Catch .44 - 2011

Awful. Just terrible. Bad start, bad ending, bad characters. What can I save? Maybe Forest Whittaker, because he was his usual self as an actor, but it’s not like his character Ronny deserves much.

It starts with three girls talking: Tes, Dawn and Kara. Soon they quit the small talk and start speaking about their business in this remote diner. They’re looking for a truck driver but they don’t know who he is, so they figure the owner of the place must know for sure what’s going on in her place,  Tes is certain that if drugs are smuggled throw there she can give them information, so they get up, guns in hands. They don’t look very good though, and Kara is shot dead right away. With a shotgun at close range, there’s no doubt she dies. Flashback to introduce them and see how they got there. I thought, oh my that was the ending? But no, the movie goes back and forth a few times :-/ Basically they work for this drug boss Mel (Bruce Willis in one of his most embarrassing characters) and although last time apparently they screwed up he’s given them another assignment. Kara feels something’s not right but the others don’t listen to her. Tes even gets angry at her suspicions because she keeps saying that Mel never let them down… he told them somebody’s stealing his drugs (or something like that) and they have to find out what is going on. 

None of them is very likable actually, they look like silly girls who think that using swear words makes them tough :-/ while truth is that an over usage of the f word only makes them look ignorant (specially the ‘you know what? f you …  no other arguments huh?). They do over use it, they barely use other words. Anyway, we see Ronny killing a deputy sheriff and then stop them while they’re driving there. He just talks to them for a while then lets them go, and they don’t seem to know him at all, they’re just eager to go on. They get to the diner and as we already saw, Kara is killed in a second. Dawn gets crazy and empties her gun on the owner who shot her sister. A man sitting alone gets up and shoos Dawn. Two out of three are dead already. Finally Tes seems to wake up and shoots him. A man (Billy) comes out from behind the bar ( I think) and points his weapon at her. Drop your weapon or I shoot you-no you drop your weapon or I shoot you . That kind of thing. 

At this point Ronny comes in and shoots a couple who simply stopped at the diner to eat, maybe because they were witnesses or maybe just because he likes shooting people. Anyway, he says the most absurd things: 1, that Billy was paid to take them girls out, which is absurd because he killed nobody, not the dead girls and not Tes right in front of him. Ronny says Mel doesn’t care about them, and he doesn’t like people screwing up like they did last time (whatever happened, we don’t know)and that he set them up. Tes here is even sillier than she ever was; the tough woman apparently was hiding a teenager with a crush on her boss, because now she’s all like “I know him” and “he wouldn’t do that to me” and stuff like that. Come on!

Ronny also reminds her that they know each other, he was the one who took her to meet Mel in the first place, and yet she had no memory of him. All this time he’s been in love with her, he always helped her (last assignment was the only one he couldn’t be there to help her, which is the only thing of the whole movie that actually makes sense: they always made it because Ronny was there! )

Ronny wants to marry her but she doesn’t of course. Ronny gives her an ultimatum: shoot Billy and come with me or I shoot you. She doesn’t know what to do because he’s clearly dangerous and delusional, but at the last moment she turns and tries to shoot him. 

Next scene we see Mel arriving. Ronny’s alive, only injured, while everybody else is dead, and Tes looks dead too. Mel speaks to Ronny for a while, some kind of story using a cowboy and an indian to talk about the two of them (I think someone has seen a few Tarantino movies… please let Tarantino things to Tarantino ok?) . After the story, Mel shoots Ronny and prepares to leave but surprise surprise Tes is not dead yet and she shoots Mel ! Good, these  could have been a nice ending, and after shooting him she should have had used her last bit of energy and drop where she was, the end, that would have been ok, but noooo, of course not, this movie is awful to the core. Next scene we see Mel’s driver outside. He hears the shots, wonders what to do for no more than a couple of seconds, then goes to watch what is happening… and as soon as he steps out of the car Tes is already there, gun in hand. She takes the car and drives away! Wow, the expert killer Ronny had thought her dead, she certainly look like dead in there, but now after shooting Mel she only needed three seconds to get up, get out and quickly sneak up on the driver, and drive away.

Of course. Why not? Who cares, a decent finale would not have saved this movie. 

Undertow - 1996

Sorry but no. A third of it was good, but then the mess starts. It’s a really simple story, seen hundreds of times really. Jack (Lou Diamond Phillips) alone on his way when a storm hits and he loses control of his vehicle and crashes. He finds shelter in the home of a crazy man, and since a big big storm is coming he can’t leave. Nothing original, there’s plenty of plots like this, still that alone wouldn’t mean much, something good can come out of old stories.. at first it seemed like this could be the case, but it lost itself very very quickly. 

What’s not too bad: I suppose that Jack found shelter at a remote cabin but I don’t know how he got there: I only see him waking up asking where he is. He meets young Willy (Mia Sara) and her husband, older and crazy Lyle (Charles Dance), whose welcome is a rifle pointed at him. At first LDP acts all scared and surprised, like any normal person would, and I liked that. I kind of liked the storm too, the rain noise, because it created a sort of claustrophobic atmosphere that served its purpose. Willy’s character was probably the one described better, because she matter-of-factly tells Jack that she had been given to Lyle when she was 13 because her father could not pay (so he sold his own daughter) and she married Lyle and has lived alone with him in that cabin ever since, scared of him, like a prisoner in her own home, but also dependent on him for nearly everything. I think that it was right that she screamed when he got hurt and cried hysterically when he died, because he was all she had in a long time, he was her husband and in a way her everything.

That’s pretty much it. 

What I didn’t like: first-the absurd affair. From the beginning you just know that Jack and Willy will end up together, not even a little doubt. I kind of hoped for a moment that they might surprise me doing what’s right and meaningful, but no, they kiss and shower and have sex… Mia is undoubtedly beautiful here but I always think that nudity is only a cheap trick to cover the emptiness of the movie. With this movie, I rest my case. 

Just imagine, her crazy husband has gone out for a while, but there’s still a storm, it’s not like he might be gone for long, and what happens? She opens Jack’s door then goes outside and has a shower..waiting for him to come… the stupidest thing ever. Even worse, they get interrupted there but the movie couldn’t end without making it clear that they have sex and therefore have to leave together ( :-/ ) and it was even worse, because it almost seems like she went from an aggressive man to another. I’m not saying Jack forces her, no no, but it seems like he does it to claim her as his own over Lyle’s. Plus this is no romance because he might very well be the only man she has talked to in years since she married at 13 and Lyle’s not exactly social!  

Second-Jack’s character becomes weird pretty soon, trying to act cool and sort of compete with Lyle, which would make more sense if Lyle wasn’t an old guy with lots and lots of weapons, and then his general behaviour, flirting with Willy when it’s pretty obvious that it means risking his very life, and shouting at him in rage but then doing nothing about it, and his attitude towards Willy like: chose me or him, or something like that. 

The storm scenes were not very cured, at a certain point it breaks all the house windows and yet it doesn’t seem to do much else; when Jack goes out he has to come back because he can’t walk and can’t stand in all that mud, that’s all. One other thing I didn’t like: Jack presses Lyle between the truck and a fallen tree and Lyle screams in pain and rage, but when Jack frees him Lyle is just as good as new, not even a little pain it seems. 

