take the forms of those who died on the island, which means that Hurley had been regularly conversing with the MIB all along.
I don't think this is correct, because Hurley is talking to people off the Island as well (Charlie, he mentions playing chess with Eko at one point etc.), and well MiB cannot leave the Island.

Unless he can project himself off the Island or something, and frankly MiB is given so many absurd powers that it honestly is kind of ridiculous that he even lost in the end, or that it took him as long as it did to get Jacob killed. That's a separate can of worms though.

EDIT: To your own argument though, there is a parallel between MiB and Hurley in that IIRC MiB sees his dead mother as a ghost as a kid, and well Hurley sees ghosts as well.
But Hurley was also one who'd regularly put his faith in others (like Jack). So is there any character that struck a better balance between the two sides? I also forget, but one character tells Hurley (about not leaving the island) that "that's the way Jacob did it, maybe you can do better" (or something like that). What this suggests is not that we should just blindly trust/follow the status quo/order, but that we can, indeed, use our confrontations with chaos--the questioning, the curiosity, the unconscious, etc.--to, indeed, "do better," without slipping into nihilism.
I agree with most of this (Though I dunno that I think Hurley would a good leader. Like yes his kindness and such are necessary traits, but the dude also seems pretty easily fooled to me. I know he says he and Ben did a good job together in the flash sideways, but dammit that's Ben Linus he put in second in command. BEN LINUS. That's like a Trump move right there!).
Really, Lindelof isn't wrong that social order must be maintained: but "WHAT social order?" is the question. I think there's two kinds of naivety on this issue: one being that we can just have a "revolution," get rid of everything, start over, and do better. That seems to ignore the progress that's been made, which means that much good has already been done. The other naivety is that since much good has already been done, any change will just make things worse. This seems to ignore that all the progress that's been made has come through change, and there's no reason to think we can't always do better.
I think Lindelof falls more into the second camp FWIW. Like this is the same guy that recently said that either political party having a majority in Congress would be "no bueno" (He actually said this) for America.
So, in the world of Lost, yes, the order must be maintained, but is it Jacob's order? I don't think so. Jacob blindly followed his mother, ended up killing his brother and feeling immense guilt over it, yet he still carried on his mother's tradition. The cast comes to the island, lead there by Jacob, but are confronted by the MIB, who undoubtedly is a major force that (often) helps them to survive (thinking back, it was even Jack chasing the MIB in the form of his dad that lead them to the caves/water).
Honestly the last part is confusing if MiB is ultimately trying to kill all the Candidates.

Like I guess he needs someone to actually stab Jacob if he can't do it himself, but its Ben that he actually gets to do it anyways so who knows.

EDIT: Unless he's saving Jack so Jack will ultimately save Ben from his cancer, so Ben can live long enough to kill Jacob but that is some foresight that I don't know I can buy.
I understand why you find the MIB more sympathetic. In a sense, I do as well. I think that probably has to do with the fact that we both lean liberal, which makes us psychologically more inclined to embrace the "chaos" of questioning, change, and whatnot; but I think that is, indeed, a psychological bias rather than a, let's say, complete rational analysis. Though, again, I say this tentatively given that it's only been a single viewing and I'm basing most of it on the episode that shows Jacob's/MIB's backstory. I'm interested to comb through the rest of the series to see how it handles this dichotomy elsewhere.
I guess to try and summarize my position here, I say it is Jacob/Mother that deserve blame for MiB's "crimes" because it was them that set up the systems in place that forced him to have to kill to escape what is essentially a kind of slavery, and they're the ones who ultimately sent people for him to have to fight.

It's like the Island is the Colosseum or something. Do we blame Spartacus or Russell Crowe for who they had to kill in combat? No, we blame the Roman elite that created and maintained such a barbaric system in the first place that forced people to kill each other. MiB didn't ask or seem to particularly want to have to murder for his freedom, he just wanted to leave. And yet Jacob kept sending him opponents.

EDIT: You could also argue that MiB being driven to commit violence because of systemic reasons reflects back on the free will/fate themes of the show, in a way. In my view, he never had much of a choice at all.
This is perhaps tangential, but I wonder if one of the reasons the series turns the MIB into the "villain" is because it sees that the seeds of that selfish nihilism can be what turns into toxic orders. Is not the Ben-lead Others the perfect example of that? Ben is the Dharma kid who never buys into their mission/purpose, in large part because of his father. So he embraces The Others (the "chaos" in this scenario), kills the Dharma people, and sets up his own society/order, but one based entirely on his thirst for power born from his sense of inadequacy thanks to his abusive father. This seems to map onto regimes like, say, the Nazis, where order is built on top of this chaotic/evil seed whose real purpose is for the glory of their leader (which often takes the illusion of being glory for the nation).
Perhaps, I just don't think basic freedom is a particularly selfish thing to want and not just something everyone should have to begin with. Someone like Ben does fall into the archetype you mention at the end here, with how he just seemed to want power to lord over others (Him telling Juliet "YOU'RE MINE!!!!" pops into my head as I write this), MiB just wants freedom. He wants to leave that dumb Island- the same goal the main characters had in the first season.

BTW do you agree with me that the seasons follow a ABCCBA structure? The "C" seasons (3 and 4) revolve around the Freighter, the B seasons (2 and 5) seem to revolve around the Hatch/DHARMA, though I think the A seasons are harder to find a common thread between beyond just being the first and last ones.
I feel like when I watch the series again I need to put all of this into an essay titled "The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me." LOL
Well I'd certainly read such an essay. There seems to be bafflingly little critical writing about Lost.
Instrumentality is an interesting comparison. If anything, my biggest problem is that as fiction it just doesn't make much sense. So afterlife is basically just life on earth where you can (eg) kill/run from the mob, but in the end you realize you're dead, meet in a church, and then move on? Weird.
Well, Christian says that the FSW is a place they made together (How? Through the bomb?), so I guess we're meant to think it reflects desires of characters on some level. If you have to escape from gangsters, it must be because you want to escape from gangsters I guess. But yeah, its just weird especially with the amnesia thrown in there too.

Jack's fake son and Aaron having to be born again (Aaron as a baby is even in the church!), are weird parts too now that I'm remembering more of the flashsideways plot. Also, WTF at Sayid having freakin' SHANNON be the ultimate love of his life and not Nadia. I mean for god's sake. Shannon. Nadia knows the Secret of Blue Water dammit, what does Shannon have going on?
Ah, I feel stupid for not realizing the one was the Star of David. I actually thought the wheel was just a reference to the wheel that turned the island. Never actually heard of the Dharmacakra but the Wiki page is interesting:
Sanskrit: "Wheel of the Law." The Sanskrit noun dharma is a derivation from the root dhṛ, which has a meaning of "to hold, maintain, keep",[note 1] and takes a meaning of "what is established or firm" and hence "law". It is derived from the Vedic Sanskrit n-stem dharman- with the meaning "bearer, supporter" in the historical Vedic religion conceived of as an aspect of Ṛta.[4]
Interesting, you'd think a wheel would be used to represent change given it's common association with time, and that time is what creates change. But here it's a symbol of the law/order that's meant to be kept/maintained.
I guess that sort of fits with the wheel on the Island, where it not spinning properly causes things things to get so weird.
Which is probably why I'll always feel like something is fundamentally missing from American TV. While I do think the elongation of series makes TV more novel-like in comparison with film, it's still working in the audio-visual-temporal medium and without utilizing those fundamental elements to the fullest artistically there is always going to be something lacking that the best of film (or even the best of auteur-driven TV) has.
Yeah.

Like in Lost, it doesn't seem to get much more cinematic than, say, using the match cuts to signify the timejumps in The Constant. And those match cuts are cool, I've got nothing against them, but when even one of the more cinematic episodes of the show only has a few motivated edits like that...I dunno, it does seem lacking. But like we were saying that's not really a Lost-specific problem as much as a American TV problem in general.
I think it adds up to quite a lot; my concern is more with the execution than the substance.
We'll like I said, if anyone is able to convince me that this show actually works it will be you.
As to whether or not it was integrated well into the fiction is another matter that I'm still wrestling with.
Yeah regardless of my thematic criticisms, this aspect I think is pretty shaky in its own right especially if you dig back through it. Even my thematic criticisms I could forgive somewhat if I thought these aspects held up better.
BTW, you said that S5/S6 kinda explained why The Others in S3 were so espionage-y about confronting the survivors, and I'm not sure I ever quite picked up on that. All I really got was that Ben kept expecting Widmore to stage some kind of island coup so he was cautious about that, but the fact that they literally see the plane blow up in mid-air would seem to suggest it couldn't have been some Widmore-planned trap... unless I'm missing something.
Explain is too strong a word, but I think it sort of justifies what they were doing, kind of. Basically, I was alluding to two things.

1) The "lists" that start getting associated with the Others several times starting around season 3 or so.

2) The whole Candidates thing.

My understanding was that Ben must know who the candidates are and are trying to manipulate them onto his side as some kind of power play, but if the "lists" aren't of the Candidates than I have no idea what the fuck that was about.

Like apparently the lists are important enough to come up in Ben's final rant to Jacob in the S5 finale ("All those lists!"), but if it refers to something else than the Candidates then I'm confused.
I'm also really clueless as to what Widmore was actually ever trying to do, other than to get back to the island (did it ever say why he left?) and take over from Ben. Then in S6 it seems he's had a completely random change of heart that we never see either. He seems to be the most obvious character-as-plot-device in the entire show, even more so than Keemy (at least he's a consistent mob-styled psycho/villain).
I thought he got kicked out of the Others for having an affair off-Island. Wasn't there a trial in a flashback or something about that? It would explain why Widmore and Ms. Hawking have a kind of uneasy relationship when they meet up again in like Season 5 or whatever if he was sleeping around with dirty non-Others.

