Clancy Chronologically: Without Remorse

You've been on pins and needles for somebody to review the books your dad was reading when you were in middle school; we're here to help.  Last year, we read all of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan books in order of Ryanverse chronology rather than order of publication (we include the John Clark and Jack Ryan Jr. books in this process).  This year, we're doing it again and posting about each of the books as we complete them/manage to be sufficiently unlazy to actually post a blog.  Your comments are more than welcome. NOTE: POSSIBLE DECADES-OLD SPOILERS!!!

Why Without Remorse?
By this point Jack Ryan, brief Marine/history professor/stock broker/desk jockey at CIA had already hijacked a Soviet nuclear sub, dismantled an Irish terrorist sub-unit, forced the defection of the USSR's intelligence chief, rescued a unit of covert troops in South America, and prevented nuclear war.  One can imagine Clancy was ready to channel his cockamamie yet well executed plots through a different character.

John Clark, né John Kelly, was introduced to us in Clear and Present Danger as the badass in charge of America's secret war on the drug cartels who nearly ends the Jack Ryan series when he thinks Ryan is behind cutting off the soldiers in Colombia.  In Without Remorse, we get a bit of an origin story of the future polylingual badass who will be in charge of executing virtually every major armed intelligence operation for the next 40 years.

Plot/Subplots
Our primary setting is in the Baltimore area, starting at the end of 1970/beginning of 1971. Having recently left the Navy SEALs for civilian life as an underwater demolitions expert, John Kelly loses his new wife in a tragic car accident.  Months later, he picks up a hitchhiker, Pam, with whom he strikes up a hasty romance.  They start to heal each other's wounds, his from losing his family and hers from falling into drugs and prostitution. Kelly takes a stupid chance in helping Pam bring her former pimp to justice, resulting in her getting killed and him nearly so.  And in a way completely unrelated to Steven Seagal's classic film Hard to Kill, Kelly seeks revenge on anybody who ever may have possibly hurt or insulted Pam, and does so...without remorse.

Jack Ryan's dad, Emmett, is the detective in charge of finding the mysterious expertly trained/polite/murderous hobo who is taking down a host of local pimps and scumbags.  He eventually puts 2 and 2 together.

Colonel Robin Zacharias, air combat mega-genius, wreaks major havoc on North Vietnamese radar defense systems.  In a daring raid, he is shot down and captured.  The North Vietnamese just want to use him as a punching bag, but Soviet intelligence officer Colonel Grishanov discovers Robin's value as an intelligence source and, improbably, as a friend.

The military and CIA work together to discover and then rescue American POWs.  I imagine the operation would be more of the province of DIA to handle than CIA, but that doesn't really work for getting John Kelly/Clark to meet Jack Ryan in the CIA.

If you've read any Tom Clancy books, you'll be very surprised that all of these plots eventually converge in our main characters.

Clancy's Women
We'll cover this topic in greater depth in future posts, but Tom Clancy's female characters usually come in one of two forms: saint or shrew.  Pam the prostitute is actually a saint, but one in the making.  Here's how you can tell: all of Clancy's honorable women can really cook.  Pam starts off as a horrible cook, but as Kelly and his new friends the Rosens help her become a better and healthier person, she also learns to cook.  Clancy has an unfortunate propensity to qualify women's looks rather than just describing their appearance. Pam is hot but too skinny when we first meet her. Sarah Rosen, brilliant clinician and compassionate human, is described thusly: "She was a rather dumpy woman, short and overweight.  All in all she looked like the sort of woman who, behind the wheel of a car, attracts the hatred of male drivers."  Drivers like Tom Clancy perhaps?  The prostitutes are actually treated with empathy, written as victims rather than cancers on society.  Women are to be protected by Clancy heroes.

Clancy Heroes
Heroes in the Ryanverse tend to be well-educated, polylingual Catholics who have served in the military; bonus points for being of Irish descent. Kelly, whom the CIA rechristens Clark in the book, can almost check off all of these boxes but lacks the formal education of the usual Clancy hero. What he lacks in diplomas he abounds in School of Life accolades, naturally very smart and analytical. The CIA will train him in a variety of skills later.

