On the TV show Once Upon a Time, all of your favorite fairy tale characters are trapped in Maine

From: http://io9.com/
BY KAILA HALE-STERN

At the New York Comic Con screening for ABC's Once Upon a Time, we were shown an intriguing fantasy comprised of equal parts promise and problems.

But the panel with creators Adam Horowitz and Eddie Kitsis, late of Lost, convinced us that the show will be worth sticking with, post-shaky pilot. These guys are masters of the flashback, and they hinted at the intriguing trips to fairy tale land in that are in store for Once, along with the familiar faces who will be stopping by to play your favorite heroine or nightmare of old. Spoilers for the pilot ahead.

Once Upon A Time is fun, quick-paced, uneven, and utterly, wonderfully bizarre. You have to be willing to accept from the get-go that some of our favorite storybook characters have come alive, transported by a curse to modern-day Storybrooke, Maine (yup), "a truly horrible place" in the words of Snow White's Evil Queen, who sends them there. The pilot veers between highs and lows: it can be rollicking and clever, or else veering too Disney or over-the-top. Once is family-friendly to a point — there's violence enough, both physical and psychological, which rightly fits to fairy tales, though in the pilot it's mostly low-rent Ringwraith terrors.

Many beloved characters and actors are to be found in both Maine and the Enchanted Forest: there's the aforementioned Snow White, whose tale seems central (a lovely Ginnifer Goodwin, totally transported from Big Love), her hunk of a Prince Charming (Thor's Josh Dallas, who israther radiant), Lana Parrilla as the Evil Queen, owning every scene she's in (you'll find yourself waiting for her), and 28 Weeks Later and Transpotting's Robert Carlyle as a standout slithery Rumpelstiltskin.

We'll also be hearing from Jiminy Cricket (Raphael Sbarge, when not a cricket), Gepetto (Tony Amendola) and his Pinocchio, Red Riding Hood and her Granny, select Dwarves (includingPoTC's Lee Arenberg as Grumpy), The Magic Mirror (Giancarlo Esposito), Cinderella (Falling Skies' Jessy Schram), and many more, if Once runs for the full 13 episode-season it has been allotted.

Special guest appearances by fan favorites like True Blood's Kristin Bauer as Maleficent andBuffy's Emma Caulfield as Hansel & Gretel's Blind Witch, as well as episodes penned by genre favorite Jane Espenson (Buffy, Caprica, Torchwood, Game of Thrones) provide further incentive to tune in in coming weeks, even if the pilot doesn't initially bowl you over.

Jennifer Morrison (House) plays Emma Swan, a tough-as-nails knockout bailbonds "person" with the ability to always tell when people are lying and the potential to develop into a more multi-faceted character. Emma is confronted by the son she gave up ten years ago, the preternaturally brilliant and troubled Henry (Jared Gilmore, preternaturally brilliant), who begs that she return with him to save his hometown of Storybrooke, where his hateful adoptive mother reigns over a cowed populace...as mayor.

Henry is convinced that Emma is the prophesied daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming that he read about in his book of magical stories, sent by her parents to another world in order to save the good people of fairy tales from the curse that has cast them into a sleepy town in Maine that time forgot.

Running parallel to their roles in the Enchanted Forest, the modern-day Snow White is a kindly teacher named Mary Margaret, her Prince Charming is a John Doe in a coma, and the Evil Queen is both the mayor and Henry's icy-hearted guardian, Regina. Here Rumpelstiltskin is pawnshop proprietor Mr. Gold, who "owns the town," at least where money is concerned, a vamped-up Red Riding Hood is portrayed as trying to "sleep her way around the Eastern Seaboard," and Jiminy Cricket, a.k.a. Archie Hopper, is a bookish child psychologist.

Throughout Emma's initial reluctant interactions with Henry and Storybrooke's population, we see via flashback how the curse came upon the realm of the Enchanted Forest. The primary problem of the pilot — save for having to swallow some clunky dialogue like "[the Forrest] animals are abuzz with the Queen's plans" — is where to go onwards, since fairy tale land has been laid to ruin in the first episode and its occupants expelled to Maine. But hints from the creators on what's in store laid out a far more twistily interesting path for what we'll see in the realm of fantasy than the pilot suggests.

Once Upon a Time creators and writers Adam Horowitz and Eddie Kitsis told the audience at the NYCC panel that there's a lot more to come in both worlds, with the storylines veering from modern-day to magical mythos and back on a weekly basis. Coming from their Lostbackground, there may also be hidden plot-points in numbers and other encoded messages, sure to please the conspiracy aficionados.

What interested me most was their revelation that future episodes will explore both the primary and background characters' motivations in the Enchanted Forest — "what made them who they are" by the time we meet them as recognizable archetypes. So while in the pilot characters are often writ in uncompromising shades of black-and-white — selfless shiny good versus vindictively cruel evil, which can be heavy-handed at times — that may lessen as we learn what really shaped their lives.

Why did Jiminy become a cricket? How did imp-like Rumpelstiltskin become a prophecy-spouting ambiguous villain? What so damaged the Evil Queen that she would try to fatally poison her step-daughter for being prettier than her? In contrast, the same characters in Storybrooke will be facing "the voids in their modern lives," the needful things they have lost by being transported from a place of everlasting love, faerie, dragons and towering castles.

