Saoirse Ronan (Hanna, Atonement) will star in the adaptation of Meg Rosoff ’s 2006’s young adult book How I Live Now, which will be directed by Kevin McDonald (Last King of Scotland). In the book, a young American girl named Daisy is sent to live with extended family on a farm in England; then, when her aunt is stuck in Norway and England is invaded by an unnamed force, Daisy and her cousins are left to fend for themselves. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “The part of Daisy was highly-coveted amongst the teen-thespian set.” Which means: As we speak, Justin Bieber is somewhere attempting to comfort an inconsolable Selena Gomez. Grade: B+ [HR]
Lafayette and Jesus are having a porch talk about feelings, except Lafayette doesn't talk too much because if he did Jesus would realize he's been POSESSED. Jesus kisses his boyfriend goodbye on the mouth and suddenly realizes that Lafayette is no longer Lafayette, just in time to get stabbed in the hand with a fork.
Sookie makes herself some coffee because hey didn't this bitch used to be a waitress? She leans down and sees the ghost corpse of her sweet Gran. Tara comes downstairs just in time to be a sounding board for Sookie's fears. Tara is not like, "Hey, remember how my hand is screwed up, and that time I got repeatedly raped by a crazy vampire who was great at texting super fast, and oh yeah I just discovered my bisexuality and learned mixed martial arts." No, instead they're still discussing Sookie's memories of Gran. Sookie Sookie Sookie!
The black-leather vampire gang mounts up on the Wiccan co-op with bazookas. Sookie makes a plea to Marnie's reason for peace, but to no avail. Marnie psychically tosses a knife into an Avril Lavigne look-alike's gut to demonstrate that she is really, really, really serious. What do you think Marnie's favorite record is? I'm guessing Carole King's Tapestry. Lafayette notices that Marnie vomited up Antonia's spirit. Antonia wears a dirty white gown that symbolizes that she is from another time.
Jesus and Lafayette do the play-by-play commentary on Marnie/Antonia's mental breakdown over her divided selves. Jessica aims her huge gun at the Moon Goddess Emporium. I wonder if Eric designed these chic vampire outfits? What is that, all-black Tyvek? Jason Stackhouse stops them from blowing up the spot, knowing Sookie is within. I see Jason still shops at the Bon Temps American Apparel. Pam calls Sookie "a gash in a sundress." Pam gets all the best lines and looks on this damn show.
From the balcony, Marnie and her minions Statler-and-Waldorf on the increasingly chaotic and now gore-spattered vamp convention. Sookie flits about in her hearts-adorned hoodie. Girl has the fashion sense of a six-year old who's been held back. The vamps are dressed like a bunch of high-school teachers chaperoning a dance. I was hoping vampire Principal Cutler would come in and break things up. Eric's endless viking memory comes back to him in a flash montage of blood and kinda gay stuff.
Alcide carries Sookie's wounded body across the wild and windy moors of Bon Temps, but then Bill hip-checks Alcide and gives Sookie his wrist blood to drink. Alcide sets up a "werewolves and vampires praying together" joke but Bill, bad stand-up, cannot produce a decent punchline. Marnie/Antonia brings Eric into the coven den, where he is greeted apprehensively by the witches until she reveals her party trick of having tamed him. Tara suggests that Marnie is more interested in war than peace, and Marnie steps up her ranting to Michele Bachmann-esque levels.
So Jessica finally gets to the door during the witch incantation that makes all the vampires go lemming themselves into the sun, but Jason Stackhouse jumps to save her just in time and the industrial mansion fans from Meatloaf's "I Would Do Anything For Love" come on as his chivalrous instinct gets thwomped by her vampire reflexes. Jessica ends up on top of Jason, where he has recently guiltily fantasized about her being. She apologizes for almost killing him by kissing him, which makes him stammer but then kiss back.
Bill is waiting for Jessica to finish dry-humping his ex-girlfriend's brother in the hallway by the staircase (subtheme of this season: sex in front of indoor stairs. One more for a hat trick.) Jason silvers Jessica back down and is forced to make extended eye contact with her after having shown his boner cards. Bill and Jess agree not to snitch on him for killing the guard, and he bolts. Damn Jason has been a cop all of like five minutes and he is already crooked.
Marnie the witch calls her inferiors "dog." It's unclear if it's because they are related to animals or because she is just cool like that. A chill beard dog helps break her out of prison. Pam, still cursed, beats the shit out of Tara and her girlfriend. For a couple of cage fighters they sure give up pretty easily! The only thing stronger than Pam's will for revenge is her hatred of being seen without her face on. Jesus and Lafayette are still stuck in "Mexico" which seems to be somewhere near "Louisiana" on the Malibu backlot. Jesus' dad's Gregg Allman wig looks like it chafes.
Speaking of the Allman Brothers, the werewolves are having a mountain jam! Debbie gets mad at Alcide for moping around about Sookie when he should be hell-bent for leather around the bonfire with the rest of the pack. Alcide and Debbie go looking for Sookie and then find her getting romantically boned by Eric in the mossy forest clearing we last saw them boning in at the end of last week's episode.