Bad Guys and Xenophobia
Ultimately Clancy's books value competence above all.  The Ryanverse very much respects Russians, British, Germans, and Japanese for their skill and strength even when those characters are the enemy. But Clancy has no use for those he deems uncultured, like the Vietnamese, Chinese (heaven help us when we get to The Bear and the Dragon), or various Middle Easterners.  Clancy generally isn't all that interested in the "why" of the bad guys or in describing them in human terms, but even less so if they aren't willing to put on a uniform and show their face for their cause.

The bad guys in Without Remorse are a diverse lot: vicious southern white pimps, Italian-American mafiosi, a cunning black drug dealer, a crooked cop, traitors in the U.S. government, vicious Vietnamese prison guards, and a Russian intelligence officer.  Of these, only the latter is given much humanity, and he's the only one who doesn't meet a violent end.  Clancy doesn't deal in loose ends (even a couple of mobsters who murdered a tertiary character in Pennsylvania get taken down).  In Ryanverse, dumb people die first, untrained second, and the skilled/trained last. Eventually, bad guys only survive if the good guys want them to, e.g. they want information or to preserve their own humanity (like Jack not killing Sean Miller in Patriot Games).

Dialogue
Clancy's strength as a writer include research, details, plotting, big ideas, and being entertaining.  His capacity for writing dialogue well doesn't really extend beyond the military and government people, and most of them end up sounding the same.  Details of foreign-ness and other-ness are largely communicated in stereotypes (those Russians sure do love their vodka, British their tea, etc.)  While descriptions of criminal activities are convincing, let's just say the speech of the Baltimore criminal population isn't exactly in David Simon's league.

Conversations between males and females in this book are excruciating.

Review
In terms of building and interweaving plots, Without Remorse is, as you'd expect in this series, masterfully constructed.  John Kelly's skill set makes him capable both to perform both a long-undetected murder spree (though the irony is that his training and previous relationship with the police is what gets him identified) and be desirable to the CIA's operations division.  What strains credulity the most is the overwhelming ambivalence toward the aforementioned murder spree by everyone in his life who is aware of his crimes, people who are otherwise kind, decent, and law-abiding.  Even the cops give him an hour to run away when they come to arrest him.  It's not as if Kelly tries to make much of a case for his actions; he just informs his friends and bosses at CIA what he's done and what he's about to do and not one of them calls the cops or spends any significant time trying to make him stop; they all just agree that these bad guys have it coming, so why not let their friend John do the work, despite the danger to him and themselves? (Nevermind the morality or legality aspect.)  The phrase "without remorse" apparently applies to every single character among the good guys.

Kelly's relationship with Florence Nightingale future wife Sandy is somewhat smart, but mostly preposterous. Sandy is a recent Vietnam widow, a gifted nurse who doesn't care for the war or Kelly's violence. Clancy has them take it slow - we don't actually see them date in the book - and creates some real friendship.  But Kelly continually dumps on her, confessing his horrible crimes to her, and putting her in harm's way.  A woman who lost her beloved husband to violence is going to be cool with hooking up with a serial killer because she just knows he'd never hurt her?  If a woman knows that you've killed a dozen people to avenge your hooker girlfriend's murder and still agrees to go on that first date, we guess she's a keeper.

The storyline of Robin Zacharias is a highlight of the novel.  Tom Clancy gets to nerd out about weapons and tactics, but also gives a compelling account of Robin's journey of faith while in captivity.  Robin is seduced by Col. Grishanov, lured in by his comfort and friendship: they're just two pilots talking about their love of aircraft and suspicion of common enemies.  In this oasis away from his regular brutal routine, Robin starts giving away too much, personally and professionally. Grishanov is initially just playing the role of spy, but comes to genuinely like and respect Zacharias. While not a precise comparison, it's a bit like those teen movies in the late 90s where the guy asks the girl out only as a bet, but comes to truly have feelings for her (10 Things I Hate About You, etc.) When Robin realizes his unwitting betrayal of his country and his faith, it's a rare poignant moment which compels Zacharias to recenter on his most important principles to help him endure his imprisonment.

Without Remorse is part typical revenge thriller, part Clancy here's-where-the-government-is-actually-competent layered fiction.  As with most of his work, there are few surprises and the outcomes feel inevitable, but there is a bit of a twist in the POW rescue mission story.  Tom always does a good job of creating a vivid environment in action scenes and almost always is clumsy in interpersonal portrayals.  It's mostly an entertaining read, but is his darkest and brutal work by far.

