True Blood 4.2 "You Smell Like Dinner"

Last week on True Blood I bemoaned the scattershot expository-heavy nature of the season 4 premiere but Holy Recovery. This show must have taken a hit of "V" last week because it came on supernaturally strong in the second episode of the season. If they keep this up we could be looking at a peak season. The show managed to pull at least a third of its characters (can we hope for two thirds?) back into a central plot (the emergence of a powerful new witch coven) in organic ways. It's the kind of braided multi-strand narrative that the best television series thrive on and which newly fanatical Game of Thrones watchers are going to eventually realize will never ever happen again on their new favorite show ever -- unless the production team ditches the source material for original stories -- but let's not get sidetracked!

What were those vamp whores up to this week?

'You want to call me that again?'

"You Smell Like Dinner" covers as much recap ground in its first half as "She's Not There" did in its entire hour while actually advancing the story. Jason is being held captive by his were-panther community and we learn why. The vampires at Fangtasia are still beset by Right Wing Christian groups -- Pam gets a particularly choice zinger in before hot-headed Hoyt gets a pumelling. Sam's shapeshifter friends become more interesting, particularly Luna. Eric continues his takeover of Sookie's house and life. He calls her "saucy" which is an impressively perfect word choice on behalf of the screenwriters given that it's 100% accurate, a bit old fashioned (he's hundreds of years old) and English isn't his native tongue.

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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 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.

Links: Dracula, Werewolf, Alien, Bridesmaid

My New Plaid Pants Oooooh Asia Argento and Thomas Kretschmann to star in Dario Argento's Dracula 3D.
Blastr the creator of MTV's new series Teen Wolf claims it's inspired by Spider-Man and Buffy. Ugh. I hate that "it's just like everything else" pitch approach to advertising but in this case it worked on me as Spidey and Buffy are two of my very favorite things. Damn you, man.
Ultra Culture "a review of Bridesmaids that's mostly just a rant about marketing."
Deviant Art Princess Leia drawn in  Alphonse Mucha style. Love it.

Last Exit to Nowhere look at this amazing fan photo to your right, in homage to Aliens.

Off Cinema
Socialite Life Glee's Naya Rivera got a record deal.
Boy Culture Do you remember these 70s and 80s tv shows? I had totally forgotten about most of these. A few I do remember vividly (It's a Living, Square Pegs)
La Daily Musto The Normal Heart stars get age-shaving portraits at Sardis. Ellen Barkin thinks she looks like ScarJo
After Elton chooses the 39 Hottest Guys in New York Theater. Thankfully there's something for everyone.
Hark a Vagrant "Brown Recluse Spider-Man" I lol'ed and lol'ed at this webcomic. Please to enjoy.