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Wrestler Trailer Displays Realism in Fake Sport. Clip of the Day

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Under discussion:

Beyond the Mat (1999)

The Wrestler (2008)

There are two kinds of people in the world: hardcore fans of professional wrestling and those of us who think the “sport” is a big joke. But Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler may change all that. It may not influence the WWE’s television ratings or increase pay-per-view sales for the next Wrestlemania, but it could create more sympathy for the staged spectacle. And this is something that hasn’t really been achieved with past attempts to showcase the sad realities found within one of the fakest forms of showbiz there is.

I’ve listened to the audiobook of Hulk Hogan’s memoir, mostly for laughs. And I’ve seen the great documentary Beyond the Mat and learned enough of the truth to have gained some appreciation for wrestlers like Mick “Mankind” Foley, though it mostly made me feel bad for that guy’s wife and children. Meanwhile, the should-have-been most heartbreaking story from that film, Jake “The Snake” Roberts’ confession that he’s the product of incest, is so unbelievable that it’s hard to take completely serious. I hate to say it, but I couldn’t help laughing then, too.

But now we finally see the trailer for The Wrestler and with it Mickey Rourke’s acclaimed performance. It seems the film brings a very realist perspective to pro wrestling, despite the fact that it’s not a documentary nor even based on a true story. While I was immediately attracted to this realism, I wondered if those other people, the hardcore fans, would be able to appreciate a movie that appears as far away in tone from their beloved entertainment as can get. Fortunately, I have some good friends who are those kind of people. And they tell me that they’re really, really excited to see the film, too.

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Posted Friday, November 21, 2008 5:00 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

10 Things Twilight Teaches Teenage Boys About Teenage Girls

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Under discussion:

Twilight (2008)

Twilight is poised to make a kazillion dollars this weekend, despite the fact that it contains mediocre acting and special effects that look like they were cutting edge back in 1977. That’s really a testament to the fans of the book series, which is dominating the teenage market. Just like Sex in the City surprised studio execs by bringing in hordes of middle-aged women and making that a hit, the teens will do the same for this moody vampire flick.

A lot of those teens are going to be of the male variety, hoping to get some insight into the mysterious creature that is a teenage girl. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times says, ” I am not now nor have I ever been a 13-year-old girl, but “Twilight” made me wish I could be.” Which if you’ve ever met Kenneth Turan is slightly disturbing, but I get his point. The movie does a great job of putting you in Bella Swan’s shoes, and letting you know what makes her tick. With that in mind, check out our list of 10 things that teenage boys can find out about teenage girls when they see this movie.

Girls Like Boys Who Ignore Them

When Edward first sees Bella in class, he stiffens up like he’s smelled a dead skunk and avoids her like the plague. Days go by and he doesn’t return to class, but she searches for him every day. Finally, when he does come back, he alternates between being nice to her, and telling her she shouldn’t be friends with him. It ends up driving Bella nuts, which is maybe what he wanted all along. Next time you see a girl you’re interested in, make sure she catches your eye, then act like she repulses you and you should be well on your way.

Girls Like Boys Who Are Mysterious

It’s important to maintain an air of mystery about yourself, and not come in all blundering like cheerful dork Mike Newton in the movie. The guy is an open book, and as a result Bella is bored by him. The only thing that catches her fancy at the new school is the bunch of aloof, slightly goth students who mosey in with tons of hair product looking like they wandered off the campus of a private school. Don’t let people know about your past, sulk around, and randomly break off during conversations and walk away. You’ll be a man of mystery.

Girls LIke Boys Who Talk About Their Feelings

While you can’t come out and do this right away, because then you violate the rule of first ignoring the girl, eventually you have to pony up and spill your secrets. Although the key is being mysterious for period of time during which you’re doing all of the “reeling in” work. In order to keep that girl you’re going to have to let her know your big secret, and make her feel like she’s the only one in the world who knows it. Of course, it helps if the secret is that you’re a hundred years old and a vampire, but the fact that you used to wet the bed until you were 10 might work as well. The key is to just open up at some point and confide in her, without seeming like a whiner.

