Reviews

A lot was focused on Laura saying unkind things in this episode, but the person who was the most cruel and in my opinion the one who needed to apologize the most was the guy's daughter herself.

She didn't stand up for her father when they were making fun of him. She was crying to her mother, but wasn't mad at the kids for making fun of him, she wanted to go where people didn't see her father.

And the worst part of it was - when Laura did the right thing to apologize, she lied and denied her own father in public. That was 100 times more cruel than the worst fat joke Laura or the other kids could think up. She drove her father to do what he did. He didn't want to hurt her with his presence, but her mother should have told her to stand up for him. If he'd been in a wheelchair, the show would never have been sympathetic to her, and the viewers would have been up in arms hearing how a guy with a disability (in the beginning, it was established that the doctor didn't know what was causing his obesity) accommodated his cruel daughter by nearly killing himself. And when he's in the hospital wanting to die, she didn't speak up; she would have let him die.

She only goes to her father after she hears other people praising his kindness and goodness. She lived with him her whole life and should have been the first to speak up for him.

I love Little House, but this one missed its mark. As a personal observation, if they really wanted to give the right message, the wife should have been the obese one and the husband should have been hunky instead of the other way around. The overweight husband/beautiful trim wife who sees "the man inside" is no new ground, even back then. Had it been the man who saw "the woman inside", then it would have been a sight to see.

I posted a review in the season finale that expressed my disgust with this series. I've been invested in this since season 1, and it's become clear more than ever that the honest, real, and gritty storytelling I respected in the earlier seasons has deteriorated into clowny, cartoony, and gimmicky writing.

Robert Kirkman must hate humanity, because technically, it's only been 2 in-series years since the world ended, and he believes, to the point of firing Glenn Mazzara and Frank Darabont, that society is going to become the worst of itselves, one-dimensional crazies. At least the governor had a much more compelling and fleshed-out writing in the show.

Negan is like a song with one note. He's way TOO obsessed with dominance, which doesn't make sense with as many people as he has. Psychologically, he hasn't had the time to create such a large force of people that are okay with his cruelty, and he has no compelling backstory. Just a lot of strutting around and bashing heads in. Had he acted this way to everyone, it would have taken nothing for his other lackeys to simply raise their weapons and fire at him.

I also don't like that they're just ignoring the past 6 seasons of TWD's story development. It's as if they got tired of slowly building character layering and just went for the shock value as if they ran out of other ideas and decided to simply "reset" the characters. Not cool.

Maybe if I weren't so in love with Game of Thrones, which does everything the right way in terms of balancing character growth plus making characters complex and deep, I could be satisfied with TWD. But it's not entertaining to watch some guy with a bat strut around for two shows and beat people senseless for no reason. It's like, so what?? Who cares about Negan, and now, who cares about the rest of the characters??

Maybe it's also because I've seen humanity come together in other real crises (9/11, the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, the Ethiopian famine, the Earthquake in Asia, and so many other disasters and floods) to know that many more people come together even without government care. I don't believe that a zombie apocalypse, especially one with far fewer zombies these days, all of a sudden turns people in their worst selves and that is the new reality.

I was done with the series last year, and I came back to see who was killed, and now I'm done for the rest of it. This is to TV what McDonalds is to food. It's cheap, it temporarily satisfies, but there's no real value and gives everyone a gut ache and makes people wish they hadn't eaten it in the first place. Sorry, but I prefer to stick to real drama and good writing.

This is just stupid.

To speak to comic book readers, I know that most of the Negan confrontation, right down to the wording is verbatim. Even the "uncensored" version of the end of the last season was verbatim on the language. Here's the real problem with those who say "if you criticize this, you're not a real Walking Dead fan because they've gone back to the graphic novels".

The characters in the graphic novels are not the same as those in the TV series. They've been written differently. They've had different experiences. People are mentally in different places. TV adds a dimension that comics don't and can't add. Robert Kirkman and Mr Gimple have just spat on the entire television characters by reverting to the comics, which don't match what's happened over the past 6 seasons. Characters such as Carol, Maggie, Morgan, Glenn, and Michonne are different people in the books as they are on TV. People like Merle and Daryl don't even exist.

You placed fully-formed people who we've had 6 years to connect to who have evolved well beyond the comics and forced them to face a one- dimensional comic book character in Negan. It's like adding an animated character to shows like Criminal Minds or adding Ivan Drago to The Americans or adding Jessica Rabbit to the Lord of the Rings trilogy or adding Jar Jar Binks to Game of Thrones. And instead of taking the time to develop Negan to catch up to the 6 years of character development, you force a page from the comics, basically spitting on where Rick, Carl, Michonne, all of them have come from and where they are.

You think some idiot running around with a bat could do more psychological damage on Rick as the death of Lori, the death of Shane, Woodbury, building the civilization at the Prison, watching his son grow up facing horror, and everything he experienced as a sheriff's deputy? No intelligent person, after getting the cheap "feels" from this episode, could say that it fits the entire story. What about the origin of the virus? What about the fact that everyone's infected? Eugene's story was actually more compelling because even though he turned out to be a good liar, he spoke to issues that actually matter in the world!

You can't write this show like the comic book. You use the books as a starting point and then take advantage of the medium of television to develop the characters and story well beyond the confines of the graphic novels. To revert them to one-dimensional snuff crap is insulting to everyone's intelligence, even the comic book reader's.

This was an episode as good as sex, because it left me satisfied and spent after it was done. If I were a smoker, I'd have been lying back on the couch smoking a cigarette while the end credits rolled.

After the episode was over the next day, I was thrilled to learn that most of the battle sequences were NON-CGI, meaning Kit Harington was really standing there with a sword while 80 horses charged straight at him.

