I’m not entirely sure what “Fall Out” was aiming for from minute one. All I know is that director Derek Dubois keeps the audience in the dark, providing a narrative that’s about eighty percent ambiguous. And I was okay with that. If you can’t really offer a larger exploration of the world you’ve built, especially considering when it’s set during the apocalypse, the best thing to do is focus on getting us to know the characters in this situation, and director Dubois accomplishes that in spades.
People often ask me why I took so long to watch “Game of Thrones,” and it’s pretty simple, really. For one thing, at the time, “The Walking Dead” had premiered, and my attention was completely on its season runs, and number two: I just didn’t want to invest time in it until I understood what it was about. In the past I’d invested time in period series based on source material, and came up with no real rewards for my investment. I spent many years watching “Deadwood” only for HBO to give it the shaft and never deliver the finishing movie that we deserved. “Carnivale” bored me to tears, and despite my best efforts to dig in to the world unfolding, “The Tudors” was just a tedious droning drama that offered nothing in return. I gave up after the second season, and I never tuned in to “The Borgias.”
It’ll be a cold day in hell before I watch a period show on Showtime ever again. No thank you.
I had such a good time with Kevin Chenault’s road trip dramedy. It’s spewing indie flavor with a lot of its narrative very much in the vein of Wes Anderson. It’s surreal without ever being pretentious, and it’s about two wandering souls questioning their own lives, but never gets saccharine at any moment. I was just won over by minute one, and had a great time watching these two individuals face a harsh world side by side, and travel in to a weird land.
Leave it to the Coen Brothers to provide movie audiences with a crime heroine that we’d never really see coming at some of the worst criminals around. Marge Gunderson is not your typical gumshoe and probably never really desired to be one growing up. She’s a small town simple woman who is about to give birth to a baby, and only really works until she is able to head off to the hospital. But things go from mundane to extraordinary when what seems like a random series of homicides on a snowy road side turns in to a very disastrous plot to extort and embezzle money out of a car dealership.
Another season of “The Walking Dead” has come and gone. Massive headlines, massive ratings, and the phenomenon keeps chugging along. With season four split in to three very brutal and effective story arcs, we break down the fourth year of the series, and explore ten of our most shocking moments of “The Walking Dead,” season four.
Is there such a thing as civility in the land of the dead? Will there ever be such a thing as civility and kindness and consideration? Do you really have to become a savage and evade all sense of morality to survive? Was Shane right? Was Shane prophetic? Would Shane have become Rick’s mentor in the apocalypse, eventually? One thing I loved about “A” beyond answering all questions, while still keeping us in the dark is that Rick finally comes to fruition as his comic book counterpart. One thing about Rick that’s always rung true in the comics is that Rick knows he’s a warrior, he knows he can survive if he thinks on his feet. What we see at the final scene of “A,” is that Rick finally knows the type of man he is. He knows he’s a warrior and he shalt not be fucked with. Most of all, don’t ever lay a hand on Carl.
You can definitely look at director Eric England’s horror drama in two plains. You can either watch it as a gory tale of a woman rotting gradually in to something beyond herself, or you can look at it as a metaphorical tale of a woman rotting in to the ugly being she’s probably always been her entire life. When you cut it down, the character Samantha is the protagonist, but never really is an empathetic individual. She’s this lecherous, vapid, and utterly narrow minded being who does nothing but ride on people’s good will and expects big returns. That’s not to say she deserves what is coming to her, but who’s to say her final transformation isn’t what she’s been her entire life?