tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5853237944234007802024-03-14T02:16:21.170-04:00THE DIGjriddle's Cinemarchaeologycinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.comBlogger246125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-77898375956428110332024-01-25T01:52:00.007-05:002024-01-25T15:21:00.090-05:00Quoth THE RAVEN (1963) Forevermore<p><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">On this day--25 January--in 1963, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLe7J3cNOCA">Roger Corman's THE RAVEN</a> first hit the screen. On paper, the film is an adaptation of the poem of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe. In practice, it just uses the poem as a jumping-off point for a raucous horror comedy about dueling wizards written by dark fantasy legend Richard Matheson, directed by the Pope of Pop Cinema and starring genre royalty.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkd0Rs1qIw7HLezUJWHTOdD1dyLTJ4TC0-dlnXLPVyyG4n2zQ1vfM1lI2BGI-SBBvRwhAvoPKIQE4u-oOd8bdwQ07uMi1sjx1XOtOhw2Hkr2NQGIGOkh9ZkYuabQhE7ZZmTjWdsAgrjffmaafImQs5rrEV5AvqOGjCET4N2Qtqd0ac3sJr6NQQl0Ah/s1235/Raven_cast3.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="735" data-original-width="1235" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkd0Rs1qIw7HLezUJWHTOdD1dyLTJ4TC0-dlnXLPVyyG4n2zQ1vfM1lI2BGI-SBBvRwhAvoPKIQE4u-oOd8bdwQ07uMi1sjx1XOtOhw2Hkr2NQGIGOkh9ZkYuabQhE7ZZmTjWdsAgrjffmaafImQs5rrEV5AvqOGjCET4N2Qtqd0ac3sJr6NQQl0Ah/w640-h380/Raven_cast3.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"></span><p></p><p><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><br />THE RAVEN was the 4th of Corman's adaptations of Poe, which are real highlights of his work as a director. The cycle kicked off in 1960 with HOUSE OF USHER, followed by THE PIT & THE PENDULUM then PREMATURE BURIAL (both 1961) and TALES OF TERROR (1962).<br /><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsVi922-RUHmApp22lqzxGV0pELm5uE0-x0wzDpq45BYDUmhKSQNbuWeL-pMOPahg8mX0SLWtdTIMIGLZHUH9_7SPu1sbJnmjyZKOkn3Nc7I9aX8z565IPDkCWmyjXPaGLaV9LvYxDRDzzg20Wh-gpkQ6vJJ_TxmwwfzOxjXtRN9KWrZxXdUBNtJKf/s1284/AIPoe_cycle1j.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1284" data-original-width="804" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsVi922-RUHmApp22lqzxGV0pELm5uE0-x0wzDpq45BYDUmhKSQNbuWeL-pMOPahg8mX0SLWtdTIMIGLZHUH9_7SPu1sbJnmjyZKOkn3Nc7I9aX8z565IPDkCWmyjXPaGLaV9LvYxDRDzzg20Wh-gpkQ6vJJ_TxmwwfzOxjXtRN9KWrZxXdUBNtJKf/w400-h640/AIPoe_cycle1j.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"></span><p></p><p><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><br /></span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">Vincent Price, who headlined all but one of the Poe flicks, had become a horror star in the 1950s and these movies helped catapult him to genre superstardom. While, castwise, he was the initial featured attraction, Corman began bringing into the Poe pictures other current horror stars--Barbara Steele, fresh off Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY, appeared in THE PIT & THE PENDULUM; Hazel Court, who had been in Hammer horrors THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH, co-starred in 3 of the Poes--and teaming them great actors who were perhaps past their primes--Ray Milland, just off his second retirement and opposite Court, in PREMATURE BURIAL[1] and Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone in TALES OF TERROR.<br /><br /></span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">TALES OF TERROR had been an anthology featuring adaptations of 3 Poe tales. One segment, a take on "The Black Cat" crossed with "The Cask of Amontillado," featured Lorre as a cat-hating drunk who finds a pal--and eventually a nemesis--in Price's comically urbane wine-taster.</span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"> It was a straight-up black comedy and arguably the high-point of the movie.<br /></span><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhF9C_FYL4sVcwKrXvrwzJSaQ90Z4rBqTKop-S_16jeoSvvEWawZcF818f8PhJv5tL2MLC0nuhyphenhypheneol0HAdlTm92Opkgtkcobbm9vlVriVn3vROXQon_IPIpNKG_uA3pnaKAzHgzpxIy_XG49Vwtl9TcGW1QFM0crZQQ6HUQPY1sJaJlYtNu2s8giKD/s650/Lorre_Tales_of_Terror.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="650" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhF9C_FYL4sVcwKrXvrwzJSaQ90Z4rBqTKop-S_16jeoSvvEWawZcF818f8PhJv5tL2MLC0nuhyphenhypheneol0HAdlTm92Opkgtkcobbm9vlVriVn3vROXQon_IPIpNKG_uA3pnaKAzHgzpxIy_XG49Vwtl9TcGW1QFM0crZQQ6HUQPY1sJaJlYtNu2s8giKD/w640-h272/Lorre_Tales_of_Terror.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"></span><p></p><p><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><br />THE RAVEN springboarded off that segment, a feature-length farce bringing back screenwriter Matheson (who had written TRILOGY and 2 of the other 3 Poes), Price, Lorre and, from PREMATURE BURIAL, Court, while adding Boris Karloff and an impossibly young Jack Nicholson, whom Corman had discovered a few years earlier.[2]<br /></span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><br />Karloff and Lorre had very different acting styles, which caused tension on the set. Karloff, who was approaching 80 by then, was a classically trained actor and, as Corman described it, he knew his lines, knew his character, understood his role and how to play it. Lorre, said Coman, "had a vague idea as to what the script was, but was prepared to come in--as a matter of fact, could <i>only</i>--come in, improvise, make up his lines, do outrageous things on the set and just kind of flow."[3] This constantly threw Karloff--no big improv guy--off his game.<br /><br /></span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">Karloff told Corman he wasn't happy with his scenes with Peter, but their conflicting approaches actually <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Y7FnlkuCg">worked to the film's advantage</a>, as their characters were hilariously mismatched rivals. Karloff is the dignified, aristocratic schemer Dr. Scarabus, plagued by the alcoholic wizard version of a yapping, ineffectual feist dog in Lorre's Dr. Bedlo. The irritation Scarabus projected toward Bedlo reflected Karloff's genuine irritation with Lorre's antics.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ_puGSb1ovLCek9Tf07KAncG_0DAdrm1MzlQBdF2h9Iyvdvpnsg8RYM9CQIO8gI53AAnW9tywbMFKBw06aKRX0BZYuN5xs5JHryh1wz2_UrW5J5gA2Dwqst4Uy9dduyre_P8dkYzl-LMnQz6MXzbuzFyFhflvLLk0ZEUY1jlo4L4qryStKhJ_3n1x/s1920/Raven_karloff_annoyed_by_Lorre.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ_puGSb1ovLCek9Tf07KAncG_0DAdrm1MzlQBdF2h9Iyvdvpnsg8RYM9CQIO8gI53AAnW9tywbMFKBw06aKRX0BZYuN5xs5JHryh1wz2_UrW5J5gA2Dwqst4Uy9dduyre_P8dkYzl-LMnQz6MXzbuzFyFhflvLLk0ZEUY1jlo4L4qryStKhJ_3n1x/w640-h272/Raven_karloff_annoyed_by_Lorre.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">That isn't to say the movie was an entirely sour experience for horror's elder statesman. Corman encouraged collaborative input. In Corman's autobiography, Vincent Price recalls how<br /></span></p><blockquote><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">"Boris, Peter and I wrote some additional jokes and brought them to Roger. He approved almost everything we'd done, added business to match, and integrated the result into the script. This was one instance where the actors and the director made a funny script into an even funnier picture."</span></blockquote><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">Jack Nicholson, then 25, plays Rexford, the son of Lorre's Bedlo. He recalls[4] that:<br /></span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><blockquote>"Roger
gave me one direction on that picture. 'Try to be as funny as Lorre,
Karloff, and Price.' I loved those guys. I sat around with Peter all the
time. I was mad about him. They were wonderful. It was a comedy and
Roger gave us a little more time to improvise on the set."</blockquote></span>Rexford <span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">craves his father's love--or at least recognition--while Bedlo is perpetually annoyed by his attentions and wants nothing to do with him. Rexford would sort of hang on Bedlo's cloak while trying to talk him into coming back home. Nicholson recalls that<br /><blockquote>"I grabbed his cloak--actually, I grabbed a lot of other things that aren't visible in the frame--just to keep him alive to the fact that I was trying to get him out of there. Of course, the good actor that he is, he just reacted to it spontaneously, slapped me and lashed out."</blockquote>THE RAVEN is the first time Jack Nicholson, then 25, got to show off the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi_YR5xkRx4">full-on Bring The Crazy</a> that, later in his career, would become one of his trademarks.<br /><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNqKtWa5NwP-cSnsZnUmCe7tpPBPC1qlIv2OQaqi28YVW0x4Uy22QFfbHVHwbDnhQWAx3eZnXuM1Epb736LvAZC1eKBzmshMqTN-3t6Mdad_9ImliZaN0x-ViEA2DH5TuEWBQgilsMIZWIvVV430hGwJ5VhlQjtAhUSYnXYS1HmcMqBNm9A-kVlrw2/s1920/Raven_Nicholson_crazy1.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNqKtWa5NwP-cSnsZnUmCe7tpPBPC1qlIv2OQaqi28YVW0x4Uy22QFfbHVHwbDnhQWAx3eZnXuM1Epb736LvAZC1eKBzmshMqTN-3t6Mdad_9ImliZaN0x-ViEA2DH5TuEWBQgilsMIZWIvVV430hGwJ5VhlQjtAhUSYnXYS1HmcMqBNm9A-kVlrw2/w640-h272/Raven_Nicholson_crazy1.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj7ApHHuyv2cDbMyEDadiWa1N_C0QLm55__QM9fTnhgp4ag1Qd6Lon9lUqb8_5TPbB5AqZVqEKEtIjdTvl16qcSvXVIEqWN0uu_2Nye6ItWMTb9k6zwm9WKTFoBqlkByv9NA8Jna1onA5YjJiRUldlaD7VP6mTrbCyaq32Eg-nvRlKbwAAiT5pAFIt/s1920/Raven_Nicholson_crazy2.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj7ApHHuyv2cDbMyEDadiWa1N_C0QLm55__QM9fTnhgp4ag1Qd6Lon9lUqb8_5TPbB5AqZVqEKEtIjdTvl16qcSvXVIEqWN0uu_2Nye6ItWMTb9k6zwm9WKTFoBqlkByv9NA8Jna1onA5YjJiRUldlaD7VP6mTrbCyaq32Eg-nvRlKbwAAiT5pAFIt/w640-h272/Raven_Nicholson_crazy2.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><br />L</span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">ike the other Corman Poe pictures in which she appeared, the film shows
off how badly Hammer had wasted Hazel Court in something like THE CURSE
OF FRANKENSTEIN. Here, she's Lenore, who faked her death in order to leave her husband--Price's Dr. Craven--for Scarabus, who calls her "my precious viper." Given a good part, she's a magnificently evil,
conniving, red-hot ice-queen. "Are we going to have some torture?", she
asks at one point, clearly relishing the prospect.<br /></span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw0Ow6c1zPZYv9t5te8l56R0YJrR1ROM1O8BSmw-otJK1SF__fI220iXFwfcAJPEZ2U7FoeDflUx8OHX8z5lELGzkzR3qcBohBa-nC1EKaUDS5aprYFhl_179ECEBY5WrG4BRjPujL05KhYdUHuJsDMFbydW6Nlzj8NVOpkjVBg40_x7cshV0LdRap/s1920/Raven_Hazel_Court.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw0Ow6c1zPZYv9t5te8l56R0YJrR1ROM1O8BSmw-otJK1SF__fI220iXFwfcAJPEZ2U7FoeDflUx8OHX8z5lELGzkzR3qcBohBa-nC1EKaUDS5aprYFhl_179ECEBY5WrG4BRjPujL05KhYdUHuJsDMFbydW6Nlzj8NVOpkjVBg40_x7cshV0LdRap/w640-h272/Raven_Hazel_Court.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><br />The film culminates in a no-holds-barred special-effects-heavy wizard duel between Karloff's Scarabus and Price's Craven--an astonishingly daring undertaking for a low-budget movie made decades before CGI tech. Some of the effects don't hold up very well today--some of the animation is crude and Price phasing through the floor didn't looks so great, even in its time--but the goofy tone of the movie makes one play along with even these moments and overall, it's an inventive, effective sequence that is constantly throwing something new and surprising at the viewer.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg4Qs8vEsKN9f2e7ay_3lrOoLOxviQkJb6mBgtkS7O5-c94K9I0HjYkWl52ekAtLkRHGWMFni2HOm7Ku49-Em0Rm30wvzmIZQRE9RL_YSaSL24ImjpLyfKytxOj_Vgtp52kow08bxSqpb3eILogPoMTjancnGaP42QKnOqZqcqiGoAJFYRAiNZ0TKR/s1920/Raven_wizard_duel1.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg4Qs8vEsKN9f2e7ay_3lrOoLOxviQkJb6mBgtkS7O5-c94K9I0HjYkWl52ekAtLkRHGWMFni2HOm7Ku49-Em0Rm30wvzmIZQRE9RL_YSaSL24ImjpLyfKytxOj_Vgtp52kow08bxSqpb3eILogPoMTjancnGaP42QKnOqZqcqiGoAJFYRAiNZ0TKR/w640-h272/Raven_wizard_duel1.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8SQKJNt6_ss28ScpeIwg8UHZZC3CpWlIHsbhFsT-7T2HfsNs40RdnJJErDc2ZtvcRZBn53t20TZHXfL8YEMHfsUaOSkTJlS9bM-kjORJ6Ir2XZlf63beVKwXRIpJmX907oyAyC1RCvjmVf0bbM0f3iL94Os31Ny1-_1wJT7LVGskOUGnsoB2BQKNu/s1920/Raven_wizard_duel2.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8SQKJNt6_ss28ScpeIwg8UHZZC3CpWlIHsbhFsT-7T2HfsNs40RdnJJErDc2ZtvcRZBn53t20TZHXfL8YEMHfsUaOSkTJlS9bM-kjORJ6Ir2XZlf63beVKwXRIpJmX907oyAyC1RCvjmVf0bbM0f3iL94Os31Ny1-_1wJT7LVGskOUGnsoB2BQKNu/w640-h272/Raven_wizard_duel2.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><br />And, of course, it culminates--like all of the Poe pictures until then--in a fiery cataclysm, as the castle goes up in flames. During the production of HOUSE OF USHER, the first of the Poes, Corman had found a barn that was scheduled for demolition. He, instead, sold the owner on the idea of burning it down--for the princely sum of $50--while his team filmed it. The footage was great, worked in that film and since it became a bit of a convention that the castle burned down at the end of these flicks, Corman always cut it into them.[5]<br /><br />That kind of recycling was another boon to the Poe pictures. From the first, Corman would send his art director Danny Haller to Universal studios to buy stock sets and scenery--things a small movie would never be able to afford to build but that the big boys would sell for a song just to get it out of the way. This would then be stored after each movie then pulled out again for the next, when the art department would have an all-new budget to repeat the process and add to the collection. In this way, the Poe pictures, all done on very low budgets, looked progressively larger and more elaborate.[6]<br /><br />THE RAVEN thus displayed, in effect, the art department budget of 5 such movies. It shows. It's beautiful, a very impressive design.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimebtslNhuPfw1XGQPDdMkjaMRi-e_6U6oJ6CTnBun27tOP4uku0FKVMWmLiS2xy7mZCG-EpgRfe-1SI7pLv45xN8GQUDUJh2RZFg_h6KFWf6sfolrVL92qofzFl2nz7jYlkhnE48L0APHQf8McQbY3cEHyOzO3VlEk9u707sY0zTs2mwZ8qWrp7pm/s1920/Raven_look_1.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimebtslNhuPfw1XGQPDdMkjaMRi-e_6U6oJ6CTnBun27tOP4uku0FKVMWmLiS2xy7mZCG-EpgRfe-1SI7pLv45xN8GQUDUJh2RZFg_h6KFWf6sfolrVL92qofzFl2nz7jYlkhnE48L0APHQf8McQbY3cEHyOzO3VlEk9u707sY0zTs2mwZ8qWrp7pm/w640-h272/Raven_look_1.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNCK0De3xzWcMRga03IxjA4v8CeccccKPHrnyjEGOfw9BDBUb76H9rSfkB-M6pZGBAhsb3YfozTS1NhbGJrFPxQVc8LE7NpW_-yT4Ye4H748Hu6GJiBGgA4mcWtBd6H1dvp9IlrEjMgAcx9NCbUrbtv7RmqyRpiOsCBEICkIFF9WHKLyoYMHQM6hSB/s1920/Raven_look2.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNCK0De3xzWcMRga03IxjA4v8CeccccKPHrnyjEGOfw9BDBUb76H9rSfkB-M6pZGBAhsb3YfozTS1NhbGJrFPxQVc8LE7NpW_-yT4Ye4H748Hu6GJiBGgA4mcWtBd6H1dvp9IlrEjMgAcx9NCbUrbtv7RmqyRpiOsCBEICkIFF9WHKLyoYMHQM6hSB/w640-h272/Raven_look2.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8UxzbuZ1aDf8wmrWa87Miv8TQ4pboiuvtwQH1mJYjw_B5kQYrdAHObwzcL0IroXPiR9af5u4kHXGbm4GI9qIRLtDXU5xjQn6KZIwRNdKdcSt6xhSfNcdB-Vg02U5xi8QfMLEUAG3733I-B_tsewrkZM8KxM2WXQTBCvRX6OpWa8jml9UwxMl5vrqY/s1920/Raven_look3.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8UxzbuZ1aDf8wmrWa87Miv8TQ4pboiuvtwQH1mJYjw_B5kQYrdAHObwzcL0IroXPiR9af5u4kHXGbm4GI9qIRLtDXU5xjQn6KZIwRNdKdcSt6xhSfNcdB-Vg02U5xi8QfMLEUAG3733I-B_tsewrkZM8KxM2WXQTBCvRX6OpWa8jml9UwxMl5vrqY/w640-h272/Raven_look3.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXVFOqeOGcsKvlBQGPBSYpa6KElqE2vDnJh0FEyQaTtUu-0goius9w-QHTDgS3LnqINEWXrLBdJP25XKpEzwsyiRbHJ5jp2W4l5h-IcQQNYAuCxu4cruW6nOi5O5NHps3913QdEleIEwpGu2ZyG4XvIEvyDfvfZTST8cjdi_zHb2rsfZ1rlE0_vK6z/s1920/Raven_look4.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXVFOqeOGcsKvlBQGPBSYpa6KElqE2vDnJh0FEyQaTtUu-0goius9w-QHTDgS3LnqINEWXrLBdJP25XKpEzwsyiRbHJ5jp2W4l5h-IcQQNYAuCxu4cruW6nOi5O5NHps3913QdEleIEwpGu2ZyG4XvIEvyDfvfZTST8cjdi_zHb2rsfZ1rlE0_vK6z/w640-h272/Raven_look4.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4sV-NC6r0S92xLOXE3R_1K-SeSac7nBaUzXM6n4tHJGEFPlF2VebjrKeq9RQzZ6Mw1gY0XZNWQEmaf-x71HirNKADeWa-wMS5a80Ba-aHzcS_9aprqQgdDibl9ZAXAxWpvSU_6tDB91qmOwWDCWx7xiNbpx5HPiFUSrTRKeiax3In1OEkoZv2WFSS/s1920/Raven_look5.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4sV-NC6r0S92xLOXE3R_1K-SeSac7nBaUzXM6n4tHJGEFPlF2VebjrKeq9RQzZ6Mw1gY0XZNWQEmaf-x71HirNKADeWa-wMS5a80Ba-aHzcS_9aprqQgdDibl9ZAXAxWpvSU_6tDB91qmOwWDCWx7xiNbpx5HPiFUSrTRKeiax3In1OEkoZv2WFSS/w640-h272/Raven_look5.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQH0biT-ENoZcS8m6GSXTlRKZ-0Cvq9rLoZMtmQ1q2kBM_dwtxcuUCoZAel9n93AZF5O5hb-Mc28EG1efPJav3wCt1CjiqjBJarh5x8qABiA3pHxb4ceM2YJfMKQD0i8uhqwapX08D_eOdGI0tqiSxaPtLYA7eIvFjyFMElQEz3efI2y6rhNay3hs6/s1920/Raven_look6.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="1920" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQH0biT-ENoZcS8m6GSXTlRKZ-0Cvq9rLoZMtmQ1q2kBM_dwtxcuUCoZAel9n93AZF5O5hb-Mc28EG1efPJav3wCt1CjiqjBJarh5x8qABiA3pHxb4ceM2YJfMKQD0i8uhqwapX08D_eOdGI0tqiSxaPtLYA7eIvFjyFMElQEz3efI2y6rhNay3hs6/w640-h272/Raven_look6.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"><br />In his autobiography, Corman writes, "I have always felt THE RAVEN... is one of the most accomplished films I directed." It is. </span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">Quirky performances, an always-moving camera, unusual angles, memorable shots. </span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">While not his best movie or even his best Poe adaptation, this is still definitely Corman the director at the top of his form. His affection for it, however, may have contributed to its major shortcoming. One of Corman's signatures is tight editing, but THE RAVEN does tend, at times, to drag, as if the director perhaps fell just a little too much in love with it and couldn't bear to part with some runtime-stretching material that may have been better left on the cutting-room floor.<br /><br />Still, the movie is a lot of fun. Humor in movies usually doesn't weather the ages so well. THE RAVEN's context, sending up the other Poe pictures, gives it some shelter against the winds of time, at least to the extent that the other films in the cycle are still appreciated. Standing alone, it plays almost like a children's movie. And as long as there are children who are monster kids, genre geeks, horror fans--or, like this writer, one of those kids who grew up--there will always be an audience for it. On this, its birthday, I'm very pleased it exists.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQm7byYnRDxAu2uI-ND6nhhVqkynR3dHL1cj7KIy6O1IZ15IJRQ2RWJLYMvo3ihLb5VwR2sAb5gSRkFb4i3u1afijt4AG0R-EoK-146t7Fxa_qgtMYdKAat7yJXtpaiV75kh4ME3O9_mht_BwQ2tGyLkxoePtkVu1TeaKoG1eZgglIOTZ6aDQniRdA/s737/Fl4_dxGX0AMcZV3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="737" data-original-width="736" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQm7byYnRDxAu2uI-ND6nhhVqkynR3dHL1cj7KIy6O1IZ15IJRQ2RWJLYMvo3ihLb5VwR2sAb5gSRkFb4i3u1afijt4AG0R-EoK-146t7Fxa_qgtMYdKAat7yJXtpaiV75kh4ME3O9_mht_BwQ2tGyLkxoePtkVu1TeaKoG1eZgglIOTZ6aDQniRdA/w640-h640/Fl4_dxGX0AMcZV3.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;"></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">--j.<br /><br />---<br /><br />[1] In became a sort of Conventional Wisdom (and thus oft repeated) that Milland in badly miscast in PREMATURE BURIAL, a part written for Price but for which Price was unavailable. While it's easy to imagine what Price would do with the role then compare it unfavorably with Milland, I confess that I've never seen this as the gross mismatch of actor with material that some insist it to be. In any event, Milland made up for any deficiencies here with his work with Corman the same year in the excellent X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES.<br /><br />[2] Corman first met Nicholson in Jeff Corey's acting class, where Corman had gone to try to better understand actors and their craft. Corman cast Jack in the actor's big-screen debut and first starring role, THE CRY-BABY KILLER, in 1958 and Nicholson appeared in his movies from time to time for the next 9 years. It was with Corman that Nicholson did his first comedy acting, first horror acting, did some of his first screenwriting and his first directorial work.<br /><br />[3] Corman's account of all of this comes primarily from his 1990 autobiography, "How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood & Never Lost A Dime," and an interview with Bob Costas that same year on Costas' show LATER.<br /><br />[4] The Nicholson quotes in this piece are from Corman's autobiography.<br /><br /></span><span class="css-1qaijid r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">[5] Though an ill-advised long shot of the RAVEN castle in flames, the characters standing outside watching it, looks fairly terrible.<br /><br />[6] Loving the ornate sets created for THE RAVEN, Corman decided, after intending to play tennis one day and getting rained out, to quickly produce an entirely original picture in this "genre" he'd created with the Poe movies, a project which became THE TERROR. All of that film's castle footage was shot on the sets for THE RAVEN on the weekend before they were torn down. The story of THE TERROR is a great one but one for another time. Corman's next Poe wasn't really a Poe at all. THE HAUNTED PALACE, which was shot in the Poe style and reused material like its predecessors, was actually a rather extraordinary adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's story, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." AIP slapped the name of the Poe poem on it and marketed it as a Poe. From there, Corman went to the UK, where he made his last 2 Poes, THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH and THE TOMB OF LIGEIA, though AIP would continue marketing various movies as Poe movies--whether they were or not--for several more years.<br /></span></p>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-675776193165718342021-07-15T20:11:00.008-04:002021-07-31T11:46:58.324-04:00Legend of the Golden VAMPYROS LESBOS (1971)<p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql lr9zc1uh a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"></span></p><div class="kvgmc6g5 cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Golden Anniversary Dept. - Released on this day--15 July--in 1971, VAMPYROS LESBOS, Jess Franco's trippy, sexy, psychedelic, so-arty-it's-always-about-to-pop vampire epic.<br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihcASKO3RTWhfjg_BEjUUYk1RcXlX95C1fOhcr3PICKeBTcZuo9Nx-BgAhUpL6gof6CpZM0VkfrU_zr-1hOqyxNcgjnUBoBNV-fBIcE3hsuc79IHKAqI-WmSXw7aBrOx4V9PvxGgkVwg/s936/vampyros_lesbos_imagej.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="936" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihcASKO3RTWhfjg_BEjUUYk1RcXlX95C1fOhcr3PICKeBTcZuo9Nx-BgAhUpL6gof6CpZM0VkfrU_zr-1hOqyxNcgjnUBoBNV-fBIcE3hsuc79IHKAqI-WmSXw7aBrOx4V9PvxGgkVwg/w640-h370/vampyros_lesbos_imagej.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><br />About 13 years ago, I wrote about my <a href="https://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2008/11/early-impressions-of-jesus-franco.html">first experiences</a> with Jess Franco's movies (which, by then, were, themselves, years in the past). About VAMPYROS LESBOS, I wrote:<br /><blockquote>"Bela Lugosi's 1931 DRACULA has been sequelized, remade, rehashed and referenced more times than can be easily counted but this is the only time anyone set out to produce a "remake"--if one can call it that--that consciously reversed everything in the movie. Franco's film is like a negative image of it. Night becomes day, cold Carpathian environs fall to warm Mediterranea, hetero Count becomes lesbian Countess, Puritanical vampire hunter becomes a degenerate obsessed with becoming a vampire himself.</blockquote><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql lr9zc1uh a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto">The film's heroine, the sad and lonely--but still fearsome--Countess Carody, is
essayed by the stunning Soledad Miranda. As I wrote back then, she "</span><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql lr9zc1uh a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql lr9zc1uh a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto">dominates
the film with her remarkable presence. Bela never drank... wine, but
when Franco zoomed into Soledad's exquisite face as she tells us 'I love
this wine,' well, I may not have literally danced a jig in joy but the
impulse were certainly there."</span> For Soledad, this was one of a
string of movies with Franco that led to a studio contract that would
have made her a major star. Unfortunately, she died after an auto accident on her
way to a party to celebrate signing it--only 27 years old.</span><br /><br />This was Franco's follow-up to his own COUNT DRACULA, starring Christopher Lee in the title role, with Soledad as Lucy Westenra. That picture had been an effort to create the first faithful sound adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel[1] but had been hampered by budget issues. It had its flourishes, to be sure, but it was an example of Franco trying to go mainstream, which almost inevitably proves to be the least interesting Franco material. I'd like to think VAMPYROS LESBOS was his palate cleanser. Working from, at root, the same material, Franco just threw out all the rules, went wild and experimental, pursued his own obsessions, made it his own, an utterly unique, hypnotic, hallucinatory dream-made-film--both galaxies different and galaxies better than the earlier picture.<br /><br />In trying to describe the music for VAMPYROS LESBOS, I'm left at a bit of a loss. "Free-form" is probably the closest I'm going to get. Jazz, progressive, strange stuff from another world. Utterly unique, the only place you'll ever hear the kind of music featured in this film is in the other two Franco/Miranda pictures also scored that year by Manfred Hubler and Siegfried Schwab.[2] The music for all 3 was released as "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlemDwKZw7U">The Vampyros Lesbos Sexadelic Dance Party</a>," and became a hit decades after the film first appeared. Quentin Tarantino used one of its tracks in JACKIE BROWN (1997).<br /><br />This is a grossly inadequate write-up for such an extraordinary film. I only realized this was the anniversary of its release too late to do it justice before the day was over! Franco is one of my cinematic heroes, a guy who could take a camera, some friends, a few rolls of quarters and some bologna sandwiches and make something so extraordinary that people are still talking about it decades later. This is one of his best.<br /><br />--j.<br /><br />___<br /><br />[1] For all the sound Dracula movies up until then, the productions had given little attention to--or, more often, had entirely ignored--the original text.<br /><br />[2] The other two are SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY and THE DEVIL CAME FROM AKASAVA.</div></div><p></p><div dir="auto"><div class="ecm0bbzt hv4rvrfc ihqw7lf3 dati1w0a" data-ad-comet-preview="message" data-ad-preview="message" id="jsc_c_z"><div class="j83agx80 cbu4d94t ew0dbk1b irj2b8pg"><div class="qzhwtbm6 knvmm38d"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql lr9zc1uh a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"></span></div></div></div></div>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-71817842270179525412021-07-07T02:46:00.008-04:002021-07-31T11:46:36.294-04:00Jungle Sam Katzman & the Five-and-Dime B-Movie Businesss<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM7vv-YZH8U0cwQkQNEugipdwog0o7-RmZi_-nT6aSFGg_qM0E1ogq5q-R3pGfhvuruhRJkGJMSE0D0QPdWA192BO-Fmg0hZuVAvjqMg3gj-FemcatD3zntT7bQaVwuwvzhREf1XztNQ/s1074/sam_katzman_junglej.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1074" data-original-width="670" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM7vv-YZH8U0cwQkQNEugipdwog0o7-RmZi_-nT6aSFGg_qM0E1ogq5q-R3pGfhvuruhRJkGJMSE0D0QPdWA192BO-Fmg0hZuVAvjqMg3gj-FemcatD3zntT7bQaVwuwvzhREf1XztNQ/w200-h320/sam_katzman_junglej.JPG" width="200" /></a></div><p>Born on this day--7 July--in 1901, "Jungle Sam" Katzman. Not a household name, but one of the most prolific b-movie producers of the 20th century. "A picture that makes money is a good picture--whether it is
artistically good or bad," Sam told Variety in 1957. "I'm in the five-and-dime business and not in
the Tiffany business. I make pictures for the little theaters around the
country." And that's what Sam did for four decades, turning out, in rapid succession and for relative peanuts, a mammoth assemblage of popular screen entertainments of every species and level of noteworthiness. At present, the Internet Movie Database <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0441947/?ref_=nmbio_bio_nm">lists</a> 239 credits for Sam as producer but even that doesn't appear to be complete. Interviewed in the '60s, "Katzman admitted that he'd lost count of the number of pictures he'd ground out," writes genre historian Tom Weaver, "but guessed it might be as high as 1200."[1] The truth is probably somewhere in between.<br /><br />Some things:<br /></p>Katzman produced two of stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen's first films. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nmOjIUR9kA">IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA</a> in 1955 featured a giant octopus, unleashed by an H-bomb, attacking the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. To save money--always tight on a Katzman picture--Harryhausen created an "octopus" with only 6 tentacles--less to animate. This proved a huge success and Katzman and co. followed it in 1956 with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o4fdX8gUMY">EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS</a>--alien invaders destroying most of the famous landmarks in Washington D.C.<br /></div><div><br />In 1957, Katzman intended to employ Harryhausen's effects in another monster flick, Mark of the Claw, but when this looked as if it would be too expensive, he farmed out the effects work to, um, lesser talents, giving birth to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoxPoQKQae0">THE GIANT CLAW</a>, featuring what was supposed to be a Godzilla-scaled, near-indestructible avian menace from the stars but that looked, instead, like some demented Muppet--specifically, in perhaps a bit of metatextual concession, a giant turkey. With arguably the worst movie monster of the 1950s but with everyone on screen taking the whole affair very seriously, THE GIANT CLAW became a cult classic.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgierQniYsHa8M2rE4OE-V0__K6uBfZPJpJQHPmqjOUHX78Y7TeV8uJs2_DPhQT4fclympSY-sFQUc8MrxB0nGXISXhGsmHEOSONgu2ISexuaDiG6uCmTrrgTNpp05hhOyNjSA8qNdog/s1500/blackhawk_1952.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1056" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgierQniYsHa8M2rE4OE-V0__K6uBfZPJpJQHPmqjOUHX78Y7TeV8uJs2_DPhQT4fclympSY-sFQUc8MrxB0nGXISXhGsmHEOSONgu2ISexuaDiG6uCmTrrgTNpp05hhOyNjSA8qNdog/w226-h320/blackhawk_1952.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>This is the era of copious comic-to-screen adaptations and Katzman, who did many, was responsible for some milestones in the genre. He produced the first live-action Superman projects, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH_5_LFUvNY">SUPERMAN</a> in 1948 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9OODivU43c">ATOM MAN VS. SUPERMAN</a> in 1950, starring Kirk Alyn as the Man of Steel and Noel Neill as Lois Lane (a role Neill would reprise in the very successful ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN tv series a few years later). Katzman produced <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x74B21OPSBI">BATMAN & ROBIN</a> (1949), with Robert Lowery as the second live-action incarnation of the Caped Crusader. Steven Spielberg is reportedly developing a movie based on DC Comics' Blackhawk; Katzman produced the first <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aWUe9LVEzE">BLACKHAWK</a> in 1952.[2]<br /><br />"Rock Around the Clock" is now regarded as a rock classic but when Bill Haley and His Comets originally released the record, it was only a very modest success. That is, until MGM used the tune to open THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE in 1955, instantly making of it a mega-hit. Katzman smelled opportunity; he scooped up Haley and co., the Platters and other rock acts and within months released <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRRSbOA1D8Y">ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK</a>, the first of an all-new genre that would quickly become omnipresent: the rock musical.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqDK7fqoK6CqyfaNCqWuR_SeHGY1Mf5-oZJRNE0uWqbJY4F3tq_EBLmBqdVSUvtHFsK3_VdWU4BLQgRfhzdjSSlnUSHQD1Jn76YAszChDVkOkWcrh-v942Tz7CYis5v2uB-3C9lO1kjA/s2048/it_came_from_beneath_sea_poster.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1610" data-original-width="2048" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqDK7fqoK6CqyfaNCqWuR_SeHGY1Mf5-oZJRNE0uWqbJY4F3tq_EBLmBqdVSUvtHFsK3_VdWU4BLQgRfhzdjSSlnUSHQD1Jn76YAszChDVkOkWcrh-v942Tz7CYis5v2uB-3C9lO1kjA/w400-h315/it_came_from_beneath_sea_poster.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></div><div><br />Katzman made 10 movies with Bela Lugosi.[3] In the '60s, he made Elvis movies. He worked with beloved--for both good and bad--cult directors like <a href="http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2010/11/legend-of-wagon-wheel-joe.html">"Wagon Wheel Joe" Lewis</a>, William "One-Shot" Beaudine and Edward D. Cahn. His career as a producer extended from Hollywood's Poverty Row in the '30s to his best years at Columbia to, later in life, the big dogs of MGM and 20th Century Fox. The diversity of his work is extraordinary; he can honestly be said to have made movies in nearly every genre. A <i>lot</i> of movies in every genre. Genres that predated him, genres he invented, genres that have passed into cinema history and genres that will never die. Back in 2007, someone at Sony--who wasn't paid well enough for this--decided to spotlight Katzman's work in one of those never-die genres as part of the studio's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Icons-Horror-Collection-Creature-Werewolf/dp/B000UAFDR0/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=icons+of+horror+katzman&qid=1625634365&s=movies-tv&sr=1-1">"Icons of Horror"</a> series, offering a set featuring beautiful prints of THE GIANT CLAW, THE ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU, THE WEREWOLF and CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN. Later this year, Arrow Video intends to release the same 4 movies in "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-Creatures-Katzman-Limited/dp/B0986FZ9P5/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=cold+war+horror+katzman&qid=1625616547&s=movies-tv&sr=1-1">Cold War Creatures: Four Films From Sam Katzman</a>," an extras-laden limited edition Blu-ray set. Sam made movies to make money, and he often bragged that he never lost money on a movie and given his
tight budgets and the supportive market in which he released them, that
may even be true. On his birthday, it seems a nice thought that, nearly 48 years after Jungle Sam's death, they're still making that money.<br /><br />--j.<br /><br />___<br /><br />[1] That's Weaver from his excellent "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Poverty-Row-Horrors-Monogram-McFarland/dp/0786407980/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=poverty+row+horrors&qid=1626761801&s=books&sr=1-1">Poverty Row Horrors!: Monogram, PRC and Republic Horror Films of the Forties</a>."<br /><br />[2] Jungle Sam was fond of Jungle settings, and among his other comic adaptations were KING OF THE CONGO (a 1952 version of Frank Frazetta's Thun'da character), DC's CONGO BILL in 1948 and a series of movies starting in '48 made from Alex Raymond's Jungle Jim comics, and starring Johnny Weissmuller, who had just finished a 16-year stint playing Tarzan at
MGM. In 1955, Katzman was in the midst of producing a sequel to Columbia's adaptation of Lee Falk's comic strip hero THE PHANTOM when he got into a dispute with the publisher, lost the rights and simply renamed the character in the film "Captain Africa." THE ADVENTURES
OF CAPTAIN AFRICA--definitely not one of his finer moments.<br /><br />[3] Those were SHADOW OF CHINATOWN (1936), SPOOKS RUN WILD and THE INVISIBLE GHOST (both 1941), THE CORPSE VANISHES, BLACK DRAGONS and BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT (all 1942), GHOSTS ON THE LOOSE and THE APE MAN (both 1943) and VOODOO MAN and RETURN OF THE APE MAN (both 1944).<a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank"></a><p></p></div>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-3182183111194314712018-11-05T02:56:00.003-05:002018-11-05T15:38:31.039-05:00"Nah": What Comes After THE WALKING DEAD's Latest Dumpster Dive?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpkRS43zvmubx1BYMAzWxA-8mVa6Njb39duiYL9OTcViUXYxdRdMaB6UfbTEPAx1fQF9TC0DUPwrpP6Ob4xeV8o4EziNpG_b0MHyYMeE-EJ6z8KNpZNzTPt4U3timX4lTVid4L9rmTyg/s1600/waking_dead_cow.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="600" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpkRS43zvmubx1BYMAzWxA-8mVa6Njb39duiYL9OTcViUXYxdRdMaB6UfbTEPAx1fQF9TC0DUPwrpP6Ob4xeV8o4EziNpG_b0MHyYMeE-EJ6z8KNpZNzTPt4U3timX4lTVid4L9rmTyg/s400/waking_dead_cow.PNG" width="400" /></a>I've been slacking in my WALKING DEAD reviews this season. I've been in a real rut when it comes to writing <i>anything</i> recently and TWD doesn't exactly inspire. After a season opener chock-full of TWD's usual idiocy, which at least gives one something at which to poke fun, the series has settled into an astonishingly bland run of eps about the characters' efforts to repair a bridge and how this has been complicated by the Simmering Tension between the Saviors and everyone else. The writers tried to squeeze in a mystery wherein someone was bumping off various Saviors who were hauling critical supplies. This suggested someone was trying to cripple the other communities and maybe incite another war but it was eventually revealed that it was just some of the ladies from Oceanside carrying out revenge killings against the Saviors who murdered their men. Fair enough--revenge killings of this sort would be a regular occurrence on a competently-written TWD--but while the writers probably thought they were throwing in a red herring when it came to the supplies, the fate of those supplies was never addressed, the implication being that Oceanside is simply keeping the stuff (which gives the murder-spree a rather different character).<br />
<br />
The last few eps have seen the writers repeatedly setting up storylines then, with tonight's installment ("What Comes After"), deciding to abandon them.<br />
<br />
Last week, Maggie sets off to the Safe Zone with the intent of
finally killing Negan. The Godfatheresque final moments of the previous season ender
suggested that Simmering Tension over Rick's refusal to kill Negan would
play a central role in this year's story, leading Maggie to assert Hilltop's independence and try to usurp Rick's leadership role, but after setting this up in such an overbearing way, the writers apparently just decided "Nah." Maggie, who, for no real reason at all, had already backed down from her more hardened stance re:the Saviors, had a brief confrontation with Michonne at the door to Negan's prison, confronted Negan then decided he was so pathetic, she wasn't going to kill him. And that was the end of that.<br />
<br />
That this went nowhere lends an amusing twist to Rick's story. Upon hearing that Maggie was heading to the Safe Zone, Rick deduced why and hitched a ride with Daryl, hoping to beat her there. Daryl is in on Maggie's plan, though, and misleads him. The two briefly scuffle and, like the show itself, end up falling into a hole and getting stuck there. The many versions of Rick have been written as complete idiots for years but in his handling of the Saviors and Negan in particular, this Rick has been written like a seriously deluded fool, insisting that, in memory of Coral, Negan remain alive and that the other communities accept and live in harmony with the Saviors, the thugs who murdered, pillaged and terrorized them. The writers seem oblivious to how far they've put his head up his own ass over this; they have Rick willing to fight his best friend, who has been with him throughout the entire zombie apocalypse, over the life of the mass-murdering Negan, and still write him as if he's pursuing some righteous dream of a better future for doing so. And, of course, it all turns out to be for nothing, as Maggie opts not to kill Negan anyway.<br />
<br />
While Rick and Daryl are in that hole, a large group of Saviors show up at the bridge work-camp intent on liberating a cache of guns from the representatives of the other communities. The two sides square off, then, as shooting begins, the action cuts away. And it never cuts back. This was set up as a major stand-off, a full-blown Savior rebellion that had been brewing for 4 eps. It finally comes to a head and, with the lives of Carol, Jerry and several other characters in the balance, the writers say "Nah" again, and we're never shown what happened.[1]<br />
<br />
Instead, the whole thing is just used as an excuse to have some shooting that attracts a pair of nearby zombie herds. Rick and Daryl make it out of that hole with zombies falling in on top of them. Rick decides to hop on a nearby horse, a runaway from the fighting, and try to lead away the herd that is closing in on them, though Daryl has his motorcycle, which would be much better-suited to the task. Rick leads the zombies up a road but when he comes to a turn, he finds the second herd bearing down on him from that direction. With nowhere to go, Rick wheels the horse and it spooks and throws him. He lands on a pile of rubble randomly deposited on the side of the road[2] and is impaled through his side on a piece of rebar. Last week's ep ended with the zombies closing in while he was pinned there. Tonight, he very implausibly manages to free himself, hop on the horse, which, after being so frightened, is just sort of milling around, and exit down a zombie-free road that suddenly appears before them, as what had previously been presented as just a turn in the road is revealed to be, instead, an intersection. It's a cheat via staging and editing; if the road just continued through the intersection all along, there would have been no reason for Rick--and the horse--to panic.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJQ7CgjyIKRAct11P3jweQ74OdzqOoxq0oFBtVCcZho5Efdshoe0WH22Xk_sDHi1CwYY2Gc4KlwmcZDTaqkjOYT9CIJcsYWFW5GW6jvVy8Xs55hOCyoSSg74mT1Fokyzp8W4bb_YOXpQ/s1600/Ricks_Last.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJQ7CgjyIKRAct11P3jweQ74OdzqOoxq0oFBtVCcZho5Efdshoe0WH22Xk_sDHi1CwYY2Gc4KlwmcZDTaqkjOYT9CIJcsYWFW5GW6jvVy8Xs55hOCyoSSg74mT1Fokyzp8W4bb_YOXpQ/s320/Ricks_Last.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yeah, right.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
AMC has been promoting this as "Rick Grimes' final season." A few weeks ago, I <a href="http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2018/10/walking-dead-111.html" target="_blank">wrote of this</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">"Andrew
Lincoln is supposed to be leaving the show after this season and AMC's
promotional materials reflect this, though it wouldn't be at all out of
character for TWD to merely be using this as an attention-grabbing ruse
along the lines of Glenn's infamous dumpster dive a few years ago.
There's no way Rick can just be made to leave; to be rid of him, TWD
will have to kill off the character, their central character from TWD's
first screen moments. AMC's greed is infamous. Its execs show every sign
of wanting to milk this cash-cow right into its grave and beyond. But
the smart ones--if there are any--<i>must</i> see the writing on the
wall. Last week's ep, a season opener, drew the smallest audience since
the show's 2nd season. The numbers, taken in the abstract, are still
impressive for a cable series but anyone but the die-hards would be
hard-pressed not to concede TWD is a fundamentally broken show that has
been, in effect, dead for years now. Killing Rick can only further
devastate the ratings. Continuing without him would be like the Ringling
Bros./Barnum & Bailey Circus without the elephants (and would go
over just as well). AMC should wrap up the series while Lincoln is still
on board and try to give it some sort of dignified ending.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">"Do I think that will happen?</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">"Not a chance."</span></span></span></blockquote>
Though tonight is only the 5th ep of the season, it was supposed to be the <i>last</i> Rick ep, but I certainly called it right.<br />
<br />
Rick wanders around on the horse,[3] bleeding enough to kill an ordinary man a dozen times over while deliriously conversing with ghosts from his past. Shane, Hershel, Sasha--they mouth pleasantries that add nothing to the show except running time. By the end, Rick is staggering across the newly-repaired bridge, the massive zombie herd behind him. Our other heroes, presumably alerted by Daryl, show up but with Rick dying on his feet, they then run away to try to spare the bridge by diverting the herd. No one goes to Rick's aid! Daryl, who is beside and slightly below the bridge, snipes several zombies but he doesn't rush up the hill to help Rick either--he doesn't even move from his position. It's utterly inexplicable that our heroes would leave a very large cache of explosives laying around <i>right in the middle of the bridge they'd just repaired</i>, particularly with the Saviors rebelling and looking for weapons, but tonight, for no other reason than that the writers decreed it, there it was--a zombie knocked over a box, the lid came off and it was full of dynamite bundles. Rick shoots it, sets it off and the bridge--and apparently Rick himself--are blown all to hell, the burning zombies plunging into the raging river below.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPBKFTO7l4PA40ClPXT_TcFC3nkFw2CTxr-_4wCVfqpe7aCVIb5jjRCpcbDTQsHjQEW8eoCGC5avB9Fe3clAqEq7wMInMnDAzG-DIkbQ284E4SKTAt78gWn1ayoC7xAWNfcdN3Sh00YQ/s1600/dumpster_dive.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="617" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPBKFTO7l4PA40ClPXT_TcFC3nkFw2CTxr-_4wCVfqpe7aCVIb5jjRCpcbDTQsHjQEW8eoCGC5avB9Fe3clAqEq7wMInMnDAzG-DIkbQ284E4SKTAt78gWn1ayoC7xAWNfcdN3Sh00YQ/s400/dumpster_dive.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
Then the writers pull their last "Nah." Rick <i>didn't</i> die in the explosion. All that hype turned out to be another dumpster dive, as Rick was, instead, blown into the river, sent hurtling down it without drowning or being eaten by the dead (who somehow <i>do</i> seem to have drowned) and just happens to wash up on shore right where Jadis/Anne was standing, waiting for her mysterious helicopter people to pick her up. She has them patch up Rick and the helicopter flies off with him on board.<br />
<br />
The last thing we see is a flash-forward scene wherein the show time-jumps at least 5 or 6 years into the future, maybe more, and the previews for next week make clear this is the new status quo. In the opening moments of TALKING DEAD, TWD executive producer Scott Gimple revealed that, contrary to all the hype regarding Rick's "final episodes," Rick's story will continue via a new series of movies AMC will be producing. Instead of letting this worn-out show die a peaceful death, Gimple describes this as a major expansion of the TWD "universe," that word every movie and tv studio in this MCU era loves. If Gimple had anything to say about how this essentially renders an entirely pointless exercise every episode of the season to date--over a third of the season--I didn't stick around long enough to hear it.<br />
<br />
One gets the strong
impression that this season was initially supposed to be very different
and then, at some late point during production, the creators faced some sort of crisis and had to radically alter their plans. The eps
prior to this were definitely building a story, even if it
wasn't terribly engaging. "What Comes After" not only abandoned
individual storylines, it abandoned the entire season. But for some intervening behind-the-scenes problem, it would have made much more sense to simply begin
this season after this latest time-jump. Rick's "death" is the only
event that has happened so far that will have any impact on anything
that comes after, and that could have just as easily been filled in via
flashbacks. As it is, these first 5 eps
are now an island of entirely inconsequential filler in a sea of
time--about a year-and-a-half between the end of last season and the
beginning of this one and 5 or 6 years between last night's ep and
everything that is to come. And AMC's immediate sequel to this latest expression of contempt for the audience is to double down on the franchise.<br />
<br />
Perhaps the next "Nah" we'll get will come from viewers.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] Only, a bit later, something of its aftermath; at one point this evening, Rick stumbled into the work-camp and found it abandoned except for some zombies. Presumably, these are the people who were killed in the confrontation, though they're sporting make-up jobs that make them look as if they've been dead for months. At the end of the ep, Carol turns up with the other characters, so at least she survived.<br />
<br />
[2] This is apparently, the debris from the <a href="http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2018/10/walking-dead-111.html" target="_blank">mysterious Hulk zombies</a> that wrecked
the bridge in the first place then were never explained.<br />
<br />
[3] TWD definitely isn't noteworthy for particularly interesting cinematography but it does occasionally manage to pull off a spectacular image, and there was a really good one tonight, Rick, on white horse, leading what seemed to be an infinite army of the dead:<br />
<br />
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Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-32635721425037484652018-10-15T04:32:00.000-04:002019-07-27T09:52:16.538-04:00THE WALKING DEAD Cain't Afford Ta' Lose No Horses, You Dummy!THE WALKING DEAD kicked off its 9th season last week but while the ep was entitled "A New Beginning," it felt an awful lot like everything that had gone before it, and tonight's installment, "The Bridge," had one checking the expiration date stamped on it well before it was over. "New," one suspects, really just isn't in the cards for this show.<br />
<br />
If my absence here over the last few months doesn't speak to it, I haven't been writing much lately. Life has been what it always is with me and I've recently been through an overly long illness as well but I was feeling blocked up and uninspired even before that bug bit me. TWD certainly hasn't done anything in the last two weeks to make me rush to my keyboard. Still, I continue to do these TWD articles as, in part, a discipline, so I probably should have wrote about it last week, whether I felt like it or not. If I sound disjointed or pretty badly off my game, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that happened when writing about this particular subject but I apologize in advance.<br />
<br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"> <span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">Near the beginning of, well, "A New Beginning," a large group of our heroes trek to Washington D.C.. The city should be like Atlanta back in the 1st season--crawling with millions of zombies, essentially inaccessible and a place no one should risk even trying to enter unless utterly desperate for something he thinks he will find there. Perhaps budget restrictions prevented any massive zombie hordes from ever materializing; our heroes are able to go into town with minimal effort or notice by the dead and invade a museum that, oddly enough, looks just like the Georgia state capitol building in Atlanta. They're after a collection of seeds, a worthy target in an apocalypse, and some primitive farming/fishing gear.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">The gear, which is the stuff that eventually causes all the trouble, doesn't really make a lot of sense. Maggie notes that an old horse-drawn plow will provide a pattern for their blacksmiths to copy. Fair enough, but a plow of that sort isn't exactly space-age tech; any good blacksmith tasked with creating one would do just fine without needing an existing one as a guide. Making even less sense is the heavy replica of a dugout canoe lifted by the leader of the Oceanside community. No one needs a pattern for a simple Stone Age dugout, just a good section of tree and the time to hack it out. Oceanside is a </span></span></span><span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">community that lives, yes, oceanside and already has far better fishing vessels. The biggest item is a replica of an old prairie wagon. Though building a wagon of that sort would be comically simple and we know our heroes already know how to do it, as they rode into town on one of their own, they go through a great deal of trouble to get this one, treating it as if it was made of gold in a world where that still meant something.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">The wagon <i>does</i> seem to weigh enough to be made of gold. To create a moment of suspense, it's made to destroy the transparent masonry on the landing at the base of the building's stairs as our heroes try to make off with it. Hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of visitors would have trekked over that floor in the life of the museum--it's large enough to accommodate dozens of people at a time and would have been built to hold up far more weight than that--but in the TWD writers' hands, it crumbles like candy glass under a wagon that weighs about as much as 7 men. </span></span></span><span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">Our heroes risk life and limb to roll the wagon out over the floor as it's giving away, then carry the </span></span></span>entirely worthless canoe over it but when Ezekiel and Carol try to move the plow, it finally gives out, and the King ends up falling through it.[1] The zombies milling about on the level below nearly eat him before he's hauled back to safety.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">Never let it be said that our heroes won't put their lives on the line to protect a valuable asset! Even if there's absolutely no reason why these items would be regarded as such. Never let it be said... well, until about 5 minutes later.</span></span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEOH5bc9HPHfWyRD0Igku2oXMfgGlSVR7PDy8WqBjdoZEkqO8yCKXGREpYxgTA-RILsJ0W1_QjJqX1bN_xPtXOGwXafVaHp9geTjWvXE6ccO1ZF3aiEan0E1WafHZ_CLVCMQ1rI4UUOQ/s1600/bridge3.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1521" data-original-width="1331" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEOH5bc9HPHfWyRD0Igku2oXMfgGlSVR7PDy8WqBjdoZEkqO8yCKXGREpYxgTA-RILsJ0W1_QjJqX1bN_xPtXOGwXafVaHp9geTjWvXE6ccO1ZF3aiEan0E1WafHZ_CLVCMQ1rI4UUOQ/s400/bridge3.PNG" width="350" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Hulk Zombie Smash Bridge!"</td></tr>
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<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"></span></span></span>Traveling home with their salvage, our heroes come to a bridge that looks as if the Hulk has crashed through it, a mess of now-coallpsed and twisted steel supports and reinforced concrete that has been smashed to bits. With a straight face, Rosita explains that a zombie herd destroyed it, a feat that is, for a TWD zombie herd, roughly the equivalent of constructing a warp-drive. No one seems unnerved by--or even concerned with--this evidence of zombies with superpowers far beyond those ever seen on the show; they just paint "Bridge Out" on a nearby road-sign, as if that was necessary, and decide to take another way home.[2] Doing so, they run into a little mud. <i>Very</i> little mud. As in, maybe an inch of it. Though there's so little it isn't even worth mentioning--more budget limitations, perhaps?--they decide their horses can't possibly haul the wagon through it, so they unhitch the critters and they, themselves, pull the wagon through it. Because on TWD, the people are so awesome that they're better at moving a wagon than are a team of horses.<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"> </span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Budget Zombie Herd Approaching Budget Muddy Spot</td></tr>
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<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">As they're finishing up, a handful of zombies appear out of the bushes behind them. There are maybe a dozen--light work for our heroes, who number half a dozen and whose best fighters (Rick, Daryl, Michonne) are present--but Rick orders the wagon abandoned, along with one of the horses that had been rehitched to it! The ep later establishes that they're using horses for transport now because fuel has (FINALLY) become too scarce. Unlike the dugout, the plow and the wagon, a horse would be one of their most valuable assets but while, only minutes earlier, Rick was willing to risk everyone's necks for those trinkets, he's suddenly dead-set on needlessly allowing zombies to chow down on one of their mounts.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">An anonymous redshirt, who seems to be the fellow who takes care of the horses, doesn't much cotton to <i>that</i> idea. He goes back to free the horse but he runs into one of TWD's patented teleporting zombies, which suddenly appears beside him, bites his arm and spooks the horse so badly that it kicks him. Rick orders everyone to go back and fight the zombies, the thing they should have done in the first place, and they destroy the ghouls in a matter of seconds with minimal effort. Redshirt Kid dies though.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
This sets up a not-terribly-interesting subplot wherein the elderly mother of Redshirt Kid becomes very angry that their boy has died on, as she sees it, a mission to help the Saviors (?!). The idea--spelled in neon letters 10 feet high--is to convey the boiling resentment among some Hilltoppers, who were enslaved and terrorized for so long by the Saviors at Sanctuary and are now being asked to accept them as just another community to which they render mutual aid, but that's an obvious point that shouldn't really need this amount of attention. Carried out both badly (because the museum job <i>wasn't</i> just to aid the Saviors) and ham-handedly, and with characters we don't even <i>know</i>, it just feels like an exercise in filling time with something that, in a better-written show, would just be accepted. Trying to get the Saviors' former victims to be all nicey-nice with them was <i>obviously</i> going to be a problem.<br />
<br />
Remarkably, Gregory is still around. He suggested Hilltop hold elections for their leader and is fuming because Maggie beat him. Redshirt Kid's father is an alcoholic who has been dry for years; Gregory plies him with hooch and convinces him to try to assassinate Maggie. That doesn't go so well and when Maggie confronts him, Gregory attacks her. For that, Gregory finally ends up at the end of a rope.<br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">Tonight's installment was mostly just a filler ep. The premise of it was that Rick was visiting Negan, locked up in a jail-cell at the Safe Zone, to give the villain a status report on the great new world the communities are building, and Rick narrates the show but it's full of all kinds of things that happen outside Rick's knowledge, events for which he wasn't present, things that, absent previously undisclosed super-powers, he has no way of knowing. The writers apparently don't expect their viewers to notice such things and as TWD's audience is increasingly being pared down to a core of die-hards, most of them probably won't.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">In this one, the communities set out to repair that bridge. Because they're getting so much help from Hilltop, Maggie insists that the Saviors do most of the work. The ep spends some time showing they're an unruly bunch, some of whom cause a lot of problems.[3] Daryl, who never liked the idea of letting the Saviors live, has been charged with overseeing them and his disgust, made plain in the previous ep, is repeated here. Redshirt Kid's mother stages a protest at being cut off from her husband, who has been locked in a storm cellar since his failed attack on Maggie. This leads to a lot of drama regarding whether Maggie should let her see the old boy, whether he should be locked up, his backstory and a lot of other things about which viewers care not a whit but which are used to consume a great deal of screentime. The writers are forcing a come-out-of-nowhere, zero-chemistry romance between Father Gregory and Jadis/Anne. As Gabriel is entirely blind in one eye and may not see so well out of the other, he's assigned lookout duty. At night (he decides to make out with Anne instead). Later, Anne sees a helicopter overhead. She's never really explained the helicopter, which we've seen before and which had some connection to her. </span></span></span><span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">At one point, our heroes' system for diverting
wandering zombies breaks down when one of the least likable Saviors goes temporarily AWOL and a horde end up marching right through
the middle of one of the bridge lumber-camps. This seems to happen only to get some zombie action into an otherwise very dull, filler-filled ep.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">In the only real substantive development, Saviors are disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Some of these are probably just leaving because they don't like having to work for a living but some are unlikely to have just disappeared under their own steam--they have families, children at Sanctuary--and others have gone missing with important supplies--in particular, a shipment of fuel intended for Hilltop's tractor. These disappearances should raise some alarms but don't. At no point does anyone seem to be trying to find out what's happening. Toward the end, one Savior, exiled by Rick, is wandering in the woods, comes across someone he knows, starts talking and is apparently killed.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">Andrew Lincoln is supposed to be leaving the show after this season and AMC's promotional materials reflect this, though it wouldn't be at all out of character for TWD to merely be using this as an attention-grabbing ruse along the lines of Glenn's infamous dumpster dive a few years ago. There's no way Rick can just be made to leave; to be rid of him, TWD will have to kill off the character, their central character from TWD's first screen moments. AMC's greed is infamous. Its execs show every sign of wanting to milk this cash-cow right into its grave and beyond. But the smart ones--if there are any--<i>must</i> see the writing on the wall. Last week's ep, a season opener, drew the smallest audience since the show's 2nd season. The numbers, taken in the abstract, are still impressive for a cable series but anyone but the die-hards would be hard-pressed not to concede TWD is a fundamentally broken show that has been, in effect, dead for years now. Killing Rick can only further devastate the ratings. Continuing without him would be like the Ringling Bros./Barnum & Bailey Circus without the elephants (and would go over just as well). AMC should wrap up the series while Lincoln is still on board and try to give it some sort of dignified ending.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">Do I think that will happen?</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">Not a chance.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"></span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">--j.</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">---</span></span></span><br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">[1] When the floor gives way, it appears to be about as thick as an ordinary pane of glass.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
[2] Robert Kirkman, the co-creator of TWD, also wrote Marvel Zombies, which saw the Marvel universe of superheroes and villains transformed into super-zombies. Perhaps this is subtley laying the groundwork for a later TWD/Marvel Zombies crossover?<br />
<br />
<span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g">[3] Among other things, they're nostalgic for Negan, and it feels like the show is setting up some scenario whereby Negan (possibly a reformed Negan?) could return to whip them into shape.</span></span></span><span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"></span></span></span><span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"></span></span></span><span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"></span></span></span><span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"></span></span></span><span class=" UFICommentActorAndBody"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="UFICommentBody _1n4g"></span></span></span><br />
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Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-66904822504433618442018-04-16T03:37:00.001-04:002018-04-20T11:56:38.218-04:00On THE WALKING DEAD, No Wrath Need ApplyThis evening, THE WALKING DEAD capped yet another lackluster season with yet another breathtakingly unsatisfying finale. TWD's writers evince a strong preference for "Tell, Don't Show" over "Show, Don't Tell." They substitute ridiculous, melodramatic speechifying in place of naturalistic dialogue. As this writer has long noted, this is a show about survival in a zombie apocalypse that rigorously adheres to an anti-survivalist ideology. It's a <i>stupid</i> show. These and many other long-running TWD problems appeared with a vengeance in "Wrath," which was supposed to wrap up the war with the Saviors.<br />
<br />
That storyline should have been essentially finished a few eps ago when our heroes liquidated most of the remaining Savior fighters but as has happened repeatedly this season, many, many more magically appeared to take the place of the fallen. In the previous ep, Negan decided to bait our heroes into a trap. Equipped with that Respawning Saviors cheat, he sacrifices even more of his men so that Rick can capture a map misdirecting the forces of the rebel communities to... well, you get the picture. Ultimately, Rick and the gang end up in a field surrounded by a large number of enemy fighters. When the Saviors reveal themselves, they just stand in the open, arranged like a firing-squad rather than firing from cover or a prone position. While this allows for a dramatic (if now well-worn) Kurosawa shot of the shoulder-to-shoulder enemy army cresting a hill, it guarantees that, in a fight, many of <i>them</i> will immediately be needlessly killed as well. Eugene suggested this arrangement and Negan went along with it.<br />
<br />
In a turn like something from Monty Python, the Saviors open fire simultaneously only to have their own weapons explode in their faces, courtesy of Eugene sabotaging the ammo he's been manufacturing. There follows what's supposed to be a very dramatic final battle[1] in which our heroes defeat the Saviors, leading many enemy fighters--too many--to surrender.<br />
<br />
Rick chases down Negan--hey, it wouldn't be a season finale without a one-on-one between these two, right?--but just as always happens, the two find a way, in the middle of a fight to the death, to talk, talk, talk. Rick points out that Negan's forces are defeated. Negan is unconcerned. "I'll get out of it," he says, "I always do." And damned if, by the end, he <i>does</i>. Rick, after seriously wounding the villain, decides to spare his life. Maggie is quite upset by this,[2] as everyone <i>else</i> should be, but the writers try to paper over it by having Rick give one of TWD's patented speeches about how they all have to work together to build a new world. "We are life!", he declares. "The new world begins." And a lot of other things just as cringe-inducing. He tells the Saviors to go home! And other than Maggie, no one, among an entire army of people who have suffered under these marauders, seen their hard work stolen by them, their lives ruined, their friends and family-members murdered, offers any objection at all.<br />
<br />
Besides being handled exceptionally badly, the series has entirely failed to do any of the work that would have been required to make such a turn succeed, dramatically speaking. The Saviors have been portrayed as sadistic bullies, fanatical ("I am Negan!") thugs who get a kick out of terrorism and murder, who enslave entire communities and live large off those they keep beneath their boot. Only a few eps ago, they enthusiastically massacred an entire population of unarmed people who had already submitted to them. There's been no indication that they have any misgivings about the horrors they've perpetuated. Negan himself is a vicious terrorist who bashes heads with a barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat, who tortures and murders helpless people through a smile, taunting his victims even while he's snuffing them out. Rick decides to keep Negan alive as a prisoner, telling him he's going
to spend the rest of his life in a cell watching this better world grow
up around him so he can see how wrong he was, but the writers removed nearly every trace of the character's humanity when
adapting the comic-book version to the screen, rendering him a
one-dimensional cartoon (a frequent complaint here). Not someone who is going to be tormented by this very limp effort at poetic justice, just someone who has a large following of like-minded fanatics and will represent a danger for as long as he lives.[3] The Saviors are a mortal enemy to be defeated, not people with whom one can ever link arms and sing Kumbaya, and there's no way to see Rick's play as anything other than suicidally stupid. There's absolutely no reason to believe the Saviors would do anything
but return to base, regroup under a new sadistic leader or break out their old one and
start all of this over again. Born of TWD's aversion to raw survivalist sentiment--killing them would be a nasty business--Rick's decision is shown as being driven by Rick's memories of Coral and while the writers want viewers to think it's a noble and moral decision and a tender tribute to his departed son, this just makes it seem <i>worse</i>, like Rick has his head utterly up his own ass and isn't considering what is, from a practical standpoint, in the best interest of those he leads.<br />
<br />
Earlier this season, the writers had some of the Saviors switch sides, and one assumes this was done with an eye toward the ultimate resolution of the storyline, an effort to establish at least <i>some</i> basis for Rick's actions, but these turncoats have, with only one exception, been nameless non-entities (and even with the one, I can't remember his name). They've done nothing to counter the overwhelming impression of the Saviors that viewers have been given over the last couple of seasons but because they exist and because the one fellow has been nothing but cooperative, the writers apparently consider this sufficient. They've gone Tell, Don't Show again. During tonight's ep, the Saviors invaded Hilltop. Tara stayed behind to fight them and a contingent of these ex-Saviors stood with her--the same sort of nonsense.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmFrjasBzV0lGgppCqNcgLUr9crypcvwvEyvpqdRrBJbd1ajLwXm7QVF_58-o9Pb-S5YtBY2MHIzyaQKyXuaBEhDeZes3whVDj4aQjQYUVoTrwWijT0nMRP6NXXA6b5firzvR698MyOA/s1600/in_that_bottle.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="419" data-original-width="741" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmFrjasBzV0lGgppCqNcgLUr9crypcvwvEyvpqdRrBJbd1ajLwXm7QVF_58-o9Pb-S5YtBY2MHIzyaQKyXuaBEhDeZes3whVDj4aQjQYUVoTrwWijT0nMRP6NXXA6b5firzvR698MyOA/s400/in_that_bottle.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
It was made even worse in this instance because just as things were about to get rolling, the approaching Saviors suddenly burst into flames from what turn out to be super-powered Molotov cocktails[4] lobbed by the just-arrived women of the Oceanside community. They've decided to join the other communities in fighting the Saviors but when they arrive, they have no way of knowing what's even going on. Their surprise appearance is completely random. They just walk up and start burning people. This is a community whose entire male population--these ladies' husbands, fathers, sons--were murdered by the Saviors. One suspects they'd probably have a very strong opinion of Rick's decision to let Negan live and the Savior community continue.<br />
<br />
One suspects just about <i>everyone</i> Negan and the Saviors have terrorized, whose friends and family the Saviors have murdered, would have a <i>very</i> strong opinion on these matters but in real time, no one but Maggie offers any dissent. And, this being soap melodrama, she just collapses, screaming and crying about how it's not right to let Negan live, instead
of taking charge of the situation like a leader (as in, "anyone who helps save that
fucker dies").<br />
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Toward the end, there's a truly bizarre aftermath scene wherein Maggie, at her desk, lit like a supervillain and with ominous music playing under her words, says Rick was right to let the Saviors live (shiver) but very wrong to leave Negan alive. She throws in Michonne as well. She says we'll put Hilltop back in order, build up its defenses, get strong. "We're gonna' bide our time, wait for our moment and then we're gonna' show him," clearly implying some sort of violent retribution one could read as extending to the entire Safe Zone community. The camera reveals she's talking to Jesus and Daryl. The former offers an agreeable smile and a nod while Daryl verbally agrees, neither being reactions that make <i>any</i> sense. Jesus has been the pacifist all season, throughout, even, this very episode, when he convinces Morgan to stop killing Saviors. Daryl's bond with Rick has been nearly unshakeable throughout the run of TWD. Even earlier this season, when he broke with Rick over the idea of releasing the dead into the Sanctuary, he apologized to Rick--the guy he calls "brother"--after. It's reasonable to think he would strongly disagree with Rick's decision re:Negan[5] but it's impossible to imagine him even considering some sort of violent action against his own "family." For that matter, it's impossible to imagine Maggie herself contemplating such a thing. To deal with a problem that could be easily solved by a quick visit to Negan's cell (and, if one wants to be unreasonably vengeful, to Rick and Michonne)?<br />
<br />
Thrown in to provide what's meant to be a shocking twist, this is just stupid. Sort of like the rest of TWD this season.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] The staging and editing of the big battle are absolutely atrocious. Negan speaks to our heroes through electronic devices which, along with the geography, make it seem as if it's coming from all around them. The whole time, they're looking around and fruitlessly trying to pinpoint it and no Saviors are visible in any direction. When the Savior firing-line appears, it seems to be <i>behind</i> them but when the bad ammo takes out that line, Rick orders a <i>forward</i> charge, in a direction where no Saviors are visible. That direction <i>is</i> where Negan and his lieutenants are standing. A hill between the rebels and Negan's contingent allow them no view of one another. During the initial Savior volley, Negan and co. fire <i>their</i> guns, which makes no sense--they don't have any targets in sight, just a hill of dirt. The rebels, unmindful of the Saviors behind them, rush over the hill and defeat those in front of them.<br />
<br />
[2] Though this being soap melodrama, Maggie, the leader of Hilltop, just screams and cries about how what Rick's doing isn't right, instead of taking charge of the situation (as in, "anyone who helps save that fucker dies").<br />
<br />
[3] The writers' decision to gut the relationship that developed between comic Negan and Carl is particularly fatal here.<br />
<br />
[4] They explode in bursts of flame that shoot 30 or 40 feet into the air, incinerating wide areas.<br />
<br />
[5] Daryl has just spent more than 2 seasons lamenting the fact that he didn't kill Dwight upon their first encounter, which is rubbish from the writers, and vowing to kill Dwight once the Savior war is over. Tonight, prior to this scene where he's plotting with Maggie, he decided, instead, to let Dwight live--gives the guy a truck and lets him leave.<br />
<br />
<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-29584717864716700322018-04-09T00:50:00.003-04:002018-04-15T19:20:51.444-04:00The Worthless WALKING DEADIn "Worth," tonight's WALKING DEAD, Negan makes his presence known at Sanctuary and deals with his disloyal lieutenants Simon and Dwight.<br />
<br />
That's it. That's the plot. In a better-written series, this would have been a subplot in an ep about something else. Here, it's the featured--and nearly sole--attraction, with only a rotating handful of scenes with other characters to pad out the rest. There's only one more ep left in the season; this was just a standard TWD delaying action to get things there.<br />
<br />
There are a few scenes with Aaron, camped out beyond the Oceanside community, that exist primarily to get in a zombie-fighting sequence. He hasn't been there long but seems to be nearly dead from exhaustion, hunger or something. His community terrorized the ladies of Oceanside and stole their guns. Now they have none but he's trying to recruit them to fight the Saviors, presumably with the sticks and stones Rick left them.<br />
<br />
Last week, Rosita and Daryl were scoping out Eugene's ammo plant and there seemed to be a lot of Saviors around. On tonight's ep, set the next day, the operation appeared to consist of seven or eight people and only two armed guards. Our heroes swoop in, take out the two heavies carrying guns and hijack Eugene as he steps outside but there's no reason they couldn't have just stepped inside and taken out the entire operation, taken away as much ammo as they could carry, probably even recruited the workers. Instead, they just take their prize and leave. Minutes later, Eugene escapes them using a ruse that wouldn't have fooled a 7-year-old.[*] By the time he makes it back to his shop, a lot more armed guards have turned up and he's assured the security situation has been addressed.<br />
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Where in hell did the Saviors find any more gunmen? I spent a lot of time in <a href="http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2018/04/walking-dead-108.html" target="_blank">my previous review</a> pointing out that no matter how many Saviors Rick and co. have killed in an entire season devoted to systematically killing them, an endless number of replacements are being continuously written into the story. Savior manpower should be down to practically nothing by now but instead, it's as if Eugene had invented a respawning cheat. It's been a recurring absurdity throughout the back end of this season. When Negan drops the hammer on Simon, he kills Simon's loyalists too--7 or 8 <i>more</i> guys. The two then move inside for a final hand-to-hand battle to the death and that respawning cheat has been working overtime again--there may be a hundred other people present to watch the festivities:<br />
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<br />
And even <i>that</i> doesn't include those who are elsewhere (like at Eugene's ammo factory). So after a whole season of all-out war, taking out Saviors left and right, the Savior force looks about the same now as it did at the end of last season before a shot had been fired:<br />
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<br />
They aren't even trying.<br />
<br />
Not much else to add; it just wasn't much of an ep.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[*] UPDATE (11 April, 2018) - About this, regular reader Jim the Hammer writes, "I like how Daryl, the hillbilly who in season 2 was able to track Shane
and that kid through a forest, in the dark, to the extent where he
points out who walked where and when, etc.... is unable to discern
Eugene's cartoon escape method in a pile of ashes. In broad daylight.