It does not appear that the show is interested in retelling the fairy tales in terms of their often harsh origin stories out of non-Disney folklore (in the original Cinderella, for example, her stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to fit the magic slipper; in the original Sleeping Beauty, the prince does a lot more than kiss the princess upon discovery and she only awakens when she gives birth to twins). Rather it seems that the creators and writers have established their own mythology with nods to the timeless yarns we were read at night, but are keen to add a modern twist of pop psychology and deeper character exploration.

This idea was further emphasized: Horowitz and Kitsis said that if Lost was ultimately about redemption, Once is about hope, a word we hear bandied about a lot in the pilot. When asked why we're seeing such a glut of fairy-tales-in-the-modern day coming to the screen — NBC'sGrimm is also on the fall schedule and an adaptation of the comic series Fables is potentially in the works — the current uncertainties of the global economic climate were cited as a driving force.

They pointed out that Disney released its wildly popular animated Snow White at the height of the Great Depression; fairy tales have ever been about escapism from unkind reality as much as moralistic lessons. "There's something comforting about the stories," we were told. And at a time when many could use their own dose of comfort and "happily ever after," Once seeks to provide storylines that particularly click with today's audience, i.e. noting that Cinderella's tale is the ultimate kiss-off and triumph over a vicious and exacting boss.

I don't want to curse Horowitz and Kitsis, who have worked together on many other projects (Tron: Legacy, Birds of Prey,Popular and Felicity are amongst their credits) with some of the pitfalls that would befall later seasons of Lost; I'm all for giving them the benefit of the doubt. But it remains to be seen whether they can sustain the enchanted flashback momentum while further developing Storybrooke's citizens.

It's also worth entertaining the notion that the fantastical sights we see are merely the production of young Henry's imaginative brain; he's a miserable kid, in therapy at ten, in search of his birth mother; why not cast her as the destined saviour out of his favorite book? Once could inspire Taming of The Shrew-like debates as to whether the supernatural elements afoot are actually "real" or are the fabrications of an overwrought mind.

It's clear that a lot of time, plotting, energy and money has gone into the show. The visuals are striking for a weekly series, and where they are cheesy and overdone it still works for both comedic and dramatic effect. The creators insist that their take-away from Lost was that "character has to trump technology," and they've certainly drawn some colorful ones.

The pilot probably won't dazzle you, but the talented cast and roster of upcoming guest stars and scribes is a good reason to give the show support in order to see if they can pull off the twistier upcoming developments we heard about at NYCC. If you ever wondered why a man turns cricket, how an Evil Queen earned her name, or if there's more to Snow White than meets the dewy eye, Once Upon a Time would like to tell you a story.

Top photo: Bob D'Amico/ABC

JJ Abrams: 'I called Spielberg and he said yes'

Lost creator JJ Abrams's new film Super 8 was produced by Steven Spielberg. He explains what it was like to work with the man who inspired him to make movies – and why he's proud to be a geek

• Katie Puckrik
• guardian.co.uk


JJ Abrams ? 'Now it's a point of pride to be a geek.' Photograph: Jeff Minton/Corbis Outline

Much has been made over the connection between JJ Abrams, director of Super 8, and his hero – and Super 8 producer – Steven Spielberg. Both view the world like wide-eyed, overgrown boys, and in their most beloved work (Abrams's Lost, Alias and Star Trek; Spielberg's ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) blend the wonder of the supernatural with the tender harvest of the human heart. Coincidentally, both also kicked off their film careers at the age of 12 by making 8mm home movies. Spielberg was after a Boy Scout photography merit badge, while Abrams's focus was his lifelong obsession with special effects.

1. Super 8
2. Production year: 2011
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 12A
5. Runtime: 112 mins
6. Directors: JJ Abrams
7. Cast: Amanda Michalka, Elle Fanning, Gabriel Basso, Joel Courtney, Kyle Chandler, Noah Emmerich, Riley Griffiths, Ron Eldard, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills
8. More on this film

"What I loved about special effects was the magic of it," Abrams tells me. We're sitting in the soft-focus, mumsy luxury of a beachside hotel suite in Santa Monica, French doors thrown open to the late afternoon Pacific breeze. The 45-year-old director-writer-musician (he has composed the themes for many of his TV shows, including Lost, Felicity and Fringe) is dressed casually in jeans and wearing black intellectual-nerd glasses, his wavy black hair a skybound thicket, as if perpetually charged by the intensity of its owner's convictions.

"When I was a little kid – and even still – I loved magic tricks. When I saw how movies got made – at least had a glimpse when I went on the Universal Studios tour with my grandfather, I remember feeling like this was another means by which I could do magic. It wasn't the guy with the top hat and the rabbits, it was a way of creating illusions that something was real that wasn't. It could be a time and a place, it could be a weather system, it could be an aeroplane flying through the air, it could be a creature that wasn't really there, a fight scene, blood splattering, window breaking, fire – it could be anything. All these things were little magic tricks, and the idea that they could all add up to create the illusion that something was real, so that people would have an emotional reaction to the relationship, a circumstance, an event – that was very exciting to me.

