Lost; Ill Omens for the Hobbit; and Gay Science Breakthrough

Gotta Love Des!

In the company of daytime soaps that have run for decades, Lost has one of the most complicated narratives ever written for the small screen. Its title accurately describes any poor sap who tries to tune in without having seen the show before. That's part of what makes this recap so funny. It claims to tell you everything you need to know in order to catch up to the show as of Season 4 Episode 8. I'm amused that it skips the entire "Tailies" storyline but includes every twist of the love triangle.



It obviously can't capture the whole narrative, but it does a surprisingly good job capturing the gist. And the just-bordering-on-satirical narrator, surprising in an official promo, is a refreshing alternative to the overly serious episode-length recap specials the show occasionally runs to help newbies.

The show certainly took some shaky turns in season three, but if it jumped the shark, it jumped back at the end. I've had a ball with it all along, and I've come to enjoy it for its outrageous plot twists. I don't expect an ending that explains everything - I just expect it to keep entertaining me, and running the occasional chills up my spine, which it has reliably done since the first episode. If it all adds up in the end, that's just icing on the cake.

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Chicago's own beloved Music Box Theatre has entered the distribution game, which seems like a very smart move to me. Its first release, Tuya's Wedding, recently began an exclusive engagement at their "home base." The next film to be distributed will be French James Bond spoof OSS 177.

A spoilsport at Salon says Guillermo del Toro is a bad fit for The Hobbit and worries that Peter Jackson is going the worrisome way of George Lucas. I had the idea they were breaking the story into 2 parts, but this writer sees it differently. Yeeks:

And where did the brilliant idea to make a "Hobbit" sequel -- a movie that will presumably cover the 60-year gap between the stories told in "The Hobbit" and in "The Lord of the Rings" -- actually come from? If you read all the back-and-forth stories closely, it becomes clear that New Line executive Mark Ordesky at some point told Peter Jackson that the studio had acquired rights to make both "The Hobbit" and a sequel, presumably based on Tolkien's fragmentary back-story information about what happens in his fictional universe between the two novels. A less kind way of saying this is that any "Hobbit" sequel won't really be a Tolkien adaptation; Jackson and Walsh and Boyens and del Toro and Ordesky and, I don't know, some guy in the Warner Bros. lunch room will be making the shit up.

Vote on which opera you'd like to see Chicago Opera Theater do. OK, you have to wait until 2010, but it's still a nifty way to raise funds for a great company.

I just recently finished reading Alex Ross's excellent history of 20C music, in which I learned (among other things) that Copland wrote for Hollywood, and now Terry Teachout writes a column on that very topic: "Memo to every symphony orchestra in America: What are you waiting for?"

The indispensable David Pogue on combatting "vampire power" in your computer usage.

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Via my un-hyperlinkable friend Audiophile, the funniest bit of satire I've seen in a long time: "Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene."