TRUE GRIT

Joel and Ethan Coen USA 2010

I've seen just about every film the Coen Brothers have ever made, and after a while, they begin to become a bit predictable in their weirdness. The wacky characters, the random plot twists, the relentlessly clever dialogue. With all of that in mind, True Grit, their remake of the 1969 film for which John Wayne won his only Oscar, was surprising for its straightforward, old-fashioned tone and predictable (but still thrilling) narrative.

Set in the late 1870's, True Grit is the story of Mattie Ross, a tenacious 14-year old girl who, while traveling West to reclaim the body of her murdered father, decides to take revenge upon the killer, with the assistance of drunken, trigger-happy Marshal Rooster Cogburn and a pompous Texas Ranger named LeBeouf.

I saw the 1969 version of True Grit a number of years ago and my memories of it are fairly dim. Given the linear nature of the plot, I assume the Coens changed little when re-adapting the novel, but 4o years of social progress have allowed them to punch it up with some of the violence and swearing that would have been common in the Old West. That said, this a fairly tame film by the Coen's standards, featuring almost no sexuality, cursing that's more amusing than shocking and violence that, while bloody, is fairly brief. This, combined with it's no-frills approach to the plot, gives the film an almost quaint, timeless feeling. It's a nice change of pace.

Continuing their successful run with cinematographer Roger Deakins (who also shot The Assassination of Jesse James, which is one of the best looking movies I've ever seen), the Coen Brothers coat the film in the slick grittyness that's been popular with Westerns ever since Deadwood. The color palette is pretty interesting as well, evoking old sepia tones while still maintaining a natural feel.

The biggest draw for this film, it would seem, is the acting. After being crushingly disappointed by his performance in Tron, it was nice to see Jeff Bridges back in top form for True Grit. He does an excellent job of distancing himself from both Wayne's performance as well as his own Oscar-winning portrayal of a drunken old codger in last years' Crazy Heart. With his indistinct, yet loquacious mumbling and his simultaneously irritable, yet Zen-like approach to life, Bridges creates a character that is entirely distinct, yet distinctly his own. Plus, he rocks the eyepatch pretty hard.

What's got most people talking though, is newcomer Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie. Highly precocious, as all child actors must be, Steinfeld also possesses all the poise and determination the role requires as well as a precisely annunciated, Judy Garland-style line delivery that further contributes to the films classic feel. Matt Damon rounds out the main cast as the preening Texas Ranger and does a nice job of making him enjoyable while still keeping him a pompous ass.

Despite really enjoying this movie, I left the theatre feeling a bit indifferent to the whole thing. I think the ending put too fine a point on the whole thing and it felt a bit abrupt (not as abrupt as No Country For Old Men). It was nice to see them do a straight Western after dancing around the genre in the past, but I'd much rather see another original offering from them in the future.

DRUNKEN ANGEL / STRAY DOG

Dir. Akira Kurosawa JAPAN 1948 / 1949

Kurosawa is one of the most (if not THE most) prolific directors in the history of cinema. He made 30 films over the course of his 50 year career, the majority of which are regarded as classics of the medium. Although he is probably best known for his samurai films (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Throne Of Blood, etc.), Kurosawa moved between numerous genres throughout his career. Given my natural predilection toward gangster films and film noir, I was eager to check out Stray Dog and Drunken Angel, a pair of films he made back to back at the height of the American occupation of his home country following World War II.

Despite some superficial similarities to American crime films of the 30's and 40's (mostly the snappy dialogue, although I'm sure most of the American slang was added in by whoever created the subtitles track), Kurosawa's films distinguish themselves with their highly personal characterization and their unique, winding plots. Drunken Angel is the story of an altruistic, alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) attempting to save the life of a young yakuza (Toshiro Mifune) who is dying of tuberculosis. Stray Dog features a young police detective (Mifune again) who must track his stolen pistol through the criminal underground with the help of a veteran officer (Shimura again)

There was a great deal that surprised me when watching these two films, misconceptions I'd had about both the filmmakers and Japan itself. Given the way it's portrayed from a Western perspective (especially the way it was thought of after the war), it's easy to imagine Japan as a rigid, repressed nation of overly serious, honor-bound men and servile, nearly mute women. Kurosawa takes us on a tour of seedy back alleys and swinging jazz clubs filled with smart-mouth molls and jocular, care-free young gangsters. Even the atmosphere of the homelife of Takashi Shimura's police dectective in Stray Dog is more akin to the suburbs of 1950's America than anything else.