"It was almost like creating my own assignments: 'I want to see if I can make that thing look real; like that spaceship's really flying, like that person has a twin and they're in the same frame.' And then I would go about doing it. Frankly, I use some of those ideas far more now than I ever did when I was a kid."

I can see Abrams getting lost in the question – in every question during our conversation – furrowing his brow and looking down into a middle space as he formulates his response, his answers picking up steam after an initial hesitant launch, until his words spill out in a salvo of emphatic zeal. He's a fast talker.

"What I love, and what Steven Spielberg has in his work, is a sense of unlimited possibility, the sense that life could bring you anything, that around every corner could be something amazing . . . extraordinary. And that's not to say glorious and good. It could be terrifying, it could be confusing, it could be disturbing, or it could be wonderful and funny and transportive."

Terrifying, funny and transportive are apt descriptors for Super 8, Abrams's first film as both director and writer. Using his adolescent auteur experiences as the jumping-off point, the story follows a group of children in the summer of 1979 as they set about making an 8mm zombie film. Our hero is Joe, a 13-year-old struggling with his mother's sudden death in a factory accident, while he assists his friends' film by designing monster makeup and exploding model trains.

Make-believe careens into chilling reality one night during the youngsters' shoot at an old train depot, when they witness a horrifyingly violent crash, followed by what seems to be the escape of a malevolent presence from one of the mutilated carriages. In the aftermath, eerie phenomena occur, the military descend, people start to disappear and Joe fights to save the ones he loves.

"When I called Steven, it was an instinct to work with someone who was a hero of mine since I was a kid, and I had no idea what the movie was," admits Abrams. "All I had was the title, and knew this could be a movie about a group of kids making movies, and he was the one person I knew who had done this the way I had, who could help a movie like that get made. So I called him, and he said yes."

But curiously, Super 8 is not the first time Abrams has worked for his hero. When he was a teenager, he was profiled in a newspaper article about his participation in a young film-makers' festival in Los Angeles. In a coincidence straight out of a movie, Spielberg read the article and hired Abrams and a friend to repair some 8mm reels that he had knocking around from his own teenage movie-making days.

Left-right: Ryan Lee as Cary, Joel Courtney as Joe Lamb, Elle Fanning as Alice Dainard and Riley Griffiths as Charles Kasnick in Super 8. Photograph: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Abrams's mother Carol has described her horror at finding the spaghetti pile of Spielberg's unspooled films blanketing the floor of her son's bedroom. "What have you done?!?" she's reported to have screamed. "He's going to sue us! We're going to lose our house! We're going to lose our cars!" Fortunately for both the Spielberg archives and Abrams's future in Hollywood, young JJ finished the job and split the $300 fee with his partner, though he had yet to actually meet the famous director.

Even the casual cineaste will be able to connect the dots between Super 8 and Spielberg classics ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park, even The Goonies. I wondered if Abrams had struggled to avoid quoting Spielberg on the master's turf of emotional, child-oriented sci-fi, or if it was a deliberate homage.

"The initial conceit was not 'do a Spielbergian movie,'" Abrams says. "I didn't think: 'Oh, let's start ripping off other Spielberg films.' It was just: 'This is a story that could be cool.'

"I'd called a guy who had a production company called Amblin, who made a bunch of movies that I loved [when I was] growing up and still love now, and when you're working with someone who inspires you in a certain way, that's part of the fun of it.

"Super 8 is about kids in 1979 who are the age that I was at that time, and I was massively influenced by Steven's films. What made perfect sense was not: 'OK, let's ape his movies and start copying things,' but let's make a movie that feels like it belongs on a shelf with other Amblin movies.

"It was a spirit, not a scene, that I was trying to emulate. It felt like: 'This is what the movie wants to be.' I would actually say that because I was doing it with Steven, I felt entirely liberated to embrace that kind of stuff. I never would have made this movie this way, I'm certain, had he not been a producer."

What about the decision to set Super 8 in 1979, before the onset of the internet and instant YouTube stars?

"The idea of doing a story about a bunch of kids now making a movie on an iPhone has no interest for me whatsoever," Abrams declares. "Part of this was about an era where, if you were that age, making movies, you were an oddball. Not every kid had a camera the way they do now, on their phone. It meant effort, because you had to consider: 'Well, I only have so much film, so what am I gonna film?' You couldn't just record over it. You had to make a choice.

"I'm obsessed with things that are distinctly analogue. We have a letterpress in our office. There's an absolute wonderful imperfection that you get when you do a letterpress, and that is the beauty of it. The time that is put in setting the type and running the press, inking the rollers, all that stuff – that kind of thing is clearly an extreme example. But it's the beauty of the actual investment of time, and the amount of time that goes by lets you consider things that somehow, in a kind of weird osmosis or spiritual way, is somehow implicit in the final product. And that seems to not exist much any more."

Was there pressure to come up with a terrifying monster for Super 8, given Abrams's early focus on special effects?