Girls Like Boys With Hair Product

Have you even seen Edward’s hair in Twilight? Seriously, it’s ridiculous. He looks like the lovechild of James Dean and Elvis, and he has to spend at least an hour getting the ‘do ready for school every day, although we never get to see how he preps it. Do vampires also get the gift of extremely well-coiffed hair? And he’s not the only one, his vampy brethren all have hair that looks like it came out of one of those books you see in the waiting areas of hair salons. The sort of hair catalogues you’re meant to pick your next look out of. Robert Pattinson fans call it “sex hair”, which either means it’s sexy hair, or it’s what your hair looks like after sex. Either way, pick up some product and start working on your locks.

Girls Stammer Around Boys They’re Interested In

If you’re looking for one of the signs that she’s really into you, this is a good one. If she can barely get through a sentence when she’s talking to you, then she wants you. Either that or she might be grammatically challenged, but let’s keep hope alive and assume that she’s just nervous. When Edward finally starts talking to Bella she sounds like Woody Allen, and you’ll need to look for those same tongue-tied signs. Besides staring at you constantly, the tangled tongue is about the only other visual cue you’ll get that she’s into you.

Girls Want Sex Just As Much As Boys Do

This one shatters an age-old myth that guys just want to get in girls’ pants. Let me tell you, girls want to get in your pants just as badly. Bella definitely tries to put the moves on Edward, and she pursues him a lot harder than he pursues her. There’s no discussion about waiting for an appropriate time or making sure the moment is extra special. No, she just wants to get him out of those clothes and get busy. Not to say that Bella’s a slut, because she’s actually a pretty chaste girl. But she definitely wouldn’t mind getting Edward in the sack for some extra-curricular activities.

Girls Like Boys Who Can Resist The Urge

Whether that urge is to suck your blood or go all the way in bed, girls love a guy with self-restraint, and it also goes back to the whole “ignore her and it’ll drive her crazy” tip near the top of this list. Edward and Bella have one fairly intense makeout scene in this movie. They’re up in Bella’s bed, and she’s in her panties. Things get hot and heavy and suddenly Edward flies backwards and slams into the wall. He knows he has to be careful with her or he’ll probably tear her to shreds. Instead of getting naked and going for it, he just lays next to her and watches her sleep.

Girls Like Boys Who Can Play The Piano

Although you’d hope that could work for just about any instrument, I don’t know if you’re going to be able to reel them in with the French Horn or the Oboe. Was Kenny G. ever a chick magnet? Stick with the basics, like a guitar or the piano. Edward plays a tune for Bella, and according to my book-obsessed Twilight friends, he actually writes a song for her later in the series. Which of course would drive any girl nuts. Still, the piano makes you look sensitive and it’s less phallic of an instrument than a guitar. It’ll make you look moody, adds more mystery, and it is like kryptonite to a girl’s heart.

Girls Like Boys Who Play Sports

Even if you’re an immortal being that survives on the blood of others, girls will still dig it if you can hit those balls into deep center field. There’s a fairly ridiculous moment in Twilight where a huge thunderstorm gives the vampires a chance to play baseball, since the thunder masks the sound when they pound the ball. They invite Bella to tag along and you can see how excited she gets when Edward makes a spectacular catch. It’s not exactly as romantic as sitting in the stands and watch your man make a free throw or break free for a touchdown, but it’s as close as Bella can get, and she loves it. So take something up, even if it’s kickball.

Girls Like Bad Boys

For years girls have been loving the archetype of the rebel, the guy who hangs out by himself, sports tattoos, rides a motorcycle, gets in trouble every now and then. Well, there’s nothing badder than a guy who could potentially kill you for lunch, and who has to constantly put himself through physical pain by resisting the urge to open up your jugular as your blood sings to him. Outwardly the vampires in Twilight just have pale skin and sparkle like diamonds when they’re in the full sunlight, but inside they’re a raging storm of emotions. While you might not be able to become a vampire, just talk back to a teacher or consider that tattoo you’ve always wanted. It’ll work roughly the same magic.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

Posted Friday, November 21, 2008 4:00 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

Who is authoring your corporate blog?

