SmartRemarks

Up front: I liked it.

Sunday’s final episode of Lost, that is… a show I’ve been watching with fascination for five years now. (No, not six… I missed S1 when it aired, but got hooked by the DVDs.)

That’s not to say that I found it completely satisfying, especially on an intellectual level. But clearly the show was shooting for emotional catharsis in the finale, more than anything else, and on those terms it succeeded very effectively. It was true to the characters we’ve come to know and care about, hitting emotional beats that almost brought tears to my eyes more than once. And it didn’t do that by resorting to cheap sentimentality; it was well-earned sentiment. As a viewer, one had to have been following along with these characters through years of travail, had to understand who they were, what they’d experienced, what kind of redemption they’d been seeking, in order for those moments to work. When everything is weighed in the balance, I think that this will go down as one of the most ambitious, and artistically successful, shows in television history.

[Spoilers below.]

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Tags: Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof, Lost, television, writers

Open sewers run through the streets. Disease is rampant, up to and including recurring outbreaks of the plague. Criminals are routinely castrated, disemboweled, and hacked to pieces in public executions. The rotting heads of political enemies are mounted on public gates. The bloody torture of animals is a popular form of entertainment. Wretched poverty is commonplace. Literacy is not. Deference to a rigid caste system is expected of everyone. Weekly attendance at a church of the official religion is mandatory, with crippling fines imposed on those who abstain. Government censorship is taken for granted. Prejudice against foreigners and indeed against anyone even slightly divergent from the norm is encouraged.

Is this some third-world hellhole? Some imaginary world of dystopian fantasy?

No. This is England at one of its greatest historical moments, under the reign of its most esteemed monarch, Elizabeth the First. This is the England we romanticize and glorify and consider the forerunner of our own modern liberal democracy.

And astonishingly, almost miraculously, this is also the world that shaped the most brilliant literary mind in human history. This culture that would be alien and repulsive to us were we suddenly to find ourselves in it, stripped of the cleansing distance of centuries, somehow gave rise to a visionary who crafted timeless works that speak to us today every bit as much as they did to audiences four hundred years ago. A man whose artistic insight encompassed not just linguistic invention but social dynamics, personal psychology, and humanist philosophy.

How is this possible?

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Tags: history, literature, philosophy, progress, psychology, Shakespeare, writers

J. Michael Straczynski, the award-winning writer/creator of Babylon 5 (and a whole lot of other television and movie work as well, e.g., Clint Eastwood’s recent film Changeling), author of a critically hailed seven-year run on Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man (and a whole lot of other comics as well, including more recently a revival of Thor that brought the character a resurgence in both sales and popularity), and a darned nice guy to boot… is leaving Thor, effective in September. The news broke this week via the latest solicitations from Diamond Comics Distributors.

He has a couple of creator-owned projects coming up at Image Comics, and he’s already several scripts deep into Brave & Bold and “Red Circle” for DC Comics… but the really exciting possibilities that come with this change in workload concern another character entirely. 

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Tags: Babylon 5, DC Comics, J. Michael Straczynski, Marvel Comics, Superman, Thor, writers

Grayson, that is. (What, you thought something else…? Dirty mind. Shame on you.)

Dick Grayson, formerly Nightwing, formerly Robin, has had a strong fan following for years, especially since he grew up and stepped out of the red-and-green costume (and his mentor’s shadow) a quarter-century ago. Now the character has done what in one sense always seemed inevitable and yet in another seemed unlikely ever to see print… he’s become Batman. And it’s exciting.

Three years ago DC’s executive editor Dan DiDio wanted to kill off Dick Grayson as a superfluous character; he backed down in the face of an overwhelming reaction from both creators and fans, and now Dick is at the very center of the Bat-universe. 

I’ve written before with (ahem) less than wholehearted approval of Grant Morrison’s writing on Batman and, for that matter, on Final Crisis… but as erratic as the path may have been getting to this point, I have to give DC Comics credit for taking a fairly bold move. If the overall execution hasn’t been as dramatically compelling as Ed Brubaker’s death of Captain America over at Marvel a couple of years back, still… shuffling Bruce Wayne offstage and having his onetime sidekick take over the cape and cowl is certainly a departure from formula, and it creates the potential for some really fresh perspectives on familiar characters.

Still, as the first “relaunched” Bat-books saw print this past week, I couldn’t help approaching them with some trepidation.

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Tags: Batman, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, Dick Grayson, Grant Morrison, Judd Winick, Robin, super-heroes, writers

My reaction to the new Star Trek movie led me to ask myself this unavoidable question. Yes, it’s certainly received a warm response—96% on the Tomatometer (which is phenomenal, even allowing that they inevitably mis-count some reviews like, e.g., the negative J.R. Jones piece I linked the other day) and a $76 million weekend box office—but I trust my critical sensibilities regardless of what the bandwagon says. My reasons for liking and valuing Star Trek have always been its intelligent storytelling and its social conscience—and this movie has neither. As Roger Ebert wrote,

The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action. Like so many franchises, it’s more concerned with repeating a successful formula than going boldly where no “Star Trek” has gone before.

The online discussion thus far among fans seems to have found an emerging consensus that the cast all did at least good and sometimes great jobs living up to their familiar characters, and that the production values admirably reflect the film’s $150 million budget… but also that the story is, to put it charitably, more than little flimsy. The real dividing line is between the majority who say that story problems don’t matter so long as it looks impressive and feels exciting… and the minority who say it doesn’t matter how much of an adrenaline rush it gives if the story insults the audience’s intelligence. I’m definitely in the latter camp. 

When everything is weighed in the balance, and all excuses and apologies set aside, this movie is crap.

What’s more, though—and this is what sparked the self-examination—the last Trek movie (Nemesis) was also crap. And the movie before that (Insurrection) was crap. And the last TV series (Enterprise), and the series before that (Voyager)—all crap. Really, there hasn’t been any reliably decent Trek on screen in at least a dozen years.

So why do I still call myself a fan? How can I still harbor any affection or loyalty for this franchise?

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Tags: Alex Kurtzman, Bob Orci, books, J.J. Abrams, movies, Star Trek, writers

I am, not to mince words, a voracious reader. (I’m not as fast a reader as I’d like, so voraciousness only gets me so far, but that’s another discussion.) My reading appetites are fairly diverse—I spend time with a good deal of nonfiction material (politics, history, science, philosophy, etc.)—but I’ve never stopped enjoying fiction, either.

A look at what’s published and read these days, however, and especially how it’s received in the culture, reveals some odd disconnects.

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Tags: books, genre, literature, writers