Trakt for iOS
Works on iPhone and iPad.
Now that I’ve watched the entire series in literally one sitting, I’m ready to go back and go through it more slowly. Maybe take notes on each ep about the things I love and things that might trigger others.
There is just so much world-building for all that it is set right here and now. The layers of detail and the breadth of the world created is just fascinating.
Each location truly feels separate, probably because they did actually film on location heh. And each culture feels very distinct which creates such a sense of realism.
I am genuinely impressed with the technical aspects of this show: directing, writing, editing, cinematography, etc. But the heart of it is the chemistry between the main cast and how well they demonstrate the sudden intimacy that their new situations create.
Nothing felt inevitable, there was always a sense of risk and possibility. At the same time, the things that do happen feel right and true to the characters and situations. It’s masterful.
I feel so fortunate that this show exists and that I got to see it.
All that said, there are some incredibly intense moments in the show. There is a suicide in the early part of episode one. Later there is various levels of gore and violence. And if you have any bodily issues, the fact that the show in no way ignores the biological issues of cis women’s bodies might shock you.
As far as I can recall, however, there is no animal harm or rape/attempted rape. I specifically recall a scene where I was like, “oh thank fuck! he’s only trying to murder her.”
At the end of the day, the people I cared about survived and/or triumphed enough that the hardships they went through felt worth it. Intensity level-wise (language, sex, violence, plot) I would compare it to Starz’s Spartacus series. Quality-wise too, it’s that good.
And I thought this show couldn't get any worse before this episode. This one is the straw...
You know all those great shows where you don't know a characters' true intentions because the writers have woven a complex web of motivations and character traits. Well this show has that, but without any discernible reason due to character or motivation.
You know all those great shows where favorite characters are put in precarious situations and the intensity comes from wondering how they'll escape, well this show has that except it happens off screen and in this case totally stupid stuff happens off-screen (again), because it is patently unjustifiable in the context of the story, an experienced ZA survivor gets bitten in the stomach of all places, and is now doomed.
You know all those great shows where you're rooting for the villain to get his comeuppance but he always just escapes because of ingenuity, smarts or just that bit of luck, well this show has that except the villain escapes because the heroes are dumbasses. Freakin' Negan escapes death again, when all Rick has to do is hit him hard with the bat, instead of that love-tap, or just jump up and shoot him through the window instead of running away.
You know all those great shows where the action is intense and yet still easy to follow because of amazing direction, well this show has that, except the exact opposite (hard to follow and no intensity because of convoluted story-telling).
You know all those great shows...yeah, I'm just going to watch those...instead.
I'm done with you TWD.
So this is the season finale, I gotta say the overall season was fine, yeah just fine.. I won't say it was amazing or awful, for me it was below average and season 2 was way better
I personally hate how they make the hardest things sooo stupidly easy like infiltrating the super secret Russian facility and how they make the hardest things mean nothing with their plot armor where they face these deadly situations over and over again yet no one dies, at least no one important
Also I'm getting sick of the same story over and over again.. There's a monster, there's a secret project and we must beat it.. Now in season 3 it's basically the same story as the previous seasons but with bigger scale.. Honestly it's getting boring now especially with the ending scene where we now know it's not over yet.. Ohhh surprise!! I bet no one saw that coming LOL
Also when Hopper was fighting that Russian Arnold Schwarzenegger.. I immediately knew that they were going to pretend to kill Hopper off but in reality he's not dead.. And we're still not sure but when that Russian soldier said not the American at the end.. I bet it was Hopper and season 4 going to be the same story but trying to rescue Hopper or maybe Hopper went through the gate and now he's trapped in the other side
Regarding El.. I personally think something off with her.. Like I feel I'm watching Millie Bobby Brown not El if that makes any sense.. I felt like her personally and the way she talks and act are extremely different than what we're used to from her.. But overall the acting was perfect and on point.. Basically the whole cast was acting amazing except Finn, he honestly doesn't know how to act, there's zero emotions on his face and when a scene with him comes up I feel like it strips me away from the show.. But anyway everyone else was amazing
Anyway, the last thing I want to say is that the writing in this show really lacks.. I hope they do better in season 4 and makes us actually scared and worried in a new and logical way
That's it I give this season 6/10
The main character Liv Moore dies and comes back as a zombie. She changes her entire way of life and starts to work in a morgue where she can get all the brains she needs. Every time she eats a brain, she gets visions and abilities or properties from the deceased and with those she helps a detective solve cases where those original brain owners were involved in.