But yeah I'm glad you agree with me that Widmore is just kind of whatever (And yeah Keemy at least is what the writers clearly intended him to be. I can't even quite discern the intent with Widmore). I still have no idea if he was lying or not about meeting with Jacob and being shown the error of his ways or whatever the line was.

Also who the fuck killed all the Ajira passengers? I know those characters don't actually matter, but still. Was it Widmore or MiB?
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

I'll try to pick up the Lost discussion tomorrow, but I do think I've decided to take a short break before I rewatch it. I decided to watch Deadwood first, which is only 36 eps. plus a movie, so it'll probably only take me 1-2 weeks to finish it.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

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Let me know what you think of Deadwood. It's one of the last HBO series that's been on my watchlist forever (Sopranos being the other big one for me) that I just haven't gotten around to yet for whatever reason.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Fished S1 of Deadwood. I don't think I have a lot of substance to say on it yet beyond the fact that it's a really solid drama (with surprisingly dark humor elements). Perhaps the thing that stands out to me the most is just the level of richness and detail they put into the setting and how the stylistic choices seem to be based as much around its location as anything. There are tons of shots through objects--doors, windows, bars--and shots where people, wagons, horses, or some combination will walk through shots. It really brings the feel of the setting to life in a way I feel most TV doesn't... or, hell, even most Westerns, for that matter. I think in comparison to classic westerns this has a much more grittier, realistic feel to it, like you can half smell the mud, flies, dust, and shit everywhere. Of course, it's not perfect; the show still suffers from a lot of the flaws of TV where too often the style becomes functional. Still, there's more cinematic touches here than the vast majority of TV, especially in the episodes directed by Walter Hill and Davis Guggenheim (hell, ep. 2 had some shots one could almost call "painterly").

I'm also enjoying the characters, though I think it's less consistent than Lost. By far, Ian McShane role as the saloon/brothel owner Al Swearengen is the standout here. I don't know how far ahead S1 was written, but if wasn't very far I get the feeling the writers knew they had a hit with his character almost immediately because the first few episodes makes Timothy Olyphant's Seth out to be the protagonist; the problem being that anyone who's seen Tombstone already knows how the story of the "former lawman trying to escape his past into a lawless town" ends, and so he's not given much to do but develop a relationship with the married woman with the prospecting claim. That leaves Al as really the primary focus for most of the episodes as most everything that happens revolves around him, which keeps the show interesting if only because he's a fun-as-hell character; like if you mixed Tony Soprano with Han Solo, the immoral, ruthless mob boss with the lovable, wise-cracking rogue. Robin Weigert's awesome to as Calamity Jane, but unfortunately she's given little to do in S1 other than weep over the murder of Wild Bill Hickok until she disappears in the season's latter half.

After a "big ideas" show like Lost that gets real abstract, it's kinda fun to dig into a show that primarily just seems to be about reveling in its world, characters, and all the amorality that they allow. It's almost fascinating, too, how the almost caricatured nature of the characters play off against the gritty realness of the setting.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:My thoughts right now is that the series seems to stress a balance between the two extremes. The power of order is that provides purpose, a reason to live and act in the service of some goal. The downside of blindly accepting that, however, is in the classic phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." If Jacob and his (foster) mother are the faith/purpose side, we must also realize that they're the side that brutally murders both the children's (birth) mother and sibling. Think back in history to all the great "ordered" empires and how many they killed in the name of their purpose/goal.
Sure. I would even argue the possibility that Jacob was actually worse than Mother since he was the one people brought to the Island over and over and over again to the Island over 2000 years or whatever it was. How many thousands did he set up to die?
Sure too if we're just taking it literally. Metaphorically it just seems an extension of people being forced into the "orders" they're born into, unless they decide to question/reject/change them.
Raxivace wrote:Eh, he's only manipulating and killing them because of the arbitrary rules and systems that Mother and/or Jacob have put in place. I don't think killing itself is a goal, its a means to the ends of freedom.

Like I think of that moment in the series finale where he has a choice between killing Jack and running to his boat. He chooses the boat.
I wasn't so much referring to what happens in the series but what he says when Jacob comes to find him in the human's camp where he says something to the effect that people weren't worth anything except manipulating to his purpose.
Raxivace wrote:Yeah I just don't see MiB as particularly nihilistic per se. Particularly as a young man where he pretty clearly represents Enlightenment Values to some extent (Which perhaps makes him later taking on the guise of "John Locke" appropriate, even if we say he's gone too far by that point and its an ironic transformation in nature). He wants to learn things, gain knowledge, stand up to injustice etc. Even though he doesn't personally like the villagers he lives with, he's still willing to live and worth with them- that's tolerance. And of course, he wants freedom.

Yes MiB manipulated and killed people (Though I also think if he could have just floated off the Island he would have done so. I think he actually may have said this at one point? In that case the only person who prevents him from doing that is Jacob.), but I can't really damn him too harshly when other characters like Ben Linus did the same kinds of shit for much less sympathetic reasons, and aren't equated with the Devil or whatever by the end. Like there's no actual reason that I can see that MiB will kill all humanity or whatever it is that's implied.

Like if he's supposed to be nihilism, it doesn't seem like killing him is a thematically appropriate ending (If its meant to be a happy ending anyways). It would be making peace with him in some fashion, or getting him to admit the errors of his ways, or learn to accept nature of the world, or something along those lines.
Extending what I said above, it seems the "nihilism" comes in the form of not thinking humanity's worth anything except manipulation for his purpose. Maybe if not technically nihilism, something like an apathetic selfishness. It's also telling that around the time he says this (I can't remember before or after) he tells Jacob that he can't find the light/cave/whatever anymore that their mother took them too. The idea being, I guess, that if you question a purpose long enough it's hard to get back to it, which leads to that attitude.

Still, I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I'm not sure if MIB's willingness to kill/manipulate to violate/change the rules are necessary better than Jacob's willingness to kill/manipulate to maintain the rules. That would seem, both metaphorically and literally, to depend on precisely what the rules are and what changing them's going to ultimately, actually get you. As for him only hurting people to achieve his goals, I don't think the show demonizes him, specifically, it's just that he's (as far as the show is concerned) the origin of where this stuff starts, so he's the epitome and symbol of that attitude that people like Ben also display (and, as you say, act on for even less sympathetic reasons).

Maybe the real issue here is whether or not the kind of questioning "Enlightenment Values" MIB show can logically lead to nihilism if taken to the extreme. What I'd probably argue is that they can but they rarely do in practice. Modernism was engulfed in this concern, and even a little bit before if we consider Nietzsche's worrying about what happens when "God is dead." But it doesn't seem like constant questioning had lead to an epidemic of people failing to find purpose. Of course, that's only speaking practically; maybe a better question is whether it should. I think you almost see that at work in Hamlet where Hamlet's constant questioning leads to him seeing through the illusions of society's beliefs, values, and ideas, and the chaos that causes for the kingdom. "Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so" can be a pretty terrifying thought, even worse if it's true and if everyone believed it.
Raxivace wrote:
I actually think it makes sense that Hurley ends up becoming the Island's "protector." It's revealed at one point that the MIB could take the forms of those who died on the island, which means that Hurley had been regularly conversing with the MIB all along.
I don't think this is correct, because Hurley is talking to people off the Island as well (Charlie, he mentions playing chess with Eko at one point etc.), and well MiB cannot leave the Island.

Unless he can project himself off the Island or something, and frankly MiB is given so many absurd powers that it honestly is kind of ridiculous that he even lost in the end, or that it took him as long as it did to get Jacob killed. That's a separate can of worms though.

EDIT: To your own argument though, there is a parallel between MiB and Hurley in that IIRC MiB sees his dead mother as a ghost as a kid, and well Hurley sees ghosts as well.
I was mostly thinking about the last few eps. where I'm pretty sure Hurley was talking to some people who were (probably?) MIB, but good point about the others as well.

Also good point about the parallel between Hurly and MIB seeing dead people. In MIB's case I'm guessing that's part of the series's theme about the negativity of being obsessed with the past and what's happened.
Raxivace wrote:I agree with most of this (Though I dunno that I think Hurley would a good leader. Like yes his kindness and such are necessary traits, but the dude also seems pretty easily fooled to me. I know he says he and Ben did a good job together in the flash sideways, but dammit that's Ben Linus he put in second in command. BEN LINUS. That's like a Trump move right there!).
I'm not sure if Hurley would be a good leader practically, but as being a symbol of the character who perhaps struck that chaos/order balance it makes sense. Yeah, I was surprised about the Linus move as well, but I feel like Hurley knew that everything that had made Ben Linus so bad was pretty much gone, and without his "Others" there wasn't much he could do from that point on. Linus was a pretty beaten man by the end. I'm surprised he even had it in him to take out Widmore.
Raxivace wrote:
Really, Lindelof isn't wrong that social order must be maintained: but "WHAT social order?" is the question. I think there's two kinds of naivety on this issue: one being that we can just have a "revolution," get rid of everything, start over, and do better. That seems to ignore the progress that's been made, which means that much good has already been done. The other naivety is that since much good has already been done, any change will just make things worse. This seems to ignore that all the progress that's been made has come through change, and there's no reason to think we can't always do better.
I think Lindelof falls more into the second camp FWIW. Like this is the same guy that recently said that either political party having a majority in Congress would be "no bueno" (He actually said this) for America.
That may be what he thinks in real life, and while I can perhaps see that in the show I certainly don't think it's overpowering or black-and-white. Lost does more than just pay lip service to the virtues and values of the "chaos" side of things, or just give the "order" side insignificant flaws by comparison. I mean, it's also worth noting that it's the character most representative of faith, of finding a purpose and protecting it, John Locke, that's killed and taken over by chaos. So it's not as if the show says "just have faith, follow the order blindly, and everything will be good." If anything, it suggests that, indeed, very bad things may come of it, and even from it, in the name of protecting it. In the end, it maybe worth maintaining on some level, but perhaps changes could indeed "do better."
Raxivace wrote:
So, in the world of Lost, yes, the order must be maintained, but is it Jacob's order? I don't think so. Jacob blindly followed his mother, ended up killing his brother and feeling immense guilt over it, yet he still carried on his mother's tradition. The cast comes to the island, lead there by Jacob, but are confronted by the MIB, who undoubtedly is a major force that (often) helps them to survive (thinking back, it was even Jack chasing the MIB in the form of his dad that lead them to the caves/water).
Honestly the last part is confusing if MiB is ultimately trying to kill all the Candidates.

