In Memoriam, a look back at pop culture deaths 2011-2012

Something that I have noticed is that in the past year alone, I have seen more shocking deaths on TV than most of the past years combined. And no, I'm not talking about just deaths, I'm talking about a character dying and you say "What the hell?" And today, we're paying our respects to all those that gave their lives and careers for the sake of the survival of the show. And I won't be covering EVERY death that has happened in the last year, just the ones that had the biggest impact on myself. And before you ask, yes, there are going to be spoilers in this review. I find it unnecessary that I have to say that, but yes, there will indeed be spoilers. You have been warned.

Game of Thrones

Eddard "Ned" Stark, Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North, Hand of the King, and loyal servant of Robert Baratheon the first of his name.
Death- Season 1, Episode 9 "Baelor"
Cause of death- publicly executed at the behest of a 12 year old twirp
We pray for your soul

Robert Baratheon, King of the Seven Kingdoms, Guardian of the Realm

Death- Season 1, Episode 7 "You Win or You Die"

Fatally wounded by a bore while hunting

We pray for your soul

Viserys Targaryen, self proclaimed "The Dragon" and true king of the seven kingdoms
Death- Season 1, Episode 5 "A Golden Crown"
Had molten gold dumped on head
We pray for your soul... to rot in hell.

Khal Drogo, The Great Khal
Death- Season 1, Episode 10 "Fire and Blood"
Smothered by wife as a mercy kill after being put in a vegetive state (it's a long story)
We pray for your soul

The Walking Dead


Dale Horvath
Death- Season 2, Episode 10 "Judge, Jury and Executioner"
Fatally wounded by a walker, mercy killed by friend Daryl
We pray for your soul

Sophia Peletier
Death- Season 2, Episode 7 "Pretty Much Dead Already"
Infected by a walker, and later shot in face by Rick Grimes after becoming a walker herself.
We pray for your soul

Otis

Death - Season 2, Episode 3 "Bloodletting"

Shot in the knee by Shane, left behind to be devoured by walkers

We pray for your soul

Shane Walsh

Death- Season 2, Episode 12 "Better Angels"

Stabbed by Rick Grimes after trying to kill him, then shot in head by Carl Grimes after turning into walker

I would pray for your soul, but you don't have one. Dick.

Boardwalk Empire

Jimmy Darmody

Death- Season 2, Episode 12 "To the Lost"

Shot in the face by Nucky Thompson

We pray for your soul

Angela Darmody

Death- Season 2, Episode 11 "Under God's Power she Flourishes"

Shot by Manny Horvitz

We pray for your soul

Batman: Arkham City

Hugo Strange

Stabbed and then blown to tiny bits

We pray for your soul

Ra's Al Ghul

Stabbed self while falling, impaled on an iron fence

We pray for your soul

Talia Al Ghul

Shot by the Joker

We pray for your soul

The Joker

Killed by infection caused by copious amounts of Titan in his blood stream.

Rest in peace you magnificent sadistic bastard! P.S- I still haven't gotten over this one.

The Matrix Trilogy

I’m just going to get this out of the way, I am going to say what everybody else has said: The first one is great and the other 2 are crap. Well, maybe I’m too hasty. The other 2 aren’t crap, but they aren’t as good as they could have been. The first movie was awesome. It had a cool idea, some cool action and it was an all around pretty cool film. And to be honest, I’m not sure why they decided to make more. The first one ended in a way that didn’t really suggest or warrant a sequel. Maybe if you wanted to do the story of another person who was woken up from the matrix and they just showed us what it is like for a normal person to live outside the matrix, that would be a pretty interesting movie. But unsurprisingly, and I can’t say that I blame them, the directors of the movie decided to add onto Neo’s story. And yeah, I will say that the second and third movies aren’t all that good, but they still aren’t that terrible either. For one thing, like the first one, they have some interesting ideas to them as well as some cool action. However they also added some things to them that are kind of silly. For one thing, I don’t think it was very wise to bring back Agent Smith the way they did. Don’t get me wrong, I love Hugo Weaving, and I thought he was a great villain in the first movie. But I just thought that the idea of him coming back and trying to clone himself was just a little silly, if they just had Agent Smith come back and do his own thing and reek havoc on the matrix, that would be cool. Which is what they did, but the whole thing about him cloning himself was just a little cooky in my opinion. Maybe I’m alone on that, but it’s just a little strange to me. So you are probably asking “Who would make a better villain than Agent Smith?” Well, to be honest, I thought the French guy, The Merovingian, would have sufficed. Sure, I don’t think he was on the Agent Smith level of epicness, but he would have been enough to hold the movie.

