Previously on Lost: Ageless mystery man Richard Alpert visits five-year-old orphan John Locke (original, not Smokey) in his foster home. Richard gasses the Dharma Initiative. Richard convinces Juliet to take a fun submarine ride to the island with him. Richard suddenly emerges from some dense flora in the jungle, then disappears back into it just as quickly. Richard experiences acute existential angst after his god is killed. A distraught Richard unsuccessfully attempts suicide through Jack.
Please chain yourself to a wall in the hold of the Black Rock and prepare yourself for a bumpy ride across an ocean of new questions, with your journey abruptly ending in a shipwreck of uncomfortable answers shaken loose by an impact with a four-toed statue.
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Previously on Lost: Sawyer's girlfriend falls down a pit with an atomic bomb, but doesn't die. Then she hits the bomb with a rock. It explodes. She dies! (We think?) The world is split into two timelines. (We think? It could secretly be just one.) Sawyer is sad because his ladyfriend is dead. He buys her an engagement ring, then throws it in the ocean because he's still sad about her being dead. Sawyer listens to Iggy Pop records. A Smoke Monster who looks a lot like John Locke kills everybody at the Temple. Kate runs from people who are trying to arrest her. Charlie tries to kill himself in an airplane bathroom. Hurley says, "Dude," meaningfully. And then says it again, with an entirely different, and even more meaningful, inflection. An unnerving horn noise blares before a cut to black.
Climb into our submarine and get ready to surface on the beach of television's most baffling island, where we'll disembark, armed with machine guns loaded with Answers, ready to slaughter all the unlucky Questions we come upon in this week's episode.
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Now that American Idol has separated the mellifluous wheat from the pitchy chaff, culling its contestant pool from its initial 3.5 million contestants to a top 12, things are finally, in the parlance of philosopher-judge Randy Jackson, "getting a millionty billionty percent real, dawg." For the unlucky amongst this ultimate dozen, wild dreams of worldwide superstardom are about to be crushed under the heel of a thousand-dollar Simon Cowell loafer and replaced with more measured aspirations to careers on the cruise-ship circuit, where weeks of national exposure lands one the headlining position on the Pacific Princess' Lido Deck Idol Revue. So whom amongst the remaining Idols can we expect to see battling deep into May, and whom should be loading up on seasickness pills for an upcoming maritime musical adventure? Here's how we handicap the Top 12.
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Previously on Lost: Jack smashes some lighthouse mirrors because he's angry and confused. Smokey throws a massacre party, and everyone at the Temple is invited. Ben Linus is suddenly impotent in whatever cosmic game Jacob and Smokey are playing. Hurley makes a Star Wars reference, and then an Indiana Jones reference. And somewhere in a makeshift camp deep in the jungle, an abandoned skullbaby mewls for the insane momma who's left it to join the Crazy Army.
Now sling your rifle over your shoulder, push your filthy, but still jauntily styled, hair our of your face, and plunge onward into the island's thicket of secrets with us as we again attempt to answer 23 questions about last night's episode.
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Now that our shared Academy Awards hangover is starting to subside, and the champagne-blunted memory of heaving your novelty Oscar statuette through a window after El Secreto de Sus Ojos' Foreign Language Film win wrecked your pool has come into sharper focus, we can begin to reflect upon last night's events. Though the list of winners played out almost exactly according to the narrative established during the interminable, brain-smoothing awards season (Geoffrey Fletcher's huge Precious adapted screenplay upset being the notable exception), there were still many important lessons to be learned from the ceremony if you just clear your mind, open your heart, and try to really hear what Oscar was gently whispering in your ear in the magical, fizzy moment before that tenth flute of Chandon finally did you in.
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Look: We know that you're incredibly busy people, with barely enough time to skim, much less absorb, all the pre-Academy Awards coverage competing for your attention on the Oscarnet™. And so in the interest of delivering you only the most essential information in the most efficient way possible, we've mustered every ounce of our Photoshop skills to render everything you need to know about this year's ceremony in a single, easy-to-understand infographic. Don't waste your time with beautifully designed infographics that squander your precious mental bandwidth by filling your head with useless, but very interesting, trivia!
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The joy of cruising the movie margins is that one thing leads to another. So, a few years back, after I'd suffered through the 1952 Poverty Row comedy Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla for my bad-movie book, I couldn't help but get Googling to find out what happened to its leads, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, whose comic act in the movie aped Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to the very limits of copyright infringement. Turned out that Sammy did not much moviewise after that (he died last year), but Duke burned bright in the last years of his life. Mitchell's first film as writer-director was 1974's Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner. While it didn't make him a household name or set the box office aflame, in 1975 Mitchell set about making a second flick, then called Kiss The Ring, later given the awesome title of Gone With The Pope. One viewing of the trailer on YouTube (embedded after the jump) had my jaw on the floor.