Would It Make a Good Movie?
It could, but like most Clancy novels, given their length and intricacy, it would be better served being a mini-series or longer (I think the Ryanverse books would make an excellent anthology series).  In order to make a great movie, you'd have to address the whole "everybody is fine with serial murder because they're bad guys" thing, make the Pam romance longer and more natural, and have people talk to each other like actual human beings.  The tension built as Kelly is training for his rescue mission in Vietnam and completing his self-appointed mission in Baltimore could be very cool on film if done right.  Ryan Gosling could play a young John Clark and someone like Aaron Paul could play Robin Zacharias.

Miscellanea
A Wikipedia user figured out the time frame based on references to the Song Tay POW raid, which took place in November 1970, and ongoing references to the MLB season, culminating in the 1971 World Series between the Orioles and Pirates. (Tom Clancy would later become a minority owner of the Orioles.)
Jack Ryan makes a cameo appearance as a college student visiting home from Boston College; his father teases him about joining the Marines.
The way the drug dealers get their product in country is ingenious and sad.
Kelly hunting the drug dealers as a hobo is terrifying.
Tom Clancy is obsessed with coffee: a Google search of the book suggests there are 35 references to coffee.  Good guys also drink beer in the Ryanverse (32 mentions), except the LDS ones: Zacharias is one of many Mormons kicking butt for Uncle Sam.

The Bafflingly Stupid Ending of the HIMYM Episode "Sunrise"

I can't decide which group the producers of How I Met Your Mother hate more: their characters or the audience.  I've dismissed many a criticism of the show, but the final scene of the episode "Sunrise" was the most idiotic thing I can remember being shown on television:

(Image by http://silvrenithron.imgur.com/)

The GIF is a mercifully sped-up depiction of a payoff of a metaphor the least intelligent 7th grader could discern.  As referenced in a previous episode, we see Ted's brief but apparently significant relationship with a balloon as a boy, a balloon he inadvertently lets go.  The final scene is even more ridiculous in real time and is an aggressively terrible artistic choice.  If you haven't seen the episode, you might assume this clip is meant to be comical.  This clip and episode reflect that Carter Bays and Craig Thomas structured the series poorly and have let it drag on far too long.  

Let's first discuss the issues with this episode itself.  Contextually it's even more disappointing after a great episode, "How Your Mother Met Me," a moving demonstration of HIMYM's romantic side.  Ted's definition of love and his explanation of his actions paint him as desperate at best and willfully destructive of his friends' happiness at worst.  Unfortunately, even the mind-blowingly dumb Robin/balloon symbolism can't be believed as an entirely definitive end to this storyline; we've seen repeated efforts to show Ted as having accepted reality.  He and Robin were always fundamentally doomed as a couple: they are at their core incompatible, valuing very different things and seeing their world in significantly different ways.  The Ted/Robin "relationship" has been a dry well for several seasons.  Robin moved on, moved on with someone they are both close with, and never was anything but abundantly honest about how she felt/didn't feel about Ted.  Ted's efforts to rekindle a relationship for years have landed as sad and desperate, not romantic in the way that is supposed to be at the core of his appeal.

The episode also undercuts several seasons' work of rehabilitating Barney's soul.  Super-drunk Barney finds two random proteges to teach the ways of "being awesome," suggesting that his personal changes in behavior and outlook came not from accepting that his previous lifestyle was damaging to himself and others (and gross and dangerous and predatory), but more that he's just moving on to the next stage.  The tale of Barney's apprentices is a serious storytelling problem.  In previous seasons, we see Barney meet his own philandering father and recognize the painful consequences his father's absence had on his life.  He recognizes that his parents' behavior and his own subsequent choices have messed him up.  His old ways die hard, but we're led to believe that he's different...until "Sunrise" suggests otherwise.  There isn't anything wrong with a show redeeming a character and then soiling him again - that would be an interesting and fairly unprecedented strategy - but it is unlikely that we'll see any lasting negative consequences for Barney, Robin, or anybody else as a result.

