Dollhouse, Firefly, Angel, Buffy : news, photos & videos

Joss Whedon & Eliza Duhsku & Tahmoh Penikett - 2009 FOX Fall Eco-Casino Party - High Quality Photos

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T21:27:14Z

- Graphics / Event 2009-09-14 : FOX Fall Eco-Casino Party

Vincent Kartheiser - Draft Magazine September 2009 Photoshoot - Medium Quality Photos

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T20:37:45Z

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Fox to open online studio inspired by Joss Whedon and "Dr Horrible" Web Series

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T19:14:07Z

Fox Digital Studios puts focus on brands

Using Director Joss Whedon as inspiration, News Corp. rebrands unit to incorporate more advertising into entertainment content.

The Microsoft-sponsored Family Guy special isn't the only major piece of branded entertainment you'll see from News Corp. in the coming months. Fox Atomic, News Corp.'s recently shuttered 2-year-old genre studio, is being rebranded to become Fox Digital Studios, a new unit that will focus heavily on branded programming.

David Worthen Brooks, a former senior vice president at Fox Atomic, will act as creative director of the digital studio, tapping Roger Mincheff, former founder-chief executive of digital marketing agency Spacedog Media, as its new senior VP branded entertainment of digital content. Both will report to Peter Levinsohn, president of new media and digital distribution for Fox Filmed Entertainment.

Mr. Mincheff is a bit of an unorthodox hire for Fox, having worked primarily on graphic novels in his 11 years heading Spacedog Media, where he integrated brands like Mazda, Universal Music, Qantas Airways, Boost Mobile and Harley-Davidson into storylines and other entertainment content. But Mr. Levinsohn saw it as a fairly seamless transition from comic books to online video.

"What we're all talking about he's already done," Mr. Levinsohn told Ad Age. "He's figured out how to get branded advertisers into a story, and there's really no difference whether it's graphic novels vs. video content."

Mr. Mincheff said his use of brands in content has always been to enhance a story's credibility. "If you're going to tell a hip-hop story, extreme sports story, a basketball story, you can't do it without brands, because brands are such a part of that world and makes it more authentic. At Spacedog, we did these incredibly relatable, human stories, and for the first time ever in comic books we saw brands do big brand integration as well. So to be able to work with Fox in completely out-of-the-box ways is pretty awesome."

Dino Bernacchi, Harley-Davidson's director-advertising, promotions and entertainment, who worked with Spacedog on integrating Harley into the graphic novel Johnny Delgado Is Dead, added, "In the days of old, the person who got stuck to the branded-entertainment division was one of the marketing folks from the film studio. This is a guy who came from the comic-book and interactive background and made his way to one of the hottest, coolest networks to be the bridge between advertisers and content."

Fox is the latest broadcast network to put dedicated resources behind digital content, following similar moves from NBC, which has a similar division spearheaded by Microsoft vet Cameron Death, and ABC, which got into the digital content arena last year with the Toyota-sponsored Squeegees. NBC has been the most aggressive of the bunch thus far, shopping around a dedicated programming slate for NBC.com to advertisers in this year's upfront and recently launching CTRL, a Web series sponsored by Nestea starring Tony Hale of Arrested Development.

But despite early investment from advertisers and the attraction of brand-name actors, no TV network has yet to truly crack the code of how to develop original programming that works as well online as it does on the boob tube. And whenever they put successful Web series on TV — NBC's acquisition of MySpace's QuarterLife, ABC's redo of MSN's In The Motherhood — they fail within weeks.

Mr. Levinsohn declined to reveal any projects currently in development, but expects Fox Digital Studios to start shopping a production reel to advertisers by end of the fourth quarter. He thinks Fox has a solution to broadcast's online programming problem by targeting the diverse audiences across News Corp.'s digital portfolio, which includes everything from MySpace and Fox.com to its 33% stake in Hulu.

"We have a very active music consumer within MySpace Music, so it's not inconceivable that we would look to create a piece of content that resonates with a music audience that would be broadened for ubiquity across the web," Mr. Levinsohn said. "We would try to leverage the audience we have with gamers or sports fans on other sports fans on other properties in the same way. What's unique here is we're storytellers, and we can create content for any genre — there are brands that make sense for any genre, too."

As an aspirational model, Mr. Levinsohn pointed to Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, an independently produced musical web series that starred Neil Patrick Harris and found a site-crashing cult following of more than 1 million views in its first few weeks on the web. "They had a very well-respected director, producer and writer in Joss Whedon, really talented people involved in the project and an interesting combination of ad-supported, transactional and physical all rolled up into one distribution life cycle."

Joss Whedon Is 'Really Excited' To Direct 'Glee' Episode, Says Cast

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T19:08:34Z

Greetings Gleeks and members of the Whedonverse ! We're betting that since the news broke that Joss Whedon would be heading over to McKinley High School to direct an episode of "Glee," you haven't been able to contain your sci-fi/musical excitement.

Apparently, neither has the man himself. "I talked to him a bunch [at a party], he's really excited," noted Cory Monteith (who plays heartthrob Finn) during a "Glee" club fieldtrip to the MTV offices. "He's a big fan of the show — and [we spoke] before it actually came out that he was going to direct. He spoke to us, the cast, for an hour at this party."

Though neither Cory nor Lea Michele knew (or, at least, would spill) what episode Joss would be putting his magical touch on, they did say they're anxious to get the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dollhouse" creator on set. "It's good to have a talented fan directing the show," Cory added.

Who wouldn't want to hang out with such a fun group anyway ? As you can see from the photo below, MTV News' Jim Cantiello loved every minute of his encounter with a few of McKinley's best voices. (Click on the image to see even more of the "Glee" visit to MTV !)

Buffy & Angel Cast - "Chosen : Moving On" Music Video - Watch The Clip

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T19:03:22Z

Angelus wins Vile TV Villain poll

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T19:01:33Z

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http://www.sidereel.com/_post/173602

"Dollhouse" Tv Series - Crossword 1

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T19:00:09Z

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http://puzzlehub.blogspot.com/2009/11/strung-out-dollhouse-edition.html

Amy Adams - 2009 British Academy Of Film And Television Arts Britannia Awards - Good Quality Photos

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T18:58:07Z

November 5, 2009 - Amy Adams at the 8th Annual British Academy Of Film And Television Arts Britannia Awards in Los Angeles. - Graphics

"Buffy : Season 8" Comic Book - Comicbookdaily.com Review

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T12:27:58Z

Just A Thought : Wherein Brent Discuss his Love For Vampire Slayers

Hey there loyal reader…all five of you…, thanks for coming back.

I've been knee deep in a column for my own website as well as preparing one for Comic Book Daily which we should see next week (it required a good chunk of reading), so I was kind of at a loss with what my column was going to be about.

But luckily I went to my neighborhood comic shop on Wednesday and an idea hit me.

I am very much a “wait for the trade” type of guy. They're more convenient for me and due to my limited income, it works out pretty well. At the moment my pull box is allowed one monthly title and one mini series. I then buy anything else in trade form with the exception of Moon Knight , Walking Dead, the recent reprint of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and most Neil Gaiman titles which for some reason I decided hard covers are the way to go.

Trade wise capturing my attention is Grant Morrison's run on Batman, Runaways (which I prefer the manga sized editions), Criminal, occasional mini-series and every once and a while a surprise. For instance a few weeks ago I picked up Pinocchio Vampire Slayer from Slave Labor and it was well worth it. The other great thing about trades is they are much easier to lend out to friends. I try this very much like a crack dealer. I get them hooked on a series or author, when I new one comes out, I make sure to mention it to them and usually one out of five will start buying it.

So what book is it that I can't wait five to ten months for ? Which is the comic book I must have ever single month ?

I imagine some of you are a little surprised give some of the other recommendations I've made in the previous columns but I'll be honest, Buffy is that consistently good.

Let's get the first part out of the way. I'm a big fan of Joss Whedon mainly because in my opinion, we both have very similar writing styles. Although Joss is much better at it then I am, we do have very similar sensibilities. His wok, 9 times out of 10 worth a look (the only exception I'd make to that rule is his second arc on Astonishing X-Men was not great). I was a fan of his television work (I got sucked into Firefly and the subsequently went into Buffy) and I am looking forward to his future internet work, especially if Dr. Horrible was any indication of how good it might get.

But the thing a lot of people tend to forget that is that Joss isn't writing the entire series.

Sure he's over seeing it but he's only jumping on a few arcs here and a one shot there. In the meantime he's brought in writers from comics (Brian K. Vaughn) and writers from the original show (current writer Jan Espenson was a mainstay of Buffy's creative staff and currently serves as show runner for Caprica) while Joss runs the ship along with editor Scott Allie.

Essentially not only is the story an extension of the tv show but so is the creative crew behind it.

The unsung hero of the series however has to be artist Georges Jeanty. Now others might disagree with me but Georges work is incredibly solid. When I first picked up the book, I thought he was okay but his art really grew on me. It is clean, solid and consistent and fits in the book perfectly. So much so that when they let the poor guy take a break for a few issues I tend to wish he was back drawing it. Georges has also managed to make all of the characters look the actors that portrayed them without giving up any of his style. He has impressed me enough that whatever he does after Buffy, I'm going to have to check out.

And I really want a sketch of Xander with an eye patch. Will have to hit Georges up next time I see him at a convention (for the record, met him a few years ago, very nice guy).

The other great thing about Buffy is the fact that because it feels like the tv series, it is strongly becoming the best “season” out of the lot because they can do what ever they want.

Hordes of monsters with no limit of an FX budget, hundreds maybe thousands of slayers up against the US army with ancient giant gods storming both sides and a submarine sitting in the middle.

This all adds up into a great sense of what I like to call “awesomeness”. The writers have been unleashed but the characters are still the same. Only now they can throw at Buffy and the Scoobies anything that Georges can draw. And given that we've seen submarines, magic and gigantic mecha version of Dawn stomping in Tokyo, I'm not sure what Georges can't draw.

The final thing that I like about Buffy is that it's given out the idea that tv shows don't have to end when they are canceled. Serenity has quickly followed suit as has Jericho and I've also heard rumblings of Pushing Daisies will also be joining the fray. And while I am all for new and creative comics, if some of my tv shows are going to be brought back and done as well as Buffy, I'm all for it.

Buffy is everything a licensed comic should be. It is well written, well drawn and keeps you wanting the next issue. Other companies should take a look at Buffy when they decide to license a property as the gold standard.

I promise I will with my take on The Adventures of Dr. Johnny Fever.

CSTS Global Charity Donation Tally has just hit a new record at $116,936.18

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T12:25:54Z

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http://www.cantstoptheserenity.com/

Bianca Lawson - "The Vampire Diaries" Tv Series - She joins the cast

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T12:23:52Z

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http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0493161/

"Cabin In Woods" Official Visual Companion SC - Available for pre-order ! (you save 20%)

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T12:22:15Z

Drew Goddard From Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Drew Goddard, writer of the monster movie phenomenon Cloverfield, comes the horror film to end all horror films ! This Official Visual Companion to The Cabin in the Woods features in-depth interviews, the full screenplay by Whedon and Goddard, stunning production art, and hundreds of color photos !

Click on the cover to pre-order : (you save 20%)

Vote for "Dollhouse" Tv Series in TVGuide November Sweeps Survey

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T12:20:28Z

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http://tvguidemagazine.com/feature/sweeps-preview-poll-enter-to-win-1000-3105.html

Christina Hendricks - "Mad Men" Tv Series - Ifmagazine.com Interview

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T11:38:32Z

Christina Hendricks says she doesn't think of herself as a sex symbol, but that's a minority opinion. In her three years as MAD MEN's ambitious Sterling-Cooper siren Joan Holloway, Hendricks has drawn wide acclaim for both her excellent performance and her stunning looks. The actress, who was previously a regular on KEVIN HILL opposite Taye Diggs and on BEGGARS AND CHOOSERS, and who still has a fan following from her recurring role as con artist Saffron on FIREFLY, talks about her work on AMC's award-winning MAD MEN, set in the world of ‘60s Madison Avenue advertising.