Kurosawa plays both sides of this argument in these films, criticizing both the outdated feudalistic lifestyle of old Japan (partially because American censorship at the time was interested in downplaying the more radical aspects of Japanese society) as well as the decadence and superficiality of Western culture. Although old codes of honor lead to the downfall of Mifune's young yakuza in Drunken Angel, his sharp suits and brash drunkeness carry just as much blame. Even the settings and locations chime in on this point. Drunken Angel is set in a squalid corner of the city along a massively polluted river, mirroring the fatal disease present in Mifune's lungs as well as the city itself. Stray Dog is set during a massive heatwave, which characterizes the oppressive, inescapable nature of a society that cannot be overcome by a single man, no matter how hard he tries.

I was also deeply impressed by the performances of both Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura in these films. Kurosawa and Mifune would eventually become each other's Scorsese and DeNiro and then some, with this pair of films being the first in a series of 16 that the would make together. Although not the international star that Mifune would become, Shimura played parts in 21 of Kurosawa's 30 films. Right from the start, the two actors create very different portraits of a relationship that would define many of Kurosawa's films: the master/student dynamic. Stray Dog features the more typical relationship of an older officer mentoring a younger one, but inverts the expected personality types of the two character, with Mifune's young detective being a driven, by-the-book stickler (attributed to the characters military background) and Shimura's veteran cop being a more laid back, adaptable maverick. Mifune's starring roles in Kurosawa's later samurai films often cast him as the brash rogue so it was interesting to see a younger version of him as a more straight-laced character. Drunken Angel features a more unconventional relationship between the two, with Shimura playing a bumbling, ill-tempered, but ultimately well-meaning mentor to Mifune's more traditional hard-headed, violent yakuza. They spend much of the film despising each other while still not able to cut ties between themselves. And while the ending of Drunken Angel is more tragic than that of Stray Dog, the former offers a more honest reflection of the shifting social traditions of Japan at the time (apparently Kurosawa was forced to cut an even bleaker ending from the film, which would have probably reflected this to an even greater degree).

Both of these films are available thanks to the folks over at The Criterion Collection if you'd like to check them out. I'd have a tough time recommending one over the other, but I will say that the Drunken Angel disc has a great half hour feature regarding the censorship imposed on Kurosawa's post-war films by the American censorship bureau in Japan. It's an interesting look at a uniquely specific time in American and Japanese history and it adds a lot of depth to the viewing experience of these two films.

TRON: LEGACY

Dir. Joseph Kosinski 2010 USA

"It's like if The Dude was Buddha, but he was also Hitler and they have to fight to the death. Inside a computer." - My girlfriend, summerizing Tron: Legacy.

Back in April, I saw a major studio release so abominable, so utterly incompetent, that I had to create a blog in order to vent my displeasure into the collective social consciousness of the internet. That movie was Clash of the Titans. And that blog was...this blog.

Friday I saw the worst movie I have seen in theatres since that movie. A movie that combined the interminable, talky boredom of the Star Wars prequels with the expository, nonsensical, quasi-religious bullshit of the Matrix sequels. What film could be so stupifyingly terrible, you ask, while still costing $170 million to produce and another $100 million to market? That film, gentle readers, was Tron: Legacy.

A brief word of explanation. Despite being raised on the neon-tinged, poorly rendered media that defined the 80's and early 90's, I have yet to see the original Tron, which opened to mixed critical reception and moderate box office success in the summer of 1982, before becoming a cult classic on home video (although the DVD is currently out of print and you can't get it on Netflix). Any curiousity I had about checking out the original has been bludgeoned into submission by the shitfest that was its sequel.

Tron: Legacy begins two decades after programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) disappeared into The Grid, a virtual world of his own creation. His rakishly disaffected son, Sam (Garret Hedlund), has eschewed ownership of his father's now multi-billion dollar company ENCOM, in favor of playing cruel pranks on its douchey board of directors, which involve pirating their software and basejumping off the roof of their corporate headquarters. Seriously.

Sam is eventually lured to his father's old video arcade where he is sucked into The Grid, a digital frontier that seems to consist exclusively of ultimate frisbee deathmatches, being chased on/by vehicles made of light and lots of really, really straight lines. Here, he must team up with his now aged father and a smoking hot computer program played by Olivia Wilde, to defeat CLU, his father's meglomaniacal computerized twin, (played by a creepily youthful CG rendering of Jeff Bridges) and escape to the real world before some portal closes.