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Previously, on Lost: Sayid is shot by Ben Linus's dad! Then he dies. For two hours. Then he un-dies. Sort of. The bearded Temple Master is angry. Claire looks disheveled. The Thing That Looks Like Locke But Is Not Actually Locke glares at her. Hurley snacks on a Dharma Initiative-supplied, generic Toaster Strudel. People live similar, but significantly different, lives on the flash-sideways timeline. You wish no one would ever use the words "flash-sideways" or "timeline" again. In the Lost writers' office, a balding man in glasses draws a red line through a whiteboard entry for "Ep. 606: Sundown." The other writers nod ominously.
Please join us as we once again attempt to answer a fresh batch of questions baked up in last night's episode, pulled piping hot from the island's wood-fired mystery-oven. [Oh, yeah: SPOILERS. You know what that means by now.]
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The past three post-Jay Leno Show weeks have been an interminable wait for the rudely hiatused host to retake The Tonight Show throne, and usher in a second reign of peace and prosperity as the undisputed ruler of late night. (Luckily, the network made sure America got its Leno fix by spackling every crack in their Winter Olympic schedule with those jaunty "Get Back" promos -- The Beatles have never been so mind-buggeringly deployed!) Even though he's had 17 or so years to prepare himself for this big night, we're sure he could use some advice to help ease his transition and quiet the angry fluttering of the first-night butterflies, and so we're offering our suggestions to make sure this latest go-around begins as smoothly as possible.
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As the red-carpeted terminus of the Road to Oscar comes into view, the terrain becomes far more treacherous, the journey more fraught with mortal peril. At this critical time, voters must be on high alert for campaign treachery, lest they be unfairly swayed by the unscrupulous tricks of the desperate; while those friendly seeming, pan-handling Na'Vi warriors loitering in front of the Kodak Theater might draw Academy Members close with the promise of a cheap Polaroid memento, they'll instead deliver a whispered reminder that the "silly little Iraq movie" made only $12 million domestic, a withering insinuation that the film's steel-nerved heroes couldn't defuse a poopy diaper while wearing a full-body blast suit.
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As is their wont -- their oft-maddening, fan-torturing wont -- Lost temple masters Carlton "The Statue" Cuse and Damon "The Swan" Lindelof have once again spent an hour of their precious final season primetime allotment chumming the waters of our imaginations with new mysteries, exactly when we ache to have giant chunks of answers tossed directly into our primitive, gaping maws. Please join us for our attempt to answer the many, many new questions raised in last night's episode, "Lighthouse." [Here there be SPOILERS. Beware! And watch the show live! Or at least very shortly after recording it! We're shouting because this show makes us so very emotional!]
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The entire country -- nay, the entire world! -- has been utterly captivated by the magic of the these Winter Olympics, which serve up all the going-too-fast-down-frozen-chutes, furiously-brushing-the-ice-in-front-of-a-stone and shooting-rifles-while-skiing-for-some-reason action untold millions of TV viewers can handle via the drama-reducing safety of an NBC tape delay. Hollywood, of course, can never afford to pass up an opportunity to monetize a collective obsession as quickly as possible, so plans are undoubtedly already in the works for a fictionalized version of these high-rated, pulse-quickening Games. After the jump, we do our best to help harried producers get a head start on casting the roles of Vancouver's hottest Olympic stars:
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As we've previously discussed, the preferential voting system the Academy adopted for this year's ten-nominee-strong Best Picture race can be terribly, terribly complicated, with even our best efforts to explain the process generating more confusion than clarity. It's not at all surprising, then, that some Oscar voters find themselves so flummoxed by the blank ballot in front of them that they'd rather open a vein with the nibs of their pens rather than puzzle out what, exactly, the Academy expects them to do with the poorly explained voting thingy before them. (Have a look at Pete Hammond's new Gold Derby piece for some firsthand accounts of the rampant voter confusion now gripping the electorate.) We at Movieline feel the pain of these uncertainty-plagued individuals, and so we're offering the Academy a helping hand by providing a simplified set of Best Picture voting instructions so that the members' collective will can be communicated as painlessly as possible to the soon-to-be-harried accountants of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Hit the jump for our helpful directions!
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By now, Jim Cameron's struggle to realize the crazy vision he'd been nurturing in his head for the better part of two decades is the stuff of moviemaking legend: years of stalking hospital nurseries, showing up unannounced in OB/GYM waiting rooms to pose as a suspiciously strong-jawed woman with an endless list of detailed questions about the magical inner workings of the uterus, haunting the stalls of the Ecuadorian baby-black-market, where he could snap up every available orphan for study.
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Even as Lost's battered Volkswagen bus hurtles down the grassy hill of its final season and towards the precipice of primetime oblivion, its corpulent, floppy-haired driver white-knuckling his way through the ride as corpses pile up in the back, the show still seems determined to raise as many questions as it resolves. Please hit the jump and join us as we tackle 23 new queries arising from last night's episode, "The Substitute." [As always, MORE SPOILERS than you can shake a sandy corpse at. DVR-impaired Losties, beware.]
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