Pretty straightforward synopsis and if you can accept the "eat brain, get visions/abilities" premise of this show you're in for a great treat.
Most of all the writing is consistent. The plots aren't stupidity driven as they are on major network shows these days, nor are the plots dragged out with nonsense you don't care about.
The acting is believable, the actors play likable characters and those have depth. They aren't cardboard characters or dull stereotypes, they all have their backstory and purpose. While this is an adaption of a comic there are apparently issues to overcome.
For example filling the time that you have in a TV format with dialogues. I haven't read the comics and can't comment on how faithful the series is overall but it definitely delivers the concept very well without having to know the comic.
Comedy is rather subtle here but usually very sweet. The humour comes often from the brains Liv eats and are situational.
Matching that comedy you get here and there fitting popculture references, like a very dark humorous, self ironic and absolutely brilliant Fight Club reference.
Especially shows with zombies are more and more frowned up on these days. People are slowly fed up with stories involving zombies. But this one takes a different approach.
As of yet (S01E10) there is no humans vs zombies, no apocalypse, just a how does a zombie try to live a normal, daily live kind of situation. Spiced up with brain induced antics, murder cases and a plot involving the commercial exploitation of zombies, in a way at least. ;) Each episode involves therefore a new case, a case that usually in some way is linked to the overall plot and therefore a new piece to the puzzle of the show.
On the other hand, because there's no apocalypse here, this show is not an action driven show. Nor is it a show where you can completely shut off your brain but I'd say it would work as a calm down kind of show.
You had an exhausting/stressful day at work, school, university, etc. and need to calm down, get your minds off things in the evening? Watch iZombie. Due to the aforementioned, it is a rather lighthearted not too serious show but it definitely is very enjoyable.
Personally this show, after the sad and undeserved cancellation of Forever, is my most favourite airing show.
Since it is a lighthearted show that doesn't take itself very serious at times - in smart ways nontheless - it may not please everyone. The cast seems a tad too young but I wouldn't go as far as to say there are miscast persons on this show as there are on other, bigger shows. When you dislike the synopsis, or think it sounds cheesy, that may be your right to say or think, but I think you misjudge this TV show very much and miss out on an incredibly enjoyable show that doesn't insult your intelligence with plots that get more and more ludicrous with each episode. Something bigger networks try more and more these days with each new show.
Charming shows like these are sadly a dying kind.
Just got back from seeing this. Here is what I'll say right off the bat: It's not nearly as bad as I anticipated based on the reviews going in. If the entire film was exactly like the first 30 minutes, I would LOVE this movie. Sure it would have been 2 hours of set up, but how much fun was that first 30 minutes?!
THE GOOD
Harley Quinn. Robbie lives up to the hype on this. Seeing the ads I wasn't head over heels. I just wasn't seeing the charm of it in short bursts. But seeing the movie totally reminds me of watching the animated series, which I haven't revisited in awhile. Makes me want to go back. She was the best part of this movie.
Will Smith. I imagine fans of Deadshot will have plenty to say about what he got wrong about the character. I didn't know Deadshot existed until this movie. I'm not a huge comic book guy anymore, so I was going in blind on this. I loved him. I thought he was great. Still not 100% the Will Smith I want to see up there, having a blast, but this was pretty damn close.
The music. They went the Guardians route with the soundtrack and it works. I'm a sucker for a recognizable old jam in a movie and there are plenty in this.
Ike Barinholtz. Big fan of this guy and he's friggin' hysterical here. He was a big part of that first 30 that I loved so much. Seeing him interact with Harley, etc, was great.
THE BAD
Everything after the 30 minutes of "We're putting together a team." Once they're assembled and the completely ridiculous plot begins, and the long stretches of boring make you even more aware of how many leaps you have to take to believe the plot, the more checked out I became. I know you have to allow some suspension of disbelief in these kinds of movies, but this one asked a lot.
Insanely subpar CG. What the hell was going on with the look of the villain? These were Mummy-level "The Rock's face pinned to a blurry CG body" effects. Just baffling.
The end was the same as every single one of these movies, whether they're good or bad, it's just a group of characters who have to use their skills to battle a CG monster, each of them fail until for some reason the last big thing they do works. Whatever. Also the end look of how the power was shooting out of the building looked very Ghostbusters (any of them really).