"It was a challenge," he acknowledges. "I needed the creature to be intimidating, scary, but also be emotive and not just be empathetic, but sympathetic. Which means eyes. Which means a mouth. Well, how many eyes? How many mouths? The idea of the movie being that you have to face the thing that is the most frightening to you, the most devastating to you, to get past it. Ultimately, it wasn't that we see the creature, but it was what happens with the creature."

The talk shifts to Lost, and Abrams's continued fascination with magic – in this case, the magic that occurs when an audience's engagement with a show turns it into something bigger than originally conceived.

"[Lost] was very much about faith versus science, and the notion of who has had a profound impact on your life and how these characters form a kind of tapestry," Abrams muses. "When you do a show that has that kind of ongoing conversation, the audience not only invests in the show in ways that you could never anticipate, but also makes connections to things that you may not have even considered. When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal. And that is part of the genius of science-fiction or fantasy writing, which is that it suddenly lets you go, 'Ooh – what if?' which the straight drama almost never lets you do."

Do woebegone Losties give Abrams an earful about the finale?

"Oh my God, yes," he groans. "For years, I had people praising Lost to death, and now they say: 'I'm so pissed at you for the end of Lost.' I think a lot of people who were upset with the ending, were just upset that it ended. And I've not yet heard the pitch of what the ending should have been. I've just heard: 'That sucked.'"

In addition to the premiere of Super 8, Abrams has a full platter of projects: the Mission: Impossible film he's producing; the upcoming TV shows, Alcatraz and Person of Interest, which he is consulting on; Fringe, the ongoing supernatural thriller series; as well as a comedy series he is developing – a new direction for him. And then there's the next Star Trek film, which he's keen to direct ("The idea of someone else saying 'action' to those actors in those characters on that set makes me jealous," he says), though nothing is decided.

As man who continues to frolic on his boyhood playing fields of magic and movies, Abrams represents the outsider who lives in his head. Does he feel responsible for perpetrating the new supremacy of the geek?

"No." Abrams shifts impatiently in his armchair. "First of all, the definition of geek has changed. When I started, a geek was an undeniable loser: long-necked, trips over his own feet, a complete outcast. And now geek means someone who likes science-fiction. When I was a kid, it was a huge insult to be a geek. Now it's a point of pride in a weird way. I feel very lucky to be working in a business and to be part of stories that are embraced by people who fit the current definition of geek. And also maybe the occasional athlete."

• Super 8 is released on 5 August

Evangeline Lilly Cast As An Elf In The Hobbit

Author: Josh Tyler
From: http://www.cinemablend.com/

Liv Tyler won’t be in The Hobbit. While her Arwen character is an ancient immortal and thus technically alive at the time this prequel story takes place, Tyler confirmed awhile back that she hasn’t been asked to show up on set. So if you’re looking for a new female elf character to replace the Arwen in these new Middle Earth movies, who do you cast? Evangeline Lilly, of course. She’s like Liv Tyler, except without the Aerosmith connection.

Hobbit director Peter Jackson confirmed her involvement today on his Facebook page. Lilly has been hired to play a character newly created specifically for the feature version of The Hobbit. She’ll be a Woodland Elf named “Tauriel”. That name even has a translation already, because of course that’s how back-story obsessed author J.R.R. Tolkien would have wanted it, were he the one inventing this new elf-babe. PJ says “Tauriel” means “daughter of Mirkwood”. So now you have a pretty good idea of where she lives.

The addition of Lilly is important, not only because she’ll look good in pointy ears, but because it could help solve one of the 4 big story problems we predicted Peter Jackson would encounter in adapting Tolkien’s book for the screen. If Evangeline’s role is big enough, it could help clear up problem #4, which is that the original Tolkien version of The Hobbit contains no female characters. None. In Hollywood, the general consensus seems to be that girls need someone to identify with, if you want them buying tickets.

Evangeline isn’t the only person getting in the Middle Earth makeup chair down in New Zealand. Jackson has also confirmed the casting of actor Barry Humpries, to play the Goblin king. This is a villain character encountered by Bilbo and his Dwarf companions on their journey. You won’t see a lot of him, but he does play a pivotal role in the story. Jackson says he’ll portray the character “in much the way Andy Serkis created Gollum”. In other words, you won’t actually see him on screen, but you will see a computer generated character created based on his performance.

Go back to the island: Lost short shot entirely on location

Corey Vidal has created a 6-minute short that brings us back to Dharma — shot entirely on the abandoned Hawaii sets for Lost. We have to go back to the island!
[via The Daily What]

Winning Mega Millions numbers are eerily familiar to fans of ABC's 'Lost'

By Jack Pickell, Boston.com Staff

As the "Lost" character Hugo "Hurley" Reyes would say, "Dude..."

The winning numbers in last night's $380 million Mega Millions jackpot - which had two winners in Idaho and Washington state - are strikingly similar to the recurring sequence of numbers that was central to the mysterious storyline of ABC's "Lost", including the winning sequence that made Hurley a rich man (see above video clip).