Once again, established character traits/abilities get thrown out the
window to advance a plot point for the simple reason that the writers
couldn't think up a reasonable and more believable method to do so."<br />
<br />
<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-4471027282780319872018-04-02T05:46:00.001-04:002018-04-04T00:55:24.129-04:00THE WALKING DEAD Still Don't Mean Nothin' v.1.5In a completely ridiculous episode of THE WALKING DEAD last week, our heroes destroyed what should have been most of the remaining Saviors, effectively ending the tyranny that has dominated their world for two seasons. There was no celebration. No one seemed particularly happy about it. In a show on which everyone talks, talks, talks all the time, no one even mentioned it. The tone of the show continued to be as downbeat, humorless and joyless as usual. Tonight's offering, "Still Gotta Mean Something," should have been a wrap-up ep in which our heroes mop up the last of the Saviors and begin to look to the future they're going to have to build but it seems the writers aren't quite willing to give up their played-out storyline just yet.<br />
<br />
Just how many Saviors are there? It's a question of absolutely central importance to this season and to any plan to defeat them but though Savior turncoat Dwight would have provided this information to the rebel communities, it has never been shared with viewers. We've had, over time, some indications. A few seasons ago when Negan first appeared, his men staged some
elaborate roadblocks and he confessed that doing so had seriously taxed
his manpower; there were, at the time, maybe 30 or 40 Saviors on-hand.
At the end of the previous season, Negan assembles his Saviors to
declare war; he's shown addressing perhaps a hundred people, which felt like an escalation but go with it.<br />
<br />
This season, Rick and co. engineered a zombie siege of the Sanctuary
then proceeded to wipe out every other Savior outpost. The carnage was extraordinary and the kills and captures should
have reduced the Saviors to a <i>very</i> manageable number. This impression was reinforced by all of the scenes set inside the Sanctuary during the siege, which made it clear
the Saviors were dangerously short of manpower and increasingly
desperate. At one point, there was a near-rebellion by the Saviors'
slave labor force, one the Saviors certainly feared. It was stopped only by the timely reappearance of
Negan--in a rather silly moment, the fear <i>he</i> instills in those lessers was enough to cow them into backing off. The Saviors even
considered a plan to arm their laborers with melee weapons and
send them out to fight the zombies. Whatever force was holed up at the
Sanctuary, it shouldn't have been an enormous one, but viewers were
denied even an estimate and had to depend on those past clues, so when the Saviors escaped the siege and
suddenly had sufficient numbers to launch simultaneous punitive
expeditions against all three rebel communities as if nothing at all
had changed, viewers were left wondering if Eugene had invented a
respawning device. Was he holed up in a hidden laboratory off-screen spontaneously
generating new Saviors by the dozen? It felt like something that shouldn't have been remotely possible.<br />
<br />
The Saviors' numbers have been further reduced since then. The night the Safe Zone was attacked, the Alexandrians--with an assist from Dwight--liquidated Dwight's crew. Only one escaped and she's still missing in action.[1] Morgan and Carol wiped out Gavin's force at the Kingdom down to the last man.<br />
<br />
A few eps ago, the Saviors loaded up what should
have been nearly all of their remaining fighters and set out to attack
Hilltop. All the Savior leaders who hadn't yet been killed, including
Negan himself, went along; all of the remaining background-noise Saviors we'd seen seemed to be among the fighters as well. As before, it felt like a force that just shouldn't have been
possible. Last week, that force was completely annihilated, only about half a dozen of them escaping an insanely ill-considered attack. Later in the evening, some of Hilltop's Savior prisoners escaped and fled. Not enough to be much of a problem--many of their comrades opted to stay behind and switch sides, others became zombies or were eaten by the critters.<br />
<br />
Then, tonight, it was yet again as if nothing had changed. Early in the proceedings, Maggie gets a briefing on where things stand at Hilltop and we learn that they've redeployed their scouts to watch the approaches for another Savior attack. When Maggie asks how
much ammo they have, she's told, "not enough to fend off another attack
of that size." <i>Another attack of anything like that size should <u><b>not</b></u> be possible</i>. There shouldn't be more than a few of them left but at various points in the ep, we're shown Daryl and Rosita surveilling Eugene's recently-established reloading shop and the place is crawling with Saviors, then later, we're shown that Sanctuary is still manned.<br />
<br />
From whence comes all these Saviors? The villains' ability to return again and again as if unaffected by the losses they've incurred makes the war campaign--and thus the entire season--feel meaningless. Making this worse is the fact that our heroes should know roughly how many Saviors are left at any given time. They would have gotten troop-strength numbers from Dwight--no attack would have been launched without that--and they know roughly how many they've killed or captured. The only reason this isn't written into the story is the same reason the other specifics of the war-plan weren't written into it earlier in the season: so the writers can just make it up as they go.<br />
<br />
That's a problem. The way our heroes got in trouble with the Saviors from the beginning
was to stupidly launch an attack without a plan--without, in fact, doing
even minimal recon of the enemy. The consequences were disastrous,
something they can't afford to repeat. The only vague excuse for a "plan" that ever emerged this season was that, after taking out the Savior satellite outposts, Rick and the leaders of the other communities were going to travel to the Sanctuary and demand the Saviors surrender. Now, obviously, the Saviors weren't meant to break the siege of the Sanctuary and that they did and how they did it--the snipers who are supposed to be shooting anyone who sticks his head up just stand around and watch as the Saviors enact a cartoon escape-plan--is completely ridiculous, but setting that aside, the implications of what we've seen is that there were somehow enough fighters holed up there to defeat the combined forces of <i>all</i> of these communities. What were our heroes going to do with them? Any effort at creating a peace that wasn't preceded by <i>significantly</i> reducing their numbers would have been suicidal but there doesn't appear to have been anything in this vein even on the drawing-board. Daryl's idea, to let the zombies into the Sanctuary, seems like a good one here but Rick rejected it. If that Savior force was big enough to do everything it has since, this fact <i>should</i> have been a part of the narrative <i>long before</i> what's been happening in the last several eps.<br />
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Tonight, Rick and Morgan tracked down the Savior prisoners who escaped Hilltop. Like a pair of amateurs, they're quickly and stupidly captured, the Savior leader Jared dreaming of marching Rick back to Negan, but a zombie herd is conveniently approaching the old building where the escapees have holed up. When the herd begins to swarm into the place, some of the Saviors free Rick and Morgan on Rick's promise that they can return to Hilltop. Instead, our heroes just kill them. Morgan finally gives Jared a long-overdue gruesome death. The herd takes out the rest and then disappears. It's steaming in one moment, gone as soon as the Saviors are beaten. Rick even <i>shoots</i> the last villain. No zombies appear in response.<br />
<br />
A few weeks ago, Jadis, Queen of the Garbage People, had captured Negan. She's rather upset about the Saviors liquidating her entire community but instead of just killing Negan outright, she takes him back to her junkyard, ineffectually ties him up so that he's able to move around, then conveniently leaves a gun, a flare and some photos she treasures laying around so that he can get his hands on them. He does then threatens to burn her pictures but she gets the flare away from him; he then uses the fact that he <i>didn't</i> burn them to help talk her into releasing him. The whole thing is completely ridiculous and it's impossible to believe she would cut him loose.<br />
<br />
Something I <i>did</i> appreciate is that in the midst of all of this, that mysterious helicopter from a few eps ago turned up at the landfill. It hovers overhead for a while then, not seeing a flare (because Jadis extinguished the one Negan had), it flies off while she runs after it yelling. It was meant to pick her up. Before he leaves, Negan asks her about it. She says nothing. Another bizarre element of the nutty Garbage People saga.[2] Even with all but one of them dead, they still manage to be the only bright spot in an otherwise dire ep.[3]<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] Negan picks up some unidentified someone near the end of this ep--probably the missing woman with her tale of Dwight's betrayal.<br />
<br />
[2] On more than one occasion, Jadis consults a <i>watch</i> she's wearing!<br />
<br />
[3] Another Garbage plus is that Pollyanna McIntosh, who has been decked out in cruddy Mad Max gear and made up to look rather rough throughout her time on the show, was finally allowed to clean up a bit. McIntosh is a statuesque goddess of a woman but viewers of TWD have gotten little indication of this before tonight.<br />
<br />
<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-26827657459259571452018-03-26T03:54:00.000-04:002018-03-26T14:56:22.434-04:00The Stupids Send THE WALKING DEAD Astray AgainDeadlier and more prolific than the zombie virus, the Stupids continued to plague THE WALKING DEAD tonight. Simon leads the Saviors to attack Hilltop with <i>no guns</i>, just a few bows and a bunch of melee weapons. Last week, regarding this plan, I asked,<br />
<br />
"How, exactly, are the Saviors, who are supposed to be getting low on
ammo, ever going to get close enough to cut people barricaded in a
walled fortress on a, yes, <i>hilltop</i>, particularly given that those people have guns--fully automatic weapons--to keep any attackers well at bay?"<br />
<br />
Tonight, we got the answer: Hilltop, infected by the Stupids, just opens the gate and lets the Saviors in. When the Savior force arrives at its objective, some spike-strips placed on the road take out the tires on their lead vehicles, so they stop within easy range of the fortress to remove these obstacles. It's dark but they're lit by their own headlines--sitting ducks--yet the Hilltoppers don't fire on them, just lets them mill about. At this point, they can be turned to Swiss cheese before they even get to the gate--there's absolutely no way they're getting inside, and no way they can lay siege to the place either. If they stay there, they can be shot down at Hilltop's leisure. They've brought knives to a gunfight and that's that. Fortunately for them--and for the ep's running time--the writers haven't yet filled their contractually-obligated quota of moments during the season when Daryl is supposed to be made to look cool. Returning from lookout duty on his motorcycle, Daryl drives right through the middle of the enemy force, shooting them down as he goes. Hilltop opens the gates to let him in and just lets the Saviors roll right on through too.<br />
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As embarrassingly Stupid as this looks, it gets instantly worse: it turns out this was Maggie's plan all along. She has people waiting to ambush them as they come in.[1] The Hilltoppers, who probably outnumber the Saviors, are armed with fully-automatic weapons. Only on TWD can this be anything other than a one-sided massacre that lasts a few seconds but, the Spirit of Stupid having descended, the Saviors somehow make a hard fight of it. At one point, Hilltop's defenders are even forced to retreat into their Big House. The Saviors approach the house by walking straight up through the yard, right in the open with no cover. Hilltop is waiting--they light the yard and open up on them from the windows. Again, something that should be a one-sided massacre (when, earlier in the season, the Kingdom's forces were caught in a similar situation facing only one machine gun, they were all killed). The Saviors are sent fleeing toward the front gate but just at that moment, Rick arrives with the rest of the lookouts and the Saviors are caught with guns at their backs, guns at their front and no avenue of escape.<br />
<br />
Game over, right?<br />
<br />
Well, no, because maybe half a dozen Saviors just dive behind the Hilltop defensive wall on one side of the gateway. The returning lookouts, who are within spitting distance and couldn't possibly have missed this maneuver, <i>just walk right past them</i>. The Saviors run out the gate, get in a pair of vehicles and drive away. Rick and Maggie shoot at them as they flee but neither Rick nor Maggie nor anyone else jumps in vehicles, runs them down and finishes them off. Hey, there are still three more episodes to fill.[2]<br />
<br />
Still, nearly the entire Savior fighting force was wiped out. Throughout this season, the Saviors have displayed a remarkable respawning ability; regenerating at the whim of the writers. The attacks on their outposts in the first half of the season should have reduced their numbers to the point that they didn't have the manpower to cause all the trouble they have since. In these last two eps, the Saviors threw their remaining fighters at Hilltop and lost badly. This <i>should</i> be the end of the war, an ordeal that has dragged on for two and a half seasons now, but there's no acknowledgement of this by anyone, no cheering, no celebrating. The tone remains as dreary as ever. Carol and Tobin have one of those cliche conversations about what Carol will do after the war in over, as if it wasn't. To get in some mixed signals, Rick takes the boards off the window of the Hilltop Big House, as if it <i>is</i> over.<br />
<br />
In the night, the Stupids come again. The Saviors' weapons were coated in zombie grue and everyone they cut begins to zombify, rising from their beds and going off in search of people to eat. They growl and grunt and are none too quiet but even as they start killing people, their noise doesn't disturb the sleep of anyone.[3] One of them even falls down the very long staircase in the Big House with what looks like most of Hilltop's population sleeping at the bottom. No one so much as stirs.<br />
<br />
The zombies who are in the medical trailers have to cross the yard and get inside the house to cause their mayhem. They're able to do so because yet again, Hilltop <i>has no watchmen posted</i>. This was an issue last season, when the lack of watchmen meant the Saviors were able to <a href="http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2016/11/walking-dead-83.html" target="_blank">wreak all sorts of impossible havoc</a> on Hilltop's grounds, and, as usual, our heroes haven't learned a thing since. With a war that may still be ongoing and a pen of dangerous prisoners in the yard, there isn't a single guard on duty, no one keeping a watch.<br />
<br />
Speaking of those prisoners, they're in a crude, hastily-constructed pen. Anyone in it could easily slip out of it. They've only credibly remained there because of the presence of guards, which makes the complete absence of guards here even more egregious. As the zombies begin to rise, the brat Henry goes down to the prisoner pen with a rifle and demands to know which of the Saviors there killed his brother. Last week, Morgan told him the now-deceased Gavin had done so and there's no reason the boy wouldn't believe that but the Stupids are upon him too; he drops in on the prisoners and threatens to begin randomly shooting them if they don't identify the murderer. Henry can do this from outside the pen just fine but even as audible mayhem erupts in the house, the boy, who doesn't seem terribly interested in what may be happening to his friends inside, <i>unlocks the pen and steps into it</i>. As could be expected, he's then easily tackled and many of the Saviors escape.<br />
<br />
As with the previous ep, the Stupids claimed <i>everything</i> this week.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] Throughout TWD, Rick has been presented as an absolutely wretched
leader but because the writers have wanted him to remain the leader,
they've compensated by having all the characters gratuitously praise his
leadership. Tonight, they did the same with Maggie. There's no way to
characterize her plan for unnecessarily allowing the Saviors inside her
fortress as anything other than utterly idiotic, a thing that got people
needlessly killed, so the writers have multiple characters come up to
her after the fight to praise her great leadership skills, to the point that it begins to look really awkward.<br />
<br />
[2] During the course of the fighting, Savior turncoat Dwight, who wants
to help our heroes win, is running around behind Simon conspicuously
failing to kill him or even trying to do so, for no reason other than
that the writers decree it. Both he and Simon are with the small group
who escape.<br />
<br />
[3] Except for one fellow who, assigned the duty of watching over two seriously wounded people in a world in which people who die return as flesh-eating monsters, lays down between them and goes to sleep.<br />
<br />
<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-42094568966403101022018-03-19T01:53:00.001-04:002018-03-21T01:42:46.529-04:00The Key To THE WALKING DEAD Is the StupidsTonight on THE WALKING DEAD, everyone got stupid. That's nothing new, of course. TWD's writers have made nearly every inch of plot progression in the bulk of the show's run entirely dependent upon and occurring as a consequence of the characters being stupid. Typically not just run-of-the-mill stupid; we're talking profound cretinism so beyond the bounds of credible as to constitute an open, ongoing insult to and mockery of viewers. No one is <i>this</i> Stupid, and no one so unfailingly, relentlessly Stupid would survive very long in a zombie apocalypse. There are other problems with "The Key," tonight's installment, but this is the one that towers over all others.<br />
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Savior turncoat Dwight has cast his lot with our heroes. He's accepted that he'll be dead with the current war is over but he wants to help them win before he goes out. Last week, he was forced to return to the Savior fold to protect the denizens of the Safe Zone. A few eps ago, Dwight intentionally led his group of Saviors into an ambush and helped the Alexandrians kill them all, but one, a woman who witnessed his treachery, got away. When he went back to the Saviors last week, he learned that she is still missing in action but he has to figure she's going to turn up at any moment, and then it will be curtains for him. As tonight's ep opens, he's back at his apartment at the Sanctuary and the Stupids kick in really hard; Negan comes to visit him and Dwight doesn't assassinate the villain on sight. He doesn't do it while Negan stands around jawing. Negan is alone and would never see it coming but Dwight let's him talk for a while then leave in peace. Another victory for Negan's plot immunity and not even the only one this evening.<br />
<br />
Negan's forces are going to attack Hilltop and Negan has come up with the idea of coating their melee weapons in walker grue in the hope that those cut by them will then die and zombify,[1] so there's a sequence of the Saviors cutting up zombies and getting their knives and axes good and gooey. It's an idea that came from the comics but there, guns and ammo were, by this point, a lot more scarce and fighting with such weapons much more common. Simon barks Negan's orders to the troops: cut some of 'em and make 'em turn but don't kill them all--they're going to go back to work for us when this is over. How, exactly, are the Saviors, who are supposed to be getting low on ammo, ever going to get close enough to cut people barricaded in a walled fortress on a, yes, <i>hilltop</i>, particularly given that those people have guns--fully automatic weapons--to keep any attackers well at bay?<br />
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Simon has a bad case of the Stupids too. Contrary to Negan's direct orders, he has genocided the Garbage People then lied to Negan about it. His situation is less ambiguous than Dwight's missing witness--when it comes to Negan discovering the truth, it's just a matter of when, not if.[2] He wants Negan gone and wants to lead the Saviors himself and his big idea is to simply wipe out our heroes. Kill off the rebel communities and move on. But from everything we've seen, the Saviors are very heavily dependent upon their subjugated communities for food and supplies; it's the very reason Negan continues to argue for a measured response. The Saviors are thugs whose loyalty is partially purchased via the apocalyptic version of a luxurious lifestyle this arrangement provides them. Simon is proposing wiping out the lower caste in this carefully-organized caste-system without any replacement.<br />
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Back at Hilltop, our heroes have gathered and are preparing for the Saviors' coming siege. Maggie spies some crates in a field, checks them out and finds a note promising a "key to the future" if she'll fill the crates with food or "phonograph records"[3] and bring them to a designated rendezvous. It sounds like a rather obvious trap but Michonne immediately dismisses the idea that it could be the Saviors solely on the grounds that it isn't dramatic enough for them. At first, Maggie is clear-headed on the matter: "If someone is tryin' ta' help us and we miss out, we miss out. If someone is tryin' ta' kill us, we die." Maggie is the leader of the community and given the circumstances, this is a no-brainer, but Michonne works on her for a few minutes and astonishingly, with a Savior attack imminent, she opts to take Michonne and Rosita--two of their best fighters--and <i>leave Hilltop</i> for this meeting with who-knows who!<br />
<br />
It turns out there really is a benevolent benefactor behind this[4] but there's no reason it couldn't have been a Savior ambush. How stupid are the Saviors if they can't easily overcome people <i>this</i> stupid?<br />
<br />
Rick puts in a turn on lookout duty, watching the roads for any approaching Savior activity and--can you believe the coincidence?--he ends up watching the very road Negan's forces are taking. He sees their convoy, sees Negan bringing up the rear and starts to give the signal to alert his own people of the enemy presence then decides, instead, to leave them in the dark about the approaching danger, jump in his vehicle and launch a hopeless solo attack on Negan's car that somewhat succeeds and doesn't get Rick killed solely because the writers decree it.<br />
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Negan has a large, open bucket of zombie grue in his front seat with his pet bat Lucille marinating in it. Apparently, Rick rather spectacularly t-boned the villain's car, smashing it and sending it flipping until it landed on its side but there doesn't seem to have been the budget to shoot such a thing--we only see Negan fleeing, Rick in pursuit, a cutaway to the other Saviors then the aftermath of what looks like a hell of a crash. Negan would probably be pretty banged up and all that zombie grue is all over him and the interior of the car but his plot armor saves him again. Rick has an automatic weapon but instead of charging in and killing Negan, he just starts ineffectually pumping rounds into the bottom of the overturned vehicle, allowing Negan to escape into a nearby building. Rick is close behind but throws away his rifle before entering! He then draws and empties his pistol, missing every time. Hearing the hammer click on an empty chamber, Negan, who has climbed a flight of stairs, turns to mock Rick--all outta' ammo now! Negan is far out of reach and Rick could easily just reload but instead, he puts the pistol away, pulls out an axe he had tucked in belt and... throws <i>it</i> away. He actually throws it with the intent of hitting Negan and misses but why in hell would anyone do that instead of just advancing up the stairs and taking the guy apart?<br />
<br />
This ridiculous nonsense goes on for a while--the two end up in a dark basement talking smack to one another, fighting some zombies then escaping the building without ever causing each other any harm.[5] Negan, in an amusing twist, is captured by Jaydis of the Garbage People.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Simon is salivating over this being his opportunity. He'd been trying, in a roundabout way, to recruit Dwight to his cause. When Rick attacks Negan's car, Simon bottles up the Saviors in an alley, tells them this could be a trap--in which case bottling them up in an alley in which they could be fired upon from buildings on both sides is just about the worst possible idea--and that they should set up a perimeter while he and Dwight will go see if Negan needs a hand. Comically nonchalant about the whole thing. Dwight and Simon come upon Negan's smashed up car. Negan could be hurt or dead somewhere nearby, they could kill him without being observed but instead of looking for him, and despite the consequences that will befall them if, as is likely, he turns up, they just decide to write him off. Simon goes back to the Saviors and tells them that after this attack on their leader, they should go to Hilltop and kill everyone. Despite the obvious consequences of such an act, they think this is a <i>great</i> idea.<br />
<br />
<span class="st" data-hveid="45" data-ved="0ahUKEwi3lI6E1_fZAhUmuVkKHdReDD8Q4EUILTAA">And that was "The Key." Dumbassery and Decay and the Stupids held illimitable dominion over all.</span><br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] This line of thought emerged when the writers, 7 1/2 seasons into the show, suddenly changed the rules and made zombie grue toxic, making Father Gabriel get very sick from covering himself in it. It makes sense that it <i>would</i> be toxic, of course, but the long run of TWD has seen countless characters--even characters with open wounds--absolutely covered in zombie gore, their faces and eyes spattered with it, etc. and no one has ever gotten the least bit sick from it. While Negan thinks people will get die and zombify from wounds from treated weapons, Gabriel himself didn't and, treated with antibiotics, seems on the road to recovery, other than having lost a lot of his eyesight. Negan, of course, knows this: Gabriel is his prisoner.<br />
<br />
[2] And, in fact, Negan learns of it in this ep.<br />
<br />
[3] I'm old enough that it sounds weird for someone to call records that.<br />
<br />
[4] It's a bizarre--and very Z NATION--fairy-tale character named Georgie who promises knowledge in exchange for music. She offers a collection of schematics for windmills, watermills, aqueducts, etc.--what she describes as "a book of Medieval achievement, so that we may have a future from our past." She says she will one day return and when she does, she'd better see great things. A glimpse, perhaps, at the ultimate end of the series?<br />
<br />
[5] At one point, Rick does bash Negan with his own zombie-infected barbed-wire-wrapped bat but Rick was kind enough to set it on fire beforehand, presumably cauterizing it and leaving Negan non-infected.<br />
<br />
<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-46542612230551928402018-03-12T02:09:00.001-04:002018-03-12T15:32:00.093-04:00Not Wanted: Dead Or Alive Or THE WALKING DEADAs with so many episodes of THE WALKING DEAD, the writers of tonight's "Dead Or Alive Or" didn't bother to provide an adequate plot. As so often happens, they chose, instead, to take a few minutes worth of material and pad it out to fill the running time. As has so often happened in recent season, this padding was so extensive that the ep even ran 5 minutes over its regularly-designated timeslot. Have to get in those extra minutes of commercials to pay for all that "work" the writers are doing.<br />
<br />
Two weeks ago, Daryl, Rosita and Tara departed the Safe Zone to lead its mostly-nameless-and-faceless residents to Hilltop. This is the latest example of the brilliant strategic thinking typically displayed by our heroes. Why make it tougher for Negan to defeat you when you can all hole up in the same small, closed-in community to which his forces can easily lay siege until he's starved out all opposition, right?[1] This being TWD, that Safe Zoners plot-string was skipped last week and, this being TWD, tonight's ep, which picks it up, didn't begin with those characters at the gates of Hilltop. Instead, that's how it <i>ends</i>. Way back in December, Eugene arranged for Dr. Carson and the ailing
Father Gabriel to escape Savior custody. They were heading to Hilltop as
well but as the show finally returned to their thread three months later, they're not there either. They're lost and driving around backroads. Most of the ep just follows around the Safe Zoners as they try to hike to Hilltop and Gabriel/Carson as they mostly just dick around and waste time instead of trying to find Hilltop.<br />
<br />
Neither of these threads feature anything interesting; they're just present to eat up running-time.<br />
<br />
The Safe Zone group opt to cut through a swamp on the premise that the Saviors wrote it off as dangerous and won't be poking around there. They run into a zombie logjam ported in straight from Z NATION season 2 but it doesn't lead to anything--they just kill the zombies and move on. Tara is still furious at Savior turncoat Dwight and, being a dimwit, tries to kill him. He eventually hooks up with a group of Saviors who haven't heard of his betrayal and leads them away from the Zoners.<br />
<br />
Gabriel and Carson find a cabin, hang out there, go on and on about Gabriel's increasing loss of vision.[2] In order to safely walk among the dead, Gabriel, several eps back, covered himself in zombie guts. Characters on TWD have been using this same trick since the 2nd episode of the series, even those with open wounds.[3] We've seen people splattered with zombie blood and gore, seen it get in their faces, their eyes. No one has ever suffered so much as a cough as a consequence but this season, the writers suddenly decided zombie gore was toxic.[4] Gabriel is ill and going bind.[5]<br />
<br />
We find out why this was suddenly written into the plot toward the end of the ep. After breaking out of the zombie-surrounded Sanctuary, the Saviors are running low on ammo and Eugene's reloading operation isn't turning out enough at a fast-enough clip--Eugene may be foot-dragging on purpose. When Negan leans on him, Eugene comes up with the idea of using primitive siege weapons to chuck zombie gore over the walls of Hilltop. Negan doesn't like this suggestion at all but from it, he gets the bright idea to have the Saviors coat their weapons in this grue, use it for a sort of biological warfare. I'm disappointed we're not going to get to see Medieval trebuchets and catapults chucking zombie-parts over the wall.<br />
<br />
And that's it. Near the end, the gate guard at Hilltop yells that Rick has returned but because if he appears, Andrew Lincoln gets paid for the ep, we never see him.<br />
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<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] As if to compensate for this obvious idiocy, the writers have Gregory point out to Maggie that the Saviors are on their way and suggests evacuating Hilltop. "How can we win?" Maggie replies, "look around, Gregory. How can we lose?" But it's so idiotic, even she doesn't sound as if she means it.<br />
<br />
[2] The Saviors reapprehend Gregory and Carson; when Carson goes for a
gun, they shoot him, one of the last doctors in the world.
