The Walking Dead Season 7 has convinced me that we as a society have not taken the proper measures to ensure all the smart people in the world have been getting laid and pro creating since the turn of the century.
That’s right. Since about the mid 1990’s people like Steven King , Arthur C. Clark , Stanley Kubrick ; and all other writers of the same quality died without any girls making sure they produced offspring. Well Steven’s not dead but he’s a Red Sox fan so I hold out no hope for his children to have the willpower to write. (yes i realize that doesn’t make much sense but I’m writing this while hungry and munching on broccoli so that’s my excuse.)
Gone are great stories like Apocalypse Now , Memento , Childhood’s End , The Gunslinger.
To be replaced by such soggy porridge written material like Cars 2 , Star Wars : The Force Awakens , and Sharknado.
Granted, Sharknado is on the top of every “Must See Movies While On Acid” top 10 list so I’ll give the writers for that a back door high five. You know, the kind of secretive “we fucked up so bad we accidentally begat a cult classic” high five. (The Evil Dead , House , etc)
Writing such a gem of a god-awful script used to be like catching lightning in a barrel , nowadays it happens so frequently that trying to see a well written movie is fruitful as waiting for rain in the Gobi desert.
That’s why I’m here in this fucking German immersion class , I got duped into signing up for this torture. Previous to this, my afternoons were spent in seat D1 at Terminal 21’s movie theater watching one or two movies an afternoon , something I’ve been doing for the past six years since returning to Thailand. But like a rock being eroded by waves over the centuries , so to was my brain being eroded by the endless stream of garbage that I was paying to watch.
You must consider that my fondness for books and movies came from my teenage years as I used their medium to break free of the absolute stupidity that is the Thai school system. I daydreamed a whole week away in school reminiscing over the genius of the movie Memento. I skipped school on Hitler Appreciation Day thanks to having watched Schindler’s List.
“Quite an experience to live in fear isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” That quote from Blade Runner’s Roy Batty , in one of the best impromptu monologues ever , still haunts me to this day as it echoed how I felt growing up , his “like tears in rain” line would need a hundred blog stories to properly explain how hard that line hit home with me.
But I’m not here to argue the merits of Blade Runner and where it stands in the queue of greatest movies ever. I’m here to lament that such great movies are becoming extinct. More so , I’m here to scream through thunder that movies over the past half decade are now unwatchable. I’m telling you that I’m here in German class because I saw in succession , XXX Return of Xander Cage , Resident Evil : The Final Chapter , Star Wars : The Force Awakens , and the aptly named The Disappointments Room ; and I just couldn’t subject myself to such shit any longer.
I first thought it comical that the *must subscribe YouTube channel Screen Junkies reiterated my exact same thought while watching The Force Awakens : “they shamelessly remade A New Hope” and passed it off as a new movie.
Then I realized, I’m not 30 years old yet , and I’ve seen every plot Hollywood is going to allow me to see. Plots are repackaged more than Christmas Fruit Cake , I’ve seen a variation of The Hunger Games now 10 different times in the past three years …
Where this all goes horribly wrong is when I have to stand up and applaud the writers for all these horrid movies because – at least they are plots that albeit awkwardly , push the plot of said movie forward in a way that kind of , sort of , more or less , makes sense.
Because the shit that the writers of The Walking Dead have put forth this season is devoid of all plot. I used to hold out hope for two shows I could shamelessly torrent every week, The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Well there was a third, but Black Mirror was saved by the only good guys left in the galaxy – NetFlix.
Now that I know Game of Thrones will come to an end by this Christmas , I’m left with this steaming pile of horse shit called The Walking Dead , a show that proves good writers don’t exist any longer. Because a good writer always respects the intelligence of the reader , and by presenting plausible sequences of events the opportunity to build believable character reactions presents itself readily.
What the writers of The Walking Dead have done is basically told its audience : you’re all idiots incapable of thought. Thus, The Walking Dead has devolved into the same toxic waste that I’ve had to sit through at the movie theater every day.
Far be it for me , a mistress from a third world country with only a blog for my portfolio of writing as a display for my talents , to tell writers of The Walking Dead what they should have done with the train wreck season 7 has become, but that’s what I’m going to do anyways.
For starters , to end last season , Glen’s brain matter was spilled over the dirt by Negan’s baseball bat , the spray of that blood landing on Maggie’s stomach, inside of which she’s carrying Glen’s unborn baby. That’s how you set up a protagonist for the following season, which Maggie should have been. Instead she’s been given 4 minutes of screen time in the following 5 hours of film.
Two months ago the show introduced a tribe of amazon women living in their own little society hidden from Negan’s group of Saviors. Haven’t heard from them since. Here’s a hint and a half for your ass – I’m addressing the writers of The Walking Dead here – have a reason for introducing a new character – let alone 50 of them. Follow up by including newly introduced characters into the plot instead of abandoning them after one episode. Just a little FYI there, you’re welcome.
This month The Walking Dead brought Gene L. Coon back from the dead to reintroduce The Gorn from Star Trek in the form of the garbage tribe. Except Gene was a great writer , while The Walking Dead writers write with the collective intellectual IQ of a gerbil.
See instead of , oh say , hiding a few guns for later , Rick instead gives all the guns he and Michone found to a group of barely literate Garbage Patch Kids. Well why wouldn’t he , after all he left a fat chick who’s never held a gun in charge of their inventory back home and failed to stash a few even back then. Negan in his infinite wisdom (provided by the writers) fails to ever leave a guard or a spy or perhaps even a dude in a tree to watch over the communities providing for him , so it’d be a piece of cake to take that sniper rifle Rosita has and put a bullet through his head any time he shows up unprotected – like he did every week until he lately decided hiding in his fortress is a better tactical move. Clap clap.
Instead of mounting any sort of attack , the show has instead spent the past 5 episodes debating whether they should attack , which is added to the 5 episodes they debated about attacking in the earlier part of season 7 bringing the grand total of attack planning dialogue to a whopping 10 hours out of the 15 this year. Here’s another hint for The Walking Dead writers – move the plot forward !! No really – move it forward. Didn’t you learn from The Farm Season 2?
Here’s my Honest Trailer Review of the latest episode of The Walking Dead – Episode 14 – The Other Side.
Watch as Sasha and Rosita embark on a suicide mission to storm Negan’s stronghold and murder him in his sleep , but then brilliantly conclude they’re better off waiting outside to plunk him with a bullet when he comes out to get the mail. Except they give up after they don’t get a clean shot the first time and storm the factory full of narrow hallways – armed with a sniper rifle. What the fuck?
We need to stop stupid people from fucking each other so that we stop making more stupid people. Your job , be you a man or woman , is to find a real smart person and make sure that guy or girl makes babies. Because if you don’t , your sons and daughters are going to be watching stuff even worse than what we’re watching right now.
That’s right, they’ll be watching Disney’s Cars 27 – because all the smart people who created Pixar will be dead by then – and Disney is the factory from which Gerbil writers proliferate.
They’ll be watching Star Wars : A New New New Hope.
I don’t know how they’ll fuck up the remake of Memento, but they’ll find a way and your kids will end up watching Memento for Dummies , which is just wrong.
If you don’t do something right now about banging a smart person, your kids will watch Sharknado 5 , which means they’ll be on acid.
Don’t let it happen !!
xx