Cool Shit 5/1

Another take on the 2015 Summer movie season.

What does it truly mean to be a human cannonball?

A Lego documentary that goes into why people like Legos so much. Because they're awesome I guess.

The reason the movie Cube worked was because of the innovation needed to make it due to a limited budget. The acting was by no means great, but you could forgive it based on the interesting premise. A remake would probably mean a bigger budget, but with that comes bigger expectations, and therefore more cooks in the kitchen. I don't have high hopes.

The Hubble Telescope is an incredible piece of technology, offering us a look out into the universe and beyond sometimes. But it is old, and probably won't last much longer. It's time for an upgrade.

For fans of Serial, a new podcast is coming that will explore true-life mysteries.

Ever wonder what a Flaming Moe really tastes like?

The Lost countdown continues...

Less than 4 hours to go before we all get Lost tonight. For a quick recap of where the characters are, take a look here at my post from yesterday. Or, you can always go here and get a possibly more accurate, yet less humorous recap. Can't wait to get your total Lost fix? Read an Interview with Hurley and an interview with Ben.

An if you really want to dive in, immerse yourself in some of the theories floating around.

Regardless, from everything I've read, tonight's episode(s) should be good.

Super Secret Lost Podcast!

The Lost finale has come and gone, but that doesn't mean it was forgotten (ok, maybe a little since it was so long ago). Since the finale was a 3 hour ordeal, we decided that instead of creating a 14 hour episode of our podcast that would bore everyone to tears, we would give our Lost listeners a special treat - 25 minutes of our insane ramblings and pinings about the Lost finale.

Download to hear musings about Keamy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (your guess is as good as mine), Dante's Inferno (ditto) ruminations on what is going on and what will be going going on in the next season. You won't want to miss it!

Definitive proof that Keamy is a badass and Sayid is a pussy (and possible evidence on what the hell Cline was talking about with "tranquilizer" Joe:



Jeremy Bentham's wikipedia page that pretty much proves that neither of us know what we're talking about.

And finally, a super awesome video that definitively explains the entire show. (I'll be impressed if you get through 2 minutes. And there are 2 more parts!)

Live Blogging the Lost Finale

Trying to update after every commercial and still not miss a second of the Lost finale. We'll see how it goes. I started a hair late, but hopefully will catch up as we get longer commercial breaks.

9:30 Update

Keamy - I don't think he's dead. I still think he's jerry-rigged up to the explosives on the boat. So his heart is still ticking. Total badass too kicking Sayid's ass with a massive knife wound.

9:36 Update

Why doesn't Michael simply start pulling wires to dismantle the bomb? Hasn't it been shown he can't be killed? Sounds like a better plan than freezing the battery to me.

Ok, so who is Charlotte? Claire in later life? Someone we haven't met?

Of course the tape doesn't work. Why would it work?

I want to see Locke and Ben star in their own sit com. Who wouldn't watch that?

Suddenly Lost is a comedy.

Who's coming down to the Orchid? Jack? Keamy? (I hope).

9:49 Update

Ok, so we have most of the Oceanic 6 together, + Sawyer.

Keamy cannot catch a break. That's the second time someone has attacked him from behind.

9:57 Update

Well, now we see how Sawyer gets left behind. So now we need to get Jin (and presumably Walt) away from the rest of the Oceanic 6, if indeed they make it to the boat.

Anyone else think we don't find out who Jeremy Benthem (I hope that's his name) is until next year? My guess is he's some sort of conspiracy guy who kep bugging the Oceanic 6, though I'm not sure why his death would hit Jack so hard then.

Charlotte is Aaron with sex change? Ok that would be too weird even for Lost I think.

Keamy still hanging on I guess if the green light is still on.

So, do we lose the island in time or what? Ben was putting a lot of metal in a place we've been told it shouldn't go.

10:11 Update

Hmmm, so Benthem is someone else. I'm hoping this doesn't mean that's all we find out about who's in the coffin. Of course my theory that he's a conspiracy nut looks bad. Hey, you win some, you lose some. Doubtful it's Ben, or Sayid wouldn't be so calm I don't think. What if Sayid means someplace that is safe is "forward" instead of back - meaning the island moved into the future.