Fortunately--and coincidentally--the stranger Coral took in has medical
training. Absurdly, Negan assigns the dying and nearly-blind Gabriel to
sorting empty shells in preparation for reloading them.<br />
<br />
[3] In fact, Rick, the first one to use the trick on screen, had an open gunshot wound in his side when he first did it.<br />
<br />
[4] Zombie grue <i>should</i> be potentially rather dangerous--human
corpses are a regular stew of bacteria--but after 8 years of watching
people intimately interact with it to no negative effect, it's a bit
late to be making it poisonous.<br />
<br />
[5] Negan's plot-armor comes with an immunity charm; he covered himself
in gore from the same zombie as Gabriel but remains unaffected by it.<br />
<br />
<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-19379123543384657272018-03-05T01:21:00.001-05:002018-03-12T00:34:04.320-04:00THE WALKING DEAD Burns BartertownI've been a fan of THE WALKING DEAD's Garbage People from pretty much the moment they were introduced. After their first appearance, <a href="http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2017/02/walking-dead-88.html" target="_blank">I wrote</a>:<br />
<br />
"Tonight, on THE WALKING DEAD, Rick and co. appeared to have dropped into
the pocket universe wherein the Max Max flicks are set; where
characters with weird names and inexpressive faces dressed in black and
grey Max Max-like gear stand around and speak through a monotone in
clipped, half-sentences as if they've grown up in the aftermath of the
nuclear apocalypse and regular conversation is strange to them. Their
home is a maze of piled-up car-wrecks and trash that stretches to the
horizon--with the whole world at their disposal for residences, they're
mindful enough of the series' desire for visuals to live there--and they
interact with our heroes while in the distance, a rusty car-door blown
by the eternal winds of the wastelands atmospherically squonks away. I
never noticed a crow cawing at any point--perhaps an oversight."<br />
<br />
Seemingly born of the writers' exposure to Z NATION, the Garbage People didn't make a lick of sense in the context of TWD's world, but they were <i>entertaining</i>, through a time when little else about the series has been, an odd, unpredictable element that felt like something phasing into TWD from a different--and better--show. Given my usually less-than-stellar estimation of TWD's writers. I can't really say it's any surprise that they apparently didn't understand what a good thing they had with this community. In the only meaningful development in "The Lost & the Plunderers," tonight's installment, they liquidated it.<br />
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That dreadful decision began with a conflict between Simon, who wants to be the big boss of the Saviors, and Negan, who <i>is</i> the big boss. Simon just wants to kill off all these rebellious communities and move on with life but, in a sequence that runs several times longer than was necessary, Negan insists they're still a resource. He and Simon argue and he orders Simon to bring to heel the Garbage People, who briefly joined the rebellion. But once at the Big Dump, Simon, still smarting over Negan's tongue-lashing, gets a little too ambitious and starts shooting people. When Jadis, the Garbage Queen, slugs him, he gives the order and the Saviors kill everyone. Negan will probably be just as pleased by this as I was.[1]<br />
<br />
A lot of the screentime devoted to Rick and Michonne here is just filler material. Near the beginning, they're packing up and about to depart from the Safe Zone, which has been torn up by the Saviors, and Michonne gets it in her head that, before she leaves, she simply must go put out the fire that is consuming a gazebo, so she and Rick charge into action, risking their lives in battle against zombies in order to waste two of the only fire-extinguishers left in the world trying, for no real reason, to put out the blaze on a structure that has already mostly burned up.<br />
<br />
Yes, that really happened.[2]<br />
<br />
Later, they turn up at the Big Dump and find the zombified Garbagers. Only Jadis is left. She's distraught and, in a development that makes no more sense than the community itself, suddenly remembers how to speak proper English, as if all that Mad Maxian stuff was just a put-on. Given that she had been allied with Rick and had just seen all of her friends and family wiped out by their common enemy <i>because</i> of that alliance, one would think Rick would have a great deal of sympathy but instead, he's openly hostile--tells Jadis this is all <i>her</i> fault, refuses to help her escape, even points his gun at her when she's fighting through zombies while trying to follow him out--shoots over her head as a warning. If this ep was the story of the end of the Garbage People told from Jadis' perspective, Rick could fill the role of the ghost of her guilt as leader for the death of her people. As it is though, she's just an element in Simon's story then Rick's, and Rick's behavior is just more random and bizarre shit, as if he's this thing entirely disconnected from what we've seen him experience[3] and who we've seen him be.[4]<br />
<br />
The ep only ever adopts Jadis' point of view when she has to see to the disposition of the walking dead who were once her friends. In what could, in better hands, have been a most remarkable scene--and in <i>these</i> hands still stands out as fairly striking for TWD--she leads the dead into an industrial shredder, watching with sad resignation as, one by one, they drop into the machine and are ground up into gory oatmeal that runs out on a conveyor belt beside her final painting--a fine, arty touch on paper that doesn't really come off as well on screen.<br />
<br />
The ep checks in on Aaron and Enid, who, in a random sequence inserted into an earlier ep, went off to find the Oceanside community, were attacked, killed Oceanside's matron leader and were captured. Tonight, they're chained, about to be executed, Enid makes a speech and the new leader, the granddaughter of the dead one, just decides to let them go. As they're leaving, Aaron decides he's going to go back and convince them to join the fight--the reason Aaron went there in the first place--which makes one wonder what has been the point of <i>anything</i> that has happened with this thread. Aaron will try to make his case, Oceanside will listen or it won't--nothing shown tonight added anything to this except running time. With TWD though, that's often all it takes.<br />
<br />
Near the end, Rick talks to Negan over a purloined radio, tells him Coral is dead. Rick says he's going to kill Negan, Negan says Coral is dead because Rick failed him. In the Walking Dead comics, Negan and Carl developed an interesting relationship that would have made a scene like this very interesting but that was almost entirely cut from the series and the scene, lacking any real dramatic weight, just plays out as Negan being the villain and taunting the hero.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] During his interrogation of Jadis, Simon suddenly mentions a helipad and solar panels on the landfill grounds, things <i>never before mentioned</i>. Rick saw a helicopter flying over a few eps ago and when Jadis does away with the Garbage-ite dead, she has electricity to do it. Simon hints that the site may have been something much more than just a garbage dump before the end of the world but later, Jadis seems to explain living there as strictly an artistic choice. The helipad will probably turn up again but the electricity may have been introduced merely to allow Jadis to carry out that zombie-killing sequence.<br />
<br />
[2] Though with a <i>war</i> on and all, one would expect the Saviors would be out looking for the Safe Zone gang, they don't seem to be doing so. Rick seems to take out a Savior in the Safe Zone near the beginning--it happens off camera--and it makes sense someone would be posted there to see if anyone returned but he was apparently all alone and Rick and Michonne are able to drive the road unmolested and without even encountering any Savior lookouts. Near the end of the ep, we learn that Negan hasn't heard from Gavin's crew at the Kingdom. They've all been killed, of course, but that happened the night before and no one, it seems, has checked on them.<br />
<br />
[3] And this would stand out even to someone who had only ever seen the last two eps of TWD--Coral had <i>just given</i> Rick the we've-got-to-do-better-about-holding-on-to-our-humanity speech as some of his dying words in the ep prior.<br />
<br />
[4] It doesn't help matters that the writers throw in a later scene wherein Michonne is giving Rick the eye for this behavior and he tells her he just wanted Jadis to go away.<br />
<br />
<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-12622727927496933612018-02-26T01:42:00.003-05:002018-03-12T00:33:26.376-04:00No Honor Among THE WALKING DEADWhen last we visited THE WALKING DEAD, the Saviors had somehow managed to escape the Sanctuary, which shouldn't have been possible and wasn't explained, and were able to terrorize our heroes' communities, which they shouldn't have had the remaining manpower to manage after a half-season of being killed in bulk, with, in the case of the team that lay siege to the Safe Zone, a platoon of guys armed with never-before-mentioned super-grenade launchers--weapons that would have made escape from the zombie-surrounded sanctuary rather easy but that only appeared after the Saviors had spent the half-season buttoned up at their compound and increasingly desperate about how to escape.<br />
<br />
(Takes a breath)<br />
<br />
"Honor," tonight's midseason debut, reverses gears in the pre-credit sequence and makes a show of explaining what happened at the Sanctuary but while the Saviors' escape is a massive plot problem, it may have been better not to even try. The writers had painted themselves into a corner on this one. The scenario they created--the compound surrounded 50-deep in zombies, with snipers posted beyond the dead with orders to blast any Savior who shows himself and all of this further complicated by Daryl's decision to punch a hole in the building so some of the dead can get inside--is basically impossible to defeat. While one can imagine ways to get out of it--those grenade launchers would have made it a pretty simple task--the writers had already spent half the season piddling around inside the compound showing that the Saviors clearly had no means of dealing with the problem and were becoming increasingly desperate. In such a circumstance, nothing this writing team is going to concoct is going to be satisfying.<br />
<br />
It <i>isn't</i>. For the purposes of allowing the Saviors to escape, the zombie army is suddenly reduced to 50 or 60 guys milling around in the parking lot. The Saviors show up at the windows with automatic weapons. The snipers observe them but for no reason at all, decline to shoot them. The snipers just sit there with multiple enemies in their sights and watch as the Saviors shoot zombies, which, hilariously, are kind enough to fall into neat piles that form a sort of barricade. The Saviors then come charging out the front door through the trail protected by those barricades. Again, the snipers do nothing, and the Saviors begin firing at <i>them</i>. And that's it.<br />
<br />
From there, it's all downhill. Before the midseason break, Coral had just been bitten by a zombie and was looking pretty rough. It was an open question whether the writers would drag out his inevitable death or just do a one-and-done but given the soap melodrama format of the show, the latter was to be particularly feared. It's the one the writers, in fact, chose. Most of the ep tonight is just Coral taking a <i>long</i> time to die while making a very long string of TWD's patented pseudo-profound anti-naturalistic speeches. The TWD version of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvJACHg1WGA" target="_blank">a slow-motion death from POLICE SQUAD</a> but without any (intentional) laughs.<br />
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That business starts where it left off, with our Alexandrian heroes huddled in a wonderful metaphor: down the drain, under the Safe Zone. Above, the town is being pummeled by grenades but below, Coral is on his deathbed saying his teary-eyed goodbyes to his companions. If our heroes were caught down there, it would be the end of them but the heartless villains apparently respect the need for melodrama; none of them bother to check out the drain, an obvious escape-route and clearly visible on both sides of the Safe Zone's walls.<br />
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Eventually the Saviors leave, and everyone decides to depart for Hilltop. Coral is obviously in no shape to be moved, so Rick and Michonne stay behind to see him to the end but shortly after everyone leaves, Rick randomly decides to move Coral anyway. Down the drain, Coral is in a safe place on a nice cot with a pillow--as good a deathbed as he could have in such circumstances--but Rick insists on dragging him topside, hauling him around the now-ruined Safe Zone and eventually bringing him to rest on the hard floor of the smoking remains of the church. The deathbed is a speech-breeding staple of the melodrama and perhaps the writers decided only one wasn't good enough for TWD--had to get that second one in there.<br />
<br />
They certainly get in the melodrama. Coral makes speeches through <i>all</i> of this, interacting with the others while maudlin music whines away.<br />
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<br />
This seemingly interminable plotline--if one can call it that--is the centerpiece of tonight's ep, which the creators turned into
another extended, 90-minute affair to accommodate all that emoting. Well
before it's over, one suspects even the viewer with the sternest
appetite for this rubbish will be wishing they'd just get it over with and let him die. Even when he finally <i>does</i>, though, it probably isn't over--Coral wrote goodbye notes to everyone, something future eps will no doubt dwell upon with substantial gravity.<br />
<br />
Over at the Kingdom, Carol and Morgan are set on rescuing Ezekiel. Morgan gets to go Terminator on a bunch of baddies. In the highlight of the ep, he disembowels one of them who is in the process of killing him. It's sort of a bummer that Morgan didn't then use the guy's innards to strangle him. Seems an obvious use for them, right? Gavin, the somewhat "reasonable" Savior, is on hand and throughout the evening, Ezekiel keeps hinting to him that he should switch sides. He's pretty intransigent but maybe he'll come over. Then it turns out that was just a ploy by the writers to fill time; Morgan captures Gavin, sets out to destroy him and we get another of TWD's usual bullwinders where everyone stands around contemplating whether Morgan really wants to kill the fellow. In the end, it doesn't matter; a kid with a sharp stick turns up and pokes Gavin in the throat (one of Gavin's lieutenants murdered the boy's brother).<br />
<br />
That's "Honor," an ep that, if it had any, would have committed seppuku early in the evening.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-21522450497498201452018-01-10T19:55:00.000-05:002018-01-17T10:58:28.884-05:00METROPOLISaversary<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span data-offset-key="44aum-0-0"><span data-text="true">Ninety-one years ago today--10 Jan., 1927--Fritz Lang's magnificent sci-fi fantasy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrFBId1b8U0" target="_blank">METROPOLIS</a> first hit the screen in Germany. This is the kind of movie the phrase "visionary masterpiece" was coined to describe, a gloriously weird epic of the future as seen from the late Weimar era wherein the working class robotically toils away on machines beneath the earth while the well-off live in a shining, paradisiacal city above, rich kids develop social conscience while experiencing visions of devils and mad scientists create androids in the form of humans to beguile and confound men.</span></span><br />
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<span data-offset-key="6rfmm-0-0"><span data-text="true">Like so many silent films, a lot of METROPOLIS was broken up and lost over the years. The film survived in often quite truncated prints--the first version I saw when but a lad was only about an hour long--and the tantalizing nature of what survived created a mystique about what was missing and what it all meant. A few decades ago, when film preservationists got serious about saving the disappearing early cinema, there began a series of efforts to find the missing pieces and restore the film. Many bits and pieces have turned up over time, leading to restorations both major and minor. The big breakthrough came in 2008 when a print of the film that had been in circulation through several owners since 1928, turned up in Buenos Aires and provided us with a near-complete print of the film.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="frqh4-0-0"><span data-text="true">METROPOLIS is a cinematic landmark. One of the most influential films ever made, there had never been anything like it and despite 91 years of imitation, homage, knock-offs and rip-offs, there's hasn't been anything like it since. But while true--and <i>distinctly</i> true in this case--that particular accolade is also a bit of a cliché. A dusty one. Monuments--things that often collect such dust--are things stored away in museums but movies, especially great ones, are things to be watched, to be experienced. </span></span><span data-offset-key="44aum-0-0"><span data-text="true">By virtue of their being the product of an age so removed from out own, films of this vintage can often put contemporary viewers in a somewhat alien headspace. Many dislike this, may others simply find it too removed from their experience to appreciate it but for those able to immerse themselves in it, such films can be an euphoric trip. Movies are, among so many other things, dreams. Dreams are often--even usually--strange, and strange can be wonderful indeed. METROPOLIS was strange in its <i>own</i> time. All those years since have just made it better.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="frqh4-0-0"><span data-text="true">--j.</span></span><span data-offset-key="frqh4-0-0"><span data-text="true"></span></span><span class="text_exposed_show"></span><br />
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Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a></div>
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cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-54862145475151830972017-12-30T15:32:00.006-05:002023-12-30T15:59:26.078-05:00Happy Birthday, Lloyd Kaufman!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Born today, 30 Dec., in 1945, producer, writer, director--movie-maker--Lloyd Kaufman, <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">the co-founder of Troma Entertainment and one of the magnificent bastards responsible for, among so many other off-the-wall classics, the Toxic Avenger movies, POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD, TERROR FIRMER, THE CLASS OF NUKE 'EM HIGH and TROMEO & JULIET. Highbrow snobs may scoff at Lloyd's shoestring productions, with their abundance of bodily fluids, bountiful breasts, abominable beasts and lowbrow humor, but for all these stiff-necked snoots' very tasteful tsk-tsk-ing, Lloyd is something they can't touch, something one doesn't often find in the picture business or, indeed, in life: a genuine original. In a milieu abundantly populated by painfully unimaginative knock-off artists, Lloyd makes movies that aren't like anything you've ever seen. He's borne the spirit of indie cinema trough a lot of years when it seemed in danger of being snuffed out entirely. One hopes he will continue to do so for many more to come.</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><br /></span>
<span class="text_exposed_show">--j.</span><span class="text_exposed_show"></span><br />
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<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-62924054769919550662017-12-11T03:25:00.000-05:002017-12-11T22:37:22.382-05:00How It Always Is With THE WALKING DEADThis season, THE WALKING DEAD has displayed a remarkable propensity for turning what should be exciting, fast-paced, suspenseful scenarios into dreary exercises in tedium and tonight's midseason finale, "How It's Gotta Be," has just become the standout example of this. What could have been a fairly taught hour-long tale is padded out to 90 minutes. The ep is full of slow-motion photography, long, meaningless montages of various characters' faces overlain with somber music, scenes that go on and on. Got to get those extra ads in there, if the show itself has to bust a gut to accomplish it.<br />
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Last week, Rick and the Garbage People returned to the Saviors' Sanctuary only to discover that the herd of zombies our heroes had previously led there was gone, along with the snipers who were supposed to repel any Savior effort to break free. A surprising cliffhanger on which to end but one tonight's ep does nothing to resolve, though the entire ep was premised on it. The issue is raised repeatedly; the only thing viewers are told is that Eugene came up with <i>something</i> and the herd was led away. As I've previously covered here, the sniper team has been made to appear and disappear at the writers' convenience and this continued tonight. Rick had found one of the snipers dead and being eaten by zombies. At one point, Jerry, who doesn't know this, speculates that the snipers must have taken their vehicles and escaped; Rick says he doesn't think they escaped.[1] Since none of the communities were warned that the Saviors had broken free--even with the known casualty, there were still enough snipers to warn every community--this would seem a reasonable assumption but later in the ep, Morgan, who was part of that sniper team, turns up at the Kingdom unharmed. And without explanation.<br />
<br />
Tonight's ep begins where last week's ended. Upon discovering the zombies are gone, Rick, ever the idiot, moves in for a closer look on foot across open ground and is, of course, immediately fired upon by Saviors inside. The Garbage People retreat and aren't seen again! They just disappear from the ep. Rick is in a pickle, pinned down and with no hope of escape, but then, out of nowhere, Carol and Jerry suddenly drive up and save him. They'd gone to what was supposed to be a meeting outside the Sanctuary of the leadership of the various communities, Ezekiel having declined to go, but like Daryl and his garbage truck last week, they show up just in the nick of time and are able to magically sense Rick's predicament and affect a rescue.<br />
<br />
The Saviors are somehow free, they're going to be out looking for revenge and if one concludes this should be a real barn-burner, well, one may have the instincts of a quality dramatist but one hasn't been watching TWD this season. The writers manage to make the Saviors' campaign against the residents of the three communities pretty damn boring. It makes sense that the Kingdom could be subdued with minimal effort--its fighting force has been wiped out--and, in fact, this happens off camera. But the Hilltop's forces are <i>also</i> taken without firing a shot. Maggie and some of her troops are driving to the Sanctuary meeting. Absent the use of magic, the Saviors have absolutely no way of knowing the Hilltoppers will be coming up that road but they've used this magic power before, in the season 6 finale, and with this supernatural knowledge, they just put a tree across the road to stop the convoy then move in and disarm the fighters. Though the Hilltop forces are armed and they appear to significantly outnumber the Saviors, they just give up their guns without a fight. Simon tells Maggie she can cooperate or meet a horrible end. She takes the deal, he shoots a Hilltop redshirt then he orders her to return home and continue growing food for the Saviors.<br />
<br />
This contradicts everything we've been told would happen. Negan has made it very clear he intends to kill the three leaders of the uprising and display their remains at his headquarters. Viewers who may have forgotten that from before get multiple reminders in this ep--Gavin, the Savior leader at the Kingdom, says he's taking Ezekiel back to the Sanctuary and Negan himself says he's taking Rick there. Besides that, Simon's course of action with regard to Maggie is some <i>really</i> horrendous writing. Hilltop has just taken part in an armed uprising against the Saviors. It has lots of guns and it <i>must</i> be disarmed. The Saviors disarm <i>everyone</i>. For all the Saviors know, these communities have the bulk of their arsenal based at Hilltop. If Maggie is allowed to simply return home, those guns could either be stashed for later use or used to carry on the fight that has just been taking place. The only reason Simon, having captured Maggie, doesn't continue with her to Hilltop and disarm the community is because the writers just didn't want him to do it. When Maggie returns home, she's no more gotten through the gates than she has a new gun in her hand. She kills one of her Savior prisoners with it (to make up for the Hilltopper shot by Simon), orders her people to begin fortifying the community against the enemy.[2]<br />
<br />
When the Saviors had been pinned down in the Sanctuary, they'd radioed another outpost to bring in a heavy machine-gun to clear the zombies. That outpost was destroyed and the machine-gun captured. Without it, they were considering increasingly desperate measures, such as sending dozens of workers into the zombie horde with melee weapons, sacrificing them on a suicide mission just to try to clear a path for someone who could lead the horde away.[3] The entire season to date has been premised on the notion that the villains didn't have the means or the manpower to fight so many but tonight, they not only have enough to simultaneously go after all three rebel communities, Negan has among his own force what appear to be a dozen or more men armed with <i>grenade launchers</i>, weapons that would have made <i>very</i> short work of all those zombies but were never employed to that end and appear only now, as if by magic, to reign fiery destruction down on the Safe Zone from outside its gates. Once inside, Negan tells his men to <i>blow up every house</i>! It feels like Negan should <i>not</i>
have the strength to wage this sort of fight, a problem
that goes beyond that magic grenade-launcher brigade.[3a] Our heroes just spent much of this season taking out
Negan's outposts, killing or capturing everyone present in a series of lightning strikes. From the fact that
they stopped hitting outposts and spoke of no others, one can
safely assume there aren't any more.[4] So from whence comes this
reserve?<br />
<br />
And <i>is</i> there even a reserve? None of the Savior forces
are shown to be particularly large. There are no Savior guards around the recently-liberated Sanctuary--until someone started shooting at Rick, it looked deserted. Both the Hilltoppers and the
Alexandrians appear to outnumber the fighters thrown against them. The Alexandrians kill several Saviors in an ambush (I'll get to that in a moment). Though
the Kingdom has few defenses left, we never see many Saviors there
either. One assumes there could be more present in all of these places,
lurking somewhere in the darkness in which most of this ep takes place, and that solves one problem but the more there
are, the bigger the other--the source of these fighters--becomes.<br />
<br />
With some sort-of assistance from turncoat Savior Dwight, the Alexandrians sort of escape Negan's siege--it's all handled in a very sloppy manner. Dwight puts a slim force around the rear of the Safe Zone to create a weak spot. The Alexandrians inside have absolutely no way of knowing he's out there and has done that but fortunately, they coincidentally pick the right place to break through their own walls and escape. Our heroes proceed up the road a short distance then stop to create an ambush for the pursuing Saviors; Dwight leads his own people right into it and they're killed. He takes out a few himself then, wounded, leaves with the Alexandrians. I say "leaves" but they don't actually go anywhere. Instead of getting the hell out of Dodge, they just return to the storm drain that runs under the walls of the Safe Zone, a place that is in no way hidden and that the Saviors could easily investigate (and <i>would</i> investigate if being written at all competently). They're still there at the end.<br />
<br />
Rick returns home to find the Safe Zone ablaze and goes in to check it out. He goes to his own house and finds Negan waiting for him. The villain knocks Rick's gun from his hand and the two briefly fight it out. Negan is doing his usual Adam West Batman villain routine and Rick in response, goes meta: "Do you ever shut the hell up?" Pretty much what every viewer has been thinking about Negan's camp antics. It's the only bright spot in this ep. It made me chuckle, anyway. Rick recovers his gun, Negan, who has no gun, pushes him out the window and rather than simply going right back in and shooting Negan, Rick just runs away! If our heroes ever get their hands on the technology behind Negan's plot-armor, they'll be unbeatable.<br />
<br />
Other items: Between and in addition to all of that, there's plenty that is only present to add to that running-time. Aaron and Enid have gotten it in their heads to attempt a rapprochement with the Oceanside community, so there's 6 or 7 minutes of that mission near the beginning of this ep that look as if they were cut in from the beginning of an entirely different one, then the focus shifts elsewhere and we're never shown anything else of it.[5] Eugene is again shown drinking and again feeling sorry for himself, then he facilitates
the escape of Father Gabriel and the Hilltop's physician (who has been
detained at the Sanctuary for some time now). When the Alexandrians are "escaping" down that storm-drain, Michonne stays behind, closing the man-hole and going back into the Safe Zone for no other purpose than to allow her to walk around a while then kill and mutilate a random Savior[6] (said mutilation occurring below the level of the camera, in line with the show's recent tone-down-the-violence directive).<br />
<br />
Coral suddenly gets an inordinate amount of screentime, which is TWD's usual set-up for an impending death. He's Wesley Crusher, planning the Alexandrians' escape and even having a parley with Negan in which he offers to let the villain kill him if it will allow the Safe Zone to survive. He staggers around in slow motion while the Safe Zone is being hit with all those grenades. All of this leads where one expects, to the scene that, last week, was teased as being so shocking everyone would be talking about it. And even adjusting for the writers' laughable overestimation of the esteem they've engendered in their audience for this particular character, it may have been too, if the entire ep hadn't been so heavy-handedly pointing to it from its opening moments. As usual.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] <span id="bc_0_1b+seedBGSvD" kind="d">Rick, Carol and Jerry decide to take some vehicles, split up and
go warn the various communities. Jerry suggests the snipers' vehicles probably won't be where they were previously parked because the riflemen would have taken them to get away from whatever happened, Rick says he doesn't think they got away. Viewers are never shown whether the sniper cars are still there but it's very unlikely that random cars that are just sitting around outside somewhere and that haven't been maintained for two years would still be in working order, yet </span><span id="bc_0_1b+seedBGSvD" kind="d"><span id="bc_0_1b+seedBGSvD" kind="d">Rick and Jerry <i>do</i> pretty quickly find cars to drive. </span>When one considers the mystery of what happened at the Sanctuary, this is another hole.</span><br />
<br />
[2] She also tells her people to dump the dead Savior so the others can
find the corpse and posts a warning that she has others she can kill if they
don't stay away, guaranteeing they'll be there soon.<br />
<br />
[3] Last week, Eugene pitched Negan on an idea for getting rid of those zombies. Off-camera, of course. Negan was concerned that the plan, whatever it was, would require seriously depleting the Saviors' ammo supply and secured assurances that Eugene could replenish that stock if given the equipment. While Eugene's mystery plan was put into effect and worked, any such mass reloading operation would take months to carry out. The incident just underscores that Negan should not have the ability to do what he did tonight.<br />
<br />
[3a] UPDATE (11 Dec., 2017) - Discussing this ep on Reddit, poster "Serialnoymb63" points out that those grenade launchers "could have been handy" when the three communities carried out that bizarre "attack" on the Sanctuary in the first ep of this season. Back then, I'd noted that Rick had charged into that situation to boldly take the <i>low</i> ground and that the Saviors in the building could have destroyed our heroes with fairly minimal effort. Those grenade launchers would have made this task a <i>lot</i> easier. And if they exist, they pretty much have to have been there at the Sanctuary all along; all of Negan's other facilities were wiped out.<br />
<br />
[4] I've spent some time in my recent TWD reviews noting the serious
dramatic problems that have arisen as a consequence of having the characters insist their
campaign against the Saviors was part of some master Plan while refusing
to share that plan with the viewers. It seems inconceivable there would be other outposts that just weren't hit but the writers have left a bit of a black hole here.<br />
<br />
[5] While the ep dwells on such peripheral matters, Rick again disappears for much of the episode, present for only a few moments at the beginning then turning up at the end for that very brief dukearoo with Negan. Though the ostensible central hero of the show, Rick has been increasingly absent from it in recent seasons, often disappearing for weeks at a time. This season seems to be addressing fan complaints re:that development by including Rick in more eps but in what amount to glorified cameo appearances.<br />
<br />
[6] At no point are we ever shown a large number of Saviors swarming over the Safe Zone after it's breached. Rick is able to enter it then leave unmolested. While wandering inside, Michonne only runs into that one Savior. I found myself wondering why the Alexandrians don't just go back and kill the Saviors who have entered their community, something they appear entirely capable of doing.<br />
<br />
<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-16455054344137921902017-12-04T01:52:00.000-05:002017-12-04T13:51:21.481-05:00No Time Like Time For After THE WALKING DEADTHE WALKING DEAD continues to bog down in its own shortcomings. This evening's offering, "Time For After," was as full of holes as Clyde Barrow's stolen Ford and amounted to little more than a series of delaying actions aimed at getting events to the big 90-minute midseason finale next week.<br />
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The crack sniper team the Alexandrians left posted around Negan's big Sanctuary seem to appear and disappear at the writers' convenience. They're supposed to be camped out in high places around the zombie-besieged compound in the event that any Saviors appear. Last week, we learned that at least two Saviors had been able to
drive up to the place, survey what had happened there then peacefully
drive away unmolested. Two weeks ago, Negan himself had walked across the yard in the open, fighting and even shooting zombies, but no sniper ever tried to plug him. Tonight when Daryl, Tara, Michonne and Rosita turned up in a garbage truck, they were immediately spotted by the sharpshooters and identified as friendlies but a little later, Eugene was able to walk right out on to the roof of the main building and stand there for an extended period without drawing any fire. And he was working on a remote-controlled glider that would play music and lure away the zombies.<br />
<br />
Last week, I <a href="http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2017/11/walking-dead-100.html" target="_blank">wrote</a> about how the writers have had the characters insist there is, behind everything they've done this season, some big master Plan to defeat the Saviors but have entirely failed to share even a vague outline of that plan with viewers. Thus rather than a storyline wherein the characters pursue clearly-defined goals while the writers manipulate events as a means of generating suspense, it's mostly just been a lot of random mayhem to no obvious end. This was further complicated by the fact that Rick went off alone to the Garbage People, threatened them and was immediately taken prisoner when they turned down his insistence they join the anti-Savior team--definitely not an outcome he Planned--while multiple other characters went off on non-Planned missions of their own and <i>no one</i> was doing <i>anything</i> in accordance with <i>any</i> Plan. The failure to explain the Plan continues to cause problems tonight. Daryl, way off-Plan, has brought that garbage truck with the idea of driving it into the side of the compound and letting the zombies flood into the place. This, he insists, will force the Saviors to "surrender" but one gets the idea he just wants to kill them all. Morgan, who has recently joined the sniper-team, likes that idea just fine, as does Tara, who has been after blood for a while now. The writers try to set up some drama by presenting Rosita and Michonne as conflicted about this but it's impossible to generate any real dramatic tension because while Daryl's idea makes perfect sense and seems really obvious, Rick's Plan remains entirely unknown, leaving viewers with no basis for comparison.While Daryl makes a strong case for his approach--the Kingdom's entire fighting force has been wiped out and if the Saviors
reverse their fortunes and decide to fight, our heroes don't have the
numbers to beat them[1]--no one points to any downside to it and the other side of the story is entirely absent.<br />
<br />
The writers skip over all of that and initially just make it all about <i>Rick</i> but this doesn't make any sense as a point of demarcation either. Rosita refuses to go along with Daryl on the grounds that "I believe in Rick Grimes." This is the same Rosita who spent all of last season going off-script at every turn--impatient, wanting to kill the enemy, disregarding the communities' plans and even her own life. Now, she chides Michonne for being impatient and not realizing that sometimes, you just have to sit and wait--their assigned place, for the moment, in Rick's Plan. "I just wish it didn't take Sasha walking out of that coffin for me to realize it," she huffs as she walks away, which makes no sense <i>at all</i>. Last season, Rosita and Sasha had gone to the Sanctuary with the aim of assassinating Negan. This was acknowledged by both to be a suicide mission but Rosita was left behind when Sasha locked her out of a gate at the last moment before mounting the attack. Sasha failed and would later die in Savior custody (a suicide, though no one knows that) then come "walking out of that coffin" as a zombie. There's no lesson in any of that to inform Rosita's actions tonight; it's just invoking an emotional moment as a substitute for any argument. Worse is what the writers did with Michonne. Last season, Michonne was telling Rick that after the war with the Saviors was over, he should be the one to lead the various communities forward to the future. Tonight, she was ready to completely disregard Rick's Plan for Daryl's. She later backed out at the last minute but with no Rick Plan on the table could offer no rationale for doing so. As a substitute, the writers turned to some of their patented speechifying, producing an unintentionally hilarious swamp of nonsense:<br />
<br />
"I came here because I wanted to see things for myself. I wanted to know that things were going to work. but y'know what? I don't get to know that. None of us do. What I do know is that things are working now, so maybe we just need to trust that things are going to keep working, because this, what we're about to do, it's not worth risking us."<br />
<br />
"It is for me," Daryl grunts. "It just is."<br />
<br />
"I hope it works--I really, really do--but I can't do it. I just can't."<br />
<br />
"Then you shouldn't."<br />
<br />
And she doesn't! But like Rosita, she doesn't try to talk Daryl out of it either. How could she? Exhorting Daryl to stick to Rick's Plan would require going through Rick's Plan. For that, Rick would have to <i>have</i> a Plan.<br />
<br />
Daryl arrived at the compound at the end of the previous ep; the nonsense I've just outlined means this one is more than 2/3 over before he finally drives that truck through the wall.<br />
<br />
Other items: The characters have always remembered or forgotten the old cover-yourself-in-zombie-grue trick at the writers' convenience. While it seems logical that one could get sick from using it, no one ever has. The writers have decided, rather late in the game after 8 years of seeing people use the trick, to address this; Gabriel may be on his death-bed after contracting some sort of infection in that manner.[2] He was sick at the end of last week's ep; he's still sick at the end of this one. Eugene is confronted by Dwight, who pointlessly confessed that he was helping Rick and co.[3] Eugene remains a coward who looks out for #1 and continues helping Negan even though his loyalties are somewhat divided--exactly where he was when the ep began and exactly where he's been since he switched sides. The Saviors fight the zombies that come flooding in after the truck crashes. They're nearly out of ammo and supplies. Eugene tells Negan he can make more bullets if he can acquire the machinery to do so but their situation seems pretty grim. Over in the landfill, the Garbage People seemed poised to feed Rick to a zombie when he breaks free, fights them, rips off the zombie's head (Z NATION!) and wrestles Jadis to the ground, finally securing her alliance with the other communities by threatening to let the zombie head eat her face. She wants him to pose for her to sculpt him as part of her fee for going along with this but he haggles her down. The outcome and the way it comes about makes it feel as if the entire business of refusing Rick and taking him prisoner was just thrown in to eat up screentime.<br />
<br />
Rick and the Garbage People drive to the Sanctuary but only to see that the Saviors have been saved by that act of TWD's god known as the Inevitable Results of Defying Rick: the snipers are dead and the zombie horde that had surrounded the compound was gone.<br />
<br />
The evening closed with a the midseason finale will feature a shocking scene about which everyone will be talking and I'm sure that's exactly what will happen.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] Though, it should be noted, this is a questionable conclusion. While the Kingdom's force was wiped out, the Saviors' manpower should have been pretty seriously depleted by what's happened so far this season.<br />
<br />
[2] It doesn't make any sense to throw this in now. We've not only seen
characters covering themselves in zombie grue for 8 years--Rick did it
the first time when he had a gunshot wound in his side--we've also seen
countless other occasions when characters have gotten zombie gore in
their eyes and even their mouths and have been entirely unaffected.<br />
<br />
[3] Eugene, who was recording himself just before this, may have a tape of the confession. Nothing was made of this, which means it's unlikely anything ever will be. Eugene was prepared to tell Negan about Dwight but backed out.<br />
<br />
<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-61667468808573969172017-11-27T02:10:00.000-05:002017-11-29T00:42:30.293-05:00THE WALKING DEAD Talks Too MuchThroughout this season of THE WALKING DEAD, the series' writers have made it clear that everything our heroes are doing in the war they've launched against the Saviors is being done in accordance with some master Plan. Though the characters are all aware of this Plan (and Rick drones on endlessly about it), the writers have so far declined to share it with the audience, which has presented a raft of dramatic problems that seriously boiled over during tonight's ep.<br />
<br />
Up front, it should be acknowledged that in a better series, viewers would have been introduced to at least some broad outline of this plan from the beginning and the writers would have milked it for suspense. Can our heroes succeed at this goal, capture this-or-that objective, take out this critical target, etc.? Will the
Saviors anticipate what's up and counter or will Rick prove to be a few steps ahead of them? What unexpected developments will monkey-wrench both sides along the way? The season could have played out like an awesome game of action-movie chess and, at times,
poker, with goals, reversals, fake-outs as the two sides try to outdo one another. Instead,
viewers have been left entirely in the dark, which has reduced most of what has happened so far to just a lot of random
mayhem with no obvious point beyond generating a string of emotional scenes--yet another example of TWD's <a href="http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2013/11/walking-dead-34.html" target="_blank">soap melodrama model</a> completely ruining what should be a great show.<br />
<br />
Tonight's ep, "The King, the Widow & Rick," opens with the leaders of the various communities sending one another letters, essentially progress updates. This doesn't make a lick of sense--whatever mailman is driving around the apocalypse delivering them could just as easily have acted as a messenger himself and simply told everyone what they needed to know. Instead, we're to believe everyone stopped in the middle of this rapidly-developing action and wrote letters. Not necessarily helpful ones either--much of what's quoted from Rick goes on about how many brave people have sacrificed their lives so that the Plan may succeed. All of these communities have suffered casualties. Do any of them really need to hear such sentiment? Is sitting and writing such things really the best use of Rick's time in such a situation? "The plan is working." Rick's text assures everyone. "We're doing this. We're winning." Something else Rick wrote immediately caught my attention. Regarding Negan's headquarters, he records, "the lookouts are all around the compound. They open a door, we fire." Last week, the Saviors had speculated that there may e snipers outside. Perhaps they'd even observed said snipers. The other thing that happened last week: Negan not only opened a door, he opened <i>two</i> and between them, he fought his way through a long stretch of zombies across open ground and no sniper even so much as took a shot at him, even after Gabriel, who was accompanying him, began shooting zombies. That isn't a case of shitty snipers asleep at their posts; it's shitty writers asleep at <i>theirs</i>.<br />
<br />
Rick, in what amounted to another glorified cameo, tried and failed to negotiate a new treaty with the Garbage People. Demonstrating yet again what an imminently skilled leader he really is, Rick doesn't take an armed force along so he can negotiate under a white flag and then leave; he just turns up at their landfill alone--the camp of a faction aligned with the same enemy against which he just launched a war earlier that same day. And then he <i>threatens</i> them; if they don't join up, they'll be destroyed. Jadis promptly turns him down--takes her a matter of seconds--and locks him up, presumably to turn over to the Saviors. "Talks too much," she says of him as he's led away, which comes across as a funny meta-commentary. With Ezekiel depressed and unable to pull himself together, Rick's capture leaves only Maggie. In the first day of this war,[1] two of our heroes' three leaders have already been taken out. Not by the Saviors but by their own shortcomings.[2]<br />
<br />
One rather suspects that <i>wasn't</i> part of Rick's Plan.<br />
<br />
Much of tonight's action, however, was taken up by several of our heroes, in various combinations, deciding to go completely off-script from <i>any</i> Plan that may exist.<br />
<br />
The writers apparently remembered Rosita and Michonne, who haven't appeared on the show in a month-and-a-half. Whatever part they were supposed to play in the Plan, they were supposed to be at the Safe Zone but they decide, instead, to team up, take a car and drive all the way over to the Saviors' zombie-surrounded compound because Michonne just wants to see it for herself. No kidding, that's why she wants to go. And Rosita goes with her because, well ,why not, right?[3] They're on the payroll--the writers need <i>something</i> for them to do.<br />
<br />
Driving down the road, they hear some loud music coming from somewhere, stop and go to check it out. They find a pair of Saviors in a warehouse with a truck loaded with huge speakers, a contraption that would be perfect for luring zombies away from Negan's compound. These Saviors aren't driving it around on orders to do that though. They've been to the compound and describe the carnage at the scene, which means they're two more those crack snipers failed to nail, but they don't know who or what caused it. They apparently went to fetch this speaker-filled truck of their own initiative, then, on their way to this critical task, while Negan and the other Saviors could be fighting for their lives against zombies, decided to stop in and do a little scavenging. They're a coincidence. Michonne and Rosita are driving up the road by coincidence and hear the music by coincidence, all so the writers could stage a fight inside the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Earlier in the ep, Michonne had advised Rosita not to come with her. "You're still healing," she insisted, "You were shot. I was just beat up." When the warehouse fight breaks out, Michonne finds that, because of her injuries, using her sword is difficult for her, which can't help but remind viewers that Rick was <i>shot</i> in the same ep in which Michonne took that beating and he's been going, going, going all season while suffering <i>no</i> ill effects from it.[4] Rosita suffered no ill effects from her own gunshot wound tonight either.<br />
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I've written quite a bit about how TWD has borrowed from Z NATION over the last few seasons and this particular fight has a Z NATION ending. As with so many of the other occasions in which TWD had aped ZN, these moments are by far the highlight of the ep. Rosita discovers a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in a box (!!!) and confronts one of the Saviors with it. She gives him a chance to surrender, he taunts her and she blasts him into atoms from a few feet away. Entirely impossible, of course, but <i>HILARIOUS</i>! The other Savior jumps in the speaker-filled truck and skedaddles but as Michonne and Rosita watch her disappearing down the road--and before one even recovers from the laughter that grenade-launcher scene just induced--we get the second very funny ZN moment, as a garbage truck suddenly appears out of nowhere, comes around the side of a building and completely crushes the vehicle. It turns out Daryl and Tara had also coincidentally decided to operate outside the Plan, had coincidentally been in the vicinity of this warehouse, which isn't on the main road,[5] coincidentally turned up just as that Savior was escaping and coincidentally slammed into the truck, though they couldn't have seen it until seconds before they hit it <i>having no way of knowing who may be driving it</i>! If anything makes TWD worth watching these days, it's these tone-purloined moments.<br />
<br />
Daryl, Tara, Rosita and Michonne continue on to Negan's compound, Daryl talking about how they're going to "end this raht now," a call-back to his insistence in last week's ep that they could crack open the main building and let the dead stream in. Elsewhere in the ep, Carol herself sets out for some unknown, unPlanned personal mission to Negan's compound as well. She's interrupted and calls it off only because a kid from the Kingdom follows her--yes, they did that "don't follow me" scene yet <i>again</i>--and she has to take him back. Carl also went off on a non-Planned personal mission to find the fellow he'd seen in the opening ep. With war underway, he's looking to recruit this stranger into their community.<br />
<br />
This season has been an incessant drone about the Plan, the Plan, the Plan, sticking to the Plan, but while this ep opened with more of that, <i>nothing</i> that happened in it had anything to do with the Plan. Whatever that Plan may be, our heroes have started a war and <i>no one</i> was doing <i>anything</i> that had anything to do with it. Why, one would almost think <i>there is no Plan</i> and the writers have just been faking it all along!<br />
<br />
Anniversary Dept. - If one includes side pieces, FEAR THE WALKING DEAD reviews, etc., I've written more than a hundred articles on TWD over the years but I've always numbered my episode reviews and in that run, this one marks my 100th. So if you wanna' wear an Hawaiian shirt and jeans...<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
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[1] This entire season has so far taken place over the course of a few hours' time; the first day ended with a night during the course of tonight's ep.<br />
<br />
[2] Maggie, meanwhile, has been burdened by Jesus' decision to take a
large number of Saviors prisoner. She builds a crude pen for them and Hilltop is now forced to once again feed them, the marauders who had terrorized the community, out of its own food. Immediately after Maggie says she won't tolerate any misbehavior by the prisoners, evil smirker Jared makes a dive for the pen's gate; rather than on-the-spot execution, all he gets is a slug to the face.<br />
<br />
[3] This leads to a continuity error. When the two leave the Safe Zone, Michonne is driving--it's her trip--but when we cut back to them a few minutes later, Rosita is suddenly driving. Another such error occurs when Rick arrives at the Garbage People's landfill. When he knocks on the door, Jadis is sitting wearing nothing but some sort of smock (perhaps dreaming of an "after" with Rick?); he's escorted into her presence and she's suddenly fully dressed.<br />
<br />
[4] The writers try to retcon that matter. Jadis shot Rick in the side but when Jadis mentions that she shot him, he says she only "grazed" him.<br />
<br />
[5] When they'd gone to check out the noise, Michonne and Rosita had left their car in the middle of the road and Daryl and Tara could have come across it and been looking for them but this makes Daryl's swooping in and slamming into that truck even more inexplicable--for all he knew, Michonne or Rosita was driving it.<br />
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<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-75099658556016831992017-11-24T04:59:00.000-05:002018-08-01T17:49:35.695-04:00In Defense of Cult Films<div class="graf graf--p" name="5fe0">
"I beseech you, learn to see the 'bad' movies, they are sometimes sublime."</div>
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--Ado Kyrou, "Le Surrealisme au cinema"</div>
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James Franco's THE DISASTER ARTIST deals with the creation of Tommy Wiseau's 2003 movie THE ROOM, a movie that has earned both a reputation as a profoundly awful film and a devout cult following of fans who celebrate it for its awfulness. Cassam Looch, "Film and TV Editor of Culture Trip," doesn't much care for THE ROOM or its following and he's written a sour article on the matter, "<a href="https://medium.com/the-omnivore/why-is-hollywood-obsessed-with-celebrating-failure-1590cfa3b0a8" target="_blank">Why Is Hollywood Obsessed With Celebrating Failure?</a>" He calls the Franco picture "the latest in a series of films preoccupied with a lack of success" but he cites as examples only it and ED WOOD, Tim Burton's loving biographical sketch of perhaps the most notoriously inept filmmaker in the history of the medium. The two films were made 23 years apart, which doesn't even suggest a trend, much less an obsession. Looch's real targets are cult films and he snottily dismisses THE ROOM, Paul Verhoeven's SHOWGIRLS and the films of Ed Wood.</div>
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I can't speak for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OApQGRkJzkE" target="_blank">THE ROOM</a>, which certainly looks pricelessly inept, but I'm definitely a fan of the others and, more generally, of the kind of off-the-beaten-track cinema Looch is trying to dismiss. Looch describes cult films as simply worthless rubbish, failures that earn only scorn and belong in some forgotten corner of landfill. This is both ahistorical and appallingly blinkered. Movies regularly fail to find immediate financial success and critical
praise for an infinity of reasons that have nothing to do with their
quality. They can be misunderstood. They can be ahead of their time. They can just fall through the cracks of our immense entertainment landscape. They can be low-budget affairs, which are much closer to
individual expressions of the hearts and minds of their creators than films
deliberately engineered by sophisticated studio machines for mass
appeal. A film attracts a cult for the same reason any film draws an audience,
because it's possessed of some quality that connects with a certain
segment of viewers. The very qualities that can alienate a mass audience from such films--their
uniqueness, their individuality, their quirkiness, their entertaining of heretical ideas or flouting of social norms, even their unwillingness and/or inability to conform to the usual standards of technical proficiency--are those that can draw a cult. Many fans see such productions as a refreshing alternative to stifling mainstream pap. What Looch has done--rejecting films merely because they're transgressive of contemporary mass-audience tastes or because they challenge traditional notions of what's entertaining--is reactionary. It may steer one away from a lot of genuine rubbish but it also closes one off from an entire world of delightful, unique and fascinating films. However obnoxious he may make himself, it's hard not to feel sorry for a film fan who does that to himself.</div>
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At this late a date, it's a little strange to see SHOWGIRLS included in this particular snort. Verhoeven is a top-notch filmmaker and more than one of his movies was widely--and wildly--misunderstood in its own time then has, upon subsequent reevaluation, garnered much respect. The cult that formed around SHOWGIRLS was made up of the people who actually got it the <i>first</i> time around. The film is a gloriously smutty, over-the-top, cynical, darkly humorous--and sometimes just dark--rendition of a classic "Hollywood story" movie that uses Vegas as a metaphor for certain unflattering aspects of American culture.[1] We have a plucky, girl-power heroine trying to take on a man's world by getting naked for its entertainment, sexy Gina Gershon, catty as nip through a y'all-come drawl, as the wisened starlet looking to hold on to her hard-earned spotlight and it's impossible to greet the dual renditions of convulsive rutting by Kyle MacLachlan and excruciatingly gorgeous Elizabeth Berkley with anything but hysterical laughter--only a few of the film's significant repertoire of charms. SHOWGIRLS is a <i class="markup--em markup--p-em">blast</i>. Upon its initial release in 1995, it became a fad among critics to bash it and it proved a massive bomb at the box-office but in the years since, <a href="https://www.theawl.com/2014/03/showgirls-is-a-good-movie/" target="_blank">that</a> <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/showgirls-a-majestic-trash-classic-turns-20-darlin" target="_blank">tide</a> <a href="https://www.popmatters.com/reframed-no-15-paul-verhoevens-showgirls-1995-2495912430.html" target="_blank">has</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFi9zqSidps&t=334s" target="_blank">definitely</a> <a href="http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/showgirls/247464/how-showgirls-eventually-turned-into-a-hit-movie" target="_blank">turned</a>. Looch's description of the film--"a blight against all involved that deserves to be dismissed as a foolish
