One of the things I keep hearing about the Lost finale is that the Sideways was rendered meaningless by the revelation of what it actually was.
I think that's actually the OPPOSITE of what was true. The Sideways, which was actually an Epilogue, showed everyone the type of life they could have led. It wasn't arbitrary, though!
Christian says at the end that they collectively created this space. If that's true, then everyone CHOSE (if subconsciously) to make the changes in their lives. But in fact, everyone gave up something to gain what they did.
Jack's biggest fear was becoming his father, and he did. But he got a chance to fix it, to BECOME the dad his never could because he was too busy dying.
Sawyer got to be a good guy, to leave behind the conman, but in return his parents still had to die to set him on that path.
Kate got to save her stepfather, to make her mom happy, but in return she had to stay a fugitive instead of going to the island and later getting freed.
Sayid got to keep Nadia alive and (relatively) happy, but in return he could never have her.
Jin and Sun got to have a much more stable relationship without Jin turning into the cold asshole that he became, but in return they had to hide their love and risk everything to get away.
Ben got to not be a psychotic mastermind and actually be a cool guy, but in return he never got to have the daughter he loved (and even worse, had to watch her from afar).
Locke got to have a father and a wife, but he was still in a wheelchair and more importantly never got to discover the island and thus the faith that gave him purpose.
Hurley got to use his wealth without extraordinarily bad luck, and uh...well he was kind of awesome but no one loved him I guess.
Charlie got to keep being a damn rock star, but he still had that nasty heroin habit.
And so on.
Okay, so if we assume that the Losties somehow enacted these changes based on what they wanted for themselves or for others then the Sideways was them basically trying to fix everything they thought was wrong with their lives, even if it dropped them in worse situations first.
It's not irrelevant, though. In fact, it's in line with, more than anything, the first season. In the first season we got everyone's backstory, and it was always related to something that was going on on-island. They all had mistakes, regrets, things they wanted to fix, and on the island they often got a chance to do it. But regrets don't just go away, they stick with you.
So everyone carries these regrets into death, especially the 90% of the cast that died prematurely. In their shared afterlife, they all try to fix these things in some ways, either before or after the flight. But the truth is they have to abandon the things they want to change and remember the things that made their lives matter more than the changes they made: the connections with other people, specifically the other castaways.
As Rose says in the first Sideways, "You can let go now." She says it to Jack, who is the last to let go of his life because he doesn't want to believe that what he has isn't real. But subconsciously, I think he knows that he's dead and he doesn't want to stop trying to fix his life.
Ben chooses not to go with everyone, possibly because he has the largest gap between the life he led and the ideal one he gave himself. He doesn't think he deserves it, and maybe he doesn't. This show was about the choices we make and the chance to start over, but the truth is you can only start over so many times.
The island gave everyone a second chance, but you can't keep trying forever. Eventually you have to let go, to boil life down to the things that made you happy and move on.
And really, Rose is telling us to let go too. We all have things we would have changed about Lost, a way we wish it would have gone or something it would have done. But it has to end, and we can't control the ending but rather have to accept it and remember the moments that made us love Lost in the first place, because those moments will stick with us infinitely longer than how it ended or the missteps it may have taken. In the long run, no matter how much people say the show needed to be about mysteries and answers, they will always remember Sawyer and Juliet reuniting in death more than that dumb ol' bird that might have said Hurley's name.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
Things From Before Now
I've been going through my bi-annual Transformers phase, and thought of this. It's a post I wrote for my last blog, the third and last post, and I was essentially berating the Transformers fanbase for pre-judging the first Transformers movie long before it was to come out.
I think it's wonderfully well-worded, and exhibits the kind of fire and passion I don't tend to ever have about things that matter. I am not sure that it is in any way useful for the like none of you who still read this but here it is anyway.
ALSO I forgot one of my main points which was that as great as G1 Transformers was it was a ploy to make you buy toys and that it sometimes made NO sense (my crown jewel example: The episode where Megatron steals Optimus Prime's arm, and MOUNTS IT ON A TOWER so it can shoot at people. WHAT?). It did occasionally rise to science fiction greatness but it wasn't always as perfect as people want to believe it was.
Anyway here's this thing read it:
Okay nerds, the gloves are coming OFF.
Boy, have I been waiting for this.
