WARNING: Spoilers for previous seasons and this episodes

Does absence make the heart grow fonder? That’s what ABC was hoping by only showing us a hint of the third season of Lost last fall and now the show returns for 16 uninterrupted episodes all the way through the rest of the season. I’ve been very vocal about my displeasure with the track the writers have chosen in the third season, after a successful and highly rated start, the show began to languish towards the end of last season with the culmination of the hatch exploding and almost completely wiping away that story dynamic. The third season saw three of the main characters Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) captured by the Others whose intent is hard to gauge, but the first six episodes of the season were disappointing, focusing too much on the above trio than the rest of the characters stranded on the beach.

The biggest problem that the show faces, as address in a previous feature here at Entertainmentopia, was the fact that the writers and producers have weaved such a rich narrative full of suspense and intrigue we (the viewers) are beginning to lose faith that they can wrap everything up and deliver us some answers. So many more questions have been brought up over the last three seasons and there aren’t many answers to go along with them.

In this week’s return episodes we delve into the back story of Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) and are given more questions, once again, with very little answers. The flashbacks do, however, show how long some of the Others made it to the island, how they were “recruited,” and how, it seems, they are kept in line through brainwashing.

Picking up exactly where the mini-cliffhanger left off back in the fall, Lost never fails to impress on telling a good story through the use of present day action and flash backs usually related directly to the character in focus for the episodes. For the first episode focusing on one of the Others, the look into Juliet’s seemingly normal past is interesting when you compare it to her current actions and her position on the island. Her final conversation with Jack, after successfully completing Ben’s surgery, was the clincher telling us exactly how long she’d been on the island and her motivations for doing everything that she has.

So does this new “second season” make up for the tedious start to the overall third run of the show? No, not yet at least, its going to take a lot more time to really get the viewers hooked back into the show and its really going to take some effort from the writers to stop dangling the carrot in front of us, as they have for over 50 episodes, and let us take a big bite to really get into it again.

Even disappointing Lost is still must see TV, but it would be a lot nicer if the show reverted back to its water-cooler, first season roots that had us all abuzz about what the monster was, where the tail section went, and what the hell was in that hatch? While the spring return of the show wasn’t anywhere near the best episode the series has done, it was better than all six previous episodes this season and the glimpses into the future look good, lets just hope there’s some substance when we finally get there.

Another week, another remake, and another review pointing out the obvious, Hollywood has run out of ideas and have now run the barrel so dry for even retread material that they have made it all the way to the 1980’s for their remakes. It should be an undocumented rule that if a studio executive is old enough to remember the original hitting theaters, there shouldn’t be a remake in his lifetime. Unfortunately, this rule may never be observed.

The Hitcher is this week’s flashback, the story of a troubled man who hitches a ride with two teenagers on their way to spring break in Lake Havasu (something Arizona residents know not to do). After a violent encounter the title character, assuming the name John Ryder, proceeds to set up the two up in a series of events leading the New Mexico Police to assume they have murdered and killed their way across the state.

This gruesome adaptation of Robert Harmon’s 1986 original written by Eric Red doesn’t seem to really go anywhere during its 83 minute runtime and I found myself mourning over the destruction of the Olds 442 car the couple was driving than I do their impending deaths. The biggest disappointment is the utter lack of any type of character development. Sean Bean’s turn as the violent rider is a great casting choice, there’s just no dimension to the character. Why is he doing this? What are his sinister motives for seemingly hacking and slashing people apart whilst driving through the desert? There seems to be no motivation or anyway to identify why he is doing this. Jason had the fornicating camp counselors to hate, Freddy the parents who burned and murdered him, The Hitcher just seems to be having a bad day.

Other than Bean’s inspiring casting is the eye candy that is Sophia Bush who spends the entire film nearly half naked holding a gun two times to big for her until she unloads a shotgun in the film’s final scene. Her beau (Zachary Knighton) seems to be just along for the ride and to offer another lead character to follow, but anyone who’s seen a horror movie before can guess his fate from the very beginning.

It isn’t that I don’t like remakes of old horror movies, quite the contrary, Dawn of the Dead is a prime example of how to modernize a classic with not only a fresh coat of paint but also reworking the interior mechanics to fit into today’s society. The Hitcher feels like someone spray painted over the top of what would pass as a good horror movie in the late 70’s early 80’s without any regard for making the film actually work in today’s society.