The Marshall/Lily confrontation was well-earned and fairly well-executed.  Over the course of the series, the writers have subtly given them a complex, meaningful relationship.  They very obviously love and support each other, but face real obstacles.  Lily is dismissive of Marshall's supernatural beliefs and disrespects his family.  She has stepped on Marshall more than once in pursuit of her dreams.  Marshall treats her dreams with tremendous hypocrisy.  He offers verbal support for her artistic ambitions, but he at no point considers her a real artist.  While Marshall is a touch too hard on himself, especially in the context of their relationship, that is true to his character.  The result of their conversation (in person and in Marshall's mind) in "Sunrise" is a significant discussion of how couples can communicate and make decisions.  HIMYM would have done well to supply Ted's relationships with more of these layers of maturity and nuance given that his romantic search is supposed to be the emotional core of the show.

Deciding to set the entire final season over the wedding weekend was a mistake, but it didn't have to be quite so poorly executed.  The show has never been limited by a sequential time frame and narrowing so much of the plot to such a short period has led to a lot of meaningless, illogical, lazy, and counterproductive story lines (did we learn nothing from 24?).  Even within the nominal framework of the wedding weekend, instead of irritating issues like Jason Segel almost literally phoning in the first third of the season, Marshall's maddening road trip, lousy rehashing of the Barney/Robin Doubts About Our Relationship issues, unfunny bringing back of previous characters, they could have done a range of intriguing stories/concepts:

More musical episodes.  HIMYM has a very musically talented cast.  Jason Segel and Neil Patrick Harris are legitimately good musicians and the rest of the core cast does well.  The Mother, Cristin Milioti, is a Tony Award nominee for best actress in a musical, and her rendition of "La Vie en Rose" in the preceding episode was gorgeous.  Even frequent guest Wayne Brady has major musical skills.  The show has consistently done an excellent job with music.  We'd all much rather have seen more music, comical or not, than several episodes of Marshall bickering with Sherri Shepherd's ill-conceived character or Ted spending three too many episodes with Jeanette.

Barney/Robin/Ted drama that isn't Ted pining for Robin.  Ted should be jealous of the wedding, not because he's Lifetime-movie-ly obsessed with Robin, but because it's not his.  He could be legitimately angry that he feels like he's done everything the right way (true or not), done everything he could to have the wife and family he wants, but The Universe has denied him.  Add to that Robin and especially Barney have no such history of wanting and planning for such a life, there could have been real drama for Ted and the group in Ted feeling screwed over by life.  If they wanted to still try to milk some drama out of Barney/Robin/Ted, how about some legitimate anger and conflict between Ted and Barney?  Ted's obsession threatens his friends' happiness and is betrayal on several levels, but nobody gets actually angry over this.

More of The Freaking Mother.  Is it too crazy to have more of the titular character of the show who is played by an award-nominated actress who is perfectly cast for the part?  "How Your Mother Met Me" was funny, moving, smart, and charming.  We saw a great character who was more than a collection of weird/cute things on Ted's arbitrary checklist.  The Mother's story and Cristin Milioti's performance merit much more than a single episode to be featured as the lead.  As long as the show has been on, couldn't we also have had some funny stories about The Kids?

Robin flying away at the end of "Sunrise" was the case in point for all of the viewers' frustrations over these final few seasons.  The constant attempts at Robin/Ted undermine the characters, are excruciatingly executed, and most importantly, wasting time that could be spent telling much more interesting, significant, and entertaining stories.

                                                 What would have made the episode better

                                                 (Image by http://silvrenithron.imgur.com/)

Karate Kid, Minus the Karate

Remakes aren't necessarily bad. But for every Ocean's 11, there's twenty movies like the Gus Van Zant Psycho shot-for-shot redo and Steve Martin's awful, awful, awful Pink Panther. The Pink Panther remake was so horrible, my wife and I quit being friends with the people who took us to see it just so we didn't have to ever think about it again.

Classic movies come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them work because of a great story - these are the easiest movies to copy. Some work because of unforgettable performances and chemistry - these movies are impossible to replicate with any degree of quality. Stories can be duplicated, updated, and tweaked to suit a new cast, though that has to be done with great care.  A decade or two from now somebody can definitely remake Jurassic Park because Crichton's story was so awesome - a rich, unethical bastard tries to play God and creates a dinosaur park; what could possibly go wrong? Steven Spielberg's unbelievably good visual and sound effects brought it to life, but we would all do well to forget the performances of Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, et al.

