While preparing for last week’s comic, I went to an obvious source for cartoon-yoda images, which was of course the fantastic Clone Wars cartoons. Pictured to the right is a quick drawing I did from one of the images, just to get a feel for the style and see what I could learn from it. Ever since Samurai Jack came onto TV in 2001 I have been enamored with Genndy Tartakovsky’s style of animation and directing. I will without a doubt be looking at the Clone Wars and SJ style to help my own personal development in comics.
The bulk of this post is actually about Lost, which as many of you know is by far my most favorite show that has been on television in a long time (as far as live-action drama goes, at the very least). However, first I’d like to share a few new things I found today and yesterday:
First: The most excellent band Incubus has a new cd coming out on November 28th, and you can listen to their newest song here: Windows Media or MOV
Second: Apparently the Spider-man 3 trailer was released on Halloween. Somehow this slipped by both myself and my esteemed internet savvy wife. Absorb it’s goodness NOW!
Spoilers and Lost in the full post!
Teh Trailer Spoilers: Apparently they’re at least playing Peter (and us) to think that Flint Marco was the actual killer of Uncle Ben. I feel like this invalidates a good bit of not only the first movie, but also part of Spidey’s whole creation story. It definitely works well into the whole Revenge = bad (not just -of the Sith either) and the whole manipulation that the black-suit will play into Peter’s emotions. The trailer also seems to completely boyfriend-bomb us with Harry using his Dad’s stuff and playing villain, also a capital R Revenge issue. At least they’re not pulling a Joel Schumacher and making some stupid decision like having Harry bond with the Venom suit because of his hatred for Peter, at least not as far as we know at this point. Just the thought makes me shiver on the cold, lonely nights.
The Sandman looks very solid, and I have no doubts about my boy Topher pulling off a splendid Eddie Brock. My biggest gripe is that it is now clear The Main Event has been correct all along (at least I believe it was his theory), there is no possible way in hell they can tell the whole Mary Jane wedding, Flint Marco Revenge, AND Venom story in one movie. They will most likely to with the Venom-ing in the last 10-20 minutes of the film. Honestly, it’s not a bad move, and I don’t think so for one bit, but the blue-balls I will no doubt be acquire are not to be envied. Two more years for a fourth movie and a fantastical Venom story-line, and only THEN can the ritual suicide be completed.
Three: Possibly one of the best movie posters I’ve seen recently – Smokin’ Aces
NOW ON TO THE LOST! Warning: If you have NOT been keeping up with Lost (or live/watch in a country other then Canada/the US, and most specifically have not watched the first six episodes of Season Three, PLEASE STOP READING unless you like spoiling these things for yourself. Honestly, it’s probably a lot like Neon Genesis Evangelion, if you hear someone talking about it before you’ve seen it…hell even if you SEE part of it before you’ve seen the previous ones, you may not really understand (and thus not spoil) anything. I just wanted to make sure and I’m not kidding, if you don’t want to know things don’t keep reading, you can come back when you’ve caught up!
Also, if you really don’t care about Lost, then you probably won’t care about any of this, but who knows?!
Season 3 was set up like two mini-seasons, really, the first six episodes were meant to be a mini-timeline in and of themselves with a supposed cliffhanger at the end. Now, I definitely appreciate the fact that they’ve eliminated the on-again off-again new episodes throughout November, December, and January in favor of giving us a longer amount of time to ponder and contemplate things. It’s a lower stress thing, because you can be certain that no new episodes are airing until Febuary 7th, 2007 at 9pm. Discussing the cliffhanger with my co-worker and fellow Lost-addict Sarah, she expressed her dissatisfaction with the mini-cliffhanger. She claimed that Jack yelling “Run Kate GDangit!” was not the extent of precipice hanging that she expected.
Expectations aside, episode six really takes some research to fully appreciate, which needless to say I respect because there are things going on that most people simply glaze over or for the most part have completely forgotten. A complaint I often hear is that the creators of Lost are just making crap up on the fly, adding more and more to a seemingly continuous degree of BS that will never really satisfy the viewers and just leave them dangling into infinity. I feel like this may be true, but at least they’re not going to give it away, and this episode proves it. They’ve written so freaking much into the first two seasons of this show that they have a veritable smorgasbord of things to pull from for the next 2-3 years if they want to. Case-and-point: Jack asks Kate to remember the story he told her in the VERY FIRST episode, a quick and touching story about him performing surgery on a young girl and her coming close to death, and in the end he expresses how he deals with fear and dealing with people’s lives. In response to this, Kates says that if she had been in that situation she “would have run away”.
This ties into the most recent episode if you consider all of Kate’s seemingly pointless and romantic flashbacks. Her whole past is about wanting to fall in love, and have a normal life, but always having to be on the run and leave those things she cares about behind. When the plane crashes, much like most of the survivors save for Locke and a few others, Kate is still very much the same, she would still run away from nasty situations. By the present point of the show, things have changed, and NOW is the time that someone like Jack is yelling at her to run away. So I hope that makes it a bit more clear as to how the show really did end on a cliffhanger as pertains to the Jack, Sawyer, and Kate predicament. The problem a lot of people have with this situation is that we’re really not getting that much with the rest of the cast members.
