Lost: Plot Twists Movies Can Only Dream Of

Ostensibly, we're in the era of scripted television. All that skanky reality TV aside, scripted television is pretty gnarly right now. Examples of well-written epic television (both recently cancelled and thriving) abound; Mad Men, True Blood, Lost, Glee, Pushing Daisies, How I Met Your Mother, Gilmore Girls are just a few (coincidentally, those that I watch).

Movies seem to have an opposite level of commitment to plot. The more popular a movie is, the more likely it is to be a predictable snooze-fest. Why is this? Wouldn't both be driven by character development and a healthy sense of plot?

My case study for this is Lost. The sci-fi Gilligan's Island is ending in May and I have been Hulu-ing my way through the past 100+ episodes. I'm to the end of the fourth season and have been wowed by the almost acrobatic way Lost's plot balances itself. And yes, I'm going to talk about major plot points now (SPOILERS, for those of you managing a Lost-free existence).

Season One: Like naive tourists in a rough part of town, the castaways of season one only venture into the light when things are safe. The first season functions much like a classy thriller; we see just enough to keep us satiated.

Season Two: The Hatch-ariffic second season plays as a theological debate. The castaways have to hit a button or presumably die, but that's hardly the most best part. The back and forths--between Locke and Jack, between Ben and everybody else--that are played in all grays make many episodes feel like philosophical debates. Additionally, Michelle Rodriguez's Ana Lucia spends a lot of time ass-kicking. Season two plays like a action movie with substance. It moves off of the character-driven base of season one.

Season Three: Camp comes into play when Ben Linus and the suburbanite Others kidnap Jack, Sawyer and Kate. Crucially, this season was not well-recieved. Certain plots felt too much like re-hash--Kate oscillated between Jack and Sawyer for one too many times.

Season Four: Thanks to the Writer's Strike, Lost was a tight plot machine in the fourth season. Flashforwards brought intrigue to current events on the island; on the island there were fresh new characters--Daniel Faraday, be my physics teacher!--and the real promise of escape.

Personally, I dug season three's camp factor, but I know from slight research that it was tremendously unpopular. Things tightened back up when the show's creators worked out a deal as to exactly how long the show would run. This, I believe, is key. Having a finite number of shows, Lost's creators were no longer making a television show and were now making a 100+ hour long film. Given that they are imminently capable, the order of the day comes to orchestrating their opus.

Television writers are getting smarter. They're building shows in segments to satisfy viewers at an incremental level.

The question is, why are films dragging on? I suspect greed. Execs and studio heads want to jam everything into every film to ensure their maximum audiences. Audiences lose in the bargain.



Watch this nifty video. Some folks made a theme song for Lost and won at Comi-con. (Overall, you can see the multitude of plots.)
*Confession: I watch a lot of reality television. But the classy Bravo/Project Runway type. No Flavor of Love (since season one).

Defending my enjoyment of that Kristen Bell movie

Confession, for a second I forgot the title of the movie I'm about to defend my enjoyment of...this may spell forgettable-ness. But really, it's good. And definitely not as a bad as a lot of reviews have made it out to be.

(When in Rome! That's it!)

Anyways, When in Rome, starring Kristen Bell and Josh "Married to Fergilicious" Duhamel is a mostly solid entry into the romcom canon. The set up has Bell and Duhamel's characters meeting cute at a Roman wedding--she's the Maid of Honor and he's the Best man, natch--and subsequently falling in love. There's a bit with the "Fountain of Love" too, which resulted in random characters played by Dax Shepard, Will Arnett, that guy from Napoleon Dynamite, and Danny DeVito. Bell's character, snookered on prosecco, steals their love coins. I guess.

(DANNY DEVITO! True fact: he made Kristen Bell look taller than she ever has in a scene where they were walking next to each other.)

But it's not the plot that's important. You know what'll happen. Never will Kristen Bell wind up with Will Arnett when Josh Duhamel is around to be more compatible age-wise and star-wise. (Not that either are huge stars. But they're the same types of actors.)

What's important is the fact that the banter is snappy, the mood is light, and everything turns out okay in the end. We're in a recession, people! Something has to be predictable, and maybe When in Rome is all we're going to get right now...

So yes, I liked it. I liked it because it was silly and fluffy and still at the end I was happy they had their own Roman wedding. I don't think it's okay that Bell's main quest was to "let love happen"; I also don't expect romantic comedies to be deep voyages into the existential crises of twentysomethings...that's what Facebook is for...

Please enjoy another romantic comedy focused on fluff and love: