True Blood 4.1: "She's Not There"

Bill still makes her red eyed and weepyLet the Season 4 premiere of HBO's hit series True Blood be a lesson to all future showrunners. This is what happens when your show has introduced non-integrated plotlines for each and every member of a huge ensemble cast. This is what happens when you try a time jump so popular post Battlestar Galactica and don't trust the audience to just reconfigure the pieces on their own.  This is what happens when you back yourself into storylines that maybe weren't good ideas to begin with. I speak of Jason Stackhouse becoming the paterfamilia (of sorts) for a whole den of barely human hilbillies and a certain reveal about our heroine. To quote Sookie (Anna Paquin) herself with the same annoyed/surprised/this-is-stupid inflection from the Season 3 climax...

I'm a fairy?

And what is it that's happened, exactly?

The show's premiere episode "She's Not There" proved to be a random disjointed mess, forced to spend the entire hour on reintroductions to every character since we've missed a whole year of their lives (as has Sookie). I can't speak for television ratings but if True Blood hadn't already peaked in terms of the number of fangbangers gathered for each episode, this premiere had garlic all over it. Wouldn't it automatically repel new viewers?

Fairy-Land

"She's Not There" kicks off with a weirdly dull and anachronistic (for this show) opening. Sookie is trapped (though she doesn't yet know it) in an alternate fairy dimension which looks like a gaudy Maxfield Parrish knock-off painting with no-budget set dressing. Sookie doesn't eat the glowing fruit which turns out to be a good idea -- the side effects are both nasty and uglifying.

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True Blood in Five Minutes

When I polled y'all about whether or not we should review True Blood Season 4 as it airs, and though the response was tepid in terms of button clicking it was "yay" in terms of coverage so we'll try it out. If response is good we'll keep going. If not, we dump. Every other film site seems to cover more and more TV [TANGENT: the worlds continue to converge though not, I should add, as they should: put the franchises on TV where no beginnings, middle and ends are appropriate and not in the cinema where you're supposed to tell a full story, damnit! [/TANGENT] and we gotta keep up or lose market share.

So before Season 4 begins next week, a quick recap of the first three seasons courtesy of HBO

For those who care about existing predispositions my favorite human is Jason (Ryan Kwanten being the show's acting MVP... and the least likely to ever be nominated for it), my favorite vampire is Pam (Kristin Bauer), my favorite eye candy is Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) and my favorite CGI creation is Joe Manganiello (as "Alcides) who cannot possibly be a real human actor considering that superhero body that makes Ryan Reynolds look like a gym slacker. I go back and forth on the quality of virtually everyone and everything in this show but I find it addictive and admire its looney commitment to all caps acting and total trashiness.

Congratulations to the Critics Choice TV Winners

In progress now but I'm about to leave for a Cars 2 screening -- Vroom Vroom (and wish me luck) -- so I won't know the rest of the winners till later. John Noble (Fringe) won Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. Margo Martindale (Justified) and Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) tied for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and Jon Hamm won Best Actor in a Drama (Mad Men)

The reporters ask Margo about Paris Je T'Aime and it was clear from both the question and the response that that particular gig (courtesy of Alexander Payne) has been fruitful and meaningful for fans and the actress herself.

you can follow a live stream backstage here. My friend Roberta of Basket of Kisses / Mad Men fandom fame, just asked Christina a question!

UPDATE: Here are the winners

• BEST DRAMA Mad Men
• BEST COMEDY Modern Family
• BEST ACTRESS, DRAMA Juliana Marguiles, The Good Wife
• BEST ACTOR, DRAMA Jon Hamm, Mad Men
• BEST ACTRESS, COMEDY Tina Fey, 30 Rock
• BEST ACTOR, COMEDY Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory
• BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, DRAMA (tie) Christina Hendricks, Mad Men & Margo Martindale, Justified
• BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, DRAMA John Noble, Fringe
• BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, COMEDY Busy Phillips, Cougar Town
• BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, COMEDY Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother
• BEST TALK SHOW The Daily Show
• BEST REALITY SHOW Hoarders
• BEST REALITY SHOW HOST Mike Rowe, Dirty Jobs
  

This list of winners tells us that the new offshoot of the BFCA is much less concerned about "predicting" the Emmys than the film branch is to predicting the Oscars. Nice to see, don't you think?

Anyway... Ohmygod, I love that scene in Paris Je T'Aime so much and now it's all I can think of so let's watch it again.

Payne, je l'aime.

Howling at MTV's "Teen Wolf"

Tyler Posey as "Eddie Munster"... I MEAN, "TEEN WOLF"! Have any of you been watching MTV's new series Teen Wolf? I thought I might give it a go as it premiered right after the MTV Movie Awards which we wrote up here (live blog) and here (fashion). I think with Mad Men missing from my summer schedule, I'm searching for a TV show worth writing about - not that an MTV high school show based on a cheesy 80s movie is equivocal but I was curious. I mean how long can the current vampire/werewolf craze last? Zombies reigned for nearly an entire decade of pop culture so perhaps this trend has got a few more years in it.

