True Blood 4.3 "If You Love Me..."

Another Monday, another day spent thinking about last night's True Blood eppy. My favorite B story thread this season is definitely Arlene's devil baby so we must begin with my single favorite shot in the episode. The little monster slobbering all over Jessica's Capital C Creepy family heirloom doll.

He's so cute. Don't you just want to procure victims for him and grind them up into mushy baby food?

"If You Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'?" is a solid episode but can't help but feel like a smidgeon of a comedown after last week's instant classic in which Eric was robbed of his memories by the new witch coven led by Marnie (Fiona Shaw). This week's episode provided several fun moments and some promising future-implications but the plot mostly was little beats in which characters were trying to decide how to deal with the major events of the previous episode: where should Sooki hide Eric? is Tara getting sucked back in for good? will Lafayette's fear of Eric continue to get everyone in trouble? who is Pam going to eat if she gets too angry? exactly what is Marnie channeling?

Cheers: True Blood is giving both Lafayette and Tara more subtle emotions to play this season.

The major B story his season appears to be Jason's stud captivity in that redneck nightmare village (they mean to use him to sire new werepups). Someone rescue him!

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I Am Number Four's Power Apps

Have any of you seen I Am Number Four? In a brain dead mood -- it's summer, it happens -- it was watched right here. At first I thought I might write up a whole review. Its jumbled five or six films in one chaos might be worth savaging as it continually reveals itself as a member of the  "we're making this shit up as we go along!" school of storytelling. Pettyfer is number four of a race of escapee aliens who are being hunted on Earth by their old nemesis and they're being killed in numerical order. I'll give you one guess as to how many of them are already dead.

Number three is dead.

Good guess!

I knew nothing about I Am Number Four's origins but immediately assumed it was based on a comic or graphic novel due to its continual expository mythology. All this for one stand alone feature? It must have fuller origins elsewhere. 

But in the end the movie is too disposable and harmless to be mean to. So let's just focus on the troublesome pet peeve: Alex Pettyfer's Magic Hands.

Pettyfer knows he's an alien and he knows he's number four but he doesn't actually understand his own powers yet and strange things keep happening to his body, like pulsing blue light from his hands. Pettyfer is a bit too, um, well-developed for I Am Number Four to double property as a puberty metaphor but it seems to be trying anyway. Once he starts using those hands his powers seem limitless. His hands are always ready with some solution: lock-picking, energy blasts, heat generation, super strength, you name it. At one point when he just decides to use them as flashlights in a dark room where key exposition secrets are hidden we had to add our own dialogue from the couch: "I've got an app for that, too!"

There's just nothing those mitts can't do.

Note to all filmmakers of this and Green Lantern and anyone taking on any future heroes with undefined powers: it doesn't work. If your hero's gifts are never defined there are no stakes. You can't push them to their limits for a dramatic climax if you've never given any indication that they have any. Think it over. 

TV @ the Movies: "Hoosiers" vs. "The Notebook"

I know that MTV's Teen Wolf is based on an 80s movie but it's not set in the 1980s so what to make of the bizarre opening scene of its latest episode "The Tell" in which Jackson (Colton Haynes) and Lydia (Holland Roden) visit that nostalgia-inducing endangered species, The Video Store, and have the following  ½ "80s" argument... 

Jackson: "Hoosiers" is not only the best basketball movie ever it is the best sports movie ever made. 
Lydia: No.
Jackson: It's got Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper!
Lydia: No.
Jackson: Lydia, I swear to God you're going to like it.
Lydia: No.
Jackson: I AM NOT WATCHING "THE NOTEBOOK" AGAIN

[cut to: Jackson, defeated, inside the store]

Jackson: Can somebody help me find "The Notebook"? 

Haha. So, maybe this was intended it as a Men are from Mars / Women are from Venus argument but do today's teenagers (non film-fanatic variety... not you reading, obvs)  even know who Dennis Hopper and Gene Hackman are? It seems like this argument was between a 30something man and a teen girl. Or maybe Hoosiers mania still lives on in high school boys? I'm not a sports person or a high school boy so I cannot speak from authority.

Once inside the store, there are a ton of movies on view but none of them seem intentionally placed there for the camera. Lazy set dressers (kidding!). For instance, there's telltale signs of a dead body (a foot!) peaking out from behind the I Am Love row. But I highly doubt the director's were like "ooh, someone dies in that Tilda Swinton / Italian melodrama that won Best Pic at the Film Bitch Awards, so let's put the body there!".

This one on the other hand is 100% intentional.

Turns out there's an evil werewolf in the store and Jackson ends up hiding right next to a copy of Let The Right One In, the only movie with its own closeup. "The Tell" that it's intentional: It's out of sequence with the other movies sitting next to it, which begin with "S". Video stores may be on the verge of extinction but surely they still alphabetize.

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.

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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