DVD Review: Lost: Season Three

Lost: The Complete Third Season
Starring Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Josh Holloway, Dominic Monaghan
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Available Dec. 11, 2007



Rarely does a show come along that lends itself so openly to viewer participation. Listening to story complaints and even going so far as to allow viewer complaints to be a driving force behind structuring the schedule of the episodes, the creators of Lost, while keeping the show on its projected path, are very dialed in on what the viewers want. When the season originally aired, it was shown in two blocks of episodes. As a way of silencing complaints of all the reruns that littered previous seasons, Season Three opened with a six-episode run. Then after a 3-month hiatus, it returned with 16 new episodes in a row. This was a valid complaint as no other show relies so heavily on continuity as does the Lost universe.

The beauty of a show like this is that when executed properly, the ambiguity actually adds to the richness of the overall mythology. But balancing between the introduction of new story elements and answers to previous ones has been the Achilles’ heel of the show since the pilot aired.

When we left the island in the excellent season two finale, Jack (Matthew Fox), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), and Kate (Evangeline Lilly) had been captured by the Others. Hurley (Jorge Garcia) had been released and sent back to camp with the message that they were never to return. And Michael (Harold Perrineau) and Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) were given a boat by the Others with the coordinates to finally get off the island and return home. It was an explosive episode (pun, intended) that left viewers clamoring for more.

But season three didn’t start with the same intensity. We see that Jack is being held captive in the Hydra (another Dharma Initiative station) while being interrogated by a new Other, Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell). Kate and Sawyer were kept in nearby cages and it is revealed that “Henry Gale,” whose real name is Ben (Michael Emerson), is in fact the leader of the Others. As the season gets under way, there are few answers from previous episodes and new questions mount quickly. The initial batch of episodes felt like a tease. While they weren’t great, they were hardly terrible either. My biggest complaint echoed that of every other person that watched and loved the show, simply not enough answers. At the very least, the ratio between answering existing questions and introducing new ones didn’t balance out.

Once the show returned from hiatus after the initial batch of episodes, a funny thing happened — it got good again. I mean, scary good. What once seemed like a convoluted mess that the writers were making up as they went along turned out to be probably the best season to date. Oddly enough, I attribute it to the fact that the show DID stumble out of the blocks. Without the uproar over the mediocrity of the start of the season, they wouldn’t have been able to turn it around. Better yet, they wouldn’t have been made to do so. In the face of waning viewership the writers were forced to start resolving some of the core mysteries of Lost. Who are the Others and why are they on the island? Why was Locke in a wheelchair? What was that cable on the beach? Who is Christian Shepard’s daughter? What do the Others want with the children? Why can’t anyone find the island? What is the Dharma Initiative? Once pushed out of their comfort zone, they answered some of these questions and found a rhythm and a balance that enabled them to get the show back on track. Granted, this is Lost so a number of perennial questions still remain. What is the smoke monster? What is the significance of the numbers? How does the island have healing powers and why does it only work on some people? How did Christian Shepard die and where is his body? What are the voices in the woods? What happened when the hatch imploded? What’s with the skeletons in the cave? Who is Jacob and what is the significance of his list? And what in God’s name is with the four-toed statue? Among many, MANY others.

To start this season the creators tried to raise the bar too high, too fast. When you go back and watch it again, it becomes clear that they took heed to viewer concerns and made adjustments on the fly where needed. The show caught up to itself in the second half of the season and for as much as can be made about the show’s ambiguity, when viewing it as a whole you get a sense of scope and realize just how much ground was covered. There were a few shallow episodes (episode #309, “Stranger in a Strange Land” and episode #310, “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”) and lest we not forget the awful intrusion of Nikki and Paulo midway through the season. But even amidst their trespasses, their penultimate episode #314, “Exposé” was pretty clever and ended no doubt with an audible jubilation from all of their despisers.

The strengths of the season were episode #308, “Flashes Before Your Eyes,” where the idea of space-and-time-travel is first discussed and we are made aware of Desmond’s “flashes”; episode #319, “The Brig,” where Locke finally deals with his “daddy issues,” and of course the brilliant season finale episode #322, “Through the Looking Glass;” when we are introduced to the game-changer for the first time: the flashforward. Up to this point, all of the character-centric episodes have been told through a combination of current island stories and flashbacks into those particular characters past. But in the finale, we see a haggard and miserable Jack in a post-island meeting with Kate and are side swiped with the idea that getting off the island isn’t the end-game result. The storytelling possibilities are limitless and in one 3-minute scene to end the season, life was breathed anew.