Like I guess he needs someone to actually stab Jacob if he can't do it himself, but its Ben that he actually gets to do it anyways so who knows.

EDIT: Unless he's saving Jack so Jack will ultimately save Ben from his cancer, so Ben can live long enough to kill Jacob but that is some foresight that I don't know I can buy.
It seems to me that MIB is less trying to kill all the Candidates as opposed to provoking them into killing themselves and/or rejecting the offer of being the Island's protector. Basically, he wants to ultimately turn them all over to his side, or get them to kill the ones that don't. At least, that's how I understood it. But doing stuff like leading them to water/helping them survive is a good tool to manipulate them, make them trust him, etc.
Raxivace wrote:I guess to try and summarize my position here, I say it is Jacob/Mother that deserve blame for MiB's "crimes" because it was them that set up the systems in place that forced him to have to kill to escape what is essentially a kind of slavery, and they're the ones who ultimately sent people for him to have to fight.

It's like the Island is the Colosseum or something. Do we blame Spartacus or Russell Crowe for who they had to kill in combat? No, we blame the Roman elite that created and maintained such a barbaric system in the first place that forced people to kill each other. MiB didn't ask or seem to particularly want to have to murder for his freedom, he just wanted to leave. And yet Jacob kept sending him opponents.

EDIT: You could also argue that MiB being driven to commit violence because of systemic reasons reflects back on the free will/fate themes of the show, in a way. In my view, he never had much of a choice at all.
I think part of the problem may just be that the series's themes and metaphoric/allegorical level don't mesh perfectly well with the story itself. Like, I think it makes sense that if the MIB stands in for chaos taken to the extreme so that it becomes seflishness/nihilism or something, then to let it out into the world would be disastrous. OK, that works on a metaphoric level, except that the way it's implemented into the story is as a guy who'd been lied to wanting to leave an island and being forced to stay there. Again, we can so on the metaphoric level that this is him running away from his purpose, but on a literal level, it's hard to understand why simply going some place else is necessarily the equivalent of running away from your purpose. Or, indeed, why if one feels that the current system/order doesn't support their values why, indeed, leaving wouldn't be the ideal thing to do.

So I guess, if anything, it just seems like the specifics of the story are getting in the way of what I think the themes are trying to express. Maybe at best you might could say that Mother/Jacob were actually trying to protect MIB since they didn't feel there was any way off the island.
Raxivace wrote:Perhaps, I just don't think basic freedom is a particularly selfish thing to want and not just something everyone should have to begin with. Someone like Ben does fall into the archetype you mention at the end here, with how he just seemed to want power to lord over others (Him telling Juliet "YOU'RE MINE!!!!" pops into my head as I write this), MiB just wants freedom. He wants to leave that dumb Island- the same goal the main characters had in the first season.

BTW do you agree with me that the seasons follow a ABCCBA structure? The "C" seasons (3 and 4) revolve around the Freighter, the B seasons (2 and 5) seem to revolve around the Hatch/DHARMA, though I think the A seasons are harder to find a common thread between beyond just being the first and last ones.
I remember at the time he shouted "You're mine!" to Juliette I was thinking just how much like a weak, scared, angry little child he seemed there.

I'd never thought about it being a chiastic structure, but I can definitely see that. One comparison between S1 and S6 is that S1 is where the series introduces so many of the motifs/themes (smoke monster, light/dark backgammon game, etc.) that become dominant in S6.
Raxivace wrote:
I feel like when I watch the series again I need to put all of this into an essay titled "The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me." LOL
Well I'd certainly read such an essay. There seems to be bafflingly little critical writing about Lost.
LOL, I was just thinking of the Brand New album that has that title. I might could be tempted to do it, though. I feel like to do it well, though, would require taking notes as I rewatch the series given how much happens.
Raxivace wrote:
Instrumentality is an interesting comparison. If anything, my biggest problem is that as fiction it just doesn't make much sense. So afterlife is basically just life on earth where you can (eg) kill/run from the mob, but in the end you realize you're dead, meet in a church, and then move on? Weird.
Well, Christian says that the FSW is a place they made together (How? Through the bomb?), so I guess we're meant to think it reflects desires of characters on some level. If you have to escape from gangsters, it must be because you want to escape from gangsters I guess. But yeah, its just weird especially with the amnesia thrown in there too.

Jack's fake son and Aaron having to be born again (Aaron as a baby is even in the church!), are weird parts too now that I'm remembering more of the flashsideways plot. Also, WTF at Sayid having freakin' SHANNON be the ultimate love of his life and not Nadia. I mean for god's sake. Shannon. Nadia knows the Secret of Blue Water dammit, what does Shannon have going on?
Yeah, I hadn't even thought of how the FSW was made by them. Again, the comparison with how well Instrumentality was worked into NGE's story is pretty stark. Maybe Sayid's story was meant to reflect his desire to protect Nadia? As for him imagining Shannon there rather than Nadia, I assumed that was merely because she died on the island, and the FSW had something to do what that?
Raxivace wrote:I guess that sort of fits with the wheel on the Island, where it not spinning properly causes things things to get so weird.
Good point.
Raxivace wrote:
Which is probably why I'll always feel like something is fundamentally missing from American TV. While I do think the elongation of series makes TV more novel-like in comparison with film, it's still working in the audio-visual-temporal medium and without utilizing those fundamental elements to the fullest artistically there is always going to be something lacking that the best of film (or even the best of auteur-driven TV) has.
Yeah.

Like in Lost, it doesn't seem to get much more cinematic than, say, using the match cuts to signify the timejumps in The Constant. And those match cuts are cool, I've got nothing against them, but when even one of the more cinematic episodes of the show only has a few motivated edits like that...I dunno, it does seem lacking. But like we were saying that's not really a Lost-specific problem as much as a American TV problem in general.
Yeah there were some creative edits to and from the flashbacks occasionally, but other than that everything else was fully functional. Like, I'm watching Deadwood now, and It's not exactly in the category of Ford or Leone in terms of cinematic stylization, but there's still clearly some thought been given as to how to shoot/edit and how (even occasionally) to have these aesthetic moments where there's a long take, or a held wide shot, or some interesting racking of focus between foreground/midground/background, etc. It just makes you realized how impoverished most TV is by even this relatively modest comparison. And with Lost it's all the more shame given its location and what we know can be done with such things (Stalker, Aguirre, Apocalypse Now... just to name a few).
Raxivace wrote:
I think it adds up to quite a lot; my concern is more with the execution than the substance.
We'll like I said, if anyone is able to convince me that this show actually works it will be you.
My thinking right now I that I think the best I'll be able to do is argue that its intentions are good but that its execution is heavily flawed, and probably leave it up to you if you consider if that means "it works" or not.
Raxivace wrote:
BTW, you said that S5/S6 kinda explained why The Others in S3 were so espionage-y about confronting the survivors, and I'm not sure I ever quite picked up on that. All I really got was that Ben kept expecting Widmore to stage some kind of island coup so he was cautious about that, but the fact that they literally see the plane blow up in mid-air would seem to suggest it couldn't have been some Widmore-planned trap... unless I'm missing something.
Explain is too strong a word, but I think it sort of justifies what they were doing, kind of. Basically, I was alluding to two things.

1) The "lists" that start getting associated with the Others several times starting around season 3 or so.

2) The whole Candidates thing.

My understanding was that Ben must know who the candidates are and are trying to manipulate them onto his side as some kind of power play, but if the "lists" aren't of the Candidates than I have no idea what the fuck that was about.

Like apparently the lists are important enough to come up in Ben's final rant to Jacob in the S5 finale ("All those lists!"), but if it refers to something else than the Candidates then I'm confused.
I'm still not sure this explains why The Others treated them how they did... surely an introduction and offered aid would've been a more effective manipulation tool than all the espionage, kidnapping, etc...
Raxivace wrote:
I'm also really clueless as to what Widmore was actually ever trying to do, other than to get back to the island (did it ever say why he left?) and take over from Ben. Then in S6 it seems he's had a completely random change of heart that we never see either. He seems to be the most obvious character-as-plot-device in the entire show, even more so than Keemy (at least he's a consistent mob-styled psycho/villain).
I thought he got kicked out of the Others for having an affair off-Island. Wasn't there a trial in a flashback or something about that? It would explain why Widmore and Ms. Hawking have a kind of uneasy relationship when they meet up again in like Season 5 or whatever if he was sleeping around with dirty non-Others.

But yeah I'm glad you agree with me that Widmore is just kind of whatever (And yeah Keemy at least is what the writers clearly intended him to be. I can't even quite discern the intent with Widmore). I still have no idea if he was lying or not about meeting with Jacob and being shown the error of his ways or whatever the line was.

Also who the fuck killed all the Ajira passengers? I know those characters don't actually matter, but still. Was it Widmore or MiB?
The only flashback I remember with Widmore was when he was on the Island as a young man, but I don't recall a trial.