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I’ll risk losing a number of cool points here by admitting that I’m a fan of the band Chicago. The band, as you might know, made the decision early in their careers that their record covers would not feature the band members but instead the band’s logo. The decision was an attempt to keep the personalities in the band secondary to the music, a strategy that worked pretty well until the early 1980s, when Peter Cetera wound up dominating and the band decided to pursue more commercial friendly pastures.

That springs to my mind every time the question of who should be involved in a corporate blog comes up. Paul Chaney at Marketing Profs Daily Fix does just that, once again exploring the question of whether a corporate blog should be a single author effort or one that brings in multiple people from within the company.

Paul concludes, and I completely agree with this, that if possible there should be more than one behind the blog. He lists a handful of reasons why it makes sense from a search point of view to have as many people piling on the thing as you can. But the most important, I think, is the third:

It gives the company many human touch points.

Even if you don’t go as far someone like Microsoft or Sun with their hundreds of employee blogs and just have two or three people contributing to a single blog, there’s a lot of value there. It gives readers - whether they be potential business partners, industry watchers or media that are looking for pull quotes - a variety of people to get to know.

It’s kind of been just me here on Inside.Spout so far but as things straighten out I’m going to be encouraging others here to chime in from time to time on issues they’re authoritative and informed on, probably introducing themselves first so you, the reader, can get to know them and their voices.

Andy Angelos on the Zocalo Group blog also serves up a healthy reminder that’s important for corporate blogging efforts: It’s more important to measure the quality of the viewers than the quantity. Corporate blogs are, by definition, meant for a niche audience. While there can certainly be a broader audience in some case (especially if you’re using your blog not so much for company perspectives but as an extension of your customer service efforts) for the most part it’s going to be a handful of targeted readers that tune in time and time again.

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Posted Friday, November 21, 2008 3:01 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

Karina’s at the Denver Film Festival

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Our very own Karina Longworth is out right now at the Denver Film Festival for her role on a panel titled DIY Filmmaking in an Indie Apocolypse and she’s actively soliciting questions to ask via Twitter here so be sure to drop her a line if you have thoughts.

Spout is also thrilled to be sponsoring the DFF’s Emerging Filmmaker Award, which is being awarded by a jury containing…wait for it…Karina. Just part of our core mission of helping new and important film voices be noticed and begin their path to finding an audience. We’ll be back with more after the panel and the jury.

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Posted Friday, November 21, 2008 3:01 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: A Clarification

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

To borrow a line from Lou Lumenick: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is this year’s Forrest Gump. This is not really arguable. In addition to sharing a screenwriter (Eric Roth), Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 Best Picture winner and David Fincher’s 2008 Best Picture front-runner (at least, as of this writing) both put groundbreaking special effects to the service of sprawling stories, spanning many decades and weaving a breadcrumb trail through modern American history, in which a man holds a torch for a woman who can’t reciprocate his love until her dreams of autonomy are spectacularly dashed. For me, the Gump comparison is a pejorative, a shorthand way to say, “This film will likely make a lot of money and win a lot of awards, and yet is so phony and cloying and gimmicky that its success will some day be seen by some as a tragedy.” But to others, the second coming of Gump would be a blessing. An Oscars-bait blockbuster? As Lumenick put it, apparently before seeing the film, “Paramount would be thrilled, and possibly the Academy would be as well.”