From the very beginning when we see a rabbit decapitated crossing a busy highway you just know the film is going to be gruesome because it can. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, even decent movies are this way (Hostel, for example), but what they have is the pedigree of the director and his or her style coming along for the ride. Music video director Dave Meyers show his pedigree by creating a one-off visual palette that seems to be over as fast as it starts and has no lasting effects on the audience.

Everyone in Hollywood needs to just try a little bit harder, especially on films still being shown regularly on late night cable channels.

Returning for the second half of its first season is USA‘s Psych, the story of Shawn Spencer (James Roday), a twentysomething with a gift for perception who convinces the Santa Barbara Police Department that he’s a psychic solving cases from missing persons to murders in the quiet coastal town. The first season of the series was a bright spot at the end of the summer season balancing a great level of humor along with the standard drama of a detective show, much akin to USA‘s Monk.

As the series returns January 19^th for a second run the show brings back the familiar scenarios in unfamiliar circumstances as Shawn and his childhood friend Gus (Dule Hill) strive to make their town a safer place. The subtly of the shows humor is not lost as sight gags blend well with wordplay. The second season premiere also keeps the routine of flashing back to Shawn’s childhood in a situation that impacts the outcome of the crime in some way, usually for the better.

Much to the dismay of the police department, Shawn continues to show them up in many of the cases they are assigned as Detective Lassiter (Timonthy Omundson) fails to believe Shawn’s “gift” at every turn while his open-minded partner Juliet O-Hara (Maggie Lawson). Providing additional foil for Shawn’s antics is his father, a perfectly cast Corbin Bernsen still channeling Roger Dorn from Major League.

When I reviewed the first part of the season last summer I did question whether the series would have enough steam to keep up the farce that Shawn was a psychic long enough to make it hold up over time, but as the season went on, and now into the new batch of episodes, Psych seems to be hitting its stride with fun stories, and excellent dose of humor making the show a pleasure to watch.

This run’s debut, “Forget Me Not”, guest stars Kurtwood Smith (That 70’s Show) as a former police captain attempting to tie a twenty year old cold case to a recent mountain lion mauling. In the typical Psych fashion things aren’t always as they seem, and a series of misadventures and predicaments await our heroes in locating the true killer. What more could you ask from an entertaining Friday night program?

Psych’s first season continues Friday, January 19 on USA. Check your local listings for time an appropriate channel.

FOX, and parent News Corp., has been known to drop the ball from time to time. OJ Simpson’s book deal, the marketing and demise of Arrested Development, but one of the biggest problems they’ve faced is properly marketing, supporting, and releasing products from Mike Judge. His first film, Office Space, the very definition of cult classic was shunned theatrically but found new life on home video and DVD, spawning some of the most quotable lines of all time. His animated series, King of the Hill, was picked up at the very last minute last season leading to a shortened and late-starting season, and, over the last year, he’s seen his latest film, Idiocracy, go from collecting dust on a shelve to being unceremoniously released on DVD with a bare-bones package and no marketing.

I shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the movie was delayed, screened, delayed again, and then totally dropped from even a limited theatrical release, but there’s some obvious reason. First off, Hollywood likes movies in which they can make trailers for; Idiocracy is not one of those movies. The industry also likes movies which don’t step on the toes of companies who also fund other divisions of the same company. Carl’s Jr., Starbucks, Fuddruckers, and Costco are lampooned so badly in this satirical piece that executives must have just been waiting to sue. Starbucks gets the worst of it, turning the coffee shop into sex shop.

The movie focuses on Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), an Army librarian and the epitome of average. He’s recruited into a secret Army experiment to freeze a human for one year, hopefully one day saving our best soldiers for wars that haven’t begun yet. Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned, and the capsules that Bauers and a prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph), are incased in are forgotten about. The base is destroyed and replaced with a Fuddruckers, and the world changes.