One more thing, the whole ending. The storm’s gone, Lyle tells him he’ll drive him out of there but Willy tells Jack that if he goes with him Lyle will kill him (who knows why, other than how crazy he is) then they kiss and Lyle sees them so now it’s for sure that he wants to kill him. It’s a crossbow-vs-rifle match (yep, for real) and Jack hurts him twice while Lyle never injures him which seems kind of silly since he’s been using weapons for a long time while Jack the day before wasn’t even able to load the crossbow and had only fired a weapon ‘a couple of times’. Anyway, after that Jack takes his rifle but Lyle has another weapon so Jack shoots him. Willy screams for a while then she wants Jack to bury him; they should go away now but Lyle has the keys of the truck so they go back for them but Lyle’s gone: it seems like two arrows and a rifle shot are nothing for him. They start shooting at each other (all the bear-traps on the floor were more boring/annoying than scaring honestly), Jack is injured, until they end up face to face. Jack’s weapon is empty, Lyle has his rifle pointed at Jack’s belly… and then nothing. He lowers it and walks away, and a few seconds later he’s found dead, sitting on his own chair… so what, he knew he was going to die in the next ten seconds so he let Jack live? How, why, how absurd is that?!?

Jack and Willy go away using Lyle’s truck, and it has to climb uphill and when it gets bogged down in the mud but Jack keeps pushing the gas pedal and making a face like he was actually pushing the truck himself, and miraculously the wheels come out of the holes they created and they can drive away ( !! :-/ seriously? ) 

Dance is a great actor, but I thought he was wasted here making a redneck accent when his own is so good; of course it would have made no sense here, but still.   

All in all, it’s not a movie I’d watch again, no.

ITA preso in trappola

Manhattan nocturne - 2016

Porter (Adrien Brody) is a daily newspaper reporter. The movie starts with him narrating the story like in an old noir. 

His wife is a surgeon, they have two children, and he’s rather famous after the time he found a missing child (accidentally, he says). Still he’s unhappy , looks lost and empty. 

He meets gorgeous Caroline who asks him to investigate her husband’s death. Simon Crowley was a film director. Caroline seduces Porter. She once goes to meet his wife with a bad excuse, so of course the smart doctor understands she was faking it. 

His boss learns that he’s seeing Caroline and wants him to retrieve a video for him. When he doesn’t find it the old man sends men to beat him up and then to search the house. The little son and the nanny are injured and his wife takes the kids away. Furious about this, Porter tries to threaten the old man but doesn’t back down and threatens him back. 

Up until now it was not bad at all, slowly escalating to keep the interest high. Unfortunately the last part was not as involving. Sadder, but still less involving. 

Investigating some more, Porter finds the video, watches it and gives it to his boss. Now that the old man is calm and satisfied, he gives Porter a key found when searching Caroline’s apartment. Porter understands it all now: Simon was twisted, always playing sick stupid games on Caroline. The night he died he took Caroline to a building about to be destroyed in the morning, and when she refused to tell him her pony-story he locked both of them inside and then he swallowed the key. Mad with fear and desperation, she killed him and then opened him up to retrieve the key and escape. Simon taped the whole thing. 

The pony-story was very very sad. When she was nine years old her stepdad abused her constantly, and when she asked for a pony so much like it was the only thing in the world she wanted, he finally gave her one but then he shot the poor animal right in front of the poor little girl, the monster. Her mother never contradicted him. :-/

ITA Manhattan night

Payback - 1999

I didn’t like this at all. 

Porter (Mel Gibson) with his wife and best friend rob and kill a group of Chinese gangsters, but then his friend is not satisfied with just half the money, so he betrays Porter, shoots him and goes away with all the money and his wife too. They believe him dead, but he isn’t. Someone takes two bullets out of his back and as soon as he feels up to it he goes to get back what he thinks is his. He makes a lot of people angry: a criminal gang, a Chinese gang, two corrupt cops, everybody’s onto him, but he makes it, just like that. He gets shot, run over, beaten with a hammer, but nothing stops him, and he goes on until he finds the 70.000 that were his part, and for that he kills quite a lot of criminals. Just 70.000, not a cent more, he’s very adamant about that. Was I supposed to find that funny? It was just silly. It might have been funny in another movie, but not here.  

ITA Payback la rivincita di Porter

Rage - 2014

I didn’t like this. The ending was not too bad, but I didn’t like it anyway. Story: Paul Maguire (Nicolas Cage) was a criminal, now he’s a businessman. He lives with his second wife and his beloved teenage daughter. When she disappears, kidnapped and killed, he goes on a rampage to find her first with the help of two old friends. 19 years ago the three of them killed a man and stole his money. The man was the brother of the Russian mob boss, and since she was killed with an old Russian weapon they think the Russians did it for vengeance against him, believing they somehow found out about them. They rage war against the Russians and of course make them very angry. A lot of people die and at the end Paul thinks about it and he understands the truth. After he had killed that man with his friends, he had kept his weapon. That night his daughter and her two friends had drunk a lot (wow, barely sixteen and they drank alcohol from the bottle like old drunks) and she showed them the gun and Michael (I think) had killed her by accident, and the two boys were so terrified of Paul that they took her away to make everyone believe criminals had kidnapped her, what with his past and all…

I mean, the ending was something of an interesting twist, but all in all the movie was just not good.

ITA - Tokarev or Furia implacabile

The night stalker - 2016

Two things to say about this movie: Lou Diamond Phillips was really good, the rest was not.
I speak as someone who knew nothing about this terrible story and had never heard of this serial-killer, so I have no say regarding its accuracy. I only talk about the movie as I saw it. LDP's performance as Richard Ramirez was really interesting, the most interesting thing of the whole movie, the only thing that kept me interested in what I was watching.
Bellamy Young plays lawyer Kit, sent to find out if Ramirez also killed a mother and son not listed in his charges. In four days a man will be executed in Texas, for those murders, and having her studied Ramirez a lot, she's sure that he committed them. Kit's character is not interesting at all, she seems so plain and doesn't feel so interested in the case as she says she is. I think this film lacked a lot: the fear and hope of the man in Texas should have replaced all the boring calls from Kit's lawyer friend reminding her of the time passing (specially since they didn't seem to affect her at all); I liked young Kit (Chelle Sherrill) but all those scenes did not explain those strong feelings that adult Kit will tell us later about - the fear he'd come for her for example. We can guess that everybody lived in fear from what the tv news say, but none of that is actually felt; young Ramirez's tragic story is interesting (how he was shown images of war and violence as a child, and how he saw his father shoot his mother in cold blood without care or flinch, tragic experiences that make having a normal life rather difficult but are no excuses for his behaviour because he chose his own path, he chose to rape and kill, he didn't have to - and yet it lacks pathos; mostly though, the problem is with adult Kit's scenes. Her absent look didn't speak of torment or pain or professionalism or any other strong emotion. The importance of her task was not enough felt, like anything she did or said.
I liked the scenes with Richard (LDP) though: how little he cared, how nonchalantly he spoke of his being evil and his wish to be pure 100% evil, and how he waited until she confessed her secret before revealing her that yes, he killed the mother and son at that hotel; he said it as if he had to, give and take, that kind of stuff, not to repent or to save someone. When she asked for more, "just you and me" with his dying breath he told her he did not care for her or her sad story, that she was nothing; he said it to enjoy his power over her and his evil nature one last time.
The end had a sadly ironic line, when her mother said that in those terrible days of fear she wanted to have her at home where she was safe, not knowing that the worst thing that ever happened to her happened at home, when her mom's boyfriend raped her.

