Walking Dead Episode Reviews: 6.6 Always Accountable

After last week hour long commercial for Into The Badlands a new Walking Dead episode is on. Will it be worth my time to write about it... Let's find out.

Tonite's episode exclusively focuses on the Daryl, Abraham and Sasha group. After successfully leading the herd away they each speed up and head back to camp, until they are attacked by a group with guns. Daryl gets separated while Sasha and Abraham crash their car, but immediately incapacitate their attackers. Daryl takes his ride into the woods and meets up with a group of survivors I'm calling the blonde family. They knock Daryl out and keep him captive thinking he's from the group they are escaping from. We get a whole bunch of exposition about this group and the dad keeps saying he won't kneel. To which I say:

They walk through a burned forest area which they caused and are going after a friend of theirs named Patty but is presumed dead when they reach the zombie filled destination. In a moment of weakness from the diabetic daughter, Daryl sneaks off with their bag, (which has his crossbow in it.)

Meanwhile Sasha and Abraham make camp in an insurance office and wait for the tracker Daryl to find them. Sasha and Abe bicker about Abe wanting to kill some zombies to which he equated to tying up loose ends, which apparently make his ass itch. They have a conversation about why they both went on the herd mission and pretty much come to the conclusion that they had to do it and each are concerned about the other cracking under the pressures of the zombie apocalypse. Concerned to the point that they might start dating later on. Also Abe found a rocket launcher.

Back in the A Plot, Daryl regroups and jumps the people who attacked him with the two trading items (a wood sculpture for the bag, but takes his gun.  He splits when a truck comes in and you guessed it, it's the people who were actually chasing the blonde family. After a brief exchange between Wade (I heard Wayne not Wade) who is the leader of this group and the blonde's they get back into their large truck to try and run them down. Daryl leads the blonde's behind a shrub structure and is able to lure the village idiot of the group into getting bit on the arm by a pinned walker.  The stupid guy immediately asks for his arm to be cut off and that effectively ends the chase since they bugger off.

Daryl's group wander into a greenhouse where the idiot daughter goes over to see a couple of dead people who they apparently knew. They spring to life and kill the daughter. while they're burying her, Daryl asks the questions and tells them about Alexandria. after a later exchange the blondes jump Daryl not believing that he is going after Sasha and Abe. They steal his motorcycle and his crossbow. He finds a large truck in the bushes and takes it over to where Abe and Sasha are. As they drive back to camp they call out on the radio and get a response from someone it was hard to tell who it was, but I thought I heard "help."

Anywho this is a better episode than the last piece of garbage. We will certainly see those two again because Daryl will get his weapons back. Prime example about how last week was total filler. Daryl tries out his role as a recruiter to mixed success, but he's getting out there and trying. I also like the progression in Abe he's had to live moment by moment and is realizing now that he has a future life in Alexandria. Sasha was still a bitch per usual. There is one serious problem

Glenn - They keep dangling this whole thing where Glenn isn't dead. This all started with their propaganda show Talking Dead, not declaring Glenn dead during their in memorandum section. My sister is convinced he's still alive and I've seen commercials on other AMC programming with Glenn still prominently featured. His name has been removed during his spot in the credits which is atypical, since a main cast member is still listed even when they die. I don't know what was so ambiguous about what happened to Glenn, but all signs are pointing to some screwed up way to keep him from dying.

Given the vast number of Zombie movies I have seen and the situation he was left in (lying on his back with walkers eating his flesh, there is NO WAY IN HELL he could survive. Glenn surviving is the show Jumping the shark and I will no longer watch if indeed he is brought back. You can watch the scene again, but I'm not going to buy it.

Those are my thoughts, feel free to comment below

C.J. Foxx 

Author of Super-Hero Bowl VI
@CJFoxxAuthor on Twitter
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C.J. Foxx movie house Reviews #13 Spectre

I'm a serious James Bond fan. I have seen every one of these pictures multiple times except for that farce of an attempt at Casino Royale with Peter Sellers and everyone in the world playing James Bond. Skyfall was one of the best in my professional opinion #3 on the all time list behind only Goldfinger and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Spectre had hefty boots to fill so did it fill them?

Spectre begins with the caption on the screen the dead are not dead and we go into a wonderfully shot sequence in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead. Arguably my favorite sequence in the whole movie, in part because my favorite bond villain of all time is Baron Samedi and well Bond dressed up as him.