After watching this season I wondered if the success of Lost as it is today would have existed 10-15 years ago. In a pre-Internet culture before the “need to know NOW” mentality was instilled in all of us and the ability for geeks everywhere (I use the term amorously) to scour the Internet for clues, would the success of a show like this have even been possible? Without having readily accessible information or being able to re-watch the episodes on DVD for any little hint that could help shed more light on what is going on, (yes, that includes me, who re-watched the scene with Locke and Ben in Jacob’s cabin repeatedly in slow motion and with pause button in hand), would it have been as well received as it is now, or is that very premise what makes the show so different, and so special?

Lost: The Complete Third Season - The Unexplored Experience is a 7-disc set that features all 23 episodes (the finale is split into two separate parts) on 6 discs and a disc of bonus features. The bonus features include a handful of never-before-seen flashbacks and the “Lost on Location” feature, a behind-the-scenes look at 10 different episodes. There are audio commentaries on four episodes (”A Tale Of Two Cities,” “I Do,” “Exposé,” and “The Man Behind the Curtain”) by executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and various actors in each episode. There’s also a Lost video game demo and promo, and of course the standard, but boring deleted scenes and bloopers. The best special features are “The Lost Book Club” that discusses the show’s literary references and the “Lost in One Day” feature that gives a fascinating look at 24 hours in the life of the series, from the writing, direction, wardrobe, and editing of no less than 5 episodes at a time in varying levels of production.

Conceptually, the show started with a fairly simple premise: tell the story of a group of plane crash survivors who end up on a mysterious tropical island. As the story has unfolded we realize the show isn’t really about that at all. Sure, they are still trapped on the island and other forces, be it people or otherwise, are trying to keep them there, but what really makes the show work is the richness of the characters. All of the characters on the island are forced to confront the failures of their past and revisit issues or events that make up the core of who they all are emotionally. They are all metaphorically lost in addition to physically being as such. In simple terms, the show is about redemption. And in a season where the characters were made to confront demons of their past and decide how that is going to shape their future, it is not surprising the writers and creators of the show did the same to equal effect.

The creators have repeatedly said that the story of Lost is a mosaic and that the total story will only begin to take shape over the course of the three remaining 16-episode seasons. Without seeing all the pieces of the puzzle we are left with little more than rampant theorized speculation. For anyone who watches this show as religiously as I do, it begs the question: Would we have it any other way?

And there’s the rub.

Review: Fred Claus

Starring: Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamotti, Kevin Spacey, Rachel Weisz
Director: David Dobkin
Release Date: November 9, 2007
Running time: 116 min
MPAA Rating: PG
Distributors: Warner Bros. Pictures

For a lot of people, Christmas is their favorite time of year. Religious implications aside, and for reasons left to the individual, there is no other span of time in the calendar year as generally well regarded as the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Having said that, it becomes more and more difficult each year to sift through the garbage and enjoy it for what it is, or at least what it was that made you like it in the first place. The season itself starts earlier and earlier thanks to the wonders of the obscenely over-commercialized retail arena and political correctness has stifled the spirit of the holiday so much that we feel martyred just for wishing someone a Merry Christmas. This twinge of sadness, this funk, lurked around and stayed with me throughout this movie.

Frederic Claus (Vince Vaughn) is the older brother of Nicholas Claus (Paul Giamotti). Nick is born into medieval family and immediately starts working his way into the role of family favorite. Eventually, and inexplicably, Nick is granted sainthood. And apparently by some stretch of folklore I have not been privy to, when you become a saint, you and your family and wives and children all become immortal. Seems weird, but so goes the narrative explanation. Fast forward to today. Fred lives in Chicago as a repo man and Nick has embodied the modern day version of Santa Claus we all know and love. Fred needs to borrow money and Santa agrees under the condition that he come to the North Pole and work for it during the holiday rush.

Meanwhile, Clyde Northcutt (Kevin Spacey) is an efficiency expert sent by some unnamed agency that apparently oversees all holiday figures and their respective operations. He is sent to the North Pole to monitor and report back the details of Santa’s operation to determine whether or not they are deemed efficient enough to handle the worldly workload of Christmas, or whether the work should be consolidated and outsourced to faster, less expensive agencies. This is where that sadness I talked about came in.

It does not take a film scholar to know well before taking your seat what was going to happen in this movie. There is strife between Fred and Santa. The conflict is dealt with and in the end, the spirit of Christmas prevails. I am not robbing you of the experience of seeing this by saying that. What DID surprise me was the message the movie inadvertently sent by the contrived plot. Instead of being a funny, lighthearted holiday romp, this struck me as quite a sad little movie. The story of an old timer who has run his business the way he wants to run it for as long as anybody can remember only to be abruptly faced with the prospect of losing everything he has worked for because someone else thinks his methods are outdated? Or basically every Mom and Pop store in Anytown, USA before the mall, Wal-Mart, or any other oversized conglomerate steamrolled them out of business. To take institutions like Christmas and Santa Claus and overlap them with the modern ideals and trappings of Corporate America is flat out depressing. It might have been an interesting concept had it not been anywhere close to what they were shooting for.