endeavour that never needs to be spoken about again... and certainly one
that should not be watched by any right-minded film lover"--is decades out of date, and would have been the words of a fool even back then.</div>
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SHOWGIRLS is now celebrated because it's <i>good</i>, not, as Looch would have it, because it's regarded as "so bad it's good," but into the latter category would certainly fall the works of Ed Wood. A former Marine and World War II vet, Edward D. Wood Jr. was an angora-adoring transvestite unter-auteur who, joined by an evolving troupe of oddballs, turned out a string of ultra-low-budget pictures in the 1950s and '60s. By ridiculing his work, the Medved brothers' Golden Turkey books brought it a posthumous cult following in the late 1970s which has only grown in the decades since. Wood is regularly cited as the "worst filmmaker of all time"--he's
become the pop answer when the question arises--but that
appellation (appallation?) really isn't defensible. While it's undeniably true that Wood was usually an awful storyteller who had absolutely no serious talent for filmmaking, it's also the case that he was a genuine artist. A <i class="markup--em markup--p-em">bad</i> artist, to be sure, but when one sees his films--GLEN OR GLENDA, BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, etc.--one is seeing <i class="markup--em markup--p-em">him</i>, not some cynical drive-by conducted by a disinterested mercenary or committee of studio business suits only looking to make a quick buck.[2] Underneath his inexpert productions, there is sincerity. One is watching a guy struggling, usually rather hopelessly, to bring to the screen stories for which he has a great personal passion. This makes his work interesting and gives his films an endearing quality, while their extraordinary shortcomings are some of the marks of his unique cinematic vision. Obviously, the "worst filmmaker of all time" is an entirely subjective judgment but it seems to me that if we're going to slap that title on anyone, the cinema is simply too heavily littered with entirely worthless, unwatchable junk to bestow it on someone whose work is possessed of these traits. Wood's films are imminently watchable and even if much of their
entertainment value is derived from their
ineptness--and the ineptness of Wood's productions is a never-ending
parade of hilarity--that still counts as entertainment value.</div>
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Looch doesn't think that counts. He asserts that it's a "problem" that Wood's films are regarded in some quarters "as somehow being worth watching."[3] Of THE ROOM, he writes, "fans quote along to the wooden
acting and inexplicably bad dialogue <b>as if it's entertainment</b>, something
Wiseau himself has said he fails to understand..." That bolding is mine and to Looch I would say, if you wished to establish that you don't understand why people find such
films entertaining, you could have saved all that writing by simply
saying so. It would have taken a single line. A paragraph, if you wanted
to get wordy. You call so-bad-they're-good films "an oxymoron of epic
proportions and one that doesn't really stand up to any scrutiny
whatsoever" but you don't offer it any real scrutiny and your own absurd notion that these films <i>aren't</i>
entertainment can't withstand the obvious reality that so many
people <i class="markup--em markup--p-em">do</i>, in fact, find them
entertaining; that's how they became <i>cult</i> films and of sufficient notoriety that you're writing about them. The project on which you embarked with your article is to wave an ugly, stifling notion of Good Taste as
a fetish against things you see as so beneath your contempt that you don't feel the need to offer any substantive case for your own view or substantive critique of the films you dismiss with verbal bulldozers; you instead treat their complete lack of merit as a given and ask your readers, who may <i>love</i> them, to "drop the pretense that these are good films when they most certainly aren't." What you've written is presumptuous, pretentious and preposterous and I suspect film connoisseurs with a more diverse palate than your own will continue to imbibe and enjoy entertainments that fall well outside the coffin-shaped box you've here labeled "good" and that the only thing of which you've convinced them is that you're not a writer on these matters worth reading. Of one, I can say that for certain.<br />
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Do better.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="d565">
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<div class="graf graf--p" name="d565">
--j.</div>
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[1] Twenty-two years old, the film is particularly timely <i>this</i> year, given the current rash of Hollywood sex-abuse scandals.</div>
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[2] Which shouldn't be read as a condemnation of such cash-in productions; they're often sublime as well.</div>
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[3] He also writes that "the B-Movies Wood is famous for are hated for good reason... they are abysmal." But one sees <i>very</i> little "hate" for Wood's movies. Four decades ago, the Medveds treated them with snickering contempt but they survive and are kept in constant circulation because people find them entertaining. Wood has been the subject of multiple documentaries over the years, a great book ("Nightmare of Ecstasy") and Tim Burton's film, which is also Burton's masterpiece. Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE has, among other things, been turned into a comic book, three different stage plays, a musical and has been remade for the screen. Speaking personally, when I owned a video store some years ago, PLAN 9 was a regular rental, so much so that each of the three times it was stolen, it had made enough to justify continuing to replace it--in my little video store, a remarkable achievement for a film of that vintage.<br />
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Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a></div>
cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-3204642833352674912017-11-20T02:00:00.002-05:002017-11-21T03:10:05.316-05:00THE WALKING DEAD's Big Unscary F UThe revamped BATTLESTAR GALACTICA from 2004 was, warts and all, one of the best tv series of its kind and from its first season to its last, its remarkably talented creative team always struggled to fit into a mere hour-long timeslot all the great material they'd cooked up. As great as a given episode would be, the deleted scenes would break your heart. "Damn," would begin my perpetual reaction upon seeing the cut material, "why couldn't they have gotten <i>this</i> into the show somehow?!" It was usually just cut for time. One wishes BSG had been allowed to exceed its allotted hour a lot more often than was the case. These days, THE WALKING DEAD is quite often given that liberty--eps routinely run five minutes, fifteen minutes, even half an hour beyond their regularly-designated allotment--but TWD is a show whose creators can barely even fill the regular hour they're contractually obligated to deliver. It has been one of the most filler-packed series television has ever seen and one of the real curiosities about its extended episodes is that virtually none of them[1] are jam-packed with lots of things happening that couldn't be cut without causing serious narrative harm. They tend, instead, to be the ones in which the <i>least</i> actually happens. That's the case with "The Big Scary U," tonight's installment, which pulls back from the more action-packed eps of the season to date to deliver what amounts to a glorified bottle episode that was nevertheless allowed to run for 75 minutes.<br />
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Tonight's a-plot takes place almost entirely at Negan's headquarters, now overrun by zombies. In a trailer outside the main compound, Negan and then Father Gabriel have taken shelter from the dead. That happened over a month ago and we haven't seen them since.[2] Back then, Gabriel dove into the trailer and Negan, who was already inside, announced his presence with his usual campy swagger. Gabriel was carrying a fully-automatic rifle, a pistol and a long knife but the force-field from the villain's plot-armor left him paralyzed and he did nothing, even as the villain threatened him. We rejoin the scene seconds later and Negan charges up to Gabriel, knocks him down and disarms him. The cold opening ends with a provocative notion; Gabriel suggests he's there to take Negan's confession. This set-up would have been an opportunity for the writers to try to humanize the awful cartoon they've made of this character. Unfortunately, they just take a pass. We learn merely that Negan once perhaps worked with children in some entirely unknown capacity and was married prior to the apocalypse. And we get to hear him do more of his usual posturing.<br />
<br />
Rick and co. brought a small army to Negan's door at the beginning of this season. They had Negan and the entire Savior leadership in front of them at near
point-blank range and with no cover and declined to simply
kill the villains on sight. Gabriel didn't kill Negan when he dove into that trailer and had the opportunity. Later, when the writers have he and Negan remember the old
cover-oneself-in-zombie-gore trick which will allow them to escape the trailer
and walk unmolested among the dead,[3] Gabriel has a pistol he recovered from Negan. Again he doesn't shoot the guy. He even offers to give back the gun! And Negan allows him to keep it! Covered in grue, Gabriel could have plugged Negan and just walked home. Instead, he helps Negan get back into the main compound and becomes his prisoner.<br />
<br />
A problem that has plagued TWD for most of its run--and that I've covered here over and over again--is how its writers make every progression of what passes for plot entirely dependent upon the characters being complete idiots with no sense of self-preservation. Even as the writers were giving Gabriel these further opportunities to take out Negan and having him decline to do so, they decided to further rub viewers' noses in the indefensible idiocy of this. Inside the main compound, there was much dissension among the Savior leaders; without Negan, they argue, jockey for position, challenge one another are are on the verge of completely falling apart and when the workers, kept in check by Negan's terror regime, begin to revolt, they're entirely incapable of dealing with the situation,[4] all of which just underscores how killing Negan would, to a large extent, solve the Savior problem.<br />
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The b-plot is really only a few brief moments, basically a cameo by Rick and Daryl in which they're going through what's left of the Savior truck they crashed in their cameo appearance last week. Daryl recovers some dynamite and decides they should use it to blast open Negan's compound, let the dead flood in and "they'll surrender. It'll be done. Hell, we could end this by sundown." He's probably right but Rick is worried about the workers. What if doing this turns the workers against us? "There's a plan, he says, "and everyone is stickin' to it." Viewers have, of course, never been let in on this plan, so instead of this season
being a suspenseful chess-game between our heroes and the Saviors, it's
mostly just been a lot of random mayhem with little hint about what this
unspoken "plan" is supposed to accomplish or how or what part anything we're being shown plays in it. Viewers have no information with which to judge its merits vs. Daryl's idea but Daryl must be unimpressed with it because he decides to go with his own. Rick vetoes it and Daryl physically attacks him! It's not a minor altercation either--Daryl tries to pound him into the ground and throws him in a choke-hold. Daryl calls Rick "brother" and Rick has been more of a brother to him than his own ever was. The two have been established as best pals, thick as thieves, absolutely loyal to one another, each willing to do anything for the other, Daryl being especially attached to Rick. The writers have done absolutely nothing to establish <i>any</i> foundation for this sort of sudden, extreme clash; it's just Daryl going violently out-of-character for the sake of adding a little action. Rick grabs the bag of dynamite and throws it in the burning truck, ending this stupid conflict by blowing up what, in a war situation, is a priceless asset.<br />
<br />
That's it, another one-line-item plot--"Negan makes it back to the main Savior compound"--with a brief diversion that doesn't go anywhere. As Rick is walking up the road near the end,[5] a <i>helicopter</i> flies over, which is definitely the most interesting thing that happens.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
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[1] None at <i>all</i> come immediately to mind.<br />
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[2] Though the show has, of late, featured a lot more action than usual, the pace is still wretched. At the end of 5 eps, the season has only covered perhaps a few hours of time. Story threads and characters still completely disappear for long stretches.<br />
<br />
[3] Since this gimmick was introduced--a carryover from the comic--the characters remember or forget it at the writers' convenience. Carol couldn't remember how to do it just last week. It also seems to work or not at the writer's convenience; tonight, it suddenly failed while Negan and Gabriel were in the midst of the dead.<br />
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[4] In fact, if Negan had returned to the main compound only two minutes later than he did, the workers would have probably liquidated the Savior leadership.<br />
<br />
[5] Yes, in a wartime situation where the enemy could turn up at any second, Rick is just walking right up the road in the open.<br />
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Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-61183675079002525222017-11-13T00:50:00.000-05:002017-11-14T18:58:15.319-05:00Some Guy, Some Cliché, Some WALKING DEADRecent installments of THE WALKING DEAD have, in the ham-handed way typical of the series, set up Ezekiel for a major fall. The King's bold and blatant displays of hubris seemed to signal his end was near and when "Some Guy," tonight's offering, opened with yet another, it looked as if his number was probably up. It wasn't though. In the end, he was able to hobble home but only as a greatly reduced "king" presiding over a greatly reduced Kingdom.<br />
<br />
The Savior compound he and his men hit turned out to be the temporary residence of the big Browning machine-gun for which Rick has been searching. The Saviors put the weapon to work on the Kingdom's fighters, who were, at the time, in an open field, and wiped out the entire force. Ezekiel survived because several of his people had moved to shield him with their bodies; he had to crawl out from under what was left of them. This set up what could have been an extraordinarily ghoulish horror movie moment, as Ezekiel, with an injured leg that prevents him from immediately walking, is not only faced with the awful deaths of <i>all</i> of his beloved subjects but then has to try to crawl away from and over them as they begin to reanimate and pursue him for his flesh. Unfortunately, this is TWD, so that moment is entirely squandered by unimaginative direction and flat staging and editing, capped by the first of what will become many "surprise" last-minute saves in the ep.<br />
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In this first one, Ezekiel is about to become Zombie Chow when a random Kingdomite who somehow didn't die in the massacre suddenly arrives out of nowhere and announces his presence by shooting the menacing zombie bearing down on the King. This is, of course, one of the most overused clichés in action pictures, and it's the central preoccupation of this ep; in a little over 41 minutes of running time, it happens no less than <i>five</i> times. Ezekiel is saved from this zombie, his man Jerry rescues him from a Savior who had captured him, he and Jerry are saved from a zombie horde by Carol, Rick is saved from being machine-gunned by Daryl (a moment which, unlike any other action in the ep, is <i>well</i>-shot and edited) and finally, Ezekiel is again saved from a horde of zombies by his animated tiger Shiva.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbl3xwYTRqPzWjb9dUPzluLWwYGoxuOO6z6lsWxctge_Fb5aqRqT_myWcx0Gs84snTiBJwugSqsMxJzzWMsFH_1d7Wq0PhqqDhaWJiH5qXZH5LMjK2xFvKMxAl9ArfTdbmuOVHEcWHGw/s1600/toxic_waste_zombies.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbl3xwYTRqPzWjb9dUPzluLWwYGoxuOO6z6lsWxctge_Fb5aqRqT_myWcx0Gs84snTiBJwugSqsMxJzzWMsFH_1d7Wq0PhqqDhaWJiH5qXZH5LMjK2xFvKMxAl9ArfTdbmuOVHEcWHGw/s400/toxic_waste_zombies.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
That last horde is TWD's latest swipe from Z NATION, a group of zombies grotesquely mutated by a swamp full of toxic waste in which they've been milling around! ZN revels in offering up all kinds of unusual zombies like this. These particular critters are utterly random. There's no reason at all for them to be there, except that they're cool. But sometimes, that should be reason enough. Definitely a nice touch. Fill in my usual comments about the best part of this show--and these toxic-waste zombies were unquestionably the highlight of the evening--being something it lifted from ZN.<br />
<br />
There are plenty of stupid bits, as always. Ezekiel, attempting to flee from zombies, grabs up a rifle and instead of shooting the creatures with it, uses it like a crutch, repeatedly driving its barrel down into the mud beneath him. <i>Then</i>, he tries to shoot it. Fortunately for him, it seems to have randomly jammed while its previous owner still had it, so he's spared having its barrel explode in his face. Later, as zombies are closing in on he and Jerry, who have no guns and are up against a chained-up gate, he notices one of the zombies has a pistol its hip. Instead of grabbing it and shooting off the lock, he continues to fight the zombies with his sword and both nearly die before being saved by Carol. Rick's plot-armor--and, one suspects, the creators' lack of familiarity with the weapon they're featuring--saves him from being turned into instant Swiss cheese when the Saviors turn their machine-gun on him and the Jeep he's driving. Rick drives up right beside the Saviors' humvee and jumps into the cab while the driver watches, when all the driver had to do was swerve out of the way, hit the gas, hit the brakes--do literally <i>anything</i>--and Rick would have been road-pizza.[1] A pissed-off 500 lb. tiger is overcome and killed by a handful of zombies who not only had the physical weakness of the long-dead but were practically falling apart from exposure to that toxic waste. Carol announces she's almost out of ammo even as she continues firing full-auto bursts at the large number of zombies she's attempting to evade rather than dropping down to semi.[2] And so on.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgem1p7uQoYwnUT00p_AohHOVlNE4P7g6eE3Fss9q_R4BjZVz0dtufQ3xJATUY8O4NmQPUQNrAjqa-H3hryh4PZtbjwLUXfr4GcjMB0kTrIrvPzdPf8BR-Z3rjuDQ60hDHj_1mBYWlK_A/s1600/daryl_gun.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgem1p7uQoYwnUT00p_AohHOVlNE4P7g6eE3Fss9q_R4BjZVz0dtufQ3xJATUY8O4NmQPUQNrAjqa-H3hryh4PZtbjwLUXfr4GcjMB0kTrIrvPzdPf8BR-Z3rjuDQ60hDHj_1mBYWlK_A/s320/daryl_gun.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
Despite how it markets itself, TWD has never really been a particularly action-packed series. Its stock-in-trade is tedious, wretchedly-paced one-line-item plot episodes wherein almost nothing happens. In recent weeks, the action quotient has been significantly amped up but we're now getting relatively action-packed eps that, paradoxically, manage to be pretty damn dull anyway. Go figure. One can't help but wonder how much of the season's budget is being burned up by all of this; it may well portend a very slow second half-season.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] Daryl's motorcycle has some interesting speed capabilities and limitations. Daryl was fired upon by the Savior in the hummer and crashed but he somehow recovers, gets back on his bike and catches up with the other vehicles in the chase, which should have been long gone by then. He gets there just in time to suddenly appear, shoot the gunner and save Rick (in a well-done little moment) but when Rick then jumps into the humvee and crashes it, Daryl, who should be right behind him, isn't even in sight and only drives up (from a substantial distance) after. It's possible Dwight's possession of the bike imbued it with some of the magic the Saviors have employed at various points, allowing Daryl to teleport in for the save then teleport back to his original position--far behind the chase and trying to catch up.<br />
<br />
[2] At one point, Carol shoots it out with some Saviors, both she and they concealed behind some cars. As has been the case throughout this season, no one can hit one another, despite being at near-point-blank range using fully-automatic weapons, and the Saviors, who significantly outnumber Carol (at first) don't just go around the vehicle behind which she's crouched and shoot her, which would be easy to do. Instead--as has also been the case throughout this season--both she and they just pointlessly spray the bodies of the vehicles. Worthy of note--at least here in a footnote--is that one of the windows on the vehicle Carol is using for cover <i>does</i> break at one point (though it took some time). In previous eps, characters hid behind vehicles and threw an ungodly amount of lead--or was it cotton?--at one another without ever taking out windshields or windows.<br />
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<br />
Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-5632983226037771372017-11-05T23:30:00.000-05:002017-11-27T02:17:49.492-05:00What's That Coming Over the Hill? Is it Monsters? No, It's Just THE WALKING DEAD<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Last week's WALKING DEAD ended with Rick, then prowling around for guns inside a Savior compound, being confronted by a gun-wielding Morales, a character who hadn't been seen since he and his family decided to split from the regular cast way back in season 1. He'd become a Savior, said other Saviors were on their way and his reappearance was such a portentous event, it became the note on which the curtain fell. "Wow!", the viewer is led to think, "where will <i>this</i> go?" The move seemed to herald some significant plot-twist, so when, a few minutes into tonight's ep, Daryl shows up and just shoots Morales in the head without a word, it was a moment of dramatic awkwardness that was absolutely hilarious. Moreso for me because sitting watching it, I'd <i>just</i> made a joke about how Daryl was up there somewhere--he'd been on the same floor as Rick--and suggested he should slip up on the fellow and kill him. Because that would be funny, not because I thought it would actually happen. After, Rick looks stunned. "Th- that was..." he stuttered and then Daryl cuts him off: "I know who it was," he says in that mumbling, dismissive way Norman Reedus has made part of Daryl's signature. "Don't matter." Which just made the already-damn-funny situation <i>really</i> damn funny.<br />
<br />
Though the definite entertainment value in this was strictly unintentional, it proved to be the high-point of the ep.<br />
<br />
It seems TWD's writers went through all the trouble of bringing back Morales just to have him introduce the Big Theme of the episode. Subtlety simply doesn't live in the TWD writer's room, so before Morales' hysterically funny demise, he called Rick a "monster," said the only difference between Rick and himself was that he had a gun and that this didn't make Rick any better, it just made <i>him</i> lucky. <u><b>OUR HEROES ARE JUST LIKE THE VILLAINS</b></u>, get it? It's material TWD has recycled so often the actors probably don't even need a script anymore to recite the requisite sentiments.[1]<br />
<br />
And recite it they do. TWD has always set up and milked moral dilemmas for melodrama but genuine moral complexity has proven to be as beyond the capabilities of its writers as warp-drive technology. Throughout TWD's run, our heroes are, on rare
occasions, shown doing ignoble things, almost always for the sake of some plot of the
moment, but in the moral landscape in which they exist they're clearly
on the side of the angels.[2] Last week when Rick killed a fellow who, it
was then revealed, was protecting a baby, he was clearly sickened, even
horrified. By
contrast, the featured Saviors are just presented as the embodiment of every bad and vicious characteristic of the human species, brutish ravagers who slaughter their way across
the landscape killing, terrorizing and stealing whatever they want, enslaving communities and taking great glee in their crimes against humanity. Their leader is a
camp cartoon who bashes in the brains of a helpless prisoner in front of
the fellow's pregnant wife then mocks the victim as he dies, who
threatens to have his men gang-rape a teenage boy for shits and giggles. Rick and co. would
have to suck <i>really</i> badly to suck as badly as the Saviors and they just <i>don't</i>. Not in that way.[3] That leaves nothing but false equivalences to be wrung from this "look how alike they are" theme but the writers throw it in the viewer's face repeatedly. The title of tonight's ep, "Monsters," flat-out screams it. Morales straight-up says it. Morgan repeats it like a mantra. "Y'see, we're the same! We're the same! We're the same." Mr. Sulu, warp factor 6.<br />
<br />
As I've so often noted, words and actions on TWD are often disconnected
and TWD's writers give no indication they've ever been
exposed to the 1st Rule of Screenwriting, "Show, Don't Tell." Here,
they can't inject their preferred theme into the ep by writing that
draws genuine parallels between the actions of the heroes and Saviors--the
Saviors are simply too deplorable--so they weave it into the ep as I've described, by
having people <i>talk</i> about it. It's hard to find in the actual actions of the characters. Rick saw to it that the baby he'd found would be cared for. When Gregory, who betrayed the Hilltop community
to the Saviors, shows up back at its gates and makes an impassioned plea to be able to
return, Maggie--incredibly--allows it. Last week, Jesus created the show's current moral dilemma by, well, acting like
a Jesus. Out of the blue and while his mission was
already underway, he suddenly decided the whole thing bothered his
conscience and instead of simply wiping out the Saviors against which his group was engaged (as was apparently the plan), he insisted on negotiating a
surrender. Hilltop has no capacity for dealing with a large number of
hostile prisoners and these are people who, as Tara noted last week,
will kill you the second your back is turned. Jesus is acting <i>incredibly</i> stupid here but the writers are siding with him, having him mouth noble
platitudes about "peace" and how we will have to live with these people
after the war is over. Because overt survivalist sentiment is never given a fair hearing on TWD, no one points out to him that the war has only
just <i>started</i>, that his own side in that war is totally outnumbered and
outgunned, that the idea of a people peacefully coexisting with another that has only ever terrorized, abused and murdered them is extremely dubious or that the only reason they'd ever have to live with any of
this particular group of murderous sadists is that <i>he</i> unwisely
opted to spare them. Instead, his foils are Tara, who, after one of TWD's patented personality transplants, has been set up as an increasingly vicious, almost proto-Savior character, and
Morgan, who is presented as completely insane. They just want to kill 'em, even after the Saviors are disarmed--a much uglier act than would have been defeating them in a battle. Jesus stands firm, even fights Morgan over it. In context, viewers have seen plenty of who the Saviors are and what they do and if anyone needs a refresher, the vicious Jared continued, in this ep, to taunt Morgan over Morgan's young pupil, whom Jared murdered, but it's still like a final insult when, near the end, the writers choose as the one who draws attention to their savage nature the despicable, back-stabbing Gregory; he calls them "monsters,"[4] bookending when Morales used that same word for Rick. While nearly the entire ep presents our heroes as basically good people who are, among other things, merciful to the point of being TWD-level stupid, they're really just all the same, see?<br />
<br />
To try to justify the presence of this theme in a story in which it's really entirely out of place, the writers throw in a moment in which Rick coaxes a lone Savior into surrendering in exchange for some information, making a big show of giving his word that the fellow won't be harmed if he cooperates then, after Rick gets the info, Daryl shoots the guy. Sort of a half-assed effort at theme-service; if the writers were serious, they would have had Rick pull the trigger.<br />
