I was stranded on the West Coast when news of composer John Barry's death broke last week -- away from my music collection, which I wanted to get to and remind myself of his vast contribution to movies.
Truth be told, we haven't been adjusting to our post-Lost existence with much grace; a good portion of the past week has been spent sitting in a church, clutching our homemade Hurley doll (stitched together from parts of a curly-haired Cabbage Patch Kid, a plush Shrek, and Teddy Ruxpin guts playing a tape of every "Dude!" ever duded, if you must know), and asking every "Jack" in the congregation if he's finally ready to step out into the light.
Some measure of solace, however, has come in the recent announcement of the Lost: Complete Collection DVD box set arriving in late August. While the official press release disclosed some of the $230 ($280 Blu-ray, for some reason) worth of extras, we weren't satisfied with the list of bonus featurettes, the island replica, and paraphernalia like a mini-Ankh and senet game. And so, we went digging further to unlock more of its secrets in a quest to justify that heavy price tag, confident that our beloved Damolcuse are saving some surprises for the deep-pocketed faithful. Here are our discoveries of 23 more goodies (we told you we're having a hard time letting go) that await at the end of your summer of mourning:
Tired of constantly having to reapply their mascara after haters line up one-by-one to toss the appletini of disrespect into their faces, the Sex and the City 2 cast are finally addressing the negative response to their movie, which, utterly unsurprisingly, is poised to out-earn its previous, less critically pooped-upon installment. In a BBC News story about the ferocious backlash, the gals (and writer-director Michael Patrick King) are finally getting their side of the story out there, licking their wounds until they can take a restorative soak in a hot tub filled with $60 million of opening-weekend cash. To help you navigate their counterpoints, Movieline will translate the best quotes from Wounded Star to Actual English:
At the onset of the American Idol season, we offered our tips about how to deal with Simon Cowell's departure from the show. Now, as the finale's laser cannons cool and the fifteen metric tons of confetti dumped on the Nokia Theaters revelers is being vacuumed up, it's finally time to say farewell.
Goodbye, Simon Cowell.
Previously on Lost: A plane crashes on a mysterious island. Six years later, here we are.
By jetliner, VW bus, yellow Hummer, unmarked BMW, outrigger canoe, sailboat or submarine, please join us as we Answer the Final Set of Questions offered up by our last, constantly commercial-interrupted moments with our favorite group of merry castaways. (It should go without saying that a frank discussion of the Lost finale will be a long string of spoilers. Beware, those who sat out this searingly important cultural moment!)
So, fellow Middlers and Tailies, Others and Dharmites, Mr. Clucksters and Apollo-Chompers, the end of Lost is nigh. On Sunday night, in a fourteen-and-a-half-hour finalestravaganza, conjoined executive producers Carmon Cuselhof will bury your favorite show alive like a couple of bickering, photogenic diamond thieves. (Have we alienated you with enough inside, borderline nonsensical references yet? Yes? Oh well, you never understood us anyway.) But how will the show finish up its six-season run? To prevent ourselves from spending this weekend curled up in the fetal position while nervously clutching a Hurley-sized bag of Dharma-branded Cheese-Flavor Air Puffs as we await the final round of Answers to our Questions, we're instead letting our imagination run wild, taking us to the place we dared not visit before: the final scene of Lost. Beware: as this is almost certainly what our last glimpse of the island will look like, spoilers are sure to abound!
Previously, on Lost: Jack looks in his bag and finds a bomb that can't kill everyone on the submarine unless they mess with it. Sawyer messes with the bomb. Everyone frets about what to do with the bomb. Sayid grabs the bomb and runs. The bomb explodes. Sayid dies. Frank Lapidus dies. (Never forget!) Jin decides to drown with Sun rather than live life as a single parent. Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Hurley wash up on the beach.
Only one more episode left, gang. Let's not waste any more time in preamble before turning the Frozen Donkey Answer Wheel to handle the latest batch of questions Lost has posed to us.
Though we should know better than to be shocked when a two-headed Hollywood abomination born of unholy congress between the TV and gaming worlds is unleashed upon the world, the recently released trailer for The Bachelor: The Videogame still locked us in gape-mouthed thrall for, oh, fifteen to twenty repeat viewings of its mind-smoothing footage of poorly animated avatars vying for a shot at a virtual rose. So much straddling and massaging! But once we finally broke the unhealthy "click to play again" cycle, we wondered why there aren't more female-skewing TV programs making their way onto the world's most popular gaming platforms: as the demographic-spanning Wii has proven, video games are not the sole province of teenage boys screaming slurs at their Halo opponents. And so here are our suggestions about shows whose video game moments have come.