The second thing that I have a slight problem with is Neo’s powers. Actually, it’s just one: Flying. Again, like Smith’s cloning ability, I just found it a little silly, and the effects that we saw when he used it were kind of cheesy. It didn’t look like it was something real, it looked like something out of Shrek. I don’t mind using CGI, but when it looks like a cartoon instead of an actual live-action movie, I really have to put my foot down.

And finally, I’m going to address the one thing that people have said in defense of the last two movies: They are just cool action movies. That may be true, but that isn’t why we all liked the first movie. The first movie was deep, perplexing, philosophical and thought-provoking. The second and third one were, according to fans, action movies. But again, the fact that they are thought of as just being ‘action movies’ is so out of place. It would be as if they made a sequel to Inception and just made a popcorn movie. I would find this excusable if we all just thought of the first movie as nothing more than an action movie. Alright, fine they did have a whole explanation as to what the whole prophecy about the one was, but that was a little too thought provoking, to the point of being confusing. Seriously, I have tried to understand everything that the Architect said in the second movie, and it still doesn’t make that much sense. I even looked it up on imdb and Wikipedia and I’m still a little hazy. I guess what they were trying to do was one-up themselves from the first movie, and they may have tried taking it a little too far. And the ending to the third movie altogether makes no sense at all. Even a friend of mine who is a huge fan of these movies admits that he doesn’t get it either.

Having said all that, my opinion with these movies is much like my opinion with the second and third Jurassic Park movies. Yeah, they have their issues, but they at least still have a few things that were good about the first movie. Were they far from perfect? Oh yes they were, but the fighting is still cool (at least when it doesn’t look like a cartoon it does), Hugo Weaving is still cool, and I think that the only issue that these movies suffer from is what I think a few of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels suffer from, the fact that they have some neat ideas, each of them would be cool on their own and could potentially have enough substance to fill up an entire movie, but the filmmakers tried to squish them all into one movie (or I guess two) and it just feels cluttered, the plot is a little too convoluted, and in the end, we still have no idea what is going on.

The Walking Dead

If this show had started about 5 years ago, I don't think I would have been into it. Zombies and horror were never really my thing in high school. But after about 5 years of reading Stephen King, playing Left 4 Dead and watching movies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, the television show The Walking Dead had my name written all over it. Fans of the show will tell you that the first season was pretty damn good, with the exception of maybe two episodes, and this season, while not AS good as the first, is still pretty darn good. So you are probably asking yourself "MP, if you love this show so much, why are you talking about it now as opposed to earlier?" Well for one thing, I was going to write something after the season ended, but after last night's episode, I feel as if I can't wait any longer, I need to talk about this season, even though there is still one more episode left. First of all, I will tell you that I'm going to try to keep this as spoiler free as possible, but given the stuff that has gone down this season, this is going to be easier said than done. Last season, we saw 3 characters kick the bucket. 2 of them were somewhat major and the other was one we had just met the episode before. While their deaths were heavy, it doesn't nearly compare to the shit that we have seen on this most current season. I won't spoil who, but I will tell you that 3 of the major characters die in this season, one of them was a shock, one of them was just downright sad, and the last one... Well, I'm not gonna lie, I was actually glad. I had really grown to dislike that character in this season. And considering that the last episode of this season looks like it is just going to be the group trying to defend themselves against a massive zombie horde, I would say that it isn't unreasonable to say one more person will die. Most people would say that killing off this many characters this early in the show's running is not a good sign, showing that the writers are already running out of ideas. But I say nay, I think this is a good thing. Just like Game of Thrones, you have to approach the show with that mentality that everybody is expendable. This is not one of those shows where people can just resolve their differences and move on, people will and have died. Even the author of the books that the show is based on has said that he will kill off whomever he pleases. Having said that, some may say that the show is loosing steam, but I say it's just getting started. Brace yourselves.

Game of Thrones vs Lord of the Rings

Over the past year, I have heard a number of things regarding the show Game of Thrones, based off of the book series A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin. All of these comments have to do with Lord of the Rings. Some say that it is an adult version of Lord of the Rings while others say that it is far superior than Lord of the Rings. As for me, I say that neither of these applies. You see, my belief is that the Lord of the Rings books are our generations version of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Both Homer and Tolkien wrote characters that fought great wars with mythological creatures and went on journeys and had fantastic adventures. Game of Thrones on the other hand, I would associate more with many of Shakespeare's plays such as Julius Ceasar, Hamlet or even Macbeth. All of these plays deal with ideas of murder, betrayal, loyalty, honor, family rivalries and so forth. All of which can be seen in the show. Sure, the story and the themes are a bit heavier than that of Lord of the Rings, but does that make them better than Tolkien's books? Not necessarily, it really all depends on which you prefer. Do you prefer Shakespeare or Homer? They both have great stories, both have great characters and you really get involved in what is going on in both cases. Again, I can't really say which is better because they both had a specific purpose and both of them achieved it beautifully. All I can say is that the three Lord of the Rings movies are ranked amongst my ten favorite movies of all time, and Game of Thrones has become one of my favorite shows.

