A Statement About True Blood

Okie doke, so this is going to be a potential cross-over post with that other blog I'm working on, but bear with me, because my worlds are about to collide.

True Blood came out on DVD last week, and lo and behold, the best library in the state (HAPLR, shmAPLR, I say to you) instantly had it available for staff consumption. You know, because we're that good. I started watching it, as I do, and at about three-quarters of the way through, have formed what I consider to be an educated opinion.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, it's more vamps vamps vamps, this time in Louisiana, this time "outed" to society, this time drinking bottles of blood in bars the way humans drink beer. No more secret societies, just vamps looking to live as (sometimes) healthy and productive members of society. Sometimes.

Enter Bill Compton, Civil War vet-turned-vamp who comes Back Home, to his family plantation from back in the day. Enter Sookie (rhymes with cookie) Stackhouse, virgin, waitress, telepath, naive southern belle. They are surrounded by the requisite cast of characters-- Sookie's friend Tara (filling the role of the Angry Black Best Friend), Sookie's brother Jason (the Neglected Ne'er Do Well), Sam the bar owner (who is madly in love with Sookie, but sleeping with Tara to soothe his... pain) Vamps who are good (mostly just Bill) and vamps who are bad ("mainstreaming" is for losers). Are we all stocked up? Good. I'm glad we didn't miss anyone.

A word about Sookie. Over at that other blog, my partner in crime and I just had a (relatively) spirited discussion about the Heroine (let me back up: this show is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, which fall loosely between the romance and mystery sections at your favorite bookseller). The evolution of the Romance Heroine has been marked in the past decade. Virgins are out, relatively experienced, gutsy broads (with interesting occupations!) are in. Which means that poor Sookie is way, way out.

It's intriguing to me how literally HBO and the show's creator, Alan Ball, are interpretting the romance novel cliches. I mean, I swear to God, the last ep I watched had newly de-virginized Sookie asking Bill if it's "always this way," and insisting that he tell her if she's doing something wrong. Bor-ing. Not to mention the cliches she herself has racked up: virgin because she could always here the thoughts of the boys trying to get in her pants, sexually abused as a child by her grandmother's brother, suddenly intrigued by a pale and very (literally) cold stranger who has just strolled into town.

I have often said that the Black Dagger Brotherhood books are everything Twilight should have been if they had, you know... been better. True Blood is everything Twilight would have been if they had been written by a romance novelist and not a Mormon (not that romance novelists can't be Mormons, too, but the ones who aren't don't necessarily have religious strictures to adhere to).

As a show True Blood is hard not to watch, but just because it's crackalicious doesn't make it good, too.

A Statement About the Finale Fever (Mildly Spoilery. Beware, or something)

It's that time of year kids!
Upfront time, "will our show be renewed?" time, "who is going to die on my favorite show?" time, "will I still care when this show comes back on the air in the fall of 2012?" time.

Maybe that's an exaggeration, but in the case of shows like Lost, January 2010 seems like an awfully long time away. It might not be, considering it might take that long to find all of the pieces of the Island after it was blown up by, you know, a hydrogen bomb. Poor Juliet. Poor Sawyer. Poor us, who have to wait 7 interminable months to find out what the frak just happened.

I think the couple of months worth of brain regeneration (and charts!) will help us understand that the finale actually told us more than we think on initial impact. I have a feeling a review of the Jacob-y moments in each of our characters' pasts will yield a great deal of info (that will be helpful in the next season, without a doubt). I have not yet read the good Doctor's final analysis, but his points last week were both illuminating and so mind-bending I might actually be glad to have all this time off to rest my brain. It hurts, but in a good way.

Another finale I watched the other night was How I Met Your Mother, which makes for the twelve-thousandth time I've watched Alyson Hannigan this week (future posts will discuss how awesome she is, but for now that is neither here nor there). A couple of things struck me about the finale: First of all, I had read previously that they shot the scenes for the last show back in January so that Hannigan would not have to come back from maternity leave. A lot of bloggers have talked about how distracting the pregnancies of the two female leads have been, but I have to say it was more disconcerting for me to see them less pregnant last night than the week before. Cobie Smulders had no discernable bump in January, and even Hannigan looked less pregnant than she had when she stormed out of the bar after Barney's offensive joke a couple of weeks ago (this was the reason she was absent for several weeks-- she was mad at Barney).

The other thing that really got me about this finale was how much I was waiting for progress-- a great ending to the goat story, some kind of Robin/Barney closure (or opening) and for Ted to meet at least another potential "One." When his ex-fiancée Stella appeared a couple of weeks ago, fans went nuts thinking that she, indeed, comes back into Ted's life and is the mother of his long-suffering children. Let us be clear: she is so not the mother. But the ending to that episode, as misleading as it was, would have been a better place to end the season. A big "Huh?" would have sat better than me than the benign acceptance that Ted has a new job as a Professor, and that the Mother is one of his students. Eh.

I suppose that's all for now (I mean, isn't that enough for you people??), but look! It wasn't all shiny, "this rocks" pontificating. Glorious.

A Statement About the Star Trek

And so our love/lust affair with JJ Abrams and his sexy genius brain continues well into its seventh year.

Goodness, gracious. Where to begin?

As promised, Mother's Day was spent in the Lewis/Barstow conjoined household at the cinema, where glorious Transformers trailers and buttered popcorn were enjoyed by all. Except for those who didn't eat the popcorn and those who have no desire to see Transformers. But I digress.

I don't think I need to go into the whole "it's an origin story, starting at the beginning, rebooting the whole franchise which was sorely in need of rebooting." Do I? Well, tough. I'm not going to.

JJ Abrams, henceforth known to The Move Girl as God, was not a Trekkie growing up, and was in fact a Star Wars dork, and for that we love him all the more. It made it even more palatable for Star Wars dorks like me to have no qualms about going to see a Star Trek movie. If anyone was going to make us love the Trek, it was going to be God. Yay God.

So we'll skip to what God does best... cheeky geektastic dialogue, cameos by Meghan Rotundi Blumberg/Carrie Bowman Flinkman, Greg Grunberg, that lame chick from the last season of Alias, and the dude who played Andrian Lazarey. I somehow now have simultaneous crushes on Kirk, Sulu, and of all people, Spock, who a week ago you could not have induced me to touch with a ten-foot pole.

Having gone to the cinema with three generations of people, some of whom had seen previous Trek films and some of whom hadn't, and walking out with everyone raving like lunatics about how excellent it was, is no mean feat.

Go see Star Trek. Now.

Also, a few housekeeping notes:
Yay, Lady Liberty! We salute your blogging prowess.
And if you have a burning desire to read what I think about trashy romance novels, go here. If you don't, then don't.
I know I was supposed to write something critical, but since I didn't, just wait until next time! When we will inevitably talk about how awesome the Lost finale was... *sigh*...

A Statement About the Tone

OK, so way baaaaaack in the day, I wrote a post about how I had gone all negative, and I was sorry, and I was going to be more positive. It turns out I went extreme in the other direction-- it seems from the look of the most recent posts that I <3 everything.

Ha.

So I'm going to come back later this week, and will have something critical to say about... something. Time to flex the "actually, I didn't like this" muscle.

Also, Mother's Day in the Barstow/Lewis household (yes, it is ONE household these days) means STAR TREK. Because that's what happens when you give birth to geeks (or, as young Sam would have me say, a geek and a nerd). Anyway, since there could not possibly be ANYTHING wrong with that movie (to be discussed next week) I have to come up with something critical. Fast.