Daily Loaf

Vampires are in.

True Blood, the Charlaine Harris-adapted stories of waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and her love affair with small town vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer) has garnered enough success for Showtime to have ordered a third season. (Even with Evan Rachel Wood’s cancerous performance.)

The CW has been raising the dead for years: Superman as a television property via Smallville, the concepts of Melrose Place and 90210, Tyra Banks — but Tyra and her ty-rades still weren’t enough undead for the network. New  to the line-up is The Vampire Diaries (cast pictured), probably starring some newcomer’s pecs and the bust of a blonde.

Oh, and there’s Twilight’s Robert Pattinson – you know, that kid from Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire? Maybe you’ve seen him in that.

The vampire has been a longtime mainstay of pop culture, exuding sex appeal and terror, and the comics world has been no stranger to blood suckers. Just ask my Dad.

I remember feeling very connected to him when we’d go comic shopping on Saturdays. He’d pick me up, we’d go to the local flea market (I’m from Ohio) and he’d buy me the comics I wanted, even getting a few of his own. I’d have my stack of X-Men — and my father would purchase issue after issue of Vampirella.

Vampirella, vampire warrior: born either of Draculon, a vampire planet, or of a division of Hell. The character’s backstory has changed in her forty-year tenure as comicdom’s sexiest vampire.

The Vampirella issues soon grew to the height of my father’s Playboy collection, and I realized that Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, everyone, let’s start the meeting. Before you start talking about winning us Oscars, I’ve got the best idea for a movie ever. It’s about an alien race that lands on Earth, but they are actually “robots in disguise.” Catchy isn’t it? These large robot-alien things can have a civil war on Earth, because, well, we need a plot. And that will pretty much be the plot for the entire movie and all of the sequels — and there will be sequels.

Gratuitous Megan Fox picture after the jump … Read the rest of this entry »

Halo is one of the biggest video-game franchises of all time. When Peter Jackson announced he would bring the beloved franchise to the big screen, geeks everywhere were transformed into little kids on Christmas Eve. Sadly, the holiday quickly morphed into a trick-filled Halloween as first Jackson’s financing fell through, then Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro tried and failed to get the project off the ground. Hopes of ever seeing Master Chief at the multiplex were looking pretty grim. That is, until now, for Halo has a savior and Spielberg be thy name!

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Note: This is our first Tournament of Summer Movie Blockbuster. In case you missed it, here’s the skinny on the tourney and a full list of competing films. And for news and reviews of this summer’s blockbusters, be sure and check CL’s Movies & TV site.

In one of the most unsurprising poll results of all time, Star Wars managed to trounce Mission:Impossible 2 in Monday’s poll. It was so bad for T-Cruise that M:I 2 didn’t even get a vote. Not one! Today, it’s #1 seed E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial vs. dark horse #8 Transformers.

Details on the films and your chance to vote are after the break.

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The New York Times is reporting that 20th Century Fox will try to delay the release of Watchmen. Deadline Hollywood Daily has a statement from Warner Bros. on the lawsuit.

This week’s DVD releases: Rope of Silicon runs down Paramount’s new Blu-Ray titles, including the Patrick Swayze stupid-face fest, Ghost; Tom Cruise going vroom vroom with Nicole Kidman in Days of Thunder; Event Horizon and The Truman Show.

Q: Who’s the most reviled movie critic? A: Ben Lyons. He’s so hated (and with good reason), that CriticWatch’s Erik Childress has a blog dedicated to using Lyons’s own words against him:

Is it possible that New York publicists have a poster of Ben Lyons in their office with the slogan that reads “Put critics in a theater full of people laughing with free tickets and one of them may laugh too?” What if the Bedtime Stories crowd was laughing at Ben Lyons laughing? Or just Ben Lyons? I guarantee he’s produced more unintentional laugh lines than Sandler & Co. did this year. Take for example:

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