This film is the directorial debut of Joseph Kosinski, who previously enjoyed what I imagine was a perfectly lucrative career as a architect specializing in computer-generated 3-D designs. And while that's a fairly desirable background if you want to make a fussy, clinical, visually specific film, it's apparently no help when trying to create compelling characters, steady narrative momentum or any kind of coherent story. I really don't know where to begin.

Oh wait, yes I do. I've never seen Garrett Hedlund in anything before, but he must have done something impressive at some point to land what is ostensibly an action lead in a major holiday film. None of that hypothetical skill is on display here, where he plays Sam as a bland, whiny punk who's too hung up on his daddy issues to bother being the head of a Fortune 500 company. Additionally, (and I guess this is the writers fault) he's apparently become Batman in the years following the first film, able to both break into major corporations and escape via basejumping as well as kick the shit out of computer programs with his sweet kung-fu disc throwing skillz.

Although the screenwriters make what should have been a smart move in getting Sam into The Grid as soon as possible, glossing over the twenty years between his dad leaving and the current events of the film leaves him a boring, blank slate, which Hedlund attempts to fill with pissy one-liners and his Aryan good looks. He actually made me miss Sam Worthington, who at least looks like a real person.

So Sam enters The Grid and is immediately wrangled into a disc fight, which is apparently obligatory due to their appearence in the first film. Despite the gratuitous kung-fu moves demonstrated by his first opponent (Tron himself), the disc battle pretty much consists of them standing in a transparent box and throwing these things back and forth at each other. This is then followed by a light bike chase where bikes chase each other until the pursuers swerve and explode for some reason. While this film may share the overly neat, hyper-sanitized action style of The Matrix films, at least those movies had inventive fight choreography and settings. Every action scene in this film takes place against a basically blank background and is about as perfunctory and dull as something can be while still being called an 'action scene'.

So after all this there's about an hour of the movie where people go to places and talk about things then go to other places to talk about more stuff. This would be a terrible way to structure an action movie, but you know what, this isn't just an action movie. It's technically an action/sci-fi/drama. So all this downtime might be a prime opportunity to explain the setting of the film, a.k.a. provide a single fucking tangible detail about what is happening. Instead, Hedlund and Bridges monotone to each other about 'bio-digital jazz' and 'isomorphic algorithms", all the while not really explaining anything about how this world works or what the stakes are in the conflict with CLU. Apparently he wants to escape into the real world with his facist army of reprogrammed soldiers and...conquer our world? I don't really see the US military having a problem killing the shit out of a bunch of guys with glowing batons and see-through motorcycles. Also, Wilde's character Quorra is the last of some kind of self-generating race of people who evolved in The Grid. What does that have to do with anything? Not much apparently. And the entire climax hinges on these discs that everyone wears on their backs which contain...your memories? Your soul? But are also keys. And weapons. None of this makes any fucking sense.

The saddest part is that there seems to be a lot of potential with in the framework of this story to get into some deeper issues. The evolution and value of artificial life. Exploring the psyche of Kevin Flynn via an entire world that he created. Instead we get a trite father/son story played out by two actors who have no chemistry and seem to be running on auto-pilot. Which is especially bad in Bridges case, considering how lively he is in every other movie I've ever seen him in ever. He's just playing an older, lamer version of The Dude, spouting Zen nonsense but with none of the wit or nuance that made The Dude so enjoyable.

Despite me wanting to punch Disney in the face for wasting almost $300 million on something so goddamn boring, I will attempt to be diplomatic and end with a few things about this movie that didn't suck:

- Although I still might not be able to pick her out of a line-up of other skinny brunette actresses, I was surprised by the child-like wonder Olivia Wilde injected into Quorra, when she could have just as easily been a tight-lipped, aloof Mila Jovovich character. Although, in a way she did remind me of the only interesting action hero Jovovich has ever played. Too bad she has to get rescued at the end, despite being the most badass character in the movie.

- Michael Sheen is great as the flamboyant club owner Zuse, despite his character being completely superfluous to the plot.

- The 3D in this movie was actually pretty sharp and didn't give me a headache. CG Jeff Bridges looked pretty crappy though.

- The Daft Punk score was pretty cool. Just listen to that instead of seeing the movie.

CENTURION

Dir. Neil Marshall 2010 UK

"He's a ruthless, reckless bastard. And I'd die for him without hesitation."