The Joker. Look. His Joker was just fine. I liked his look, he was even being kind of crazy sometimes. But for the amount of screen time he actually gets DOES NOT equal the amount of articles I had to see about this dude pranking people on set and being disgusting and sending gross gifts to Viola Davis blah blah blah. Seriously, the PR train on this has been going strong for what feels like a year and a half and it all amounts to....15 minutes, all together? Sure sure this will set him up for other stuff but come on. So many articles about him being in character and pranking. So many. The other actors had to hate it. Especially considering the fact that they BARELY share the screen with him! It'd be like Jeremy Irons pranking the shit out every single cast member in BvS "for his character." Lawrence Fishburn would not stand for that shit.
Anyway, I didn't completely hate it. I had fun sometimes. I laughed at things they didn't want me to laugh at sometimes (so did the rest of the theater). But it wasn't the worst.
9.1/10 -- the best of Season 19 so far. South Park is generally at its best when its teasing out little hypocrisies in our culture. There's a fine line between sensitivity and kid gloves, and it's pretty clear which side Matt and Trey think our culture has landed on. That said, they didn't skimp on the humor in the midst of their commentary. The escalating gags between Randy and the Whole Foods checkout guy in particular was a great comic runner, and the safe space song, with accompanying musical gags, is up there in the pantheon of great South Park musical numbers.
Butters, as always, is superb, and his being a hard at work filter to the mean things on the internet was an idea as silly as it was inspired. By the same token, tying the episode together by doing one final "starving children infomercial" parody where the kids used iPads to do Butters' old job was a brilliant way to tie a bow on the episode's themes. The "safe spaces" people construct to make themselves feel good when there's people with far worse problems out there is a striking theme. I can't say I loved that "Reality" basically acted as the creators' direct mouthpiece at the end, but it was still an episode with an interesting point, and a lot of excellent comedy to keep the episode flowing.
There are two things that bugged me in this episode:
Rose, the actor for Liv, seems to have issues staying serious while acting. You see her smiling several times when she says her lines and it gets cut shortly after. At minute 3, when she turns back to the corpse for example.
Or the significant amount of scenes where she generally seems too lively. This was the opposite in episode 1. While there she said at the end she can step her game up, she's still undead. Even if she eats the brain of an artist who's upbeat and she behaved like that even before she did.
The second thing is the zombie make-up. From scene to scene it sometimes looks very unevenly applied, especially around the eyes and you can see it when Liv raises her eyebrows.
Other than that I loved it. The "lesson" at the end was great. The chemistry between Ravi and Liv felt much more natural. The introduction of the second zombie was better than I expected.
But I must admit, that I do understand if people don't like this show. It's - at least so far - nowhere near an action/suspense driven show, it seems to be one of those lesson at the end of each episode type of shows. These tend to be less good received overall.
This episode gets bonus points for a female character being protective of a male character as well as the male objectification through a female without any kind of specific buildup or social comment on it as if it is natural. Something that is usually not done in our oh so equality centered society/media but frowned upon when it is vice versa.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm... cautiously optimistic about this season? We're 3 episodes in and so far it's good. I'm actually enjoying watching Arrow again.
Am I still bitter about Diggle having a son instead of a daughter in this timeline? Yes, I am. It shouldn't be a big deal, really, but for some reason it makes me sad.
The new team is slowly growing on me. Right now Wild Dog is your typical stubborn, hot-headed idiot, but hopefully he'll get better. Curtis quips way too much and it's not half as charming as when Cisco does it on The Flash, but he was actually useful in this episode, so kudos to him for that.
John and Lyla's relationship is honestly my favorite on the show. I always enjoy their scenes together.
I'm curious to see what will happen next with Felicity and Rory. There's potential for some quality angst there, but I'm not sure if I trust the writers to handle this dynamic properly.
I'm totally here for Bad Bitch Thea Quinn destroying the asshole reporter. Get wrecked, Susan.
The slow-mo shot of Oliver walking away from the explosion was cool in that weird cringey way where it was almost too cheesy to handle, but somehow still made my inner 8-year-old jump and clap her hands with glee.
Oh, and apparently ingesting a drug slowly fries your brain and destroys your internal organs, but if you bathe in it, you're suddenly invincible? How does that even work?
So it looks like we're getting Prison Break: Arrow Edition next week! Just please, kill the bastard that framed John while you're at it.
At the end of S2 I was very anxious about the direction the season finale set back then.
