Sunday, December 14, 2008

Vampires for Everyone: The Many Faces of the Vampire

Below is a sampling of the more popular vampire books. The vampire novel is still hot and leads the way in the new trend of cross-genre novels and series. Feel free to print this list up and take it to the bookstore or use the Amazon links to order online.

All of the books below are linked to Amazon where you can find more information about them and purchase them if you wish.

Vampire Humor:


Fangland by John Marks

You Suck: A Love Story by Christopher Moore

Vamped: A Novel by David Sosnowski

Vampire Romance:

Any Way You Want It by Kathy Love

The Last of the Red-Hot Vampires by Katie MacAlister

Primal Desires (The Primes Series #6) by Susan Sizemore

Romancing the Dead (The Garnet Lacey Series #3) by Tate Hallaway

Vampires Are Forever (The Argeneau Vampires #8) by Lynsay Sands

Vampire Thrillers:

99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale by David Wellington

The Darkness (The Vampire Huntress Legend Series #10) by L. A. Banks

They Hunger by Scott Nicholson

Vampire Science Fiction:

The Fledgling by Octavia Butler

Fall with Honor (The Vampire Earth Series #7) by E. E. Knight

Vampire Fantasy:


Child of a Dead God (Saga of the Noble Dead #6)by Barb Hendee and J.C. Hendee

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Vampire Historicals:


Baltimore,: Or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

Vampire Angst:


Bottomfeeder by B. F. Fingerman

Vampire Humorous Mysteries:


From Dead to Worse (A Southern Vampire Mystery #8) by Charlaine Harris

The Undead Kama Sutra (The Felix Gomez Mysteries #3) by Mario Acevedo

Vampire Hard-Boiled Detectives:


Blood and Rust: Two Novels of the Cleveland Undead by S.A. Swiniarski

Half the Blood of Brooklyn (The Joe Pitt Casebooks #3) by Charlie Huston

Teen Vampire:


Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga #4) by Stephenie Meyer

Misc. Vampire:

The Vampire's Betrayal (The Savannah Vampire Chronicles #4) by Raven Hart

http://www.buybooksfortheholidays.com/2008/12/vampires-for-everyone-many-faces-of.html

American Film Institute released the winners of its AFI Awards Sunday, including its annual top 10 list.

Org's top 10 movies of the year, in alphabetical order, are "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Dark Knight," "Frost/Nixon," "Frozen River," "Gran Torino," "Iron Man," "Milk," 'Wall-E," "Wendy and Lucy," and "The Wrestler."

"Slumdog Millionaire," which has been racking up honors this awards season, was not on the list. One of AFI's criteria is that a film has "significant creative and/or production elements from the United States."

Awards contenders "Revolutionary Road," "Reader" and "Doubt," which meet that criterion, were also left off the list.

The AFI top 10 TV programs of the year, including series, telepics and minis, are "Breaking Bad," "In Treatment," "John Adams," "Life," "Lost," 'Mad Men," "The Office," "Recount," "The Shield," and "The Wire."

Several series that garnered multiple nominations from the Golden Globes and guilds in the past week were left off the list, including: "30 Rock," "Entourage," "Weeds," "Damages," "Dexter," "House" and "True Blood." This is the first awards attention NBC's "Life" has ever received.

AFI kudos are selected with a 13-person jury process where members discuss and debate the merits of titles and provide detailed rationale for each selection. The jury's composed of "scholars, film artists, critics and AFI trustees."

"Entertainment Tonight" film critic Leonard Maltin chaired the film jury, while AFI Trustee Emeritus Richard Frank chaired the television jury. For a full list of jurors, visit Variety.com

Creative teams for the selections will be honored at a luncheon Jan. 9 at the Four Seasons Hotel in BevHills.

True Blood Music Video of the Day


This is for Lafayette ! Enjoy

Brick house by the Commodores ( I think someone else is covering it here –let me know if you know who )


send me your favorites: truebloodindallas@gmail.com

Sucking the life out of "Near Dark"

from the La Times this morning

Near_dark Sucking the life out of "Near Dark": Remember when cynical observers said "True Blood" was too similar to "Twilight"? It looks like the backers of another vampire project, a remake of Kathryn Bigelow's "Near Dark," are closing the coffin on their plans because they fear the same critique. Producer Brad Fuller explains to reporter Chris Hewitt: "'Near Dark' is probably not going to happen....I think that 'Twilight' was the same type of thing we were going for, although 'Near Dark' was a much darker, sexier, rated-R version of that. But I’m concerned that, conceptually, that 'Near Dark' and 'Twilight' are too similar in terms of a vampire movie. For now, that movie is on hold.' Now here’s something new –- usually, when a movie is a surprise hit, you can’t move in Hollywood without bumping into a similar project designed to cash in. It’s not often when the opposite occurs, and a hit movie causes another in development to stall. But that seems to be the case with the remake of Bigelow’s 1987 vampire western, in which a young farmer (Adrian Pasdar) falls in love with a girl (Jenny Wright), only to find that she’s part of a family of utterly demented vampires, played by half the cast of 'Aliens.' 'The concept of "one person’s a vampire, the other person isn’t and they’re in love," with the success of that film, we would not measure up,' continued Fuller. 'It’s not the right time to make that.' " [Empire]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2008/12/near-dark.html

Alex Skarsgard is filming new movie in New York.


My, my aren't we are very international this morning.
How about a little Swedish from our very favorite Swede, Alex Skarsgard

' Sedan åker jag till Los Angeles i slutet av januari för att börja med säsong två av "True blood". '

After the translation we get :

'Then I go to Los Angeles in late January for the first of the season two of "True blood '

You don't have to let international articles get you down, just use a translator like:

http://www.stars21.com/translator/swedish_to_english.html
* Babelfish ( my favorite) does not do Swedish to English

The article is about Alex filming a new movie called '13' in NY, it's a remake of a French film.

translate it yourself here

HBO asks what can viewers expect from 'True Blood?'

Early HBO interview with Alan Ball from HBO -right before the series started.
(another of the older articles I'm going to post so we can reexamine)

HBO: After 'Six Feet Under,' making a show about vampires is a bit of a departure — what can viewers expect from 'True Blood?'

Alan Ball: It's based on a series of books written by Charlaine Harris, and it takes place in a world where vampires have made their presence known to humans. They've come out of the coffin, so to speak, because of the development by a Japanese biotech firm of synthetic blood for medical purposes, which the vampires claim fulfills all of their nutritional needs. So they've organized, and they're struggling for assimilation and for equal rights. That's sort of the big-world picture, and then in the small world of the show, which is a very small town in northern Louisiana, there is a waitress who works in a roadhouse, and she's telepathic, which has been a seriously debilitating pain in the ass for her. Everybody thinks she's crazy. She has no social life because of this, and then she meets a vampire. And because, technically, he has no brainwaves, she doesn't really hear his thoughts. So for the first time in her entire life, she can relax and be herself and not be on guard about hearing people's private, innermost things. And then there's a huge array of other characters; it's a really fun show. I remember when I was first pitching it, I said, ''This is popcorn TV for smart people.''

HBO: How did you discover these books and decide they'd make a great HBO series?

Alan Ball: I was early for a dentist appointment, and I had some time to kill. I went into Barnes and Noble, and I just bought this book on impulse. It was just a little paperback, and on the cover, the tagline said, ''Maybe having a vampire for a boyfriend wasn't such a good idea.'' I thought it was kind of funny. I started reading it that night, and I couldn't put it down. And the minute I was done with it, I wanted to read the next one. And I really got addicted. It's just such a fun world, and she really nailed so many things: They're very sexy, they're hilarious, there's a lot of interesting sociology. I'm from the South, and it was a very authentic look at the South. It's the kind of book you think, ''I'm going to read one chapter before I go to bed, and you read six.''

HBO: What do you think fans of 'Six Feet Under' will like about 'True Blood'?