I feel like Neil Marshall and I would be good friends. I'm basing this solely on the subject matter of his films, which clearly demonstrate that he and I are on the same wavelength. The premises of his four films to date are as follows: A team of English soldiers battle werewolves in the Scottish Highlands (2002's Dog Soldiers); a group of women realize they're not alone after they become trapped underground while cave diving (2005's The Descent); a female Snake Plisskin must fight her way out of a post-apocalyptic Scotland (2008's Doomsday); the survivors of Rome's legendary Ninth Legion must fight their way back from behind enemy lines in the cold frontiers of 2nd-century Scotland (2010's Centurion).

In addition to having a clear obsession with people trying to escape the apparently savage hellhole that is past, present and future Scotland, Neil Marshall's films are a pretty neat blend of action and horror elements from the past few decades, and I'm willing to forgive his two not so great movies (Dog Soldiers tries to be the Evil Dead with werewolves but it's not funny or scary enough, and Doomsday goes for a 28 Days Later meets The Road Warrior vibe, but ends up being way too derivative) since he made one of the scariest fucking horror movies I've ever seen (holy shit, watch The Descent). While Centurion is nowhere near as accomplished as The Descent, it's definitely a head above the other two and worth your while if you're looking for a lean, bloody historical flick.

Based around the legends of the Ninth Legion, Centurion is set in 117 AD, at a time when the Roman Empire was fighting to expand its northernmost frontier and conquer the island that is now England and Scotland. Their major roadblock comes in the form of the Picts, a vicious warrior tribe that slaughters an entire Roman garrison at the start of the film. The sole survivor, Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender), escapes to the south where he is conscripted back into the Ninth Legion, led by General Virilus (Dominic West), and sent on a mission to subjugate the Picts for good.

Despite lacking the epic cinematic sweep of Ridley Scott's Gladiator or the immersive authenticity of HBO's Rome, Centurion does alright by its historically spotty source material, despite indulging in a few modern cliches (the surprisingly PC core group of soldiers includes a Greek, an Indian and the always ubiquitous Moor). The use of my great pet peeve, CG blood, is balanced out by the relentless, unflinching violence and some of the coolest kills I've seen in a film in a good long while. Marshall brings a slight edgy grindhouse style to the action, but mostly plays it straight and allows you to follow in the footsteps of hard men, for whom murder and survival was way of life as well as a punch-clock day job. Nice little touches, from two soldiers casually flipping a coin to decide who executes a prisoner, to the men eating warm, partially digested food from the belly of a deer, demonstrate the brutal camradarie and attitude men of the era would have had in ways that are inventive and entertaining to watch.

The supporting cast is filled with a few regulars of modern British B-movies, but the film shines a bit brighter than the rest thanks to the two leads. Michael Fassbender, who you may remember from his brilliant turn as Lt. Archie Hicox in Inglorious Basterds, plays it fairly straight here as Quintus, the son of a gladiator who blends an early education of pit fighting with the merciless discipline of the Roman army. Quintus barely has two dimensions on the page, but Fassbender fills him with a sense of humble dignity and some viciously blunt humor that comes when you least expect it. Equally enjoyable is Dominic West, who pretty much plays Virilus as a 2nd century version of McNulty from The Wire; irreverent, loyal to his men and almost psychotically dedicated to the task set before him. The two roles are similar enough for me to think that West is the kind of guy who just plays himself, but when he's that damn charming, I can't really bring myself to mind.

A surprising standout was Olga Kurylenko (the most recent in a long line of bland Bond girl) as a vicious Pict tracker/warrior named Etain, who serves as a hotter, bloodier Joe LeFors to the Roman soldiers Butch and Sundance, relentlessly hunting them across the landscape like a Terminator in blue face paint.

The film doesn't contain too many surprises, taking some fairly predictable, but always enjoyable twists. It does, however, contain some of the most heinous, unnecessary first-person narration this side of Dexter. Voiceover can be used well, but I think Neil Marshall should have taken Robert McKee to heart.

At this point in his career, I'm willing to call Marshall at two for four, which isn't bad, but given the craftsmenship he's shown himself to be capable of and given some of the pretty wild ideas he's apparently sitting on, I hope that he can find his footing and start giving us something, if not better, then at least consistent.

127 HOURS

Dir. Danny Boyle US 2010

"Oops."

