I’ve been an avid Lost watcher since the first plane crash (I think I’ve counted at least 4 so far). I’ve stayed tuned in through the ups and downs. The frustrating finales, the endless third season full of questions which we all knew deep down that they had no intention of ever answering. A few months ago though, midway through season 5 I made a decision: Enough. I finally jumped ship. I still remember the Lost moment which did it. Sun receives a phone call, and rather than just tell us who’s on the other end Lost plays it’s trademark “whaaa?” music and flashes to something else, deliberately obscuring the identity of the person on the other end, and leaving us wondering for nearly sixty minutes just who the heck it is. When that question was finally answered, it turned out not be a question worth answering. The person on the other end was the Lost equivalent of Sun’s drycleaner. There was no mystery, Lost had, as it so often does, simply created drama and tension around nothing. Lost had once again jerked me around and I finally said forget it.
But nobody ever really leaves the island. A couple of weeks ago the season ended and the verdict from my friends was that the finale, which I’d boycotted since I’d missed all of the last half of the season and was now out of the loop, was fantastic. Still I resisted, until this weekend, when Lost sucked me back in.
This weekend I watched Lost the way it’s always been meant to be watched. All at once, in heavy doses, as if there were a cable protruding from my brain and pouring polar bear filled episodes directly into my cerebral cortex. In one day I knocked out ten episodes, back to back to back. It’s the way Lost must be watched. Suddenly all the annoying mystery phone calls to Sun’s drycleaner no longer mattered. Those silly attempts to create mystery out of nothing become mere footnotes when you’re watching it all at once, with one episode flowing into the next and connecting right into one another. They try to duplicate the effect of watching the entire series as one long endeavor, with those little “previously on Lost” montages before each episode… but it just doesn’t cut it. read this entry »
When Doctor Who returns to the airwaves this season it’ll arrive not only with a brand new Doctor (the youngest actor ever to play the part… Matt Smith is only 26), but with a new companion too. The good news? She’s pretty and she can’t possibly be any more annoying than Donna Noble.
BBC America has launched its phase one. What the hell does that mean? A brand new, 2 minute trailer for their upcoming Torchwood miniseries, Torchwood: Children of the Earth. 
Something disturbing is hatching over at Fox, something even worse than a facehugger. Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse for the Alien franchise after the disaster that was the Alien Vs. Predators, Fox goes and does this. 
Terminator Salvation is an entertaining film, as long as you don’t think about it. The special effects are splashy the action is fast-paced and fun. Even the characters are, with the exception of Bale’s somewhat blank John Connor, interesting and well acted. Anton Yelchin in particular, who you may have noticed a couple of weeks ago as Chekov in Star Trek, really shines here as Kyle Reese. In fact, forget John Connor. They should have given us an entire movie focused on him. No the movie’s problems have nothing to do with anything that happened on set during the film’s making, they’re much deeper and more ingrained than that. It’s the script. It’s the entire premise on which the film is built that’s at fault and there’s really nothing the movie’s one-named director McG, even if he’d been allowed to deliver the R-rated movie this franchise deserved, could have done to fix that.
The unthinkable has happened. Disney is remaking Flight of the Navigator, a seminal, untouchable film for anyone who was a kid in the 80s. After the limp, lame mess they made of Witch Mountain earlier this year, there’s no reason to believe they’ll do anything other than utterly destroy all our happy memories of Navigator with the reboot. 
It’s all over for Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles. There had been some speculation amongst fans that Fox might be willing to renew the robot stompin sci-fi show for another season, but today the network announced it’s fall 2009 prime time lineup, and Sarah Connor isn’t on it.
Going into the weekend, there was speculation that Trek might actually have the warp power to beat out the newly debuting Angels & Demons to hold onto the top box office spot for a second weekend, becoming the first Trek to do so since First Contact. The results are in, and it didn’t happen.