When you got onto MAD MEN, did you have any sense that it was going to turn into a phenomenon or did you just think, ‘Boy, this is different' ?

HENDRICKS : I have stopped trying to figure out how anything will go. All I know is that I loved the script, I wanted to be a part of it and I'd do whatever to be a part of it. I didn't anticipate anything, I just sat back and enjoyed each moment as it came.

Last season, MAD MEN delved into some real-world historical issues like Marilyn Monroe's death and the Cuban missile crisis. Will there be other historical events this year that have an impact on Joan ?

HENDRICKS : I think if you do a show that is taking place in a different time period, it's going to constantly affect people, the way everything affects us today. So even if it is not a major focus of certain things, certainly events will continue to arise and be dealt with. I can't tell you what's going to happen with Joan – I can tell you that Season Two was a really hard year for her. But I think some of your questions will be answered.

iF : Is it a learning experience being on a show that is so grounded in historical accuracy ?

HENDRICKS : Absolutely. I think it's more [learning about] the things that happen on a day to day basis. Like you pick something up on a desk and you think, ‘Huh, I didn't realize that they had that kind of stapler then,' or, ‘I didn't realize that White-Out was invented by then.' Things like that – you're constantly being stimulated by things around you and the amazing set and design department.

iF : Do you look at the way MAD MEN is advertised to the audience and then look at the way they do things in MAD MEN and think, ‘Man, I wish we really advertised the show the way they do things at Sterling-Cooper,' or ‘Why don't they on the show do it the way they do it for real ?'

HENDRICKS : I don't think of it that way. MAD MEN is based in the world of advertising, but it is about so many other things, about people and relationships and things, so it's a wonderful element, and an interesting element, but I don't take it apart that much. There are just so many elements happening.

iF : You played the rape scene very affectingly.

HENDRICKS : Well, thank you. I'm sure it was harder to watch than [to play]. I mean, it's certainly hard to conjure up those feelings and imagine what that must be like for anybody, but the director and writers and Sam [Page], who played the fiancé, everyone was so professional and we made sure we rehearsed everything ahead of time so everyone would feel comfortable and it was just handled so beautifully that there was no discomfort as far as any physicality or anything like that. We just got to be actors and really act the scene the way it should be acted, so that was good.

iF : In what we've seen in the first two seasons, do you have a favorite scene or a favorite storyline for Joan ?

HENDRICKS : Well, I think one of my favorite scenes was in Season One. I really loved the episode called ‘Babylon,' which had the lipstick scene, which is one of my favorites. Because I had the guys on one side of the glass, and the girls on one side, and it was very sexually charged and it showed the office politics, and I thought it really sort of defined what you were going to see in this show and in this office, and I thought it was just a really, sexy, naughty, inappropriate scene that I loved [laughs].

iF : How have you adapted to the fact that you, at least you as Joan, have become a sex symbol ?

HENDRICKS : [laughs] I don't [see myself that way], but that's really lovely [to hear]. God, I would probably be a very obnoxious person if that were something that occurred to me, but thank you.

iF : Are there any secrets to the costuming on MAD MEN ?

HENDRICKS : No secrets, really. Janie [aka Katherine Jane] Bryant's our costume designer and she's unbelievably talented and creative and beautiful, so it's just a matter of showing up and seeing what beautiful thing is hanging in your closet [for the show] and putting it on, so it's pretty easy, actually. The show's amazing. I still love [vintage clothing]. I've shopped vintage since I was ten years old, so I've actually had to curb my purchasing of vintage, just so I don't look like I'm walking around in my TV show outfits.

iF : What did you do during the most recent MAD MEN hiatus ? Were you vacationing ?

HENDRICKS : I did a little bit of that. Right before I came back, I did a movie called LEONIE and now I'm just knee-deep in the middle of Season Three.

iF : Do you think the gender politics of MAD MEN's era and have changed as much as one would hope in the present ?

HENDRICKS : Absolutely not. [laughs] No, I don't think so. We've come a long way, but I think there's a lot of things still [that need examining].

iF : When MAD MEN started getting critical acclaim, Emmy Awards and other attention, did that help in any practical or creative ways on the show ? Did it let the creative team do anything that they hadn't been able to do before ?

HENDRICKS : No. I think that Matt [Weiner] has really had a lot of control over the show and not only that, AMC has been really supportive and thrilled with what he brings to the table. So I feel like we've been doing what we wanted from the beginning and he wasn't making concessions, and still doesn't, and that's why it's got the integrity that it has. I think we've had it from the beginning.

David Boreanaz - "Bones" Tv Series - 5x07 "The Dwarf in the Dirt" - Promo - Watch The Video

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T11:33:56Z

Buffy & Angel Figurine Coll Mag #2 Buffy - Available for pre-order ! (you save 20%)

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T11:29:30Z

This second special in a series of magazines/figurines focusing on Joss Whedon's Buffyverse features the vampire with a soul, Angel, an extremely popular character from Buffy, The Vampire Slayer who ultimately went on to star in his own smash hit show. Packed with stunning imagery and extensive details on Angel, this collector's edition magazine includes a hand-crafted lead figurine boasting a highly detailed sculpt of actor David Boreanez. Each figure comes packaged with the magazine in an individual box.

Click on the cover to pre-order : (you save 20%)

Julie Benz - About her career - Buzzymultimedia.com Interview

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T11:24:04Z

Julie Benz is one of the sweetest-looking people on Planet Earth, and yet somehow she winds up in a lot of films and TV shows dealing with violence. Yes, there are the romantic comedy and drama films she's done for Lifetime, but audiences are apt to know her for the vampire Darla she essayed throughout the runs of both BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and its spinoff ANGEL or Rita Bennett Morgan, the role she's played on four seasons thus far on Showtime's DEXTER, a character who doesn't realize her husband is a serial killer. Then there are the female leads in THE PUNISHER : WAR ZONE and RAMBO and the dangerous realtor in SAW V. Now Benz is back on the big screen as FBI Special Agent Eunice Bloom in THE BOONDOCK SAINTS : ALL SAINTS DAY, a follow-up to the cult hit BOONDOCK SAINTS that has been ten years in the making.

Speaking in a phone interview, Benz sounds delighted about all of it. She acknowledges she hadn't known the history of SAINTS when she was first auditioning for the sequel. darla from Buffy, buffy the vampire slayer, vampires “I was sent a script that was called ALL SAINTS DAY and no one told me it was a sequel or anything about it. I read the script, I really liked it, I loved the character of Eunice Bloom, and I went in and I auditioned for it and I met with] Troy Duffy [writer/director of both the original and the sequel] a couple times. I don't usually talk about my auditions to anybody, so nobody even knew about it. I didn't tell anybody ‘I'm going into this movie' until after I got the film, and then I mentioned to my trainer, ‘Oh, I got a movie, it's going to be a sequel to BOONDOCK SAINTS,' and he just started flipping out and couldn't believe it. That's how I realized that this movie's bigger than what I'd thought,” she laughs.

There was no time to do research into the world of Federal agents, Benz notes. “I literally walked off the set of Season Three [of DEXTER] and walked onto the set of BOONDOCK SAINTS the next day,” she laughs. “I was cast at the last minute and I had no time for any weapons training. My first day on set, they literally handed me a gun, they said, ‘You're going to burst into the room, you're going to fire six rounds into camera, you're going to change the mag without looking at it and then you're going to continue firing.' And I had never fired a gun before, onscreen or off. So I was like [breezily], ‘Okay.' Troy has this amazing ability to make you think you can do it. He really has this passion. You get caught up in his energy and he'll sit there and – he swears a lot, so I'm going to quote him – he's like, ‘You're just going to go in there and you're going to fucking open up six rounds and you're going to shoot right in the fucking barrel !' He's all excited and you're like, ‘Okay, I can do this !' Actually, you're like, ‘I better be able to do this …' It's basically sink or swim, and sinking was not an option, because we didn't have the budget to sink, and we didn't have the budget to do take after take. So you get a limited amount of time and you just have to do it. I had to learn how to twirl a pistol, where I spent the whole shoot [practicing] twirling a pistol for the big pistol-twirling scene and since then, I have been to the firing range and I have learned about weapons and guns, and I'm actually really good at it naturally, but I figured, I'd better become better at it so I can just step in and just do it and not have to think about it. [In the scenes], I was shooting blanks. You can't shoot live ammo – you shoot blanks. I mean, it's still gunpowder, it's still loud, it still gives the gun a kick, but you can't use a real bullet – they're not going to let you !” she reminds with a laugh.

buzzy multimedia, sci-fi audio books, science fiction audio books Besides using guns, was there anything else Benz needed to learn for SAINTS ? “The accent,” she reports. “I had to work on the accent. I had a dialect coach who I studied with every single night, and I'd tape out all my dialogue phonetically for the next day and it was a very specific accent that Troy wanted, so I had to rely a lot on his ear. [Eunice is] from the South, but it's not a general Southern accent, it's a very specific kind of Troy Duffy Southern accent, a specific sound that he wanted. I could say that it's a cross between Georgia and Texas, but then that would really throw you off if you know anything about accents. That's how it was described to me, but at the end of the day, it was very much a very specific accent to the world that Troy created. We had kind of like a Holly Hunter/Kyra Sedgwick kind of quality accent.”

The accent may come in handy for future roles, Benz believes. “Oh, definitely. I can now do a really great Southern accent. I also know how much work it takes me to do accents. I had the same experience in THE PUNISHER : WAR ZONE – I had to do a slight Jersey accent and that also took a lot of work for me to do it. But it's fun. It's a challenge, when you're working as an actor – it's just an added challenge to conquer.”

Benz enjoyed working with filmmaker Duffy. She says she still hasn't seen OVERNIGHT, the feature-length documentary about events surrounding the original SAINTS that paints Duffy in a sometimes unflattering light. Benz takes issue with this. “From my own knowledge of the industry, you can edit anybody and make them look like an asshole. You can even follow me around with cameras and edit me to make me look like I'm an asshole. So I don't put any stock in that documentary at all. I went into [BOONDOCK SAINTS II] wanting to have my own experience with Troy Duffy and I have my own experience with him and he's extremely passionate about what it is he's doing. And he has no filter, so yes, he'll say things off the cuff that maybe somebody else wouldn't say, but at the end of the day, he's actually extremely sweet, very compassionate, very passionate about what it is that he's doing, and you don't get your whole crew and cast to return to work with you if you're an asshole. I base [perceptions of him] on the people he surrounded himself with and the people who love him and have known him for a very long time.”

Part of the appeal of playing SAINTS' gun-toting Fed Eunice, says Benz, is that the character is very dissimilar to DEXTER's Rita – although, the actress hastens to add, she loves that role as well. “I definitely look for characters that are outside the realm of Rita when I'm on hiatus. That's not to say that I wouldn't play characters who are similar. Mostly it's about scripts and what's written on the page. But at the same time, I love playing Eunice, be a badass. I got to play with weapons and hang with the guys and be one of the guys for a short time and that was fun for me, because in my day job [as Rita], yeah, I'm soft, vulnerable and emotional and working with children.”

Throughout DEXTER's run, we've seen Rita's two young children by her previous marriage to an julie_benz_rita abusive drug addict. This season, Rita and Dexter have a baby boy together, who is often in scenes with Benz's Rita and Michael C. Hall's Dexter. What's it like sharing the screen with a real live infant ? Oh, God, the babies are amazing,” Benz replies. “We were very lucky when we cast these two babies and both Michael and I have a special bond with them and it's enriched our jobs, I think, and it's enriched our lives, working with the babies. First of all, it really keeps you on your toes, because you have to act off of what the baby's really giving you. The baby is not reading the script,” Benz points out with a laugh, “doesn't understand the script, doesn't even know we're acting. So you really have to live in the moment and the baby forces you to be in the moment and forces you to really live with what's going on onstage while we're shooting. I find it freeing and exciting. There was a scene in [an] episode where I find that Dexter's been keeping his [bachelor] apartment, and it was brilliant the way it was written, because in many ways, just that added element of having the baby in the room forces you to handle things a little more gently. You don't want to scream and yell in front of the child. So it was a really interesting added element to the drama of the scene.”

