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Fringe Mid-Season Finale (Yes there's a thousand of them now)

Fringe Mid-Season Finale

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

            Olivia has been kidnapped!  Last week the Fringe team was lead to believe that Nina Sharp, played by Blair Brown was behind Olivia’s (Anna Torv) strange headaches and time slips but in reality it turned out that it was David Robert Jones (Jared Harris), the man who first appeared in episode 7 of season one and proceeded to walk through walls to escape prison. 

            It appears that Jones is very interested in Olivia’s extra sensory abilities.  Jones is the person behind Olivia’s headaches and the presence of Cortexifan, that liquid that enhances ESP capabilities in young kids, in her bloodstream. 

            Last episode, the Fringe team detained Nina Sharp suspecting that she was the only person capable of obtaining the special liquid but as we have learned over the course of the series, Jones has the ability to walk through walls using special equipment.   

            Jones has apparently kidnapped Nina and is torturing her in the hopes of using that emotional stress to enable Olivia’s ESP powers.

            As the Fringe team is debating how to find Olivia, an Observer, one of those derby’d, eyebrowless gentlemen that appear at key moments of history, appears out of thin air in Walter Bishop’s lab at Harvard.  Except he has been shot!  But who shot him?

            Jones seems to know that the one way to get Olivia to use her ESP powers is from great stress so he straps Nina Sharp to a mattress spring and electrocutes her in the hopes of eliciting a response from Olivia, but to no avail.

            Outside we see a group of Observers meeting in a park and discussing the injured Observer, whose name we learn is September.

            The episode uses quick-cut editing to indicate insistence and we see Broyles, played by Lance Reddick, preparing to interrogate Nina Sharp.  She protests, and claims innocence to kidnapping Olivia. 

            We cut to Olivia’s apartment where Peter and Lincoln Lee continue the search for the missing Olivia.  Peter browses the room and figures out that a random fixture on the ceiling is a spy-cam.

            We cut to Jones preparing to torture Nina, and Olivia trying to illuminate the light board that was first introduced in season one as a signal to how much ESP power an individual possesses.

            Back in the secret lab, the other Nina is stalling to keep from being tortured, and Olivia figures that she needs Nina to refresh her memory of some traumatic event in order to access her ESP powers.  Olivia claims that the Cortexifan is blocking her ability to use her ESP. 

            Broyles tells the Fringe team of how the Observer appeared a few weeks back when Peter went to the Alternate New York to talk with Walternate in regards to getting back to his own timeline.

            Peter decides that he wants to go into the dying Observer’s consciousness to speak with him.  Ominous music ensues as Walter tells him that if the Observer dies he might be trapped in the Observer’s mind forever.

Peter enters September’s mind and speaks with him.  September tells Peter that he is originally a member of the science team part of his group of Observers.  The Observers are apparently a possible future version of humanity that travels outside of time.  He then sets about explaining everything that has occurred over the last two season of Fringe.  He then tells Peter that he has to go home in order to save Olivia.  Suddenly September’s universe starts to crumble.  Peter is thrown out of September’s mind and September dies.  His body disappears off of the table in Walter’s lab.  Astrid, who has very little to do in this episode picks up a tray.

              Peter is more fully determined to save Olivia and get back to his timeline.  He is now convinced that this reality more than ever is not his own. 

            Peter goes to his actual apartment only to be caught by men who work for Jones. 

            Olivia wakes up and sees Peter strapped to a gurney and this is the emotional stress she needs. The light board illumines fiercely and the entire building begins to shake.  Olivia burns the henchman left behind to safeguard Jones’s escape and frees Peter.  But we are not treated to a happy reunion kiss.  Peter tells he that he is now more than determined to get back to his own reality.

            It begins to rain, a metaphoric cleansing rain to signal the end of the episode.  But this is a contradiction because nothing is fine and good.   This is not a happy ending.  Nothing has been resolved.  Peter is convinced that this reality is not his and that he is going home.  The music swells, and he walks out of the frame and the credits roll.

            The screenwriting elements used in the episode are fairly standard boilerplate, a lot of swelling strings on the soundtrack as a well as quick editing to heighten the tension.  Unlike last week’s episode, which used parallelism to juxtapose the story lines, this week was very straightforward with a lot of telling by the characters through monologues. 

Fringe

Fringe continues it’s run as one of the more intriguing, if maddening programs on television.  The producers have “reset” the show’s overarching conspiracy more than once since the show began.  But the last two seasons have settled on a string theory concept that seems to have carried them up until the present.   

This season began with the Observers, those hairless derby wearing “men” that ensure order in the universe, resetting the cosmic time line so that Peter, played by Joshua Jackson never existed in the original universe.  But fear not, the producers did not jettison one of their principle actors.  Instead he’s been given a new story arc to embark on.  Jackson’s Peter Bishop has been desperately trying to return to his “original time line” the whole season. After the Observers managed to erase him from the universe thus restoring order.