Are you, by chance, familiar with the movie Dead Snow? (Of course you are, but please, just play along.) Here's the pitch: Nazi zombies terrorize some medical students on a ski vacation. Nazis, zombies, skiing, terror. This is an excellent pitch. Chances are good that you, the discerning moviegoer, would be interested in such a film. (Please wait until the end of this post to click over to Netflix and do a Watch Now. It's not going anywhere.)
But you know what? That's only the second-best Nazi-related pitch you're going to hear today. How about:
Previously on Lost: Two men sit on a beach. Two men sit on a beach, one wearing a white ensemble, the other dressed in black. Two men sit on a beach, chatting with an undertone of mystery and menace. Two men sit on a beach, and one of them is all, "I'm gonna learn some loopholes, and then I'm going to kill you!" And the other one's like, "Go right ahead, brah. I'm mostly unkillable!" Then the two men Indian leg-wrestle, with the one in black throwing in some illegal noogies. "Bah! I'm gonna kill you, you'll see!" he says. "See you in Hell, or on another Purgatory island or something, tough guy!" Eventually, an atom bomb explodes.
Let's cherish this time together, as we have only two more episodes to raise our Questions, and search for our Answers. Like the ones we're about to ask concerning "Across the Sea," right now!
By now, you've probably seen the staggering number: $237,000,000. No, it's not an early round of federal aid to help keep Greek garbage collectors on the job in an attempt to stave off anarchy on the Peloponnesus for a few more days. It's the budget for Robin Hood, Universal's opening volley in the summer blockbuster wars. As the document leaked to The Wrap is maddeningly vague, Movieline has decided to dig a little deeper to try and detect some of the culprits in the production's bloat; not surprisingly, a significant portion of it can be found in excessive "above the line" expenditures, where the talent, director, and producers exact their pounds of budgetary flesh.
In a brilliant -- if diabolically cynical -- counterprogramming move to service multiplex patrons reluctant to pay $14 to watch men in weapon-laden metal suits clang against one another or deranged German doctors stitch together new pets from unlucky topless tourists (the 'Pede is expanding to 17 screens, everybody! Road trip!), Focus Features is unleashing an army of chubby-limbed, diaper-pooping Babies upon the world this weekend. But what are people saying about the film now that they've finally placed Babies' plump hand in their mouths and pretended to nibble it down to its still-soft phalanges while muttering about how totawwy dewish, yes you are, you yumster widdle yummyface it is? We've rounded up some of the choicest, most adorable (and mostly real) quotes from the early reviews.
Previously on Lost: Jack gets on a boat with Sawyer. Then Jack changes his mind about being on a boat with Sawyer, and throws himself overboard. Jin sees photos of his baby in a digital camera. Jin and Sun are reunited! Then Frank Lapidus says, "Look who can speak English again, just in case you forgot that Sun couldn't speak English for a while, due to that bumping her noggin," while shaking his head in amused disbelief. John Locke is tricked into giving a kidney to a mean old man. Then Locke is thrown through a window, paralyzing him upon impact with the ground. Sayid is shot in the stomach, killing him. Then Sayid is resurrected.
Now that we're all caught up after an interminably tense hiatus week (why do you torture us so, ABC?) let's get down to the important business of Answering another round of Questions about last night's episode of Lost.
On Friday, as you may remember (or as you may not remember, if you quickly pushed the experience out of your mind to protect your mental well-being), I liveblogged a Very Special On Demand Viewing of The Human Centipede, so that any curious-but-potentially-squeamish readers could get a sense of whether or not they might want to subject themselves to the horrors of the moment's most buzzed-about human/insect hybrid how-to film. As chance would have it, I followed up my afternoon Centipede screening with a night trip to Disneyland, where I placed myself in the thrall of yet another unspeakable cinematic abomination: the Magic Kingdom's Captain EO Tribute, an attraction hastily revived following the death of embattled (but still generally beloved) star Michael Jackson.
Surviving this unprecedented double-feature demands some kind of analytical reckoning, and so we've pitted the two in a point-by-point deathmatch to determine the superior work of art. Which will prevail? Let's find out.
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