stuff
Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey are set to star with George Clooney in Men Who Stare at Goats. Based on journalist Jon Ronson's book about his research into a top-secret unit within the US Army called the First Earth Battalion, established in 1979, which trains its soldiers to "adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them." (This TOTALLY could have happened in the Generation Kill/True Blood crossover fic I rec'ced yesterday!) Set in present day Iraq, the fillm follows a reporter (McGregor) who stumbles upon the story of a lifetime when he meets Lyn Cassady (Clooney), who claims to be a former psychic solder from the First Earth Battalion, who was reactivated post-9/11. Grant Heslov (Unscripted) will direct. (THR) [imdb]
A review of the True Blood pilot that compares it to Kathryn Bigelow's film Near Dark:
'Alan Ball has spooky timing. His masterpiece of American morbidity, Six Feet Under, ended its first season three weeks before the September 11 attacks. After a summer of watching various people die in unexpected ways, audiences watched the ultimate segment opener, a mass death that underscored in gargantuan and shocking ways the show’s central premise, i.e. that we all have to go sometime. It took me years to warm up to the show, but its relevance was unmistakable from the start.
'This time around, the subject seems to be vampires, but it’s really values-the small town variety. Ring any bells?
'Back when he scripted the first season of his latest HBO series True Blood, based on the popular vampire novels by Charlaine Harris, Ball might have guessed that Republicans would attempt to restart the culture wars, but he couldn’t have imagined just how big a role the notion of “small town values” would play in the staging of that combat.'
Interview with Alan Ball about True Blood. He talks about working with Charlaine Harris and casting the lead roles. He also says something interesting about Eric: "Eric was a Viking who came to America about 1,000 years ago and was made a vampire either on the voyage over or once he landed in America." I'm pretty sure this fact never came up in the books; what I vaguely remember from the books is someone saying that Eric has been in American at least 100 years, or something like that. Does Ball have inside information from Harris? (TheFutonCritic)
James Middleton and the new cast members of Sarah Connor Chronicles talk season two. Contains spoilers. (TheFutonCritic)
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton giving a joint address on Saturday Night Live.