Lost and Found

"D'ya feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?"

I just watched "Mystic River" for the fourth time, a film by Clint Eastwood that clocks in at two hours and 17 minutes. Over two evenings in the last week, I spent about three hours and 15 minutes watching the first four episodes of "Lost."

I had misgivings watching the show even though I tried hard to like it, so that I could maybe be socialized into that water-cooler circle of avid discussions about last night's episode. Even as a countless number of people told me to keep watching, that it keeps getting better, that I was going to keep going through the episodes faster and faster. Well, the first thought that comes to me is this: the first seven minutes of "Mystic River" sent a deadly chill through my soul that was harder and more urgent than any of the purported scary moments and frights in "Lost." Eastwood didn't need any special effects, plane crash or a woman jabbering in French on some unknown signal. He put a boy alone in a darkened frame, lying prone and shaking in sawdust as a skewed figure loomed above him. Before that, the boy was driven away in a black Cadillac and stared out the back window. It was a story so real and the sensation of the unknown so dreadful and the direction so graceful and gentle, an extreme to the moment in the film, that made you feel coweringly disturbed. Before you knew it, Eastwood had entered your consciousness in all its realms -- spiritual, psychological, emotional and logical -- and instilled a responsibility to his movie, because you recognize the blind passion and the sometimes futile attempts to negate the unprompted effects of moral negligence.

"Lost," on the other hand, felt to me like a collective of every narrative device ever employed in an M. Night Shymalan movie. Sure, many of the plot twists were akin to the genius of "The Sixth Sense," and there is a little of "Unbreakable" from the impossibility of surviving a crash caused by a plane torn apart in mid-air. Unknown entities shuffling through long rainforest brush, we've seen aliens do that in "Signs." People banding together when forced into a state of separatism, just like "The Village." Weird, unfathomable happenstance, "Lady In The Water." That end of the world feeling -- "The Happening?" Unfortunately for Shyamalan, his moviemaking magic ended with "The Sixth Sense" and every subsequent movie was a poor attempt to cash in on the Big Irony that earned him an Oscar nomination. It feels forced, a frustrated auteur trying to get smarter with each movie he makes but the burden of his own intelligence must be crippling -- it just falters into lameness weaker than a thug staring at the wrong end of Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum.

There's nothing new on "Lost" thus far in four episodes. The teleplay is atrocious -- when one of the survivors tries to convince his disgruntled sister that a lady in depression needed to be helped, she retorts without looking up from her crossword, "What's a four-letter word for 'I just don't care'?" I've never seen "Survivor" either, but I have to believe that was as cringeworthy as some of the things contestants on that show are made to do. "Lost" seems to me like an hour each week of being told how to feel and react to the events unfolding. Cue orchestral maneuvers which crescendo and alert you to start feeling creeped out and cue Matthew Fox looking cute and hot and squinty so you can focus on a nice hero. "Lost" is an amazing television enterprise, getting it right at a time when broadcast production is in about as much trouble as the music industry -- it has managed to get people tuning in every week and on to its Web site inbetween episdoes for the last five years. In TV, all you need to do is shepherd the viewers from one commercial break to the other and have them hang off a cliff like Stallone so the advertisers can pay for million-dollar episodes to be produced in Hawaii. It's much more challenging than I'm making it out to be, and cable produces much more provocative programming. But the "Lost" formula is great: a large cast of characters with convoluted secrets that you could spend a l-o-t o-f t-i-m-e r-e-v-e-a-l-i-ng t-o s-t-r-e-t-c-h t-h-e n-u-m-b-e-r o-f a-i-r t-i-m-e y-o-u- c-a-n s-e-l-l. Some day, all this would make a really good theme park, or at the very least, a Wii game.

I suppose as the mystery thickens in "Lost," there must be plenty of puzzles to ponder over which I'm quite sure I'll never be able to get, because I'm just no good at things like that. That's why people log on to ABC's Web site and work on this stuff as ads scroll on. But in these times, it's all about cutting back so 30 seconds of a shot of Sean Penn's tattooed back with tight, tensed muscles thinly veiled by a singlet showed me a much fuller and complex character than the three plus hours and multitudes of people on "Lost." The convulsion of grief upon learning of his daughter's death carried by the organ death march of a first communion hymn is stirring and frightening at the same time, especially when passion is a religion. The entire film is a street opera where ballets of betrayal are fought in Boston backwater alleys and the roots of Shakespearan tragedy creep along each scene like a cancerous virus, from the screen to you. The two women in the film are the schizophrenic psychoses of Lady MacBeth -- the lunacy of guilt and the madness that underlies a lack of remorse. As in the greatest literature from the Victorian Age, tragic events are set in motion because of the occurrence of what is usually seen as pure and life-affirming: love. And they don't stop, because there is no commercial break in life. This isn't a word game or a brain teaser. The film gets darker and bleaker and I got more afraid accordingly, because I just can't find the answers by flipping to the back of the book.

I'm not saying "Lost" is a bad program or that it's stupid to watch it. It's just not for me. The fourth episode revived my faith because it finally unlocked the secret to my heart -- it tugged at a few strings when Locke could walk, because it was his "destiny." When all else fails, sentimentalism is always effective, as evidenced in pet food commercials. I'll likely keep the second DVD of season 1 in my HomePal queue to see what else is revealed about the other characters, but I think I need to bump "Mean Streets", "Ran" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" up before it.