Review: True Blood S5E7 “In The Beginning…”

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Wow.

That, in a word, sums up my reaction to tonight’s episode of True Blood. While I’ve enjoyed this season, I cannot deny that it’s been an uneven one with great episodes alternating with episodes that felt like they were mostly serving as filler. Tonight’s episode was one of the great ones and, if the final half of this season can continue to build on this episode’s momentum, season 5 of True Blood will be a memorable one indeed.

A lot of things happened on tonight’s episode of True Blood and I’m still taking them all in, even as I write this. This is going to be a review of first impressions and I make no apologies for that.

For a show that has often been in danger of coming across like a collection of random scenes and flamboyant quirks, tonight’s episode had a very definite and very strong theme and that was the theme of hate. Why do people (and vampires and werewolves) hate and how does it feel to be hated? Can hatred be ended or are we just fated to live our lives in a world that’s dominated by people trying to kill each other for reasons that don’t even seem to be all that apparent to them? At it’s best, True Blood has always served an allegory for the prejudices that have poisoned the past and which refuse to die in the present. That was certainly the case tonight. It was rarely subtle but then again, True Blood rarely is.

That’s kind of why some of us love it.

Where to begin with recapping this episode? Well, let’s start with Sookie. After having her little freakout at the Faerie nightclub, Sookie was subdued by two faeries who, once Sookie regained consciousness, informed her that she has to be careful with her magic powers because, since Sookie is only half-Faerie, she’s running the risk of depleting herself. As the faeries grimly explain to her, if she uses up her magical powers then she’ll no longer be half-faerie. Instead, she’ll just be normal. Sookie can barely disguise just how excited she is by this news.

Later, Sookie goes to the hospital to see Luna, who is still recovering from being shot by rednecks two episodes ago. While there, she talks to Sam and she asks him if he would want to be normal if he had the chance. Sam replies that he doesn’t know and that he really doesn’t have a choice in the matter. Sookie, however, does and she ends the episode lighting up the sky in an effort to deplete her magic.

As for Sam, he’s using his powers to continue to pursue the men who shot him and Luna He manages to catch one of them — who, somewhat predictably, is named Jim Bob — in the hospital.

Jim Bob’s friends, meanwhile, are busy hanging out with their new best friend, Hoyt. Usually, I find an excuse when writing these reviews to refer to Andy as being a dumbass. However, I may have to stop doing that because, as of late, Hoyt is a 100 times more of a dumbass than Andy. Having been “rescued” last week, Hoyt is apparently now a born again redneck and he seems to have little trouble joining up with this hate group and letting them know all about how angry he is at Jessica.

Yeah, Hoyt’s definitely a bigger dumbass than Andy.

But, as tonight’s episode proved, rednecks aren’t the only ones who are capable of hatred. Do you remember how, last week, I theorized that Russell wouldn’t actually kill Roman? Well, I was certainly wrong as tonight’s episode opened with Roman dead and Salome assuming control of the Authority. And, much as I (and a lot of other people) predicted, it was revealed tonight that it was Salome and not Nora who originally dug Russell up in the first place.

As the new head of the Authority, Salome not only releases Nora but also pardons Russell for killing Roman. Once the lone dissenting member of the Authority is killed by Russell, Salome leads the remaining members in drinking the blood of Lilith. Though originally hesitant, Bill and Eric both also drink the blood because, as Eric puts it, it’s just vampire’s blood.

In the very next scene, we find Nora, Salome, Russell, the Rev. Newlin, Eric, and Bill all drunkenly wandering the streets of New Orleans. While Russell and Newlin flirt, the other members of this happy group go out of their way to intimidate humans and announce that the city belongs to them. As if to prove their point, they then crash a party where they proceed to make a bloody (and almost disturbingly graphic) feast out of everyone there. Eventually, so much blood is spilled and so much hatred is released that a very naked Lilith suddenly appears and proceeds to walk over to where Nora is feeding on one unfortunate guest. As Eric, apparently lost in his own daze of a blood lust, watches Lilith and Nora, he suddenly has a vision of his own as Godric appears to remind him that he knows what he’s doing is wrong but, ominously, Nora does not.

(At this point, the show truly earned my review of “Wow.”)