Last night's (real) winning numbers were:
4, 8, 15, 25 and 47, with the "Mega ball" 42
The "Lost" numbers:
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, with the "Mega number" 42


That's a match on four out of the six numbers, including the "Mega" digit.
Coincidence...? You tell us. Give us your theories on this in the comments section of this item.

13 Mysteries LOST Never Explained

By Chris Littler
From: http://blog.koldcast.tv/

 

Mysteries LOST Never Explained

Lost is a show about the survivors of a plane crash living on an island. No, wait. It’s about survivors of a plane crash living on an island, trying to get away from an evil monster made out of smoke. No, wait. The smoke monster is being controlled by a mysterious group of people who have lived on the island for years. Natch. Decades. Natch. A thousand years. And there’s a hatch now. And the island also has mystical properties that allow people to heal. But those properties are being controlled by a set of rules that are made by two mysterious figures who represent two sides of mankind and are at war with one another for really silly reasons. Also, there’s a cabin in the jungle that keeps on moving. Oh, and we almost forgot — the island can also travel through time. 

Lost isn’t really a show about anything. Or, if you look at it upside-down, it’s a show about everything. Over the course of six seasons, Lost transformed from a simple story about people struggling to survive in surreal circumstances into a show obsessed with its own mythology. As the episodes went on, there was less and less about what the characters wanted and more repositioning of the characters so that they could be in the right place at the right time to learn something about the universe. Luckily for us viewers, the universe of Lost is extremely interesting and complex – kind of like the world of Hard Drive 13, a very Lost-ian series about a young computer hacker uncovering a galaxy-wide conspiracy theory. 

Lost has come to an end, and with it, several mysteries that were posited early on in the series were left unsolved. Fans who cried out for answers were thrown a few scraps and told to tune in to Fringe. We decided that it’s time to get off our hammocks, sift through the expansive Lost mythology, and demand an answer to the most dangly of the dangling threads.

1. What caused Walt’s powers?

We learn early on that Walt has special powers (other than his proclivity for being captured). He can make things appear using only his mind. Like in “Special” when he asks his father to look at the picture of a bronze cuckoo clock and a bronze cuckoo crashes into their apartment window. Or when he says a number in backgammon and rolls it. Coincidence? Not likely. Most Lost theorists say that Walt’s powers derive from the same thing that gave Desmond his powers: a prolonged exposure to electromagnetic energy. 

2. What caused The Incident? The drilling or the bomb?

The Incident is alluded to a great deal in the early seasons as the reason the hatch exists. If not for The Incident, then no one would have to push the button. If the button isn’t pushed, then the world will end. We find out later that The Incident is when a time-travelling Jack and Company detonate a nuclear weapon at the bottom of a well hosting a pocket of electromagnetic energy, releasing a huge quantity of it. But we’re not quite sure what happens next. Or if the bomb or the drilling is what caused The Incident to occur. Did the bomb do anything? And if it did, why are there no traces of it in current times? 

3. Who was shooting at our heroes in the outrigger during their time travels?

Without the supplementary materials that come with the complete set on DVD, we’d have no idea that the outrigger crew chasing Juliet, while she was traveling through time, were members of the Black Rock crew. It’s a small bone thrown to fans who were clamoring to know why someone in a boat would fire without warning. It seemed like they were trying to kill them with great intent. Apparently, this is one thing that the show’s producers had an answer to, but decided not to follow up on for the sake of telling a better story. To quote Damon Lindelof:

“…we started talking about paying that off this season, it felt like the episode was at the service of closing the time loop, as opposed to what the characters might actually be doing in that scenario. It never felt organic. We decided we would rather take our lumps from the people who couldn’t scratch that itch than to produce an episode that was in service of putting people in an outrigger and getting shot at.”

4. Who killed all the Ajira passengers and why?

In the episode “Recon,” we finally see what happened to the remaining passengers on the Ajira flight that brought the Oceanic 6 back to the island: they died. These poor people, who had no idea what they were getting into when they booked their tickets, ended up rotting on the beach. And they weren’t even given the proper respect of having on-screen deaths either. We can kind of assume that the Man in Black killed them all, but there’s no real reason he’d have to. It’s not like they were posing a threat to him. He’d have to have done it purely out of boredom.

5. How was the cabin able to change locations?

There’s a mysterious cabin in the middle of the jungle where a powerful man named Jacob is supposed to live. We learn later on that Ben Linus, who leads Locke to the cabin in the first place, has no idea where Jacob really is, or what he looks like, or what he wants, and that Jacob left the cabin a long time ago. We can even gleam from sparse details that Smoke Monster, aka Man in Black, lived in the cabin after Jacob left it. But we never learn how the cabin is so good at switching locations. It’s there one minute, gone the next. Are we meant to assume that the Smoke Monster is moving the cabin from one place to the next? It’s been two thousand years. You think the guy would settle down.

6. Why did Jacob leave the cabin?

Another cabin-related question: if we’re correct in assuming that Jacob did live in the cabin after Horace and his lady vacated, and that’s why Richard told Ben to look for him there, what made him give up on the place and relocate to the foot of the statue? It’s altogether possible that Richard lied to Ben about where Jacob lived to keep him as far away from him as possible, or that Ben was lying about his knowledge of the cabin. There are too many variables. Let’s just assume that Jacob didn’t have enough room for his giant loom.