As the opening narrative explains, those with the high IQs plan their family lives much more in-depth than the white trash, low-IQ residents of American, who spreads his idiot seed all over turning the American population into monster truck watching, beer swilling, ball-cracking-loving imbeciles throwing natural selection out the window. In the year 2505, the world is stupid, Costco is as large as a medium-sized state, and buildings are duct taped together, and it’s hilarious.

The beauty of Judge’s work on the story is the biting satire of a future, owned by corporations where ads appear everywhere (including your pajamas), similar to the office environment in Office Space, the United States 500 years in the future is a reflection on current times (in this case, two years ago because of the numerous delays in the film’s release). The sight gags are more prevalent than in any of the director’s previous work, but they all work while poking fun at a consumer driven America reliant on advertising and buzzwords to get through the day.

This is by no means a cinematic masterpiece, but the acting, director, special effects, and story all wrap up into another cult classic notch on Judge’s belt, who routinely produces quality comedy in either animated or live action form. While 20^th Century FOX may have handled the film like the plague, there’s nothing to fear here. There’s a very polarized opinion on the film to those who get it, and don’t get it. Those who understand the satire involved, including being fascinated with a show completely focused on one man getting kicked repeatedly in the balls, will find an enjoyable film biting in its wit and capitalizing on Judge’s talents. Those who don’t understand may find easier comedic faire in simply punching a friend in the junk.

Idiocracy is now available on DVD, do yourself a favor and at least rent the film and show FOX how badly they messed this one up.

ABC’s latest try at a comedy series comes out resoundingly well in the form of The Knights of Prosperity which seeks to rob the multi-million dollar New York apartment of Mick Jagger, lead singer of The Rolling Stones. Jagger himself provides a hilarious cameo lampooning himself as a hat-addicted, Asian-assistant employing, movie lover complete with a Rolling Stones tongue that squirts butter on his popcorn.

The real standout about the series is the lack of laugh track and the honest laughs that truly hit their mark in a series not seen since the fallen Arrested Development. Only NBC’s The Office and Scrubs seem to pull of the intellectual humor to the same degree, but there’s also some humor for everyone’s taste.

The ensemble cast lead of Donal Logue, late of Grounded for Life, also stands out as the standard sitcom caricatures  we’ve come to expect over the years, but with each actor personifying the role and bringing a little big of something to it. Whether it is the dim-witted, bombastic Rockefeller, the Indian cab driver who loves his crazy bread, or the intern duped into thinking the group was making a sequel to the Jimmy Fallon vehicle Taxi, the cast really shines.

Even with the hi-jinks, obtuse named “operations,” and the thought that no group as incompetent as them could pull of an Ocean’s 11-like heist like this, they make surprising progress in the pilot to obtaining the keys and access to Mike Jagger’s apartment. The ending scene shows how worthless the key is, but the joy of the hunt is much better than devouring the prey.

With all hope the ratings for the series will hold steady (especially anchoring the 8PM MST hour and leading into the returning Lost with the recently introduced In Case of Emergency). For those still lost after the demise of Arrested Development, there’s something smart back on TV that will have you laughing and wondering what this mish-mash of would-be criminals will do next.

Black Christmas, a remake of a 1974 film of the same name, is everything you would expect from the modern Hollywood, a paint-by-numbers horror film that does nothing to further the genre, and in some respects, is so amateurish it may not even quality for credit in a upper-division college course.

There’s so much wrong with this film and it doesn’t even dare to appease the audience by including the three horror staples we’ve all come to know and love: gratuitous nudity, creative deaths, and genuine scares. The only nude scene we get is a girl showering from behind, the deaths are all the same, so much in which they could have used the same death scene over and over again and you wouldn’t even notice, and the scares are all terminally forced.

Even writer/director Glen Morgan’s attempt at a twist is over shadowed by his penance for shooting people from the ankle down and almost blatant attempt to make you feel as though you know who the killer’s sister is. By the time he throws her image on the screen after a flashback you know it can’t be that obvious, and you aren’t that stupid. The prolonged ending to kill off a few more people in non-inventive ways is just a ten minute segment tacked on to a film that’s already 90 minutes too long.