When Benz first joined the cast of DEXTER four years ago, did she imagine the series would become such a hit “I did,” Benz says, “but then I think everything I do is going to run for a long time. I think that's kind of a funny thing – you take a project and you basically drink the Kool-Aid. You fall in love with it and you think everyone else is going to fall in love with it. Not every project warrants that kind of love, but definitely DEXTER did. I thought it was one of the best scripts I had ever read. And I also thought that this was the type of show that I'd like to watch, so that's pretty much all I can base it on. But yeah, I really thought it would be the interesting phenomenon that it is. I think it keeps growing, too, and it's really cool to have a show that keeps growing and growing and growing.”

james marsters, spike from buffy, buffy the vampire slayer There was a recent article on DEXTER in the Los Angeles Times that referred to the series as “Can't Wait TV.” Benz agrees with the assessment. “It's true. You're on the edge of your seat and I think especially this season – we have an amazing season, we have an amazing addition to the cast in John Lithgow and I think we have probably one of the most shocking season finales that we've ever had and I think people are interested to find out what happens and want to see how it's all going to turn out in the end. It's like a train wreck !” she laughs, withholding anything more that could be construed as a spoiler.

Benz acknowledges being quite a fan of DEXTER guest star Lithgow. “Who isn't ?” she asks rhetorically. “He's John Lithgow. He just does everything – comedy, drama, stage, television, film, he writes children's books. He's a true Renaissance man, and no one plays creepy like he plays creepy, so I was shocked when they told us he was joining our cast. I was like, ‘You're kidding me. John Lithgow ?' I was even more shocked when he came up to me and told me he was a fan of my work on the show, and I was like, ‘Are you sure you're talking about me ?'” she recalls, laughing. “He's extremely generous and kind and warm, It's shocking that he plays creepy so well, because there's not one creepy bone in his body.”

As far as her penchant for winding up in violent fare, Benz says, “Well, I don't sit there and search for it, I don't say, ‘Oh, give me another violent movie, I want to shoot ‘em up.' It just seems to be where the interesting characters lie for me. Each one of the projects was an interesting character, struggling with [issues and emotions] that interested me as an actor, so they just happened to be in action movies or action shows, they just happened to be in that genre. It wasn't because I seek them out. In [the TV series] SUPERNATURAL, I played this woman who had tremendous faith, and that was so interesting to me, to play someone who just really believed in God, not questioning at all. In DEXTER, Rita is a very damaged and fragile bird who has managed to grow some balls through the love of a serial killer, but she started out as this real fragile, damaged bird, and that interested me. And then in RAMBO, another woman who has tremendous faith who drives into a war zone and tries to save people, and meanwhile, in many ways, she's responsible for a lot of people getting killed and having to live with the weight of that. In THE PUNISHER, she's Mama Bear who's trying to protect her child after her husband gets murdered, and in SAW, you have a woman who set the whole thing in motion and has to live with the knowledge of that. And in BOONDOCKS, you have Eunice, who's fun. She's the lightest character of them all. I think what's so great about her is, BOONDOCKS is a fantasy movie in many ways. It's a movie made for pure entertainment. It's campy at times, it's dramatic at times, it's action-packed, it's funny – it's not meant to be set in the real world. You're not supposed to actually believe that the Saints are out there. You're supposed to go and enjoy it and go on the ride and take it for the entertainment that it is. And it's creative and fun. And the great thing is, the Saints steal all of their ideas from movies. It's kind of a play on movies as well. There's lots of interesting layers to it, but at the end of the day, it's pure entertainment.”

There aren't any in-jokes about Benz's career in SAINTS, she says, “But on DEXTER, they've mentioned SAW right in front of me. There's a scene where Deb [Jennifer Carpenter] was babysitting the kids and she said that she let them watch SAW. They have a lot of that. They had a TWILIGHT poster hanging up in Astor's Rita's daughter, played by Christina Robinson] room. Melissa Rosenberg, who's our head writer on DEXTER, is the one who adapted the books into the screenplays for the TWILIGHT movies, so they have a little bit of that kind of like humor.”

darla, buffy, buffy the vampire slayer Mention of vampire movies naturally leads to thoughts of Benz's work as the sanguinary Darla on BUFFY and ANGEL. These days, is she more recognized for her work on DEXTER or on the earlier shows ? “You know, I think it's a very similar audience,” Benz muses, “so I think both. It's funny – a lot of people don't recognize me as Rita when I'm out and about. I think because I don't dress like her – Rita's always in a sundress and I'm always in jeans. Surprisingly, most people off the bat will see Darla and then they make the connection to Rita. Maybe it's because I look more like Darla than Rita,” she laughs. “I feel like with Rita, she's more kind of a character kind of role for me, kind of lets me know what it feels like to be a character actor. She really is so far removed physically from who I am. Darla was tortured, she's been around four hundred years – I'd feel a little jaded, too,” Benz laughs. “You can't blame her. Plus, she was in search of her love. Every character has a mix [of emotions] in them somewhere. Obviously, I'm playing them. But I'd say Rita definitely has some of my softer side, my more vulnerable side, and Darla obviously has my fantasy tougher side. And Eunice Bloom is just totally a fantasy – she's just a person I would like to think I am.”

Is coming into a film sequel like BOONDOCK SAINTS II, SAW V or RAMBO anything like guest-starring on a TV series, as far as coming into a group of people who've all been working together for awhile ? Benz opines the film experience is sometimes better. “Sometimes on a TV show, people have been working on it for a long time and everyone's jaded, like a totally dysfunctional family. People are not going to be as open to something you're going to do for a short period of time. When you're doing a sequel to a film, those people are just very excited to be doing it again. There's a bit of a different atmosphere, a bit more of a welcoming atmosphere. Not to say that every TV show has that [jaded] quality, because they don't, it's just some do. I've done quite a few [film] sequels and they've all been amazing experiences, because everyone was so excited to be back and revisiting the characters and they usually have the same crew back and it's like a giant family reunion. ”

During the filming of RAMBO, Benz became passionate about educating people about the blight of the population in Burma. “I'm still very much involved,” she says. “I know the situation over there is getting worse and worse, so until it gets better, I'm involved.” For more information, Benz recommends visiting the website uscampaignforburma.org. julie benz, julie benz interview

On the professional front, Benz adds, “I have a Hallmark movie coming up Christmastime, good family fun, with JoBeth Williams and Elliott Gould called UNCORKED, a little romantic comedy, and I also have an indie film that is going to be hitting the festival circuit called BEDROOMS with Xander Berkeley and Jesse Garcia. I'm getting ready to start another movie, but I don't want to talk about it yet. I keep saying I'm going to take a vacation, but I keep getting offered stuff and going to work !”

"Dr. Horrible" Web Series listed on io9's Top 10 Dumbest Evil Geniuses of All Time

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T11:18:44Z

Click on the link :

http://www.io9.com/5397430/gallery/

Morena Baccarin - "V" Tv Series - The Buzz on Morena

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T11:06:34Z

The remake of the sci-fi show "V" that premiered on ABC raised many a mystery. One of the biggest : Who is that woman ?

Even if you didn't watch the season opener, you may recognize Morena Baccarin from the promos for the show : She's the enormous serene head projected on a hovering spacecraft with a message to earthlings : "We mean no harm."

But don't you believe it. What you can believe is this : The actress is scoring out-of-this-world searches on the Web. Lookups on the rising star soared up an astronomical 4,580% in one-day searches on Yahoo !, making the "V" headliner one of the top five searches on the Web. The buzz is paying off : A whopping 13.9 million viewers tuned in, making it one of the highest-rated new shows this season.

The leggy actress is the head of the V (for visitor) alien invasion, a reptilian species — masquerading as human — that brings health care, technology, and, oh, yeah, a secret plan to take over the planet. (You can catch up with the show and the characters courtesy of the LA Times' roundup.)

Brazilian-born Baccarin is not new to sci-fi. The 30-year-old actor played the role of Inara Serra in Joss Whedon's 2002 space-western series "Firefly," and more recently she played the villainous Adria in "Stargate SG-1."

The original "V" miniseries from the 1980s imagined what would happen if fascism overtook America. The old version's beautiful but evil leader was played by Jane Badler. In the remake, the beautiful but evil leader channels a more modern bad guy : The corporate executive armed with a PR campaign that Enron would have envied.

Check out the opening of "V," where the star's enormous, well-coiffed head is first projected. With that warm smile coupled with chilling plans for world domination, we're betting that resistance to the star — and the show — will be futile.

Eliza Dushku - Breeders' Cup Winners Circle Event - High Quality Photos

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T10:58:12Z
- Graphics

"Serenity" Movie in the Science fiction tear jerkers

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T10:18:59Z

Let's just be straight up with each other for a minute, OK ? I cry at movies. It doesn't really matter what genre ; I bawled like a school girl during “Man Without a Face.” I got a lump in my throat during “The Wedding Singer” and “Lilo & Stitch.” And let's just not bring up “Old Yeller,” yeah ?

But, for some reason, there just aren't a lot of tear-jerking sci-fi movies out there. Maybe that's secretly why I love the genre so much — I can go on a date without having to touch up my makeup a billion times.

But I know there were a couple out there that got me a little choked up. OK, so my biggest embarrassment is how much I sobbed when Bruce Willis had to say goodbye to his daughter in “Armageddon.” But I knew there were others out there. So I went to my most magic of 8-balls : Twitter.

“Twitter !” I called out into the abyss. “Show me the saddest science fiction movies to grace the screen !”

The first three responses came back almost instantly. “Battlefield Earth,” “Battlefield Earth” and “Battlefield Earth.” Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. “The Matrix 2 and 3″ were next. COME ON, Twitter, where's the serious ? Remind me to never ask you for medical advice (again).

But then, a series of other answers came in, restoring my faith in the medium. Their answers, mediated and moderated, below :

Serenity :

Ah, Joss Whedon. You loveable, sadistic, hairy bastard man-child. You have a track record of creating the most memorable characters to grace screens big and small, and then completely wrenching them from us in as gruesome or pointless manner possible. Wash's death I can almost handle, seeing as how he went out as a hero. But killing Book by just letting him bake in the sun for a spell, all of that delicious backstory just evaporating with him ? You're dangerously close to “you suck” territory, bub.

The Iron Giant :

This surprise bit of sweetness about a boy and his bot packed several emotional gut punches. The most powerful, however, was when the silent titular Giant sacrificed himself to save his friend, as well as most of the state of Maine. Twitter friend Knappst3r, who evidently cries about as much as I do, cited this movie, in addition to “Serenity.”

The Fifth Element :

We've talked at length about this quirky cult classic, which has become a surprisingly divisive wedge in fandom (you either love it or hate it). I fall into the former camp. And, most importantly, I got a little sad at the end, when Leeloo can't feel love, but sacrifices herself thanks to Bruce Willis and some climactic music. Zeblue Prime mentioned that he cries at lots of sci-fi movies because of the sheer epic nature, but specifically cited The Fifth Element (or E5, if you have no idea what you're talking about, because I just made that up). And GeekGirlDiva, ever the sort to fall for romance, seconds The Fifth Element as a key climactic sobfest.

A.I. :

A few of you got a little choked up over A.I. — most notably the last scene. Elwang admits that a lot of people trash the movie, but the part where he gets his mom back for a day makes him all manner of weepy. ReallyBigPeach mentions a rough scene I'd forgotten about, when Little Robot Boy gets left in the woods alone. I blame Gigolo Jane for blotting out that memory — I can't seem to remember anything for around half an hour either side of her appearance. Star Trek :

Very few people think of the rebooted “Star Trek” as a tear-jerker, unless bright, blinding lights make your eyes water. But at least one person was on the same page as me. Pippsta remembered that opening scene being a little sad. And I couldn't agree more. CarrieLeighC went one further, saying it had her “sobbing faster and harder than any other movie ever has.”

I'm taking up a collection to rent “Old Yeller” for her.