<br />
Like last week, there's a lot of shooting and wasting of what should be precious ammo. When the Hilltoppers transporting those captured Saviors are set upon by
a horde of zombies, they open up, full-auto, even though there's no
reason for it (and to prove that the heroes and Saviors are all just the
same, some of the good guys even get killed trying to protect
those prisoners). Last week's silly, shallow-field shootout between Rick's group and the Saviors finally wraps up--who knew military-grade weapons couldn't shatter the windows on cars? As happened last week, the Saviors killed in that exchange zombify and though they've only just died moments earlier, the zombie make-up and appliances are caked on to them, making them look as if they've already been dead for weeks or months.<br />
<br />
At this point, that sounds a bit like a metaphor for THE WALKING DEAD.<br />
<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[1] Morales was given several minutes to make his own speech introducing all of this, which just added to the impression that the writers were going to do something important with him and made it more funny when he's immediately killed.<br />
<br />
[2] Even when they stole guns from the Oceanside community, which was <i>very</i> wrong, no one was hurt and the action was done in the cause of fighting a common enemy. There's no doubt that when the fight is over, the only way Oceanside won't be welcomed as a friend is if it chooses not to be one.<br />
<br />
[3] That's also why it's completely ridiculous to drag this theme into the show over and over again until it's worn down to parody. "Don't matter" indeed!<br />
<br />
[4] When Gregory is raving about the evil of the Saviors and insisting Hilltop not let in Jesus' prisoners, there's a moment I found very funny when Maggie, looking to shut him up, angrily shouts at him--"GRIGORY!"--like she's trying to make a young child behave. It's all in Lauren Cohan's delivery.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB9WE9sHriThpnYzsSTwmELfCaOQ8I20_Qr5eV4W8Izo2E0g_cKiUmDemuWFUTsqGT35bwwmsBgGAP8UkOWM9YlbjFwu8ZiaHtdLxsZE7SZods8KF-DE_HT_fyGNe_ec3IOvnDRT71BQ/s1600/madmothermaggie.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB9WE9sHriThpnYzsSTwmELfCaOQ8I20_Qr5eV4W8Izo2E0g_cKiUmDemuWFUTsqGT35bwwmsBgGAP8UkOWM9YlbjFwu8ZiaHtdLxsZE7SZods8KF-DE_HT_fyGNe_ec3IOvnDRT71BQ/s400/madmothermaggie.PNG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"GRIGORY!!!"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-33124474436980228892017-10-30T04:35:00.001-04:002017-10-31T00:12:14.765-04:00The Damned WALKING DEAD... With Pictures!There was a lot of shooting tonight on "The Damned," this week's installment of THE WALKING DEAD, but for all that sound, fury and fully-automatic gunfire, not a lot of clarity and, this being TWD, not a lot of logic either.<br />
<br />
Our heroes' "all-out war" against the Saviors continues, with a number divided into teams who are tasked with hitting various Savior compounds in different locations. Unlike last week, the ep is very fast-paced but the action is, for the most part, <i>very</i> badly shot and edited. While there seems to be some overarching plan at work and definite mission objectives, the writers never let the audience in on either, so instead of a script that establishes a set of goals and builds suspense around how and if our heroes can achieve them, as would be appropriate to make an ep of this sort work, it's all just mayhem. Heroes and Saviors crash into one another--sounds a bit like SURVIVOR, doesn't it?--then needlessly burn through incredible amounts of ammo.<br />
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A team from the Kingdom including Ezekiel and Carol are on foot and heading to the site they're supposed to attack, while another featuring Morgan, Tara and Jesus are supposed to hit a different compound, the one Rick and co. hit after first encountering the Saviors back in season 6. In both cases, the characters stress the need to be stealthy, which would make sense if these attacks were timed to occur simultaneously with the operation against Negan's headquarters in the last ep but makes absolutely none in the aftermath of that event. It's been established since shortly after the Saviors first appeared that they use radios and satellite phones to communicate. They've even, on occasion, <a href="http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2016/04/walking-dead-78.html" target="_blank">employed magic</a> to accomplish <a href="http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2016/11/walking-dead-83.html" target="_blank">impossible tasks</a>, including teleporting from one location to another. After the attack on Negan's hq, there's no more reason to assume the Saviors won't know they're coming than there is logic in the Saviors not knowing they're coming. When Morgan and co. are scanning their target, Jesus says, "If they see us, if they fire a gun, we're not getting in."[1] Ezekiel and his team, meanwhile, are on foot and heading for their objective when they encounter a lone Savior who ducks behind a car and instead of someone just flanking him and shooting him, twenty people plant their feet and open up on the car with fully-automatic weapons, a clamor that would be heard for many miles around. Then they just as loudly wipe out a horde of zombies. The Savior <i>still</i> escapes, and Carol delivers the punchline: "If he tells them we're here, it's over before it started." And if the audience didn't get the point (or have enough of a laugh), she repeats this sentiment a little later.<br />
<br />
Rick's team is attacking another facility. One group shoots it out with the Saviors in the yard while Rick, Daryl and several other men slip in through a different entrance. As we eventually learn, they're in search of a cache of guns that are supposed to be on the 4th floor. From the fact that they're mounting an operation of this scale to acquire it, we can assume it's supposed to be a <i>big</i> cache of guns but Rick and Daryl leave the rest of their group behind in order to climb to the 4th through an elevator shaft. Presumably, the two are going to find some room packed with weapons then somehow carry them down all by themselves.<br />
<br />
The shootout that rages in front of this same building offers some of the worst staged and edited action in TWD's run. Perhaps for budgetary reasons, the two sides are shooting at one another from very close quarters, the sort of combat that, using military-grade weapons, would be over very quickly but here is prolonged merely because the script says so. I've put together some screen grabs to illustrate. The fellow in the foreground with the rifle just can't seem to hit that bald guy:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0r_oZDwMjePrIdWrB82EJ9g097IrbhtSnM3XWoB9fRU07IxQOr2njhmMXgqQsO7AJWOh3oMFxg772NJIXCxDNNdkV9dU710f_aVHasqsOUun7O8H-Yn_NYj-SXXX2W05G6W4Al1M4Vw/s1600/01.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="404" data-original-width="720" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0r_oZDwMjePrIdWrB82EJ9g097IrbhtSnM3XWoB9fRU07IxQOr2njhmMXgqQsO7AJWOh3oMFxg772NJIXCxDNNdkV9dU710f_aVHasqsOUun7O8H-Yn_NYj-SXXX2W05G6W4Al1M4Vw/s640/01.PNG" width="640" /></a></div>
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The guy at the lower right can't take out this fleet-footed duo:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3K28NpmNn1tXUCmkClOpOTuIIu6DI4eUqujKcS5d-9zjU9P-sPb8OQcZ44fgV-nTaj_0r7RzNXiJy0OzotequQYOV-MqqUmDe0tw_namC2kNcgjGi7dzI3DgFUhoiW48O0b1XrQ6dnw/s1600/02.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="404" data-original-width="720" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3K28NpmNn1tXUCmkClOpOTuIIu6DI4eUqujKcS5d-9zjU9P-sPb8OQcZ44fgV-nTaj_0r7RzNXiJy0OzotequQYOV-MqqUmDe0tw_namC2kNcgjGi7dzI3DgFUhoiW48O0b1XrQ6dnw/s640/02.PNG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Just duck your head a bit; they'll never be able to nail you, even as you run right toward them:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuJzLbLRpfrvFqJa2axiYYzx_8tJULgKWbAcm3KfrVFZmMP5BpOSLqoWG6xGncCusUJaGiJIxidgBWkAqzQg3dBVQ1YOadnwkOuENBFmVXJayfTYQ9suE5igMDoujz4590lchnnJOtRQ/s1600/03.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="404" data-original-width="720" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuJzLbLRpfrvFqJa2axiYYzx_8tJULgKWbAcm3KfrVFZmMP5BpOSLqoWG6xGncCusUJaGiJIxidgBWkAqzQg3dBVQ1YOadnwkOuENBFmVXJayfTYQ9suE5igMDoujz4590lchnnJOtRQ/s640/03.PNG" width="640" /></a></div>
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How hard is it to machine-gun this guy from this angle?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6wugtyMaFOnK6flVMT-m-Gd8J6hJtAw5qufzWQERpsdAoznb3hE-3JNx8nN8ikW1IIB1-dqy4lfy4k3qbtL8HVQBo6_Dfz-MR6C0YWUSkKNQpGHpRKckP_GUcgwrN_BPuVsfbQtykzw/s1600/04.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="404" data-original-width="720" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6wugtyMaFOnK6flVMT-m-Gd8J6hJtAw5qufzWQERpsdAoznb3hE-3JNx8nN8ikW1IIB1-dqy4lfy4k3qbtL8HVQBo6_Dfz-MR6C0YWUSkKNQpGHpRKckP_GUcgwrN_BPuVsfbQtykzw/s640/04.PNG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
At one point, Aaron sees some Saviors trying to flank Eric and some other fighters. These infiltrators are practically in reach of him. This is his point of view on them:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU_UIgNu39SKlsWGU2X28dtarAPgFNV09qMlZgRRT4AIbWmBHG4CoNmBUT8u9SWm_aWPdtXFfE2_-ymQTDUWTEmJ9TqqPOBfEvFdK_jiRrzmAGwbTMRrqNv7BYAMufZxPcRYWk5aOlJg/s1600/12.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="404" data-original-width="720" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU_UIgNu39SKlsWGU2X28dtarAPgFNV09qMlZgRRT4AIbWmBHG4CoNmBUT8u9SWm_aWPdtXFfE2_-ymQTDUWTEmJ9TqqPOBfEvFdK_jiRrzmAGwbTMRrqNv7BYAMufZxPcRYWk5aOlJg/s640/12.PNG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
...as they come streaming in...<br />
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Instead of just gunning them down, he jumps in a car and backs over them. The car seems to go from 0 to 70 in the space of about two feet. This is how close it is to them as he cranks it and they pass behind it:<br />
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...yet when he throws it in reverse, the impact on the no-goodniks is so great, they're sent flying over its hood to their deaths.<br />
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The entire shoot-out is filled with this sort of thing. Eventually, the dead Saviors begin reanimating and eating their former comrades; these zombies, which are people who were just killed moments earlier, are made up so that they're grey, have sunken features, inhuman eyes and look like they'd been dead for weeks:<br />
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There are some other amusing errors in the ep as well. At one point, a group of Saviors gun down a pair of redshirts who were with Morgan. One of the redshirts had been very nervous about gong on the mission and after he dies, his corpse stares at Morgan in a way that was meant to be creepy and probably would have been if the actor hadn't been visibly breathing every time the camera fell on him. More bizarre is an image Morgan sees when he emerges from the Savior compound after going on a bit of a killing spree. Jesus, Tara and their team had just captured and disarmed a group of Saviors, who dropped their guns, walked out of the building and surrendered. When Morgan steps out in the aftermath, there among the Saviors is Jared, the bastard who, last season, stole Morgan's stick and murdered Morgan's young trainee Benjamin. And he's holding a rifle! That's him over Morgan's left shoulder:<br />
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Morgan has a lightning-fast flashback then walks up to Jared and the rifle is suddenly gone:<br />
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Jared is nothing but a murderous bully but Jesus won't let Morgan kill him, which is part of another ridiculous retread element in this ep, a badly-handled effort to craft a moral quandary. In the midst of what appeared to be simply a search-and-destroy mission, Jesus suddenly developed an humanitarian streak and insisted his people not just wipe out the enemy. This basically comes out of nowhere. Earlier, a Savior had hidden in a closet and pretended to be a terrified innocent only to turn on Jesus and Tara when Jesus sought to offer him mercy. Like most of the Saviors, this one was drawn as cartoonishly evil, making a grand flourish of crushing beneath his heel the prenatal vitamins the Saviors had stolen from Hilltop and that Tara had just said Maggie needed. He didn't offer a hearty "MUAHAHAHAH!!!" when he did it but if viewers heard that in their heads anyway, they were alert to the spirit of the moment. Jesus managed to put down this vitamin-crushing lout then <i>still</i> insisted on taking him prisoner instead of killing him. Our heroes, who are already short the manpower they need to fight the Saviors, certainly have no capacity to deal with prisoners, nor apparently were they part of any plan. The Saviors have proven themselves to be nothing but sadistic murderers who will kill you if you turn your back on them for even a second--something that had, in fact, <i>just happened again</i>. I'm sure Jesus' course of action will work out for the best all around, just as these things always do on TWD.<br />
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Rick, meanwhile, never finds that cache of guns but he does fight and kill a fellow whom he assumes is protecting it. The man's shirt is helpfully torn open and we see he has a tattoo of the name "Gracie." When Rick explores further, he finds a room with a sleeping baby, its name "Gracie" helpfully spelled out on a mobile over the crib. "TWD: We Do SUBTLETY!!!" Rick is clearly upset by what he's done and looks in the mirror handily present for just that moment, one of Rick's "what have I become?" moments.<br />
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Somewhere else in the world, Ezekiel learns from a radio that the Saviors have learned he and his team are coming (gee, ya' think?) and he decides to carry out the mission anyway. He's just spent the entire ep smiling, crowing about the great victory to come and expounding on the fact that he's smiling and crowing about the great victory to come. He is, in short, being set up for an epic fail, something that will no doubt play out next week.<br />
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This should have been a suspenseful ep but lacked any suspense. It was an action-packed ep but the action was handled just as badly as the drama in <i>every</i> ep. Like last week, the lack of any explanation for what the different teams are supposed to be doing, besides just killing Saviors, leaves viewers without much of a narrative line to follow[2] and when even that goal is abandoned, one can't help but wonder, what's the point?[3] This is TWD's 4th stuck-around-way-too-long season and in these first two weeks, it's shown no sign of life.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
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[1] After the Safe Zone's first attack on this facility, the Saviors had installed a zombie "moat" around it, a double fence with the space between filled with zombies, just as Murphy built around his own headquarters in last season's Z NATION. And though our heroes are standing <i>and talking</i> only a few feet from the zombies in that moat, none of the creatures react to their presence until the script says it's time for them to do so.<br />
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[2] In the comic, our heroes led the zombie horde to Negan's compound in order to pin down Negan's best fighters there and take them out of action. On tv, they mounted a major attack on Negan's compound just so we could get a few more minutes of Jeffrey Dean Morgan mugging and camping it up.<br />
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[3] The Kingdom team stays together (though it has a secondary group off camera that hooks up with it toward the end), the Morgan/Jesus/Tara team splits into two different groups and Rick's team is split into two different groups, then Rick and Daryl both go off on their own. With so many simultaneous threads and without a narrative line to contextualize them, the matter of who is where becomes at times a bit of a jumble.<br />
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Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-64245681465628684792017-10-23T02:32:00.001-04:002018-10-24T23:33:39.128-04:00At 100, THE WALKING DEAD Needs MercyTonight's season 8 kick-off of THE WALKING DEAD also marked the series' 100th episode and the heavy promotion given that fact by AMC in the lead-up to it suggested the creators were planning something special. It was certainly the time for it. Last season, our heroes and the Saviors declared all-out war on one another. Unfortunately, TWD has been running on fumes for several seasons now and the only "something special" its creators could manage was to turn an all-out war into a moronic exercise in tedium.<br />
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As last season had ended, the combined forces of our heroes had decimated the Savior contingent Negan had brought to subjugate the Safe Zone. Negan used his plot immunity to escape. Though he made his exit in a lumbering military vehicle and was <i>hours</i> from his home base, Rick thought it was more important to have a weepy moment with Michonne than to send fighters in vehicles to run down and capture/kill the villain. It isn't clear how much time has passed between this and tonight's installment but it is clear the writers are showing their traditional disregard for this critical element. Maggie is pregnant. She first revealed she knew this at the time of Glenn's fake dumpster-dive "death," way back in the middle of <i>season 6</i>. After our heroes took out the dead that had invaded the Safe Zone that season, there was a period during which they cleaned up and rebuilt. Dialogue implied it had been a month. Upon the subsequent introduction of the Hilltop community, the Hilltop doctor gave Maggie a transabdominal ultrasound, something that would only work if she was 8 weeks along or more. At the end of that season, she suffered a serious complication and the effort to get her to the doctor at Hilltop led to our heroes' first encounter with Negan. That complication was later diagnosed as a placental abruption, a <a href="http://americanpregnancy.org/pregnancy-complications/placental-abruption/" target="_blank">condition</a> that can only occur after 20 weeks of pregnancy (and typically happens much later). At this same time, Carol, who had left the Safe Zone, was shot to pieces--multiple gunshot wounds. It would be a minimum of 5 or 6 weeks before she would recover from such injuries, probably significantly more. She did recover, convalescing at the Kingdom, then, when healed, spent x amount of time living alone outside the community, basically written out of the story. In the middle of that season, Aaron took an <i>incredibly</i> vicious beating by the Saviors
that could have killed him and probably should have. It would have been
another 4-6 weeks before he would have been fully operational again. Then in the last few minutes of season 7, <i>Rick</i> was shot. But tonight, <i>he's</i> fully recovered--another 5 or 6 weeks.[1] Maggie's pregnancy should have been quite visible since at least 12 weeks in and by tonight's ep, she should be ready to pop but instead, she <i>still isn't even showing</i>. And she even made a joke about her pregnancy--"They say you can wage war through the second trimester."<br />
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A 5-or-6-week gap between the seasons is problematic in other ways. In his previous appearance, Negan was shown to have assembled his forces and told them they were going to war. Now, we're to believe it's been <i>that</i> long and not only has he entirely failed to go to war, he was so unprepared that he was caught with his pant's down by even one of <i>Rick's</i> idiotic schemes.<br />
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Rick's big plans are... well, you've seen the show--you know. This one was a mess of both the writing and the staging. Daryl is able to get a list of all of the guard outposts around Negan's compound. He gets it from Dwight. They tie messages on arrows and shoot them back and forth to one another over what's made to look like only a few feet of distance, like some POLICE SQUAD joke. Rick and co. take out the guards, rig some explosives to prevent any reinforcements from getting in then just drive some cars with metal plates on them right into the Saviors' compound and up to Negan's headquarters, circling them to form a defensive perimeter right in front of a building that is probably 20 stories high. That's Rick, the screen general who tries to deliver a rousing speech,[2] draws his saber then boldly leads his forces to take the <i>low</i> ground. The Saviors could sit in any one of their seeming infinity of widows and pick them off like fish in a barrel. It's already been established that the Saviors have all kinds of explosives. A few grenades (or pretty much <i>any</i> explosive) chucked down into that little nest--something that could have been done by the Saviors inside with no danger to themselves--and it would have been all over for our heroes, not just the end of the operation but of the leaders of all three communities, <i>all</i> of whom were present on the ground. <i>That's</i> how bad Rick's plan was.<br />
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A gunshot in the air signals our heroes' presence and--wouldn't you know it?--the first guy to stick his head out the door is none other than Negan himself. The series has established that the Saviors, who are mostly dimwits and bullies, are basically a personality-cult built around their leader. More specifically, <i>fear</i> of their leader, who steals their wives and maims and murders them for transgressions. When Negan steps out, there are dozens of people with guns on him and ending the problem of the Saviors is probably as simple a matter as putting a bullet in him. There's no way around this. Even if, like Rick, one foolishly wants to try to make some kind of peace with his lieutenants, killing him is the first step. No scenario for where to proceed doesn't begin with that. And if, afterwards, those lieutenants won't play ball, they're all dumb enough to have followed him out of the building and into plain gun-sight and can also be liquidated on the spot. They're all there in a line, the entire Savior command structure. There's no rationale for doing anything except killing Negan on sight but impossibly, no one does it. Instead, we get several minutes of his usual smiles and wisecracks and campy, way-over-the-top villainy, as he postures away about how his dick is bigger, how Rick doesn't know what's about to happen and even threatens Rick and co. with <i>death</i> without eliciting a bullet. The television incarnation of Negan is a one-trick pony and this is the trick. We've already seen it over and over again--by now, it makes for very dull television and when Negan isn't being killed any second of any one of the minutes he's prancing around like this, very <i>bad</i> television too.<br />
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Rick eventually opens fire on Negan but though he's aiming right at the man at near-point-blank range with a fully automatic weapon, the villain's plot-armor proves too much. That armor apparently projects a powerful forcefield as well, as none of Negan's underlings are killed either. In fact, even though a big shootout erupts, no one on <i>either</i> side is killed in it. It's as if the cache from which they all drew their weapons was left over from THE A-TEAM. Our heroes waste a <i>lot</i> of what should be very precious ammo, mostly spraying the buildings' <i>windows</i>, then hop in their cars and skedaddle, while Daryl leads a herd of zombies onto the grounds,[3] something that could have been done without putting <i>any</i> fighters inside the compound and at risk.<br />
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Before the shooting started, Negan had Gregory, the cowardly former leader of Hilltop, try to get the Hilltopians to stand down, which goes about as well as
could be expected. A little later, when everyone is escaping, Father Gabriel, one of the least
useful castmembers, sees Gregory in distress and tries to rescue him.
For his trouble, Gregory steals his car and leaves him behind in the
midst of an advancing zombie horde. Gabriel ducks into a trailer in the yard--the same trailer, it turns out, in which Negan had, only moments earlier,
taken refuge. Negan emerges from the darkness, alone nad unarmed but with a grin and some threatening words and Gabriel, who is carrying a fully-automatic rifle, becomes the last person in the ep who can kill Negan but for no reason at all doesn't.<br />
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As is TWD's custom, the ep featured an extraordinary amount of filler. The pacing is terrible, there's no tightness in the editing, practically every scene long overstays its welcome. Items like apparent fantasy sequences showing Rick as an older man and a series of scenes in which Coral encounters some crazy fellow at a gas-station[4] are present just to eat up running time. Fill in my usual SMH sentiment about the fact that this is yet another ep that couldn't even fill its allotted hour yet was still allowed to exceed its scheduled running-time by five minutes.<br />
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The "war" looks as if it's going to continue--more Savior outposts to hit, probably at just as glacial a pace and with as few consequences. In its last few seasons, TWD's only bright moments came when it was ripping off the spirit of Z NATION, the vastly superior zombie apocalypse on SyFy. Tonight's ep (which featured barely a hint of ZN)[5] was called "Mercy." On ZN, to "mercy" someone is to put them down after they've died and zombified. TWD has needed that kind of mercy for several seasons now.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
---<br />
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[1] This reconstruction, of course, allows for, among other things, reasonable healing times and actual human prenatal development. A timelin is one of the most basic elements of competent narrative construction but it's also something TWD's writers have never been able to manage. They had, for example, Carol leave the Kingdom shortly after she arrived. They'll do enough research to learn what a placental abruption is but not enough to learn when such a thing actually happens.<br />
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[2] The ep in fact opens with Rick delivering one of his awful speeches, the usual TWD-patented trite sentiment that's meant to sound noble and stirring. The writers have recycled this so many times that Lincoln could probably deliver it without a script.<br />
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[3] Daryl was leading the zombies with on his motorcycle but driving along at a slow pace, as he did when leading the zombie herd in season 6, was apparently judged to be insignificantly dramatic--it's being intercut with the events inside the Saviors' compound--so he's shown gunning the engine and riding it far faster than slow-shuffling zombies could possibly follow. Yet they're able to follow him anyway.<br />
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[4] Rick drives the fellow away with gunshots. Coral looks unkindly on this. Rick thinks the man could be a Savior lookout but, being the brilliant leader he is, lets him run away anyway, right on the verge of the assault on the Savior compound.<br />
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[5] In the fantasy sequences/flash forwards/whatever-they-are--Rick seems to be experiencing them in the present--the world is a lot brighter, a lot more dreamlike and there's always Weird Al in the air. It's a small nod but it counts.<br />
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Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jriddlecult" target="_blank">@jriddlecult</a>cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-585323794423400780.post-66071698238853539882017-09-15T21:10:00.000-04:002017-10-28T02:05:33.602-04:00Harry Dean Stanton (1926-2017)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Harry Dean Stanton has died. Harry was a great, often underappreciated though much beloved actor--a personal favorite--and quite a character, who came to specialize in memorable, offbeat roles. A Kentucky native and veteran of World War II, he was bitten by the acting bug while at university and just went with it. He worked right to the end (he finished two movies that haven’t even been released yet) and with 200 credits in a career that spanned more than 50 years, his notable parts seem almost endless. The amnesiac Travis in PARIS, TEXAS, the ill-fated Brett in ALIEN, Brain in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, the hopped-up repo specialist in REPO MAN, he was a regular in David Lynch's troupe for years--a brief smattering like that can't even scratch the surface. One of my perhaps oddest but most persistent images of him is from THE FIRE DOWN BELOW. It was a truly godawful Steven Seagal picture and after slogging through this unintentionally hilarious movie, Harry utterly randomly comes out on his porch with a guitar at the end and sings "Kentucky Waltz." In context, it was utterly surreal. And it was glorious.<br />
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Harry was 91. Rest easy, old boy.<br />
<br />
--j.<br />
<br />
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Email: <a href="mailto:jriddlecult@gmail.com">jriddlecult@gmail.com</a><br />
Twitter: @jriddlecult
cinemarchaeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13507603255666191405noreply@blogger.com0