At the beginning of the episode we see Peter Bishop and Anna Torv’s Olivia Dunham kiss.  Apparently she “remembers” that Peter has always existed in this plain of reality.  This isn’t explained through dialog but merely through a series of scenes in which Olivia feels weird and headache-y and the world gets all swirly around her.  Meaning all the effort that the Observers had gone through to expunge Peter from existence has seemingly failed.

After this flashback intro we are presented with this weeks main plot.  A young man in a mental institution near Deerfield, Massachusetts who appears to be talking to himself, but this is intercut with a group of men breaking into a house and attacking and killing the homeowner.  Every word he says is in direct response to the actions of the men in the house.  After the attack he man in the institution collapses exhausted.

Olivia meanwhile has started to remember information about Peter.  She stops by his apartment and proceeds to detail how the apartment looked in Peter’s timeline where he lived with his father Dr. Walter Bishop, played by John Noble.

Walter postulates, as he often stands as the Greek Chorus of the show, introducing the scientific theory that each episode will be based on, that Peter is influencing Olivia somehow to remember the things she is remembering about Peter.  

The boy from the hospital meanwhile, whose name we learn is Sean it turns out, is not actually schizophrenic, as he has been diagnosed but is actually communicating telepathically with the killers, because he is related to them.

The man the men killed was a journalist who had been investigating a doctor who was renown for his in vitro fertilization techniques. 

Walter in the next expository scene posits the theory that the killers felt threatened by their possible discovery and like a colony of bees protecting their hive, lashed out. Peter and Olivia visit the fertility doctor at his retirement home and discover that he was not giving the families that came to him for assistance the variety they were looking for but was in fact using the same batch of sperm for each family, his own. The doctor then makes the interesting claim that he had tried to defy God’s law by trying to reverse engineer genetic traits that had been lost to humans through evolution back into them.  Hence the hive-mind of the antagonists. 

Walter also figures out that the Cortexifan, that he and William Bell developed to expand the mind of young children and expand their ESP powers, Olivia included, was found in Olivia’s blood recently, contributing to her migraines.

Walter forces Seth Gabel’s Lincoln Lee to take him to Massive Dynamic, the corporation that he and William Bell founded to ensure that the only remaining vials are still intact.

Back in Massachusetts, the hive-mind men find their maker and kill him in a very obvious homage to Frankenstein.  Astrid meanwhile is tasked with accompanying Sean as they try to track the other hive-mind men.  Astrid humanizes Sean by explaining that not hearing dozens voices in your head in normal.  Sean had felt lonely when all the voices stopped talking.

Peter and Olivia go looking for the scientist’s old notes only to be ambushed by the hive-men.  A shootout ensues wherein they kill a number of the hive-men.

Peter finally accepts that Olivia really remember all the stories she has been telling him instead of being influenced by Peter as Walter had thought.  The two finally kiss again.

Walter meanwhile drinks a vial of the Cortexifan only to discover that it is just Red #4 and water.  Peter had been waiting for Olivia in a car but she never comes back. Someone has kidnapped her!  Olivia wakes up and discovers that she is tied up with Nina in a dungeon.

The show uses parallelism on a number of levels to explicate the ideas being presented in the episode.  The hive-mind men, the multiple universes, the story lines are parallel to each other.  And the structure of the episode remains consistent as the same story arc in each scene follows each story arc.

Get your hand out my pocket!! The pure undriven shite-iness of The Devil Inside

If the Internet had existed the way it does today when Malcolm X came out we would have had a billion "Get yo' hand out my pocket!" memes we could use to rickroll other noobs. Of course that line came at a very dramatic moment in a pretty good film, but it still relieved us of the tension that Spike Lee's score was inducing in us at the time.

I say all this to set up my rant about 'The Devil Inside', one of the most atrocious and blatant middle fingers any so called filmmaker has given me since I took it in the wallet from Transformers 2.  I had been doing a lot of write ups for another company touting the unique and interesting marketing that the studio was using to sell Devil Inside.

It seemed like the movie was going to at least be unique, which I must admit up front, it was.  But not in a way that I can forgive. This movie is atrocious. And lazy, and stinks of the most cretinous major studio cynicism that I have encountered in a long time (I refused to see Transformers 3. Fool me once...)

I won't bore you with a traditional review because its not even worth that. Let's cut straight to the end which was straight up monkey shit.  We got like 45 minutes of bullshit exposition that was worthless to the plot, another yawn inducing 10 minutes of fretting and hand wringing (oh I thought that dude was possessed but maybe he's just tired). Then a lot of screaming and nonsensical garbage that the directors essentially just throw out in the last frantic car chase.

I will admit at the beginning I was impressed by all the rationale the filmmakers used for having cameras everywhere. "Ooh that's inventive. They seem to be giving the audience some credit," I thought. 

