Walking Dead Episode Review 5.11: The Distance

I apologize for the delay, been battling the flu mixed in with allergies.

Trust is a tricky item to utilize.  Too little and you’re Paranoid Rob Lowe who has cable. Too much and you’re Manti Teo with a fake girlfriend.  For a multitude of different reason, trust is hard to come by these days.  

Aaron Wroggers arrives with promise of shelter and a town where they can all safely live the remainder of their days.  He shows pictures of the steel walls that protect them from the zombies.  What does Rick do, he punches Aaron square in the jaw.  Now put yourself in Rick’s shoes.  Last time he put his faith in someone outside of his group, they turned out to be cannibals.  This whole episode is basically a vetting process for Aaron and the team gradually realizes that maybe, just maybe Aaron is a good guy.

Aaron wants to help but Rick keeps threatening to kill him if anything he says goes awry.  I understand both sides, Rick is trying to protect his group from a potential false prophet and Aaron is trying to do and say everything he can think of to show them that he is telling the truth about Alexandria.  I like how during a firefight with Zombies, Aaron offers to let Rick tie him up again. 

The exchange between Aaron and Eric seemed to seal the deal that he is an on the level person.  They exuded the same types of exchanges that members of Rick’s crew would have with each other.  Aaron is out collecting the license plates from every state.  Eric injuries himself trying to get a plate for Aaron, but then Aaron loses the car with the plates. They both have human qualities still, like Rick and his crew. 

The episode ends with everybody arriving at the gates of Alexandria and hearing the sounds of children playing on the other side of the fence. 

This not a bad episode by any stretch, but it’s a long job interview for Aaron and a trust building exercise for everyone else, Simple but effective.  

C.J. Foxx Movie House Reviews #6: Kingsman: The Secret Service

Have you ever seen a movie that from the moment the production companies credits roll that you know you’re going to like it?  I’m not talking about something like the Avengers, Fifty Shades of Grey (for our female fans) or some other flick you’re really amped up about. I’m talking about a movie you really don’t know anything about before you go in a watch it. The last one of those I had was when I saw American Hustle.  When Duke Ellington popped on I knew I was in for something special. The same feeling came over me when I heard Money for Nothing blare over the retro production titles and I was not disappointed.

Kingsman is a James Bond movie if you gave it the Super Soldier serum.  It accentuates all of the action with amazing hand-to-hand and gun play sequences, The eccentricities of the characters, the villian’s treacherous plot and the comedic elements the Bond Franchise is known for.  Kingsman does this in such a way that still feels like its own movie and not a Bond knock off.  I think part of reasoning comes from the fact that this movie is a Hard R loaded with violence and language. None of the bond films ever uddered the type of language used or displayed the level of graphic violence on display. It also has a distinctly British feel to it, which is absent from the Bond franchise.

The talk going into this picture is that it’s a bond meets X-men movie, but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. I doesn’t help that director Matthew Vaughn’s last picture was X-Men first Class.  Kingsman simply goes into territory that the bond franchise never did: the recruitment of the spy. The story begins with a mission that results in the death of a Kingsman, who happened to be Colin Firth’s protégé.  He leaves a medallion for his protégé’s son Gary.  Flashforward to the present where the son now known as “Eggsy” has grown into a malecontent, Firth gets him out of jail and auditions  to be a member of the kingsman. The bond movie franchise never really established an arc about how James Bond became 007.  They did a teensy one in Casino Royale, but Bond was already a full on government agent before hand, not a little-car-stealing squirt with a smart mouth.

On to the Characters: The kingsmen are all named after characters in King Arthur’s court which is a cool touch. And the new recruits are trying to be the next “Lancelot” as he was killed by the female version of Oscar Petsorious during the opening scene while trying to save Mark Hamill of all people. (No seriously he’s in this movie) Colin Firth plays Galahad who is an elite agent of the Kingsmen, Mark Strong is Merlin the trainer of the new recruits and a former field agent himself and Sir Michael Caine is Arthur. Firth and Eggsy share a Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn type relationship from My Fair Lady.

Samuel L. Jackson plays the villain and he deserves his own paragraph. The villainous Valentine is basically Spike Lee, if he was a Bond villain.  He dresses in bright colors (including Knickerbocker Orange) and always has a baseball cap on his head even if he’s wearing a suit (usually of the NY Yankees) He’s afraid of blood for some reason and they gave him a lisp, which is incredibly awkward like Danny Glover’s was in Shooter.  Valentine is a billionaire movie mogul/lobbyist who has this plan of getting everyone in the world a free sim card that gives everyone free internet forever. 

While the recruits are being thinned out Firth is investigating Valentine who they believe is responsible for Lancelot’s death and eventually Firth has dinner with Valentine eating McDonalds burgers and fries of all meals.  This is one of the many times the movie discusses its love of spy movies and the clichés within.  Teamwork is a major theme in Kingsman which is notably absent in Bond films.  The most teamwork you’ll see in a Bond movie is when Bond is shagging his girl.

