Consider yourselves warned, HBO fans: No one lives forever. So teases the new extended trailer for True Blood Season 6 , which premieres on June 16 and which will find Bill as evil and as full as himself as when we saw him last summer. The state of Louisiana, meanwhile, has declared war against vampire, while Alcide and company are worried that werewolves may be next. Check out the 90-second teaser now: True Blood Season 6 Promo Earlier today, we also posted the first promo for Pretty Little Liars Season 4 .
With True Blood Season 6 scheduled to premiere on June 16, HBO will premiere the first trailer for this major return prior to tonight’s Game of Thrones Season 3 opener. But we’ve got your first look at it below. In this 30-second tease, Bill remains transformed and on te war path, searching for a frightened Eric and Sookie; while we also see some Tara/Pam strife and a shirtless Alcide. A VERY shirtless Alcide. Watch now! True Blood Season 6 Trailer
With True Blood Season 6 scheduled to premiere on June 16, HBO will premiere the first trailer for this major return prior to tonight’s Game of Thrones Season 3 opener. But we’ve got your first look at it below. In this 30-second tease, Bill remains transformed and on te war path, searching for a frightened Eric and Sookie; while we also see some Tara/Pam strife and a shirtless Alcide. A VERY shirtless Alcide. Watch now! True Blood Season 6 Trailer
Southern goth-chic gets a swoony supernatural makeover in Beautiful Creatures , a teen franchise-starter that suggests what Twilight might have looked like with a reasonable budget, a competent script and halfway-decent special effects, but still saddled with next-best source material. Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s book, the first of four, reps a calculated synthesis of proven YA-lit elements and recent publishing success tactics, which makes for ingratiating storytelling on the page. Fortunately, writer-director Richard LaGravenese has jettisoned most of the novel and refashioned its core mythology and characters into a feverishly enjoyable guilty pleasure, unapologetic in its mass-market rebel ‘tude. Though Beautiful Creatures has what it takes to support a series — a “gifted” girl, a smitten guy and powerful evil forces determined to keep them apart — the film could face trouble winning over cynical young auds who view it as the latest shameless attempt to cash in on the fantasy craze, which of course it is. And yet, now that the Twilight and Harry Potter series have run their course, the timing seems right for a soapy romance in which a sensitive small-town hunk (Alden Ehrenreich) falls hard for the new girl in town, not really minding that she’s a witch — or “caster,” as they prefer to be called here. With a dark-haired, pale-skinned look more likely to inspire 1920s audiences than today’s supermodel-obsessed tastes, Alice Englert ( Ginger and Rosa ) brings a refreshingly relatable quality to the role of 15-year-old Lena Duchannes, who’s moved to dead-end Gatlin, S.C., after things got out of control at her last school. Lena wants to keep a low profile while counting down the days until her 16th birthday, when a family curse predicts she will be “claimed” as a dark witch, but Ethan recognizes her as the mysterious girl he’s been dreaming about for months, and insists on getting to know this melancholy stranger. The best young-adult offerings tap into deeper themes that resonate with teens, but this one trades mostly in dopey wish fulfillment, granting magical powers and a devoted admirer to girls who imagine themselves as outsiders. It’s about feeling different, having a secret and discovering that special soulmate in whom one can confide. With his heavy brow knit in an expression of deep concern, Ehrenreich looks the way a young Orson Welles might if cast on a CW series, with a plucky Southern accent in place of a sonorous radio voice. Though the film preserves the idea of Ethan as narrator, it ditches the novel’s off-puttingly snide tone, allowing the popular girls — led by self-righteous ex-g.f. Emily (Zoey Deutch) — to damn themselves, while saving the amusing putdowns for Gatlin. Nearly everything about the book has been streamlined for the screen, which may rankle fans (who are likely to miss the ethereal song that binds Ethan to Lena, at least), but it makes for a far cleaner plot. While Lena spices up a traditional teen courtship with doses of magic — as when she caps a date by conjuring snow out of thin air on a muggy December afternoon — her powerful dark relatives (a vampy cousin played by Emmy Rossum and shape-shifting undead mom Sarafine, played with lip-smacking relish by Emma Thompson ) arrive to demonstrate what happens when witches go bad. The film goes out of its way to forge memorable character introductions, which will serve the series well, should sequels follow (more confusing is a scene toward the end when