"Maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge."— J.J. Abrams
Totally.
Disagree.
In the short term, when a couple begins their relationship, a little mystery goes further than knowledge, but at some point those personal mysteries have to unravel in order to get to know each other much better.
The fascination with mystery boxes is that of a young child several days before Christmas, shaking boxes under the tree. Since you cannot see what is inside the box, it makes one mad to find out. For some, the sole goal is to rip the box open to see what is inside. For a few, it is anticipatory dread that there may be something disappointing inside the box.
Some say LOST was Abrams' monument to mystery because it left so many unanswered questions. If six seasons were a tribute to his love of magic, wonder, and infinite possibility, what was truly inside LOST's mystery box?
Showing posts with label Abrams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abrams. Show all posts
Friday, April 4, 2014
Thursday, February 6, 2014
REWORKING THE CLASSICS
Things are not going at light speed in the new Star Wars universe. According to CNet via the Hollywood Reporter, Oscar-winning writer Michael Arndt left the new JJ Abrams Star Wars project
back in October because of what direction to
take in Episode VII.
Arndt is said to have wanted to focus on a younger generation of heroes, specifically the children of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia, with the original stars playing supporting roles.
Apparently director Abrams wanted to keep the classic protagonists in the spotlight for one last hurrah for the fans before they are likely dispatched to the annals of science fiction future history (or something like that) in Episode VIII. That makes the picture more marketable and accessible to the older fan base.
Columnists lament that we have to wait a while longer to get to know those new, younger characters. Reportedly, some characters have disappeared from the Arndt version of the Episode VII script completely and been replaced with new ones. As the CNet writer opined: "Let's hope it's not the fickle juggling of cast and characters we saw from Abrams in "Lost" that drove the series into complete silliness and a narrative storyline that became impossible to resolve in a satisfying way."
Burn.
Star Wars has a deep origin story and guidebook for the universe George Lucas created when he helmed the franchise. The question pondered in the media is a good one: will Abrams mess with the characters so much that the basic narrative of the series becomes garbled or silly?
This is also the first criticism I have read that based a reviewer's unsatisfied explanation of the The End of LOST as being partly the "fickle juggling" of characters that made it impossible to resolve the series. If this refers to the fact that the Others story line, then the odd time travel arcs, then later the Jacob-MIB story line, masked or clouded the original vision of the show, that is a valid point. The additional new characters introduced into the series may have been conflict fodder to stretch the show through six seasons, but all shows have to address those issues. If one removes the Others, the time travel, the Jacob-MIB story, and the sideways world (which may be the "silliness" of plot switches), then could LOST have been resolved to everyone's satisfaction?
Arndt is said to have wanted to focus on a younger generation of heroes, specifically the children of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia, with the original stars playing supporting roles.
Apparently director Abrams wanted to keep the classic protagonists in the spotlight for one last hurrah for the fans before they are likely dispatched to the annals of science fiction future history (or something like that) in Episode VIII. That makes the picture more marketable and accessible to the older fan base.
Columnists lament that we have to wait a while longer to get to know those new, younger characters. Reportedly, some characters have disappeared from the Arndt version of the Episode VII script completely and been replaced with new ones. As the CNet writer opined: "Let's hope it's not the fickle juggling of cast and characters we saw from Abrams in "Lost" that drove the series into complete silliness and a narrative storyline that became impossible to resolve in a satisfying way."
Burn.
Star Wars has a deep origin story and guidebook for the universe George Lucas created when he helmed the franchise. The question pondered in the media is a good one: will Abrams mess with the characters so much that the basic narrative of the series becomes garbled or silly?
This is also the first criticism I have read that based a reviewer's unsatisfied explanation of the The End of LOST as being partly the "fickle juggling" of characters that made it impossible to resolve the series. If this refers to the fact that the Others story line, then the odd time travel arcs, then later the Jacob-MIB story line, masked or clouded the original vision of the show, that is a valid point. The additional new characters introduced into the series may have been conflict fodder to stretch the show through six seasons, but all shows have to address those issues. If one removes the Others, the time travel, the Jacob-MIB story, and the sideways world (which may be the "silliness" of plot switches), then could LOST have been resolved to everyone's satisfaction?
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
CARRY ON
A correspondent from Forbes magazine was at a Disney event last weekend.
The report was from Disney's D23 Expo. This is the Disney-centric expo version of comic-cons.
At the show, visitors got to see glimpses of new materials from Pixar, Disney Animation, Marvel Studios, and some of the upcoming live-action tent poles. Some stars made appearances, like Angelina Jolie, to plug her next movie, Maleficent, in which she plays the Sleeping Beauty villain in a film told from her point of view.
But the reporters' big news item from the expo was on J.J. Abrams’s upcoming summer 2015 tent pole Star Wars Episode 7. Visitors learned absolutely nothing about Star Wars Episode 7.