I'd say Jin was definitely dead, but we all know how this show likes to play around.

I see Desmond got off the boat which is good, but who knows if that means he's safe.

10:19 Update

So, who do we think Sun is referring to? Ben? Desmond? Does she really want to go back there because she thinks Jin is still alive?

I see Sawyer had to take his shirt off to make it back to the island.

Did Ben say he had to "change?" Like clothes? Think he's going to put on an Oceanic outfit to somehow swindle his way off the island?

Something happens in the next 40 minutes to change Jack's mind about lying about the island. I can't even begin to imagine what it is.

10:33 Update

Well, having an island disappear before your eyes is probably something big enough to make you want to lie.

I don't like the fact that Desmond was in a helicopter crash.

Ok, so does Lapidus and Faraday somehow fall into a time loop - which would make them both "know" about the island in the future because they keep experiencing the past? Yeah, I don't know what that sentence means either.

They wouldn't kill Desmond in a simple helicopter crash, would they?

10:47 Update

No they wouldn't! Though they keep teasing me.

So Claire doesn't want them to go back, Jack wants them to go back, Kate doesn't want them to go back, Sayid and Hurley probably are going back, and Widmore and Sun are looking to go back (could Widmore be the captain of the Black Rock and have done what Ben did long ago to save the island from other people that were coming to get it - someone like Ben? That hurts my head.

Portugese on the boat, right? That can only mean one th- Penny! And...hmm, it seems something must be in my eye or something. It's getting misty in here.

11:00 Final Update

Why wouldn't Aaron stay with Penny and Desmond? The kid has to take another 8-9 hour raft ride in the sun? Is that healthy? Is Kate that selfish?

Jack is in some really bad shape. Speaks to Matthew Fox as an actor.

Think the island they landed on is same one Jack had his dalliance with Bai Li (or whatever) on, and got his tattoos?

Ok, Locke in the casket was a surprise. I guess the island will heal him when they go back. Also guess he wasn't cut out to be such a good leader since "bad things happened" after they moved the thing.

So Faraday...where did he go, along with all those other expendable people?

Oh, now that we know Desmond does get off the island, do you think she meant Ben or Desmond? I'm guessing Widmore would have interest in finding either one of them. But why would she sell out Desmond? Does she blame him for the bomb stuff?

That's it for me. I hope some of these ramblings are somewhat coherent. Some things came true, some things turned out to be wrong, and some things simply make no sense. I think that sums up Lost perfectly. Feel free to post in the comments to laugh along with what I thought was going on...

Here's to a great season 4 - and hoping that season 5 will match it.

Thoughts on Lost - "There's No Place Like Home"

Ok, here are a few thoughts about the show last night, the show in general and an updated list of who I would be hanging out with on the Island. Please feel free to discuss whatever in the comments section.

First, I direct you to the Entertainment Weekly recap of this week's episode. While heavy on inferences and outside references, it does a good job of linking actions to past episodes that you might have forgotten.

As for last night's episode, I'm not a huge fan of the direction they’re taking the finale. Right now, I'm done with the Oceanic 6. I've always hated Hurley, Sun isn't much better, Kate and Jack are getting annoying, and taking a baby along for that ride, and we've kinda already seen where Sayid is gonna wind up. I want more Ben and Kemy. Hopefully we get it in 2 weeks, but with the way they’ve set up the Oceanic 6 (they’re as spread out as they could possibly be in the Lost geography) it’s going to take a lot of storytelling to get them all back together and in the hull of an airplane.

A couple of random thoughts/theories of mine about the island:

* How the hell did Faraday have the orchid drawn in his notebook without being there?

* Abbadon = Walt grown up? – popular theory on the web. Not sure I necessarily agree with it, unless they explain that aging weirdly on the island also gives you a bizarre accent.

* The “crash” site of the plane they keep saying was a hoax? Not really a hoax. I think they’re all dead in another timeline. (read below).

* Moving the island means moving it somewhere in time.

* Jack Shepherd is not dead.

The orchid station has a cool video, which we've linked to before here.

