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jriddle73 (387)
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LEATHERFACE first hit the screen today
THE NIGHT STALKER debuted on this day
FOOLISH WIVES, released on this day
METROPOLIS, released on this day
ZATOICHI CHALLENGED, released on this day
MAN OF STEEL is a godawful movie
THE EXORCIST, released on this day
SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE released on this date
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, 50 years old today!
CHRISTINE, released on this day in 1983
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And it was ridiculous before it even got that far. The central characters are absolutely losing their minds, almost from the beginning, for no apparent reason.
I stopped the original series--both watching it and writing about it--upon Rick's departure. I gave up on FTWD somewhere early in the 2nd season. I was writing about it too, and it was arguably even worse than the original. Its big initial selling-point was that it was going to show how it all started, how the dead overran the world while Rick was in his coma, then it just skipped over all that. Par for the course.
The main mujahadeen group backed by the Reagan administration was the Hekmatyar faction, out of which came most of the major leaders of al Qaida and the Taliban, including Muhammad Omar, Osama bin Laden, Omar Abdel-Rahman and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar himself. They spent more time terrorizing and murdering other Afghans--peeling religious dissenters alive, throwing acid in the face of unveiled women, etc.--than they ever did fighting Soviets.
It was a terrible movie. But unlike the 2nd one, which was also terrible, it wasn't saved by the editing (the 2nd one featured some of the best editing of any '80s action picture). It was always hilariously terrible but it became even more so after 9/11, as the "heroes" in the movie are, in effect, al Qaida and the Taliban.
Yeah, I really miss the old IMDb boards. I had been there and loved them for years before I started writing about THE WALKING DEAD. At the point I wrote that article, my first proper one on the series, I had been in a very bad place in life for some time, and it was writing about TWD on the IMDb board that sort of dragged me back to writing when I hadn't been doing much of it for a long time. That piece was like a formal come-back. While TWD was really taking off, I apparently tapped into some dissenting sentiment a lot of people felt about it, at a time when everyone else was going nuts over it, but hadn't quite seen put into words yet. A lot of people told me, over the years that followed, that reading my stuff made them enjoy the otherwise-bad show a lot more. It was always fun to post a new one and watch (and participate in) the food-fights they would generate, because fans of the show HATED my articles on it and took it way too seriously. My stuff was never more popular than when I was writing about TWD.
Someone once told me that, in the end, I sort of won, as everyone got sick to death of the show. But it's more the case that all the problems I was identifying while it was on the rise eventually just wore everyone down. It never really got any worse--season 3 was, in my view, the low-point and it was still on the rise then. It just took a while for everyone to get sick of it.
Yes, it really died after that. They were occasionally able to turn it around for a run of good eps here and there--fairly rarely--but nearly everything that came to make it so unbearable for pretty much everyone came to the forefront in season 2. From there, it was just a matter of how long it took before people got sick of it.
Marathoning the 2nd season would lessen the effect but it was still <i>very</i> poorly paced and became appallingly stupid and unfocused. It later turned out there were some good reasons for that: the original plan for season 2, which sounded great, fell apart and the creators were left trying to cobble together that crap that eventually made it to the screen in very trying circumstances (Frank Darabont, the showrunner, was fired only a few eps in, and his replacement was entirely bereft of talent).
I wouldn't go to ranking them but season 2 was--like most of the rest--an incredibly bad season, showing a very dramatic creative collapse from the previous season. It wasn't just dull (though it WAS dull, and very poorly paced); it's the point at which a whole host of problems, which, years later, would strangle out the audience, first came to dominate it. The midpoint of that season was when I began writing about it and sort of documenting where it was going wrong.
https://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2012/01/walking-dead.html
The show's creators just fundamentally didn't understand the comic, which featured very strongly written characters and is essentially an anthropological study of how this zombified world changes them over time. The show tried various approaches to the material but eventually settled on a soap melodrama model that entirely eschews characterization and focuses on trying to provoke emotional responses from viewers, fundamentally changing the characters from episode to episode if it's necessary to get those responses. So there are, in effect, no characters, and there's no progression. More to the point, there's no story. I wrote a piece at one point called something like "The 8 Ricks of the Walking Dead" that went through the different versions of Rick and showed that they were just arbitrary creations to serve the melodrama needs of the moment and couldn't be said to be the same character.
They've done what they could with me and I'm in relatively stable condition, if disabled (probably permanently) and with my heart connected to a machine in case it suddenly tries to quit on me. Still not likely to live to that ripe old age but what can you do, right? I don't remember the first time I saw YF--it's one of those things that go back so long it feels like it's always been with me. I've always love the old Universal horrors too--going back that far too. YF has seemed to get better with age. But that night in cardiac recovery, THAT was when it was funniest.
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