Mo Collins | Through the Shattered Lens

The latest episode of Fear The Walking Dead really didn’t do much for me.

That’s not necessarily the show’s fault, or at least not entirely. As I’ve said from my first review, I didn’t start regularly watching this show until the start of the current (and final) season. As a result, I’m still learning who many of these characters are. Perhaps if I had watched the earlier seasons, I would have been more emotionally connected to Sarah’s search for her brother, Wendell. And perhaps I would have been more concerned with Josiah’s need to get revenge on Morgan.

But, even with all that in mind, last Sunday’s episode was punishingly slow. It felt like a throwback to one of those old episodes of The Walking Dead where some minor character would randomly run into someone and then we’d have to spend 40 minutes listening to them have a conversation about nothing before some random Walkers finally showed up. For lack of a better term, it was kind of boring. For all of the trouble that the episode put the viewer through, it needed a better pay off than “Wendell’s here but I’m not going to let you see him.”

Josiah carrying around his brother’s disembodied heard was visually interesting but, from a narrative point of view, it was pretty stupid and it kind of made me wonder how someone who could be dumb enough to carry around a zombie head could possibly manage to survive in the world of the walking dead. The fact that it all led to Josiah having to euthanize an adorable dog did not help matters. I get that the whole idea behind The Walking Dead and its spin-offs is that the world is a terrible place where terrible things happen but honestly, Josiah was just an idiot. He was probably an idiot before the zombie apocalypse and he’s apparently still an idiot afterwards. My hope is that we’ve seen the last of Josiah because I really don’t want to have to spend another episode listening to him whine about his dead brother. Instead, I hope future episodes will take us back into The Tower and the world of Strand. Colman Domingo only appeared for a few minutes in the latest episode but he owned every one of them.

Finally, it appears that there are still some atomic warheads that were not set off during the previous season. And I guess the Stalkers now have one of them. That’s probably not a good thing.

Epix is doing a free preview this weekend so, earlier tonight, I watched Robert De Niro and Zac Efron in Dirty Grandpa. You may remember Dirty Grandpa as being the film that came out in January and made a ton of movie despite the fact nobody will admit to having seen it.

Myself, I hope that the cast of Dirty Grandpa was paid in cocaine because then, at the very least, I could be assured that they had a better time making the movie than anyone else has had watching it. The plot, as it is, features De Niro as a widower who is obsessed with getting laid and Efron as his straigher-than-straight grandson who takes him down to Daytona for Spring Break. Efron is engaged to Meredith (Julianne Hough) who we’re supposed to dislike because of …. reasons, I guess. The film certainly hates her, even though all she’s trying to do is plan a nice wedding. De Niro would rather Efron get together with a boring political activist (Zooey Deutch). Meanwhile, De Niro himself is obsessed with Deutch’s friend, played by Aubrey Plaza.

Anyway, this is one of those films that’s even worse than it sounds. The pacing is so off that even the scenes that should work fall flat and visually, the film resembles a high quality YouTube video. The majority of the humor is racist, misogynistic, and homophobic (but, of course, we’re not supposed to notice because the “good” girl is vaguely defined as being a liberal political activist). Zac Efron, who is really only a credible actor when he’s playing dumb (read into that whatever you want), is miscast as someone who actually has something that’s going on in his life and Aubrey Plaza, one of the most unique comedic performers working today, is almost totally wasted. Both Zooey Deutch and Julianne Hough struggle within the confines of a script that obsessively hates women.

(By the way, would you believe that the script for this movie was included on the Black List, the annual list of the “best” unproduced scripts in Hollywood? I would. Being included on the Black List is perhaps the most overrated honor that Hollywood can provide, seeing as how most Black List films end up sucking.)

As for Robert De Niro, his performance actually isn’t that bad. But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s Robert freaking De Niro playing a role that could have just as easily been performed by Johnny Knoxville in old age makeup.

Anyway, I watched Dirty Grandpa because I wanted to see if it was as bad as everyone said it was and it was.

Go to Hell, Dirty Grandpa.