During the training each of the recruits is assigned a dog and Eggsy’s is named J.B. but as he explains it not after James Bond or Jason Bourne but rather Jack Bauer. Nice touch.

Firth follows the clues to a church in Kentucky where Valentine does a test of his device on the church goers and the action sequence that ensues is amazing. I’m glad to see that there are some film makers that are willing to step up the bar when it comes to action scenes. This scene is on par with the two Raid films and the Red Circle Sequence in John Wick. The scenes are frenetic but not shaky to where you can’t follow along like in Captian America the Winter Soldier.  This is another place where the R rating helped.

This film did not waste any of the two hours and change in screen time.  Many subtle points are referenced in later acts of the picture. It may seem like I’m glossing over much of the picture, but this one is well worth the watch and I really don’t want to spoil anything big.  It’s not without faults as I found the fight scenes to be a bit CG heavy and a bit exaggerated for my liking, but this goes along with the over the top feel of the movie.  You have to suspend your disbelief a bit on this one, as it’s more like the Roger Moore era, than the Daniel Craig era of bond films. the “Star Wars part” of the third act is a bit goofy. This is the best movie I’ve had the pleasure to review thus far and I give it 8.5 out of ten spy movie clichés.

C.J. Foxx 

Author of Super-Hero Bowl VI
@CJFoxxAuthor on Twitter
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Walking Dead Episode Review 5.10: Them

First Beth, now Tyreese who is next? Are we going to go for three Major cast member deaths in a three consecutive episodes, Let’s dive in and find out!

Nope, this episode is one of the dullest I’ve seen since Beth quest to get drunk. Basically they’re walking down a road to Washington, hungry and thirsty, weary of the existence they’re forced to live, frustrated and grieving from the continual death of their comrades.  While I appreciate the allegory of the throes of combat, it does not make for entertaining television.  

This is a show about Zombies and yet they make these entirely sappy and pointless episodes.  For many of us these TV shows are the heroin that keep us drudging through our lives until next week’s episode, till the next season. It’s escapism and we don’t need to be reminded of what we are escaping from.  If I want to watch people crying and grieving, I’ll watch a New York Knicks game.

Sasha is raging after losing Tyreese, almost stabbing Michone during a fracas near a bridge.  Daryl is using cigarettes to burn his hand, Everyone is dealing with the harsh reality in their own way. Michone of all people is the voice of hope. 

So it starts raining and everybody is happy for a bit then they go to a barn because Daryl found one somehow.  During storytime at Uncle Ricky’s, he calls the group "The Walking Dead."

Zombies come to the barn blah blah, they hold them off. This review is short because the producers needed a filler episode, this is the kinda crap that makes me love real shows like Breaking Bad.

Maybe we'll get lucky and get something good from the arrival of Aaron, 

C.J. Foxx 

Author of Super-Hero Bowl VI
@CJFoxxAuthor on Twitter
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C.J. Foxx Movie House Review #5: Fifty Shades of Grey

Holy Crap!  This is exactly why I love writing, and why I love my new writing lifestyle.  Never in a skillion years, would I ever go to this flick under my own accord.   Because of my new circle of friends, and my new existence, I found myself doing the icebucket challenge of movie reviews.  Attending this showing, I felt like that one, singular dude in a yoga class or Meathead Rob Lowe with Cable.  During every second of the night the young ladies in this 100% female audience refused to take this seriously, giggling and gabbing (Actually, in many instances, making this better).  I wondered about Charlie Hunnam and how he was the original cast as Christian Grey, because my loving sister has a serious crush on him, drooling over his days as Jackson Teller from Sons of Anarchy.  I was more into Venus Van Damme but to each their own.  

This movie is 50 shades of Beautiful. The sets and cinematography are ravishing.  They accented the 'grey' nature of Seattle in the opening shots of the picture and didn't let up with any of the other locations they visited throughout.  Seattle is now on my list as a place I want to visit on vacation, even if they require you to compost your trash if more than 10% of it is food.

A detail I noticed was that every person who associated with Christian Grey had blonde hair (except for two people, his mother and our female Protagonist Anastasia Steele).  Between Dakota Johnson’s character name, the fluke that she works in a hardware shop, where it’s a bondage cornucopia, I had understood how the book version could use this to its advantage.  The movie, on the other hand, the way they chose to convey all of this and the timing of the dialogue was so laughable.