As of tonight’s episode, it certainly appears as if that long-threatened war between humans and vampires is right around the corner…

Random Thoughts And Observations:

Tonight’s unofficial scene count: 35.
Who do you think the Dragon is? I’m going to make an early guess and say that it’s Buddy Dearborn, if just because I can’t think of any other reason for including that scene where Andy goes to visit him.
I have to admit that I found the scenes where Lafayette attempted to get that spirit exorcised out of him to be almost unbearably disturbing and difficult to watch.
How hot was Alcide while he was training for his fight with J.D?
Though it didn’t do much to move the story forward, my favorite scene tonight was when Arlene was watching her wedding video. It was a sweet moment of calm in a stormy episode and Carrie Preston’s performance as Arlene really sold it.
This entire episode, in fact, was very well-acted. Denis O’Hare was all decadent evil as Russell and Anna Paquin’s scenes where she considers whether or not she wants to be normal were very well done.
As often happens whenever True Blood tackles the most serious of themes, this episode was full of some great one-liners. Here are some of my favorites:
“I don’t know how to make lunch so I made you breakfast instead.”
“Your son doesn’t have a grave because y’all ate him.”
“Hate group is about more than hate.”
While I think the show made the right decision when it came to killing off Roman, I’m still going to miss Chris Meloni’s performance in the role.

Trash Film Guru Vs. The Summer Blockbusters : “The Amazing Spider-Man”

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

I know, I know — it’s really not even fair, is it? To review director Marc Webb’s probably-happening-to-quickly relaunch of Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises seems like setting this flick up for defeat. Truth be told, though, I actually saw this flick on opening night, and held off on reviewing it here on Through The Shattered Lens because, well — everybody else was already having a crack at it on here. I swear. I think this is the fourth or fifth review of this film to go up here. So I held off. And honestly, the fact that I wasn’t rushing home to sit down and review it right away should tell you something right there, shouldn’t it?

Not that The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t a perfectly decent little superhero flick, it is. But that’s all it is. I can’t find much fault here, really — Webb’s directive from Columbia seems to have been to, in effect, Nolan-ize the Spider-Man story with this reboot, and on the surface, he seems to have done that. The tone is darker and more somber. James Garfield’s take on Peter Parker is altogether more haunted and troubling than was Tobey Maguire’s. He’s less likable, too — a development I actually welcome. Emma Stone does a nice job as high-school love interest Gwen Stacy. Martin Sheen’s Uncle Ben in an altogether more realistic and involving take on the character than we got in Sam Raimi’s first flick. Sally Field is great as Aunt May. Dennis Leary does a fine job as Gwen’s dad, police Captain George Stacy, who has a hard-on to arrest Spider-Man. Campbell Scott, in flashback scenes as Peter Parker’s dad, cuts both a kindly and haunting figure, and the decision of the filmmakers/studio to concentrate on the mystery surrounding the elder Parkers is a good one that gives the series a little bit more depth.About the only two serious knocks against the film are the normally-reliable Rhys Ifans’ take on the villainous Curt Connors/Lizard, his performance in both roles being of a distinctly lacking/mail-in-in nature, and the CGI effects in general, which are of middling quality, particularly in terms of their realization of Connors’ Lizard persona (or maybe that should be reptile-ona). They’re not bad, but they’re not up to the level we expect in our summer blockbusters at this point, and I would say they’re pretty of a piece, quality-wise, with, say, the second Hulk flick.

Anyway, by and large, the word we’re looking for here, across the board, is competent. Not inspired, by any means, and not groundbreaking — just competent. I’ll be honest and admit I liked this flick better than Joss Whedon’s Avengers, since it at least provided some level of human melodrama to back up the action, but it seems that the lesson studios have taken from Nolan raising the bar on the entire superhero genre is not that we want more complex, challenging, higher-quality, more technically-brilliant, more multi-faceted fare, but that we just want these flicks to be “darker” and “more realistic.” They “get” what the success of the Batman films means on a surface level, but they really don’t “get it” at all.

For those of you who are old enough to remember the “evolution” of the comics medium in the mid-to-late ’80s with books like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, assuming you were paying attention to comics back then, this will all seem terribly familiar — after the success of those two books, the “Big Two” publishers said they got the message and that people were ready for “superheroes to grow up.” And what did we get? Not more intelligent, thought-provoking, boundary-pushing, stories and characters that challenged the conventions of the genre itself the way those works did, but a steady stream of “darker,” more “mature,” somber, soul-less versions of the same kind of crap the industry was already cranking out — a state of “creative” affairs that continues unabated to this day. Nolan’s raised the bar on superhero storytelling on the silver screen the same way that Miller, Moore, and Gibbons did on the printed page, and Hollywood seems to have taken the same “lessons” from it that Marvel and DC did a quarter-century ago.

in other words, welcome to a new age of superhero sameness. On the one extreme we’ll have pure, unfiltered, two-dimensional, check-your-brain-at-the-door, CGI-heavy slugfests, a la The Avengers. Comics could always do these and do ’em well, and now so can the movies. On the other hand, we’ll have ostensibly more “mature,” “realistic,” “darker” stuff like this. But don’t expect another series with the innate intelligence and willingness to push the envelope in new directions that we’ve gotten with the Dark Knight films anytime too soon. Meet the new boss — same as the old boss.