There was no title announcement, no casting confirmations, no teaser posters, nor any major acknowledgment behind ‘Yes, J.J. Abrams is still directing’ and “summer 2015′ is still the goal.
How refreshing. No spoilers. No news. Nothing.
It was a shock to the fanboy collective when Lucas sold his bounty to Disney. Disney is in the "franchise" business and Star Wars is an iconic franchise. The reboot has the entertainment industry on pins and needles. (Especially this summer when Hollywood' had a record number of blockbuster box office busts.)
There are two camps in regard to Abrams, the movie director. Younger audiences tend to like his Star Trek reboot. Older, original die hard Trek fans do not care for the Abrams version of the franchise. It overwrote much of the canon elements of the original series. So there is some unease when Abrams was tapped to make the seventh Star Wars installment.
In retrospect, there were very few spoilers in the LOST saga, in part due to its long story format and its disjointed segment sequences (flashbacks/real time/flash forwards) and its inability to answer deep questions without raising more mysteries. For example, even today, no one can definitively say what the smoke monster was, or what it truly represented.
The report was from Disney's D23 Expo. This is the Disney-centric expo version of comic-cons.
At the show, visitors got to see glimpses of new materials from Pixar, Disney Animation, Marvel Studios, and some of the upcoming live-action tent poles. Some stars made appearances, like Angelina Jolie, to plug her next movie, Maleficent, in which she plays the Sleeping Beauty villain in a film told from her point of view.
But the reporters' big news item from the expo was on J.J. Abrams’s upcoming summer 2015 tent pole Star Wars Episode 7. Visitors learned absolutely nothing about Star Wars Episode 7.
There was no title announcement, no casting confirmations, no teaser posters, nor any major acknowledgment behind ‘Yes, J.J. Abrams is still directing’ and “summer 2015′ is still the goal.
How refreshing. No spoilers. No news. Nothing.
It was a shock to the fanboy collective when Lucas sold his bounty to Disney. Disney is in the "franchise" business and Star Wars is an iconic franchise. The reboot has the entertainment industry on pins and needles. (Especially this summer when Hollywood' had a record number of blockbuster box office busts.)
There are two camps in regard to Abrams, the movie director. Younger audiences tend to like his Star Trek reboot. Older, original die hard Trek fans do not care for the Abrams version of the franchise. It overwrote much of the canon elements of the original series. So there is some unease when Abrams was tapped to make the seventh Star Wars installment.
In retrospect, there were very few spoilers in the LOST saga, in part due to its long story format and its disjointed segment sequences (flashbacks/real time/flash forwards) and its inability to answer deep questions without raising more mysteries. For example, even today, no one can definitively say what the smoke monster was, or what it truly represented.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
REVOLT
JJ Abrams has a new pilot series set for the fall. It is called REVOLUTION. From the press release:
Our entire way of life depends on electricity. So what would happen if it just stopped working? Well, one day, like a switch turned off, the world is suddenly thrust back into the dark ages. Planes fall from the sky, hospitals shut down, and communication is impossible. And without any modern technology, who can tell us why? Now, 15 years later, life is back to what it once was long before the industrial revolution: families living in quiet cul-de-sacs, and when the sun goes down lanterns and candles are lit. Life is slower and sweeter. Or is it? On the fringes of small farming communities, danger lurks. And a young woman’s life is dramatically changed when a local militia arrives and kills her father, who mysteriously – and unbeknownst to her – had something to do with the blackout. This brutal encounter sets her and two unlikely companions off on a daring coming-of-age journey to find answers about the past in the hopes of reclaiming the future.
I saw the trailer on G4 last evening. My initial impression was that I had seen this show before hand, in various composite elements. First, there was a 3D graphics landscape inspired series about what would happen if man was suddenly eliminated from Earth. What would happen to the buildings left alone in nature? The show depicted the elements taking over cities and towns in one, five, ten, hundred or more years without man's involvement. Of course, buildings were taken over my vines, animals took over the landscape, and then infrastructure collapsed into rubble. Second, several years ago there was a web novella that was updated weekly with crude 3D animation figures telling the story of a tech salesman in NYC on business when he woke up and most of the Earth's population had vanished in an electromagnetic spike. I cannot remember the name of the series or its bookmark on an old discarded laptop, but the story involved the main character traveling, mostly by foot, back to home in Seattle. When he leaves NYC, he finds bands of confused people, trying to live off the remains of stores. As he gets closer to the goal, he begins picking up pieces of mystery of what happened to everyone. There are bands of war lords on horse back inflicting their own brand of justice on strangers. There is also a mysterious shadow government organization trying to suppress the truth. He learns from underground groups to avoid that organization by avoiding urban settings, camping in the wild, and living on the edge. He slowly learns that there may have been a large electromagnetic burst of some kind which had an adverse affect on the United States, making some people disappear or vanish in their sleep. One of the tell tale signs when he reaches his home is whether his wife's bed had an indentation; that meant she was gone - - - out of phase with his existence. He also learned that one of his clients may have been part of the secret organization who knows all the answers to the mysteries of the Event. The story line began to point to some government weapons program. But before the story concluded, the author's web site stopped updating material. After no updates, I forgot about it, including its title.