7. How were the ancient Egyptians able to build a magical lighthouse?

The Lighthouse is one of those last-minute structures that appeared in Lost’s final season. Why no one had seen the lighthouse up until that point is explained with the fact that the lighthouse can only been seen by someone who is looking for it. So it’s already pretty magical at that point. Upping the magic quotient even higher is the lighthouse’s ability to keep tabs on any of its candidates at any time. How are the ancient Egyptians so adept at building such a magical property? Were they assisted by some power-giving magic juice from the Source, perhaps?

8. Who is Mother, and how is she able to kills all the Romans, burn down the village, and enter the well?

Mother is one of the most mysterious figures in the show. She appears in only one episode as the caretaker of Jacob and his brother but not before she murders their real mother. All we really know about her is that she came to the island by accident, doesn’t like outsiders, and knows a heck of a lot about the mystical properties of the island. At one point, she murders an entire town full of Romans, which strongly suggests that she was the smoke monster before her ward took the mantle.

9. How did Eloise Hawking know Brother Campbell?

There ended up being a lot of connections between the characters during Lost’s seven-year run, but none have seemed as strange as that of Brother Campbell and Eloise Hawking. Brother Campbell is Desmond’s former religious advisor who fires him after finding him drunk. Eloise Hawking is a former Other who killed her own son and tried to undo it in a time-travelling paradox. In what universe would these two people meet to pose for one poorly-Photoshopped picture? Only in this one. And we’ll never know why.

10. Why do some characters have the ability to talk to the dead?

Like Walt’s ability to create objects out of thin air, some other characters have powers that were never fully explained. Both Miles and Hurley have the power to communicate with the dead, albeit in totally different ways. Miles seems to get the short end of the stick. He’s able to only hear the final words of the dead by getting real close to the ground. Hurley can talk to them like they were his best buds asking for a piece of his chicken bucket. No explanation is ever given as to why these two characters have these powers. We’re left to assume that some people have it and some people don’t, and perhaps the island has nothing to do with it.

11. Why was the island underwater in the flash-sideways timeline?

We know that the island sinks when the plug at the source is removed – because the place falls apart in the finale. But there’s no reason the island should be underwater in the flash-sideways timeline. In the flash-sideways timeline, Oceanic Flight 615 never crashes, therefore no one is around to travel back in time and sink the thing. The only answer we might be happy with is that the collective minds of those creating the flash-sideways timeline surmised that only a sunk island would have prevented the plane from crashing, therefore it had to be underwater.

12. If David Shepard is real, then what the hell is he doing with all these people he doesn’t really know?

The flash-sideways timeline is a creation of all the people who have died on Lost. When they die, they immediately enter a place where they’ve forgotten everything that happened on the island, and live their lives in a different way than it actually went. But everyone who exists in the flash-sideways timeline is real. Jack’s father says that explicitly. So then, who the hell is David Shepard, and what is he doing in this cathartic dimension of the mind? If he’s real, then he must be someone else’s kid, because Jack never had a chance to pop a real one out in his lifetime. Does that mean that he’s on loan from someone else’s heaven? How does one get a gig like that, and does it pay well karmicly?

13. Is Michael trapped on the island forever?

In the final scene in the church, Michael is suspiciously absent. We’re led to assume then, that Michael’s spirit is still trapped on the island for killing Ana Lucia and Libby. This doesn’t seem very fair to us, seeing as how pretty much everyone in that room did some pretty horrific things to stay alive, and that Michael didn’t really plan to kill Ana Lucia and Libby, it must be a mistake. Fortunately for Michael, in “The New Man in Charge,” a short that premiered with the DVD box set, Ben Linus and Hurley travel to Santa Rosa to recruit Walt. Their mission? Help Michael move on. WAAAAAAAAAAAAALT!

Chris Littler lives in Hollywood. He has a degree in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, one of the most prestigious writing programs in America, which he totally plans to hang on the wall when he has a Study. Chris currently covers video games at UGO.com when he’s not performing improv at iO, and is currently writing a one-hour TV pilot with his friend Wes. Like everyone else you know, he has an album available to purchase on iTunes and has lots of things to say on his blog: chrislittler[dot]com.

Weezer Reveal Ridiculous Album Cover

From: http://pitchfork.com/

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Hurley means Hurley.

At this point, Weezer may be better at creating WTF internet memes than making songs. Here they go again with the cover for their upcoming record Hurley, due out on Epitaph September 14. As Spinner reports, the cover is a close-up photo of Jorge Garcia-- aka Hurley from "Lost"-- as you can see. He looks happy to be off the island.

In an e-mail interview, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo told us the rationale behind the sleeve: "We just wanted to use that picture of Jorge Garcia's face on the cover. It's such an amazing album cover, and we didn't want to have any other words on it, so we just figured everyone was going to call it Hurley, so that's what we call it."

In other Hurley news, the record features a track called "Run Away" that's co-written by none other than Ryan Adams. Listen to the new Weezer single "Memories" here and click on to read the rest of our brief e-mail Q&A with Rivers about Hurley:

Pitchfork: Why did you decide to sign with Epitaph Records for this release?