The last days on Mars - 2013

Rather boring, actually. Unless you like watching long scenes in astronaut suits and an open finale.. me, not so much. I was prepared for a few boring scenes at the beginning, until the troubles started happening, then I thought there would be more interesting scenes... there were a couple of scenes that weren't bad, but generally it was rather boring. More in detail:

Vincent ( Liev Schreiber) is our protagonist, and has a close relationship with Lane, for some reason; I think she helped him after some sort of traumatic experience, I'm not sure. He's on Mars, along with four other man and two women. He's been there 6 months already, and only have 20 more hours before returning home, so basically the title should read "the last hours on Mars", not days..

Anyway, one of them, Marko, finds some kind of bacteria and wants to study it more because it could be a huge discovery, and trouble starts. When people die they become infected and start walking around with a lust for killing. Marko is the first one, he dies and then kills one of the women, Balby, Dalby or something like that, can’t be bothered to look that up right now. Both turn into murderous monsters and start walking towards the base. There’s only Kim and Harrison(or something) there, and he rushes to open the door! as if there was nothing strange in seeing the man he thought was dead walking all the way (it was far away); I don’t remember if the monster still had his helmet on or not, but still, he opened without looking because the monsters certainly didn’t look normal anymore nor they could talk. He’s killed right away but Kim fights a lot and can warn the others when they arrive. She understands pretty quickly how dangerous the situation is, and when the leader is badly injured and dies, she rushes to tie his body up so he won’t be able to rise again, while the others were judging her and telling her things like ‘he’s dead, what are you doing?’, as if being dead he would care about being tied up. 

When they all understand that dead bodies rise again as monsters they grasp the situation, and the man Irwin who was some kind of doctor or psychologist or whatever basically kills Kim by locking her up inside a room with the monsters to save himself, while she was still alive and well, and then he tells the others that “she didn’t make it”. I was glad when he died too. Aren’t astronauts supposed to be trained not to panic? 

Anyway, one by one they all die, the last ones are Lane and Vincent. Lane is hurt and wants to save Vincent so she walks away while he sleeps but he runs to her so she takes off her helmet and dies and he cradles her body until the monster starts moving, then he crashes it with a rock. 

He had called for help and when help arrive, they get out of the vessel without being able to see outside so they all get killed, and the monsters take over with it, but Vincent gets on board to free it, and the movie ends with him alone, leaving a message that should reach someone in 15 minutes, and he says that he’ll be waiting to be rescued unless he feels that he’s about to transform too and in that case he’ll somehow ( I don’t remember how) destroy the ship-vessel-whatever and end it. 

The movie ends right there, so we don’t know if he’ll be found alive or not, which is silly because if he dies and can’t fully explain what happened there’s a chance that other people might be send there to find out what happened and fall victim as well. 

Anyway, when we meet Vincent and Lane at the beginning, he tells her the things he won’t miss and names Kim multiple times, letting us know they all think she’s a nuisance, that nobody likes her, but honestly she was the only one with a little sense in her head, and when she died in that stupid way the movie lost its only chance. Her fight with the monsters was the most interesting bit of it all. The rest was rather boring.

vincent - liev schreiber

lane - romola garai

kim - olivia williams

irwin  - johnny harris

Longmire season 1

I liked this series a lot, the western atmosphere, Henry most of all the characters, he is my absolute favourite, but also Walt and Vic, at first, but not too much at the end because I don't like her obvious adoration for Walt. 

For a lot of episodes we keep seeing little flashbacks of Walt and Henry, regarding the mystery of Walt’s wife’s murder. Indians taking care of Walt’s wounded back, and Walt telling Henry that it was a secret not to tell Cady. 

1-Pilot  - Walt lost his wife a year ago. Case: Walt and Vic find a man dead. He was looking for an indian girl, his daughter who ran away and turned into a prostitute. Walt asks Henry’s help to talk to her, and when later hears that “if you want girls, go talk to the indian at the Red Pony” he is upset and goes to Henry asking about it, and of course he’s pretty upset too; still, later he provides informations on “the other indian at the Red Pony”. This guy gets shot while talking to Walt, and Walt gets the shooter, leaving him wounded after getting the info he wants. (Did this murderer die? Did Walt call someone to go get him? He was bleeding but I haven’t seen the wound clearly. Could he drive to find help? Did Walt really leave him there to die?) . They find the girl and they bring her back to her mother at the Reservation. They should be even now, I guess, whatever happened before between Walt and the Indian police. I loved the scene when they met Matthias and first thing first he punched Walt and Vic threw herself at him in a rage and they had to held her, she was great, a lovely scene. I already liked the actress in Battlestar Galactica, she’s good :-) . Walt finds out that his deputy Branch is running for Sheriff. 

2-The dark road - We meet Walt’s daughter. Walt speaks German! Walt asks Vic and Henry who Cady’s dating, and at the end we see that she’s dating Branch, which was not at all surprising. The case: a young girl’s body is found; she’s Mennonites, not Hamish, and Rumspringa is when they go out to see the world and decide if they want to go back or not. Walt notifies Hannah’s dad but the man doesn’t seem to care much about it “she was lost to me long ago” :-/  Walt could not notify her mother because the man wouldn’t let her talk to strangers :-/ Cyrus Brooks was a Mennonites but left at 17. Walt has known him for ten years. He drove her to work to help her, while Davis was in love with her. Hannah had scheduled to secretly meet her mom so Walt goes in her place and guess what, she didn’t know about her death because the husband had not told her! Unlike him, she cries her heart out. When Hannah’s brother found out she was working as a stripper he thought it was his duty to bring her home but she didn’t want to; she ran and he ran after her, and she fell and hit her head and died.

3-A damn shame - There’s a fire, and at first they thought that Ray had died, leaving his wife Alice and his son TJ, but he was actually running away from the mob, and faked his death. When a guy comes to the station asking where Alice is, saying that he’s Federal, Ferg tells him where to find her. He certainly wasn’t, and kept Ray’s family hostage; they get him, but Ray died trying to help, to prove he wasn’t a coward. 

4-The cancer - Two indians are found dead in a river; Henry knew one of them, Freddie Whitehawk, so he’s very touched. Great scene. A cop, Eli, is involved; he worked with Freddie growing and selling pot, but a competitor killed Freddie so Eli shot him. Another one was still around and they shoot him down, Eli and Walt.  