Charisma Carpenter - "Legend Of The Seeker" - 2x01 "Marked" - Spoilers

Webmaster — 2009-11-07T10:11:57Z

On the syndicated fantasy series Legend of the Seeker, the Seeker has dispatched the evil Darken Rahl, and our heroes (Richard, Kahlan and Zed) should just be able to lounge around and goof off knowing that all is right with the world ... right ?

Not so much. Unfortunately, the good guys are about to experience the Wizard's Second Rule when Legend of the Seeker's second season begins this Saturday in syndication, right after a special episode designed to catch you up on the events of last season.

"Season two is basically going to pick up where season one left off, but what Richard is going to be confronted with is Wizard's Second Rule, which is something from Terry Goodkind's novel series," said executive producer Kenneth Biller. "And Wizard's Second Rule says, 'The greatest harm can result from the best intentions.' So, essentially, Richard [Craig Horner] is going to have to deal with the repercussions of his big victory, of fulfilling the prophecy, and killing Darken Raul."

Here are nine legendary spoilers for the Seeker's second season, along with hot new guest stars (spoilers ahead !) :

Someone new joins the team, and Kahlan's going to have issues.

"There is disorder and disarray among the D'Haran's and the Mord'Sith in the absence of a strong man to unite them," Biller said. "There is a lot of jockeying for power and position, and Cara [the Mord'Sith who helped Richard kill Rahl in the season-one finale] ends up making a very tense alliance with Richard and Kahlan, ... which Kahlan [Bridget Regan] is not happy about."

Tabrett Bethell joins the cast as Cara.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Charisma Carpenter guest-stars.

She's in the season premiere, and she looks hot.

Remember those skin-tight Mord'Sith outfits ? Well, Carpenter's more than looking the part. "She plays a Mord'Sith, who clashes with Cara and ultimately with Richard," said Biller. BTW, you'll want to check out the knock-down drag-out fight between Carpenter and a naked Cara.

There will be plenty of other hot lady guest stars this season.

Star Trek Enterprise's Jolene Blalock ("T'Pol") will be recurring as Sister Nicci, a Sister of the Dark, and Jessica Marais's Denna will return to spin Richard's head around again.

"Denna has found a new tantalizing and very profitable way of making a living now that Rahl's empire has crumbled, but what we also will realize is that this is just a front for a grander plan she has to take over Dahara," said Biller.

"The show is way hotter and sexier this year."

"There's an incredibly hot and sexy introduction of Cara," said Biller. "It has a higher degree of epic action than we've shown before on the show. ... It's going to put Richard right square in the middle, in between former adversaries and former allies. Richard is going to have to make a very, very difficult decision about who he is and what his quest is going to be. It sets up the whole quest for the second season that Richard is going to be on with Kahlan and Cara. It sets up some real tension between Kahlan and Cara, who don't like each other very much and don't trust each other, but by the end of that episode, for reasons the audience will discover if they watch the episode, both will be by his side."

Without someone in charge, there's chaos.

"People are rising up and trying to claim power in the wake of the vacuum that's been created by the absence of Darken Rahl. Richard is going to be confronted with what happens to Rahl's armies. Now that Rahl is gone, what happens to the Mord'Sith ? Now that Rahl is gone, what happens to the people that used to follow Richard as the Seeker that were fighting for the resistance ? Are they all good ? Are they all bad ? What are the repercussions of the aftermath of a war, and refugees, war crimes, all sorts of things like that ?" said Biller.

Last season's battle between Richard and Rahl screwed up the world more than just a little bit.

Richard, Kahlan, and Zed (Bruce Spence) will discover that "the powerful magic that collided when Richard killed Darken Rahl tore a rift in the veil between the world of the living and the underworld, and from the underworld, which is ruled by the Keeper, new and dangerous threats to Richard and to all life itself is going to emerge," he said.

There's going to be war.

"The keeper of the underworld is now waging war on the land of the living, and Richard is going to have to fight that war. He's going to have to fight the creatures and minions of the underworld that are trying to essentially destroy all life, and while he's doing that he's on a quest to find the Stone of Tears. Legend has it the Stone of Tears is an ancient object that will heal the rift and once again protect the world of living," said Biller. "Richard's going to come up against our coolest and scariest creature that we've ever done. An unkillable creature." How do you kill and unkillable creature ? "You'll have to watch," he said with a laugh.

Richard and Zedd will discover more about their own past.

Richard will learn more about the mysterious circumstances of his birth. "He's going to find out that he's not exactly who he thinks he is," said Biller. Meanwhile, Zedd is going to "learn secrets from his past that he didn't know about. We're going to find out more about Zedd's history, some of which is dark."

The new season will riff on the book.

"As we did in season one, we're using some of the tentpoles and some of the mythology and some of the characters from the second book, but we are riffing on that book, as we did in season one. We're creating lots of stand-alone stories that fit within that overall season-long quest. So it'll be a combination, as it was in the first season, of characters and elements from the book and those that are either of our own invention or our riff, if you will, on some of Terry Goodkind's mythology and characters."

Are you ready for more Legend of the Seeker ?

Why you should be watching Dollhouse when it comes back in December 2009

Webmaster — 2009-11-06T15:55:31Z

If you're the sort of person who cares about things like then, then you probably don't need me to tell you that Dollhouse has been knocked off of Fox's November sweeps lineup. If you aren't the sort of person who cares about things like this, then you're probably wondering what a dollhouse has to do with a fox while you subconsciously evaluate any of my previous blog entries to determine whether they give off an “anthropomorphic animal fetishist/pedophile vibe.”

If, by some miracle, you a) know that Dollhouse is the newest sci fi/action/drama by Joss Whedon (Buffy, Firefly, Dr. Horrible), b) haven't heard of Dollhouse, but are always open for a good show to watch and/or c) aren't now frantically searching the Internet for a photo of me to put up on posters at your children's schools, then this post is for you.

As you may or may not know, “November sweeps” is, in a colloquial nutshell, when the Neilsen ratings board kicks it into fifth gear and, in effect, decides what shows are likely to be renewed (or, indeed, which are likely to finish their current seasons at all). Now, as Whedon has said himself, Dollhouse was never going to live or die on the sweeps. Much more likely Dollhouse is going to die in mid-season obscurity, only to be revived into a twisted, undead pseudo-life as a cult phenomenon on DVD. That is, unless we—O Dorks of the Internet—can band together and save it.

Well, “save it” might be a little melodramatic. Ideally, we can band together and save it from mid-season cancellation, which is a fate that should be reserved only for the most unwatchable pop culture dross. And Dollhouse is anything but unwatchable.

Comedian (and big ol' pop culture nerd) Patton Oswalt said in a recent interview that television is currently going through a renaissance similar to the one film experienced in the seventies. And, for what my considerably less noteworthy opinion is worth, I agree entirely. On subscriber services like HBO especially, but also on the networks, we're seeing not only a marked increase in the quality of writing, production and performances, but also an incredible maturation of theme. I honestly can't name a film made in the past fifteen years that has the same psychological acuity of The Sopranos. In all of the thousands of hours of film and television I've watched, I have never seen anything—ever—with the deep sociological prescience and understanding of The Wire. Generation Kill demonstrated a more complex, nuanced view of the war in the Middle East than any film with similar themes (yes, even The Hurt Locker, which was excellent on its own merits). Deadwood was gritty American Shakespeare—a completely unique, fresh take on a genre that seemed doomed to endlessly derivative Sam Peckinpah worship. Arrested Development somehow managed to stay on the air for three seasons on a major network by making increasingly more esoteric jokes about its own meta-narrative. AMC's Breaking Bad is loaded with moral ambiguity so rich and thick that you could, to quote Oswalt out of context, drizzle it over pancakes.

There are more, but all of these shows are destined, I think, to become the Serpico's, the French Connection's, the Taxi Driver's and the Chinatown's of tomorrow. Well, except for Arrested Development, which is probably more of an Annie Hall. In their own way, all of those shows I mentioned are the kind of bold, important projects that will live on in our cultural memory and—no doubt—in hundreds of Masters' theses. But...

But !

Dollhouse is not one of these shows.

[sound of a record being scraped against a needle]

“Oh shit but wa—what was he—oh God wh—where am I ? Am I alive ? Who's the prime minister ?”

Though you should take a moment to collect your blown mind, I do intend to address the statement that seems to run contrary to the original thesis of this post. No, Dollhouse is not one of the Great Shows. It does not have a universal appeal that will persist for years after its inevitably been cancelled. It's a decidedly—proudly—niche little universe that Joss Whedon has created, and some of you will absolutely hate it. But I love it. And I do think it's important, in its own way. And here's why.

Though the '70s is the best decade to reference when describing some of the greater contemporary trends in television storytelling, Dollhouse owes much more to the ‘80s. Though rightly-derided for a many reasons, ‘80s culture allowed for the rise of the pulp films like no other decade before, the most notable of which are in the sci-fi and horror genres. The ‘80s gave us Blade Runner, the Road Warrior, Aliens, the Terminator and Robocop. Each one of these movies, while firmly bound by science fiction tradition, riffed on the genre in an interesting way. Blade Runner gave us a little existential crisis to go with our robot murder, The Road Warrior blended tropes of the American Western into its apocalyptic sci-fi milieu, and Aliens arguably remains the iconic vision for military-based sci fi to this day. Dollhouse, to get back on topic, does a lovely job of sneaking in some surprisingly thoughtful ruminations on the nature of identity between all of its witty dialogue, well-crafted characters and inventive sci-fi conceits.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, the premise of the show is that, if you have enough money, a group of people who run something called—surprise—the Dollhouse, will program a built-to-order human being for you to do with as you will for a few hours… or weeks. As you can imagine, the strength of the conceit rises and falls with each individual writer. When its good, Ecco—the “doll” or “active” protagonist played by Eliza Dushku—is sent on “engagements” where the client's needs could never be satisfied by a regular prostitute, bodyguard or really good friend, instead requiring some special skill or life experience specific to the task. When it's great, as in season one's high point “Man on the Street,” there's a sad, subtle irony to Ecco's engagements with the powerfully needy, broken people who hire her. In that episode, a rich computer programmer (played by none other than Oswalt) hires Ecco once per year to act out a scene that should have happened with his wife—if she hadn't been killed in a car accident while she was coming to meet him.

What's great about Dollhouse is that it never pauses to spell out these connections. It trusts the intelligence of its audience like no other show on a major network. In “Belle Chose,” a recent season two episode, a sociopath captures women using veterinary anesthetic and poses them like, well, dolls in eerily mundane tableaus in his basement. In one of the typical CSI-alike procedural-em-ups that dominate network television, the connection between this man's disgusting actions and the actions of the Dollhouse would be explicated in a two-minute monologue. Dollhouse does the opposite. In the very same episode, we see the people who run the Dollhouse being protective of the dolls, refusing to carry out actions of unambiguous evil and, instead, carrying out actions of ambiguous good. Though Whedon can't resist the clean narrative geometry that comes from having distinct “good” and “bad” guys throughout, he and his writers aren't afraid to let the good guys be wrong sometimes, the bad guys be right others, and let the two camps constantly inbreed and shuffle about.

Just to put an exclamation point on why Dollhouse, while niche and a little bit inaccessible, is absolutely worth the right kind of person's time, here's a dialogue exchange where, afterward, I sat literally dumbfounded and astonished that I had just heard it on any major television network, let alone Fox. The scene takes place between Dr. Saunders (Amy Acker), a permanently “imprinted” (that's what it's called when they get custom personalities shoved in their brains), and Topher Brink (Fran Kranz), the genius “sociopath in a sweatervest” whose job it is to program the dolls.

After Saunders admits that she's afraid to take back her original personality (even though its been offered to her) because that would imply, necessarily, killing the only “self” she has any familiarity with, she says :

“I'm not better than you. I'm just a series of excuses.”

“You're human,” says Topher.

“Don't flatter yourself.”