Mind you, all of this was pretty much written and ready to go before I saw The Dark Knight Rises — and now that I have, my initial view still stands. Reaction to one flick shouldn’t change one’s opinions on another, after all. So yeah, this is perfectly adequate, acceptable superhero fare — but in the wake of DKR , do “adequate” and “acceptable” still cut it? Should they ever have? And are we willing to settle for movies like The Amazing Spider-Man that think that all DKR and its ilk prove are that audiences want the same old stuff, albeit with “darker,” more humorless trappings — or are we going to reward work that does what Nolan’s done with his Batman series in terms of pushing the genre itself in directions we’d never before expected? Let’s vote with our dollars, and vote wisely.

6 Films That Are Not The Dark Knight Rises: The Girl From Naked Eye, Magic Mike, Rock of Ages, Ted, 21 Jump Street, and Underworld: Awakening

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Right now, everyone seems to be heading out to see The Dark Knight Rises for the first, second, or hundredth time. By my own personal count, the various writers here at The Shattered Lens have seen the film a combined total of 12 times since it opened on Friday. (Myself, I’ll be seeing it on Tuesday.)

But what if you don’t want to see The Dark Knight Rises this week? What if you just don’t want to deal with the big crowds? Maybe you want to wait a few months so that you can see it for a dollar. Or maybe, you showed up at the theater and discovered that the showing was sold out or perhaps you’re just not into the whole Batman thing. What then? Well, believe it or not, there are other movies out there and below, you can find 6 reviews of films that came out this year but are not The Dark Knight Rises. Some of them are worth seeing and some of them definitely are not. But all six of them are alternatives for those of you who want to see a movie but, for whatever reason, don’t want to see The Dark Knight Rises.

(Even better, they’re six films that I saw earlier this year but, until now, still hadn’t gotten around to reviewing.)

1) The Girl From Naked Eye (dir by David Ren)

Jake (Jason Yee) is the driver for a sleazy escort service that’s headquartered out of a strip club called Naked Face. Jake ends up falling in love with Sandy (Samantha Streets), an escort who writes poetry in her spare time. (Yes, one of those…) When Sandy is murdered, Jake goes on a violent search for her murderer.

The Girl From Naked Eye is a pretty uneven and rather predictable film but I actually enjoyed it. It’s obvious that director David Ren is a fan of the same old film noirs that I love and, at its best, Girl From Naked Eye is a loving tribute to those films. Streets is likable as the ill-fated Sandy and Gary Stretch brings some unexpected depth to his villainous role. Perhaps best of all, Girl From Naked Eye is only 80 minutes long. Sometimes, you just don’t need that extra 30 minutes to tell your story.

The Girl From Naked Eye is very much an independent film so it might be playing near you or it might not.

2) Magic Mike (dir. by Stephen Soderbergh)

After me and my BFF Evelyn saw Magic Mike, I hopped on twitter and I tweeted, “Memo to single guys. Go hang out around the theater when Magic Mike gets out. You will get laid!” Yes, Magic Mike is that type of film…

“Magic” Mike (played by Channing Tatum) is the most popular attraction at Xquisite, a male strip club that’s run by Dallas (a wonderfully sleazy performance from Matthew McConaughey). Mike ends up serving as a mentor for Adam (Alex Pettyfer) while pursuing Adam’s disapproving sister (Cody Horn) and saving up his money so that he can start his own business. However, the life proves a lot more difficult for him to leave then he originally thought…

There’s actually a lot of plot in Magic Mike but, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The film knows that we’re all here to watch Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, and Joe Manganiello shake everything that they’ve got and the film does not disappoint. Director Steven Soderbergh’s directs in such a way that the film’s dance numbers are both exciting and, at the same time, distancing. By taking a rather documentary approach to otherwise salacious material, Soderbergh reminds us that, ultimately, Tatum is just doing a job and fulfilling the requirements of fantasy as opposed to reality.

When Christy Lemire of the Associates Press gave a less than positive review to The Dark Knight Rises, all of the fanboys on Rotten Tomatoes became obsessed with the fact that she had previously given a positive review to Magic Mike. Many of them left comments complaining that the only reason Lemire enjoyed Magic Mike was because it featured naked men. While all one has to do is read Lemire’s review to see that’s not the case, so what if it was? Films have been objectifying women for over a century. What’s wrong with a little fair play?

Magic Mike is still in theaters.

