Last week ABC premiered a new show with thrilling potential. FlashForward is strong on pretty much all fronts: a mind-bending concept, a stellar cast and enough thrills to satisfy even the hungriest of Lost fiends. In fact, it’s Lost meets Heroes with none of their flaws (yet) and a more mature voice out of the gate.
The solid performances are led by Joseph Fiennes with Sonya Walger in hot pursuit and John Cho finally showing some depth, supported by other well-chosen talent. (Randomly, Seth MacFarlane– the iconoclast gazillionaire behind Family Guy– makes a guest appearance in the pilot, and claims that he will hold a semi-regular role on the show.) The score induces actual nail-biting, within a stone’s throw of The Twilight Zone.
Watch a clip:
The business angle of the premise is brilliant: two minutes and seventeen seconds of mass syncope that reaches every corner of the globe. That means millions of stories waiting to be told, which spells hundreds of spin-offs in as many countries, which lights my money candle. If FlashForward were stock and I were rich I would buy a fat chunk, because this show has a very bright future. Incidentally it airs on hulu, which could go one of two ways: a) it could actually float on ad rev from the website, or b) it could be a ploy to cultivate an audience (the old bait-and-switch: after Season 1 it’s available to network-watchers only).
The show has one very visible flaw: its sadly bland print ad campaign. Its posters and billboards are overlooked on the buzzing boulevards of Los Angeles, and probably every major city in America, because they lack even a shadow of the show’s gripping, apocalyptic intrigue. Instead they could pass for ads pushing a local news special or a failing radio show (see video above). FlashForward is chock-full of cinematic meat that is a slow pitch over the plate for good marketing. It’s shameful, but not fatal.
Tune in because everyone is going to be talking about it soon. Roll over, Star Trek.
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. - Thomas Jefferson
Supposedly Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Edison are among the many creative minds to claim substantial inspiration from their dreams. Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (winner of the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement) chronicled his own sleeping hours in the lyrical film Dreams, a pilgrim’s journey through Van Gough paintings, war zones, peaceful villages, and hell itself. What are dreams? Do we glimpse in them a world of pure imagination unfettered by the limitations of our own? It would seem so. I can zoom through space and time, survive death and have sex with beautiful strangers.
The Bard asks, “…in that sleep of death what dreams may come?” Might we meet imagination itself, the writer of our narrative existence? The real Willy Wonka?
I’m a little worried about that, because Wonka can be creepy. The original depiction by Roald Dahl is no less cynical than those by Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp. He lets the little dreamers literally destroy themselves in Candyland. But it’s his house, his rules. There is always a shadow to be found in dreams; always a nightmare to shake us up. We are uncomfortable even in the cradle of imagination. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” and we aren’t meant to forget it.
Last night I dreamed several good stories, scenes and off-color jokes. Where’s my Lifetime Achievement Award?
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. - Thomas Jefferson
Pretty soon I had my arm back again. Now I can’t feel a damn thing in it. All numb. I’m afraid to cut it, you know? Maybe tonight you’ll do it. Sure, just cut them up like regular chickens.
The famous dinner scene in David Lynch‘s “Eraserhead” (quoted above) is a classic example of absurdist cinema. But what does absurdist cinema and literature do for us? Some people love it, some people hate it. According to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, absurdism actually helps us identify patterns in real life. I came across the McCune-Miller article This is Your Brain on Kafka at Arts & Letters Daily.
Those who had read the absurd story selected a higher number of strings as being consistent with the pattern. More importantly, they “demonstrated greater accuracy in identifying the genuinely pattern-congruent letter strings,” the researchers report. This suggests “the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities” are enhanced when we struggle to find meaning in a fragmented narrative.
It might sound absurd, but this clip below might actually make you smarter.
Weird. Judging by the above scene (and his many films and commercials), Lynch is certainly attracted to absurdity. At the website City of Absurdity, Lynch is quoted as saying: “…the concept of absurdity is something I’m attracted to.” I don’t know why, but I enjoy Lynch’s movies. His recent “Inland Empire” is dazzlingly baffling and, most definitely, absurd. But it’s the very mystery of non sequiturs and strange connections that makes for incredible stretches of the imagination. Maybe it’s like working out the mind – all that diving into a gibberish and trying like crazy to make sense of it. In the end, we want order and meaning. Even when it’s not apparent, we often create it. The very act of creating sense and order is incredibly satisfying. It’s what life’s all about.
Speaking of David Lynch, he’s on Twitter. So if you need some absurd tweets, follow him. And he currently has an art show (yes, he paints too) in Santa Monica. Maybe I’ll check it out this weekend, now that I live here.
I’m going to append a list of excellent absurd films to this post soon. What’s your favorite absurd movie, and why?
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. - Thomas Jefferson
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