By Dean Robbins
‘True Blood’ is the anti-‘Twilight’
Forget about “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.” HBO’s “True Blood” is the vampire series that really matters this summer. It’s the anti-“Twilight,” eschewing chaste undead romance in favor of depraved sex, bloody violence and pitch-black humor. Once you’ve seen hellishly appealing lead vampire Stephen Moyer, you realize that “Twilight’s” Robert Pattinson is little more than face powder and hair product.
As season three opens (Sunday, 8 p.m., HBO), Moyers’ Bill has been kidnapped. Girlfriend Sookie (Anna Paquin) pursues him while the rest of the cast work through their own problems in a small southern town where vampires live out in the open. A vampire king scolds his underlings for allowing “moral anarchy” to run rampant, while the vampire queen asks, “Isn’t moral anarchy sort of the point?”
It is, and I expect a heaping helping in this summer’s episodes.
‘Jaws: The Inside Story’
Wednesday, 8 p.m. (BIO)
You may not think you need to spend two hours on a beautiful summer night watching a documentary about the making of 1975’s shark-attack classic. But – trust me – you’ll be glad you did.
Like me, you may know a couple of facts going in: that director Steven Spielberg paid a steep price for deciding to film on the real Atlantic Ocean; and that the mechanical shark rarely worked. But there’s so much more. Did you realize that Spielberg’s career hung in the balance due to extreme budget overruns? That star Richard Dreyfuss disowned the movie in a TV interview when filming wrapped? That the filmmakers wrote the script as they went along?
We learn that Spielberg has avoided the ocean for over three decades, fearing that sharks are mad at him for making “Jaws.” If that’s so, this documentary will do absolutely nothing to appease them. CV