Watching Benjamin Button, occasionally I actively loathed it, but mostly I just felt genuinely disappointed that it seemed so lacking in genuine feeling. I’m a realist — I understand that the masses will probably go the other way on this one, and I won’t begrudge them that. But as a critic, it is my job to clearly state, for the record, what ignited that loathing and disappointment. This is something I did not do the last time I wrote about the film, and now that the film has screened for a larger portion of the press, I’d like to rectify that mistake. I’ve tried below to lay this out in as plain language as I can muster, so as to hopefully avoid any misunderstandings. After this writing, I promise –– I’m going to try very hard not to waste my energy trashing the inevitable prom king. There are so many movies that are so much more worthy of my attention, and frankly, I’m tired of fighting for my right to disagree.

So: Spoilers ahead!

First things first: this is a film in which the following things happen:

Two new lovers recline a sailboat somewhere in the Florida keys, where they are coincidentally treated to the sight of a NASA spacecraft taking off.
An old woman lays dying in a New Orleans hospital, the very day that, coincidentally, Hurricane Katrina rages outside.
A man and the son he gave up at birth coincidentally exit the same whorehouse at the same time, paving the way for the father to establish a relationship with his abandoned boy for the first time.
There is a ten minute-ish Introduction to Chaos Theory sequence, presumably so that we, as viewers, are equipped to rationalize the film’s dependence on incidental coincidence.

But before any of that, there’s a prologue. Shot in the palette of the Zapruder film with scratches and fuzzy grain to match, this tells us that at some point during World War I, a French-born, New Orleans-based clockmaker was commissioned to make a piece for the train station, and he deliberately made a clock that ticked backwards, “so that the boys we lost in the war might come home again.” An initially befuddled crowd is thus turned awestruck and appreciative, to which the clockmaker barks in a heavily accented monotone: “I hope you enjoy my clock.”

Cut to 1918, the last day of that war, and the birth of a baby “with all the infirmities not of a newborn but of a man well into his 80s, on the way to the grave”. When the mother dies in childbirth, the freaked-out father snatches the baby out of its cradle and runs it over to the back porch of an old age home, where it’s tripped over by the proprietor, Queenie. Because Queenie is a magical negro, she ignores her boyfriend’s non-interventionist admonitions and takes the baby in, raising it as her own kin.

“You never know what’s coming for you,” Queenie intones portentously when this opportunity arises. It’s a line that’ll be repeated throughout the film a number of times, and in the context of the film’s big fake Southern accents and big fake period detail, it plays like a whimsical, pie-eyed rewrite of the thesis statement of last year’s Best Picture winner; “You can’t stop what’s coming.”

What’s coming, of course, is that this aged baby will, thanks to the magic of a performance capture process developed for this purpose, slowly grow into a flawless specimen of man in the form of Brad Pitt. With few exceptions, the technology that puts Brad Pitt’s head on the body of other actors for the first quarter of the film (to describe the process with more finesse would be to give the philosophy behind it too much credit) achieves its intended result: it fools the eye, it almost looks real enough to drown out the inner knowledge that it is not real at all. But it’s hard not to question whether or not this lavish effects process is really necessary, if it’s anything more than a show-offy gimmick. In the last section of the film, when Benjamin ages backward from drinking age to infancy, he’s played by child actors who bear a resemblence to Pitt but aren’t asked to digitally wear his face. Fincher obviously thought pure casting was sufficient for his final act, so why wasn’t it good enough for his first?

Even if one were able to completely get over the gimmickry that makes that verisimilitude possible, there’s still something that feels off about this first section of the film, in the way the characters often seem to interact with Benjamin as if playing to the back row of a theater instead of to a person, smaller than them and right there in close quarters. This sense of a disconnect dissipates as the character ages and becomes more recognizably embodied by Pitt, but Fincher never goes long without finding an excuse to let an effect fill the frame and distract from what’s going on between people. In one of the first scenes where Benjamin is actually connecting to someone on an intimate level, he does so amidst a fog of almost comicly painterly CGI snow. A few scenes later, a hummingbird (which, it’s implied, carries the spirit of Button’s counterpart to Forrest Gump’s Ltnt. Dan) buzzes over a scene of World War 2 carnage, swooping across the screen like Tinkerbell. When this hummingbird popped up again, very near the end of the film, I half expected it to be wearing a tiny little Brad Pitt visage.