It isn't quite the moment in Blade Runner when Rutger Hauer, confronted with the fallibility of his own creator, is driven into a profound existential rage where he, in effect, chokes God to death, but it certainly echoes the theme. It's been within the ambit of science fiction for some time to assume that in the not-so-distant future technology will give human beings Godlike power, and Whedon—like the very best of science fiction writers—has the curiosity, audacity and imagination to question how power like that will affect the people who choose—or are chosen—to use it. It's dorky, pulpy, gloriously fun stuff, and there's at least a little bit of it in every single episode—even the bad ones.

Oh, and there are bad ones.

I've spent a lot of time singing Dollhouse's virtues in part because I'm trying to convince you to watch it, but also because I think it's too easy to focus on its faults. Some writers can't handle high concept sci-fi, and there are a few of them on Dollhouse's staff. Fortunately season two hasn't dipped quite as low as the worst episodes of season one (I'm looking at you, ridiculous pop singer episode), but there was still one or two that didn't work for me. But even when the episode-to-episode plotting gets a little shaky, the higher-level intrigue and philosophy remains solid, and the crap is never quite laughably crappy. Some of it comes close, though (still looking at you, pop singer episode).

Amidst a sea of CSI spin- and knockoffs that rake in more than many countries' GDP, it's actually kind of amazing that shows like Dollhouse still get made. Every time I watch an episode, I get that same feeling of disbelief usually reserved for Arrested Development :

Who would ever give someone money to make this ? I wonder. And then I think : Oh yeah, Jesus. Jesus would give Joss Whedon money to make Dollhouse, because Jesus has really good taste. And he loves us. And hates CSI.

Contrary, I'm sure, to the opinions of some of Fox News' commentators, I'm reasonably sure that Jesus is not currently employed by the Fox network, which makes Dollhouse's existence all the more miraculous. And because divine intervention is officially off the table, it will take altogether more corporeal means to keep it from suffering an unjust fate. So write about it, dear FFWD readers. Blog about it, talk about it, tell your friends about it and please, please, God please watch it. And if someone you know participates in the Neilsen ratings who doesn't seem likely to watch it, try to convince them to leave their transmitter thingie on while it shows (Sunday nights !) or lie on their paper mail-ins. In the war on bad television, just as it is within the Dollhouse itself, there is no such thing as ethics.

"Angel vs. Frankenstein" Comic Book - Available for order !

Webmaster — 2009-11-06T15:53:13Z

Writer/artist John Byrne returns to Angel for this special one-shot featuring a new spin on a classic horror confrontation.

Out of darkness and nightmare he comes for what he claims is rightfully his-but Angelus is there before him. Two legendary monsters. One goal. Who will claim the prize ?

Click on the cover to order :

Morena Baccarin - "V" Tv Series - Popeater.com Interview

Webmaster — 2009-11-06T15:04:23Z

Morena Baccarin, star of alien remake 'V,' is Anna, the head of the alien visitors. She's beautiful and cool as a cucumber, but underneath it all, she's...well, she's a lizard. In the pilot, we catch a glimpse of character's true nature - and in real life, we catch a glimpse of something much sweeter. PopEater chatted exclusively with the Brazilian-born actress about the show, whether or not she's going to have to eat a rodent, her loyal 'Firefly' fans and how she feels about today's reports that the show mimics the Obama presidency. She even talks about her famous haircut.

First of all, congratulations on last night's great ratings !

"Thank you !"

I've been told to ask you only questions that would "paint you in a positive light."

"[laughs] Excellent ! That's what I like to hear. But 'feel free to ask anything'."

I have to get this out of the way since I know it's probably the first thing you get asked. The rodents...

"[laughs] Oh yeah !"

In the original 'V', the head alien, Diana, ate a rodent. Were you nervous about that during the audition ?

"It wasn't really a thought that crossed my mind right away, but then I realized as I got the job, oh crap. After I YouTube'd it, I remembered. [laughs] And I knew, obviously, that it wasn't in the pilot script. There were a lot of jokes by the producers about being ready for the hamsters. But I haven't had to do it yet. I think that their position is, let's wait but let's also give the people what they want. I think that they want to do it in a different way. Pay homage to that moment without necessarily sticking a hamster down my throat."

Now, should that actually happen, are you OK with rodents ?

"You know, I don't love 'em ! [laughs] It's not necessarily something I look forward to. I don't know. I think I have to wait and see when I'm in the room with it. I might have a total freak out."

I know there are going to be nods to the classic series. Have you filmed any that were surprising to you ?

"Yeah, there were some really great things in the script. The stories have been really, really fun. We're not just redoing the original. We're updating it. I thought it was wonderful the way they adapted the script to embody the fears we have today, post 9/11. Things like that that really make sense in today's world."

Anna is a very different sort of V leader than Diana was in the original. What sort of things have you done to make her your own ?

"Well, I have a memory of the original from when I was little and watched it, but I don't really remember everything she did. This character is very different. I remember the character of Diana being very, very evil. And I think that, in order to do the show well in today's world, we have to be a little more subtle. I think it's a lot creepier when there is more manipulation, and a subtly to it that you can't quite figure out why you don't trust this person. So that's more what I'm going for. I want people to be drawn to her and to follow her in spite of themselves, but have this intuition that something is terribly wrong."

I don't know if you've been on the web this morning, but there are a bunch of stories about V paralleling the Obama campaign...the show talks about hope and change and universal health care, and it premiered on November 2nd. What do you think about all that ?

"I don't know. I think it's great that people are talking about it. But I think people have opinions about everything, and we have this compulsion, I think, in our culture, to put everything in a box and say that's what it is, because then we can understand it. And it certainly does echo that a little bit. It echos the Obama campaign. But I think that would be so rude to say that Obama is an alien or is Anna. [laughs] I mean, the man is the President of our country. I think that there's a sense of irony in our show...a realistic irony, that it takes aliens to give us health care. It is so difficult to get anything passed. To get this whole health care thing figured out. I think it's kind of funny and it speaks of our culture, and the fact that we are looking for somebody to rescue us, and pull us out of this hole we got ourselves into. And it might as well be an alien. [laughs]"

When I mentioned that I was doing this interview, one of the main things I was asked to ask you was your decision to cut your hair. You also got no less than seven marriage proposals.

[laughs]

Do you think it's strange that people are so focused on a haircut ?

"Yeah, it's a little weird for me. I'm obviously inside myself so I can't tell what people are seeing, but I do think it's a little odd. I mean, it's very complimentary, and if people don't like it, oh well. What can I do ? And it's a little odd that again, we kind of obsess in this culture about labeling people, and, 'Ooh, what does that mean ?' or 'What does that represent ?' I think it's very appropriate for this character. I had my hair cut short before for another film role I did, and I just happened to keep it because I thought it was unique and I felt very comfortable in it. And when this all came about I thought, wow, this is perfect for this role because it's different. And a lot of people are afraid to do this to themselves, to give themselves such a drastic haircut, because they're afraid of what people are going to think. And I thought it would be really amazing to have a leader with this haircut. I think it's a really fun addition to the character. And you know, if people want to talk about my hair, great ! [laughs] Let's talk about it !"

Most of the comments were positive, by the way. I just thought it was interesting that there were so many of them !

"Yeah ! It was like that with Jennifer Aniston for a while. Everyone wanted the Jennifer Aniston haircut."

Maybe you'll start a trend. It might be interesting to see on the show...everyone emulating Anna's haircut.

I know, right ? That would be really funny. Although it would take a lot of people cutting their hair.

Your face is on billboards everywhere and all over TV. How has this experience been different from the one you had with 'Firefly' ?

"It's been unique. It's been very different to be recognized on the street and have everybody looking at me, going, 'Oh my god, it's that girl !' Yesterday was my first experience with that. Yesterday after the show aired. And it's very exciting, but it's a little weird, I have to admit. [laughs] I kind of feel like I have to prepare myself, but I don't know exactly what to prepare myself for. It's really, really unbelievably exciting and I'm thrilled to be a part of it. I'm really glad that people are watching the show. I'm having a really great time doing it."

I know they are showing the series in 'pods' and there have been some reports of production issues. How much have you filmed and when do you start shooting again ?

"We filmed four episodes and they're all in November, and we go back into production in January... we have a little break right now."

Have you seen the scripts ? Do you know if they feel different ?

"I haven't seen the new scripts. I don't know if they've been written yet. There have been changes and things going on and to be honest, I'm a little out of the loop. As actors we just basically get the script and we shoot what we're given. It's been fun. I mean, there's all this talk of stuff happening. There's been some changes made. We haven't felt major...we haven't gotten like, 'Oh my god we can't shoot this scene !' They've been taking care of it and it's all been...with a show like this, it's so high profile and there are so many things about the show that they are really careful with every detail. I just think everybody is being extra careful and really attentive, which is a wonderful thing, because we want to but the best product out there."

Joss Whedon fans and 'Firefly'/'Serenity' fans can be rather vocal. Is there a line that people yell out at you on the street ?

"The 'Firefly' fans that I've encountered are super shy, really sweet, and they kind of look at me and decide whether or not they're going to say something. You can see the whole process happening. [laughs] And then they go, 'I really loved 'Firefly' and I'm really sorry that it didn't continue.' I mean, that's the big line. 'Why couldn't it have gone on and is there going to be more ?' That's the biggest question I get."

Are you tired of being asked if there will be a 'Serenity 2' ?

"No, it's a huge compliment. But I also feel bad because I wish I could say yes. But at this point, it's been a few years now. Maybe we should put it to rest."

[laughs] We're all sad about that.

"It was a great show !"

It certainly was ! You know, I just read that your 'Firefly' costar Nathan Fillion asked you to do a 'Castle' guest spot. I know you couldn't do it, but would you do one in the future ?

"I don't know. We've been texting each other and I know he's really excited about the prospect. It's an ABC show and I don't know how ABC would feel about that, so we'd have to run it by them. It's just a conversation that he and I have been having. I don't know if anything is actually being considered. But it would be fun and I would love to."

He did a little nod to 'Firefly' in the Halloween episode...

"Yeah ! I heard about it but I didn't see it."

Since Joss Whedon likes to cast people he's worked with before, I have to ask this. Would you want to do a role in the 'Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog' sequel ?

"Oh my god ! I would love to ! I'm not joking when I say, if Joss Whedon called me up and said, 'Do you want to come over and read a script for me ?' I would be like, yes ! I would do anything that man says."

Nathan Fillion - "Castle" Tv Series - Jose Molina Castletv.net Chat

Webmaster — 2009-11-06T12:34:37Z

Click on the link :

http://www.castletv.net/jose-molina-chat-transcript/2604

Buffy & Angel Cast - "Take me on the floor" Music Video - Watch The Clip

Webmaster — 2009-11-06T12:32:31Z

"Sugarshock" Comic Book - One Shot - Available for order !

Webmaster — 2009-11-06T12:21:07Z

Originally presented in the first online issues of MySpace Dark Horse Presents, for which it won the Eisner Award for Best Web Comic, Sugarshock tells the story of a rock band led by charismatic but crazy Dandelion Naizen, a hyperactive singer/songwriter possessed of a mean hatred of Vikings (don't ask) and a mission for a secret government agency that may only exist in her head. But when her band, which includes a robot bass player, is enlisted in an intergalactic battle of the bands — emphasis on battle — Dandelion gets to prove herself as both singer and soldier.

This is Joss Whedon at his funniest and most hyperactive, with writing that bursts off the page in a way seldom seen in comics. Multiple Eisner Award winner Fábio Moon delivers the outrageous story with equal energy, as well as providing a fourteen-page look at his process, with never-before-seen character designs, page layouts, and promotional images.

Joss Whedon's Eisner award-winning story gets its own comic !

Click on the cover to order :

Morena Baccarin - "V" Tv Series - Is the show mocking President Obama ?

Webmaster — 2009-11-06T11:39:26Z

The hour-long drama "V," about the arrival of an alien race on earth, debuted on Tuesday to good reviews, but some can't help but spot similarities to the Obama administration. So, are the writers poking fun at the President ?

Obama hates FoxNews and possibly any other media outlet that make him look bad. You're either supposed to say good things about him or you won't get an interview with the President. The episode of "V" highlights that, plus Obama-mania, and his Healthcare strategy for America.

