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The end to one of the most baffling shows to hit primetime

by Jack Kentala

There’s an old sort of theory. Or just an image, really. It’s a man riding a horse, and rigged to a stick is a carrot dangling just in front of the horse. The horse wants to eat this carrot, so it moves forward, but, alas, so does the carrot. The horse, though, keeps going for that carrot, and the rider of said horse gets where he wants to go. It’s the same sort of logic of a “Free beer tomorrow” sign permanently outside a local dive; an enticing promise that turns out to be empty.

That’s what Lost has been for the duration of its six seasons. Carrot and stick. Since the show thrives on creating mysteries that the hapless viewer think will get resolved, a reasonable person could assume there’d be equal parts carrot and stick. This, unfortunately, has not been the case.

Seasons one through five have concocted riddle after riddle on the enigmatic Island, and many viewers, myself included, finally thought the showrunners would finally give us that fucking carrot at the end of it all. We’ve endured polar bears, dinosaurs, magic children, visions, ghosts, hatches buried in the ground, the Dharma Initiative, a smoke monster, and, shit, wave after wave of plane-crash survivors and island inhabitants materializing each subsequent season just to pad out the cast of castaways.

Consider it a bad case of American television gone amok. If there’s party to finger, I blame ABC, getting the show’s writers to keep the endless, unresolved mystery going season after season because, hell, ratings weren’t that bad. Only once the scribes knew there was one season left to go, they could finally start gift-wrapping all the little oddities of the show and put an end to the shenanigans.

Season six was supposed to be the Rosetta stone for everything that had happened prior. But it wasn’t. It invented more things. Introduced new characters. Had the gall to put a Mayan temple on an island in the South Pacific with, sin of all sins to anyone halfway knowledgeable of civilizations, Egyptian fucking hieroglyphics inside. And it prominently featured a sideways parallel universe of sorts, in which the famed Ocean flight 815 didn’t crash, and all the passengers went on with their magically-intersecting, marginally-happier lives.

For those hoping the grand finale wouldn’t be total bullshit, well, it was a reminder that Lost never really was that great of a show past its first season. Once it gained its cult status, it veered into a really smarmy, smug, pompous, self-important show that had every sort of limp religious allegory thrown at it, along with a long-running debate of free will versus destiny that held about as much water as the shoddy Star Wars prequels. Same with the latter, Lost has always been pulp; one of the most expensive soap operas ever produced, complete with paper-thin characters, black-and-white morality, and oddly-foreseeable twists. All the while being, naturally, a horrid frustration for anyone wanting a legitimate, scientific explanation of What The Fuck Is Going On besides some warble about the Island possessing an enormous volume of electromagnetic energy.

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One of the better superhero franchises returns with the standard baggage of all superhero franchises

by Jack Kentala

It’s easy to bemoan sequels, especially for the so-called “superhero” franchise films. For comic fans, there are innumerable changes to the coveted Lore for the sake of making a compelling hour-and-a-half to two-hour movie, laden with ret-conning and character compositing and various rejiggerings that muddy the pure waters of the diehard. For the adult populace seeking to watch something slightly more entertaining than reality TV, there’s the barrier of the PG-13 rating, which requires all possible grittiness and swearing and sex to getting sanded down to something harmless enough for the 14-year-old boys in attendance, not to mention the latter usually resulting in a lowest-common-denominator, playing-to-the-moronic-masses dumbing-down of most everything. And for anyone just trying to enjoy a damn film, there’s the product placement, the unwieldy comic relief, and the nagging suspicion that they’re watching a two-hour commercial for action figures.

Rather miraculously, Iron Man has proved itself to be one of the more tolerable, watchable franchises, which I’ll just go ahead and say I believe is entirely the result of the inspired choice of casting Robert Downey Jr. and getting micro-indie (circa Swingers) turned big-budget writer-actor-director Jon Favreau to helm the show. Amazing how Favreau went from slumming it with the criminally-underseen, Swingers-spiritual-successor, small-budget mob movie Made to a gargantuan, multi-unit, multi-million moneybag like Iron Man in around fifteen years, which is about the equivalent of fifteen minutes in gated Hollywood.