Though the use of certain of these effects may be unprecedented, there is precedent to the genre of the romantic effects epic, and while I’m not the biggest fan of Titanic, or Peter Jackson’s King Kong, those films succeed on a level where Button fails: their spectacular effects serve to support the romance at the core of the story, while Button’s effects only get in the way. The inner evolution of the characters seems incidental to Fincher. Increasingly as the film wears on, it seems as though the crux of each scene is the juxtaposition of a slightly younger Brad Pitt with a slightly older Cate Blanchett, and Fincher seems to move from one juxtaposition to next as quickly as possible as if he’s convinced that if he just hits every point on his predetermined timeline, the relationship itself will happen organically. It doesn’t.

And this isn’t full the fault of the effects. There’s no doubt that Fincher is in love with his imagery (this is the only explanation I can come up with for that chaos theory sequence, which plays as nothing but a flaunting of Fincher’s contractual right to final cut), but he doesn’t seem to trust it. Eric Roth’s script tells us over and over again, in very literal language and often via narration, that this is a film about loneliness and difference. Every feeling and every story detail is telegraphed in advance, underlined throughout and commented on after the fact.

Button is the opposite of Pitt’s last Oscar hopeful in that respect: The Assassination of Jesse James was a film in which every frame seemed to invite contemplation. Benjamin Button is a film in which every cut seems designed to block thought. Maybe the earlier film’s failure says it all about the philosophy behind Button’s construction: for audiences and Oscar voters, thinking is bad. Spoon-fed artifice is good.

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Posted Friday, November 21, 2008 1:01 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

Vampire Love Interests: A Timeline

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Under discussion:

Blacula (1972)

Et Mourir de Plaisir (1960)

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Dracula (1931)

The Horror of Dracula (1958)

The Hunger (1983)

The Lost Boys (1987)

Love at First Bite (1979)

Nosferatu (2000)

Once Bitten (1985)

The Vampire Lovers (1970)

Vampire's Kiss (1989)

Vampyr (1931)

Interview With the Vampire (1994)

Vampire in Brooklyn (1995)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer [TV Series] (1997)

Dark Shadows [TV Series] (1966)

Underworld (2003)

My Two Dads [TV Series] (1987)

Twilight (2008)

Let the Right One In (2008)

True Blood [TV Series] (2008)

The vampires of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels are described as impossibly beautiful. But it’s one vampire, “Edward Cullen,” who is written as having such appealing details that it would seem impossible for a girl not to fall in love with him. In actuality, that’s what has happened to most females, young and old, who have read the books. And while his cinematic portrayer, Robert Pattinson, doesn’t quite resemble a marble statue of Adonis, the actor is still getting his fair share of seven-year-old suitors asking to be bitten.

Cullen is hardly the first vampire to so strongly attract the hearts (and necks) of mortals. But what is it about the bloodsucking undead that turns us on so much? Is it truly their stone-white skin and chiseled features? Or perhaps it’s their ability to go all night long? Let us take a look at the many vampire love interests that literature and cinema have given us over the years in an attempt to find out their sexy secret.

1819: Lord Ruthven from The Vampyre by John Polidori
One of the granddaddies of modern English vampire literature, Polidori’s short story features a character not unlike Twilight’s Cullen in terms of suave, seductive sex appeal. Yet this alluring vampire is as deadly as he is desirable, and while he might honor a lady with his hand in marriage, he’s still liable to kill his new bride and then go into hiding.

1828: Lord Ruthven from Der Vampyr by Heinrich Marschner and Wilhelm August Wohlbruck
This is basically the same guy from Polidori’s story, but in Marschner and Wohlbruck’s opera he has to disguise himself in order to be granted the young Malwina’s hand. And when he’s exposed, he’s struck by lightning and sent to hell, very much lowering his availability.