Hidden agendas aside, the wasted talent in the movie is enough to run anyone out of town. Vince Vaughn and his fast talking, effusive way has worked in the past, and will no doubt work again, but he needs to learn the lesson of time and place. I am pretty sure his whole shtick was lost on any kid who went to see this movie. And any respectable adult in the audience should have noticed how tired his act was after The Break Up. When the five or ten worst movies of 2007 comes around, Paul Giamotti will now have the distinction of having starred in two of them after the awful Shoot ‘Em Up. And Kevin Spacey is still on auto-pilot in another cheesy performance I think he phoned in from the set of Superman Returns. To top it all off, the CGI used to put regular sized actors faces on elfin bodies did nothing but creep me out.

The Rub:
Full of bad performances, distracting and weird looking CGI, and an inadvertently depressing story, Fred Claus wants to be a funny fish out of water holiday film, a la Elf, but it completely misses the mark. The previews made it look bad and the execution was that much worse. We must be on the Naughty list this year because we all got the same big lump of coal. Merry effing Christmas.

And there’s the rub.

½ * out of ****

Review: Tree

Starring: Bill Elverman, Kate Berry, Avery Laine, Jeff Garretson

Director: Michael R. Steinbeck

Running time: 46 min

Distributors: Drop Shadow Productions

“More and more intense. Every day I am seeing the future. I am seeing my glorious end. The tree is telling me the story of my death.”
- Tom Brueggeman, Tree

The Skinny:
Tom Brueggeman and his family discover the tree in their yard gives them visions of the future. Tom struggles with his visions as they are gradually more vivid outlines of his own death.

The Review:
Horror films, or what passes as a textbook definition of horror films today, are all about blood and guts and gore and how disgusting can you make it onscreen. Even worse, with a lower budget the ideas behind all that gore become cheesy imitations when applied on film. Tree is different, and different for all the right reasons. It is different because it applied some novel concepts that aspiring filmmakers should take note of; one of which is that it all starts with the script. Without a good story to tell you are dead in the water.

The movie opens as Tom Brueggeman (Bill Elverman) and his family have recently taken over the family farm in rural Wisconsin after his wife’s father passes away. Tom doesn’t seem to be terribly motivated to have been relegated to this life, but he manages anyway. In the basement one morning, Tom finds a journal his father-in-law left behind full of crop reports and farming tips but at the end there are these stories. Creepy stories that are a bit off-putting to Tom so he ignores them and goes on about his day.

Chopping wood one evening after a long day, Tom starts to see flashes that include his daughter, then his wife crying, then nothing. He passes the visions off as an offshoot of the typically overworked farmer. Later, Tom’s daughter Katie (Avery Laine) tells him that when she is out in the yard playing she “sees things sometimes. Like dreams but I’m awake.” Tom questions her but seemingly for her sake, he ignores it. Katie and wife Ellie (Kate Berry) begin having visions too, but theirs seem to be less of the macabre and more about winning pie contests and the like. They both try to convince Tom this is not a bad thing but as the days go on and the dreams become more intense, eventually showing Tom his own death, he is understandably rattled and less willing to accept this as a perky anomaly.

Another of those novel concepts is finding actors that happen to be good at acting. In many independent films, the acting is one of the main areas of opportunity. In this film it is one of its strongest attributes. Lead actor and writer Bill Elverman gives two winning performances. First his script is original and fresh. He takes the time to tell the story, and his simple idea is maintained for the length of the film. Second, his performance, with Avery Laine, is the heart of the movie. Their performances, as well as the music used in the film, really helped ratchet the tension.

There is a scene by the river stuffed with people used more as a backdrop than to heighten the tension of the scene. This would not have been as distracting had it not been for the strength of the performances leading up to that scene. It was off base, but not enough to ruin the movie.

I smelled the ending coming long before it actually happened, but what saved it from the throes of mediocrity was the very last shot of the movie. I wont ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the closing image rose above what came dangerously close to banality and really brought it home for a strong finish.

The Rub:
An independent film full of strong performances, crisp writing, and refined direction that makes for a genuinely honest movie that actually tells a story. A refreshing change from other horror movies that spend all their time and money relying on blood and guts and special effects they can’t afford.

And there’s the rub.

*** out of ****

Learn more about the film:

http://www.thetreemovie.com/

http://www.myspace.com/treemovie