Seems to me the only real purpose of either was to drive the conflict, with both being aimed towards Ben. That's why I thought maybe Ben's reluctance to embrace the crash survivors was about him suspecting it was a Widmore plot against him or something. So that seemed to explain some of his deviousness by giving him a (largely off-screen) enemy to guard against.

Good question about the Ajira passengers. I have no idea either.
Well that sucks. Luckily it seems pretty harmless against people who aren't old or who don't have any underlying conditions, so let's hope he doesn't!
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." -- Carl Jung
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Derived Absurdity »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Well that sucks. Luckily it seems pretty harmless against people who aren't old or who don't have any underlying conditions, so let's hope he doesn't!
Not true. Many of the victims so far have been young and seemingly healthy.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Derived Absurdity wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Well that sucks. Luckily it seems pretty harmless against people who aren't old or who don't have any underlying conditions, so let's hope he doesn't!
Not true. Many of the victims so far have been young and seemingly healthy.
Death rates spike with underlying conditions and as age increases: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavir ... ographics/ Without either I would expect the death rate to be pretty minuscule (I don't know if any statistics are tracking the two in combination; they should be). Of course, when hundreds of thousands of people are getting a disease even an extremely small death rate would mean there will be "many" statistical outliers.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Fished S1 of Deadwood.
Image
I don't know how far ahead S1 was written, but if wasn't very far I get the feeling the writers knew they had a hit with his character almost immediately because the first few episodes makes Timothy Olyphant's Seth out to be the protagonist; the problem being that anyone who's seen Tombstone already knows how the story of the "former lawman trying to escape his past into a lawless town" ends, and so he's not given much to do but develop a relationship with the married woman with the prospecting claim.
I've never actually seen Tombstone before- I've always been pretty satisfied with Ford's take on that story in My Darling Clementine, but looking at the cast of Tombstone does make me want to give it a watch though.

The stylistic stuff you mentioned does have me pretty curious about Deadwood too, at least in comparison to these other "prestige" dramas that seem to never evolve beyond a slick functional style at best. Recently I started Haibane Renmei though, so if I watch Deadwood it will be after that.
It's almost fascinating, too, how the almost caricatured nature of the characters play off against the gritty realness of the setting.
Reminds me of that bit in The Wire people say is supposed to be a jab at Deadwood.


Eva Yojimbo wrote:I wasn't so much referring to what happens in the series but what he says when Jacob comes to find him in the human's camp where he says something to the effect that people weren't worth anything except manipulating to his purpose.
I don't really remember it being quite that negative of a line but admittedly its been 10 years since I've seen the episode.
Extending what I said above, it seems the "nihilism" comes in the form of not thinking humanity's worth anything except manipulation for his purpose. Maybe if not technically nihilism, something like an apathetic selfishness. It's also telling that around the time he says this (I can't remember before or after) he tells Jacob that he can't find the light/cave/whatever anymore that their mother took them too. The idea being, I guess, that if you question a purpose long enough it's hard to get back to it, which leads to that attitude

Still, I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I'm not sure if MIB's willingness to kill/manipulate to violate/change the rules are necessary better than Jacob's willingness to kill/manipulate to maintain the rules. That would seem, both metaphorically and literally, to depend on precisely what the rules are and what changing them's going to ultimately, actually get you. As for him only hurting people to achieve his goals, I don't think the show demonizes him, specifically, it's just that he's (as far as the show is concerned) the origin of where this stuff starts, so he's the epitome and symbol of that attitude that people like Ben also display (and, as you say, act on for even less sympathetic reasons).
This seems to be where your allegorical read on the show and my more literal one departs even further because I'm kind of in the camp of that they should probably just destroy the Island anyways, it doesn't seem worth protecting for vague reasons and having so many people die over something so abstract.

Maybe its like that treasure in Nibelungenlied (At least Lang's adaptation), its just better off forgotten at the bottom of the ocean.

This is also maybe another example where it would be nice if we had more an idea of what the actual rules that governed the Island were- or at least, what governed Jacob and MiB. Thinking about this more now I can see why you lean toward an allegorical reading more, since it does seem like they want the emphasis on "Rules" as a concept and not a specific list of specific rules.

It does seem at odds to me with how other aspects of the show are written though for reasons I can't quite explain at the moment (Perhaps its the specific nature of flashbacks and such, and how other mystery elements of the show do seem to get more clarity applied to them).
Maybe the real issue here is whether or not the kind of questioning "Enlightenment Values" MIB show can logically lead to nihilism if taken to the extreme. What I'd probably argue is that they can but they rarely do in practice. Modernism was engulfed in this concern, and even a little bit before if we consider Nietzsche's worrying about what happens when "God is dead." But it doesn't seem like constant questioning had lead to an epidemic of people failing to find purpose. Of course, that's only speaking practically; maybe a better question is whether it should. I think you almost see that at work in Hamlet where Hamlet's constant questioning leads to him seeing through the illusions of society's beliefs, values, and ideas, and the chaos that causes for the kingdom. "Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so" can be a pretty terrifying thought, even worse if it's true and if everyone believed it.
It is a scary thought, but I agree in practice its just too rare to begin with to even bother seriously thinking about what would happen if that was adopted en masse.

It does kind of remind me of the argument that Christians sometimes make to atheists though- "Well why aren't you just going out raping and murdering and so on if you don't believe there's a God to punish you for it?"

I always found that kind of question more revealing about the person that asks it than about whoever they're asking it to.
I was mostly thinking about the last few eps. where I'm pretty sure Hurley was talking to some people who were (probably?) MIB, but good point about the others as well.
What which ghosts are you talking about here? Richard's wife?
Also good point about the parallel between Hurly and MIB seeing dead people. In MIB's case I'm guessing that's part of the series's theme about the negativity of being obsessed with the past and what's happened.
Yeah. I seem to recall the final scenes of the show even having a lot of lines that were variations of "It's time to let go" or "It's time to move on" etc.
I'm not sure if Hurley would be a good leader practically, but as being a symbol of the character who perhaps struck that chaos/order balance it makes sense. Yeah, I was surprised about the Linus move as well, but I feel like Hurley knew that everything that had made Ben Linus so bad was pretty much gone, and without his "Others" there wasn't much he could do from that point on. Linus was a pretty beaten man by the end. I'm surprised he even had it in him to take out Widmore.
It fits his FSW story about him not making the power play to become principal or whatever that was about too.

Still...I dunno, I just don't buy Ben's change of heart. I realize that's not much of an argument but dammit he's just too much of a son of a bitch throughout that show!
That may be what he thinks in real life, and while I can perhaps see that in the show I certainly don't think it's overpowering or black-and-white. Lost does more than just pay lip service to the virtues and values of the "chaos" side of things, or just give the "order" side insignificant flaws by comparison. I mean, it's also worth noting that it's the character most representative of faith, of finding a purpose and protecting it, John Locke, that's killed and taken over by chaos. So it's not as if the show says "just have faith, follow the order blindly, and everything will be good." If anything, it suggests that, indeed, very bad things may come of it, and even from it, in the name of protecting it. In the end, it maybe worth maintaining on some level, but perhaps changes could indeed "do better."
You could also argue though that the Oceanic 6's skepticism of Locke is why he dies and why MiB's plan works as well as it does.

If they had faith in Locke, and listened to him and gone back to the Island with him when he asked then Season 6 plays out WAAAAAAY differently if Locke is still actually alive and not driven to suicide (Or at least he would have done so had Ben not come in, talked him out of it, and then murdered him anyways. Damn, that was up there in terms of dark shit even for Ben). "Chaos" doesn't take him over then.
It seems to me that MIB is less trying to kill all the Candidates as opposed to provoking them into killing themselves and/or rejecting the offer of being the Island's protector. Basically, he wants to ultimately turn them all over to his side, or get them to kill the ones that don't. At least, that's how I understood it. But doing stuff like leading them to water/helping them survive is a good tool to manipulate them, make them trust him, etc.
I thought it literally just came down to that Candidates being alive on the Island prevented MiB from leaving, like the implication that Dogen being alive powered the ash that repelled MiB.
I think part of the problem may just be that the series's themes and metaphoric/allegorical level don't mesh perfectly well with the story itself. Like, I think it makes sense that if the MIB stands in for chaos taken to the extreme so that it becomes seflishness/nihilism or something, then to let it out into the world would be disastrous. OK, that works on a metaphoric level, except that the way it's implemented into the story is as a guy who'd been lied to wanting to leave an island and being forced to stay there. Again, we can so on the metaphoric level that this is him running away from his purpose, but on a literal level, it's hard to understand why simply going some place else is necessarily the equivalent of running away from your purpose. Or, indeed, why if one feels that the current system/order doesn't support their values why, indeed, leaving wouldn't be the ideal thing to do.
I can agree with this.

I do want to say that your allegorical read is the most interesting read I've seen on Jacob/MiB since the show ended. And the first I've honestly seen like that despite being heavily into the podcasting scene and internet forums and such about Lost when it was airing (Lol one podcast I listened to had a 30 hour episode on the series finale), though that may have also biased me pretty heavily toward literal thinking about the show. But yeah, once season 6 starts I just don't think things mesh up super well.

Perhaps it also becomes a question of whether you think this is an intentional or accidental crack in the story, this split between metaphor/allegory and the literal events. Another ambiguous example that comes to mind is the ending to Jin's character arc, where he basically chooses to die with Sun instead of fighting to survive the Island and go and raise Ji Yeon. That always stood out to me since so much of the show is about shitty fathers and yet Jin ends this way- sure in the moment it feels like him affirming his love and commitment to Sun despite their own rocky relationship, but he still leaves an orphan out in the world now and I honestly can't say how much self-awareness that kind of ending is written with.