As with Game of Thrones I decided three episodes was enough before sounding off...

episode 1 (pilot) "Wolf Moon"
It begins, as many monster movies, do with an investigation: cops, flashlights, woods, dead body ...or half of one at least (ewww). We are then introduced to the lead character Scott McCall (Tyler Posey), who is shown shirtless fixing his LaCrosse gear. So he's already coded as "hot jock". His best friend Stiles (Dylan O'Brien), a cop's son, calls to urge him to sneak out and see what all this dead body business is about. Weirdly, Stiles has Scott who is a severe asthmatic, hold the flashlight while they run up and down forest hills in the pitch black. Pant pant. Cough cough. BITE BITE. wolf attack! Well, you saw that coming. The next morning at school there is this amusing but entirely implausible* conversation, as Stiles berates Scott for being such a nerd.

the writers of that 80s Michael J Fox movie, get a shout out but this is closer to borrowing a "title" than adaptation.

"Dragging me down to your nerd depths. I'm a nerd by association. I've been Scarlet Nerded by you."

The creator of the show cited Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an influence in a recent interview -- another reason I tuned in -- and in dialogue exchanges like this you can feel it reaching for the smart geeky pop culture fun of that classic.

But in no way shape or universe is a guy on a high school's #1 sports team who looks like this a nerd.

No that is not a key party invitation from a cougar. That is a sex talk with his mom! (Cuz, you know, people generally have those talks with their mom while dripping wet and wearing only a towel.) Of course the mom uses this opportunity to make an MTV in joke -synergy!

I'm not going to end up on some reality show with a pregnant 16 year old."

ANYWAY... I was talking to Joe after the show about all this sexiness and I said 'Remember in 80s and 90s movies how the people playing nerds were sometimes not regulation hotties who have personal trainers on speed dial.' And he says...

Oh, you mean the bad old days?"

So... uh, well, Joe won that argument.

Trust: I'm not complaining about looking at Tyler Posey. But when your casting director fills an entire high school with beauties, it's hard not to giggle at the conversations about who's hot and who's not.  There is one moment in particular in episode one that had me totally LOL'ing where I was supposed to be sympathizing: A super hot black girl (unnamed... this school is lily-white but for her) stares at the new girl chatting up the most popular couple in school. She asks Scott and Stiles why the new girl gets to hang with them on her first day and they tell her 'Duh, she's hot!' So basically three hot 20somethings pretending to be highschoolers are staring at three other hot 20somethings pretending to be highschoolers, whilst bemoaning their fate as the Unhot?

The things you're hearing are hilariously irreconciliable with what you're seeing. Hey, maybe the show is a sly satire on body dysmorphia?

But if there's one thing this show is not, that's subtle. [Lots more after the jump, including more Buffy comparisons.]

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X-Men: First Adaptation

Andreas here. In his recent review of X-Men: First Class, Nathaniel pointed out how movies keep trying to master "television's most powerful asset (long form storytelling) without having the right equipment by which to master it (weekly hour-long episodes)." This is exactly why, to my mind, the most successful adaptation of the X-Men comics to date wasn't directed by Bryan Singer, and doesn't have a numeral after it. It's the Marvel/Saban-produced X-Men: The Animated Series, which ran for 76 episodes in the mid-'90s.

Like many superhero-themed TV shows, X-Men: TAS served as a "greatest hits" compilation, compacting decades of comics storylines into dense, bite-sized portions. It showcased some of the comics' most thrilling narrative arcs and most terrifying villains, like Apocalypse and the Sentinels. While the X-Men films have only scratched the surface of most characters, reserving the vast majority of screen time for Xavier, Magneto, and a few privileged others, the animated series had time to explore its mutant ensemble, devoting whole episodes to individual crises.

Better yet, X-Men: TAS used its guise a kids show (complete with lasers, spaceships, and time travel) to introduce a new generation to a range of social issues: institutionalized oppression, harassment, self-loathing, political assassinations, police states, and more. It was covertly progressive and slyly written in ways that are still impressive today. The show ended its run over a decade ago, yet its main authority figures (who doubled as bad-ass warriors) were a black woman and a disabled man.

So while I'm still excited to see X-Men: First Class, I doubt it'll top X-Men: The Animated Series, which embraced and exploited its source material's superpowered soap opera. (It was also my childhood gateway drug into the nerdy world of superheroes and comics, so that nostalgic attachment helps.)

I'll close with my big wish as a cinephile and animation junkie: why can't we get more high-quality, feature-length, animated superhero movies, à la Batman: Mask of the Phantasm? Bad example, I guess, since that was tragically unprofitable... but the idea's still good! I'd definitely pay $8-10 to see X-Men: The Animated Movie on the big screen. Oh, and Marvel, while you're catering to my dreams: can you please bring back the Sentinels?

What dreams would you like Marvel to fulfill?