It's always tough (I would guess) to make a suspenseful movie based on a real-life event. You have to get the audience invested in the characters and create tension regarding their fates, even though they probably know how it's all going to turn out. Some films do this really well. Titanic is a great example (assuming you like it, which I do). Bryan Singer's Valkyrie (despite having a few substantial flaws) maintained a pretty good level of tension throughout. Danny Boyle's difficulties with this were compounded by the fact that most of the film is one guy stuck in one place. The film is at the same time, an obvious sell and a difficult task. Fair warning, this review will contain spoilers for real life starting with the next paragraph.

James Franco plays Aron Ralston who, in April of 2003 was hiking the canyons outside Moab, Utah when he fell into a narrow crevasse and trapped his arm under a boulder. Ralston remained trapped there for over 5 days, slowly dying of thirst and exposure until he finally cut off his own arm below the elbow with a multi-tool and walked through the desert until he found rescue. Serious shit. The film is pretty much a one man show, but it also features Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn as two girls he meets shortly before his accident and (via flashback) Treat Williams as his father, Lizzy Caplan as his sister and Clemence Poesy as his ex-girlfriend.

As I said above, it's tough making a movie when the ending is a truthful, foregone conclusion, but Boyle ratchets up the tension nicely at the beginning, showing Ralston as a goofy, go-for-broke adrenaline junkie, the kind of guy who would be weird and off-putting if he wasn't so much damn fun to hang out with. He spends the first fifteen minutes (aka one of the longest and most effective pre-title sequences I've ever seen) living a charmed life of off-road adventure in which he meets and charms hot women with his knowledge of secret underground hot springs. It's a succinct, but effective set-up to his character and not much of a stretch for Franco, who's pretty much always charming and likable. It also allows Danny Boyle to show off the snazzy split-screen camera angles and blaring world/techno music that won him the Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire.

Once Ralston is trapped, Boyle dials back the directorial tricks, but the camera never remains fixed, showing Ralston's predicament from every angle as he tries to figure his way out of an impossbile situation. Some of the moves seem flashy (the zoom inside Ralston's camera as he rewinds footage from earlier; the sped-up tracking shot from his position to his car 17 miles away where he left behind a sweating bottle of gatorade) and I suppose they are, but their extremity keeps you right along side Ralston as he combs back over everything he could have done differently and slowly becomes fixiated on basic necessities that he sorely lacks. Boyle also makes the smart move of having Ralston lay out everything he has on him from the get-go, getting the audience on the same page and circumventing any criticisms of "why doesn't he have this" or "why didn't he do that". He's also extremely economical with his use of flashbacks. They're often connected to what Ralston is thinking/doing at the moment (his parents buying him his first video camera as a kid, etc.) and usually provide some welcome levity. Eventually they begin to blend with Ralston's hallucinations and fantasies in some pretty clever ways. Toward the end, the flashbacks become a little too pointed in their meaning (a flashback to him breaking up with his girlfriend as he's starting lose hope, complete with her telling him that he's going to end up alone), but definitely more hits than misses.

As great a job as Danny Boyle does, this movie really rests on the shoulders of James Franco. As I said before, the guy is nothing if not likable, and his inital goofy, over-the-top persona ultimately gives way to something much more relatable as the film goes on. It's fun seeing him impress himself with little feats of ingenuity (I was particularly fond of him using his climbing harness to give him support while he slept) and he does a great job of immersing the viewer in the bizarre sort of routine he develops for himself while he's trapped. From the odd, endearing pleasure of the 15 minutes of sunlight he gets every morning to the desperate rationing of his water, Franco sells every moment of the film and makes the character a really easy one to hang out with, despite his dire circumstances. How great he is, combined with this being the kind of role that the Academy creams their pants over, makes Franco a pretty solid bet for a Best Actor nomination this year. He really shows his stuff toward the end of the film, when his mind starts to work against him. There's a scene involving the footage he took with the two girls he met that should be creepy and sad, but Franco manages to make it bittersweet and understandable nonetheless.

On a final note, I've read reports of people vomiting/fainting/running from the theatre screaming when the final act kicks into gear. Those people are pussies. While the sequence is grueling, I don't really understand how you couldn't be completely rivited by it. Boyle manages to not shy away from the gore, but not exploit it either. By the end of the film, you feel like you owe it to yourself and Ralston to stick with him through what has to be one of the hardest fucking things anyone can ever choose to do. Don't be a pussy.

As I said, this is certain to be an Oscar contender this year, so if that's the kind of thing you like to be up on, definitely see this flick. Also see it because it's great. Now I just need to get to Black Swan....

UP NEXT: Black Swan, at some point. And those Kurasawa flicks, eventually. My Netflix account is becoming tragically stagnant.

