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proximoception) wrote2010-04-07 01:40 am
proximoception) wrote2010-04-07 01:40 am
(no subject)
Lost is annoying me again. How can we kill time now, the writers think, then think, have him find and convince all the others in world B. Having someone go and convince X number of others of something--anyone not sick of this device by now?
Association of Ideas Theater: I saw a few minutes of Eddie and the Cruisers on Fuse the other day and realized it's not just a determining influence on Velvet Goldmine--past the point of plagiarism, thinly veiled by Haynes' attempts to reference Citizen Kane as cover (as I've mentioned before here)--but also quite a large one on The Watchmen, of all things. Conceptually, I mean; it's by no means a good film, but the premise had promise. Surely it and The Big Chill have some shared ancestor movie--one schematically closer than Kane? They're from the same year but awful similar.
Perhaps both owed something to The Man Who Fell to Earth, since in its bizarre way that movie, too, was a descendant of Citizen Kane--a debt alluded to and/or dodged in its overt Third Man obsession, I guess. There are only three failures there, but every good screenwriter knows three occurrences suggest infinity.
Looking for sparks among the scattered ember-members of something that once seemed real isn't unrelated to the falling away of a normal society or questing band, one by one (maybe inaugurated by "Childe Roland" and immediately echoed in Idylls of the King?), found in or varied on in The Grapes of Wrath, The Crying of Lot 49, Catch-22, Blood Meridian and elsewhere. The And Then There Were None tradition and the horror movie paradigm it spawned is another, less interesting cousin. Does Moby Dick predate "Roland"?
The last movement of The Last of the Mohicans movie is a striking example of cast attrition, though I don't know how closely it sticks to Cooper.
The broader attrition tradition must go back long before Cooper. Something's hovering near my consciousness. A Christmas Carol? Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Perhaps something in Shakespeare--progressive isolation is important in King Lear and Macbeth. Not insignificant in Julius Caesar and Richard III, either...
Oh, duh, The Odyssey.
I think I really must be forgetting some link or links in the Eddie part of the family tree though. I don't mean mere Kane imitations, like Lenny or whatever, but ones connecting the dead or missing Kane figure with a lost American innocence, the '60s, something like that.
Association of Ideas Theater: I saw a few minutes of Eddie and the Cruisers on Fuse the other day and realized it's not just a determining influence on Velvet Goldmine--past the point of plagiarism, thinly veiled by Haynes' attempts to reference Citizen Kane as cover (as I've mentioned before here)--but also quite a large one on The Watchmen, of all things. Conceptually, I mean; it's by no means a good film, but the premise had promise. Surely it and The Big Chill have some shared ancestor movie--one schematically closer than Kane? They're from the same year but awful similar.
Perhaps both owed something to The Man Who Fell to Earth, since in its bizarre way that movie, too, was a descendant of Citizen Kane--a debt alluded to and/or dodged in its overt Third Man obsession, I guess. There are only three failures there, but every good screenwriter knows three occurrences suggest infinity.
Looking for sparks among the scattered ember-members of something that once seemed real isn't unrelated to the falling away of a normal society or questing band, one by one (maybe inaugurated by "Childe Roland" and immediately echoed in Idylls of the King?), found in or varied on in The Grapes of Wrath, The Crying of Lot 49, Catch-22, Blood Meridian and elsewhere. The And Then There Were None tradition and the horror movie paradigm it spawned is another, less interesting cousin. Does Moby Dick predate "Roland"?
The last movement of The Last of the Mohicans movie is a striking example of cast attrition, though I don't know how closely it sticks to Cooper.
The broader attrition tradition must go back long before Cooper. Something's hovering near my consciousness. A Christmas Carol? Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Perhaps something in Shakespeare--progressive isolation is important in King Lear and Macbeth. Not insignificant in Julius Caesar and Richard III, either...
Oh, duh, The Odyssey.
I think I really must be forgetting some link or links in the Eddie part of the family tree though. I don't mean mere Kane imitations, like Lenny or whatever, but ones connecting the dead or missing Kane figure with a lost American innocence, the '60s, something like that.
no subject
no subject
The show worked initially because there was some kind of fusion between your curiosity about the people and about the strange places, objects, events. The writers know that well enough to throw in a half dozen new characters each season, but a) the old ones are still kicking around getting staler, b) you can't make things new the same way twice, let alone five times.
Probably a cardinal lesson for fiction-writers? The people things happen to have to stay as surprising as the happenings. Very hard to maintain that on TV, I guess--the attempts to renew spent characters are pathetic: "let's give her an alcohol problem" or "um, maybe she stutters after watching her brother die." Actually the latter sounds more interesting than anything any Lost character is presently doing.