A woman, Lizzie, flirts with Walt, and Vic’s jealous *rollingeyes* I really like Walt and Henry’s friendship :-))  

5-Dog soldier - The disappearance of three Cheyenne children leads to discover how these children are taken from their homes for no good reason and given to white foster parents who take double money for indian children. There’s talk of an Hector, a mysterious figure that helps Cheyenne when they need him. The social worker planned the kidnappings and killed her accomplice, and although Walt has no actual proof he scares her telling her that Hector will come for her, so she prefers surrendering to him. I think the children will go back to the real parents, but I’m not 100% sure. - A woman trafficking children: disgusting :-//

6-The worst kind of hunter - Branch’s uncle is causing trouble at his retirement facility; he was sheriff once.  Henry throws a fundraiser party for Walt :-) but is not happy about Walt’s decision to go after the bear Vic’s married, and says about her husband “he doesn’t care, we fight all the time” and “he wants to move to Australia”; she hates Wyoming, but still she’s mad because he didn’t even ask

A body is found in pieces by to hikers, and it looks like he was killed by a bear. The man, Ed, 12 or 20 years a girl killed a girl, stabbed her 12 times.  Omar agrees to hunt the bear only if Vic goes with him. Vic is shot with a tranquilizer by Pete, the bear expert, who says he was aiming at the bear..  It was for vengeance: a guy (who’s that again?) who lost his job (guard?cop?warden?) because of him , put meat on him to have the bear kill him.

7-8 seconds - Vic’s called in while she was having sex with her husband :p a drunk Walt needs a ride home (seriously? drunk on beer? must be strong stuff!). He had called Lizzie from home, then he felt like he was cheating on his dead wife and hung up, and that’s why he went to the Red Pony and started drinking…  Cady feels guilty keeping her relationship secret, and when she says that maybe if Branch wasn’t competing against her dad it might be easier, he says he could quit the race! He said that and was serious, but she says no, she’d feel even more guilty, and she leaves him instead…  he says he doesn’t want them to be over.. guess he loves her..  and he probably doesn’t care all that much about being sheriff, his father does! It ends with Walt and Lizzie together at the Red Pony… I’m not sure I like her.. 

A man was badly beaten into a coma. Vic tells Walt that Branch might be sleeping with the victim’s wife because he knew about Walt being drunk, but he’s not, we know that! it’s Branch’s father (Gerald McRaney): I so don’t like Branch’s father! A kid beat that man Chris because he was having an affair with his dad; after he kid confessed his mother asked Chris if it was true about the affair… really woman? your son just told you he beat a man almost to death and you ask about the affair? 

8-An incredibly beautiful thing - Case:At a gas station the owner Ellis calls the sheriff’s office after seeing a girl, all dirty and confused, that looked scared. Later he’s found dead and Ruby is very shaken up. The place had a camera so they can see her; she had gone missing two years before in Portland. Walt asks Henry to track the fugitive’s car and Ferg goes with him and actually helps because he collects minerals and knows a lot about that. They find a cabin with a little baby in a rabbit cage. The girl Evelyn is kept prisoner with the animals. She’s called April now, and when another girl named October goes looking for the baby they catch her but have to release her. She also went missing, five years ago. When she sees the baby, she tries to get it and she stabs a social services woman, even tries to stab Cady but Branch stops her. October runs away while Branch worries about Cady; a car picks October up and hits Vic. They finally find the man of this ‘cult’, but not the women; somehow Walt figures out where to find them: the man had put them on the train tracks to be killed, but they save them :-)

Episode after episode we see bits of flashbacks on Walt’s past (did Walt kill his wife’s murderer? Does Henry know because he followed him? we’ll see)

9-Dogs, horses and indians - Walt hears shots on his radio, so he goes to help at the Reservation, and this time the Res cop seems actually glad to see them: “we could use the manpower”. They find the car and the body of the indian man Malcolm. The car is found in Walt’s territory. Matthias had actually found him already before, and had moved the car over the line to involve Walt. 

A motion had passed, at the Tribe Council, that changed the ‘percentage of blood required to be part of the tribe’!  (yeah, people are people everywhere, that’s the bitter truth :-/ ). Malcolm had decided it, wanted it, although I don’t know why or how money are involved, really don’t see how money can come out of it. 

We see Branch playing golf with his father: I really don’t like that man! - Walt finds out about Branch and Cady and confronts him, angry. Branch ‘was’ dating her for six months. Walt is furious, really mad, he says she was “dating Branch behind my back”, come on!!  He was so mad he went to check a place alone, but luckily the squad arrived :-p - Branch tells Cady he doesn’t regret a single moment, and then he says that now he can only do one of two things: either quit or beat Walt, and he’s no quitter…  

10-Unfinished business - A kid is dead, shot with an arrow. He was one of four guys that a year ago raped an indian girl but were found not guilty. When another boy is found dead, the father of one of the remaining two says that he wanted to kill the three boys that made his son rape that girl. He makes an attempt on the third boy’s life to make them believe him and protect his son, but then Rich tries to kill Jake. Walt stops him. Rich says that Jake had a gun to his head to make him rape the poor girl. Rich tries to kill himself then but Walt stops him. 

Walt wakes up on his couch, and Lizzy’s there, and when Vic and Ferg come to pick him up they see her there, and Walt’s kind of upset about that, he didn’t want them to know. Later on Vic asks Lizzy what her intentions with Walt are, and I found this so so annoying, how cliché her having a thing for her boss :-/  Lizzy asks her then. 

Vic hasn’t given Walt the gift that Lizzy brought for him. She just puts on her wedding ring and looks at the gift, but she leaves it in her desk drawer. 

Walt’s phone machine still has the voice of his wife; a year ago she was going thru chemo. 

 A Denver detective comes to talk to Walt: “we’ve found the man that killed your wife”. Before talking to him, Walt  calls Henry. Cady didn’t know that her mother had been murdered, she thought she had died of cancer. Now she knows and is hurt and angry at Walt for never telling her. 

Walt tells her that he was trying to protect her, that her mom didn’t want her to know. 

The Denver detective tells him that he found the body of the man that stabbed her, and asks him if he killed him, and Walt says no.

End of season 1

Cast:

Walt Longmire - Robert Taylor

Victoria Moretti - Katee Sackhoff

Henry StandingBear - Lou Diamond Phillips    :-D

Cady Longmire - Cassidy Freeman

Ferg - Adam Bartley

Branch Connally - Bailey Chase

Ruby - Louanne Stephens

Jacob NightHorse - A Martinez

Matthias - Zahn McClarnon

Criminal minds season 8

1 - The silencer - Abilene, Texas. While a prisoner is being transferred to a hospital, there is an accident and he escapes. The guard he kills is found with the lips sewn shut, so they wonder if the prisoner is the Silencer. It wasn’t too clear, so I’ll try: this man was deaf, then his mother had him undergo a highly experimental procedure and he started hearing, only in his head now it’s too loud and it never stops and he just can’t shut it off, and on top of that his mother was a horrible woman that should never have had children. Never a kind word in all his life, he has never spoken a single word, and the constant, loud noise kept driving him crazy. They catch him of course, and when he realizes there is no peace anywhere and there’s no other choice than put him back in prison, he shoots himself. The episode ends with a mysterious figure taking pictures of the entire team! I’m pretty sure s/he doesn’t have good intentions…

Morgan and Garcia are just back from a visit to London, where Emily works now. He was on temporary duty there. Alex Blake is the new girl. Garcia’s not talking to Kevin now, but she tries to start over and make friends with Alex. I understand her here, I love Prentiss and when things are good I wouldn’t want them to change (movie-wise of course; lots of things I’d like to change in my life :-/ ) but Alex is not bad. So far :-p

-As I grow older I pay less attention to what men say, I just watch what they do. Andrew Carnegie

-A man is known by the silence he keeps. Oliver Herford

2 - The pact - San Diego, CA. The victim, after a blow to the head, was chained to a car and dragged to death. Two women did it: the mother of a little girl that was killed, and the sister of a woman who killed herself after her baby boy was killed. They are out for a vengeance. They kill the woman responsible for Sam’s death and two of the four men who took little Kelly. The third is a psychopath who plays them around promising to take them to where the girl is buried, he even gets Ellen to shoot someone in exchange for Kelly's body, but the guy keeps playing with them and smiling until he uncovers a skull saying the rest is somewhere else, until the mother can’t take it anymore and kills him in rage with the shovel. Poor woman. 

