Lost

I don’t really have time to watch anything new, or rather, I do have time but can’t be bothered. So I thought I’d check in with my thoughts on the biggest TV program of the moment. Most people in the UK won’t be getting the new season till June, so if you want things to be a surprise, I suggest you not read this. Those people lucky enough to live in Belgium are about 5 or 6 episodes in, and those smart enough to get Bit Torrent and download new episodes as they’re broadcast in the USA, like me, are right up to date with the 19th episode of season 2.

Just to make it clear here that I’m not going to get into speculation on the nature of the island and all the other quandaries and enigmas that have been set out. I’m looking at what we have so far in the way of television and how entertaining it is.

I missed the first season when it was first shown in the UK because I was working early shifts and had to be in bed. I picked up the season 1 DVD box set back in November, though, and got through all 26 episodes in just a few days. It was a genuinely very tense thriller, interspersed with excellent character material. The mysteries were compelling and the slow build worked very well, hitting a crescendo midway through the season with the discovery of the hatch and running with it till the season finale.

(Again, spoilers from here on in.)

The second season continues directly from where the first left off, with Locke and Kate deciding to go down the hatch, going missing and Jack going after them. What they find down there is a guy who has to press a button every 108 minutes. He does a runner and Locke takes over as button presser. In the first season, Locke was, without a doubt, one of the best developed and most interesting characters of the bunch. He was more ‘at one’ with the island than anyone else and the one most engaged in discovering the island’s mysteries. This is, of course, what led him to the hatch, but he’s spent most of the latest season stuck in there. Hunter-gatherer, shamanistic Locke is no more, dedicating his faith in fate and the events on the island to the pressing of a button. Simply, the character has been castrated. The most recent episode starts toward rectify this, but it may well be too late.

And I think this shows perfectly well the problem with the series. From the very beginning, the creators have insisted, in retaliation to claims that they’re making it up as they go along, that they know exactly what is going on, that they know what the big reveal will eventually be. It’s just a matter of getting there. But as the show is renewed each year, the ‘getting there’ part takes much longer, and so they have to find diversions for the characters. Locke, as one of the most proactive characters, was castrated for a good reason: by sticking him in the hatch, they cripple the plot, stop it from progressing. Now, the hatch may be part of the wider mystery and Locke's obsession with it is mostly in character (he's blindly faithful, he's looking to justify Boone's death in some way, his confidence has been shaken), but this does all whiff a bit of killing time. And really, that’s what they’re doing.

(There’s also the problem that, no matter how long the series runs for, the pay-off will always be the same, and people who don't realise that risk ultimately being disappointed for the amount of time they’ve invested. Let’s hope the producers know when to end it.)

That’s not to say the new season hasn’t had its highlights: the introduction of the tail section survivors, including the awesome Mr Eko, darker character turns for Charlie and Sayid, Claire remembering what happened to her when she went missing in season 1, and the continued excellent character material provided in the flashbacks. But while the first season did an excellent job and building real suspense, the latest season seems much more scattershot. It is much less structured and too involved in taking the scenic route to the eventual explanations, and as a result the questions surrounding what's really going on which drove the series through its first season are losing interest. The new season is in its run-up to the finale now, and is picking up the pace, but they really need to either provide more explanations or find a more interesting way of delaying them. I'm sure I'm not the only one getting bored, and unless the series gathers some momentum, I'll probably not bother with the third season.

Isao Takahata: Grave of the Fireflies

“September 21, 1945... that was the night I died.”

Isao Takahata again. For those not keeping up, he’s a director who works for Studio Ghibli, Japan's foremost animation studio. It's often compared to Disney (mainly by Disney, who bought Western distribution rights to their films a few years ago), but the comparison doesn't really hold water outside of them both making animated features. Grave of Fireflies, a film portraying how normal people try to continue to live during the Second World War, shows these stark differences.

