"Outstanding Main Title Design," An Undersung Emmy Category

If you're a carbon based life form, chances are you feel a certain amount of affection for the opening notes and images of the main title designs of certain TV series. These things have a way of seeping into our DNA.

I cannot watch True Blood's titles, for example, without singing along "...I wanna do bad things to you ♫" and it would probably take my Emmy award if the Outstanding Main Title Design were handed out only once every 10 years. Unfortunately it has been ripped off ever since and now every remotely creepy TV series aims for a mix of slow-mo vs sped up montage of religious, violent, and sensual grotesquerie from American Horror Storyto Penny Dreadful. But True Blood's titles were the perfect marriage of everything that makes that show that show. It's actually even BETTER than the show itself.  True Blood lost this category in its year to the adorable pop up multiple identities of The United States of Tara. 

My other favorite main title of a current series is Game of Thrones. I don't watch the show for reasons I've long since overshared but I think the opening titles are refreshingly original, a masterwork even. For what it's worth Game of Thrones won this Emmy in 2011 (Trivia Alert: David Fincher's two-time Oscar winning editor Angus Wall, who we've interviewed in the past, was the creative director!).

Even in the YouTube/Gif era when we are all accustomed to obsessing over the tiniest mnemonics of our favorite things, this category is rarely remarked upon. So let's discuss this year's nominees after the jump

THE NOMINEES THIS YEAR? Stroke the kitty to continue...

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True to the End? A Final Season in Bon Temps

Here's Adam on a show that probably should have ended a couple of years ago but finally has its eviction notice -Editor

It’s been seven years and we’re finally (almost) to the end. I don’t know how many people of you have stuck with True Blood from the beginning. Nathaniel bolted during the show's nadir (season 5) though he's silently returned since. But if you’re anything like me, you believe that season six was, as much as it could be, a return to form, a reminder or the series glory days. 

As I plowed through the first three episodes of this seventh and final season, I could not help but feel that it has all been a prolonged set up to something better... or perhaps 'trimming down' to something better more aptly explains it. While no episode has been an absolute knock out, you can feel season 7 trying desperately to become the show it once was before it meets the true death. 

Lets start at the beginning of the end... 

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Bob & Carol & Depp & Tilda

The New Yorker on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice by Paul Mazursky. I love that movie so much
NYT RIP the influential filmmaker Paul Mazursky (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, An Unmarried Woman, Enemies: A Love Story) 
THR The Academy sues the estate of art director Joseph Wright. His family auctioned off his Oscar for My Gal Sal (1942) for $79,200. (God, imagine how much an Oscar for a famous movie or actor would get!) But auctioning off Oscars is a big big no-no. AMPAS freaks out every time.
Bryan Singer tweets a treament of X-Men: Apocalypse

Daily Mail Johnny Depp on the set of Black Mass. Lots of old age makeup
X-Finity Matt Bomer implies that his Montgomery Clift biopic is on indefinite delay
The Wire Joe talks that Eric/Jason sex scene on True Blood and what a failure the show has been in terms of the gay. Co-sign every word.
The Black Maria on the Hunger Games of the 70s, Roller Ball
The Dissolve in the greatest summer blockbusters
Comics Alliance revisits Batman to look at Vicki Vale, the 1989 version of "Strong Female Character". (I totally forgot Ms Vale was an acclaimed photojournalist - not that it matters)

The 1989 model had fluffier hair than her successors, but that’s really the only significant difference. She establishes her Totally Empowered cred early, makes eyes at the hero, then gets the hell out of the way... She ends the film in the hero’s arms, fulfilling her role as reward for his victory, with nary a whisper of the professional goals that drove her to him in the first place. She is pretty and in need of rescue and almost entirely in service to the male characters’ plot and characterization—but she gets to be vaguely spunky and is slapped with a typically male career, so it’s totally okay.

I can only imagine the interviews that took place upon the release of "Batman", touting her modernity, her break with the damsels of the past, her ineffable 1989-ness.

Towleroad Adore Delano continues to hit it hard in that tiny assured-media-interest window post RuPaul's Drag Race. Party!
Clothes on Film wonders what happens to contemporary costumes when the movie wraps. Featuring The Descendants, Brick and Silver Linings Playbook
Variety Tom Hardy reunites with Inception co-star Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant 

Tilda = Best
Tilda Swinton has proclaimed that everyone should see Julia because Tilda has great taste. She's so extraordinary in that movie and she should've won her second Oscar for it. (Sorry Oscar nominees of 2009 but you just don't compare)

I made a film with Erick Zonca called JULIA of which I am extremely proud: in the United States it had a very small release by a great little and passionate distribution company called Magnolia.. but there was only so wide they could release it.. PLEASE look for that one.. it is something else.. and I LOVE it.

Her Reddit Q&A is often hilarious. Consider this response to whether or not she's a clone of David Bowie.

The laboratory gave me strict instructions to issue no comment

I'm so proud that I've been a fan of Tilda since Edward II (1991) so she's MINE. I am so proud to have given Tilda the gold medal right here for Julia. The Film Bitch Awards are awesome. *pats self on back* Should really watch that movie again.

Naked Alexander Skarsgård Reading Books By People I Know

I couldn't make out the book Eric Northman was reading on the season finale of True Blood so I just decided it was a book by someone I know. I couldn't resist the GIFing...

Congratulations to all my published author friends and frienquaintances! Not all of them are just-published but lately it seems like there's been a wave of such happenings and I am so happy and proud for them. Writing a book is no easy task. It's like scaling a Swedish mountain in the snow. Naked. 

Speaking of --  back to Alexander Skarsgård. It's nice for him to finally bring his penis to work with him but that final "cliffhanger" was DUMB in all caps. Everyone knows they're not going to kill off Eric. The showrunners have already said they didn't because they're terrified of change and constantly fandering. I'd say that that's the whole problem with True Blood except that implying it only has one is even dumber. 

Linksium

Photogenesis has brief promotional clip of Guardians of the Galaxy
IndieWire a catalogue of old movie magazines now available online
Empire the Fading Gigolo trailer - Woody Allen & John Turturro do their own version of Hung
Glenn Dunks on The Conjuring as all haunting movies. All of 'em!
i09 What is wrong and right about Elysium's mixed bag

CHUD First look at Channing Tatum (with poiny ears!) in Jupiter Rising
Cinema Blend Wagner Moura (Elysium) and John Leguizamo competing for a Pablo Escobar biopic
Gawker Christina Bianco does it again - 19 divas singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" 
Advocate with two new Hercules films coming, The Advocate outs the demi-gods gay side 
Variety annoyingness: Her gets moved into the December glut... as if November isn't good enough to make an Oscar run. Wrong! 

the 80s are inescapable
Variety 'we'll never escape the 80s' alert: Pope of Greenwich Village co-stars Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke and Daryl Hannah are all reuniting for a hitman movie called Skin Traffix. (*sniffle* no Geraldine Page this time.)
Towleroad Lady Gaga's new song "Applause"... which sounds suspiciously like Missing Persons to me. Or maybe that's just Gaga's voice.
Best Shot The Color Purple is coming (tonight! watch it in the next 24 hours and post somethin!). Next Wednesday The Bad and the Beautiful!

tv lolz
i09 wonders what the hell is going on with True Blood -- who knows anymore. Who cares? Such a hot mess.
Gayest of All Time This "dramatic retelling" of a recent Project Runway in pictures made me LMAO 
Vulture quotable Christina Hendricks wants to be on Game of Thrones post Mad Men