Current list of people I want to be close to on the Island right now. I define this list as who I’d currently want to be with on or near the island, to increase my chances of survival (and feel good about my survival.):

10. Jack – He does something he’s not proud of I bet. Something that is going to be eating at his conscious. Still, he’s got a sense of loyalty that won’t quit.
9. Locke – He might be the savior of something, but that doesn’t mean he has any clue what he’s doing. In fact, it always seems he’s going against what he should be doing. Of course, right now he’s positioned as a savior, so it wouldn’t be a terrible place to be by his side.
8. Kate – She’s a survivor, no matter what. And she’s easy to look at.
7. Desmond – Glad to hear his decision about not going back to the island. You can get killed there just for looking at a tree funny. Not so happy to see he’s on a soon-to-be-exploding freighter. That doesn’t bode well. Kinda get the vibe when Faraday gets back, Jin is going to put Sun on the raft to go back to the island, and he’s going to stay with all those other survivors (you know, the ones that we never saw before that suddenly got to escape) and Desmond as the Freighter explodes once they kill Kemy – that thing on his bicep has to be involved here. My suspicion? We all think Desmond dies in the finale but he’ll wind up alive in the next season. Ok, that’s more my hope than anything else.
6. Sawyer – Like Kate, he’s a survivor. So far, he seems to be picking the right sides, which makes him smarter than Jack. How much smarter, I don’t know.
5. Sayid – Well, we know he survives into the future, we just don’t know how. He’s running off into the wild to get Jack…not sure why he’s loyal to Jack. Perhaps he’s been with Ben since the beginning and is a mole? There are a lot of earlier connections to Sayid and the island (that army guy that sees him Iraq and then winds up in the hatch when desmond gets there? Hmmmm?
4. Faraday – Talk about secrets. I don’t think he’s keeping them because, I think he’s actually keeping them from himself. As in future Faraday has left clues for past Faraday that present Faraday is slowly starting to pick up? Yeah, I can’t follow that either. That notebook of his contains some powerful things though.
3. Kemy – Yes I know I suggested earlier that he will probably die, but still – he’s a badass and apparently has intel that gives him a leg up on most of the people on the island. And he came out of a scrap with the smoke monster fairly unscathed. And he does at least go into a firefight with a decent bargaining chip (the device I believe will blow up the boat if he’s killed.) There are worse people to be near when SGD.
2. Alpert – He never ages. That’s kinda cool. He’s always one step ahead of people when we see him. That’s really kinda cool. And he apparently knows a place on the island that others don’t, where he can kinda chill out, not age and probably bang chicks. And that’s the coolest.
1. Ben – How can it not be? He said it last night. He has a plan for everything. Sure, he got his daughter killed, but aside from that, when hasn’t be been in control of the situation. I don’t like his tactic of allowing people to beat him up to make them feel like they have the drop on him, but it’s better than being a corpse.

And finally, here's my bizarre totally not thought out theory about the island that makes my head hurt...

I see the island as a place that sits at the edge of time travel. With the island you can travel through time , which is basically a different dimension. Each time you travel, you start a different strand which becomes your timeline. These strands eventually come back tog

Lets consider our “present” as a cord of rope. Now, with the island one can travel within time. But once they do, it splinters off and becomes a different stand of rope (one of the strands that make up the rope). It remains to be seen whether these strands go off into nowhere; I believe they eventually must come back together to keep the large cord of rope as one. That then means while one may be able to manipulate certain events in the past, the overall constant cannot be changed. Or perhaps the island can change events in the future, and that’s why it’s so dangerous to move it. Regardless, that’s why I think these characters are so intertwined with their pasts. I think they know each other in the future, and that when they travel back in the past, their consciousness retains this information, so that they will still all come together so as not to ruin the time structure of the cord of rope.

Could you imagine seasons 3 and 4 the same episodes as the first two season just from a different perspective? Or maybe that’s just the series finale.

I won’t even pretend to think I understand what I just wrote. It’s obviously thrown together without a lot of thought.

Want a little Lost? Well you get a lot!