3) Rock of Ages (dir. by Adam Shankman)

In this adaptation of the hit Broadway show, Sherrie Christian (Julianne Hough) is an innocent girl from Oklahoma who dreams of finding super stardom in Los Angeles. She gets a job working as a waitress at an incredibly filthy-looking club run by Alec Baldwin and she also gets a boyfriend (played by Diego Boneta) who is an aspiring musician himself. Everything’s great except for the fact that the mayor’s puritanical wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) hates rock and roll and wants to close the club down. Luckily, alcoholic rock star Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise) is willing to help out. Did I mention that Russell Brand is in this film as well? Because, he like totally is…

Rock of Ages gives you a chance to watch your favorite actors and actresses shake it to some of the least danceable music ever written and it’s just about as bad you might expect. Between the vanilla performances of Hough and Boneta and the film’s rampant sexism (every female in the film is either a shrew or a whore and apparently, the only thing that can redeem them is allowing Tom Cruise to drunkenly cop a feel), Rock of Ages is a combination of the forgettable and stuff that you wish you could forget. For a director who specializes in musicals, Shankman seems strangely lost here and the majority of the big numbers feel lifeless. The one bright spot is Mary J. Blige who shows up in a minor role and quickly reminds everyone what singing is all about.

Rock of Ages opened with a lot of hype but that hype didn’t translate into box office success. You can probably still catch it at the dollar theater but you might want your money back afterward.

4) Ted (directed by Seth MacFarlane)

Ted tells the story of a lonely 8 year-old boy who, one night, wishes that his beloved teddy bear Ted might come to life. Well, Ted does come to life and ends up proving to the world that magic does exist. Briefly, Ted and his owner are celebrities but soon, Ted’s fame fades and, 28 years later, Ted (voiced by director Seth MacFarlane) and his owner (now played by Mark Wahlberg) are slackers who spend their time smoking weed, watching TV, and obsessing over pop culture. (At times, it almost felt as if the film was a documentary about life here at the TSL Bunker.) However, Wahlberg’s girlfriend (Mila Kunis) feels that Ted is holding him back and eventually, Wahlberg is forced to make a choice between childhood friendship and adult love.

I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of Seth MacFarlane’s. I hate the Family Guy and I’ve never gotten through more than 2 minutes of The Cleveland Show. However, I also have to admit that I enjoyed Ted for what it was. It’s a massively uneven film that pretty much tells the same joke over and over again but that joke (i.e. a cute toy saying or doing something incredibly crude) turns out to be surprisingly resilient. For their part, Wahlberg and Kunis are a likable couple and Kunis does a good job generating some much-needed sympathy for her thinly drawn character. Add to that, Joel McHale is in this film and how can I not enjoy a film that features Joel McHale?

Ted is still playing at a theater near you.

5) 21 Jump Street (dir. by Phil Lord and Chris Miller)

Morton (Jonah Hill) and Greg (Channing Tatum) have been unlikely friends since high school. Greg was a jock and bully while Morton was a guy who looked and acted a lot like Jonah Hill. When Greg and Morton graduate high school, they both enter the police academy together and, upon getting out of the academy, they find themselves assigned to hazardous duty like patrolling the local park. However, it turns out that there’s a new designer drug out there and Hill and Tatum are both sent back to high school. Only now, they’re working under cover…

21 Jump Street was a real surprise when it came out earlier this year, a laugh-out-loud comedy that managed to both satirize and celebrate the conventions of the American cop film. Hill and Tatum had a lot of chemistry together and there was something oddly touching about watching Hill return to high school and discover that he was now considered the cool guy while Tatum was now the outsider. 21 Jump Street has kinda gotten forgotten in all the hype surrounding The Avengers and the Dark Knight Rises but ultimately, 21 Jump Street can stand with those two films as proof that occasionally a big-budget studio production can turn out to actually be a good film.

(Plus, James Franco’s look-alike brother, Dave Franco, is in it!)

21 Jump Street is available now on DVD and Blu-Ray but it’s also still playing at a few dollar theaters across the country.

6) Underworld: Awakening (dir by Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein)

Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is back and this time, she’s searching for Michael, who has gone missing. The plot doesn’t make much sense and the film has one of the most disappointing endings ever but it does provide the viewers with everything that they’ve come to expect from an Underworld film (with the exception of Scott Speedman, who does not return to the role of Michael in this film).

Underworld: Awakening opened at the beginning of the year, got terrible reviews, and made a decent enough amount of money that there will probably be yet another installment in the series come 2014. That said, Underworld: Awakening is probably the most vapid of all of the Underworld films (and that’s saying something) and, following the releases of both The Avengers and the Dark Knight Rises, it looks like even more of an empty exercise in CGI and action than it did when it was originally released. That said, this film does star my girl crush, Kate Beckinsale, and, after watching her in this film, I spent a few hours looking for monsters to fight. I will always recommend any film that features a women kicking ass and that’s about the only reason I have to recommend Underworld: Awakening.

Underworld: Awakening is currently available on both DVD and Blu-Ray.