Check out the video below (from "Hannity") and let us know if you think the similarities are on purpose, or if it's just a big coincidence.

Nicholas Brendon - Hallowhedon 2009 - Watch The Video

Webmaster — 2009-11-06T10:56:12Z

Happy Birthday To Armin Shimerman, 60 Yesterday !

Webmaster — 2009-11-06T10:39:37Z

Date of Birth : 5 November 1949

Location : Lakewood, New Jersey, USA

Height : 5' 6" (1.68 m)

Spouse : Kitty Swink

Trivia

Was the first actor ever to play a Ferengi on Star Trek, as "Letek" on the "Star Trek : The Next Generation" (1987) episode "The Last Outpost." Five years later, he was offered the role of Quark on "Star Trek : Deep Space Nine" (1993), the first Ferengi character in the main cast of any Star Trek series and a role that he would play for seven years.

In "Judging Amy" (1999), he played a lawyer who was trying to argue that demons exist. His "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (1997) character, Principal Snyder, was eaten by a demon.

Was on the set of "Star Trek : Deep Space Nine" (1993) during a large earthquake in Los Angeles. He rushed to go home to check on his family, so he did not have time to get his makeup removed. His Ferengi makeup "scared the living shit out of people" as he says at conventions.

Along with Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, John de Lancie, Michael Ansara and Richard Poe, he is one of six actors to play the same character on three different 'Star Trek' series. He played Quark in "Star Trek : The Next Generation" (1987), "Star Trek : Deep Space Nine" (1993) and "Star Trek : Voyager" (1995).

When the first wave of the "Star Trek : Deep Space Nine" (1993) action figures were released, he did a commercial for the figures dressed as Quark, his character on the series. It showed him in his bar, picking up each character figure and quickly talking about it.

Along with Mark Allen Shepherd, Patrick Stewart and Colm Meaney, he is one of only four actors to appear in the pilots of two different 'Star Trek' series. ("Star Trek : Deep Space Nine" (1993) and "Star Trek : Voyager" (1995)).

Along with Michael Dorn, he is one of only two actors to appear in eleven different seasons of "Star Trek" ("Star Trek : The Next Generation" (1987) Seasons One, Two and Seven, "Star Trek : Deep Space Nine" (1993) Seasons One through Seven and "Star Trek : Voyager" (1995) Season One).

Along with Marina Sirtis, Tim Russ and Ethan Phillips, he is one of only three "Star Trek" regulars to appear in three different "Star Trek" series ("Star Trek : The Next Generation" (1987), "Star Trek : Deep Space Nine" (1993) and "Star Trek : Voyager" (1995)).

Former "Beauty and the Beast" (1987) co-star Ron Perlman gave him advice on how to emote effectively under full-head prosthetic appliances when he landed the role of Quark on "Star Trek : Deep Space Nine" (1993).

Parents : Herbert and Susan Shimerman.

Personal Quotes

"I didn't take anything from the set at the end of Deep Space Nine. I wanted to remember everything the way it was."

"We were right across from each other for years on the lot, but I never met Jeri Ryan until Boston Public."

"Angel : Aftermath" Comic Book - Issue 26 - Available for order !

Webmaster — 2009-11-06T10:35:52Z

'Boys and Their Toys,' Part 1 of 2

Somebody has made a movie based on Angel's adventures in hell ! Angel and Spike go to a comic con to see how badly Hollywood has mangled true events, only to find themselves surrounded by supernatural evil at every turn. Can Angel tell the difference between an evil demon and a 14-year-old fanboy dressed as an evil demon ? Is there a difference ? The Angel : After the Fall team of Brian Lynch and Stephen Mooney throw Angel and Spike into an all-new hell !

Click on the cover to order :

Buffy & Angel Cast - "I Don't Dance" Music Video - Watch The Clip

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T21:28:45Z

Alyson Hannigan - "How I Met Your Mother" Sitcom - 24 episodes ordered !

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T21:20:51Z

This just in : CBS trims 'Numb3rs,' orders more 'NCIS' and 'Mother'

Numbers-show_lA CBS spokesperson is confirming that the network has cut Numb3rs‘ episode order from 22 to 16. Translation : This is most likely the show's final season.

I'm hearing Flashpoint will likely take over the Friday 10 p.m. timeslot in February, although there's been no official confirmation of that.

In related news, CBS has upped the episode orders of How I Met Your Mother, NCIS, NCIS : LA, CSI : Miami, and Two and a Half Men from 22 to 24, while requesting one additional episode of Criminal Minds, CSI : NY, The Big Bang Theory, The Good Wife, CSI, and The Mentalist, bringing their totals from 22 to 23.

"Dr. Horrible" Comic Book - Medium Quality Pages Preview

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T21:16:10Z
- Graphics

On shows created by Joss Whedon - Psychology Bad

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T20:03:43Z

In the Buffyverse, the bad guys are arch-demons and their minions. Their most potent and fearsome weapon is magic. In the Firefly 'verse, the bad guys are Alliance government higher-ups (“key members of parliament”) and their operatives. What is their most powerful and frightening weapon ? It's not military—armed conflict is fairly conventional, the unsuccessful war for independence is over, and the government maintains only an occasional military presence near the border planets. It's not information technology—Captain Malcolm Reynolds and the crew of Serenity fly beneath the government's radar and neatly elude detection at every turn. It's not genetics or cybernetics—Joss's vision of the future is refreshingly free of aliens, mutants, and robots (all the characters are very recognizably human). Instead, the really scary stuff in the series Firefly and the movie Serenity, the homologue to magic, the most insidious weapon, is neuroscience.

The two central mysteries that drive the larger story arc are the madness of a young girl on the run from Alliance agents (River) and the existence of the savage, demonic “Reavers” on the outskirts of known space. As it turns out, both of these story elements arise from abuse of neuroscience by the government. Neuroscientific manipulation is the most devastating form of personal mutilation (River) and the most destructive source of mass mayhem (Reavers). Like magic, it can also be used for good, but with unpredictable and mixed results, as exemplified by River's largely unsuccessful treatment by her physician brother Simon, using neuroactive drugs and neuroimaging.

By adopting neuroscience as a superweapon and dramatic engine, Joss follows a long tradition of extrapolating from current scientific frontiers to dystopian extremes. Nuclear physics, genetics, and computer/robotics technology have been mainstay dramatic devices since the 1950s. Joss's choice of neuroscience is relatively novel and very timely—brain research is on the verge of revolutionizing our world and our understanding of what it is to be human. Firefly and Serenity dramatize this revolution by making neuroscience seem nearly magical, personifying its power and peril in the character of River.

The reality of brain science is, of course, much less mystical and dark—modern neuroscience provides a biological basis for understanding human psychology and leads to unprecedented cures for neurological diseases. But it takes mystery, danger, and strife to construct a gripping story, and in Firefly and Serenity neuroscience provides those ingredients. That's okay—as in most dystopian fiction, Joss's dark vision of science still inspires a sense of wonder along with the dread. River makes us marvel at how our very essence depends on the neural mechanisms of the brain—a central truth emerging from current neuroscientific research with ever-increasing clarity (Crick). Most philosophers of mind now believe that human consciousness will be explained at its most fundamental level by neuroscience—that perceptions, beliefs, desires will be precisely identified with specific brain states (Dennett, Chalmers). We will need to reconcile and integrate that scientific revolution with our understanding of what we are, so that neuroscience enlarges rather than diminishes our humanity. In Serenity, River epitomizes this synergy of neuroscience and soul, by taking control of her own explosive neural potential and turning it into something miraculous and powerfully human.1 1. How Joss Makes Neuroscience Seem Like Magic

In Firefly and Serenity, Joss draws on his considerable dramatic powers to make neuroscience seem as dark, mysterious, and potent as magic seems in Buffy and Angel. Throughout Firefly, Joss deftly juxtaposed River's beauty, grace, and innocence with bouts of violent madness and flashes of preternatural power, the aftereffects of her psychic mutilation in a government research facility. Even in lighter episodes focusing on Mal's semi-comic heroism, we got troubling hints of the terrible force that River represents. In the beginning of “War Stories,” Kaylee and River chased each other around the ship, fighting over an apple and laughing gaily like the young girls they should have been. Kaylee won the apple away from River and exulted that, “No power in the 'verse can stop me.” Late in the episode, Kaylee was left alone to guard the rear in a gunfight. She looked horrified and lost, unable to do anything but hide behind a barrier. Then River, barefoot and clad in a flimsy shift, walked dreamily into the frame and gently took away Kaylee's huge revolver. River briefly scanned the scene, muttered some nursery rhyme-like mnemonic, stood up, and calmly shot three men dead in quick succession, with her eyes closed. When she then said to Kaylee, in her little girl voice, “No power in the 'verse can stop me,” the effect was chilling. River is a frail young girl, but neural manipulation had made her into a homicidal monster, and Kaylee stared at her, aghast. As River said (in the episode “Trash”) to the formidable fighter Jayne, after his previous betrayal of her and Simon was revealed : “I can kill you with my brain.”

River's outbursts in other episodes ranged from the comic and relatively harmless (cutting up Preacher Book's Bible and trying to rearrange it into something more sensible) to the clearly dangerous and seemingly demonic (suddenly slashing Jayne across the chest with a kitchen knife, declaring that “he looks better in red”). Her genius is not only for violence ; in various episodes she showed off hints of an unguessable range of abnormal talents. In “Safe,” she grasped a complex local Maypole dance in just seconds and joined in seamlessly, then elaborated, eventually becoming the center of the dance as everyone else clapped appreciatively. In “Shindig,” she seduced the petty criminal boss Badger by suddenly adopting a brash Cockney persona that convinced him she was a kindred spirit from the same slums. In “Objects in Space,” she outwitted and humiliated a Boba Fett-like bounty hunter named Jubal Early. Like River, Early was psychologically twisted in a way that gave him great power. He quickly and quietly overcame the crew one by one with his spooky ability to assess a person's weak point and apply the right kind of cruel, irresistible pressure. But River was spookier and more subtle-a spirit who seemed to take possession of the ship itself, and finally to inhabit Early's own mind.

In fact, River is a psychic. Perhaps this is innate, like much of her other genius, although Simon hinted that this too could be a “gift” from the Alliance—when Mal said, “I think she's a reader,” Simon replied, “They've definitely altered the way she reacts to things, even the way she perceives.” Her demonstrations of psychic ability earned her the label “witch” at several points, especially in “Safe” (where she was nearly burned as one), making the connection to magic explicit. By the beginning of the movie, the rest of the crew is clearly frightened of her and her unpredictable powers.

In the opening to Serenity, Joss treats us to a dizzying first-person taste of River's psychological dislocation. He steps the audience back through four levels of reality in a sequence that would do credit to Philip K. Dick (the master of layered realities, whose fiction gave rise to the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly). We begin with the familiar Universal logo unfolding to announce the feature. Next is the startling realization that we are already in the movie itself, looking at a computer display of the real planet Earth. We pull back to see River's childhood classroom lit in saturated nuclear white. That scene briefly establishes her youthful genius and conflict with authority, then subtly sours into a bad dream foreshadowing the holocaust on Miranda. We are violently jerked into the next reality—a densely equipped laboratory in dim blue light, our first glimpse of the scientific nightmare hinted at so darkly throughout Firefly. Here the adolescent River we know is restrained, struggling but still dreaming, with a steel probe inserted into her forehead. We are introduced to her chief tormentor, an Alliance scientist who describes his manipulation of River's brain with cold-blooded relish and obvious pride. This scene evolves into a thrilling (and deliberately parodic) rescue. At the height of the action, Joss pulls the rug out from under us again (and laughs at his own action sequence starring the more typically inept Simon) by freezing the frame, then rewinding. We are finally in current time, watching a holographic tape with the Operative, a Bond/ninja-like government agent in pursuit of River. As punishment for a serious breach of security, the Operative executes the sniveling scientist in a poetic and brutal fashion calculated to satisfy our thirst for revenge against River's captors. By the end of this opening sequence, we have an intimate sense of River's disordered mind, and we are left in no doubt about the movie's attitude toward neuroscience. It is the government's most insidious and powerful tool.2

How insidious, and how powerful, we will not fully realize until the neuropharmacological holocaust on Miranda is revealed. Miranda is neuroscientific mind control writ large and gone catastrophically wrong. It is the ultimate in disastrous utopian experimentation. It is the deepest explanation of River's madness, and her confrontation with the awful reality of it brings about a Freudian release that restores her sanity.3 Most surprisingly, it is also the explanation for the demonic Reavers. They turn out to be the tiny fraction of the Miranda populace with paradoxical reactions to the “Pax,” the neuroactive drug spread by the Alliance government through the water supply to control all hints of violence and rebellion. The Pax made everyone else simply “lie down” (as River's teacher commands in the dream), becoming so apathetic that they simply wasted away in place. As River says of the Reavers, “They never lie down.” 2. How Joss's Vision Relates to Neuroscientific Reality

In Firefly and Serenity, Joss has constructed a wonderfully human story, with the kind of emotion, action, and detail that makes us believe in, laugh with, and cry over a family of human characters. Yet this story points up a scientific truth that some find to be disconcertingly inhuman—that we are essentially neural creatures, nothing more and nothing less than our brains. In fact, referring to the brain as something we possess is inappropriate. We do not own brains, we are brains. That fact is vividly dramatized by the profound neural alterations to River's perception, cognition, behavior, and personality. Yet scientific reality can be even more bizarre. Brain lesions can strike at the heart of what it is to be human.

