To be or not to be... Lost

Hello dear mates and readers,

At the beginning of our English course Felicity made us some suggestions on books and films we might read/see to practice the language. Regarding films she focused on humour TV series being consistent with one of the course subjects. Do you know what I did? I was dramatically inconsistent with the point since I started watching the TV series ‘Lost’ (Perdidos) which doesn’t meet any of the Felicity’s reasonable suggestions. What a mistake! The ‘Lost’ series is meant to be one of the most addictive series on TV. It’s a real thriller. And watching it is quite likeable since it leaded by a bunch of incredibly beautiful actors (women and men too!) all filmed in a luxurious nature which is supposed to be a remote tropical paradise-like non-inhabited island (the island is actually Hawaii which is not that bad anyway). But those episodes don’t meet any of the three basic criteria I guess Felicity was suggesting.

One. There’s no humour at all. Neither English humour nor anywhere else humour.

Two. There’s very little English culture in that series. With the exception of the accents of two characters the rest are typically American. The characters supposedly from Great Britain are an English guy who played the bass in a Rock band and a Scottish man which is not yet clear to me what he was doing before he got ‘lost’ except that he used to run Marathon races. Everything in that series is ‘American’. People’s talking, reactions, believes, violence, everything is American.

Three. ‘Last but not least’ is the language spoken in the films. Ah, my friends. This is a great series to learn the English (American) that is likely we won’t hardly need to use in most circumstances. What do I mean? Imagine a group people under limit situations. Imagine them surrounded by mysteries, dead threads and not able to trust anybody around them. No matter whether they spoke Russian, English or Swahili the question is ‘how’ would they be speaking most of the time? Educated language? Family language? Work language? No, obviously not. They speak fast as a lightning, using all kind of down-the-road (am I using right this expression?) language and all sort of odd words, at least within my English knowledge.

A few examples of what I’m saying are: buddy, gizmo, ‘you’re a dump hick!’, nutter, hatch, latch, ‘he is a jinx’, ‘a deranged woman’, ‘you’re mad at me’, piss off!, dude, sodding, ‘to drive someone nuts’, ‘how long was your last fix?’, clout, etc.

Do you want me to sum up my ‘Lost’ experience? Terrific! No more coffee. No more non sleep pills needed! One gets trapped to the episodes rightaway. You just can’t quit them so you stop sleeping, eating, working and…STUDYING ENGLISH. Our course falls into pieces!

I made a big mistake. I waste a lot of time on watching ‘Lost’. No English learned except indispensable words like ‘dude’, ‘gizmo’, ‘jinx’… Now I feel sad. I apologize to whom it may concern. Please don’t do the same mistake. Don’t follow my wrong path. BUT my friends, ‘Lost’ made me HAVE A GREAT TIME and as a not intended bonus I GOT A DEGREE on how to survive in tropical islands. Is all summed up that bad? May be it is but just in case it is not, does anyone know how I can get a tomorrow’s flight to the… Seychelles Islands?