1872: Carmilla from Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Young Laura is just happy to have a new best friend, but lesbian vampire Carmilla is interested in more and keeps lunging at Laura’s chest. Unfortunately, it would take another 100-plus years before heterosexual girls found it both acceptable and trendy to “dyke out” with their gal pals. Also see versions of the story in Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses.

1897: Count Dracula from Dracula by Bram Stoker
He’s not quite Lucy Westenra’s love-interest, more like a meaningless fling for the newly engaged girl. But after a nightly affair with the Count, Lucy seems to have acquired a mysterious, deadly STD, which is later discovered to be vampirism. Fortunately for Mina Harker, his next “partner,” the disease is curable by way of killing the person you contracted it from. Also see Tod Browning’s 1931 adaptation and Terence Fisher’s 1958 version.

1922: Count Orlok from Nosferatu, directed by F.W. Murnau
Based on Dracula, Orlok (Max Schreck) is also not much of a love-interest, probably because he’s so damn ugly. But he is tricked into thinking he’s desired at the end, as Ellen (Greta Schroder) gives up her body as a self-sacrificial attempt to stop the spread of vampirism to others. Or because she’s like those cruel popular girls at school who’d tease the nerds for their own narcissistic pleasure.

1966-1971: Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows, created by Dan Curtis
He should have never cheated on his true love, Josette, or he might never have been turned into a vampire by his jilted, supernatural mistress, Angelique (Lara Parker). And Josette might never have killed herself. Ever since, Barnabus (Jonathan Frid) has just been looking to replace her, whether with look-a-likes or her actual reincarnated spirit. And no girl wants to feel like she’s a substitute for another woman, even if she’s supposedly that woman reborn.

1969-present: Vampirella from miscellaneous Vampirella comics, created by Forrest J. Ackerman
Though a vampire hunter by trade, Adam Van Helsing couldn’t help falling for Vampirella the moment he first laid eyes on her. He would say that it’s because she’s not like other vampires, that she’s not evil. But he’s a guy, and really the immediate attraction was that body and its near lack of clothing.

1970: Carmilla from The Vampire Lovers, directed by Roy Ward Baker
Ingrid Pitt is hot and all, and those longing stares of hers are enchanting, but the only reason she has more luck seducing friends like Emma (Madeline Smith) than did her 19th century literary counterpart is because this film was made at a time when experimentation with lesbianism was becoming more acceptable, especially to the guys who went to these kinds of movies. Not surprisingly, there would be plenty more soft-core lesbian vampire movies to come.

1972: Prince Mamuwalde from Blacula, directed by William Crain
Blacula (William Marshall) may be one smooth vampire, but he’s not so good at keeping his ladylove from being killed…twice! At least he comes to the understanding that he’s as dangerous as he is attractive and so doesn’t allow any more women to succumb to his seductions.

1979: Count Dracula from Love at First Bite, directed by Stan Dragoti
Thanks to blood banks, Dracula (George Hamilton) no longer needs to be such a villain, and he can devote himself more fully to romantic pursuits. Unfortunately, he’s got issues similar to those of Barnabus Collins and is only after a girl (Susan Saint James) who reminds him of his true love, Mina Harker. Fortunately, she’s kind of flaky and she doesn’t mind being a substitute.

1983: Miriam Blaylock from The Hunger, directed by Tony Scott
No man or woman can resist the beauty of this vampire played by Catherine Deneuve, but her lovers pay a terrible price. They become immortal yet they still age, so they end up looking like the walking dead rather than the undead. Still, Miriam has amazing seductive powers, and even after seeing what has happened to one companion/victim, and even though she’s married and not a lesbian, Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon) can’t help climbing into bed with the gorgeous creature.

1985: Countess from Once Bitten, directed by Howard Storm
With a girlfriend as hot as his, Mark (Jim Carrey) should just wait for her. But as a teenage male, he’s got to have sex, and like many young dudes, a sexy older woman is the answer. But not only does she not take his virginity, she begins turning him into a vampire and, worse, won’t allow his attempt at a one-night stand be simply that.