The cast, composed of mostly C-list catty celebrities who can easily pull off being a spoiled sorority girl merely serves as canon fodder as the deaths pile up. Of course, in typical Hollywood don’t-go-in-there-stupid-thinking half of the deaths could have been avoided if the characters had any intelligence beyond painting fingernails and calling each other a bitch. The most notable cast member being Michelle Trachtenberg, who now appears doomed to star in a subpar movie in every single genre possible, but you’ll be hard pressed to put face to name during the end credits.

A few names you will remember are the aforementioned Miller and James Wong who served as members of the crew for the excellent, and genre-defying, Final Destination series, but it seems each has fallen on hard times and will put anything out for any easy few million.

So, in the end, Black Christmas is another Hollywood remake that doesn’t turn out so well. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything you’d like in this entire film, because you’ve seen it all done before, and sometimes better. One can only hope that studio big wigs get a clue, but we all know they won’t as long as there’s more movies from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s that people barely remember, they’ll be ready to green-light muck like this. 

A strong, impressive voice and excellent songwriting skills are what Christine Evans has and each one of these wealthy perks propels her sophomore album, Push. This 16-year-old singer/songwriter successfully broke through the indie barrier in her native Canada with her debut album Take Me Home in 2004 with help from 11-time number one hit producer Tom Hall.

Differing from fellow Canadian artist Avril Lavigne, Evans doesn’t necessarily produce catchy, throw away pop songs geared for massive radio play, as Lavigne’s hits have done in the past. This isn’t to say, however, that several of her songs do not stand out as very radio friendly cuts which show off the appealing choruses while still preserving the songwriting that she’s known for.

Many of Evans’ songs focus on the deeper, more emotional issues of loneliness, lost love, and perseverance with the album’s title track, “Push,”; being one of the only ones which could be considered upbeat but still focusing on a troubled relationship. On “Believe“; she sings “I cant’ hide, I can’t weep / I can’t make you be with me / I could fight, but could I win / I can’t make your heart give in”;.

The general theme of the songs transfer from her first release but the album doesn’t go down the emo track of self loathing. It is surprising, however, to see such a serious album from such a young artist in a world of pop princesses cranking out hit after hit while simultaneously attempting to land on every tabloid ever written.

In the two years since the release of Take Me Home Christine and her voice seem to have matured greatly with a slightly different sound but much more commanding over the already impressive debut and accompanying instrumentation backing her up.

The only thing inhibiting Christine is a more broad commercial release of her work in America where her CDs go for upwards of $30 online at popular sites like Amazon.com due to their import status. However, discs can be had for more reasonable prices at www.cdbaby.com, www.futureshop.ca, and directly through www.christine-evans.com. Regardless of business matters, those looking for solid songwriting and a genuine musical act need not look any further, regardless of the country.

Papa Roach’s fourth release is proof positive that the band has not only put the pseudo-rap/rock days behind them, but firmly established them as a relevant rock act with the energy, song writing talents, and singing chops to be one of the premiere mainstream rock bands in the United States. The Paramour Sessions, named after the Paramour Mansion, builds upon the excellent Getting Away with Murder and continues the bands tradition of releasing better and better albums with each release.

The three times platinum Infest, the band’s breakout debut, and its radio-ready single “Last Resort“; solidified the band in the mainstream, but its hokey rapping and decidedly generic tracks didn’t lend themselves to anything more than cookie cutter rock bands attempting to step into the shoes of success created by Korn in the blending of rock and metal with rap.

The Paramour Sessions takes the new-found sound of the group, thankfully devoid of rapping from lead singer Jacoby Shaddix, and blends it with the angst influenced lyrics of the band’s sophomore release lovehatetragedy.

The album’s breakout hit “…to be loved“; is a welcome glimpse into what the rest of the CD offers with catchy riffs that further exemplify the band’s strive to become a more focused rock act. The album is the most lyrical collection that the band has put out with much more focused songs and the ability to flex some musical muscle seems to certainly suit the band.

A lot of early fans of Papa Roach have been increasingly outspoken about the new course of the band, for better or worse, but as a fan of music The Paramour Sessions is by far the strongest collection of tracks the band has released thus far in their career and the entire disc holds a top place on my iTunes collection in several playlists.

The disc is a worthy purchase of any fan of the band that hasn’t been turned off by the shift in musical style as well as any fan of hard rock in what could very well be one of the best and most solid rock releases of 2006.