I have loved Transformers forever. It completes a holy trinity with X-Men and Sandman of my favorite worlds of fiction, ever. I used to wake up every weekday at 7 to watch it, and often missed my bus catching the second episode.
I love Transformers. This fact will need to be remembered, for later.
When I heard the movie was being made, my first two thoughts were:
1.) Awesome!
2.) Oh shit, the internet is going to EXPLODE.
And it did. For months, I've watched elitist, self-absorbed fans berate a movie they know next to nothing about, nitpicking and complaining and generally making idiots out of themselves.
I'm tired of it. So I'd like to talk a little bit about your concerns.
1.) Its not going to be like G1 (Generation 1, the original cartoon)!!!!!!
This ticks me off more than anything. Listen up, kids, and listen good. If you want G1, if you want flatnose Optimus and Soundwave and a cast of too many, GO AND WATCH THE DAMN CARTOON. Alright? Can we get past this? No? Okay.
What fans often fail to understand about this sort of thing is that there is NO artistic integrity in making a carbon-copy movie based on something. One of the biggest complaints about movies these days is that everything that was good is being remade, and that it can't capture the magic of the original.
It thus stands to reason that recreating the G1 cartoon in real life would also lack this magic. More than that, it'd be boring to make. Its not new or creative, its just a remake. And, as we'll see later, most of what worked in the Cartoon would NOT work in a live action movie.
Second, and this is the part I fear the most, for I know geek hearts are weak and cannot take real life,
YOU ARE NOT THE TARGET AUDIENCE.
I know, I know. How could you not be? You're the fans. If you're not appeased, then the world isn't right. But you are not the reason they're making this movie. They need normal people, the people who aren't already watching the cartoon, or people who forgot about it, to go spend money watching it.
You may still be resistant. Let me point out some statistics. Spiderman and X-Men have been two of the most successful movie franchises of all time. They broke box office records (with sequels, I should add). Why? Because the fans approved? No. They made the movies different and accessible, so anyone could go see it. They took the X-Men out of bright costumes because they knew that wouldn't bring in regular people. And it worked. People who wouldn't read an X-Men comic under any circumstances saw the movie, and became fans.
It is completely closed-minded to believe that the creators of this movie would adhere to the frankly ridiculous standards of the original material and still hope to make any money on this movie. Moreso, it'd be a completely soulless, ultimately inane project.
This is a reimagining of the Transformers. A what if. A new way to get people excited. This leads us into our next "problem".
2.) wtf, the Decepticons are lame, AND WHERE IS SOUNDWAVE?!
In case you didn't know, the official list of Decepticons is:
Megatron
Starscream
Barricade
Bonecrusher
Scorponok
Frenzy
Blackout
Two/three of these were in the original team. This pissed people off.
It shouldn't.
The original Decepticon team would not fly today. Let's take a look.
Megatron - Becomes, though a complete suspension of physics and sense, a handheld gun for the other robots to shoot.
Starscream, Thundercracker, Skywarp - Three of the same jet, colored differently. To be fair, they had different personalities and powers.
Soundwave - Became, again illogically, a tape deck.
Rumble/Frenzy - Two small human-sized (sometimes) robots that were tapes contained in Soundwave's chest.
Ravage - A jaguar, again a casette.
Laserbeak - Bird version of above.
Reflector - Three largely useless robots that combine to form a giant camera. Banned from the cartoon after a few episodes because his toy was no longer being produced.
C'mon. Half the team is recolored versions of each other, and a good number of them have completely illogical transformations (I don't care if you see mass shifting as a power the Transformers have, I don't buy it as being anything more than a plot/character device). Three of them come out of one's chest. They barely qualify as characters, although they were all equally aweomse and owned their fair share of Autobots.
People were complaining that Soundwave and Megatron were going to be made into planes.
So, if the Transformers are so advanced, why does one of them have to become a 1980's tape deck to record and spy? Since Laserbeak could already do this, WITH video. And Megatron. He becomes a gun. With, one would hope, more firepower than the gun he has mounted on his arm, which is actually BIGGER than his gun form since a robot can hold it. You can't honestly tell me you're expecting people to go see a movie like that.
I'm upset there's no Soundwave, too (Especially as a jet. Have you seen his latest Cybertron toy? That thing is so sick.) but they're going to use the characters they think will be most interesting to people who have no idea who Shockwave or Ravage are. Three of the same jets will not cut it.