It's no secret that we here at The Popcorn Trick are huge fans of Lost. So much so, that for the past three years, I have take a moment here and there to joy down my ideas and theories of just what the heck is going on on that island. And now I pass them along to you!


Unedited, rough - it's just the way I want to share them, so you can scoff at the errors, laugh at my foolishness and be dazzled by the potential of the predictions coming true. Be warned - it's a bunch of stuff and you ADD freaks will probably wine about the length, but I didn't want to edit anything in case it actually comes true. So without further ramblin'...


My theory on Lost
November 2, 2005

The island has 6 stations. They correspond to the Dharma Initiative. The Swan station, is the electromagnet one. Apparently there was an incident. I believe whatever they found (be it magnetic properties or something else) basically can create a fold in time. So this station is actually still based in the 70s or 80s, when the project started. That explains the old feel of that bunker. Every 108 minutes, the numbers have to be entered so that this fold in time still exists. If they aren’t, maybe time folds in on itself and destroys the world. No idea about that. Still working on it. Anyway, the rest of the island is in the present. Reasoning? The hatch where the tail survivors were seemed run down and dilapidated. Basically it appeared as though the project was abandoned and the hatch hadn’t been used in years.

A lot has been made about the food in the hatch. Why there wasn’t a lot more in there, or where it came from in the first place. Could supplies be being air dropped or something? But why would a company continue to drop supplies to an island if they abandoned the other projects? Well that’s where the time loop comes in. If it’s a loop, the same period of time could be being repeated over and over. So maybe supplies are being dropped – but it’s always the same supplies being dropped over and over, because time is now in a loop.

So now the plane crash…well what if continually pushing the buttons causes the loop in time? And what if at one point about 44 days ago (not 100% accurate on this) Desmond didn’t put in the exact sequence? What if he missed it or typed it wrong? And that had an effect that would cause a plane to crash? And once he realized it, he went back to punching in the numbers. So now the castaways are caught in this time loop?

It would explain the weather predictions (Locke seems to know when it might rain, he might have possibly recognized the pattern) and maybe it sent the lostaways back in time which might explain Locke being able to walk? Almost like he now exists before he lost the use of his legs? And puts Jack in a position to see people he already met in his past? Maybe grabbing at straws here.

And maybe children are so important to get out of there because they haven’t been born yet at this point in time? So they shouldn’t exactly “exist” on the island? I’m just trying to force some of the stuff that’s been going on into my theory.

The numbers could also play a part because if there is something to do with time, possibly someone could know the numbers from the future and use them in the past which would mess stuff up. Like the lottery or something. Maybe you can’t use the numbers out of place in time, and if you do, bad stuff happens. I know that doesn’t explain a lot of their placement in the rest of the series.

Another thing I read on a forum is that the people on the boat that grabbed Walt, is that they could possibly be the De Groots, the couple that were in the video seen developing all these initiatives at U. of Mich. Now, what if they got sucked into the present somehow on the island, and are trying to get back to their time? But they can’t find the hatch, and so they’re just trying to survive on the island. They know no one will come save them because they put the island because Dharma left years ago (that’s the present) so they’ve basically gone crazy.

The theory isn’t fully fleshed out, and there are obvious holes, but it’s fun to speculate. I’m at least leaning toward time warp/loop/fold. It also explains the pirate ship in the middle of the island. And then maybe the monster is a dinosuar, even though they said it wasn’t.

The time loop also helps explain the monster, and the appearances of the monster. What if the monster was a dinosaur? Perhaps a dinosaur happened through the magnetic field that surrounds part/all of the island and was therefore around to rip the pilot out of the plane and chew up his body. And then maybe it somehow walked out of the loop. Or the code in the computer controls the loop, and therefore if it wasn’t punched in a couple of times, the dinosaur went back to its present time. The rest of the incidents on the island could actually be a “security system” as Rousseau said the monster was, or it could be things coming in and out of the time loop.



Theory on Lost – revised
4/12/07

Ok, some of the time loop stuff might be true and some of it might be a little far fetched. Of course the appearance of Locke’s dad could suggest that there is a way to travel from the island to the “mainland” (for lack of better term. Assume it means the real world) through a wormhole or some other rip in the fabric of time. Who knows? That might be a giant leap of faith.