Like you can almost imagine a sequel 20 years later where Ji Yeon resents her father for this or something.

Its similar to the cracks in Jacob/MiB story, they always seemed accidental to me and that the show was more pro-faith/Jacob/Jacob's version of order etc., but I find your thoughts about this interesting, and having me reconsider things at least somewhat.
So I guess, if anything, it just seems like the specifics of the story are getting in the way of what I think the themes are trying to express. Maybe at best you might could say that Mother/Jacob were actually trying to protect MIB since they didn't feel there was any way off the island.
Mother must have thought there was a way off the island though, otherwise she wouldn't have killed all those people and filled in the well where they were doing their sciency-shit I guess.

It also seems like an extremely condescending kind of "protection" to me, though I can totally buy that the characters legit felt that way.
I remember at the time he shouted "You're mine!" to Juliette I was thinking just how much like a weak, scared, angry little child he seemed there.
Yeah in some ways he's still that kid lashing out at his father, just like every other male character on the show lol.
I'd never thought about it being a chiastic structure, but I can definitely see that. One comparison between S1 and S6 is that S1 is where the series introduces so many of the motifs/themes (smoke monster, light/dark backgammon game, etc.) that become dominant in S6.
"Adam and Eve" is perhaps another one.

That one kind of irked me though because at the time Lindelof/Cuse said that the Adam and Eve reveal would prove they weren't making the show up as they went along. It totally doesn't prove that, though these days I don't have any issue with pulling something from early in the story like that again in the later parts (I think we talked about something similar with the crossplosisions in NGE).
LOL, I was just thinking of the Brand New album that has that title. I might could be tempted to do it, though. I feel like to do it well, though, would require taking notes as I rewatch the series given how much happens.
Jimbo you should know by now I don't follow much music. [sad]

Trying to trick me with these obscure references... How can that album even be brand new if it came out in 2006? That don't make no sense.

But yeah if you were to do something about Lost, I would be interested. Lostpedia is a source you could try using too, since its kind of the EGF Wiki of Lost (Though you could say it has similar issues).
Yeah, I hadn't even thought of how the FSW was made by them. Again, the comparison with how well Instrumentality was worked into NGE's story is pretty stark. Maybe Sayid's story was meant to reflect his desire to protect Nadia? As for him imagining Shannon there rather than Nadia, I assumed that was merely because she died on the island, and the FSW had something to do what that?
Maybe, though Penny was in the Church with them at the end too and she was never on the Island AFAIK. I think it was just for real Shannon there too and not an imaginary version.
Yeah there were some creative edits to and from the flashbacks occasionally, but other than that everything else was fully functional. Like, I'm watching Deadwood now, and It's not exactly in the category of Ford or Leone in terms of cinematic stylization, but there's still clearly some thought been given as to how to shoot/edit and how (even occasionally) to have these aesthetic moments where there's a long take, or a held wide shot, or some interesting racking of focus between foreground/midground/background, etc. It just makes you realized how impoverished most TV is by even this relatively modest comparison. And with Lost it's all the more shame given its location and what we know can be done with such things (Stalker, Aguirre, Apocalypse Now... just to name a few).
Yeah for real, imagine how much better Lost would be even in just a visual sense if you had a Tarkovsky or a Herzog behind it. I'm just salivating at the thought.
I'm still not sure this explains why The Others treated them how they did... surely an introduction and offered aid would've been a more effective manipulation tool than all the espionage, kidnapping, etc...
I mean yeah, that would be more effective, but that doesn't seem to be how Ben generally operates (For whatever reason he has to be written like a Bond villain or something half the time).

It is, however, how The Count of Monte Cristo operates!
The only flashback I remember with Widmore was when he was on the Island as a young man, but I don't recall a trial.
You got me wondering about this, so I looked up Widmore's page on Lostpedia.
Lostpedia wrote:During his time as leader of the Others, Widmore made routine trips off the Island. During one of those trips, he fathered Penny with an unknown woman who lived in the outside world.

In 1988, Widmore assigned Ben and Ethan to kill Danielle Rousseau. When Ben returned to camp with Rousseau's baby, Alex, he was angrily confronted by an aging Widmore, who demanded to know why Ben was holding a baby. Ben was angered that Widmore had not informed him of the baby prior to accepting the mission. Widmore demanded that Ben kill her, claiming it to be the will of Jacob. Ben refused, and instead proposed that if it were indeed the will of the Island, Widmore should be able to kill her instead. Scoffing, Widmore turned his back and walked away, leaving Ben holding the baby. ("Dead Is Dead")

As leader of the Others, it is presumed that Widmore played an active role in the purge of the DHARMA Initiative in December 1992. However it is still unclear where he stands on the event, although Ben claimed that it was "the leader's" decision to kill the Initiative members. ("Cabin Fever") It is currently unknown whether he meant Widmore or Jacob. It should be noted that since Ben is a known liar, this might not be necessarilly true.

Some time after the Purge, Ben had Widmore exiled from the Island and supplanted him as leader of the Others. As Widmore was led to the submarine by armed guards, Ben came to say farewell. Widmore, however, felt Ben had come to "gloat" about his victory in having him exiled. Widmore had been exiled for "breaking the rules": namely, for regularly leaving the Island, and for having a family off the Island (specifically, a "daughter with an outsider"). Widmore scornfully told Ben that one day he would have to choose between Alex and the Island. He was then led to the submarine and exiled. ("Dead Is Dead")
I may have been thinking of that weird trial Juliet had, and just presumed that Widmore must have gone through that too.
Seems to me the only real purpose of either was to drive the conflict, with both being aimed towards Ben. That's why I thought maybe Ben's reluctance to embrace the crash survivors was about him suspecting it was a Widmore plot against him or something. So that seemed to explain some of his deviousness by giving him a (largely off-screen) enemy to guard against.
This is totally what it should have been and would have explained a lot. It would explain why Desmond wasn't recruited into The Others too (Widmore connection), the weird nonsense with Widmore (IIRC) faking the 815 wreckage could even be considered evidence by Ben that they're somehow working for Widmore etc.

It would make some of the stuff with Eloise's church, the return mission etc. in S5 kind of weird, but that could be worked out.
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Finished S2 of Deadwood. Again I'd say it was solid with good solid world/character development overall. I'd say the major things that marked this season was the introduction of the political machinations about what state was going to annex the Deadwood camp that is set-off against the more personal stories/struggles of the characters and how much (if at all) they're willing to work together. I was pleasantly surprised by how much development they gave the female characters compared to S1, with Trixie starting to learn math so she can work as an accountant rather than a prostitute and Joanie opening up her own brothel; they don't do a ton with either storyline, but it's better than S1 where they just seem helplessly at the service of their pimps. Probably the last major development was the introduction of Bullock's wife and step-son, which introduces the awkward triangle between them and Alma, who became Bullock's lover before his wife arrived; but Bullock remains such a bland character that this is probably the least interesting development of S2.

Perhaps the other thing I noticed this season, to an extent that I was wondering how much it was already there in S1 and I just missed it, was how florid the writing was at times. There are moments where character break into speech that's damn near Shakespearean, especially EB Farnum, who's perhaps become my favorite character next to Swearengen (who gets sidelined with life-threatening kidney stones this season). Of course, Farnum is meant to be this weaselly, pretentious character so it makes sense that he tries to project that in his speech, and it's also funny how that floweriness contrasts with the abundance of obscenities. Just for a few examples:
E.B. Farnum:
Could you have been born, Richardson? And not egg-hatched as I've always assumed? Did your mother hover over you, snaggle-toothed and doting as you now hover over me?

Richardson:
I loved my mother.

E.B. Farnum:
Puberty may bring you to understand, what we take for mother love is really murderous hatred and a desire for revenge.
And (after he's been given the title of mayor):
E.B. Farnum:
August commencement to my administration, standing stymied outside a saloon next to a degenerate tit-licker.
As for flaws, besides the Bullock stuff, the series still doesn't really know what to do with Calamity Jane. She mostly just hovers around the camp for comic relief. Other than the opening episodes I don't think I found this season quite as well-directed either. It still has its moments, but they're fewer and farther between. I guess you might say the focus shifted slightly from the direction/atmosphere to the writing. Normally, I would say that's a step backwards, but given how good the writing is, it's hard to complain too much. I might also say that all the political stuff got a bit confusing, mostly because (similar to Lost) the inciting parties were, to a large extent, kept off-screen, so you kinda just had to decipher what was going on based on how the characters were reacting to stuff.

Also, though I don't think this series is theme-heavy, one of the interesting turns this season is how almost like a dysfunctional family the camp becomes, and how even a ruthless murderer like Swearengen starts forming some bonds and maybe even something of an emotional attachment, while still trying to keep his distance from everyone. It's like watching the formation of a community from the ground up.
Raxivace wrote:I've never actually seen Tombstone before- I've always been pretty satisfied with Ford's take on that story in My Darling Clementine, but looking at the cast of Tombstone does make me want to give it a watch though.

The stylistic stuff you mentioned does have me pretty curious about Deadwood too, at least in comparison to these other "prestige" dramas that seem to never evolve beyond a slick functional style at best. Recently I started Haibane Renmei though, so if I watch Deadwood it will be after that.
Tombstone is a pretty campy, OTT take on the story; almost the complete opposite of Clementine, which is one of the most understated films ever made in Hollywood. The real highlight of Tombstone is Kilmer's Doc Holiday. It was probably my favorite Western as a kid (along with Maverick, which I'd also recommend just because of how funny it is) so I'm sure some of my appreciation is nostalgic.