The one brain structure specifically mentioned in River's case is the amygdala, an almond-shaped nucleus in each hemisphere near the base of the brain that is involved in emotions and memory formation. Simon explained that repeated “stripping” of River's amygdalae had made it impossible for her to filter or control her emotions : “she feels everything … she can't not” (“Ariel”). In reality, selective damage to the amygdalae, which is very rare, has the opposite effect, blunting emotional reactions.4 Wider damage to the amygdala and other structures in the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, produces amnesia, the inability to form new long-term memories. This condition (dramatized in the movie Memento) was first clinically described in a patient known as H.M., who underwent bilateral surgical removal of the medial temporal lobes in order to control debilitating epilepsy. As a result, H.M. lost the ability to form new long-term memories (memories that last beyond the point at which we are deliberately holding them in consciousness, over the course of seconds or at most minutes). H.M. lives in an eternal present, unable to extend his own personal narrative beyond what he remembers from before the surgery (Squire and Kandel).

Other brain lesions due to surgeries, mechanical injuries, strokes, or tumors can impact perception, cognition, and selfhood even more dramatically. Perceptual agnosias can be strikingly specific, eliminating a narrow slice of conscious experience and leaving the rest intact. For example, patients with lesions confined to the “fusiform face area” of the brain have perfectly normal vision, but can no longer identify individual human faces. Other specific lesions can selectively eliminate color or general form vision. Lesions of the parietal lobe (one of the four major divisions of each brain hemisphere) affect spatial cognition. Most brain functions are “crossed,” and thus lesions of the right parietal cortex impact perception of the left half of space. Awareness of the left half of objects or even the left half of the body can be wiped out. In a famous series of self-portraits, an artist who suffered a parietal stroke began by drawing only half his face ; the other half was added gradually in subsequent portraits as he recovered over a period of months. Parietal patients sometimes fail to groom or dress the affected half of their bodies, feeling that they belong to someone else. It is hard to believe that a thinking, functioning human being could cognitively disown half their body, but this goes to show that everything we experience and believe depends on some kind of neural information processing. When you destroy that neural process, you take away a piece of reality (Rapp).

Even the unity of consciousness can be disrupted by brain lesions. The two hemispheres of the brain, which are largely redundant in function, communicate via a thick bundle of fibers called the corpus callosum. In some cases of intractable epilepsy, the corpus callosum is surgically severed to prevent the spread of seizures between hemispheres. Experiments on these patients have shown beyond doubt that the two hemispheres have separable conscious experiences and behavioral responses. If the two hemispheres are presented with conflicting cues in a visual recognition test, the patient will point to one answer with the right hand (controlled by the left hemisphere) while simultaneously pointing to a different answer with the left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) (Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun).

These scientific observations present us with an inescapable truth : the brain and the self are one and the same. There is nothing about us that does not depend on some kind of neural processing somewhere in the brain. That is the reality dramatized by River's condition throughout Firefly. How can Joss reconcile this scientific reality with his own moral framework, defined as always by human individuality and self-determination ? For the answer, we have to examine the climactic battle in Serenity. 3. River Triumphant

We can see in retrospect how the entire Firefly story was always building toward the final battle in Serenity. This is where Joss weaves together all the longer threads of his story—Mal's cynicism, Alliance oppression, River's madness, the nightmarish Reavers. The setup occurs on Miranda, where River exorcises her madness by unearthing her searing memory of the holocaust, and Mal rediscovers his idealism when confronted by an Alliance crime too heinous to ignore. Both characters, internally conflicted throughout the series, are at last themselves again, Mal a hard-bitten freedom fighter, River a delicate teenage girl, though with a difference.

Many of Joss' final battles in Buffy and Angel take place on two planes, one physical, the other magical.5 In Serenity, Mal fights the straightfor ward physical battle, going one on one with an invincible opponent, using gun, blade, and fists, and calling on every combat trick and ounce of stubborn courage he's got. River must fight a battle that is physical but also entails another plane of reality, not magical this time but neuropsychological. The Reavers are transformed on this plane, gutted of human personality and inflamed into virtual demons by an accident of Alliance neuropharmacology. River herself has been transformed by Alliance neuroscience, into the ultimate warrior, a murderous automaton triggered by a subliminally broadcast Alliance signal in the bar on Beaumonde, unstoppable until Simon utters a safe word and she collapses. Her transformation into the perfect fighter cost River her sanity. After Miranda, she seems to have recovered her sanity, but as battle commences, she unfortunately seems to have simultaneously lost her will and ability to fight. She weeps over her fallen brother like a child losing a parent, plaintively crying, “You always take care of me.” Then, she straightens, and Joss turns the scene on its head with just two words : “My turn.”

Like any good Whedon apocalypse, this one forces the heroes to face imminent death under hopeless circumstances. Mal is run through with a sword, expiring on the floor, while the Operative dusts his hands off and walks away. River sacrifices herself to protect the rear, sealing the blast door but dragged into a pit of raving demons. On first viewing I believed at one point that Joss had really killed off both characters (okay, I'm gullible). But Mal drags himself up off the floor for one more round of punishment, and he has one more ruse de guerre up his sleeve. And River, miraculously, is dancing in a Reaver inferno, a slim wraith dealing death with balletic martial grace. This is the scene where Joss brings together everything Alliance neuroscience has created : the inhuman ferocity of the Reavers, the supernatural power of River's transformed mind.6 When the blast door opens again at last, it reveals River standing over a roomful of slain Reavers, eyes smoldering, blade dripping, the apotheosis of girl power. The awesome potential of her neural transformation is unleashed, but it is now hers to command. Her sword hand is retightening, in readiness to mow down the Alliance soldiers who have swarmed behind her, but when they are given the order to stand down, she exchanges a glance with Mal and drops her blade. The epilogue shows her whole again, a naturally curious teenage girl, innocently spying on Simon and Kaylee's lovemaking. But she is also the genius and the warrior, ready to take her place beside Mal at the helm of Serenity, in full control of herself and her power.

Thus endeth Joss's neuroscience lesson. Humans are neural creatures ; they can be destroyed at the neural level, they can be twisted at the neural level, they can even be enhanced at the neural level. But, as River exemplifies, those neural circuits contain a core of humanity, a kernel of self-determination that can overcome the agony and madness to assert itself as a courageous and loving human being. Science confronts us with the fact that our essential selves are neural—we are brains, nothing more. But that does not make us one bit less human.

1. There is a natural tendency to view scientific explanations of human psychology as somehow incompatible with our status as unique, individual human beings possessed of free will. If we are simply complex neural networks whose characteristics and actions are determined by physical processes, how can we also be loving, suffering souls, free to choose right or wrong, wisdom or folly ? I believe this longstanding philosophical dilemma arises from an impoverished conception of what a complete scientific explanation of human psychology would look like. We imagine that the brain works like a desktop computer or a B-movie robot, with simple input/output behavioral patterns and no internal life. But in fact our brains contain on the order of 100 billion neurons, each making on the order of 1,000 to 10,000 connections with other neurons. This makes the human brain by far the most complex sys tem in existence. Thus, our physical embodiment is not a constraint on human freedom, but instead a virtually infinite substrate that supports the ineffably rich and subtle variety of human experience. We should celebrate the brain as a miraculous source of human power, not bemoan it as a physical prison. River's story explores both the physicality and human power of the brain. She dramatizes how the brain is part of the material world—and thus subject to physical mutilation that can cause madness—but also how it is rich enough to embody love, courage, sacrifice, genius—all the personal qualities that are most essential to our concept of humanity. (Ed.'s Note : See Thomas Flamson's essay on free will.)

2. It is worth noting that, while neuroscientists are unsavory characters in Firefly and Serenity, in reality they are mostly a decent lot, more interested in curing disease and understanding the mind than in world domination. The technologies employed for evil purposes in Joss Whedon's fiction are beneficial or promising therapies in the real world. Neuroactive drugs provide our best approach to controlling depression and other debilitating or life-threatening psychological disorders. Brain stimulation is used to ameliorate movement deficits in Parkinson's disease and to relieve intractable pain (Perlmutter and Mink). Prosthetic sensory implants in deaf patients can support auditory perception up to the level of speech recognition (Wilson, Lawson, Muller, Tyler, and Kiefer). Neural implants in the frontal cortex can be used to read the brain's movement commands, and are expected to someday give paralyzed patients and amputees precise control over real or prosthetic limbs and hands (Barton). I imagine Joss appreciates much of this himself, and has no more real antipathy toward neuroscience than James Cameron (writer/director of Terminator) does toward computers.

3. Freud's classic conception of hysteria involved repression of a traumatic event into the subconscious. The psychic energy associated with that trauma manifested itself as the hysterical symptoms afflicting the patient. The cure, according to Freud, was to relive the event, bringing it into the light of consciousness and thus releasing the psychic energy once and for all. River's experience on Miranda follows this pattern quite explicitly. The mystery that Joss then teases his audience with is whether, in losing her madness, River has also lost her genius and power.

4. Ed.'s Note : See Bradley J. Daniels's essay, “Stripping' River Tam's Amygdala.”

5. In the Buffy season seven finale, for instance, the powerful fighters (Buffy, Spike, Faith) opened the Hellmouth and took on the First Evil's army of übervamps. Elsewhere, the magically gifted Willow was performing a spell to activate an army of Potentials as full-blown slayers, providing essential support in the physical battle. Willow had previously described this spell as the most powerful magic she had ever attempted and given instructions that she should be destroyed if the spell failed. Everyone fought bravely, but final victory again depended on magic, in the form of an amulet worn by Spike, through which the enemy was destroyed, though at the (temporary) cost of Spike's own life.

6. Joss professes to choose his character names with great care. The phonetic similarity between “River” and “Reaver” is no accident—the girl and the madmen are two sides of the same coin, both products of Alliance meddling with minds. I think of “River” as a reference to the “stream of consciousness,” psychologist William James's famous description of the continuous succession of states in one mind that we think of as the self or the soul. A “Reaver” can be one who plunders or pillages (from Middle English reven, to plunder) or one who tears things apart (from Middle English riven and Old Norse rifa, to rend, cleave, split, or break)—both apt descriptions for the savages in Firefly and Serenity.

"Astonishing X-Men : Gifted" Motion Comic - Episode 1 - Available on Hulu

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T19:59:48Z

Click on the link :

http://www.hulu.com/watch/106671/astonishing-x-men-gifted-episode-1

Morena Baccarin - "V" Tv Series featured in "Hijinks Ensue" Web Comic

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T19:53:09Z

Click on the link :

http://hijinksensue.com/2009/11/04/better-than-i-know-myself/

Amy Adams - Unknown 2009 Photoshoot - Good Quality Photos 1

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T19:47:42Z
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All Your Characters Talk The Same - Joss Whedon can help !