Bond is hunting a guy who threatens to blow up a stadium, but thwarts him superman style with loads of collateral damage. Bond gets scolded by M and suspended yada yada yada. Here's where we start running into my biggest issue with the movie. We've seen it before. Everything in this movie feels like it's been cherry picked from other movies. Granted it hard not to when you have 23 other films but it just seems like they phoned it in on this one, trying to cash in on the fact that Blofeld is back. I would say spoiler alert but the title of the film gives it away since that's the name of Blofeld's organization. So anyone who's actually seen a bond movie before is going to know that going in.

In other predictable notes Andrew Scott shows up as a bad guy BIG SHOCK since he plays Jim Moriarty on Sherlock. Word from the wise, don't cast someone who the audience knows as villainous heel if you want us to be surprised he's a bad guy.

So Moriarty shows up as this guy leading the merger between MI5 & MI6 named "C" He sees the George Orwellian future of surveillance and drones doing the work, viewing the 00 group as obsolete. Bond goes rogue so to speak following the orders of The previous "M" who gave him one last mission after her death in Skyfall. Those orders lead him to the Spectre organization and I won't go into anymore detail here because it's really painting by the numbers at this point. 

It's not that this is a bad movie, but I feel like I've seen it already and never have I felt more that they need to stop making bond movies than after this one. And I love Daniel Craig as Bond, I think he's the best one because his character is the closest to the one from the books. Nothing in the movie is really glaringly bad except for Sam Smith singing the opening number. Good God that was a bad song. I never want to hear him sing anything again.

The acting is solid and the movie is entertaining. Christoph Waltz knows how to play Blofeld and was probably the best choice they could have gotten. he plays the intelleticual villain well and could do it in his sleep. Dave Bautista plays the Manacing Mr. Hinx. You may know him better as Drax the Destroyer from Guardians of the Galaxy. Léa Seydoux is the primary bond girl and does a good job, but blondes aren't really my type and Monica Bellucci shows up so Bondcan bang someone older than him for a change

The story is fine, it's just that the series is tired and bringing back Blofeld is just another example of it. I know they wanted to bring back Blofeld long before this but due to complex legal issues that only recently settled they couldn't use Blofeld or the name Spectre. They made the first bond movie in 1962 and they've written movies off of every single book Ian Fleming ever wrote and then some. It's 2015 now and they had a great run. It's time for James to go into the sunset and get a well deserved applause.

Although it may seem that I am down on this movie, It's not bad by any stretch. believe me when I say this is far from the crappy entries like Octopussy, View to a kill, or any of the Pierce Brosnan flicks after Goldeneye. If this wasn't a "Bond" Flick I'd probably think much better of it. I give this 6.5 vodka Martinis out of 10. 

Walking Dead Episode Reviews: 6.5 NOW

Fuck me this was a bad episode. What a clunker. It's not worth my time to write about what happened.

Outside of Maggie revealing she's pregnant, nothing really happened that hasn't already happened to the other characters already in the first damn season! We get it Alexandrians, the world sucks, grow up! We're way too far into the series to have this sort of display, we watched our main cast go through this in earlier seasons so it's incredibly annoying to watch this again. It's like watching Ted on How I met your Mother say he's into Robin again. Somebody has got to be Marshall and say damnit Ted!

Any suspense you had from the previous episodes got thrown out the window when Rick is running into camp to open the show. He was trapped in an RV last we saw him. They don't show how he got out, just that he did. Thanks for nothing! Pretty much all of the main characters no-showed tonite's episode. No Daryl, Abraham, not even Morgan, Carol or Father Gabriel made appearances and they are at Alexandria!

This season has been really good thus far and then last week was a necessary albeit boring back story episode for Morgan. At least though there was a purpose for it and we needed to know how Morgan got from season 3 to Now. They could have just jumped right back into the frey, but instead we get this filler episode and an awful one at that. I loathe filler episodes. The show does two 8 episode story arcs and have the comics to build off of so it's not like they have to write new story lines each year. Most good episodic dramas write 13 episodes each year and in that time have to advance the story from season to season. There just isn't time to waste especially when each the walking dead does two arcs that are completely independent from each other.

I have read articles that say they have a line to season 10 and on of this show, five + seasons. It just screams greed when they don't make an effort to advance the story. And the ratings justify the means because everyone is still going to watch even when they put out shit like this. They even have a second walking dead series now and and a show that talks about what just happens in a pretentious way. They keep claiming that Glenn isn't dead, which is totally ridiculous! Worst yet, every episode this season has been a commercial for the newest show AMC is going to cancel after one season. Into the Badlands. One of the reasons they extended last week's show to 90 minutes in length was to put in a full length trailer for this Martial arts drama.