Ethan, a sophomore in the book, is shown leaving for NYU). By granting LaGravenese the freedom to refashion the novel as he sees fit, Warner Bros. gives Beautiful Creatures an edge over other recent hit fantasy-series adaptations, which have often shown stiff, gospel-like fidelity to their source material. By contrast, this project comes across as downright blasphemous — and not only against the potboiler that inspired it; LaGravenese’s script takes on Bible-beaters, book-banners and all who invoke God to justify small-minded prejudice. In one particularly campy scene, Sarafine goes head-to-head with Lena’s guardian ( Jeremy Irons , the picture of drawling Old South gentility) in the local church, dabbing holy water behind her ears like perfume as she dismisses the superstitious townsfolk’s notions of religion. Considering how little it takes to get certain groups riled up about what their kids are reading, the film goes awfully far out of its way to align itself with blacklisted literature, offering up Viola Davis’ voodoo “seer” (and resident librarian) as its high priestess. Garcia and Stohl clearly saw To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye as models for the series, although Beautiful Creatures demonstrates few of their insights into human nature, hewing closer to Judy Blume and Twilight fan fiction. Likewise, while Ethan and Lena turn one another onto Vonnegut and Bukowski, throwing their names around for punk credibility, either writer would surely recoil to see himself quoted in this context. The film ultimately plays like so much teenage girl poetry, heavy on the angst, endearingly naive in its notions of love and yet brought vividly to life by a game cast, evocative locations (both indoors and out) and stunning anamorphic lensing. Louisiana works nicely for Civil War-obsessed Gatlin, suggesting a tween-friendly True Blood . RELATED: ‘Beautiful Creatures’ NYC Premiere: Twi-Hard With A Vengeance? Follow Movieline on Twitter.
You’re done gorging on turkey, which means only one thing: ‘Tis the season to be stuffed with Oscar punditry. Movieline ‘s Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics has awoken from its L-Tryptophan slumber to provide you with our latest Oscar Index , which evaluates the contenders for Best Director. The latest Index on Best Picture can be found here , and over the course of the long weekend, we’ll be weighing in on the Best Actor, Actress and Support Actor and Actress races. How The Oscar Index Works With each award category that we track, we’ll present four different rankings. Movieline Executive Editor Jen Yamato , Managing Editor Brian Brooks and myself will each provide our personal weekly rankings of the movies and actors in the running, and then those results will be weighted and averaged to determine an official Movieline ranking for each category. Let’s begin: Best Director In terms of perception, the Best Director category has been fairly static for a while now, but that should change next week as Les Misérables and Zero Dark Thirty screen for critics and reaction to them begins to flow through the blogosphere. Up to this point, the strong standings of the directors of those films, respectively, Tom Hooper and Kathryn Bigelow , has been almost pure buzz, so their positions could rise or fall sharply once actual scenes and performances can be scrutinized. Until then, Steven Spielberg remains the auteur to beat despite Lincoln ‘s at-times sloggy pace, and Ben Affleck is holding strong as his Argo continues to do well at the box office and on the word-of-mouth exchange. The Master director Paul Thomas Anderson could use a Harvey Weinstein-style reheating, and Ang Lee may need a different kind of PR campaign after he annoyed critics, including Movieline’s Alison Willmore and the New York Times’ A.O. Scott ,, by undercutting the often-breathtaking visual narrative of Life of Pi with a cliched journalist-interviews-story-subject framing device. That could result in Lee falling in favor harder than the zebra hits the lifeboat in his film. Frank DiGiacomo’s Picks Jen Yamato’s Picks Brian Brooks’ Picks 1. Steven Spielberg 1. Tom Hooper 1. Steven Spielberg 2. David O. Russell 2. Steven Spielberg 2. Ben Affleck 3. Kathryn Bigelow 3. Ben Affleck 3. Ang Lee 4. Ben Affleck 4. Kathryn Bigelow 4. Michael Hanecke 5. Tom Hooper 5. David O. Russell 5. Benh Zeitlin And the leaders are… Movieline’s Top 5 Best Director Contenders: 1. Steven Spielberg ( Lincoln ) 2. Ben Affleck ( Argo ) 3. Tom Hooper ( Les Misérables) 4. Ang Lee ( Life of Pi ) 5. David O. Russell ( Silver Linings Playbook ) Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Given the off-the-charts camp factor in the tantalizing prospect of Lindsay Lohan playing Elizabeth Taylor , Lifetime might prize descriptions of Liz & Dick as “trashy” or “awful.” So the network might harbor mixed emotions in reading that the movie about Taylor and her