Alan Ball: I think they will like the quality of the performances. It's another amazing cast, who are just doing really spectacular work. It's very sexy, and it's very funny. There's a lot of dark humor. It certainly goes places that I've never seen a series go before. It's not as existentially exhausting as Six Feet Under was, maybe, but ultimately, it's similar terrain in that it's really just exploring the human condition... and the vampire condition, since vampires are not really human anymore.

HBO: With all the vampire films and shows that have been made, how have you set 'True Blood' apart?

Alan Ball: There's a lot of gray area; the vampires are just like humans. Nobody's a hundred percent good, nobody's a hundred percent bad. There's also the aspect that an entire subculture springs up around the vampires. There are people who are called ''fang bangers'' who basically just want to hook up with vampires because apparently sex with vampires is really good. Vampire blood is kind of the hot black-market drug. If you ingest vampire blood, it's like a combination of ecstasy and Viagra — it gives you incredible strength. But it's also incredibly dangerous and incredibly addictive. Plus the fact that it's a vampire show that's taking place in such a mundane location. It's not New Orleans; it's not Anne Rice. One of my rules is: I don't ever want to hear opera music in the show, ever. We're staying away from the Baroque things. We're staying away from the standard, supernatural blue light. We're staying away from vampires having strange contact lenses. We're staying away from any sort of special effects that become the focus. I just want to give my actors fangs and let them act. What is it like to be immortal, to have lost everybody you love? To yearn for your humanity?

HBO: What was it like to adapt this series from the book, as opposed to creating something entirely original?

Alan Ball: In a lot of ways, an adaptation can be easier. One of the great things I discovered once we started turning Charlaine's books into a series is that her books are so successful because those stories work. The books are narrated from Sookie Stackhouse's point of view — the character that Anna Paquin is playing — and we're just sticking to her story. Now, the other characters in the world that don't really appear in the books, except when they're in her story, we're taking them and creating new things for them to do. But in a lot of ways Charlaine has done a lot of the heavy lifting already by creating this world and these characters. At the same time, I think, when you're just creating an original world, then you really have the freedom to just go anywhere. That being said, though, once I got into the second or third, fourth season of 'Six Feet Under,' there was a logic that you couldn't break. You couldn't just have this character do this because it would make a good story. We had established the psychology and a sort of character that had to remain true.

HBO: Does recasting someone else's work expand your horizons as a storyteller?

Alan Ball: I think working in television is great because you're always learning. The fact that you have to keep telling a big chapter of that story every two weeks, you're always learning. I tend to be drawn towards material that has a sensibility that, while it may not match my own original sensibility, it's very much in the same ballpark.

http://www.hbo.com/events/trueblood/interview/index.html

Novedades en torno a la segunda temporada de True Blood (Sangre fresca)


We know True Blood and the Sookie books are a big hit around the world and countries including UK, Italy and Spain eagerly await the series broadcast.

The full translation of this article is below, they have used the various spoilers, sides and casting calls as a basis for the article, we have collected here:

http://lovingtruebloodindallas.blogspot.com/search/label/Season%20two

HBO depositó su fe en su nueva serie desde muy temprano. Antes mismo de tener oportunidad de cautivar a los telespectadores, True Blood fue renovada para una segunda temporada tras la emisión de sólo dos episodios.

Read on in Spanish:
http://www.pizquita.com/noticia11454.html

Read on in English
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8953571/News-about-the-second-season-of-True-Blood-Fresh-blood-

Best Of 2008: Top 5 New Series- Fancastcom says TB is # 2

2. True Blood

Blame it on the Twilight phenomenon, but Vampires are now the new sexy. HBO banked on this when they created True Blood, under the guidance of “Six Feet Under” creator Alan Ball. In small town Bon Temps, Louisiana vampires are just regular citizens, thanks to the invention of synthetic blood. Some locals are still apprehensive about their bloodthirsty neighbors but waitress Sookie Stackhouse, played by Academy Award winning Actress Anna Paquin isn’t afraid. She has the ability to hear other’s thoughts and is drawn to a handsome 173-year-old vampire named Bill Compton, played by Stephen Moyer. Not since “Interview with the Vampire” did drinking blood look so sexy.

full list here

http://thebiz.fancast.com/2008/12/top_5_new_series_of_2008.html