They escape to Mexico, but when Sam’s aunt is caught, Darlene is not there, she went to get some drinks. Ellen said they killed five people, so I guess they killed all the four guys that got Kelly. When Rossi asks about Darlene Ellen protects her, she says "she's long gone" and when their eyes meet in the distance (Ellen on a police car, Darlene on a bus) they exchange smiles and nods, and Darlene escapes. It was a significant moment when Ellen saw her, and Darlene shrugged her shoulders as if apologizing for her running away, and Ellen smiles happy that she got away and nods to her approvingly. 

Rossi has an amount of 31 vacation days, but he doesn’t want to use it, he hates vacations - "how about a safari in Africa?" - "too hot" - "how about Italy?" - "too many relatives" :-p, so Alex: “if I were you I’d give your vacation days away to a colleague in need” so Rossi: “Garcia, see how many people in the Bureau have spouses in the military serving overseas”. Still he'll have to take six days he doesn't want...

-Ralph Steadman wrote: evil is always devising more corrosive misery through man’s restless need to exact revenge out of his hate.

-Paul Brown once said: if you win, say nothing, if you lose, say less.

3 - Through the looking glass - Families are abducted, kept prisoner for a few days then killed. They posted regularly pictures portraying a happy family that was only a façade.He makes them reveal their dirty secrets and make choices, and if he’s not satisfied he kills them. They manage to save the second family, though, and stop him.
The  guy kills Vanessa, the son's tutor, because the husband wouldn't say he had an affair with her, but after she's shot he understands the guy knows it all and confesses to avoid more deaths. Then he showed them Darren, the boy their daughter is in love with, and when given the choice: his life or the money, the daughter begs her to save him but she says he's a lowlife and he got her into drugs so she chooses the money saying she doesn't care if he's somebody's son... what a disgrace of a woman.
He even has the face to ask "where's my money?" and then the unsub shows her her son and says to confirm that she wants the money over her son's life... and now she regrets it.

It was a powerful scene when cheating and gambling-husband, controlling and shamely-greedy-mother and their addict-daughter were given a last chance. Kill themselves or young son/brother dies. The father could not sacrifice his wife or daughter, but mum said “it’s all my fault, do it” and when the unsub says “you won’t die for each other, you’re not a good family” or something like that, “so the boy will die” (or so the whole family will die, not sure) the woman screamed NO! and threw herself on the gun and turned it on herself and shot, believing to die, but it was a test, so it was merely loaded with blanks…

Beth tells Hotch she’s been offered a good job in New York, and he says she should take it because it’s good for her, and she thinks maybe that’s goodbye but he doesn’t want to break up at all, he says NY is not far and he can get there any chance he gets :) sweet :)

-The German author Goethe wrote: behaviour is the mirror in which everyone shows their true image

-One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others: Lewis Carroll

4 - God complex - A  man abducts men to operate on them and take their right leg, and if they don’t die in the operation he lets them go. What he tries to do is: reattach a leg. 

A man ‘walks’ with crutches into an ER with a leg that is not his own. The unsub’s a respected man with a wife that believes he experiments on mices. She has a prosthetic leg and he wanted to ‘fix her’ because he loves her, but she never wished for that.

Reid apparently has been calling regularly, for six months, a mysterious woman. He tells her that now his headaches are gone, and they have never seen each other. He calls her during the case for medical advice :-p Alex insists on asking him what's going on and he tells her that he reached out to a geneticist for his headaches and talking makes him think better and adds that he doesn't "want them to know about her" referring to Morgan and the others. Alex tells nothing and he whispers a ThankYou :)
Morgan and Garcia think she has a girlfriend but they don’t know who it is. She has a problem, and Reid tells her that his team might help her but she doesn’t want to because “I cannot let him hurt you because if he knew..” and she cries. Then she said Love You before hanging up, and he’s quite shaken by that….

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote: when a doctor does go wrong, he’s the first of criminals. He has the nerve and he has the knowledge.

-Body and soul cannot be separated for purposes of treatment for they are one and indivisible. Sick minds must be healed as well as sick bodies. Dr Jeff Miller

5 - The good Earth - La Grande, Oregon. Four men disappeared. A delusional woman sees herself sick no matter what the doctor says, and she also is super-naturalist, like: she buried her daughter, who was perfectly fine, but she saw her full of spots, because “the soil will heal you..”, and she abducted a pregnant woman to eat the placenta (mum and child were released safely) and she also abducted some men and kept them like animals in a barn. Now, I know she killed at least three… but I’m not sure about what she was doing with them… gathering their blood? Eat some parts of them believing it will heal her? The blood was to be mixed, or drank, or poured on the soil… dunno. They catch her and Blake comes up with a trick to make her surrender, just to show us how good she is, so we won’t miss Emily. 

JJ’s son Henry is scared of Halloween because it’s the time when monsters can go out and blend in, and he overheard mum and dad talk and JJ was saying that there was no end to all the monsters walking around… but at the end Henry decided to go treat or treating anyway after JJ told him he should go and figure out which monsters are real and which ones are not. Basically, he dressed up as “his favourite profiler” and came out as a little blonde version of Reid :-) so cute, it was the cutest thing :-)

-I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity. Edgar Allan Poe

-Alfred Austin said: show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

6 - The apprenticeship - Miami, Florida. Young prostitutes are suffocated to death. An adult murderer is teaching a teenager how to be a murderer ; the kid started out by himself torturing and killing dogs. Two psychopaths with a bond, until the kid takes a girl he knows and the other gets angry, and they fight, and the kid hits him so later the adult strangles him. The team takes him out, in the end, saving the girl. At the end, a body is found, killed like Silencer did, and there’s our mysterious figure that keeps taking pictures of them all…

Reid”were there any other victims?” - Garcia”uh actually yes but not of the human variety, in the last month six puppies have been suffocated and beaten and thank God there are no photos because I draw the line at dead dogs”

Morgan wants to teach Reid how to play baseball:-p of course he knows all the theory, so they practice :p At the end he plays with Morgan’s team, and the last winning moment is all for him, hitting and running :p and Morgan shouting You did  it! and hugging him and the whole team is there, cheering and shouting :-))

-Better than a thousand days of diligent study, is one day with a great teacher. Japanese proverb

-The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your own riches, but to reveal to him his own. Benjamin Disraeli

7 - The fallen - People are being burned and killed in Santa Monica. The unsub is killing the homeless, and at last he takes Scott and the team rushes to save him.