Rivers Cuomo: Our seven-record deal with Geffen was up. [Epitaph owner and Bad Religion guitarist] Brett Gurewitz made us an offer we couldn't refuse. He is a fan of the band and was helpful with getting the mixing and mastering done at the end of the record. It is cool to have a label head that is also a songwriter, in a band, and produces records.

Pitchfork: What are some advantages of being on Epitaph as opposed to Geffen?

RC: The record deal is about a million times better. We own the masters. It's an experiment and we're all going to find out what the advantages are.

Pitchfork: Could you have re-signed with Geffen if you wanted to?

RC: Yes.

Pitchfork: Did you work with Ryan Adams in the studio? Did you guys bond over obscure metal albums?

RC: We were mostly so excited with what we were writing that we didn't have a chance to talk about old metal. In any case, I think his knowledge of metal lore is deeper even than mine, so I was out of my league.

Pitchfork: Some people reacted negatively to the mainstream pop production and sound of Raditude. Does Hurley continue with that sound or is it different?

RC: Hurley is definitely a raw, unpolished, high energy "alt-rock" album.

Pitchfork: Now that you're on an independent label is your music going to be more "indie" i.e. less polished and pop-sounding?

RC: No.

Pitchfork: Are any of the songs you did with Katy Perry going to be on this new Weezer album?

RC: Nope.

Pitchfork: Are there any more Weezer-brand products in the works a la the Wuggie?

RC: No.

Posted by Ryan Dombal on August 9, 2010 at 2 p.m.

Tags: Weezer, Ryan Adams, WTF, Art

Continue Reading →

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'Lost' epilogue leaked online. And it explains everything! Sort of.

The 12-minute epilogue to "Lost," which is included in the DVD box set that releases Aug. 24, leaked online this afternoon. And honestly, it's like the good, 'ol days again, when we all pored through pages of Lostpedia and tried to figure out if obscure references made by Benjamin Linus actually contained meaningful anagrams.

The epilogue, in which Mr. Linus plays a prominent role, may not explain everything. But it does cover the following much-debated topics: the island's pregnancy issues, the presence of polar bears, Walt's specialness, the relevance of Room 23 and the Hurley bird.

UPDATED: YouTube's full clip, which we originally posted here, was pulled down. And so was the Jezebel link we provided earlier. So here's an official, partial clip, provided by Disney. You can't see all 12 minutes of the epilogue here but at least the video won't get yanked.

By Jen Chaney

P.S...

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5743400/Lost_Epilo ...
http://www.dejavurl.com/trailer/Lost_Epilogue-The_New_Man_In_Charge

'Lost' Auction Offers Everything But Book of Answers

By Drew Kearse
From: http://www.asylum.com/

Previously on "Lost": A lot of sh** happened. And now that its run is over, we still have a lot of questions. Luckily, there will be one question answered for us: Who will spend the most money on props from the show? That's right, "Lost'"s creators are auctioning off pieces of the set August 21-22 in Los Angeles.

We combed through a preview of the items up for sale and, without further ado, here are our favorite 10 items, which we hope our sugar mamas will be bidding on:

10. Ben's Canadian and Swiss Passports
As soon as Ben revealed the secret closet behind his bookcase, we knew he was a badass. But then we saw his foreign passports and currency. Yeah, Napoleon can kiss his evil, manipulative ass.

9. Collection of 32 Dharma Beer Cans (Various Conditions)
Man, this takes us back ... Jin learning English ... so many memories.

8. Desmond's Photograph of Himself and Penny
Everyone's favorite Scotsman. A true hero. A true lover. And now we can own the only thing that gave him hope.
7. Eko's Staff (Complete With Bible Carvings)
Oh, Eko. So deep, yet so misunderstood. Your time with us was short, but the memories will last forever -- especially if we buy this staff.
6. Hurley's Lotto Ticket
Luck, good and bad, follows our portly friend, and here is quintessential totem of that fact.
5. Jin's Wedding Ring
You had us at "Others, Michael!" You had us at "Others!"
4. Dharma Films and Projector
No stag party is complete without some vintage Dharma porn on an old-school projector.
3. Sawyer's Letter of Inner Demons
It's definitely a little creepy to carry this paper around, but you're already bidding on items at a "Lost" auction, so whatever.
2. Locke's Knife
We would not want to be on the bad end of one of Locke's wheel-by knifings in the outback.
1. Sweet Package of Sayid
So, this is the only Sayid thing the preview mentions, but we're all hoping for the audio cassette of "How to Speak Like Sayid, Torture People and Bang Chicks."

The preview offered us just a little taste of what's out there. Of course, if it's anything like the show itself, they'll probably keep most of it for themselves.

Your Dad Gives The Awesomest Facebook Advice

by TBone
from: http://nextround.net/

Bummed out Lost is over? Your dad to the rescue with random metaphors that will blow your mind.

