Matthew Perry and Jorge Garcia on the premiere of Mr. Sunshine
I tuned into the premiere of the new comedy “Mr. Sunshine” and was surprised to see Jorge Garcia pop up about three or four minutes in.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Jorge was invited to play a guest role on the pilot because Matthew Perry, the star, writer, and executive producer of “Mr. Sunshine,” is a huge LOST fan.
It was great to see Jorge. The show itself wasn’t so good though. It’s supposed to be a madcap comedy about the wacky life of Ben, the manager of a San Diego sports/circus/concert arena (Matthew Perry), and the colorful eccentrics surrounding him, but with the exception of a few funny moments, the jokes fell flat. The best part was actually the semi-serious subplot about Perry’s fear of commitment driving away his love interest, Andrea Anders, the liveliest actor among the regular cast.
You can catch a glimpse of Jorge in the video clip below:
It’s eerie and thrilling watching this, seeing the old sets again — the Dharma village, the temple, the Orchid station, the jungle.
At least I think they are the real sets. They seem too realistic to be computer-generated or to have been recreated. But if they are real, I have no idea how the fans got in to film there.
While seeing the old places was thrilling, the storyline, at first, didn’t seem too promising. Then, at the end, the character says something that was so good, so right, it gave me a moment of chills. (At last! A LOST ending that satisfies!)
You really have to watch this all the way through.
Jeff “Doc” Jensen is back! He wrote a new LOST column yesterday which revealed that he was actually sitting in a pew in the church when the final scene of LOST was being filmed:
I was in the church when Christian Shephard (John Terry) threw open the doors and the entire castaway soul cluster … vanished into the afterlife in a flood of white light. In EW’s Best of 2010 issue, on sale now, I share a little more about the visit, including the misdirection that was employed to fool the spoiler stalkers lurking outside the church and how Fox and Terry were the only actors that knew the big secret of the Sideways world during the filming of the sequence.
Jensen has also been rethinking his original conclusions about the meaning of the finale:
I declared that the Sideways world was a legit spiritual purgatory in my first responses to the finale. With the passage of time, I now see other possibilities, and more, I wonder if I missed some of the points Lost was trying to make about religion, spirituality, and the afterlife by becoming so locked into purgatory theory. More to come in the next week or so; my long-promised, long-delayed last Lost column will post before the end of the year.
“Real Steel,” which is in post-production and will be released sometime in 2011, is about robots who fight each other in the boxing ring. It doesn’t look like my cup of tea, even though it has several things going for it: it stars Hugh Jackman and features Evangeline Lilly (Kate) in an as-yet unnamed role; it has Steven Spielberg as a producer; and it is based on a story which was originally adapted to be a Twilight Zone episode.
According to Wikipedia’s synopsis, “Hugh Jackman plays Charlie Kenton, a washed-up fighter who lost his chance at a title when 2000-pound, 8-foot-tall steel robots took over the ring.” Charlie ekes out a living making low-end robots from scrap metal, but when he “hits rock bottom, he reluctantly teams up with his estranged son Max (Dakota Goyo) to build and train a championship contender… Against all odds, [they] get one last shot at a comeback” in the “brutal, no-holds-barred arena.”
You can see a couple of very quick glimpses of Evangeline in the trailer:
Deadline Hollywood reported that Jorge Garcia (Hurley) will star in Alcatraz, a FOX drama about a group of Alcatraz prisoners and guards who mysteriously disappeared 30 years ago and show up in the present day.
Jorge, who was the first actor cast for the show, will play the “hippy geek” Dr. Diego Soto, a world-class authority on Alcatraz. J.J. Abrams is co-executive producer. Filming will begin in January in San Francisco and Vancouver.
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Photo of Alcatraz by Ben Peoples, via Wikimedia
Still catching up on the LOST news … a couple of weeks ago, Damon Lindelof wrote in The Daily Beast:
The most awesome part about being one of the primary storytellers of a popular television show is hearing how much its most loyal fans hate it.
Oh. Wait. It’s actually not awesome. It hurts like hell.
I know—boo hoo for me. That’s the price of doing business, isn’t it? If I’m asking you to invest your time and attention in a story I’m telling, it’s your right to tell me that you hate that story.
You just don’t get to call yourself a “fan.”
At least that is what I had always believed.
He changed his mind after watching the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, which he hated, despite being a Harry Potter fan. When he left the theater, his brain was churning:
As I staggered out into the parking lot, my brain was deftly trying to resolve a deep and complicated paradox: If I loved the book, and the movie was an incredibly loyal adaptation of that book…
How could I possibly hate the movie? And even more distressing…
Based on the careful emotional logic I’d been using to insulate myself from the slings and arrows of “Why didn’t you people answer any goddamn questions?” and “A golden light in the middle of the island? SERIOUSLY?!?”, if I hated the movie…
Did that mean I was no longer a fan?
He turned it over in his mind, in the parking lot, and came to a conclusion:
I still love Harry Potter. Deeply and profoundly… I’m still a fan. A huge fan. Huge.
And so I sincerely and genuinely apologize to all those whom I have stripped of their Lost fandom just for complaining about the stuff you didn’t like. It doesn’t make you any less a fan. In fact…
It just makes you honest.
I respect that. And I’m genuinely sorry for ever feeling otherwise.