No thanks, I'd rather watch reruns of How I Met Your Mother, than watch this show right now. Not that they care, they're still raking in all the money.

Those are my thoughts, feel free to comment below

C.J. Foxx 

Author of Super-Hero Bowl VI
@CJFoxxAuthor on Twitter
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Walking Dead Episode Review 6.4 Here's not here

As expected we got the Morgan backstory episode and it's a 90 minutes. Let's dig in.

The episode starts with Morgan talking to someone in the present and he says he'll tell him everything. So we then cut to a season 3 Morgan at his little hideout after his last encounter with Rick. He decides to leave and clears another patch or land and burns a pile of walkers. He sharpens a bunch of staffs and uses them to protect the perimeter. The next day or so he stumbles upon a couple of survivors (a father and a son) and Morgan stabs the the father in the neck and chokes the life out of the son.

A day or so later Morgan finds a cabin in the woods and shoots at the man who lives there who tries to talk him down. Morgan refuses and is knocked out by the mystery man. He awakens later on in a cage. The man who put him there is an aikido practicing vegetarian named Eastman. Morgan keeps asking the man to kill him, but he refuses and offer to feed him. A few days later he offers Morgan the couch or the door as the cage door was never locked. Morgan attempts to kill Eastman and breaks an important piece of art on the wall which angers Eastman, but he still spares Morgan and relays the same choices back to Morgan who elects to get back into the cage.

The two live together for a while and we learn Eastman was a criminal psychologist who saw the evil in a particular prisoner. He could tell that this one in particular was fooling everyone but him and as a result the prisoner attacks Eastman who subdues him. He later escapes from prison and murders Eastman's family and then turns himself in because all he wanted to do was ruin Eastman's life. Eastman trains Morgan how to use a jo and later they return Morgan's old camp. A walker comes out, the turned version of the person Morgan killed earlier and he freezes up. To save Morgan, Eastman pushes him out of the way, but is bit in the process.

Morgan nearly snaps again and Eastman subdues Morgan in a brief skirmish. Morgan resharpens his bo and stabs a walker who was chasing two wounded survivors. The survivors leave Morgan a can of food as an attempt to not kill him and when they see the good in him, they leave a bullet as well and they limp off.

Back at camp Eastman is digging graves because they bury the zombies there as well as normal people, Morgan sees the grave of the man who killed Eastman's family. Eastman then revealed that he captured the murderer and starved him to death which took 47 days. It didn't make him feel any better and the only thing that did was deciding not to kill anyone ever again. He found out about the apocalypse when he went to turn himself in only to find there was no one to turn himself in to. After burying Eastman Morgan sets out and runs into the train tracks that lead to Terminus.

Back in the present it is revealed that the person he's speaking to is the "Alpha wolf" as he's been credited the one he's fought with multiple times. He says that his code requires him to kill everyone in the Alexandria camp. Morgan locks him up and is called away. End of the episode.

This is the worst episode so far of the new season but it is a necessary one given the stark differences between the Morgan we've seen before and the one we see now, but also the differences between Rick and Morgan. Rick kills, Morgan doesn't, Rick doesn't bury the zombies, Morgan does. Rick doesn't try to convert people who tried to kill him. Morgan does and this seems to be a major point of contention.

It wasn't as bad as the snooze fest that were the Governor side episodes in the 1st half of season 4. My biggest gripe with the episode was actually the representation of Aikido. Being someone who has actually practiced the art, some of the points mentioned in there aren't really that accurate. Now there are many different styles of Aikido, some of which are more vicious than others so I'll let some of the philosophical points slide a bit, The most egregious part which I can not ignore is the weapons training which is completely inaccurate. Aikido does do work with a staff called a Jo, but many of the jo techniques are sword driven and none of the motions either Eastman or Morgan used are consistent with what is taught in Aikido. Morgan's work is more consistent with Donatello from TMNT.

Knowing how far ahead the Walking dead plans things they must have known last season that Morgan was going to have trained under an aikido teacher, so get someone who has actually practiced aikido to teach him! If you want a better representation of aikido in Cinema, watch a Steven Seagal Movie, just try not to laugh when he runs...

Those are my thoughts, feel free to comment below

C.J. Foxx 

Author of Super-Hero Bowl VI
@CJFoxxAuthor on Twitter
C.J. Foxx Like us on Facebook

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GGTL79M