Alan Ball

The second season of HBO's True Blood kicks off tonight and doesn't waste any time jumping into the scary murder madness that has engulfed the citizens of Bon Temps.

According to the show's creator, Alan Ball, everything intensifies this season: vampires are more monstrous, sex scenes are even sexier, shape-shifters become more, er, shape-shiftery, and the anti-vampire movement becomes even more zealous.

Here are more highlights from the conference call Ball recently held with reporters:

• Talking about the serial killer: "The first season we, the audience, did not know who the serial killer was. In this season, as the show progresses, we know there is a character who is up to no good and is dangerous long before any of the other characters on the show know it."
• Describing the anti-vampire cult and whether or not it's a metaphor for our current political climate: "That whole conflict becomes deadly serious. Given the nature of the political debate in this country, I think it's very easy to look at it in a satirical light. I've been clear from the beginning: they really believe they have a mission to save the world."

To see what Ball has to say about Evan Rachel Wood's character and the real-life romance between the show's two stars, Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer, read more

I was jealous of the folks at the Paley Festival in LA last week when they got to see a sneak peek of the second season of True Blood. Well, kudos to HBO for slipping this clip out to the rest of us, because it's a dark and creepy first look at season two of the vampire series.

The clip focuses on Sookie, Bill, and Bill's new little vampire girl, Jessica. They're in a car together in the woods, and Sookie storms off after an argument. Bill's sure Sookie will come back eventually, despite Jessica's disdainful comments that Sookie wants him to chase after her. But then there's this . . . thing. Lurking. With long fingernails.

Alan Ball has continued to say that the show will follow Charlaine Harris's books pretty closely, so I bet some of you reading might know what's happening here. If so, are you pleased? If not, what do you think is going on? To check out the clip, just read more

All of the new DVD releases hit stores (and Netflix) on Tuesdays. So each week in What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday, I sort through the best of the batch and tell you what to add to your queue.

Nip/Tuck: Season Five
Season five finds Sean McNamara and Christian Troy making the leap from Miami to Los Angeles. While the new city provides a welcome change of scenery, the satisfaction is for the viewer only as business isn't exactly booming at the McNamara/Troy office. In fact, the two men find themselves without any clients at all and must resort to hiring a publicist to get their practice rolling. The publicist (played by Lauren Hutton) tells the duo that they must perform surgery on celebrities to create buzz. Guest actors that pop up in this DVD include Portia de Rossi and Oliver Platt.

Special features include unaired scenes and a gag reel titled "Severed Parts."

One more up next so read more

There's been some controversy and outrage surrounding Alan Ball's adaptation of Alicia Erian's novel Towelhead, which I might understand more if I hadn’t read the original work. People are calling the film "abhorrent," "ethically reprehensible and irresponsible," and "gratuitously offensive." And yet, this isn't really Ball’s fault. His adaptation is completely faithful to the novel — I don’t think there’s even one line of dialogue or one bit of action that isn’t in the book — so why wasn't there this reaction to the novel?

The story is shocking and disturbing. It’s a coming-of-age tale focusing on a young woman (Jasira, played poignantly by Summer Bishil in the film) who is half-Lebanese and half-white, living in a largely white Texas community with a strict father and a leery older male neighbor. Everything Jasira does (from using tampons to dating a black boy) seems to anger her father and disappoint her mother (played by Maria Bello). So, Jasira confuses the attention she gets from her leery neighbor (Aaron Eckhart) with a kind of true affection, which he easily exploits. Jasira's young sense of self and her burgeoning understanding of sexuality get all mixed up with abuse and humiliation and — occasionally — pleasure. This is just the tip-top of the iceberg, so read more

I don't think it will be a revolutionary statement that how one feels about Alan Ball's new HBO series, True Blood, will have a lot to do with how one generally feels about vampires. Me, they've never really been my thing; they're OK and all, but the mere mention of fangs wouldn't necessarily get me to tune in. This review, then, is for (and by) the vampire-agnostic.