Oscar Reactions

So it's not news to anybody that the Oscars were last night and if you have been following this blog, you also can pretty much piece together that I disagreed with the academy on a lot of their choices. While I disagreed, I can actually understand why they went with the choices that they went with, unlike last year where The King's Speech swept everything, and I felt like it was just your basic generic Oscar contender. This year, I actually watched it and said "I would have gone differently, but I respect your decision". So let's get started, and I'm only going to touch on the topics that I actually have something to say on. And to be clear, my picks are not my predictions, they are my choices, who I wanted to win.

Best director/ Picture
Winner- Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist)
My Pick- Martin Scorsese (Hugo)
It's no secret that I am a huge Martin Scorsese fan, and it's even less of a secret that I adored the movie that he made this year, I even admitted to it being one of my new favorite movies. What I loved about this movie is how it saluted old school movies and paid tribute to some of the films that continue to inspire movie makers even to this day. Oddly enough, so was the case with The Artist. The fact that this movie was a silent film, all in black and white and done with 1930's music, just like they would have made it in the movie making days of old really shows that this movie was not made for the money, it was made for the art. Someone really had a story to tell and the fact that even mainstream audiences were able to enjoy it as well just goes to show that some art forms may never die out, even when we have reached an age where movies have to have certain things (namely SOUND). I really admire this movie for going all out with the silent movie thing. Did I mention that I still have yet to see The Artist? Even if I don't enjoy it as much as other people did, I can at least give it credit for what it was trying to do, and evidently achieved as well. I stand by my stance that I think Hugo was the best movie this year, combining older movie elements with modern day effects and visuals, but I think this honor was well deserved. Kudos to the cast and crew.

Best Actor
Winner- Jean Dujardin
My Pick- Gary Oldman
Gary Oldman has long been one of my favorite actors, and has long been an icon in the film community. His nomination this year marks the first time that he has even been recognized by the academy. If Artist wasn't in sweep mode, then I don't think him winning would be that far off. Mostly because his fellow thespians acknowledged him for the legend that he is and even hinted at their own disgust that it took this long for him to get recognized. Well, Oscar or no Oscar, I still love you Gary.

Best Actress
Winner- Meryl Streep
My Pick- Rooney Mara/ Michelle Williams
While I would have liked to see Michelle Williams or Rooney Mara win this honor, because I thought they were both perfect in their roles, I can't fault the academy for going with Meryl Streep, mostly because it's Meryl Streep. She is hands down one of the finest actresses of all time and deserved the award a lot more than she had earned it. Being that Rooney and Michelle were able to get nominated this year, it's not much of a stretch to say that another one will be in their futures.

Best Supporting Actor
Winner- Christopher Plummer
My Pick- Max Von Sydow
This is another one where I can't fault them for going with their choice because as much as I love Max Von Sydow, I am glad that Christopher Plummer won because he too is a fine actor that has yet to be recognized. I listed him as my second choice to win.

Best Song
Winner- Man or Muppet
My Pick- Man or Muppet
Screw it, I love The Muppets, and I don't give a rat's ass who knows it either.

Sean Bean

Brace yourselves, my rant is coming...