tumultuous romance with Richard Burton is actually pretty good, all things considered, despite an inevitably episodic nature and one glaringly unnecessary device. Such fact-based TV movies are rare these days, but this post-Thanksgiving telecast is just hammy enough to generate numbers rivaling the hordes of paparazzi that dogged the not-always-happy couple. The movie’s secret weapon, it turns out, isn’t Lohan at all, but rather New Zealander Grant Bowler (barely recognizable from a small part on True Blood ) as the dashing, often-drunken Burton, who classes up the movie in much the way Burton’s classically trained Shakespearean actor played off Taylor’s lifelong movie star. Directed by Lloyd Kramer from a script by Christopher Monger, the narrative is framed, somewhat unfortunately, by having the two speak directly to the camera against a stark black backdrop, in what approximates a kind of posthumous interview about their relationship. While it offers another means of getting inside their heads, it has a certain beyond-the-grave quality — exalting their epic love, yes, but feeling too much like something from one of the Mitch Albom movies Kramer helmed. “I fell for you the moment I saw you,” Burton tells her (and Bowler has the rich Welsh baritone down pat), one of several lines of dialogue — including “My heart is broken, and you have the smashed pieces” — seemingly calibrated to appeal both to those willing to embrace the romance and those eager to approach the movie like a screwball comedy. The first 30 minutes or so are devoted, appropriately, to the beginning of their torrid affair on the set of Cleopatra , where the two go a bit too quickly from squabbling to screwing, essentially under the noses of their respective spouses. In this case, the adage, “If the trailer’s rocking, don’t come knocking,” more than applies. After that, Liz and Dick engage in epic fights, spend money like drunken sailors, take refuge from the prying press by living on a yacht, and struggle through Burton’s bouts of melancholy over failing to win Oscars, including when she earned her second for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf while he was overlooked. OK, so there’s plenty of fun to be manufactured watching the movie — and even drinking games, like taking a swig every time a doctor or associate delivers bad news. Still, Bowler is quite good as Burton, and Lohan certainly is adequate, barring a few awkward moments, thanks largely to the fabulous frocks and makeup (courtesy of Salvador Perez and Eryn Krueger Mekash, respectively) she gets to model. Moreover, there is something strangely fascinating about a couple so madly hot for each other as to be unable to find equilibrium or peace, as well as how the Taylor-Burton pairing helped pave the way for a more aggressive (and intrusive) breed of celebrity journalism. The movie also benefits from the revelation about Taylor saving Burton’s love letters long after his death, which came more than a quarter-century before hers. In a sense, the producers shrewdly used Lohan — no stranger to the tabloids herself — as a publicity multiplier, but they needn’t have worried. Because while Liz & Dick is wobbly at times, the movie ultimately stands on its own. RELATED: Liz-aster! 5 Critics Damn Lindsay Lohan’s performance in ‘Liz & Dick’ − With Faint Praise And Sheer Scorn Follow Movieline on Twitter.
The winter doldrums are starting to hit thanks to a chillingly skin-free week on the boob tube. Gone are the dog(gystyle) days of summer when Game of Thrones , Magic City , and True Blood kept us swimming in skin. The only offering this week is the ever-luscious Megan Fox keeping things hot in a skimpy sci-fi outfit for Wedding Band . Megan’s bountiful boobage can barely be contained by her rubber bra during the guest spot on her husband Brian Austin Green ’s new show, so that may be enough to get your rocket prepped for lift off. Megan looks as slinky and supple as she did in the infamous FHM Photo Shoot back in 2008, when we finally caught a bit of Fox’s pelt. See pics after the jump!
This week on the boob tube, Strike Back delivers the glandular goods with a topless pool scene from Natalie Becker . Meanwhile, the True Blood season finale gets pulses pounding thanks to a send off from Valentina Cervi’ s supple suckers.
The boob tube is hot this week with both Strike Back and True Blood keeping the nude fires burning. On Cinemax, Strike Back is only two episodes into its third season and is raising bars everywhere with plenty of crack-jack rackage. So that’s why they call it Skinemax! This week it was Natalie Becker baring her buoyant butterbags playing an arms dealer who loves to swim topless. She’ll have you assaulting your deadly weapon! And over on HBO, Valentina Cervi bid farwell on the season finale of True Blood with a final flash of her fantastic funbags. That’s one pulse pounding send off! More pics after the jump!