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Jack Kentala’s Three Most-Favorite Films of 2009

2009, like most other years, saw me going to the theater probably less than a dozen times. Chalk it up to insane ticket prices, or obnoxious other-viewers, or the slimming release window between the theater and DVD, or my daily binge of a movie per day via Netflix, or, hell, I can be my usual curmudgeony self and say that it’s rare when ten good films come out in any given year. This fine online establishment has hosted my lukewarm reviews of Avatar and Where The Wild Things Are, to the downright-mauling of Inglorious Basterds and, to a lesser extent, Drag Me To Hell.

That said, I expect I’ll catch up on 2009 films early next year ‘round the Academy Awards, when most of these hit DVD. If nothing else, I expect good things from Up In The Air, if only because of director Jason Reitman (though I honestly don’t like Thank You For Smoking) and George Clooney. Considering that I just watched the 2000 film Tigerland, which criminally played in a scant five theaters, and now have placed next to Traffic as my favorite of the year, I figure I’ll run into some 2009 films that slipped through the cracks for the rest of my film-watching years.

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$230 million worth of pretty emptiness; or empty prettiness

written by Jack Kentala

I, like many others, already had an opinion about Avatar before I stepped into an IMAX theater and put on 3D glasses. I had an opinion about how I could spend $230 million. That, as a nonplussed, nonfan of Titantic, nor Aliens, nor the Terminator movies, I could make a hell of a better movie with $230 million than James Cameron. That as an independent filmmaker going broke making a film with an out-of-pocket budget of $15,000, I don’t have the risk of having so much money and marketing out of a product (as Avatar is certainly more product than film) and, thus, can actually tell a story where the morality isn’t black and white; where one set of people are eulogized while dying and the others are mercilessly slaughtered; where one feels a growing sense of fatigue at every shiny, pretty thing.

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Ten-sentence children’s book turned into a 101-minute film with varying degrees of success

written by Jack Kentala

Consider the polar ends of the spectrum: Where The Wild Things Are, mostly-beloved picture book by an ageset now in their 20s and 30s; a hipster-approved trailer accompanied by an unheard version of The Arcade Fire’s classic “Wake Up,” and an OST by hipster-approved Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; a film heavily advertised on adult-oriented outlets like Pitchfork and The AV Club; coming from solid director Spike Jonze and cinematographer Lance Acord; promised as “dark” despite a PG rating (which I give benefit-doubt to, since 2001: A Space Odyssey is rated goddamn G); in stark contrast to, at the 12:30 p.m. showing on opening day, myself being the only adult viewer without (multiple/loud) children. (more…)

A Sam Raimi film for people who really like Sam Raimi films

By Jack Kentala

Some would say I’m unqualified to “review” a Sam Raimi movie. I agree. After all, the only films of his I’ve seen are Spider-Man (decent), Spider-Man 2 (worse), and Spider-Man 3 (deliberately terrible). I have seen nothing of his horror films. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a contemporary non-M. Night Shyamalan supernatural/horror film. (more…)

The first movie to successfully copy the poster for The 40 Year-Old Virgin, but one of Soderbergh’s weaker films

By Jack Kentala

Yet another disclaimer: This is not your typical film review. I spend half of it talking about cinematography and name-dropping the past ten years of Soderbergh films. I also may or may not reveal the ending. That said, you’re still allowed to read it. If you want.

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Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore a new Quentin Tarantino film

By Jack Kentala

To disclaim: This isn’t a bog-standard review. There won’t be a plot summary. There won’t be any spoiler warnings; said spoilers will be applied liberally, probably within the first paragraph. And I won’t even attempt to provide a fair-and-balanced, point-counterpoint view.

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Sci-fi action movie that aspires to be…something with aspirations?

By Jack Kentala

Before I begin: This is not a review. I won’t summarize the plot; that can be found elsewhere. I’ll talk about many plot points, including the end of the film, so for those who wish to avoid those sort of things, shield your eyes.

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