Some exciting things to consider:
-Locke found on Eko’s stick the phrase: “Lift up your eyes and look North – John” This not only fuels Locke’s newly rediscovered faith in the island, but also will lead him to either look to the North and find the Hydra station (and thusly the main characters) and bring together the plotlines of everyone on the island, or he will search to the North and find something new which will provide the much needed intrigue for the rest of the cast once more
-Desmond apparently has the newfound (psychic?) ability to see into the future – He did absolutely nothing to prevent or warn of Eko’s mishap and it could easily be written into something very interesting, also the preview of the last part of Season 3 included parts where Desmond flips out about what’s happened to him, and Desmond flashbacks can tie into Penelope which will finally bring in the very end of Season 2 for us all to enjoy
-Alex asked about Ben during her incursion into the base – This not only served to humanize Ben before the operation, causing you to begin to consider him as an actual human being and therefore add to the cliffhanger a bit as you are at least slightly concerned about the outcome of the surgery, but also introduced the concept that Alex may believe Ben is her father, and she more then likely has no clue Rousseau is even out on the island or that she even exists
-The producers have promised a bunch of things for the rest of Season 3, which I won’t spoil here but you can easily read the general things on any spoiler page if you like – Six episodes are out of the way, leaving 16-17 episodes to remain. These episodes will be playing from the beginning of February all the way straight through May non-stop every week. We all had high hopes for the beginning of this season and the short six episode storyline, but I really feel the rest of the season will be the gasm-fest we are waiting for…
To wrap things up, I will discuss my general impressions of Season 3: It began on a very different note, openly spoofing Desperate Housewives with ‘Other-ville’ and completely changing the status-quo of the Jack-Kate-Sawyer relations. Looking back, and re-watching some of Season 2, I was becoming so sick of the normal interactions between them that I gained a newfound respect for what was being done in Season 3 with the three of them. If you do the same, please tell me you weren’t sick of Jack and Sawyer giving each-other bitch looks and fighting over Kate, and her playing the middle field. Not to mention the bitch-fests between Locke and Jack, now it’s clear who’s in charge of the camp. I am very pleased with how things have changed, the characters have been forced into changing.
The last thought I have to share is that they have clearly been building and building for almost two and a half seasons now, adding more and more mystery while revealing a few things but ultimately creating more questions for everyone. It has started to frustrate a lot of people, to the point that Lost lost (hah) in ratings to another show in its timeslot last week. We have – The monster, Desmond, the Others, the Cable into the water, the Flame station, Juliet, Rousseau, the Numbers, the Hatch, Adam & Eve, the Dharma Initiative, Alex, the Black Rock, each and every main character’s backstories, etc. and you cannot honestly believe that things will never come together, and that we will never get answers to many of these questions. There has been a long time of building, and my personal prediction is that very soon we will see a rollercoaster ride of revelations, answers, new mysteries, and most of all excitement that I absolutely believe will live up to the quality of the very first two Pilot episodes of Lost.
Being that you are most certainly not a woman, I can see how you would get sick of the “oh, Jack…oh, Sawyer!” I don’t know if I was sick of it yet (and I’m not sure I ever would be), but I agree that the dire situation les autres have placed our heroes in has been a very nice change of pace.
I’m having a premonition that there will be no wedding in Spidey 3 – don’t know why. More to come!
I was thinking that Ben is some sort of father figure to Alex, too. Maybe they had a good relationship when she was younger, then as she started to figure out that things weren’t right (especially when they had Claire), she distanced herself from him.
I’m also curious about the statue that Sayid, Sun and Jin found, the foot with 4 toes.
Hopefully next season, the revelations will begin.
Ah damn, I left out the statue! Thanks Elena! I went back and added a picture to provide more of a break between the top stuff and the massive spoiler…ing. Any other awesome things I left out?
Well, the trick that the island has of manifesting itself to look like people/animals of the pasts of the Lostaways (that’s what televisionwithoutpity.com calls the Lost cast, so I’m adopting the word). We’ve seen Jack’s father, Eko’s brother, the horse that allowed Kate to escape that one time in the rain, Dave to Hurley, Boone talking to Locke, Ana-Lucia to Eko, and possibly a couple of others.
Then there was that weird thing with the bird calling Hugo’s name. I thought at first that Libby’s spirit had inhabited the bird to try to warn Hugo away, but it wasn’t much of a warning, if that’s what it was.
Oh, and about the polar bears. When we learned that Sawyer and Kate were being kept in bear cages, I assumed that the polar bears escaped from/were released from the cages, and that’s why they were on the island. But since it’s a different island, I don’t know what to think. I might go back to my original “Walt conjured up the polar bear from reading Hurley’s comic” theory, but then, why did the second one show itself so late? Polar bears don’t do well in that climate.
The island manifesting itself is definitely a prominent theory going around, right now I see nothing to prevent it from being a good possibility. One thing that the show’s creators have said is that anything that happens in Lost is capable of happening in the real world, but they may just have over-active imaginations about the real world also…
Polar Bears are supposedly excellent swimmers, so the other island thing doesn’t really matter to them and from what we know I’d say it’s safe to consider that they got out of those cages. With the climate issue, one of the experiments of the Dharma initiative that is hinted at a lot and written many places is studying not only animals but also climatology, on the neon-map there was a line talking about the de-climatization of Ursus Maritimus, which is latin for Polar Bear. So again I think we can assume they are a direct result of the Dharma experiments. Walt being able to conjur things out of imagination has always been a flakey theory to me…but I could easily be wrong!
True, it’s a convenient, flakey theory, but I liked it because it went with his adopted father being scared of him, and saying that “things happen” around Walt.