The battle was brilliant, full of strategy on both sides, high emotion, and great happiness and despair on all fronts.

**SPOILER PART**

I was really sad about Rickon, more than I thought I would be. Rickon was the last true-blood Stark male who could be Lord of Winterfell and isn't paralyzed from the waist down. Bran is still alive, but since he is the new Three-eyed raven, somehow I can't see him going back to Winterfell, getting married, and having kids, unless Meera is game and the White Walkers have a few gynecologists to help out. Who knows? GRRM must have an idea of whether or not the Starks continue.

Looming over the entire episode was Petyr Baelish. I can't help but think that everything is happening because of his fault, yet he's now in a position to control the Starks and the North. So the victory seems a little bit hollow to me, but that doesn't detract from the episode.

Ramsey's end was awesome and perfect. No simple beheading or hanging for him. Somewhere in whatever Westeros calls heaven, Tansy and Violet are rejoicing along with that old woman, the "20 ironborn scum" and everyone else he's screwed with over the years. My only wish was that Theon could have been there to see it too. I'm sure when he finds out, he'll feel some quiet satisfaction that "Reek" is now dead forever from him and he'll never have to fear going back, though it won't restore what he's lost.

All in all, fantastic episode. I'm sorry about Wun Wun, but happy that Tormund is still with us. Maybe there's hope for Brienne after all, unless Jaime comes to his senses finally.

A MUST SEE! Worth all of the writing lapses in earlier episodes to get to this point. Better than the Hardhome massacre!

I know everyone is having fits over the non-reveal cliffhanger, but to be honest, I don't really care who it is at this point, because I was barely caring about this show before the finale actually hit.

First of all, comic book dialogue rarely translates well into a serious grown-up TV show, so "Pee pee pants city" made me want to puke, not be all nervous. Rick and the gang have seen things that make some stupid moron with a bat look like your Sunday School teacher.

While I'm at it, a LOT of the dialogue throughout the show has gotten unbelievably stupid, amateur, and hard to listen to, especially by Abraham, and he's a character I don't hate! Otherwise, the writing has gotten more lazy and worse than a bad Twilight fanbook. Last- minute hardships? Characters becoming almost schizophrenic in their decision-making??

Not only that, but I can't believe that in a world where only 3 years or so have gone by, Rick and the gang look like refugees, yet we meet characters with gelled hair and perfect shaves in modern hairstyle (I'm talking about the weirdos in body armor yet pretty-boy hair that seemed out of place). This is the world where everyone has lost all semblance of civilization? People facing and getting hardened to atrocity, yet some moron with a bat has several hundred people at his disposal, and everyone we've met so far from his crew is as sadistic and consenting as he is? Not very believable in real life.

Come on! Read ACTUAL human history! Roman emperors were assassinated by their own praetorians or advisors, yet some harry buffoon can make people wet their pants. This show, and the comic books, have all jumped the shark, preferring to make cartoon characters rather than real world reactions to a zombie apocalypse that has gotten extremely short on zombies.

Not only that, but knowing what Rick's group has gone through when mega-herds have gone by, all of a sudden, we have this mega group of survivors who ride the roads with impunity with no herds to ever endanger them? Wasn't it a single gunshot in season 2 that brought a herd down on the farm? Guess we can unload entire clips and sound gargantuan alarms without a single care in the world now.

Plot holes galore!! I can't even list them all here, but whoever's writing has ADD and thinks we all do too.

I was turned on by this show because I saw real-life reactions to real-world events. Rick going nuts was believable in season 3, Michonne's slow-awakening to trusting someone again was compelling and believable as well, but all of a sudden, Carol losing it on the eve of knowing the group was in danger? Come on! She's had worse trauma and shrugged it off like nothing. They changed her character. They changed Daryl into a simpering swamp-rat with no storyline, and I LIKED him! What happened to the old people at Alexandria? The prison? Anywhere? It's like characters just drop off the screen (Judith, anyone?? Where is SHE?!??!)

I'll probably check the internet after the next season premiere to see who died in the cliffhanger, but I took it off of my DVR. I'm done with Walking Dead. It's become insipid and stupid. It's a shame. I used to love my Sunday nights with it, and I actually miss Shane and the Governor compared to the crap the show serves up now.

This movie would have been really great had it not been for the WAY over-excessive use of the shaky cam for every single shot in the movie. There's nothing that ruins the experience more than some kid whose father rushes him to the emergency exit during an action scene to go throw up his popcorn just outside the door for all of us to see.

For example...***SPOILER ALERT***...

Every time the mockingjays mimicked the whistle signal, the idiot behind the camera would point up and shake the crap out of the shot. It felt like a 4-year old son of the director was handed a camera and told to "shoot the sky".

***END SPOILER ALERT***

Seriously. The use of the shaky cam just about ruined it for me. It's like when a singer uses so many vocal runs in a song that the melody is all but unintelligible. Likewise, this movie had emotion, a good plot, an engaging story, and good actors. Too bad we were all focused on the kid puking and trying to keep our eyes unfocused enough during the 2 hour shaky-cam fest to not join him ourselves.

DO NOT DO THAT IN THE SEQUEL! I came to see a movie, not ride the Tilt- a-Whirl.

These days too many movies are all about substance and no story. There have only been a few of which the story transcends all...The Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption, and others.

This story will have your attention throughout the entire movie, and leave you breathless by the end of it. The fight sequences are grueling and realistic, and the story is authentic Great Depression realism.

This movie really approaches the problems of the Depression unflinchingly, and shows what the lack of income can do to a family, and a family's security. To me, this is more about survival and a second chance than simply s boxing story.

Most definitely a *must see* movie! And if I don't see it nominated on next year's Oscars, I would be extremely surprised.