The quotation above is taken from the opening of the film, which shows main character Seita dying of starvation in a public place and his ghost appearing nearby, reunited with the ghost of his little sister, Setsuko. They then accompany the viewer through the events that led them to that point. Their father is a high-ranking military official, their mother is killed in an air raid and so they’re shipped off to live at their aunt's house, who treats them like shit, so they leave and set up home an in abandoned house by the river. Not living within a community, they do not receive rations and it isn’t long before they’re driven to stealing in order to eat. Soon after, Setsuko falls victim to her hunger, and Seita, realising that he has lost his entire family, gives up hope.

I can’t think of too many Disney films which open with the main character’s death, but here it works incredibly well, setting the tone for the entire film. Rather than give the impression that the brother and sister duo are a pair of plucky underdogs who overcome seemingly insurmountable adversity, it tells us immediately that the story does not have an Americanised, rags-to-riches happy ending. This is not a film about the wonderful stoicism of the human spirit; it is a film about the hard and tragic realities of war.

Another very non-Disney image is the mother after the bombing and the removal of her body once she passes away. Primarily, it is burnt and bloody with limbs missing, and riddled with maggots when it is taken away, presumably to be thrown in a mass grave. The extremely graphic representation of her injuries is decidedly not PG-13 material, but again this is and unblinking look at the repercussions of war which does not patronise the viewer. The lack of a proper funeral for the mother is paralleled strongly with Setsuko’s cremation later in the film, demonstrating that while they starve because they live outside of a community, the freedom it allows them gives them back the right to bury and mourn their dead.

Finally, there is no good guy/bad guy dynamic in the film. While Disney would no doubt portray the sides as black and white (complete with camp, fetishist Nazis in leather gloves, probably anthropomorphised foxes or snakes), here there are only people and consequences. The Allies are never given a human face, certainly, only ever appearing in the form of the planes that drop the bombs, but neither are they vilified through dialogue or any other means. They, and the consequences of their presence, are simply presented as facts in these peoples’ lives. Similarly, Seita is not portrayed as good and honourable, scavenging from houses during air raids and stealing from farmers’ fields as a way to survive. The result is a character who is more a person than a caricature or stereotype, and the film, despite being animated, is much more realistic for it.

While the film is certainly not cheerful viewing, it is not all sullen. The scenes which develop Seita and Setsuko’s relationship are very touching and their early life living down by the river has an idyllic and innocent air to it, as the frolic and play in the countryside. The deeper emotional subtext of the film, with an overwhelmed Seita unable to mourn his mother properly and Setsuko being able to in a more naïve, innocent manner also provides an emotional core to the film. It is, though, an unflinching and an emotionally draining portrayal of what the war did to our apparent 'enemies'. And for that reason alone, it is more than worthy of your time.

The Atomium

The Atomium, for the uninitiated, is Brussels’ answer to the Eiffel tower. It’s a large steel structure made to mimic the structure of an atom, with the metal balls representing the nucleus, electrons, protons and neutrons. It was originally constructed back in the 50s, which is pretty impressive considering the engineering and construction work involved. It's located in a large, picaresque park in the north of Brussels, near Brupark and Mini-Europe, two other big tourist attractions.

I first went to the Atomium back in January, but it was closed during the off-peak winter period for some much needed restoration. This principally involved polishing the balls and making them gleam, which is no mean feat for a 103-metre tall structure. It reopened back in February, and I made the trek again when a friend was visiting a few weeks ago.

The initial reaction to the structure is one of awe. It is incredibly large, with few pictures doing justice to its scale. After queuing for quite some time on a busy Sunday, we finally got inside and were ushered straight to the lift, which climbs, at a speed quick enough to make your ears pop, the 100-odd feet to the highest sphere. The views from the top are amazing, both of the immediate area and further away in Brussels centre.