But the credits roll with NOTHING having been resolved.  And yes I know what you're gonna say, but I like movies that have unresolved endings. Case in point, Chinatown, one of the greatest films ever made. Man, it just ends. No happy ending at all but you leave that film saying, "Wow."

Whereas you leave Devil Inside like most people in the audience I sat in going, "Wait, that's the fucking end?!" Are you fucking kidding me?" And then as we walked out the theater, yelling at the people waiting in line to see the next showing, "Don't waste your money! It sucks. This is bullshit! They robbed you! Get your money back now!!" (I love NYC)

I was laughing my ass off. I haven't seen people this mad in forever.  I mean pissed.  It was like the filmmakers spit in your eye and then kicked you in the ass then made you give them money. And the whole debacle ends with a goddamn web address! No denouement, no credits. A motherfucking website.

It was like they ran out of money and the studio heads, greedy assholes that they are were like, "we don't care. This movie cost (reputedly) one million dollars to make (and it looked it), we're gonna make back our investment no mater what.

I honestly don''t know if I should hate them for being this craven or admire the seediness of the whole thing. PT Barnum would have been proud for sure.

Drive

I saw Drive a while back but it stays with me. 

I'd say I'm vaguely a Ryan Gosling fan, having been blown away by his performance in The Believer and to a lesser extent his performance in The Notebook (love it or hate it). I felt like he was an actor worth paying attention to. And Nicolas Winding Refn has been on my radar since I watched Bronson, where I first discovered Tom Hardy.  

But nothing prepared me for Drive.

Drive is propulsive, moody, colorful, well acted.  After watching it I immediately called my buddy and said, "I don't know what it is but I think I love this movie!" And was heartened when she exclaimed the same in return.


Drive just has this thing about it. It seemingly knows what it is portraying, see the song "A Real Hero" playing while the hero is literally driving around L.A. at night.

My Internet crush verbalized the mesmerizing traits of Drive better than I here. But I think one of the things about a Refn movie is that he manages to get amazing performances out of all his actors. I mean everyone in Drive is spectacular. I've never been a huge Carey Mulligan fan but she was spectacular in a role that could have easily been a stock Hollywood stereotype.

Christina Hendricks was really impressive in her cameo, Ron Perlman was heartbreaking, and Bryan Cranston continues to stun. See? You care about the characters. 


And I think that is what a good director does. He gets everything out of his performers. I've never been an Albert Brooks fan but he was fantastic. I left the theater and immediately wanted to go back in and see that movie again. And that never happens. Can't wait to see what he does next.

 

Not Really Kubrick after all

Please make it stop! I have a problem, and that is that I am a completion-ist.  I can't stop watching a movie, any movie before the end credits role. The problem with that is once I realize the movie is putrescent it becomes a battle of attrition. I once sat all the way through 8MM.

I say all this to preface the fact that I just finished watching Fear and Desire by Stanley Kubrick.  Fear and Desire is the fabled first film by the former war photographer turned film master. The plot is really basic but what is weird is the myriad voice-overs that permeate the film.  I did a little research and discovered that initially Fear was supposed to be a silent film.  The disembodied voice overs would become a hallmark of Kubrick's filmography.  Barry Lyndon is a great example.

Anyway, I realized about 15 minutes into the movie that it was unwatchable. You do not care about any other the characters or care what is happening onscreen.  I just wanted it to stop. It's so boring and plodding that I understood why Kubrick disowned it. It was the work that wasn't up to snuff with his later masterpieces although you can see the beginnings of his trademarks all over this "film". But it simply not up to snuff and I can see why Kubrick never referenced it.

OTIS feat. Otis Reading

I'm a Jay-Z fan. And I begrudgingly a Kanye West fan, can't deny the man's talent. And I am wicked excited to hear Watch the Throne when it drops. I might actually pay money to own it, which in this day and digital age is a hell of a thing to say about almost anything. It better be worth it. But that is not why I'm posting this. This post is about sampling. I am a believer in sampling. Always have been. "Paul's Boutique", "3 Feet High and Rising" and "De la Soul is Dead" all the way through to DJ Spooky, DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, etc. But I just listened to OTIS, the new single from Watch the Throne and simply do not know how I feel about someone sampling an entire song, in this case Try a Little Tenderness by Otis Redding. Otis Redding was great. Great I tell you, a master of soul music. I'm one of those people who think something is wrong with you if you don't like Otis Redding and his peers. So when I hear this song, and the lyrics are tight and complex, and the verbal jousting is on point I get a little disappointed that the production doesn't match up. This song sounds like it's fighting itself. The entire time I listened to it I was thinking Otis Redding. Not Jay-Z. Not Kanye West. And here is where I feel the song fails. It's not like H.A.M. where you kinda recognize bits and pieces of stuff and that brings the song to another level. No. This song distracts because it doesn't challenge when it is supposed to have me head-nodding. I can only hope the rest of the songs on the album stretch it a little bit more, challenge my ear. Go for it. I want to be challenged, make me go digging through my digital crates trying to find that two second clip of music.