The Abrams pilot story has a mish-mash premise. A large, global electricity black out could happen. But the premise that man would not have the technology to create any sort of power afterward, including simple batteries, does not make much sense. Also, in the trailer, one of the characters when the Event is happening, downloads information into a decorative flash drive. Somehow this drive has its own power source that can be used to boot up patched up computer components to communicate with other people in secret. It sounds a little Hatch-like with the terminal to input the Numbers to "save the world."
If there was a huge electromagnetic disturbance that knocks out all of the electricity on the planet, why would it continue to prohibit engineers from rebuilding the grid by coal, steam, geothermal or wind generators? And if this EM event was so grand, why is the Earth's core not affected, as the series show people still living subsistence lives farming suburbia throughout the seasons. The Earth itself is a giant electromagnetic generator, whose polar fields create upper atmospheric shell that creates a protective ozone layer from the sun's deadly forms of radiation.
So before the pilot is shown, there are concerns about the Big Premise of REVOLUTION. If you are going to set down a huge mystery, there has to be a science fiction plausibility answer otherwise viewers won't care.
Our entire way of life depends on electricity. So what would happen if it just stopped working? Well, one day, like a switch turned off, the world is suddenly thrust back into the dark ages. Planes fall from the sky, hospitals shut down, and communication is impossible. And without any modern technology, who can tell us why? Now, 15 years later, life is back to what it once was long before the industrial revolution: families living in quiet cul-de-sacs, and when the sun goes down lanterns and candles are lit. Life is slower and sweeter. Or is it? On the fringes of small farming communities, danger lurks. And a young woman’s life is dramatically changed when a local militia arrives and kills her father, who mysteriously – and unbeknownst to her – had something to do with the blackout. This brutal encounter sets her and two unlikely companions off on a daring coming-of-age journey to find answers about the past in the hopes of reclaiming the future.
I saw the trailer on G4 last evening. My initial impression was that I had seen this show before hand, in various composite elements. First, there was a 3D graphics landscape inspired series about what would happen if man was suddenly eliminated from Earth. What would happen to the buildings left alone in nature? The show depicted the elements taking over cities and towns in one, five, ten, hundred or more years without man's involvement. Of course, buildings were taken over my vines, animals took over the landscape, and then infrastructure collapsed into rubble. Second, several years ago there was a web novella that was updated weekly with crude 3D animation figures telling the story of a tech salesman in NYC on business when he woke up and most of the Earth's population had vanished in an electromagnetic spike. I cannot remember the name of the series or its bookmark on an old discarded laptop, but the story involved the main character traveling, mostly by foot, back to home in Seattle. When he leaves NYC, he finds bands of confused people, trying to live off the remains of stores. As he gets closer to the goal, he begins picking up pieces of mystery of what happened to everyone. There are bands of war lords on horse back inflicting their own brand of justice on strangers. There is also a mysterious shadow government organization trying to suppress the truth. He learns from underground groups to avoid that organization by avoiding urban settings, camping in the wild, and living on the edge. He slowly learns that there may have been a large electromagnetic burst of some kind which had an adverse affect on the United States, making some people disappear or vanish in their sleep. One of the tell tale signs when he reaches his home is whether his wife's bed had an indentation; that meant she was gone - - - out of phase with his existence. He also learned that one of his clients may have been part of the secret organization who knows all the answers to the mysteries of the Event. The story line began to point to some government weapons program. But before the story concluded, the author's web site stopped updating material. After no updates, I forgot about it, including its title.
The Abrams pilot story has a mish-mash premise. A large, global electricity black out could happen. But the premise that man would not have the technology to create any sort of power afterward, including simple batteries, does not make much sense. Also, in the trailer, one of the characters when the Event is happening, downloads information into a decorative flash drive. Somehow this drive has its own power source that can be used to boot up patched up computer components to communicate with other people in secret. It sounds a little Hatch-like with the terminal to input the Numbers to "save the world."
If there was a huge electromagnetic disturbance that knocks out all of the electricity on the planet, why would it continue to prohibit engineers from rebuilding the grid by coal, steam, geothermal or wind generators? And if this EM event was so grand, why is the Earth's core not affected, as the series show people still living subsistence lives farming suburbia throughout the seasons. The Earth itself is a giant electromagnetic generator, whose polar fields create upper atmospheric shell that creates a protective ozone layer from the sun's deadly forms of radiation.
So before the pilot is shown, there are concerns about the Big Premise of REVOLUTION. If you are going to set down a huge mystery, there has to be a science fiction plausibility answer otherwise viewers won't care.
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