Deadwood's definitely worth watching, and it's not overly long either. To me, 12 eps. a season seems about right for TV, because even with that it's easy for writers to run out of ideas and to have eps. where things just seem stymied. Deadwood does better than most if only because it keeps its setting in the foreground and the characters are so fun, even when not much is happening.
Raxivace wrote:
It's almost fascinating, too, how the almost caricatured nature of the characters play off against the gritty realness of the setting.
Reminds me of that bit in The Wire people say is supposed to be a jab at Deadwood.

I'd forgotten about that, though I'm not sure I'm seeing how it's a "jab" at Deadwood... though the series does use the word "cocksucker" a fuckton.
Raxivace wrote:This seems to be where your allegorical read on the show and my more literal one departs even further because I'm kind of in the camp of that they should probably just destroy the Island anyways, it doesn't seem worth protecting for vague reasons and having so many people die over something so abstract.

Maybe its like that treasure in Nibelungenlied (At least Lang's adaptation), its just better off forgotten at the bottom of the ocean.

This is also maybe another example where it would be nice if we had more an idea of what the actual rules that governed the Island were- or at least, what governed Jacob and MiB. Thinking about this more now I can see why you lean toward an allegorical reading more, since it does seem like they want the emphasis on "Rules" as a concept and not a specific list of specific rules.

It does seem at odds to me with how other aspects of the show are written though for reasons I can't quite explain at the moment (Perhaps its the specific nature of flashbacks and such, and how other mystery elements of the show do seem to get more clarity applied to them).
I wonder what would happen if they did destroy the island. I would say that the "purpose" that Mother/Jacob are trying to protect does exist on the literal level; it's the electromagnetic source that has all kinds of powers, including the ability to manipulate spacetime. When they do get close to destroying the island in the finale, my thought was the unleashing of that power might end up destroying more than just the island. Jacob uses the metaphor of a corked wine bottle keeping the evil in at one point, and I'm wondering if instead of just referring to the MIB he was also referring to the island itself. When Desmond actually gets to the source it can't be accidental that it's essentially a giant cork that he removes that drains the pool and starts unleashing hell.

The Nibelungen treasure is an interesting comparison. I forget its function in Lang's film, but I know in Wagner it's the gold in the water guarded by the Rheinmaidens that can be turned into the "ring of power," but only once a person renounces love. Though the work is more complex than just that, the central conflict there is probably between love and the corrupting drive for power. I think there's some of that too in Lost (I perhaps see it most in how they handle Rose/Bernard during the later seasons, living their blissful married life on their own, disconnected from the power struggles of everyone else), but it's complicated by the whole purpose/nihilism dichotomy.

In terms of the rules being left vague, I might also argue that's part of the point. When we come into life we don't know what the rules are, we have to learn them as we go along, and even then it's often vague and highly contextual in terms of what's acceptable and what's not. In life there's not even "one set of rules" but many, ranging from the most informal of social niceties to those codified into law on a national level. I think not knowing the rules is one of the very things that make us feel "lost" and either leads to blind following or questioning. I also think keeping the purpose/source vague plays into that, because often "rules" are made for good reasons at the time they're made, but those reasons are forgotten over time to the point most follow them without having any idea why. The "button" in S1 was a good metaphor for that.

In RL I can think of something like homosexuality. In ancient cultures when tribes were small and under constant threat of death and extinction, marriage and procreation was less about love and a desire to have a family, and more a crucial element of survival. So back then, the idea of sex-for-fun (in any capacity) was probably considered "sinful" merely because it showed people were putting personal pleasure ahead of what was best for society. Of course, once societies get large/strong enough, that should no longer be a concern, yet people carried that mentality along for centuries, passed down generation-to-generation, with many not even considering (or not considering very deeply) why it existed until it was challenged in the last several decades (at least in the west).

I also think Lost's theme of parents/fathers is a good metaphor for that as well, especially since that's typically how we first learn about life's "rules."
Raxivace wrote:
Maybe the real issue here is whether or not the kind of questioning "Enlightenment Values" MIB show can logically lead to nihilism if taken to the extreme. What I'd probably argue is that they can but they rarely do in practice. Modernism was engulfed in this concern, and even a little bit before if we consider Nietzsche's worrying about what happens when "God is dead." But it doesn't seem like constant questioning had lead to an epidemic of people failing to find purpose. Of course, that's only speaking practically; maybe a better question is whether it should. I think you almost see that at work in Hamlet where Hamlet's constant questioning leads to him seeing through the illusions of society's beliefs, values, and ideas, and the chaos that causes for the kingdom. "Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so" can be a pretty terrifying thought, even worse if it's true and if everyone believed it.
It is a scary thought, but I agree in practice its just too rare to begin with to even bother seriously thinking about what would happen if that was adopted en masse.

It does kind of remind me of the argument that Christians sometimes make to atheists though- "Well why aren't you just going out raping and murdering and so on if you don't believe there's a God to punish you for it?"

I always found that kind of question more revealing about the person that asks it than about whoever they're asking it to.
But I think it's worth considering whether those who do start questioning that stuff take it to its logical conclusion or if they just stop before they find themselves staring into the abyss, so that some comforting illusions remain even if they are illusive.

I think there's two ways to take that kind of questioning from Christians; the first would be, as you said, reflective of them, that they assume there's a desire in people to rape/murder and that belief in God/punishment is the thing that stops them. The second would be what should stop any individual who had those desires if they thought they could get away with it and there was no source of objective morality to stop them? The typical atheist/humanist answer to this is that individuals are stronger in groups/society, so anything that harms society (like murder) is likely to be harmful to the individual. While I do think there's some truth to that (it's true, at least, that we do better overall in groups), I'm not sure it's true in every particular case. I think it's easy to imagine cases where even something like murder would, indeed, only help the individual doing it while not hurting society enough to really affect them. If that's true, then what's the rational argument against doing it?

That's a good chunk of what Raskalnikov in Crime & Punishment struggled with, but Dostoevsky just came to the idea that doing such a thing would wreak havoc on an individual's conscience because we had an ingrain sense that murder was wrong. I think that's too easy of an answer, especially given how it wouldn't apply to sociopaths, or even (perhaps) people who had, indeed, taking the questioning of such social values to its extreme conclusion.

Going back to the stuff about rules, I might also mention that "God" seems an extension of the parental concept, where we get "rules" codified by society projected onto this ultimate parental figure.
Raxivace wrote:
I was mostly thinking about the last few eps. where I'm pretty sure Hurley was talking to some people who were (probably?) MIB, but good point about the others as well.
What which ghosts are you talking about here? Richard's wife?
The one I was thinking of most was Michael, though, TBH, I can't remember if any of the ghosts Hurley sees would've said anything relevant to the MIB.
Raxivace wrote:
Also good point about the parallel between Hurly and MIB seeing dead people. In MIB's case I'm guessing that's part of the series's theme about the negativity of being obsessed with the past and what's happened.
Yeah. I seem to recall the final scenes of the show even having a lot of lines that were variations of "It's time to let go" or "It's time to move on" etc.
The final episodes had that motif in generation, especially in the Locke/Jack FSW.
Raxivace wrote:Still...I dunno, I just don't buy Ben's change of heart. I realize that's not much of an argument but dammit he's just too much of a son of a bitch throughout that show!
I can buy that he radically changed after his daughter's death. It seemed after that the only thing he had on his mind was revenge against Widmore, and I can buy that beyond that he really didn't care too much about what would happen next.
Raxivace wrote:
That may be what he thinks in real life, and while I can perhaps see that in the show I certainly don't think it's overpowering or black-and-white. Lost does more than just pay lip service to the virtues and values of the "chaos" side of things, or just give the "order" side insignificant flaws by comparison. I mean, it's also worth noting that it's the character most representative of faith, of finding a purpose and protecting it, John Locke, that's killed and taken over by chaos. So it's not as if the show says "just have faith, follow the order blindly, and everything will be good." If anything, it suggests that, indeed, very bad things may come of it, and even from it, in the name of protecting it. In the end, it maybe worth maintaining on some level, but perhaps changes could indeed "do better."
You could also argue though that the Oceanic 6's skepticism of Locke is why he dies and why MiB's plan works as well as it does.

If they had faith in Locke, and listened to him and gone back to the Island with him when he asked then Season 6 plays out WAAAAAAY differently if Locke is still actually alive and not driven to suicide (Or at least he would have done so had Ben not come in, talked him out of it, and then murdered him anyways. Damn, that was up there in terms of dark shit even for Ben). "Chaos" doesn't take him over then.
Good points. I'll be interested in a rewatch of seeing how this dichotomy plays out in different situations over the course of the series. One thing that confused me early on is how frequently the series frustrated both the "faith" and "skepticism" aspects.
Raxivace wrote:
It seems to me that MIB is less trying to kill all the Candidates as opposed to provoking them into killing themselves and/or rejecting the offer of being the Island's protector. Basically, he wants to ultimately turn them all over to his side, or get them to kill the ones that don't. At least, that's how I understood it. But doing stuff like leading them to water/helping them survive is a good tool to manipulate them, make them trust him, etc.
I thought it literally just came down to that Candidates being alive on the Island prevented MiB from leaving, like the implication that Dogen being alive powered the ash that repelled MiB.
Actually, a thought I had later as I was thinking about the whole "source" thing is that I remember MIB saying something to he effect that he couldn't leave the island in smoke-form, and it's only after Desmond pulls the source cork that MIB becomes "human," so is it possible that what he was really after was to get someone to destroy the source and that maybe THAT'S what was keeping him there? The only thing that wouldn't make sense about that is what, exactly, the candidates are needed for. If anything, having nobody there besides Jacob and MIB would basically mean MIB could never leave.
Raxivace wrote:I do want to say that your allegorical read is the most interesting read I've seen on Jacob/MiB since the show ended. And the first I've honestly seen like that despite being heavily into the podcasting scene and internet forums and such about Lost when it was airing (Lol one podcast I listened to had a 30 hour episode on the series finale), though that may have also biased me pretty heavily toward literal thinking about the show. But yeah, once season 6 starts I just don't think things mesh up super well.