Most of the time I felt this Season was very weak overall and confirmed my reservations more often than not. The plot is getting way too fast, way too big to stay what made iZombie so great. Just like Ravi said in the last scenes, it all started in the morgue. Now it's too big to stay there. I like that iZombie is moving the plot forward and doesn't stay for years and years in one place, story-wise. But I'm still not onboard with how fast that is achieved. Mainly because it was this "small" group of people we followed and we, as the audience, were the "selected few" to follow along. It's the same feeling Friends gave and still gives me. This season, on the other hand, broke this off without the proper care, without a good transition by focusing too much on other things like the military corps.
Now I do have my doubts whether a fourth season is going to get me this feeling back. But it did get a lot of setup this season to become even greater than it ever was. Yet I remain cautious.
While the season was overall weak and I am not too happy with it as a whole, despite some really good episodes, this second part of the season finale was by far the best episode. We got a lot of answers, a few sideplots were concluded (more or less) quickly to make room for the next season (business as usual) and new stories. All my issues here and there do not make this season bad, though, but by direct comparison with S1 and S2, S3 simply lacks on many things. Things I hope S4 will make better.
But no matter how good S4 will be, Major, as a character, was simply destroyed this season. I loved that guy at the end of S1, in S2 he was still pretty darn cool, S3 on the other hand....ughh. I don't like him anymore, can't relate to his changes, even though S3 followed him closely in how people treat him and stuff. He's this muscled, good looking and now hollow character. That's probably the biggest bummer in S3. Besides the loss of the cure sideplot. I tink that was pushed too much into the background just to resurface for tension reasons at the end.
Clive getting his girl back in a tragic way was great.
Liv getting back to her new-old self, the pale zombie, was overdue and Ravi is just being the best, like always.
I would have been so pissed if that end scene would have been exactly that for iZombie.
S4 was announced in May despite somewhat low ratings, even for iZombie.
http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/izombie-season-four-renewal-cw-tv-show/
I like that iZombie started on The CW, other networks probably would have cancelled this ages ago.
Just like in Orphan Black an episode where a character says s/he's gonna leave.
In like 9 out of 10 cases it raises either a death flag or is a red herring to fill an episode.
Either way, the character isn't going to leave. In this particular case I instantly thought Natalie taking Major to Italy raised a death flag for her. It'd be weird letting Major leave the show right now and she's the reason for him to potentially leave, so she needs to go to resolve it.
And then that totally unexpected end. Damn you, iZombie.
Finally Major is reunited with Natalie and then that. Although, I am not a fan that the character Major is degraded to a guy who sleeps with every woman who's not running away because he's the chaos killer kidnapper.
But I liked the irony of Liv claiming she's wearing a wig and a ton of paint while in fact it's usally the other way around.
Then again, I don't like Liv as a human as much as I like her as a zombie.
Overall a good episode, though, even if a bit tame in terms of brain-of-the-week than I expected upon reading the synopsis.
Remember how Season 4 was somewhat of a huge change and shifted the focus onto too many characters at once? How that was escalating in S5? S6 is more of a back to the roots kind of thing. That's pretty good.
However, for me, this season feels like they add yet another bunch of new characters and mix it with most of the B or even C characters of previous seasons. Yes, OitnB has always been an ensemble cast driven series. That's fine. Yet, there are characters that are more interesting than others, some are straight out annoying. The interesting characters in this are the new ones. Daddy, the sisters and their contribution to the season wide plot, some of the (garbage as usual) guards.
The rest I do not care about, Red is done, Piper does the same shit again and again and again as usual, Daya is annoying as f*ck and needs to get shived. Lorna is spectacularly dumb. Vause is...yeah, just kind of there, more passively than actively slipping into shit. Suzanne's story is over and annoying, she shouldn't get any more screen time. The story with Tasty is going on for far too long as well, ending how it was clear how it would end. It's just happening to open up a new storyline for Caputo in S7. Unless he is preoccupied with other stuff. I cannot understand a bit why anybody would put up with Diaz either. Sure, some people are into "fiery women" and stuff but she is a loud, foulmouthed toxic person.
Exceptions are Dogget, who did the right thing, but her boyfriend was kind of weirdly pushed aside for the rest of the season.
And it's always fun to see McCullough, even if she goes through a tough time. Luschek actually buying a DeLorean was hilarious.
But then there was no Kimiko Glenn in this at all. That's a huge bummer..although, Soso's story was over with Poussey dead.
A very mixed bag this season. Very mixed.
Technically, this show and their setup makes it possible to let this run forever but for me it's time to end this. Rumours are S7 is gonna be the end anyway. But there's a lot of money in this so I guess we'll see about that.