Films that are classic because of acting and chemistry should not be duplicated. Take, for instance, The Godfather. The Godfather isn't plot-driven; the plot is meandering, if anything, and meanders Forrest Gumpishly. In short, the story is the moral decay of a man who was an army hero, separated from his family's untoward dealings, who not only eventually embraces the business, but becomes even more vicious and evil than any of them could have anticipated. Al Pacino was so effective in every phase of the transition that many in Hollywood still think he can act. (Hasn't been true since 1995 - don't forget dude was even in Gigli. Not kidding.) Marlon Brando's epic portrayal of Don Corleone spawned dozens of copycats in mafia productions thereafter. Nobody's been stupid enough to try to touch this, but in part it's because the story isn't all that interesting.

I'm not saying that Karate Kid is as good as The Godfather, but it is still iconic as a coming of age story exploring issues of family, friendship, parenting, and self-discovery. The Karate Kid is beloved because of the Daniel/Mr. Miyagi relationship. We really see the hole in Daniel's life left by not having a father to show him how to be a man and the deficit of family joy in Miyagi's life, having lost his wife decades before. Each fills the void in the other's heart, a process we see as Miyagi teaches Daniel about becoming a man as he learns karate. Much of the story is told without dialogue, in well-directed quiet moments (John G. Avildsen also directed Rocky and Lean On Me). Ralph Macchio nails the role of the vulnerable and earnest Daniel, but Pat Morita's Miyagi is convincingly wise, witty, drunken, and heartbroken. For his efforts, Morita was nominated for an Oscar.

And Jackie Chan will match this how? Jackie is a hell of an entertainer, but we don't have any evidence he can act. We don't want to hear Madonna try her hand at opera. Jaden Smith did a good job playing Will Smith's son, but that's a bit like crediting Eminem's performance in 8 Mile. Otherwise, Jaden has not put himself in the Haley Joel Osment category. I assume Will Smith is helping guide his son's choices. Will built a strong career based on savvy choices, acting in roles which would make a lot of money in pretty good movies or show his range as an actor and sometimes both. He also turned down The Matrix for Wild, Wild West and gave us Seven Pounds.

This movie is risky. The trailer looks good enough with well-choreographed fights and beautiful cinematography. However, trailers can make just about any movie look appealing. Mel Gibson's What Women Want looked pretty funny, but virtually every watchable scene in the movie was in the commercials and the rest of the movie was total garbage. Jackie Chan isn't a proven box-office draw. The Rush Hour movies did really well, but Around the World in 80 Days lost at least $40M and he isn't the lead in any true blockbusters not co-starring Chris Tucker.

As for the title, even in the trailer it says that "Dre" will be learning Kung Fu and not karate. The people behind the movie explain that Dre learned Karate from his uncle and mistakenly thought he could use it to defend himself. Chan's character will show him the errors of his ways and teach him that Kung Fu must be combated with Kung Fu. So they named the movie after the way the kid thought he could fight. It's a stupid and obscure explanation, and even Jackie Chan said they'd call it Kung Fu Kid in China.

Thus are the perils for the Karate Kid remake. Will it sink to the levels of The Next Karate Kid (featuring a performance by Hillary Swank that she certainly had Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-ed out of her brain) or will it be an Ocean's 11? You'll have to tell me 'cause I'm not risking it.

Is the Smoke Monster Behind the Return of the Ocean Six?

I make constant fun of people's stupid Lost theories, how they're based on little evidence, stupid conjecture, and the moronic sci-fi they've encountered other places. Like that would stop me from trotting out my own stupid Lost theory.

I propose that the Smoke Monster orchestrated the return of the Oceanic Six and Ben to the island. Why would he do such a thing? He knew he could use Ben to kill Jacob and could use Locke's form to convince Ben to do it. Island rules required that their return be as similar to the way they originally got there, hence the necessity of as many of the Oceanic Six going as possible. Smokey needed Locke to get off the island and act as a recruiter, saying he was going to have to die. He did this via Richard Alpert when Locke was flashing through time and FLocke had Richard remove the bullet and deliver his message about getting them back. Smokey needed Locke to leave the island, die, and come back - that's why he had him move the island in the first place.