You then head back down the lift and are left to your own devices to explore the other balls. This is where the centre falls on its face. Each sphere is supposed to house separate exhibitions of some kind. Some are very informative (the history of the structure, details of the recent renovations), some are simply services (a cafe, a dormitory for visiting schoolchildren), others, however, are simply baffling: a whole room given over to one rather small abstract piece of art and a room with a big telly are just two of the things on offer here. Think of the Louvre in Paris. It serves two functions: firstly, it’s an art gallery which houses some of the most famous pieces of art in the world; secondly, it’s an important historical monument in its own right. I have the feeling that the Atomium could be used in a similar way, and feel that there is a lot of wasted space and wasted potential.

Still, focussing on what it is rather than what it could be, it’s certainly a fun day out, even if I wanted to actually climb the thing and they’d so kindly provided a lift and escalators.

Kevin Smith

I’ve wanted to write something about Kevin Smith for a while. He used to be my favourite filmmaker back in Sixth Form (a dizzying 7 years ago!), but he’s fallen from grace to the point where I find the site of him, and the thought of most of his films, quite sickening.

It was quite a gradual process which started with indifference – I just stopped watching them – and then when I switched completely from VHS to DVD, I never bothered to replace his films with DVD versions. When Clerks X (a 10th anniversary edition of Smith’s debut film) was released, I went back and watched the film, and enjoyed the hell out of it. Having not seen any of his films for a good three years, I also had a look at Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma… And that’s when it dawned on me: not only is this collection of work of quite poor quality, it is also remarkably strange oeuvre.

Clerks is undoubtedly the film that cut out a niche for Smith. It tells the story of two friends who work low-paid retail jobs in their hometown in small-town New Jersey. Filmed on a very small budget in the convenience store where Smith was working at the time, it’s a portrait of two young high school graduates who should have gone to university, but instead are happy loafing about, playing hockey, dealing with their love lives and harassing customers.

The film shows Smith’s lack of directorial style, though somewhat disguised beneath the restrictions of a low budget. But Smith has always been a writer more than a director and what stands out is the dialogue. Private contractors working on the Deathstar, Dante’s summing up of a woman’s role in sex, and, of course, the 36 dicks are all laugh-out-loud moments. The film seemed to be made to the gen-x, grunge generation of the early 90s: slackers, dick jokes, and general bad taste (including knocking over a coffin at a funeral and necrophilia), but even today there’s a lot to recommend the film. It has something of a naive charm and is genuinely very funny, something that later films would seem to forget.

Smith has claimed that Mallrats suffered from meddling producers and so he’s made himself bullet-proof to any criticism of that film. Chasing Amy, however, was much beloved and was a film that Smith very much wanted to make. Hailed on its release as Smith’s return to his indy roots after pissing about with $5,000,000 of studio money with his second film, it tells the story of a guy who falls in love with a lesbian and manages to convert her, only to find out that he wasn’t the first guy she was with and screw everything up. The most notable thing about the film is that Smith finally deals directly with the repressed, adolescent homoeroticism of the lead male characters which was clear in his two previous films. However, it reads as something of a meta-Kevin Smith film, and while Smith’s dialogue shines through on many occasions (“Hey, I always notice the far-away look in her eyes”), the plot is contrived, and the film just seems too self-conscious and too wrapped up in Smith’s real-life preoccupations to be good in its own right.

By the time Dogma came out, though, Kevin Smith had apparently forgotten how to be funny and decided to be morose (though morose with lots of swearing). Dogma, like Chasing Amy, was a deeply personal film for Smith, but for a filmmaker whose fan base was fuelled by the wide-eyed nihilism of gen-x slackers, the film was ill-advised. Sure, a new generation of 15-year-olds will love the swearing, dick jokes and shit demon, and the quasi-religious and spiritually confused will love the pious message, but Smith’s early fans, if they were still hanging around by this point – after distracting forays into studio production and self-referential homoeroticism – would certainly be turned off by a film that not only has a message, but one strongly anchored in Smith’s always-present Christian beliefs, very much in strong contrast to the ideas and lifestyles of the characters in his debut.

In this respect, Smith’s films can been seen as an odyssey from the nothingness of nihilism to the somethingness of faith; unfortunately, both the laughs and the fans deserted him along the way.