Word: undeadness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Twilight also observes movie laws as aged as Edward, who was initiated into the realm of the undead in 1918. Defiantly old-fashioned, the film wants viewers to believe not so much in vampires as in the existence of an anachronistic movie notion: a love that is convulsive and ennobling. Bella could be any Hollywood heroine in love with a good boy whom society callously misunderstands. She's Natalie Wood to Edward's James Dean (in Rebel Without a Cause) or Richard Beymer (in West Side Story). Cathy, meet Heathcliff. Juliet, Romeo...
...maybe someday I will. Alan Ball (Six Feet Under's creator) is adapting a series of novels by Charlaine Harris with a seemingly can't-miss premise, given the current rage for Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books: What happens when the undead try to integrate into mortal society? But while writerly honor forbids me to use a "suck" or "bite" joke, the early episodes of True Blood are, shall we say, drained of interest...
...with her own supernatural issues. She can read people's minds, making daily life a minefield of too much information. When the bar gets its first vamp visitor, 173-year-old Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), she takes a shine to him, not just for his smoky looks or his undead-Confederate-soldier courtliness: to her relief, she can't read his thoughts. Their romance unnerves her friends and coworkers, though, particularly when women start turning up dead with twin puncture wounds...
There are signs of the show the title sequence promises in Episodes 4 and 5, which dial down the heavy-handedness (trusting the audience to get, say, the gay-prejudice allegory without showing GOD HATES FANGS signs) and explore more intriguing corners of undead life (such as the curse of seeing your own mortal children grow old and die). As it happens, they're the work of writers other than Ball. Maybe what this Blood needs most is a transfusion...
...Ursidae living in martial-arts monasteries--yeah, we're covered. But present-day, nonmagical, human China? Kung Fu Panda is set in a pre-industrial China, like Mulan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The new Mummy sequel, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, set in the 1940s, is about an undead 2,000-year-old Han emperor (Jet Li) and an army of terra-cotta warriors. The China that appears in American pop culture is about as modern as Arthurian England...