When did that happen? In the episode "Cabin Fever," Hurley, Ben, and Locke go looking for "Jacob's" cabin. They decide the Locke should go in by himself, where he speaks to "Christian" and sees Claire. Locke asks if "Christian" is Jacob, to which he's told, "No, but I can speak for him." This scene should give us pause for a few reasons. First, in "Ab Aeterno" in season six, Jacob appoints Richard as his sole intermediary, so anybody else claiming to speak on his behalf is a liar. Second, it's the Smoke Monster's modus operandi to appear in the form of people who are dead on the island. Third, who is hanging out with "Christian" but crazy, crazy Claire, the same Claire who said to Jin, "That's not John, that's my friend" (i.e. Smokey). "Christian" later tells John that Ben wasn't supposed to move the island, he was. Smokey needed Locke off the island, not Ben.

To summarize: Smokey convinces Locke to move the island so Locke would be transported to Tunisia in order for Locke to die and come back with the Oceanic Six. Ben intervenes, moves the island and is thus banished, screwing things up. Smokey takes corrective measures, leading Locke back to the frozen donkey wheel. Locke goes back to the real world, fails to gather the Oceanic Six, tries to kill himself before Ben murders him, and the Ocean Five, dead Locke, and Ben go back to the island. Smokey, now FLocke, convinces Ben to kill Jacob. Then Ben kills Jacob.

Think I'm crazy? Consider the when they get inside Jacob's dwelling in season five's "The Incident", FLocke tells him, "You have no idea what I went through to get here." I formalized this theory and then ABC release this clip for next week's episode.

I Got 24 Problems

Nice to see that 24 is straightening itself out. Like the Cincinnati Bengals, season 8 has a lot of bad character issues, but unlike Team Ochocinco, Team Bauer is beginning to smooth out a lot of the problems. President Hassan, lovingly referred to as Fantastic Sam by Entertainment Weekly's Lynnette Rice, started off as a reformer in the Gandhi/Mandela mold who has a thing for white girls, then becomes part-time despot when he's betrayed, then becomes paranoid and emasculated. Dana goes from tough-minded tech to jittery girlfriend of Freddie Prinze Jr. to chick who somehow hid her background from CTU (the same organization that can tell the shade of skid marks in your underwear from outer space), to crazy thief-helping lady who needs Freddie Prinze Jr. to clean up her mess. The scenes with Hassan and Dana/Jenny, up until two weeks ago, were nigh unwatchable. Then the writers remembered the most important key to making a great episode of 24: it's all about Jack.

Jack not only solves all of the problems on the show, he fixes all of the problems of the show. The show is structured such that we couldn't possibly care about Hassan and his marital problems. How did they fix that? Give him a gun, running next to Jack. Dana/Jenny nearly singlehandedly derailed the season. How did they make her interesting and useful? Now she's a traitor, an opponent for Jack. More Jack is always the solution to a flagging episode. If Jack hasn't kicked some ass or at least barked at a terrorist/traitor in the past 20 minutes, it's time to add that scene. Supporting characters come and go - Tony, Michelle, Kim, the 58 presidents they've had on the series - but Jack is forever.

24 is truly at its best when combining Jack's badassery with debate over tough and relevant ethical questions. Season five, the show's best season, asked us, what do you do when the president is the terrorist? Season seven reminded us of genuine questions about the efficacy and morality of coercive interrogation if it means stopping greater evil. This last episode, the top bureaucrats around the President have a vehement debate about whether they should accede to the demands of the terrorists and hand over Hassan or risk the consequences of a giant dirty bomb attack on Manhattan. It's a stirring exchange and sets up one of the great scenes in the show's history: President Taylor's ballsy speech about courage and morality. Actress Cherry Jones once again convinces us to vote Taylor, somehow being even more awesome than President Palmer.

For the series' final ten episodes, let's hope the show sticks to the formula that has made it great: more Jack.

LOST: Why Punk is Dead, but Richard Isn't

In discussing this week's episode of Lost, "Ab Aeterno", my wife and I compared what we thought about how they chose to tell Richard's story versus the expectations we had for it. We had both anticipated that it would be more of Richard's story across the various eras of the island we had seen, starting with him coming to the island up to the time of Ben and Locke. Our vision of his episode was much like the time travel story device in season five, jumping around to different times to see glimpses of Rousseau's story, Widmore's history, other groups who had spent time on the island, etc.