Okay, this has been bugging me for a long time now, and I feel practically obligated to speak on this. There is an actor called Sean Bean, he has appeared in alot of good movies. Most notably, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Unfortunately, he has gained this reputation recently for always playing characters that always bite the dust. In LOTR, his character died at the end of the first movie, in Goldeneye, he got crushed by a falling piece of debris. When I saw him on the main poster for Game of Thrones, I thought "Finally! He's playing the main character, so he can't die... Right?" Wrong! He died at the end of the first season. What is it about Sean Bean that makes studios want to kill him off so quickly? And in Game of Thrones, there is no excuse. For crying out loud, he is the only guy on the main poster! It's not like he is in the background or anything, he is front and center sitting on the Throne that this show is all about! Now I love Sean Bean, he's one of my favorite actors, but I really want to know what it is about him that people just love to shoot, stab or choke. It's almost as if he made a deal with the devil: Sean Bean gets his rugged looks, cool voice and bad assness, and in return he must always die in every single movie he is in! He even voiced a character in the game Elder Scrolls V: Oblivion, and guess what? HE FUCKING DIES IN THAT ONE TOO!!! And the worst part is he is actually badass in real life too! He once got into a bar fight with a guy, got stabbed in the arm with a piece of glass, proceeded to tell the man "One does not simply stab me with a piece of glass! Brace yourself, an ass-kicking is coming!" kicked the guy's ass, and all he did afterwards was mend himself with the first aid kit and buy another pint. They even asked him if they should call an ambulance, to which he replied "One does not simply call an ambulance" And if anybody is wondering when I'm going to stop talking about this guy, all I have to say is this: One does not simply STOP talking about Sean Bean! It should also be noted that he has become the source of two different internet memes. One involves his character from LOTR who says the line "One does not simply walk into Mordor" which can be changed into "One does not simply stop procrastinating" "One does not simply stop playing Skyrim" and the other involves his character from Game of Thrones who says "Brace yourselves, winter is coming" it even became the tagline of the show and yet they still felt the need to kill him! YOU HACKS! Anyway, this can be changed into "Brace yourselves, the Whitney Houston 'Best of' albums are coming" "Brace yourselves, finals are coming" whatever you want. I'm sorry, I'm at a loss for words here. And before you guys give me shit for essentially ruining the ending to every movie he's in as well as the first season of Game of Thrones, all I have to say is this: One does not simply NOT see this coming by now! At this point, the poor guy has become a walking spoiler. It's almost like he's saying "Brace yourselves, my death is coming" the second he walks on camera. And on top of that, I haven't even seen the season of Game of Thrones, someone spoiled it for me too. At first, I thought he was kidding, reasoning that one does not simply spoil something so easily, but after looking into it, I was saddened to find out that he does in fact die. And it was just terrible, it wasn't even like LOTR or Patriot Games where he went out like a boss, he just gets decapitated and that's the end of it. Fuckers. And don't even bother trying to tell me to let this go, one does not simply let this go!

And before people start to give me shit for recycling those two memes, all I have to say is this:
One does not simply stop using internet memes!
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Okay one more... Only because I'm ungodly immature and I never learn.
Brace yourselves, more reviews will be coming.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

I wasn’t really intending on writing this review quite yet, but I saw the movie on TV a couple of weeks ago, and it really got me thinking about all of the things that are wrong with it. Don’t you just hate it when you have a movie that is really good and then it gives you a sequel that just plain sucks? Sigh (looking at Transformers DVD). Well, Jurassic Park is a prime example of such a franchise, and it really breaks my heart to do this because I really liked the first Jurassic Park movie. It really makes me sad to think that the people who brought us this masterpiece are giving us this schlock. For those who are unfamiliar with the story, here goes: Jurassic Park is about a guy who wants to build a theme park that is really unique and unlike any other in the world. He gets the idea of cloning dinosaurs and making a zoo out of them. Unfortunately, on the weekend that some scientists are set to view and give final judgments on the park, the dinosaurs are let loose and run amuck, killing some of the people involved and causing the park to be shut down and the island totally abandoned. It was a good story and had what I like to call a Frankenstein moral, which is basically when a person uses science as a means of screwing with nature and the drastic results that ensue. It was a great story, had some good action and on top of that, it had some of the greatest visuals of the time.

So, needless to say, people were really excited to see if there would be a sequel. Fans pressured both Michael Crichton, the author of the original novel, and Stephen Spielberg, the director of the first movie, to give us the sequel. To all those I say this: Be careful what you freaking wish for you whiny pigs! First of all, I have to point out that the visuals aren’t nearly as good as they were in the first movie. Normally if a movie had bad CGI, I give it crap for having bad visuals despite the fact that we are living in a post Jurassic Park world. THIS movie, however has no excuse because not only is it a sequel, it’s done by the same studio, director and screenwriter. What the hell happened?

Also, I remember reading the second book, and there were A LOT of unnecessary changes between the book and the movie. Seriously, you guys did both because fans asked you for them, shouldn’t you at least try to stay the same? The biggest one that I can remember is that in the book, the people that want to take the dinosaurs off the island are from a rival company who hired Dennis Nedry in the first movie to steal dinosaur embryos. In Lost World, they are taking advantage of the fact that INGEN (the company that tried to make the park) has abandoned the park, and want to build a park of their own. In the movie, the CEO from the first movie, John Hammond, has been kicked off the board of directors because his nephew staged some sort of coup de tat and had now taken control and wants to capture the animals to make a park of his own. Apart from this, just about everything about these characters is the same. Their motives are the same, their personalities are the same, they even die the same way. So why change it? I understand the desire to take artistic license, but there is just no reason to do it if the characters are essentially the same! All you did was change the names!