Via: buzzfeed

Top 10 Lost Plot Holes

By David Scarborough
From: http://www.hecklerspray.com/

We absolutely adored Lost here at hecklerspray. Every episode piled on the intrigue with careless restraint; phallic stone plugs, grown men wearing too much eye-liner and a guy who could turn into smoke at his illogical whim – Lost had it all.

After six series, fans waited patiently for a final episode they thought held promise to unravelling the Island secrets in a satisfying way. Most people only found that there was no surprise inside this Island’s Kinder Egg, just left with chocolate on their fingers and a deep sense of urgent bowel movement.

What it did leave us was enough holes in the plot to sink a badly-rendered submarine. Some people say it leaves the series with a sense of ambiguity. We say the writers cocked-up. Here is our Top 10 Lost Plot Holes…

Remember back in Season 4 before Sayid got the tubb-tum, and was going all Jason Bourne around the flashforwards? Well, there was a mysterious ‘Economist’ he was tracking down to kill for Ben. Was it Widmore? Probably. Will we ever know? Unlikely. This is destined to remain as frustratingly inconclusive as Sayid’s English accent in the final season.

9. How does it make sense that Desmond could go into the afterlife and back?

Granted, a lot of these plot holes arose after the final series, mainly because the final episodes dealt with a colossal clusterfuck of ideas when it started spouting religious hokum. When Widmore bought his giant donut to the Island to help harness Desmond’s resistance to electromagnetism, it propelled our Des into this purgatory. It was kinda like the plot to Flatliners, except without Jack Bauer crying every five minutes.

8. What are The Numbers?

The numbers were a prevailing mystery throughout Lost’s run. The first were the cursed equation that linked somehow to the Island, in turn making Hurley’s life hell when he used to Numbers and won the lottery. They were then engraved and used in The Hatch to stop the world ending (and by not typing them bringing our team to the Island). Later they were revealed to be assigned to the last candidates. Did it ever explain why they were so important/cursed? No. Because how could you tangibly explain why numbers are so important? You’re an idiot if you thought it could ever make sense.

7. How can you travel through time using ‘Water and Light?’

This is a plot hole in the form of a rare occurrence on lost: an answer. Seemingly medieval Man in Black decides to harness the Island’s ‘Source’ to get out of that damned place. It’s simple really: he attaches a wheel to a wall and uses water and light to travel. You read that right, he uses water and light; a startling scientific breakthrough that would have Stephen Hawking kicking himself (if he could).

6. Why did some time travel and not others?

Jack struggles to work out when the show stopped making sense.

Back in Season five when the show decided to embrace its sweating nerdling underbelly, it skipped our characters through time all with the help of a frozen donkey wheel – yes, that actually happened. When Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Ben and Sun came back to the Island, Jack, Hurley, Kate and Sayid were swamped by white light and transported back to the 70s to get their hippy on with Sawyer. Meanwhile, Sun, Ben – and to a lesser extent, Frank – remained in the present day. The only slight assumption we can make is that Sun, Ben and Frank were not Candidates, and Jacob transported the others back in time with his magical droopy eyes.

5. How comes Kate didn’t grown any armpit hair?

She doesn’t exactly jump into the banana grove every other day to have a quick trim, does she? Maybe she supplied it all for all the awful wigs Jack wears.

4. What was the Smoke Monster?

Last time we went down the log flume at Thorpe Park, there wasn’t a giant pillar of smoke on the other side. Was MIB killed and the Smoke Monster took his form like Locke, or can MIB just take the form of smoke now? If he was dead then why did Smokey also want to leave the Island? Where did MIB go when he fell down the hole (there was just ground down there when we visited it)? It would’ve made more sense if Jacob had created him by just bending over and letting one rip.

3. Who ordered ‘The Purge’?

Back in Season three, everyone kept banging on about the Dharma Initiative purge. We later found out that Ben gassed the whole village, then dumping all the bodies in a hole. That’s not very Namaste! It also seems totally unlike the laidback Jacob to order a Holocaust on the unsuspecting scientists. Maybe he just got sick of their stupid haircuts.

2. What’s the deal with Christian Sheppard?

Christian Sheppard is one of Lost’s greatest enigmas. It’s a fair assumption that his body was taken by MIB, considering Cocke admitted as much to Jack, proclaiming to have been the visions of Christian Sheppard all along. It all gets confusing, though, as Hurley saw Christian in Jacob’s cabin along with another person – who was that (it certainly didn’t look like Jacob). Also the Man in Black couldn’t leave the Island, yet Christian appeared on the boat located outside of the Islands magnetic radiance and, more bafflingly, appeared to Jack twice at his hospital in LA. Those evil manifestations of smoke, eh? What a bunch of lying bastards.

1. What is Walt?

This picture was taken on Walt’s 8^th birthday.

The big question that was on everyone’s lips: What was the deal with Walt? Yes, everyone know that the kid’s balls were dragging in the sand by the end of Season two, assuring he was given a quick exit. Yet, he appeared in frequent freaky visions (covered in water whispering backwards to Shannon; telling Locke he had work to do) and was the much coveted prize of The Others. Did we ever get an answer as to why he was so special and seemingly possessing superpowers? No. It has left fans frustratingly screaming ‘WAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLTTTTTTT!!!!’ in despair.