I hadn't yet recognized that choosing to do a more tradition flashback for Richard was a deeper way of telling his story and truer to what the show does. Lost is the anti-24: the writers never take the exposition bat to your head; they give you the critical details and let you fill in the blanks and come to your own conclusions. In the context of a well-crafted mini-biopic, we learn how Richard comes to the island and what he thinks of it (at varying times, it's Hell or the thing preventing Hell from being unleashed), why Richard doesn't age, how the statue of Taweret broke, how Jacob interacts with The Others, the methodologies both Jacob and the Man in Black use to forward their philosophies, and most importantly, what the island is. Instead of telling us the stuff that happened in Richard's life, they gave us the principal narrative which tells us what motivates him and shapes his character; via his story we get big pieces about the mythology of the series.

Kudos to the creative team of the show for not using Richard's episode as the blunt instrument I was expecting, which would have told me little about the character himself. By going to the character-centric storytelling formula which made previous seasons so excellent, we got all the information about the grander scheme of the series we needed as well as the reason we should care about that.

I've Taken Your Vantage Point

Is it just me or is it impossible to tell if Dennis Quaid is phoning it in or just plain can't act? His decades-long Harrison Ford impersonation inspires just barely enough confidence to keep watching his bland handsomeness. He's like a wide receiver who runs a 4.3 40 yard dash, but can't catch the ball consistently or run routes accurately - we keep cheering because of his likability, but keep needing to look away because of the actual performance.


This description of Dennis Quaid also applies to his movie Vantage Point. We want to like the movie - interesting concept, likable cast (Matthew Fox, Forrest Whitaker, etc.), potential for cool political intrigue - but the film is thinner than Mischa Barton on a coke bender. We see the same stretch of time from different points of view, each angle revealing new information and dimensions to our story. It's cool in concept, but the problem with that is twofold: 1) it's repetitive seeing some of the same footage several times and 2) we really only end up with about 20 minutes of story. The run time is 90 minutes, but it feels shorter than that.

With this approach, there is little in the way of character development, so we don't care about the good guys or understand/fear the bad guys. The movie isn't nearly as smart as it thinks it is, sort of the film version of Kanye West. Perhaps the most entertaining part of the DVD is hearing Sigourney Weaver (who has what amounts to a cameo role) in the extras sing the praises of director Pete Travis again and again.*

Taken is a similarly short movie, but is less complicated, has fewer characters, and has few special effects. Why is it so much more effective? First, Liam Neeson is awesome. Somewhere around the Bourne movies, many in Hollywood figured out "Why not have our lead actor in our action movies be somebody who can actually act rather than someone who just looks the part?" This tradition is carried on in the recent Batman movies, James Bond movies, etc. Neeson first showed us his action chops in Batman Begins (since we all agree the Star Wars prequels didn't happen) and not only is credible, but makes us feel his plight. The movie takes the time to establish his relationship with his daughter and even his ex-wife as well as laying out what in his professional background would enable him to be such a world-savvy badass. They're simple scenes with little drama, but they help create the emotional resonance for the rest of the story. When we see Liam fly off to Europe and bash faces in, we understand who he is, what his daughter means to him, what the bad guys want, and why we should care about any of it.

That is not to say that Taken doesn't have some weak components to it, but those elements center around the daughter. Kim is played by Maggie Grace who is supposed to be 17, but considering she was playing 20 on Lost six years ago, it's a big stretch. Add to that she and her friend were covering up the fact that the band they were going to chase around Europe was U2, a band for fogies and behind-the-times Soviet Bloc countries, is fairly dumb. The subplot of Kim's aspirations to be a famous singer is completely forgettable and actually a waste of time in a movie which doesn't waste time.

To summarize, while both movies are short and action-packed, Vantage Point is more in love with its concept than it is telling a story with characters we care about is while Taken uses nearly every minute to its maximum economy and doesn't pretend to be more of a story than it actually is. Lessons to be learned: actually take the time to let us form an opinion about the characters so the story has some meaning; it's better to hire people who can actually act and leave the pretty but dumb prom dates at home.


*Fake Sigourney quote: "Pete Travis is at the apex of all artists. Spielberg, Scorcese and the rest buckle in his presence because of their unworthiness."