And another thing that I thought was kind of a bummer is that they chose the wrong character to have in this movie. I’ve got nothing against Jeff Goldblum, but Dr. Grant was a much better character in my opinion. Plus, I thought Malcolm died at the end of the book! They didn’t even leave it open-ended, somebody asked about him, and a character just shook his head. Unless he beat up all of the dinosaurs and swam back to the mainland (with a broken leg mind you), there is no way he should have survived that! Unless of course you were Chuck Norris, Jack Bauer or Sean Bean. But again, I digress.

Now onto another thing that makes me cry, Vince Vaughn. You have to give the guy some credit, he made a shot at becoming a more dramatic actor, and he wasn’t that bad either, the problem was that all of the scripts he was handed were just crap, including that shot-for-shot whale of a fail remake of Psycho. You did not misread that. They actually tried to remake Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece that is Psycho, and in this version, they practically gave away the twist ending in the trailer. But I digress. In this movie, he was sent as the photographer who turned out to be some sort of badass… Even though he didn’t do anything. He used a wrench… to open a cage. We know he held a gun at some point… because he wanted to take out the bullets so one of the poachers couldn’t shoot a T-Rex that was chasing the group. He did some other things that were… done? But that was about it. Needless to say, I hated this character and I’m glad that Vaughn decided to go into more comedic roles.

The only character that I actually liked in this movie was the main hunter, played by Pete something (I don’t know how to spell or pronounce his name). You may also remember him as Kobayashi from The Usual Suspects. Yup, he played the lawyer that almost got his brains blown out by the wussiest Baldwin brother. More recently, he was the dying father in Inception, and the shady mob boss in The Town. In this movie, he plays the main poacher that is hired by the company to bring back as many dinosaurs as possible. Actually, now that I think about it, that’s all there really is to his character. And yet, he’s far more interesting than anybody else in this movie. Maybe it’s because he has a gun and actually uses it! That’s the problem with this movie, it has a ton of characters, but we don’t care about any of them. In the first one, I really liked the characters, I already mentioned that I liked Dr. Grant, but the Kenyan hunter was cool, Samuel L Jackson playing a scientist was… a miscast in my opinion, but still interesting. In this movie, I just watched it thinking “Boring… Boring… Ooh! T-Rex! Okay that’s over… Boring… Boring… Ooh! Raptors!”

Going back to Vince Vaughn for a second, I have to bring up something about the gun. Throughout the whole movie, he, Jeff Goldblum and Julianne Moore are protesting the fact that INGEN is taking the animals off of the island, arguing that their actions will get people killed. They also believe that it isn’t right to take the dinosaurs out of their natural habitat. At one point in the movie, Pete whatshishame has a chance to take a shot at a T-Rex that is storming through their camp, eating everybody alive. At the moment where he is going to take the shot, he realizes that the shells in his gun are empty. It is later revealed that Vince Vaughn took the loaded shells out of the gun and replaced them with the already used ones. So the people who wanted to keep people from getting killed just did something that ended in people getting killed. That’s ethical, right?

And now, we come to the biggest problem of the movie. This is where the entire movie just dies. I could take bad characters, unnecessary changes from the source material and confused morals to the story. But this part just irks me to no end. After they capture the T-Rex and put it on a ship to be brought to the mainland, the ship arrives in San Diego, crashing into the harbor. The dock workers look for the crew, only to find that they have all been eaten, one of them even left his hand on the helm. It should also be pointed out that at this point, the T-Rex was still unconscious and in the part of the ship where they left him. So what the hell killed the crew? Are we meant to believe it was the T-Rex? If so, how did she break out, kill the crew, and get back into captivity without damaging the ship in the slightest? I know this is something small, but for crying out loud people! Am I the only one who spotted that?! Somebody told me that in the original screenplay, a bunch of raptors snuck aboard and killed the crew and then jumped off. Well why didn’t we see that? Answer me you sluts! 

All in all, you can gather by now that I don’t care much about this movie. However, with all that said, it isn’t all bad. The scenes with the dinosaurs, though they aren’t as nearly breathtaking as the first one, are still pretty cool and fun to watch. Now you are probably wondering what I thought about the third movie. To be completely honest with you, I actually don’t think it’s that bad. Mind you, it’s far from perfect. VERY far from perfect, but I don’t nearly have as many problems with it as I do with Lost World. Yeah some of the characters are idiots, but they at least realized at one point that they are being idiots and accept the fact that they are in over their heads. The scenes with the dinosaurs (especially the raptor chase) are pretty freaking cool and it was nice to see Dr. Grant again. But I’m pretty sure I’m alone on that one, so say what you will.