So here's the takeaway: I don't doubt at all that True Blood could develop into a deeply fascinating series for people at all points on the vampire-fan spectrum. But in the two episodes HBO sent me, the vampire parts were something I just needed to get through so I could get back to Alan Ball's witty writing in the more human realm. The second episode is stronger than the first; I've heard from some critics who got a full batch of five episodes that each one gets better. But the fate of many a TV series has been determined in episode one, and in True Blood's case, that's cause for some concern.

True Blood's protagonist is Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), a Louisiana waitress with an unfortunate "gift" for reading people's minds that makes her daily life a struggle to tune out the thoughts of those around her. It's somewhat of a relief, then, when a pale stranger named Bill (Stephen Moyer) settles himself into her bar one night and asks for a drink of Tru Blood, the synthetic blood substitute that has made it possible for vampires to live among humans. Sookie can't read his mind but still quickly figures out that Bill's a vampire; "Am I that obvious?" he drawls in return. Why yes; you just asked for fake blood at a bar at night. It's not hard to guess. For more on the highs and lows of True Blood, just read more

I first heard of Towelhead when I caught a trailer for the Alan Ball-directed film adaptation of Alicia Erian’s novel. The trailer looked like a sweet (perhaps a little bittersweet) coming-of-age story with moments of dark humor. The book is all of these things, but I was not at all prepared for exactly how disturbing it would be, or how utterly sad.

Towelhead is written in the frank and simplistic words of 13-year-old Jasira, the daughter of a white mother and a Lebanese father. In the summer of 1991, Jasira moves from her mother’s house in Syracuse, NY, to Houston, TX, to live with her strict father, Rifat. In a largely white community, Jasira becomes increasingly aware of the fact that she’s different and that different is bad. But when she starts to date a fellow student who is black, Rifat angrily forbids her from seeing him, reacting out of deep-seated prejudices he insists he doesn't possess. For more about Towelhead, read more

This weekend, writer/director Alan Ball of Six Feet Under fame returns to HBO with True Blood. The vampire saga, based on the novels of Charlaine Harris, follows Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), a waitress who can read minds — except for the one of Bill, a vampire who's new to town.

I've checked out the first two episodes of the show and will give you my reaction before Sunday's premiere. But first, why not hear about the show from Ball himself? I recently had a chance to join a group of reporters for a chat with Ball about True Blood's themes and goals. Here are highlights:

• On the essential element of a vampire story: "Certainly, the one thing I feel like you have to have is you have to have a character. You have to have a specific person that you're invested in. You have to feel for them. If it's just a story device with fangs, then I'm just not that interested. I'm not that interested in special effects. We're really trying to really focus on who Bill is, what's his history, what is the curse of being immortal, how is that a bad thing, what's it like to be immortal and still yearn to be human, to have lost everything that meant something to you? To meet somebody and feel like you have a second beginning?"
• On doing a more outrageous show: "It was just really fun to do something that was less subdued because Six Feet Under had been all about subduing one's emotions and being afraid of the primal feelings that we all have that are the byproduct of being creatures with souls and having to deal with the fact that we all know we're going to die. It felt sort of liberating just to get a little crazy and the books had that energy and I just really responded to it."

To hear why Ball thinks vampires are sexy, just read more

At Comic-Con, I was lucky enough to catch some footage of True Blood, Alan Ball's (Six Feet Under, American Beauty) HBO adaptation of the book series by Charlaine Harris, and I was hooked. Now there's a trailer for the series, which premieres on HBO Sept. 7, so we can all discuss the show: whether or not it looks to be of the same caliber as Six Feet Under, how distracting the Southern accent attempts may be, how smitten we are or are not by Anna Paquin in this role, etc.

In the series, Paquin plays a telepathic waitress in a Louisiana town who meets a vampire when he walks into her bar and she discovers she can't read his mind.

Have you read these books? Does the show look like it will do the book series justice? To watch the preview for True Blood, read more