Speaking of characters....
3.) They're not using enough characters!
The thing about movies like this is that going to 2, even 2 and a half hours, is a lot. Lord of the Rings and movies like it are one of the rare instances where this sort of thing is allowed, by the STUDIO, now.
Let's say they use the entire original Autobot cast. That's 19. 19. You can't have 19 main characters in a movie. Even 10 is pushing it. The writers are only putting in characters they have time to develop, not just fanservice eye-candy (not to mention, they'd need way more Decepticons, which makes the problem worse). Again, artistic integrity prevails over whiny fans.
Here's the thing. They can't do whatever they want. The reviewers of this movie aren't going to be rating it as a remake of the original, but as a movie, and telling people to see it or not to see it. Having too many characters plagued X3, and resulted in a lot of resentment because none of the characters got enough development.
Not to mention, money. It takes a lot of money to have fifteen giant robots running around all fighting each other. Again using X-Men as an example, things like the Beast and the Danger Room were in the scripts of the first and second movie, but they just didn't have enough. So what did they do?
They saved it until they made enough money with the first two.
That is the thing. This movie is a test. They have to market this to the masses, to make them want to see more. If this movie makes money, they'll make another one, and make it better and bigger, with more characters (MIRAGE, PLEASE) and stuff. This is a movie for everyone. Not just for you. Don't be selfish.
Or, if you think you're so great, make your own movie. Become a director. Writer. Whatever. See how it does.
This has gone long enough already, so one last thing:
4.) Optimus/Bumblebee/etc. aren't the vehicles they're supposed to be!
Who are you to tell them what vehicles they should and shouldn't be? Optimus is still a tractor trailer. So he has a long nose. He's had them for a long time. G2, for instance. Now, Bumblebee being a VW bug is really logical, given his name, but like with Optimus, doing it for real wouldn't work. They tried to do Optimus as a flat-front, but he wouldn't have been big enough. There wouldn't be enough vehicle to make a big robot. The cartoon didn't have this problem because anything could be any size it needed to be. These all have to be real, scaled vehicles.
Which makes sense for Bumblebee being a racecar. If he were a VW bug, he'd be tiny. He wasn't huge in the cartoon either, but they don't have room for tiny guys in this movie.
Again, having everyone be exactly what they used to be is boring. We've all seen it already. Let's see something new and creative, with some homages to G1 but not bound by it.
I don't know if this will change anything. I don't know if I can make the Transformers fandom see how they're killing their own beloved franchise. But I hope some of you will read this and give the movie a break. These guys are trying to bring something they loved into our time, to make people love it the way we did. There are robots who transform into vehicles, and fight. The central themes are going to be there. The coating may change, but if it doesn't, then there's no point.
And give Michael Bay a break. The man knows explosions. The fights are gonna rock. And its not like he controls it. The writers are responsible for a lot too.
So, come this time next year, you can be all pissy and pouty that you can't watch your G1 cartoon on a bigger screen, and hate the movie (a lot of you will hate it because its cool to hate comic book movies, and I have nothing to say to you). Or, you could approach it with an open mind, see a new wave of Transformers, a reimagining of a classic, and not be an asshole and annoy the rest of us. And who knows? Maybe if you remove the giant nostalgic G1 stick out of your rectum, you might actually enjoy it.
Don't worry. G1 wont mind. I'm sure it wants you to be happy.
I have loved Transformers forever. It completes a holy trinity with X-Men and Sandman of my favorite worlds of fiction, ever. I used to wake up every weekday at 7 to watch it, and often missed my bus catching the second episode.
I love Transformers. This fact will need to be remembered, for later.
When I heard the movie was being made, my first two thoughts were:
1.) Awesome!
2.) Oh shit, the internet is going to EXPLODE.
And it did. For months, I've watched elitist, self-absorbed fans berate a movie they know next to nothing about, nitpicking and complaining and generally making idiots out of themselves.
I'm tired of it. So I'd like to talk a little bit about your concerns.
1.) Its not going to be like G1 (Generation 1, the original cartoon)!!!!!!
This ticks me off more than anything. Listen up, kids, and listen good. If you want G1, if you want flatnose Optimus and Soundwave and a cast of too many, GO AND WATCH THE DAMN CARTOON. Alright? Can we get past this? No? Okay.