If I had to point the blame, the problems lie primarily on the script.  It wasn’t how the words were delivered, it was the words themselves.  It turned this movie from a possibly bold, controversial and sophisticated piece of art into a flimsy, flavor of the week, gimmick.  So like in every other “chick flick” the leads single, a sexually liberated roommate Kate and Grey’s driver, Taylor owned moments of needed comic relief.  Jamie Dornan took some horribly plotted dialogue, doing what he could with it.  Handsome and looking all decked out in some nice costumes/suits I thought how it may have different with Jax Teller, looking equally as swag.  Regardless, no one could save this joke.

Dakota Johnson still climbs higher a star, her talents as an actress shined through the dilapidated and seemingly broken project.  How ironic that her mother, Melanie Griffith, was in rather sexual explicit roles herself at a younger age.  She was doing provocative nude scenes at age 17 in movies such as Night Moves and The Drowning Pool.  Her breakout role was in an underrated Gem called Body Double (aka the film Brian De Palma did after Scarface) in which she portrayed porn star Holly Body.  I saw many moments where Crockett’s Daughter had the same looks as her mother

This film reminded me of another sexual explicit film from the 80s called 9 and a 1/2 weeks. The plots are near mirror images of each other where the innocent and sexually inexperienced woman meets a mysterious gentleman, turning her into a submissive… reluctant until she warms up to his hidden exploits.  Eventually he pushed her past her boundaries, and she splits.  Fifty shades dove deeper into the bondage world but the films had the same feel.

Fifty shades was too worried about pushing the sex scene envelope, but should’ve shelved one of them to explore a little more of who these people were.  I was kinda bored waiting for the final shoe to drop... An extremely sexy billionaire dude rolls into town, because he’s so rich and powerful, he’s the guest speaker at your commencement ceremony.  He chooses this random, hardware shop working girl, showing off his toys and his crazy top secret “eyes wide shut” kind of hobby.  Everybody is screwed up, especially behind closed doors, you know what helps look the other way…? a bottle of Dom in your private jet, that turns into a yacht, that turns into a space shuttle.

In the end this film was a piece of trash and basically an exploitation of the book that grabbed the fascination of many and falls short of this film’s predecessors.  Go out and see this one, live a little, get spanked.  I give this one 3 and a half out of 10 possible Catwoman whips “Mee-ow”.

C.J. Foxx 

Author of Super-Hero Bowl VI
@CJFoxxAuthor on Twitter
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http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GGTL79M

Walking Dead Episode Review 5.9: What Happened and What's Going On

So we’re back after a couple months hiatus on the Walking Dead.  A new Arc is beginning so it's like a season opener all over again, what do they have in store for us this time?

The show didn’t even make it to the opening credits before a mission was established: get your ass to Mars, I mean Virginia.  Everybody Hates Chris has family there and it’s supposed to a well fortified and protected place ala Woodbury.  When they arrive, they discover that it was burned to the ground, no survivors.  Everybody Hates Chris is devastated.

Tyreese who I can’t erase out of my head as Z from It’s always sunny in Philadelphia, has become a surrogate father to EHC.  I like this angle until Tyreese gets bit in the arm while being entranced by photos of EHC’s twin brothers who ironically enough are the ones who bite him.

Then we go to cameo land where get appearances by the hunter he spared at the beginning of the season, then Bob, and the two girls he was traveling with Lizzie and what’s her face, the normal one. The Governor even shows up. The radio goes crazy and starts talking about the events. The theme here is of regret, wondering if taking a different course would have changed anything, but in the end we all have earn our keep.  Oh FMS, Beth even shows up, singing a diddy no less. I should have known she’d pop back in again, she has nothing better to do.

I’m kinda disappointed at the painting by the numbers being done here.  Cameos like this are extremely common in opening episodes.  The first one that comes to mind is when Rita showed up in flashback form in the first episode of the next season after she was killed off on Dexter but it’s a common occurrence.  Also, things tend to happen in these episodes, like when they killed off T-Dog, had Herschel bit and killed off Carol in the opening of season three. I did say that right, Carol was written out of the show before they changed their minds and had Daryl find her a few episodes later.  I kinda wish they’d just make these cast members a bit more unpredictable and spread them out over the course of the season rather than at the beginning or ends of an arc.  They did that with Lori but that’s about it, they don’t kill off ancillary characters midseason.

My gripes aside, this is a strong episode, it reminds me quite a bit of the film Jacob’s Ladder.  There was some clever misdirection done since they made you think at the beginning of the episode they were burying Beth since her death was fresh on everybody’s mind, when they were really burying Tyreese.  Also I enjoyed how they did the shifts between Cameo land and real life. These were done quite well, especially the one where they amputate Tyreese’s arm.  In the end, they teased Tyreese’s death at least three times before and now he finally paid the bill.

I’m Glad better Call Saul is on next, because I need something upbeat after this downer of an episode.

C.J. Foxx 

Author of Super-Hero Bowl VI
@CJFoxxAuthor on Twitter
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http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GGTL79M