THE WALKING DEAD Episode 1.6

"TS-19"

Sundays 10pm AMC

Between the airing of this episode and last week's, news broke that Frank Darabont fired the entire writing staff of show (except Robert Kirkman, obviously). Despite the internet uproar, I found myself relatively unconcerned by this. Kirkman and Darabont wrote all but two episodes of the first season so it shouldn't be that big of a change, and if the up and down nature of this short season was any indication, a more unified voice guiding the series should be a plus. So that's just my two cents on that.

This episode had some internal pacing problems of its own, but overall I think it was a strong ending to a brief season. It answered a few questions, raised a bunch more and drove home the themes that will theoretically be driving the show forward next year. I'm going to talk pretty explicitly about the ending of the episode in this review, so fair warning.

After arriving at the CDC and meeting Dr. Edwin Jenner, the survivors are offered a brief respite from the horrors of the world above. Their stay is soured however, when the mental fragile Jenner informs them that there is basically no hope for a cure and that the zombie plague has likely ravaged the entire planet. He then seals the survivors in the complex and initiates a self-destruct sequence. DUN DUN DUNNNN!

I liked this episode a lot, so I'm going to get the one problem I had with it out of the way first. The talking CDC computer was a silly way to deliver exposition and the whole self-destruct sequence (despite making sense in context) struck me as a cheap way to generate tension, and an unnecessary one too, given that they characters had just learned that, in the long term, they're pretty much fucked. That the last half of the episode centered around this was kind of weak, but the actors and writers managed to carry it through pretty well.

This whole CDC diversion seems like a substitution for a brief arc in the comic (issues 8 to 11 or so) where the characters stumble upon an isolated gated suburb and too quickly come to believe their troubles are over. The emotional thrust of the two scenarios is the same, but the CDC plotline comes with the added bonus of throwing a bone to TV audiences who probably wouldn't put up with the fact that the comic never widens it scope to indicate how the infection started or how it affected the rest of the world. Granted, Jenner doesn't actually tell the characters much that they don't know, but I suppose it helps to cement the gravity of what's happened.

Another big change from the comic is them keeping Shane around for as long as they have. It's easy to see why in this episode. His scene with Lori in this episode was pretty harrowing (and made up for the cliched scene of him drinking in the shower) and it would have been a shame to bring that whole love triangle to a boil too soon. Jon Bernthal is a solid actor and they've been doing a good job of having Shane and Rick be each other's biggest support while still driving a Lori-shaped wedge between them, slowly but surely. Speaking of which, I'm guess another one will be driven in by what Jenner whispered in Rick's ear. DUN DUN DUNNNN again!

The final bit that I think they did really well were the two scenes between Andrea and Dale. I was never really concerned that they were going to actually kill them (and even if I hadn't read the book, I still would have thought so), but it was an effective way to allow Andrea to come to grips with her grief over Amy's death and another nice building block in her relationship with Dale. That whole final sequence with Jenner trying to convince them to commit mass suicide with him did a really effective job of distilling the core motivation of the book which is (to me anyway) "Keep fighting even though you'll almost certainly die anyway". I think if the show keeps that in mind going forward, it'll be alright.

So yeah. Here ends my full season of TV reviews. It was a short season, sure, but it was fun to watch and to write about. I feel bad about falling off with my Boardwalk Empire reviews (the finale was great, by the way), but I think I just can't pull off movies and more than one TV show at the same time. I'll be back next year with more Walking Dead and this spring I'll be reviewing Game of Thrones on HBO. And by reviewing, I mean talking about how it is the greatest thing ever. Here's some final stray observations:

- Glad that the Chekov's Grenade came back into play. Not what I was expecting, but fun.

- This show is pretty good as far as being realistic (other than, you know, the zombies), but I really feel like they all couldn't have been that close to that explosion and still been fine at the end.

- Nice musical montage at the end. I'm not too familiar with the Dylan song they used, but they lyrics were sweetly appropriate.

- I kind of wish Jenner had stuck around. I liked the actor a lot. The stuff with his wife wasn't particularly original, but he played it well.

- Jacqui stayed behind to die. No one cared.

- I'm probably never going to get to that How To Train Your Dragon review, so here it is: It was fun! Jay Baruchal should do more voice acting! The physics of the dragons flying were extremely intricate and cool! I'm sure it looked great in 3-D! The main dragon looked like my girlfriends stupid cat! It wasn't as funny as Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs but you should see it anyway!