There's No Place Like Home

Today is a watershed day for many.

It marks the last Thursday of the month of May. It marks the anniversary of Edmund Hillary (and his Sherpa from Nepal) reaching the summit of Mt. Everest. Bob Hope was born this day. Wisconsin enters the American Union. And to be added to this vast catalogue of importance, , the season finale of LOST premiers.


I'll admit right now, I am a bit obsessive and - dare I say - fanatical with this show. You would be too after a lingering flu and a lazy Christmas vacation. but I'm not here to justify my noble cause: I'm here to enlighten and engage the general public to what will surely be the defining show of the Second Golden Age of television.

Whoah, sounding a bit too much like a COM class there...

So ... where did we last leave these island cast aways? We've discovered the Oceanic Six, and see their initial arrival to the civilized world once more. But ... there's something that Jack, Kate, Sun, Sayid, (and Aaron, though he can't really talk) aren't saying. What of this fabricated tale, that they were the only survivors, that their survival was one of Lord of the Flies - subsistence on a deserted island. And when any of the five "mix up" a detail, it is of course, due to shock, and not the inaccuracies of their fabrication.

One of the delicious riddles of the show now is how these people manage to get off the island; they are visibly unscathed, relatively un-traumatized, and all at separate points at part one of the "There's No Place Like Home" denouement. Kate and Sayid have been taken by Charles Widmore's people, Jack and Sawyer are again roaming the jungles of the island, Jack fresh from a recent appendectomy and sewn up like a 7th grade home economics project. And Sun? She and her husband Jin have been transported to the freighter to await deployment.

An interesting tidbit from part one of the finale was during the flash-forward. Jack is deposing what happened when the plane (as he says) hit water. "We used cushions, a few life jackets...at that point, there were only eight of us left." Eight, eh? but it's the Oceanic Six. I'm no math major, but some things are not adding up.

And, hallmark to LOST and its' hidden intelligence, this season's finale gives a more than generous nod to various cultural and literary elements. "There's no place like home" of course, is a line from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the beloved children's novel by L. Frank Baum. On many occasions, the show salutes these metafictions - that is, stories that open the characters into strange and wonderful worlds they never thought existed. It can be said with Alice when she goes "through the looking glass" (the title of season three's finale) or of Dorothy when she realizes she's not in Kansas anymore. could the writers be insinuating the island is no more than a vivid fabrication - a falsification made for whatever reason to keep the island's inhabitants in a sort of limbo or purgatory until their lesson is learned?

Or maybe they just really really like to freak the viewers out.

Quote of the day: Locke: You guys have electricity? How do you manage that?
Ben: We have two giant hamsters running on a massive wheel in our secret underground cave.

A Flurry of Films

This weekend was one of elevated intellect, elevated insight, and elevated blood pressure.

The first two are owed in part to the vast amount of films I watched. The last has to do with the $4.03 I paid per gallon of gas, as well as the promise of seven years indentured servitude and my firstborn child.

America’s national holidays let me savor time that I wouldn't have had originally, and provide a cathartic release to watch all of the films I’ve wanted to watch over the past few years but have made excuse - you know. "Oh, I can't, not tonight, A Shot of Love with Tela Tequila is on ... is she straight? Is she bi? Is she greedy and attention-seeking?" "Not tonight, I have a headache," "..." and so on and so forth. But with little excuse, barring my iTunes library is already too full, I decided, with no time like the present, that this was the weekend to catch up.

I have a friend who won't watch the Oscars unless she has watched all films nominated that year. At least for best picture. I’m not sure how she feels about Foley editing or best-set intern - I’m just talking about the majors.

I’ll start with the one I saw last: there will be blood.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays (incredibly, I might add) the hardened, articulate oil tycoon Daniel Plainview, a man bent on striking deals and finding as much black gold as possible. He claims to be a family man, caring for his prepubescent son, H.W. (whom he adopted, an orphan child of one of his dead workers).

The film follows several decades of Plainview’s life, from humble beginnings in the 1890's where he digs for silver but finds black gold, all the way until the 1920's, where Plainview has evolved, gone to seed, and the years seem to be catching up on him. The humble, concise Paul Sunday (Paul Dano, who plays the identical twin Eli as well) once approaches Plainview in the late 1890's about his family's goat farm, where he believes there is a lucrative market for oil drilling. And thus begins the transformation of the sleepy town of little Boston from religious bastion to industrial behemoth.

The clarity in which Paul Thomas Anderson writes and directs makes this film an instant classic. And let's not talk about DDL - who listened to old turn-of-the-century recordings to adapt the speech patterns of men of the time. And his mustache? Day-Lewis means business. Oil business.

In this sleepy Texas town (which was coincidentally filmed right next to its Oscar contender, no country for old men) we find less of what life is like in 20th century oil country and more of the evolution - or regression - of a man. Plainview reveals to his brother, "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people." you don't get a plainer view on Plainview than that.

I drink your milkshake.

Watch this movie. Now. Or there will be blood.

Tomorrow: If you're lucky (or if I’m up to it) an in-depth review of the season finale of LOST.

Quote of the day: "I drink your milkshake."