Perhaps it also becomes a question of whether you think this is an intentional or accidental crack in the story, this split between metaphor/allegory and the literal events. Another ambiguous example that comes to mind is the ending to Jin's character arc, where he basically chooses to die with Sun instead of fighting to survive the Island and go and raise Ji Yeon. That always stood out to me since so much of the show is about shitty fathers and yet Jin ends this way- sure in the moment it feels like him affirming his love and commitment to Sun despite their own rocky relationship, but he still leaves an orphan out in the world now and I honestly can't say how much self-awareness that kind of ending is written with.

Like you can almost imagine a sequel 20 years later where Ji Yeon resents her father for this or something.

Its similar to the cracks in Jacob/MiB story, they always seemed accidental to me and that the show was more pro-faith/Jacob/Jacob's version of order etc., but I find your thoughts about this interesting, and having me reconsider things at least somewhat.
Well, thanks for that. Years of reading Blake/Jung and then watching NGE has primed me for reading like this! Plus, as soon as the series started with the black/white, faith/skepticism dichotomies I figured there was going to be some metaphor/allegory in play. It just took a long time to get to the source (harhar)!

I would guess the cracks are mostly accidental. My gut feeling is that Lindelof probably had the basic themes worked out ahead of time, but the demands of writing a dramatic TV series necessitates that a lot plot and character stuff is going to happen and it's hard--especially with multiple writers/directors--to make sure that every twist and turn makes sense both on a literal/story level and that it lines up with the underlying metaphor/allegory.

Yeah, Jin's death bothered me too and for the same reason. I also think it's understandable on the literal level, especially given that Jin has never met Ji Yeon and also especially after how most all of S5 and S6 is about Jin trying to reunite with Sun, and how often you hear that "I'm never leaving you again" line. So while in the moment I think his decision makes sense for the character, theme-wise it seems to feed negatively into the "shitty fathers" idea.
Raxivace wrote:
So I guess, if anything, it just seems like the specifics of the story are getting in the way of what I think the themes are trying to express. Maybe at best you might could say that Mother/Jacob were actually trying to protect MIB since they didn't feel there was any way off the island.
Mother must have thought there was a way off the island though, otherwise she wouldn't have killed all those people and filled in the well where they were doing their sciency-shit I guess.

It also seems like an extremely condescending kind of "protection" to me, though I can totally buy that the characters legit felt that way.
I thought she killed them because she believed them messing with that stuff was dangerous, not necessarily because it meant a way off the island. Of course, we also know that messing with that stuff WAS dangerous given S5 and "the incident."
Raxivace wrote:
I'd never thought about it being a chiastic structure, but I can definitely see that. One comparison between S1 and S6 is that S1 is where the series introduces so many of the motifs/themes (smoke monster, light/dark backgammon game, etc.) that become dominant in S6.
"Adam and Eve" is perhaps another one.

That one kind of irked me though because at the time Lindelof/Cuse said that the Adam and Eve reveal would prove they weren't making the show up as they went along. It totally doesn't prove that, though these days I don't have any issue with pulling something from early in the story like that again in the later parts (I think we talked about something similar with the crossplosisions in NGE).
I'm guessing they probably knew who "Adam and Eve" were, though it's a bit odd they gave them that moniker given that it was Mother/son! A good example of how NGE tended to make much better use of its references.
Raxivace wrote:
LOL, I was just thinking of the Brand New album that has that title. I might could be tempted to do it, though. I feel like to do it well, though, would require taking notes as I rewatch the series given how much happens.
Jimbo you should know by now I don't follow much music. [sad]

Trying to trick me with these obscure references... How can that album even be brand new if it came out in 2006? That don't make no sense.
LOL, band's name is Brand New. It's not even a band/album I particularly like, but I've always loved that title.
Raxivace wrote:You got me wondering about this, so I looked up Widmore's page on Lostpedia...
Interesting. I seem to remember that scene with Ben "exiling" Widmore, but it probably didn't quite register that was what was happening at the time (or why). All that talk about leaving the island being wrong is now making me think of Wagner's Parisfal. In that opera there's essentially this group of monk-like figures called the grail guardians whose purpose is to, well, guard the holy grail. One of them, Amfortas, ventures outside their world and ends up with a wound in his side that won't stop bleeding. So Parsifal makes a journey into that world that's full of temptation in order to cure him and restore... well, what exactly that is is debatable. But the conflict between that hermetic existence centered around an abstract purpose VS the desire to be in the world of men with all its temptations reminds me of Lost, especially that Widmore stuff. It's also pretty similar to the MIB/Jacob dichotomy.

BTW, Parisfal is the only Wagner opera that I know that's been made into a feature film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsifal_(1982_film) It's also one of the best opera films out there (probably the most overtly artistic). Syberberg definitely brings his own visual take to the story (extremely surrealistic), but it also contains all of Wagner's music and words.
Raxivace wrote:
Seems to me the only real purpose of either was to drive the conflict, with both being aimed towards Ben. That's why I thought maybe Ben's reluctance to embrace the crash survivors was about him suspecting it was a Widmore plot against him or something. So that seemed to explain some of his deviousness by giving him a (largely off-screen) enemy to guard against.
This is totally what it should have been and would have explained a lot. It would explain why Desmond wasn't recruited into The Others too (Widmore connection), the weird nonsense with Widmore (IIRC) faking the 815 wreckage could even be considered evidence by Ben that they're somehow working for Widmore etc.

It would make some of the stuff with Eloise's church, the return mission etc. in S5 kind of weird, but that could be worked out.
Is there any reason it can't be that? Does Ben ever explicitly say why he does what he does?

I'm also wondering, does the series ever really explain how much or even how Ben/Widmore are aware of Jacob and "the rules?" All I could ever figure from that is that Richard must've told them.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." -- Carl Jung
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Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Eggtown)

Post by Raxivace »

Jimbo, I can't help but notice you've ignored the excellent budget Photoshop masterpiece I made using Microsoft Paint...

Like, I get you're probably extremely jealous of my incredible artistic abilities that put Da Vinci, Renoir, and Hokusai to shame but c'mon man. It took me like a whole five minutes to make that!
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Of course, Farnum is meant to be this weaselly, pretentious character so it makes sense that he tries to project that in his speech, and it's also funny how that floweriness contrasts with the abundance of obscenities.
Yeah I can sort of see a Shakespearean quality in that bit you've quoted.
As for flaws, besides the Bullock stuff, the series still doesn't really know what to do with Calamity Jane.
You've mentioned similar complaints with how the female characters on Lost were handled. Why do you suppose some of these American prestige shows seem to not know what to do with their female cast?
I might also say that all the political stuff got a bit confusing, mostly because (similar to Lost) the inciting parties were, to a large extent, kept off-screen, so you kinda just had to decipher what was going on based on how the characters were reacting to stuff.
I find this kind of writing technique really frustrating sometimes. The visual novel series Umineko no Naku Koro ni particularly had a lot of this kind of thing- it perhaps made some sense there since it was hugely influenced by Golden Age mystery novels and the like where of course you're supposed to take character actions and reactions as hints, though there's ultimately no clear answer given the various mysteries at the end of the damn story despite asking you to invest like 80 hours into it.
Tombstone is a pretty campy, OTT take on the story; almost the complete opposite of Clementine, which is one of the most understated films ever made in Hollywood. The real highlight of Tombstone is Kilmer's Doc Holiday. It was probably my favorite Western as a kid (along with Maverick, which I'd also recommend just because of how funny it is) so I'm sure some of my appreciation is nostalgic.
Well I'll try and give Maverick a look as well.
Deadwood's definitely worth watching, and it's not overly long either. To me, 12 eps. a season seems about right for TV, because even with that it's easy for writers to run out of ideas and to have eps. where things just seem stymied. Deadwood does better than most if only because it keeps its setting in the foreground and the characters are so fun, even when not much is happening.
Hmm, I might get onto pretty quickly, once I'm done with Haibane Renmei then.

BTW, are there any other shows you were planning on watching here soon?
I'd forgotten about that, though I'm not sure I'm seeing how it's a "jab" at Deadwood... though the series does use the word "cocksucker" a fuckton.
IIRC the argument is something like "David Simon is criticizing these other shows that use base vulgarities to entertain instead of doing social critique" or something like that. I can't remember if I read that critique online or in one of the books I read about the show.

I'm not sure how much I buy into that though, especially because The Wire itself wasn't exactly above that sort of thing.
I wonder what would happen if they did destroy the island. I would say that the "purpose" that Mother/Jacob are trying to protect does exist on the literal level; it's the electromagnetic source that has all kinds of powers, including the ability to manipulate spacetime. When they do get close to destroying the island in the finale, my thought was the unleashing of that power might end up destroying more than just the island. Jacob uses the metaphor of a corked wine bottle keeping the evil in at one point, and I'm wondering if instead of just referring to the MIB he was also referring to the island itself. When Desmond actually gets to the source it can't be accidental that it's essentially a giant cork that he removes that drains the pool and starts unleashing hell.
What's funny about the cork is that when the Richard flashback episode first, there was a huge argument online as to the whether the cork was just a metaphor or if there was a literal cork. I was in the metaphor camp myself, and well I was wrong lol.