A victim had been there only two months, but her phone shoed only Minnesota numbers, not one from California, and Reid says: “wait, so she lived somewhere two months and didn’t make any friends? I thought that only happened to me”.

Rossi was in Vietnam in 1969, and now he meets his old sergeant, Scott. At the end Rossi tells him that he joined BAU because of him. 

Honestly I didn’t understand much about those war scenes in Rossi’s past. I understand that Marine Hernandez saved Rossi and Scott in some way, but I don’t get how. He died, but I couldn’t understand why he made that move or how it would have been had he not returned to them…

It ends with Rossi dedicating his last book to Scott and Hernandez “two men who saved me so I could save others”

-You never find yourself until you face the truth. Pearl Bailey

-I am not concerned that you have fallen. I am concerned that you arise. Abraham Lincoln

8 - The wheels on the Bus… - Fredericksburg, VA. A schoolbus full of students is abducted. The driver is killed, 14 kids are left at an isolated location that the team finds. The other 10 kids are prisoners, numbered, and sort of used for a real-life videogame. Rossi understands this right away… 

I don’t know this “Gods of combat”, if this game really exists and had a bus, gas masks, shot-collars, teams.. I was thinking more of Battle Royale, where teenagers are forced to fight to the death. 

With Kevin’s help Garcia finds the frequency the two kids are using to speak and give orders to their ‘players’, and she hacks it to interrupt it and speak to a kid [ there is also the Hunger Game’s (another Battle Royale look-alike) I volunteer! :-p ] and she helps him take the collar off. Soon the team gets there with a squad, and the kids are rescued. One of the two unsubs, two brothers obsessed with competition and with this specific videogame (learning that he was dead, his brother said: I guess I won) and two of the kids are the only ones who died: Trent, killed by a girl who was his friend but whose family had also been threatened, and the girl that the volunteer was trying to save but the now dead unsub killed her. 

Kevin is enlisted too, to help. Apparently they occasionally see each other, but are still separated.

Garcia asks him out for a drink but he has other plans, although his face shows regret. I honestly think she made a mess: she didn’t want to get married because she said she believed it would have ruined everything, and by not marrying him she has ruined everything… :-/

She then meets Rossi : R.”how you doing?”- G”have you ever had one of those days that you wanna unplug from anything? Literally?” - he has her give up to him her three phones and the tablet and says “ok, tonight you’re coming to my house, we’re gonna listen to Tony Bennett on vinyl and drink 18 year-old scotch” - G”I don’t drink scotch” - R”you’ll learn” - G”thanks” - R”anytime” 

-French novelist Jean Giraudoux said: I’m not afraid of death. It’s the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

-Frederick Douglas said: it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men

9 - Magnificent light - A man who writes books and gives motivational speeches on “be who you really are and let nobody stand in your way” is the last person to see the victim alive.

The team finds out right away that the last victim had gone to see this Barry Flynn’s show. It turns out pretty quickly that he’s not the murderer: those people were actually killed by a sort of extreme ‘fan’ (Raphael Sbarge). This Carl sees things and is convinced that the people he kills are evil. 

At the end, we see the usual mysterious figure stealing Derek’s glass and hanging up more pictures on his wall.

Rossi mentions the ‘mezzaluna’ type of blade :-D :p

I know they have to close the case in 40 minutes, but seriously Garcia found Carl’s name among thousands of fans? Ok she only looked for those who live in Seattle and had had anger management issues, but come on, all the fans or superfans must for sure appear on her computer?? Anyway, it doesn’t bother me all that much (just a little bit here and there when they go too far) because it’s characters and acting performances I’m looking for in this show.

It ends with Flynn lending his car to Morgan (via Garcia) to get to a ceremony to honor Jason Ryder, his dad’s old partner, and she's there to listen to him. The mysterious figure takes Morgan's glass with his prints...

-A great deal of talent is lost to the world for the want of a little courage. Sidney Smith

-The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive but in finding something to live for. Fiodor Dostoveski  

10 - The lesson - Winslow, Arizona. Three months ago a man woke up from a coma, and is now the unsub (Brad Dourif). He wants to turn someone in his perfect marionette-exactly like the two marionettes that didn’t save his father, murdered when he was a child.

Reid is still secretly talking to this girl, who now says that she thinks her stalker has gone, because in two weeks there’s been no mail, no phone calls, and now that she thinks he’s gone she wants to meet him. Reid is scared she won’t like him.

At the end, the team goes to Rossi’s house for a drink, all but Hotchner who wants to go to NY to see Beth and Reid who goes to meet his mysterious girl, but then he sees a man sitting alone and looking around and calls her to tell her he thinks her stalker is there, and therefore not to enter. He was wrong, the man was simply waiting for a friend who was late. We see the girl’s face but he doesn’t, and we see that her gift for him is the same book he was going to give her, and when a waitress gives it to him he sees that inside she has written a quote signed Thomas Merton, the one I wrote down here.

-William Shakespeare once wrote: love looks not with the eyes but with the mind

-Thomas Merton once wrote: love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone, we find it with another

11 - Perennials - Citronelle, Alabama. Gulfport Mississippi. Pensacola, Florida. This unsub who calls his victims with different names tries to turn himself into Russell Smith, a murderer now dead 25 years. He thinks he’s Smith reincarnated, and is killing those that he believes to be Smith’s victims reincarnated.

It ends with the new mystery: after the silencer-copycat, now the mortician-exchanging-legs-copycat. “someone’s out there mimicking the crimes we’ve solved” says Morgan. Yep.

-I have never yet heard of a murderer who is not afraid of a ghost. John Philpot Curran

-The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort. Mason Cooley

12 - Zugzwang - When Reid tries to phone his lady friend, someone else is there and he’s crazy scared for her and talks to Hotch first and then to all the team. He’s so touching, like never before. This scene is very well played, when he says “please help me” his begging voice gets to you, and his “help me find her” touches your heart. It touched mine..

Garcia finds her surname quickly, not many geneticists called Maeve. I love that he doesn’t want to see her picture. :-3

Investigating, her parents tell Hotch that they suspect her fiancée (Reid didn’t know about a fiancée) and he turns out to be the man Reid had suspected to be her stalker, that time at the restaurant! He says he was stalked too, though. The solution is pretty easy: not this guy, but his new girlfriend Diane (Michelle Trachtenberg) was the stalker. 

She abducts both him and Maeve, and by this time she’s still alive. She is alive when Reid gets there too. The boyfriend is dead, and Reid tries to make a deal with her, and tells her that he wants her, not Maeve, but when Diane kisses him she understands he doesn’t love her at all. He could not fake that.

Now she’s super dangerous, and when Reid admits he would die for Maeve, Diane can’t accept that and does the worst thing, puts the gun to her head next to Maeve and when she shoots they both die. It ends right there, with Reid crying.

This was painful.

-Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. Lao Tsu

13 - Magnum opus - A guy kills people to take their blood, then he uses that blood to paint. 

Two weeks have gone by and Reid has not left his flat. Garcia and JJ stop by trying to see him but he doesn't answer and doesn't open the door; Garcia only gets him to 'knock twice if he's counscious'. Morgan always gets voicemail. Morgan tries to help Reid by involving him in the case. He succeeds, and Reid comes out to help. At the end he asks their help in tidying up his place, putting aaaaaall his books back into place; Morgan JJ and Garcia help him, then hug him and leave. The last book, he puts away himself: Maeve's book.

-My blood alone remains, take it, but do not make me suffer long. Marie Antoinette

-Sometimes the hardest part isn’t letting go, but rather learning to start over. Nicole Sobon

14 - All that remains - One year ago a man called 911 saying “my wife is gone” and now the same man calls 911 saying “my girls are gone”, his two daughters. The police believe he killed them all, and more so when they discover how much he drinks and find out about his blackouts (and double personality). The younger daughter is found dead, the older one alive, and she accuses her dad of everything, but her behaviour is odd and JJ senses something’s wrong. Truth is: she killed her mom and her sister because she was jealous (a psychopath, they say); she says her mom loved Katie more.

-Love never dies a natural death. It dies of blindness, and terrors and betrayals. It dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. Anais Nin

-Alan Lightman said: the tragedy of this world is that no-one is happy, wether stuck in a time of pain or joy

 15 - Broken - Austin, Texas. A gay kid was forced by his father to go to a “rehabilitation center” or whatever they called the place, a sort of prison camp, and ‘daddy’ also paid a prostitute to do it with the kid while he was present in the room, watching and judging, and shouting at him for not doing it right. Basically they broke the kid, and now that he’s all grown up he can’t accept himself. When he sleeps with a man he kills him because what they did was 'wrong', then he tries to do ‘the right thing’ and seeks out girls, but his impotence makes him angry and he kills them too. 

He eventually kills his father and his best friend gets killed by accident. He’s about to kill himself too but they convince him not to, and after his testimony the camp is finally shut down, that horrible place, and the people there are arrested. 

It ends showing that the mysterious figure has a recording of Blake’s lesson, so maybe he was in her class?

We see Blake teaching her class when a text arrives: it’s from Garcia and it reads “Avengers, assemble!” :-p

I don’t know if this counts because Rossi said it during the final showdown, to convince him he’s not an abomination at all; he said “ if you wanna live your life according to a single message go ahead but try John 13:34 instead:

-A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, you must love one another

-The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places. Ernest Hemingway

16 - Carbon copy - When JJ receives flowers with zugzwang written on the card, the investigation on the Replicator gets more serious. Who said that to Reid, Maeve’s stalker Diane or the Replicator? At this question they answer: if it was him then he knew about Reid’s calls, meaning he’s stalking the team

The unsub leaves a picture of Hotchner on a victim’s body. Pretty quickly they guess who he is: Donnie, a man suspected to be a murderer 15 years ago, and that was later cleared of all charges. Gideon worked on that case and caught the right guy, but Donnie’s name got to the papers and his life was ruined. Now he wants revenge. Once caught, he admits in anger of having killed those nurses, but knows nothing about the other murders, in other states. After a phone call, he kills himself. The Replicator is still out there, clearly obsessed with them

-Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Charles Caleb Colton

17 - The gathering - People with urges to kill or otherwise do horrible things, get together in a support group, where they put their fantasies into stories that will be read aloud, and this process is supposed to take the urges away. One day Peter realizes that his stories have been put into action by the man leading the group, and feels betrayed. Peter confronts Mark and then he kills him. The ep’s murderer has been murdered, and it was the first time for Peter, so now he’s struggling with it. He abducts a woman that knows him only via online chat, he takes her to the pool and eventually throws her in , all tied up to drown. The team arrives. Peter doesn’t flinch when Morgan saves the girl, he simply threatens to cut his own throat. JJ is trying to make him calm down and put down the knife, when Reid starts saying how this urges will always be in him and honestly they won’t be able to help him with that, but he still has to keep trying to fight it. Peter says “I appreciate your honesty” then slices his own throat and falls in the pool.

Hotch confronts Reid about that, and he explains: he had lied to Diane, doing what he was supposed to do, and it hadn’t worked, so now he has tried something different, sadly with the same result. His judgement is compromised because of Maeve’s death. 

Garcia meets Sam, an ex, while she was with Kevin. He’s jealous, but she is clear with him and she reminds him that “it’s no longer any of your business”. 

The episode ends with Kevin and Garcia clearing things up and stating that they want to stay friends even if the romance is no longer there (well, he has been dating other girls, so why shouldn’t she?). Garcia has invited Sam home and plays the ukulele for him (literally, no metaphores here..)

-Barbara Grizzuti Harrison once said: all acts performed in the world begin in the imagination

-Oscar Wilde said: I can resist anything except temptation 

18 - Restoration - Chicago, illinois. It’s Morgan’s city, and we meet again the detective that had suspected him. The unsub was once a kid molested by the same man that molested Morgan, so he has to talk about it to explain the molester’s MO. He even has to go to prison to talk to him, because his young friend didn’t help him, didn’t want to be a snitch, and another man dies. 

After they catch the guy, alive, Morgan speaks to the press saying that he was too one of Carl’s victims, but what happened doesn’t have to destroy you, you can become stronger and fight it. Easier said than done, one might say, but still he IS right.

After hearing the news, all the men in prison with Carl learn about what he did. It ends with Morgan receiving a call: Carl is dead.

-I am dead. Only vengeance can restore me. Terry Goodkind

-For darkness restores what light cannot repair. Joseph Brodsky

19 - Pay it forward - Bronson Springs, Colorado. In 1988 the city buried a time capsule. In 2013 it’s opened, and a head is found inside it. A man arrested for vandalism had heard of a girl being raped, and the whole thing was shut up with money. The unsub started by killing the boy responsible, then in 2013 he killed all those involved, like the journalist that did NOT write about it, then three years later he met the girl who had changed her name and married her. Now she finds out what he’s been doing and reveals the truth: she was 15 and scared, and made it up. He’s now angry at her but the team arrives, saves her and arrest him. 

-A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. Edward De Bono

-There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now. Eugene O’Neill

20 - Alchemy - Reid is burying himself into work, and he reads lots of local newspapers, and he connects two murders that nobody else has connected. A woman lost her child and a sociopath man takes advantage of her grief and the insanity that went with it. She took men home, trying to get pregnant, because he had told her that her son would come back. They would then kill the guy and cut him to pieces. The man is arrested; the woman goes to drown herself where her son had drowned.

To help the grief, Reid lets himself fall asleep and dream of dancing with Maeve. Agent Stern is played by Claudia Christian. 

-Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams? Alfred Lord Tennyson

-JRR Tolkien wrote: I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil

21 - Nanny dearest - Each year a nanny is abducted, tortured and killed and always posed on the same day. When this unsub was a child, his little sister drowned in the bathtub and the nanny was declared innocent and he never got over it. In a way it’s the same old story, over and over again, as it is always with humans: one person does something wrong and all the category gets the blame.

