Up, Grief, and Healing from Loss

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Disney-Pixar’s Up has a special place in my heart. It’s a fun adventure film with some stunning animation and great writing, and every time I sit down to rewatch it, I find myself in love with nearly everything on the screen all over again. This wasn’t always the case, though. The story is centered on a man dealing with his wife’s death, and fridgings are an overused trope that I hate a great deal. But the more I thought about it, the less this fridging in particular bothered me. Up takes that common trope and reworks it into an important life lesson with a surprisingly positive message about dealing with the death of a loved one.

The Walking Dead Season 4 Finale

I hate cliffhangers. I really do, because no matter how angry I get at the rest of the season, cliffhanger endings actually make me want to tune in for the next season. Season 4 has left me feeling very ambivalent about this show. There are parts of it that I really did not like—such as the Governor’s storyline and ending—and there have been other parts of it that I loved.

Spoilers and a trigger warning for rape ahead.

The Walking Dead: “After” Review

Well, finally, Season 4 of The Walking Dead continues. I can’t say that I’ve been too happy about the season thus far. I mean, the midseason finale was a pretty big letdown when it comes to the Governor’s character, even if we finally got to see the epic battle between him and the Atlanta survivors. What I can say that I like about the confrontation is the prison is currently overrun with walkers and now uninhabitable, putting our survivors into even more danger. It was about time for them to move on from that place, though I still lament the death of Hershel and am significantly worried for some of the other characters as well. So at this point, I think there’s still hope that I might come out of this season happy.

Making the situation even worse for our survivors, I’m sure, is that among them there’s still a potential murderous psychopath, whose identity has yet to be revealed and who spent the first half of the season luring walkers to the survivors by feeding them rats. And considering that we don’t know yet who this person is, I’m guessing that he or she survived the showdown at the prison and is still at large.

My bets are on it being one of these two. No, seriously. He is the sole survivor of a previous group of people, and she likes to name and befriend walkers.

This episode picks up right where the last one left off, with Carl and a severely injured Rick escaping from the prison together. Spoilers after the jump.

The Walking Dead: “30 Days Without an Accident” Review

Well, I can’t say that I was particularly excited for this season. Last year, I had started reviewing this show weekly, but I held off on giving my thoughts on the final episode of season three and ultimately neglected to review it. Partly, I chose not to write the review due to being really busy at the time, but mostly I chose not to write it because I thought it was a huge disappointment.

Thankfully, though, I at least didn’t hate this season’s opening episode, “30 Days Without an Accident”. Maybe there’s hope The Walking Dead and I can rekindle our relationship.

Spoilers after the jump.

The Walking Dead: “This Sorrowful Life” Review

Spoilers! And potentially triggering content!

This week’s episode was just as exciting as last week’s, and it brought us a lot of great character moments. As a whole, this season is shaping up very nicely, despite a few iffy things here and there, like killing off every black character thus far besides Tyreese and Sasha. And though I was disappointed that Andrea didn’t feature in this episode at all, considering what happened last week, “This Sorrowful Life” managed to be thrilling just the same.

When first watching this episode, I honestly thought it was going to be about Rick moping around because he planned on handing Michonne over to the Governor, which makes little sense now that I think about it. In “Arrow on the Doorpost” I thought Rick could tell that the Governor was BSing him about the deal. I mean, the Governor allowed Merle to almost kill Glenn, he sexually assaulted Maggie, lied about everything involving the Atlanta survivors to Andrea, and attacked the prison with walkers. Clearly, he’s a man of his word.

But all that aside, I could certainly see why the temptation to hand Michonne over to the Governor was there. And looking back on the whole Randall incident of last season, I sincerely worried that Rick would go through with the plan. I was pleasantly surprised when he didn’t.

The Walking Dead: Seasons 1 and 2 Review

Spoiler alert!

Well, I’d say waiting two seasons to watch Shane die was certainly worth it, but that might imply wanting him dead to be my only reason to follow this show. The Walking Dead certainly differs from other mainstream zombie shows and movies, probably due to its focus. Most zombie things tend to concentrate on showing, you know, zombies. The Walking Dead, on the other hand, will go almost entire episodes without bloodthirsty carcasses stumbling across the screen to eat the random extras.

The lack of zombies—or walkers, in this case—has caused a bit of an outrage among some of the fans. This is probably in part due to the comics the show is based off, where the writers stated that they wanted the story to follow the character Rick around and chronicle his life during this tragedy. I cannot quote that exactly, as most of my comics are being borrowed at the moment, but you get the picture.

If there’s one thing I have to give The Walking Dead credit for it would be that, first and foremost, it’s one of the few things I’ve seen that’s portrayed people with real human reactions. I always find myself comparing it to something like the Resident Evil films, where Alice will meet an unimportant extra and watch that person get eaten with little to no emotional reaction to it. Like, it’s just a person, who cares, right? On top of that, not everyone in The Walking Dead is some badass with super fighting skills. They’re real relatable people having real relatable reactions.