Anyway, I think the show currently is heavily leaning toward the idea of the fathers of the castaways somehow being involved in what is going on on the island. Aside from many of the main characters having daddy issues (Jack, Locke, Sawyer, Sun, Kate), this could also go a long way into explaining how these specific individuals got on the island. And it could stem all from this one theory:

Jack’s dad is Jacob.

Last night, we saw Ben hold Jacob in very referential tones. There was a lot of “Jacob can fix this.” But we have yet to see Jacob, which suggests that he is either not on the island, or he at least travels back and forth from it. The island seems to have a real world presence, and so this could be where Jacob spends most his time. It seems that Jacob has some background in medicine (as does Jack’s dad) and Jack now has another connection that was given a lot more priority last night (he’s Claire’s dad, who is now the only person on the island who seems to have had a kid there.) Did he manipulate things to get her there?

The other meta idea of Jacob controlling things is the idea of the plane crash. While the Others seemingly had no idea it was going to happen, it’s entirely possible “Jacob” orchestrated it and neglected to tell them (reasons unclear still). This would explain how these people could have all been on the same plane.

I’m suggesting that there is a cabal of people made up of the fathers’ of the main characters. Whether they sit on the board of this biomedicine company or whatever – they seem to have the means to get all these people on the island. Kate’s dad was military, Sawyer’s dad (who it is speculated could be Locke’s father (whether or not they’re brothers or that guy is scamming Locke will hopefully come up later), Jack’s dad (obviously) and Sun’s father (would he send his daughter to the island for research – especially if he knew her baby wasn’t hers? I’m assuming if these fathers are in cahoots with the Others, they can gather the same intel and know things that even the characters might not know about themselves).

Furthermore, with these parents behind some of the stuff, it only makes sense that they might want their children to either be part of something big, or to take over eventually. Ben and the Others at this point might not be anything more than “guardians” to whatever the island holds – and the company wants to continue the research.

Obviously there are a lot of holes here and other things that aren’t taken into account. I just came up with this on the fly.

Theory on Lost – 2/7/08 (before Season 4: ep. 2 aired)

One show into Season 4 and my theory changes – but not as much as I thought it would. I still think fathers may be involved… mostly Jack’s dad at this point. I’m not buying the whole, “well I’m messed up on drugs so I think my dad is still alive when he isn’t” moment from last year’s finale.

I believe the island is some sort of portal – and that the Jacob character may be stuck between the 2 moments the portal connects. Yes, I said “moments,” because I still believe it has something to do with time.

The big question now is what happened to make Jack want to go back to the island from his flashback. I’m guessing it has something to do with guilt (he’s got a lot of that) that slowly eats at him.

On the island time stops. It’s kinda like it’s held outside of time. That’s why Ben’s friend (forget his name – the one that talks to Locke about killing his dad) and Ben for that matter don’t seem to age. Now, Ben did age from teenager to who he is now, because he has gone off the island (for whatever reason) and then come back.

Now, because of what happened to Desmond (the explosion of the button and dharma station) he has somehow found himself back in “current” time – meaning time is moving for him. This is suggested by his beard growth. His beard grows, yet no one else’s does.

This is also evidence of the time loop. One can be effectively created by traveling on and off the island.

I also got a weird “Tyler Durden” vibe from Charlie in the premiere. The shaved head, glasses and different clothes seemed to give a nod to Fight Club and the TD character. Is that a hint that everything is in Hurley’s mind? Is he just play acting all the characters? I don’t think so, but then could it have been a red herring the producers love to put in the episodes?

Once again it seemed rain is something significant. It happened at a pretty climactic moment in the premiere.

One thing that is weird is how much Locke is working to make sure Jack stays on the island. This could lead to Jack’s dad having some sort of evidence. It has been suggested (and backed up with screen shots) that Jack’s father is in the cabin with Locke in the premiere. If these two are having a powwow, or have been for a time, that could explain why Locke has been doing all this crazy stuff to keep Jack on the island (specifically blowing up the submarine. Otherwise why should Locke care if people leave the island. He can stay.)