1987: Star from The Lost Boys, directed by Joel Schumacher
She’s only a half-vampire, but that makes Star (Jami Gertz) all the more appealing to the new guy in town, Michael (Jason Patric). Especially when it turns out she’s not a full-blown vampire because she didn’t kill him as instructed.

1989: Rachel from Vampire’s Kiss, directed by Robert Bierman
Like Countess from Once Bitten, this beautiful vampire (played by Jennifer Beals) similarly serves as a caution against one-night stands. But she could also just be a figment of Nicolas Cage’s character’s imagination.

1992: Count Dracula from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Those sunglasses are downright sexy, but thanks to a prologue connecting Dracula to Vlad the Impaler, the titular vampire (played by Gary Oldman) has pretty much the same obsession issues he exhibits in Love at First Bite. He’s just after Mina (Winona Ryder) because she resembles his love from centuries earlier. Which means that girl in 1979 actually reminds him of Elisabeta.

1994: Lestat and Louis from Interview with the Vampire, directed by Neil Jordan
It’s kind of like My Two Dads, only one of the guys is actually into the other guy and the non-bisexual one acquired their “daughter” (Kirsten Dunst) by metaphorically pedophilic means. And 30 years later she can’t forgive him for having his way with her, forever stunting her growth as a woman. Dysfunctional family or strange vampiric romance? When you’re as good looking as Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, it’s hard not to attract all sorts of admirers and possibly complicated relationships.

1995: Maximillian from Vampire in Brooklyn, directed by Wes Craven
Even for the ‘90s, that mullet was not attractive, yet it somehow didn’t deter Angela Bassett’s character from falling victim to Eddie Murphy’s advances, as well as his fangs.

1997-2003: Angel and Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon
Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is apparently similar to Adam in the Vampirella comics, because even though it’s her job to slay vampires, sometimes she can’t help but have sex with them. It’s not her fault though, especially if they have a soul and look like hunky actor David Boreanaz, or if they’re just Billy Idol-sexy like actor James Marsters.

2003: Selena from Underworld, directed by Len Wiseman
It’s hard enough making a relationship work between a vampire and a human, but vampire on werewolf love is totally out of the question. Or is it vampire on vampire/werewolf hybrid love? Who cares, Kate Beckinsale is hot in that leather outfit! Whatever he is, Michael (Scott Speedman) is a lucky man, or something.

2008: Bill Compton from True Blood, created by Alan Ball
At last, vampires have gained civil rights, yet interspecies love is still not completely acceptable. This of course makes them even more appealing to open-minded and sexually curious individuals like Sookie (Anna Paquin), who is immediately smitten with Bill the vampire (Stephen Moyer) when he walks into her bar/life.

2008: Eli from Let the Right One In, directed by Thomas Alfredson
Many young boys tormented by bullies eventually turn to the goth subculture for acceptance. And typically the initial attraction is by way of a cute goth chick, similar to the crush Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) has on his new neighbor, Eli (Lina Leandersson). But if that chick turns out to actually be a vampire and is able to fight her boyfriend’s battles for him, it might be time for that guy to find a new crush and subculture. Hint: ska girls are cute, too, if there’s any still out there.

2008: Edward Cullen from Twilight, directed by Catherine Hardwicke
He may be the hottest thing to happen to young girls since The Beatles, but he’s obviously more of a fantasy, not being real and all. Still, to fellow character Bella (Kristen Stewart), he’s absolutely perfect, and perfectly incarnate. It’s a little strange that he’s 108-years-old and still attending high school — or maybe that’s just his way of finding statutory rape victims — but otherwise he’s attractive in every single way. Except that he’s not human, and he puts her life in danger. But apparently those things are part of the allure of vampires.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

Posted Friday, November 21, 2008 12:00 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments

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Wrestler Trailer Displays Realism in Fake Sport. Clip of the Day

10 Things Twilight Teaches Teenage Boys About Teenage Girls

Who is authoring your corporate blog?

Karina’s at the Denver Film Festival

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: A Clarification

Vampire Love Interests: A Timeline

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