What fans often fail to understand about this sort of thing is that there is NO artistic integrity in making a carbon-copy movie based on something. One of the biggest complaints about movies these days is that everything that was good is being remade, and that it can't capture the magic of the original.
It thus stands to reason that recreating the G1 cartoon in real life would also lack this magic. More than that, it'd be boring to make. Its not new or creative, its just a remake. And, as we'll see later, most of what worked in the Cartoon would NOT work in a live action movie.
Second, and this is the part I fear the most, for I know geek hearts are weak and cannot take real life,
YOU ARE NOT THE TARGET AUDIENCE.
I know, I know. How could you not be? You're the fans. If you're not appeased, then the world isn't right. But you are not the reason they're making this movie. They need normal people, the people who aren't already watching the cartoon, or people who forgot about it, to go spend money watching it.
You may still be resistant. Let me point out some statistics. Spiderman and X-Men have been two of the most successful movie franchises of all time. They broke box office records (with sequels, I should add). Why? Because the fans approved? No. They made the movies different and accessible, so anyone could go see it. They took the X-Men out of bright costumes because they knew that wouldn't bring in regular people. And it worked. People who wouldn't read an X-Men comic under any circumstances saw the movie, and became fans.
It is completely closed-minded to believe that the creators of this movie would adhere to the frankly ridiculous standards of the original material and still hope to make any money on this movie. Moreso, it'd be a completely soulless, ultimately inane project.
This is a reimagining of the Transformers. A what if. A new way to get people excited. This leads us into our next "problem".
2.) wtf, the Decepticons are lame, AND WHERE IS SOUNDWAVE?!
In case you didn't know, the official list of Decepticons is:
Megatron
Starscream
Barricade
Bonecrusher
Scorponok
Frenzy
Blackout
Two/three of these were in the original team. This pissed people off.
It shouldn't.
The original Decepticon team would not fly today. Let's take a look.
Megatron - Becomes, though a complete suspension of physics and sense, a handheld gun for the other robots to shoot.
Starscream, Thundercracker, Skywarp - Three of the same jet, colored differently. To be fair, they had different personalities and powers.
Soundwave - Became, again illogically, a tape deck.
Rumble/Frenzy - Two small human-sized (sometimes) robots that were tapes contained in Soundwave's chest.
Ravage - A jaguar, again a casette.
Laserbeak - Bird version of above.
Reflector - Three largely useless robots that combine to form a giant camera. Banned from the cartoon after a few episodes because his toy was no longer being produced.
C'mon. Half the team is recolored versions of each other, and a good number of them have completely illogical transformations (I don't care if you see mass shifting as a power the Transformers have, I don't buy it as being anything more than a plot/character device). Three of them come out of one's chest. They barely qualify as characters, although they were all equally aweomse and owned their fair share of Autobots.
People were complaining that Soundwave and Megatron were going to be made into planes.
So, if the Transformers are so advanced, why does one of them have to become a 1980's tape deck to record and spy? Since Laserbeak could already do this, WITH video. And Megatron. He becomes a gun. With, one would hope, more firepower than the gun he has mounted on his arm, which is actually BIGGER than his gun form since a robot can hold it. You can't honestly tell me you're expecting people to go see a movie like that.
I'm upset there's no Soundwave, too (Especially as a jet. Have you seen his latest Cybertron toy? That thing is so sick.) but they're going to use the characters they think will be most interesting to people who have no idea who Shockwave or Ravage are. Three of the same jets will not cut it.
Speaking of characters....
3.) They're not using enough characters!
The thing about movies like this is that going to 2, even 2 and a half hours, is a lot. Lord of the Rings and movies like it are one of the rare instances where this sort of thing is allowed, by the STUDIO, now.
Let's say they use the entire original Autobot cast. That's 19. 19. You can't have 19 main characters in a movie. Even 10 is pushing it. The writers are only putting in characters they have time to develop, not just fanservice eye-candy (not to mention, they'd need way more Decepticons, which makes the problem worse). Again, artistic integrity prevails over whiny fans.
Here's the thing. They can't do whatever they want. The reviewers of this movie aren't going to be rating it as a remake of the original, but as a movie, and telling people to see it or not to see it. Having too many characters plagued X3, and resulted in a lot of resentment because none of the characters got enough development.