Yeah I dunno what would have happened if the Island was destroyed, which is frustrating. Some have used the fact that the Island was sunk in the flashsideways to suggest that nothing would have happened, that the world would be fine. Of course its hard to take anything about the FSW as a comment on the nature of Lost's physical world, though the sunken Island is a kind of random inclusion otherwise in the grand scheme of things.
The Nibelungen treasure is an interesting comparison. I forget its function in Lang's film, but I know in Wagner it's the gold in the water guarded by the Rheinmaidens that can be turned into the "ring of power," but only once a person renounces love. Though the work is more complex than just that, the central conflict there is probably between love and the corrupting drive for power. I think there's some of that too in Lost (I perhaps see it most in how they handle Rose/Bernard during the later seasons, living their blissful married life on their own, disconnected from the power struggles of everyone else), but it's complicated by the whole purpose/nihilism dichotomy.
IIRC the treasure is just riches and jewels and such in Lang's film. Interesting to hear that its pretty different in Wagner.

I always thought Bernard and Rose were kind of weird with their disconnectedness in the later seasons. Like its almost like they're a standin for people who aren't watching Lost or something, its strange and perhaps makes them the polar of opposite of someone like Hurley who feels like a fan standin to some extent.
In terms of the rules being left vague, I might also argue that's part of the point. When we come into life we don't know what the rules are, we have to learn them as we go along, and even then it's often vague and highly contextual in terms of what's acceptable and what's not. In life there's not even "one set of rules" but many, ranging from the most informal of social niceties to those codified into law on a national level. I think not knowing the rules is one of the very things that make us feel "lost" and either leads to blind following or questioning. I also think keeping the purpose/source vague plays into that, because often "rules" are made for good reasons at the time they're made, but those reasons are forgotten over time to the point most follow them without having any idea why. The "button" in S1 was a good metaphor for that.
To some extent I can agree with this, but the thing is that there are characters that do seem to know what the rules are and just don't say anything.

Like I can't even tell if the thing where Jacob and MiB is some kind of supernatural rule that literally prevents them from doing so, or just something social. Both MiB and Jacob seem to have some kind of belief about this, I just don't know what it is. Same thing with Ben and Widmore- it gets especially confusing when Ben goes on about Widmore changing the rules.
In RL I can think of something like homosexuality. In ancient cultures when tribes were small and under constant threat of death and extinction, marriage and procreation was less about love and a desire to have a family, and more a crucial element of survival. So back then, the idea of sex-for-fun (in any capacity) was probably considered "sinful" merely because it showed people were putting personal pleasure ahead of what was best for society. Of course, once societies get large/strong enough, that should no longer be a concern, yet people carried that mentality along for centuries, passed down generation-to-generation, with many not even considering (or not considering very deeply) why it existed until it was challenged in the last several decades (at least in the west).
In this example though, what's lost to time is the reason for the rule, not what the rule itself is.

Like I would be cool if the reasons for the rules on Lost are ultimately revealed to be irrelevant to modern times, I just would have liked a better idea of what the rules even were.
I also think Lost's theme of parents/fathers is a good metaphor for that as well, especially since that's typically how we first learn about life's "rules."
This I do agree with. Reminds me of Ozu's I Was Born, But... come to think of it.
I think it's easy to imagine cases where even something like murder would, indeed, only help the individual doing it while not hurting society enough to really affect them. If that's true, then what's the rational argument against doing it?
The only scenarios like this that I can easily think of are killing in self-defense and the like, where few people would even argue against the morality of that killing.

Beyond that though, a "logical" case depends on what your starting principles are. Whether its humanistic belief in society, capitalistic self-interest, religiously motivated, some combination of these beliefs and/or others etc.
I think that's too easy of an answer, especially given how it wouldn't apply to sociopaths, or even (perhaps) people who had, indeed, taking the questioning of such social values to its extreme conclusion.
Its not like sociopaths can't also be among the humanists you mentioned earlier, and understand the benefits of living in society.
The one I was thinking of most was Michael, though, TBH, I can't remember if any of the ghosts Hurley sees would've said anything relevant to the MIB.
Michael is a whisper though, not a MiB manifestation.

Did you see the Epilogue? They even address Michael there somewhat.


I can buy that he radically changed after his daughter's death. It seemed after that the only thing he had on his mind was revenge against Widmore, and I can buy that beyond that he really didn't care too much about what would happen next.
Hmmm, it might just be too long since I've seen the show itself then.
Good points. I'll be interested in a rewatch of seeing how this dichotomy plays out in different situations over the course of the series. One thing that confused me early on is how frequently the series frustrated both the "faith" and "skepticism" aspects.
For me of course, it seemed pro-faith when I looked at it and that bothered me because of the general anti-intellectualism that America keeps seeming to devolve into. Not that I think Lost caused that of course, but it just seems like the wrong message for the times we were and still are in.
Actually, a thought I had later as I was thinking about the whole "source" thing is that I remember MIB saying something to he effect that he couldn't leave the island in smoke-form, and it's only after Desmond pulls the source cork that MIB becomes "human," so is it possible that what he was really after was to get someone to destroy the source and that maybe THAT'S what was keeping him there? The only thing that wouldn't make sense about that is what, exactly, the candidates are needed for. If anything, having nobody there besides Jacob and MIB would basically mean MIB could never leave.
The candidates only make sense as a system if Jacob wants to kill MiB and can't do it himself. Apparently, Kate is that person to do it (What a weird person to have do it).

Otherwise, yeah, if protecting the light is his goal itself then its pretty pointless to bring people over other than as entertainment for him I guess. That then goes back to my Island as Colosseum comparison.
Well, thanks for that. Years of reading Blake/Jung and then watching NGE has primed me for reading like this! Plus, as soon as the series started with the black/white, faith/skepticism dichotomies I figured there was going to be some metaphor/allegory in play. It just took a long time to get to the source (harhar)!
Listen bud, making bad puns is MY job!
I would guess the cracks are mostly accidental. My gut feeling is that Lindelof probably had the basic themes worked out ahead of time, but the demands of writing a dramatic TV series necessitates that a lot plot and character stuff is going to happen and it's hard--especially with multiple writers/directors--to make sure that every twist and turn makes sense both on a literal/story level and that it lines up with the underlying metaphor/allegory.
I agree with this to at least some extent, and these limitations of network TV are why I've tried to temper some of my criticisms over the years a bit, as I've learned more about how chaotic running such shows can be.
Yeah, Jin's death bothered me too and for the same reason. I also think it's understandable on the literal level, especially given that Jin has never met Ji Yeon and also especially after how most all of S5 and S6 is about Jin trying to reunite with Sun, and how often you hear that "I'm never leaving you again" line. So while in the moment I think his decision makes sense for the character, theme-wise it seems to feed negatively into the "shitty fathers" idea.
Yeah.

This might be a weird comparison, but it reminds me of when the show tries to suggest in that S5 Kate episode that Sawyer jumping off the helicopter in S4 was just him being selfish and running away from his problems or whatever. I always thought that was a weird angle to bring to Sawyer kind of out of nowhere, but thinking about it isn't kind of similar to this Jin thing? The difference being that the show doesn't seem to want to make the case about Jin.
I thought she killed them because she believed them messing with that stuff was dangerous, not necessarily because it meant a way off the island. Of course, we also know that messing with that stuff WAS dangerous given S5 and "the incident."
I might have to rewatch the episode.
I'm guessing they probably knew who "Adam and Eve" were, though it's a bit odd they gave them that moniker given that it was Mother/son! A good example of how NGE tended to make much better use of its references.
Come to think of it NGE has its own Adam and Eve, doesn't it! [laugh]
BTW, Parisfal is the only Wagner opera that I know that's been made into a feature film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsifal_(1982_film) It's also one of the best opera films out there (probably the most overtly artistic). Syberberg definitely brings his own visual take to the story (extremely surrealistic), but it also contains all of Wagner's music and words.
Sounds interesting. I might have to try giving it a watch sometimes. And yeah I can see that parallel you draw with Widmore.
Is there any reason it can't be that? Does Ben ever explicitly say why he does what he does?
I'm not sure he actually explicitly says tbh, beyond the thing with putting the Jack and co. in cages to get his spinal surgery.
I'm also wondering, does the series ever really explain how much or even how Ben/Widmore are aware of Jacob and "the rules?" All I could ever figure from that is that Richard must've told them.
Ben has some idea of who Jacob is, since he mentions him a few times throughout the series, like in the S4 finale where he turns the wheel ("I hope you're happy, Jacob." or whatever the line way).

What gets really weird though is how Ben thinks Jacob is the one in the Cabin. I think the last word on that is that it was actually MiB in there the whole time, though that doesn't explain why Jacob told Illana to go the Cabin when she reaches the Island in S5. Or why there was ash around the Cabin. Or why Ben ever believed Jacob was in the Cabin, since Richard should know he was in the Four-Toed statue (Unless Richard just told a lie to Ben? Unless MiB somehow tricked Ben into believing Jacob was in there, but when/why/how?). The Cabin honestly just doesn't make sense no matter how you slice it.

I have no idea how much Ben knows about Jacob's rules though, and what Richard was actually doing for like 100 years is vague.

I have even less idea about Widmore. The only direct connection I can even think of between him and Jacob is that thing we talked about with him saying Jacob met him in S6, and that's vague too of course.

EDIT: A line I just remembered that may be relevant to this was when Ben says something about how he thought he was summoning the Smoke Monster, but it turns out the Smoke Monster was summoning him. On one level I think it clearly means that Ben realizes he was being manipulated by MiB this whole time, but the "how" is lacking there which makes it confusing.

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Anyways sorry it took me a couple of days to type all this out. I got sick a few days ago (Not with coronavirus!! Well, hopefully not. I don't think it is anyways since I was vomiting pretty bad a few days ago and its not one of the known symptoms IIRC), so something like this took me even longer than usual to get written up.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
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