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Reviews
Detour (1945)
the cracked psyche
Nobody likes an unreliable narrator in any form of story telling, and Ulmer's 1945 Noir masterpiece gives us one of the most questionable purveyors of facts the genre has seen.
Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, the man who we're supposed to entrust for the truthful retelling of recent events in his life, but about halfway through the film one can't help but be at least somewhat suspicious of Roberts' recounting of his tale of the cruel indifference of fate.
Its like this: when a child does something wrong and they know they're going to get into some deep trouble for it they'll go to great lengths in order to make up a story so as to make them, the guilty , seem like an innocent person, while those around them were the ones conspiring against their well being. Roberts is arguably the same way: the story is told from his perspective, and if one adheres to the idea that he is, in fact, mentally unstable then everything that we've seen has been a lie in order to cover up for the murders for which he is guilty. A detour, not from Al's trip of getting from A to B, but from sanity.
The edition of the movie that I saw was part of a Film Noir combo pack so the quality was poor (complete with alterations from black & white to some sort of blue tint, and plenty of hissing audio.) but even the detracting qualities of the DVD could not hinder the brilliance of Detour.
Lost: Across the Sea (2010)
6 seasons worth of episodes & this is, without a doubt, the worst
Forget "What Kate Does" this, my friends, is THE episode that contains all the marks of BAD television; redundant twists, stale acting, terrible child actors, wretched dialogue. Without a doubt Lost has seen its moments of teetering on lame, but this goes over the line and falls down flat on its face.
Incredibly lazy writing on the part of Lindelof and Cuse, as if they're saying "can this be over now?" Patton Oswalt has a bit where he lambastes George Lucas for the prequels, and I'd like to steal a line from his bit: "I don't care where the stuff I love COMES FROM I just love the stuff I love."