Don't you hate when you're screwing around on the couch in the freshman lounge with your ex-boyfriend's best frenemy and the Vampire RA walks in? Bill is such a fangblocker, stopping Eric and Sookie from getting to second base. Bill cuffs Eric and tells Sookie it's strictly vampire business, because he is a vampire businessman.
Eric gets locked in vampire jail with Pam, whose face is rotting off like a golem Real Housewife. Pam says King Bill is a pompous dork, which he totally is. Nothing like a little bit of artificial power to turn an angry nerd into an overconfident entitled Zuckerberg.
He flirted with villainhood as a robber in A River Runs Through ItThe River Wild and a dancing miscreant in Footloose, but now Kevin Bacon seems to have fully embraced unlikability: He'll follow his roles as a Nazi in X-Men: First Class and the guy who wrecks Steve Carell's marriage in Crazy, Stupid, Love. with one as the bad guy in Robert Schwentke's (Flightplan, Red) comic-adapted supernatural actioner R.I.P.D., about a murdered cop (Ryan Reynolds) who joins other undead officers in the Rest In Peace Department, then tries to catch the guy who killed him (Bacon, presumably). Grade: B+ [Variety]
Terry Gilliam is developing another movie, this one an adaptation of Paul Auster's highly Gilliam-y novel Mr. Vertigo, about a levitating sideshow performer and the mentor who teaches him to fly. Even Gilliam sounds doubtful that this project will ever advance beyond the screenplay he's writing, but just to be safe, everybody should probably buy more insurance. Grade: B+ [Playlist]
True Blood has always had a little bit of a Grecian tragedy motif to it — what with the season of the Maenad and all — but never so much as right now. First up: MOM KILLIN', good old fashioned accidental mother murder courtesy of Tommy the dogboy Merlotte. Then the Scooby gang of Tara, Lafayette, and Jesus accidentally run over magic Marnie, but like all witches she takes a licking and keeps on tricking.
The theme of this week's episode of True Blood is "taking advantage." What exactly it means to exploit another person's weakness (or strength) for personal gain. Sookie is constantly given opportunities to exploit the men in her life, and she wavers between staunch refusal to even engage with the idea and then biting her lip like "well mayyyybeeeee just this one tiiiiiiiiiime."
We start where we left off: Vampires want to know where Eric is hiding, but for some reason they don't go check for him at the Bon Temps franchise location of Senor Frog's — Monsieur Crapaud's. He is shitty drunk in a sleeveless sweatshirt and some hoop shorts wandering alone down the road like a David Lynch movie and then harassing Sookie. Cut to bloodsucking HBIC Pam, whose wardrobe is extra-stolen from Sasha Fierce's closet this week. It's like they realized that Pam is everybody's favorite character, which has nothing to do with the core fanbase of this show being sexually aggressive older women and gay men (and the guys who are forced to watch HBO with them handcuffed in bed).
When we last saw our heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, she was deciding whether to let a brainwashed blond 6-foot-plus-tall vampire hitchhiker into her car. Good-hearted pushover that she is, she can't help but take pity on the naked GQ model and lets him come over and into her house. Sookie sets some boundaries in place (no touching, no biting) while she and Eric reenact the greatest hits of the Clothed Female Naked Male porn subgenre (CFNM/NSFW).
The werepanther children still holding Sookie's brother, Jason, hostage speak in a hilarious Southern patois that involves a lot of "I reckon." In the land of the panther people, Jason Stackhouse is the smartest person around, but it doesn't help any when he's tied up and can't reach his cell phone in his jeans.
Damn it whatever I love this show. It's entertaining and mostly unpretentious. Even when it is pretentious it's ridiculous. It asks nothing from me but the complete suspension of disbelief, and in return it gives me stupidly attractive naked people doing inane dialogue about the complexities of vampire politics. Bon Temps seems to be located in or around Jackie Treehorn's estate.
Eric Northman (the secondary vampire love interest in Sookie's supernatural love-interest spangled life) has been chilling in her living room, probably watching Toddlers and Tiaras on TV. He's come to deliver another speech about how he needs to own and control Sookie. Can't blame the dude for being upfront with his needs, but you also can't blame her for telling him to get the hell out. Eric is always attempting to seduce Sookie with hot pick-up lines like, "Your blood tastes like freedom." Why do I always feel like they're not actually talking about her blood?
Guess who's back in the vampire-loving, motherblooding house? True Blood! That televisual dreamworld on HBO in which the men are good-looking and the women are good actresses. Where small towns in the South are pansexual oases that look deceptively like backlots in Malibu. Where everything is lit like soft-core pornography and also written like soft-core pornography. Yes, the supernatural soap is back to match Game Of Thrones round for round in gratuitous sexual content.
When we last left Sookie Stackhouse she'd been delivered to an alternate world resembling a Maxfield Parrish painting of the Olive Garden, which turned out to be the fairy (sorry, faerie) realm. If you made it past that last sentence, you probably already watch True Blood. But if not, welcome to True Blood. I'll go gentle on you first-timers. Just kidding. There is no going gentle.