When they catch him, he tries to run (leaving the baby there, the baby that in his fantasy replaced his sister…) but JJ shot him twice: one hit him right on the head, she’s a great shot!

Very good the bit of scene at the end, when the little girl’s mum thanked Tara (the only victim who ever escaped him) and hugged her, and Tara finally cried.

It’s always nice to see JJ’s family, they are so cute together :-)

-Children are educated by what the grown up is and not by his talk. Carl Jung

-Alone, all alone. Nobody, but nobody can make it out here alone. Maya Angelou

22 - #6 - Downtown Detroit, Michigan. The unsub abducts a married couple and forces them to stab each other. When he finds a woman alone, without the husband, he abducts another husband alone, the ‘number six’ of the title.It turns out that number six ‘is’ the unsub.

Blake’s husband comes back with shocking news: he’s been offered a teaching position at Harvard, and got one for her too, and she doesn’t know if she’s ready to leave the BAU. Reid tells her that there will always be work, but what is rare is to find someone that makes us happy. She wants to stay at the BAU, she loves him and she'll go visit every chance she has, but she needs this job..

-We are not the same persons this year as last, nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love the changed person. W. Somerset Maugham

23 - Brothers Hotchner - Sean Hotchner calls his brother Aaron on a case. He’s a bartender now and a girl died in his club/bar/pub/whatever. At first it seems ecstasy overdose, but not to Sean. He saw the girl bleeding, from the eyes and the nose, her whole face red. People start dying, from drugs in clubs, or even at home drinking wine. 

This Sean here was kind of disgusting, talking of what his partner Thane (Sean Maguire) does very nonchalantly, as if there was nothing wrong in drugging girls to have sex with them! I call that rape :-/ How come nobody pointed that out?!?

The unsub is targeting only drug users, Thane drugged the wine to give it to girls to drink in the club, and Sean stole a box of wine from the club and sold it privately. They catch the unsub and at the end Sean shows up at Beth’s place to talk to Hotch and then is taken away in a police car.

It ends with the Replicator hacking Garcia’s computer and then we finally see his face when he’s probably on the point of killing Erin.

Garcia : “guys, I have found something stranger than a time traveling police box”, another Doctor Who reference :-D 

-Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof. Richard Bach

-Cruel is the strife of brothers. Aristotle

24 - The Replicator - New York City. Erin is walking feeling very sick and then the Replicator seated her on a bench. He calls Hotch taunting him, remembering when Foyet called him and he was too late. He seats with her so she doesn’t die alone. Erin had figured out before them that the Replicator was inside the FBI and added a note on her report, an infinity symbol cut into the victim’s wrist. So the Replicator cut that symbol on her wrist. The unsub is a genius but also alone, and when he got trouble at work he snapped. He got transferred , Erin ruined his career like she did to Blake. 

He makes their helicopter crash and takes Blake. He chains her with 8 locks, and arms a bomb in there. Blake and Hotch and Reid are locked in a sort of cell. For some reason, he let them go and locked himself and Rossi in, but Rossi expected that and took countermeasures. He can get out but locks the replicator in to blow up. It ends with the funeral and the team sharing memories about Erin, together, because as they always say “that’s what families do”

Kevin is working on Garcia’s computer. 

-Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober. Not to make us sorry but wise. HG Wells

-Richard Bach wrote: the bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.

End of season 8

McFarland, USA - 2015

This wasn’t bad. It was nice, one of those lovely stories based on a true one, which makes it all more precious. In the ‘Ron Clark story’ there were children studying, here there are boys running :-) It is based in McFarland, an American city were people are very poor and kids have to work a lot to help their families. Coach Jim White (Kevin Costner) moves there with his family because he lost yet another job and could only find one here. At first it seems the worst thing that could happen, there’s despair in their faces, but they have to give it a try. Soon White sees a boy running home from school and seeing how fast he is , he has an idea. He starts a cross-country team. He starts coaching seven boys of his school, meets the Diaz family, even goes to work in the fields with them to understand what their life is; slowly he makes a team out of them, and they accept him. At the end, the team wins the State Title, changing a lot for them because they all got a chance to continue their studies and have a better life. 

When the team starts winning, White finds himself having job offers from ‘better’ schools, and for a moment he seriously consider accepting it, after his daughter got hurt while she was out with the kids and other friends. His wife opposes this decision, saying that when there was trouble everybody stood in front of the girl to protect her, and that Julie would not be safer somewhere else, so at the end coach White chooses to stay at McFarland. :-)   

ITA McFarland

Dirty dancing - 2017

Just terrible. One of the worst things I’ve ever seen. Awful. Even the dancing part was terrible! If I wanted to be nice I could save only two things: Baby’s sister and the scene when Penny was giving Baby a dance lesson. Nothing more. Johnny was so plain, he had nothing of Patrick Swaize’s charisma. I didn’t like his acting, his dancing, nothing really. Baby (Abigail Breslin) was not good either. Breslin looked like she was thinking “let’s say these lines and get it over with”, no commitment whatsoever, no soul at all. Her acting was plain and the dancing… well, did she dance at all? A few poses, that’s all. I can’t even say it was bad because she made a few moves during the dance lessons, (those were bad, but one could say she hadn’t learned yet) but nothing more. She basically didn’t dance at all, we always see her face or her moving from one pose to the other. Like moving a mannequin. Then there are Baby’s parents: the actor playing her dad at least tried, but what could he do here? Their story was boring, on the verge of divorce because they hadn’t had sex in a few months and mommy was feeling ignored :-/ It’s enough that he finds himself alone at dinner once and he runs to her to cry his heart out and make peace in the bedroom. 

There is no atmosphere at the hotel, Penny and Johnny don’t look the great friends they’re supposed to be, Johnny has no expressions at all and Baby has just one. I know, after the success of Twilight apparently expressions are not so important for actors or movies, still I’d appreciate to see/feel some kind of emotions, they are not out of fashion yet, not for me.

Some things were completely changed (see parents story) and other things were so copied they were even worse, like when Johnny tried to imitate Swaize’s moves. Of course a few lines were left intact, because there can be no Dirty Dancing without Johnny saying that nobody can put Baby in a corner; its most famous line, that in the original movie was touching, in Gilmore Girls was funny,  but here it was just painful. 

Honestly in the original movie one can’t say for sure what it’ll be of the characters, because we see him come back to dance with her and the movie ends. If one thinks about it, she’ll have to go home, who knows if they’ll ever see each other again, it’s not sure that they end up together, but who cared about it, we just watched them dancing together in front of everybody and that was the important thing. Here, they decided to let us know: the scene moves to an older Frances, who just watched what we watched, and then meets Johnny after a long time. She’s married to someone else and has a child. She wrote a book about that summer that changed her and he wrote the choreography, apparently. Still, absolutely no emotions, everything’s so plain. It’s not the idea per se, it’s just that it was awful to watch. I can’t believe movies like this are finished and distributed worldwide! What a waste of time and money and space. 

Did I forget anything? I hadn’t said that this was a musical with lots of songs, everybody sang something. Now, the singing was not bad, but it was boring. Not even the music could save this terrible movie.