Nicholas Jahr
Most Recently: 'Lost,' One Week Later
Nicholas Jahr is a freelance writer born and raised in Brooklyn, and a founding editor of the Crumpled Press.
On Was David Mamet Ever Really A Liberal Anyway?
@Abe Sauer. Ah, The Edge. Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin, and a black guy walk into the woods. Who dies first? Hysterical.
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On ‘Scream 4’: The First Mainstream Feminist Horror Film
@Horror Chick. Okay, so now I guess I have to go see this, dammit. But the "first mainstream feminist horror film"? I'll grant, as you say, 'The Descent' didn't qualify as mainstream in these here United States. But I think AnxietyOfLinkfluence could make a stronger case for Alien (Sigourney gets chased around by penises with teeth, fer crissake), and I'm sure there's a few others -- like the original Scream. The whole point of that film was that Neve (the brunette, no less) slept with her boyfriend and lived to fight another day, overturning the established conventions of the genre. (As I think about it, I usually give Joss Whedon far more credit for this same play in the first two seasons of Buffy, which is basically about the teenage girl who sleeps with her boyfriend only for him to turn out to be a total jerk.) Still fairly puritanical, I grant, but I'm not clear from your review if the latest take does any better on that count.
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On Please Stop Emailing
"Plus I still see it in the "unread" count."
You know Gmail -- it looks like you're using Gmail -- has a lab that'll turn that off? 'Hide Unread Counts'.
Sleep the sleep of the just tonight.
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On The Mechanic's Gay Panic
This is dead on, with one caveat: Statham's relationship with the hooker isn't supposed to demonstrate he's an exceptional tipper, it's there to demonstrate he's straight. If I remember correctly Statham leaves his protege behind to go indulge in a little soft core, so the kid has revenge-sex with some woman and then promptly returns to trailing after our hero, moon-eyed. At which point I turned to one of my friends and whispered "Now I know why they had Statham fuck that woman." Five minutes later it was time to whack the boyfucker. "Now I really know why they had Statham fuck that woman."
Some woman sitting behind us moaned 'Oh no' several times as the protege went down on the guy. The disbelief and horror in the theater was palpable.
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On 'Lost,' One Week Later
@admiral: Does it detract from time spent hashing out various possibilities and the themes of the show with my friends? Not really (well, maybe a little). Would I ever recommend the show to someone who hasn't seen it? Hell no.
As for Twin Peaks, while I don't think I've watched the show since it aired, I loved it to the bitter end. I think that was a show that benefited from its loose ends and the, to my mind, fairly bleak conclusion it reached. Lost didn't. And while I agree with sunnyciegos (@4:41), I could've imagined an ending to the show that didn't sacrifice Sayid, Sun, Jin, et al in an attempt to pull on the heart strings, left any number of mysteries unanswered, and was still vastly more satisfying.
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On 'Lost,' One Week Later
@metoometoo: Yes, almost everyone died on Lost, but a good number of people didn't. They're all white. That's telling. Eko could've vanished into the jungle, he could've been sent off the Island; instead they killed him. As for Walt, while I wrote Walt off long before most people I know, bringing him back for the series finale in some way was certainly not out of the question.
As for Shannon and Boone, well, at the time I was impressed that Shannon caught that bullet and not Sayid. But ultimately that wasn't the way this story shook out. Sayid's 'transformation' (to use a word that gives the writers way too much credit) in the final season was both poorly executed and repugnant.
Lost may have had one of the most diverse casts ever (though outside Sayid it doesn't seem more diverse than your standard crew of the Enterprise); how you treat the characters who reflect that diversity matters. (If you think such things matter at all, which I do.)
As for my originality, or lack thereof, well, I haven't read much of what other people have been writing on the show. I only delved into the insanity that is Lostpedia after the show ended. But I'm making a broader point about how the treatment of the story's female and minority characters also reflects the writers spectacular failure to come to grips with the themes and questions they raised (which were a lot more interesting to me than who built the statue). Maybe I haven't made that point as clearly as I might, but that's a separate issue.
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On 'Lost,' One Week Later
@major disaster: Why do we keep watching? At some point I think Kolsterman twittered that anyone who hated the show and kept watching deserved what they got. As someone who had high expectations for the show, but thought it had started to go off the rails during season 5 (if not 4, when if memory serves the writer's strike hit), and it still seemed to me that he missed the point. I read novels to the last page. I sit through the whole damn movie. How else to come up with an informed judgment? Particularly if the work in question had some amount of promise in its early stages, in which case I'll give it a chance to make good. And straight through season 4, Lost still looked like it'd pay off.
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On What's Invisible At Harvard: A Conversation
"Discussion sections" killed me. I worked my way through most of the latter half of my life as an undergrad, and had to choose my classes accordingly. Then there would be extra classes, held at hours determined by consensus, in which everyone would get a sense of which of the 1,000 pages of material assigned that week they should actually be reading. Drove me nuts.