Not to mention, money. It takes a lot of money to have fifteen giant robots running around all fighting each other. Again using X-Men as an example, things like the Beast and the Danger Room were in the scripts of the first and second movie, but they just didn't have enough. So what did they do?
They saved it until they made enough money with the first two.
That is the thing. This movie is a test. They have to market this to the masses, to make them want to see more. If this movie makes money, they'll make another one, and make it better and bigger, with more characters (MIRAGE, PLEASE) and stuff. This is a movie for everyone. Not just for you. Don't be selfish.
Or, if you think you're so great, make your own movie. Become a director. Writer. Whatever. See how it does.
This has gone long enough already, so one last thing:
4.) Optimus/Bumblebee/etc. aren't the vehicles they're supposed to be!
Who are you to tell them what vehicles they should and shouldn't be? Optimus is still a tractor trailer. So he has a long nose. He's had them for a long time. G2, for instance. Now, Bumblebee being a VW bug is really logical, given his name, but like with Optimus, doing it for real wouldn't work. They tried to do Optimus as a flat-front, but he wouldn't have been big enough. There wouldn't be enough vehicle to make a big robot. The cartoon didn't have this problem because anything could be any size it needed to be. These all have to be real, scaled vehicles.
Which makes sense for Bumblebee being a racecar. If he were a VW bug, he'd be tiny. He wasn't huge in the cartoon either, but they don't have room for tiny guys in this movie.
Again, having everyone be exactly what they used to be is boring. We've all seen it already. Let's see something new and creative, with some homages to G1 but not bound by it.
I don't know if this will change anything. I don't know if I can make the Transformers fandom see how they're killing their own beloved franchise. But I hope some of you will read this and give the movie a break. These guys are trying to bring something they loved into our time, to make people love it the way we did. There are robots who transform into vehicles, and fight. The central themes are going to be there. The coating may change, but if it doesn't, then there's no point.
And give Michael Bay a break. The man knows explosions. The fights are gonna rock. And its not like he controls it. The writers are responsible for a lot too.
So, come this time next year, you can be all pissy and pouty that you can't watch your G1 cartoon on a bigger screen, and hate the movie (a lot of you will hate it because its cool to hate comic book movies, and I have nothing to say to you). Or, you could approach it with an open mind, see a new wave of Transformers, a reimagining of a classic, and not be an asshole and annoy the rest of us. And who knows? Maybe if you remove the giant nostalgic G1 stick out of your rectum, you might actually enjoy it.
Don't worry. G1 wont mind. I'm sure it wants you to be happy.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Bad Girls Go Good
Penned by Phil
I make them bad girls go
Bad girls go good
I know your type, you're daddy's blackest sheep
Just calm it down (Calm down)
I'll be the one you can keep
'Cause I'm polite and I always call
I'm gonna make your mother proud
She was kind of a mess, now she's in a nice dress
I make them bad girls go good
I make them bad girls go good
You were hangin in the corner
Doin' all sorts of drugs
Now you're stayin' home to study
Trading drinking for hugs
I make them bad girls go good
I make them bad girls go
Bad girls good, good, good,
Bad girls good, good, good,
Bad girls go
I know your kind, got some good habits to lend
Yeah you're that guy that I would love as a friend
But now I'm callin' up my grandma just to see if she's fine
You make me wanna get a job
She was kind of a mess, now she's in a nice dress
I make them bad girls go good
I make them bad girls go good
I was hangin in the corner
Doin' all sorts of drugs
Now I'm stayin' home to study
Trading drinking for hugs
I make them bad girls go good
I make them bad girls go
Bad girls go good, good, good,
Bad girls go good, good, good,
Bad girls go
Oh she got a way with the dudes in the place
She make 'em wanna spend the night
Oh he got a way with the chicks in the place
Make 'em wanna live their lives right
Oh she got a way with the dudes in the place
She make 'em wanna spend the night
Oh he got a way with the girls in the place
Make 'em wanna live their lives right
I make them bad girls go good
I make them bad girls go
Bad girls go good, good, good,
Bad girls go good, good, good,
Bad girls go
I was hangin in the corner
Doin' all sorts of drugs
Now I'm stayin' home to study
Trading drinking for hugs
I make them bad girls go good
I make them bad girls go
Bad girls go good, good, good,
Bad girls go good, good, good,
Bad girls go
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