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T19:34:29Z

All Your Characters Talk The Same — And They're Not A Hivemind !

It's one of the biggest problems plaguing fiction — and it seems to hit genre fiction especially hard sometimes : the characters who all sound exactly alike. How do you keep your characters from all having the same voice ?

This is something I've struggled with in my own fiction, and it's a much messier problem than you would think. Even when you feel like your tough woman space captain and your sensitive young astro-biologist are incredibly well drawn and full of character and neuroses, and nobody would ever imagine they were the same person. And then you're looking over your novel for the tenth time, and you realize that they're all sounding absolutely identical.

It makes sense, in one way — your characters are all aspects of you, after all. They all came out of your head, unless you based them on your friends or other fictional characters. (And even if they're based on someone else, they're still your creations, when it comes down to it.) You're speaking through their mouths. But that doesn't mean they're doomed to sound like you, or like the same person. This is totally a solveable problem.

Here are some solutions to the issue, ranging from least crude to crudest. If the least crude solution works for you, then you don't need to worry about the rest of them — but I've used all of these methods at various times, and there's no shame in using tough measures on your characters.

1) Listen to how people talk. I have a feeling this is what "real" writers do. Don't listen to how people talk on television or in the movies — go to a bar or cafe and just listen to the conversations around you, and try to hear how people are speaking. If you can write down snippets of people's conversations without being a total creep, then do that. V.S. Pritchett writes about doing this when he was a young writer — and one of those snippets of conversation even found its way into a short story that he later published. Try to get a feel for the rhythms of conversation, and the way different people form sentences. Bottom line is, if your characters all sound the same, then they're not sounding like natural dialogue at all.

2) Try to "hear" your characters' individual voices. This is not really cruder than the first one, actually. If your characters are really that vivid in your head — if you really feel like they're real, breathing people that you've brought to life inside a living story — then you should be able to hear their voices. And they don't just sound different because they choose different words to express themselves — they are saying different things.

Say Space Captain Starjumper makes lots of definitive statements, because she's got lots of points to get across, while Astrobiologist Second Class Sparrow is constantly raising tentative half-questions. Maybe Captain Starjumper has an undercurrent of insecurity, and that's part of why she has to make sharp statements all the time. And Sparrow really knows more than he's saying. The way in which people say the things they say also provides the reader with more information.

3) Realize your characers are not talking to you, or directly to the reader. Unless you're really doing some kind of post-modern fourth-wall-shredding exercise, your characters are talking to each other. And think about what kind of reaction your characters are hoping to get when they say something. Not the reaction they actually do get — it's too easy to jump straight to that — but the reaction they expect. Fine, Navigator Angstrom's revelation that he turns gay whenever the ship is in hyperspace meets with a stunned silence. But was Navigator Angstrom hoping for a stunned silence ? Was he trying to provoke an angry response, or some kind of accepting, reassuring statement ? Was he trying to guilt-trip the captain for making so many hyperspace jumps lately ? It sounds obvious, but it's often hard to remember : the response you're hoping for shapes the way you talk. And every one of these characters has a script in his/her head for how this conversation is going to go, whether it goes that way or not. You, as the author, know the way you want/need for the conversation to go, but you need to know what the characters want/expect as well.

Update : Zack Stentz, writer on Terminator : The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Fringe, points out another helpful way of looking at this : "Every interaction between two people is on some level a negotiation for status." Remember that, and your characters' speech will automatically get richer and more interesting. Apparently this advice originates with Terry McNally, co-writer of Earth Girls Are Easy.

4) Try giving each character a few unique verbal tics, or habitual words. Maybe Captain Starjumper says "I declare" a lot, in between all those declarative statements she makes. (Okay, bad example.) Maybe Navigator Angstrom makes lots of puns, or tosses lots of sarcastic jokes into the end of every comment. Give each character a few habits of speech, and maybe after a while those props will help you hear each character speaking differently. You may even be able to go back and take out some of these tics, if they get too repetitive, and if the speech around them has started to differentiate itself from the rest.

5) Go one step further, and give them catch phrases and stuff. This worked for Dickens, after all. A lot of Dickens characters basically have the same verbal habits over and over — the most famous of these, of course, is Mrs. Malaprop, who always uses words incorrectly, and gave us the term malapropism. (Update : Various people have pointed out this is not true. Sorry about the mix-up. I've read almost every Dickens novel, and somehow I believed this incorrectly. My bad !)

But it's true of a lot of minor Dickens characters. And especially if you're going for humor, there's nothing wrong with having a character who comes out with variations on the same funny line on several occasions. Maybe your astrobiologist character constantly states the obvious, but prefaces it by saying, "I have made a cunning observation."

6) Realize that you may have, at most, three or four character "voices" and refine those. As regular readers of this blog know, I utterly, unreservedly love Joss Whedon. But he is a perfect example of a writer who has a few voices that he uses over and over. There's always the stilted British person (Giles/Wesley/Adelle), the funny, quippy nerd (Xander/Topher/etc.) and the lost/crazy girl (River/Echo/Fred/etc.) And the amazing thing is — those characters are all wildly individual and have tons of depth. You would never mistake Giles for Adelle, even leaving apart that she's way prettier. (Well, somewhat prettier.) Whedon may have a few basic voices that he reuses over and over again, but he finds other ways to make his characters unique and distinct from each other. He's also worked, over the years, to refine each of those voices and make the most of their strengths.

7) Vary your sentence lengths, and play with punctuation. If all else fails, try this. In real life, some people tend to speak in longer sentences, others in shorter ones. (Actually, we all vary our sentence lengths all the time, but our average sentence lengths vary quite a bit.) There's nothing wrong with just deciding arbitrarily that Captain Starjumper's average sentence will be five words long, while Navigator Angstrom's will be twenty. Also, you can try giving one character lots of emdashes or colons in his/her speech — but do this sparingly, and only for one character. In my new fantasy novel, I have one character who includes lots of parenthetical statements, and I put those in actual parentheses. But I made sure to avoid any funny punctuation games with any other character's speech, so it didn't start annoying the reader too much.

8) Adjust the French/Anglo-Saxon mix. Those of us who write in English are lucky — it's actually two languages in one. (Plus random language detritus from a dozen other languages.) We're speaking a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and French, the language of the Normans who conquered England in 1066. And just as the Enterprise's engines are a mix of matter and anti-matter, your speech is a mix of French and Anglo-Saxon. And some people definitely use more words of Latin origin than others — it's often a badge of education and upper-class status to use lots of obviously Latinate words. So if all else fails, try experimenting with having one of your characters use more Anglo-Saxon words than the rest of them, or more fancy French words. Grab a dictionary of etymology and think about which words come from which language — you can give your characters a more Germanic or more French "voice" without actually making them speak a foreign language at all. You could also just try having some characters use more one- or two-syllable words than the rest, but this might be subtler and more fun.

Gina Torres - "Washington Field" Tv Series - Pilot - Thefutoncritic.com Review

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T19:32:22Z

So you've seen all of the new shows this fall - but what about the ones that didn't make the cut ? For the next 30 days we're going to take a "first look" at a collection of 30 pilots that didn't land on the 2009-10 season schedule. Are there any gems that got passed over or are they all deservedly locked in the networks' vaults ? Stay tuned.

WASHINGTON FIELD (CBS)

(written by Jim & Tim Clemente ; directed by Jon Cassar ; TRT : 42:57)

What is it ? A drama about the National Capital Response Squad, an elite unit of the FBI.

Who was behind it ? : "Criminal Minds" showrunner Edward Allen Bernero executive produced the hour which was written by brothers Jim & Tim Clemente, the latter of which is a former FBI agent. "24" veteran Jon Cassar directed the pilot.

The plot in a nutshell : "In 1999," the opening narration explains. "The U.S. Attorney General mandated the creation of an elite squad of FBI agents, specialists in the investigation and prevention of major crimes involving citizens and our national interests anywhere in the world... [which] became the National Capital Response Squad operating out of the Washington Field Office of the FBI. These are their stories." And with that we meet the members of the NCRS : Raymond Stone ("K-Ville's" Cole Hauser), the squad's commander who doesn't take kindly to bureaucratic oversight ; Jackie Palmer ("Firefly's" Gina Torres), their deployment coordinator/motorcycle enthusiast ; Mark Chen ("NUMB3RS's" Matthew Yang King), explosives expert ; Tommy Diaz ("CSI : Miami's" Eddie Cibrian), evidence expert ; his wife Amanda Diaz ("The Wedding Bells's" Teri Polo), medical forensic expert ; Dean Jameson ("NCIS : LA's" Adam Jamal Craig), investigative analyst ; Rasha Hamali ("Law & Order's" Angel Desai), intelligence analyst ; and Terri Porter (Emily Rose), media liaison.

Tying them all together is a massive communications center (think CNN's election touch screen on steroids) overseen by Jameson, giving Stone real time updates on his team's efforts via multiple video feeds. Their latest case : a series of bombings in the DC area (a kayak, a gas station, a storefront) which have sent the city into a panic. More troublesome is that each bomb uses a foreign substance that does significantly more damage than your usual shrapnel-based explosives. Thankfully each team member's unique skill set helps generate some leads - from the fact that each bomb was detonated from a nearby remote to a print left behind at one of the sites to video captures of his vehicle. All of that however takes a backseat when the mayor calls the bomber a coward during a press conference, causing him to attack the FBI itself - killing Terri in the process. Inevitably the gang rallies to avenge her death as they - using methods too convoluted to reproduce here - uncover that the bomber is actually a male/female team, and now must stop them from taking out an entire shopping mall. Sure enough they do and another incident is saved from the headlines.

What works : To its credit, "Washington Field" looks and feels like your typical CBS procedural - everyone is distinguishable enough to merit a paycheck and a case is adequately introduced, investigated and closed - but...

What doesn't : ...boy if it isn't soul-crushingly vanilla and serious in the process. Sure there are a few flashes of non-seriousness (Chen's phone goes off during bomb disposal training, freaking out his students) but for the most part everything is said through gritted teeth. When asked about his team's credentials by the local police, Stone proceeds to rattle off - "Ma'am, we lead the investigation at the Pentagon on 9/11, the Khobar Towers in Saudi, the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen and I've done multiple ops in Iraq and Afghanistan" - in pure get-the-fuck-out-of-my-face fashion while a meeting with a Senate oversight committee ends with Stone declaring that his phone call is more important than all this bullshit. Even worse is that all of the character beats are painfully stilted, whether it be the Diazes going on a picnic - complete with their sidearms in the basket ! - or Jameson, shaken up by the images of Terri's body, actually saying, "I didn't need to be warned. I need for it not to have happened."

The biggest flaw however is the show's silly reliance on its CNN election board to tell the story. Arms are waived and fingers and spread so often you think they're playing Wii rather than solving a crime. I get that this is all fancy, high-end technology but no one is every going to look cool flailing their arms to spread out crime scene photos, a fact that's even more amplified when the locals oh and ah at the site of Jameson doing just that. That mixed with the show's grim and gritty tone and you have the recipe for an exponential amount of unintended humor. And just when you think the show hasn't overplayed its serious hand, the pilot wraps with Stone offering some unnecessary closing narration (keep in mind someone else does the opening narration) - "That's the thing about my team, what doesn't make the news makes them heroes... but someone has the bear the cost of that security" - during Terri's funeral.

The bottom line : Well, at least he didn't say it using the CNN election board.

"Dollhouse" Tv Series - 2x05 "Public Eye" - Trailer - Watch The Video

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T16:10:50Z

Click on the link :

http://www.hulu.com/watch/106274/dollhouse-trailer-the-public-eye

"Buffy : Season 8" Comic Book - Issue 29 - Available for order !

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T16:09:41Z

Oz's temple in the Tibetan mountains is no longer a safe retreat for Buffy and her troops. Discovered by Twilight's magical agent, Amy, and bereft of their own magic, the army is preparing for a human war with guns, grenades, missiles . . . and MANPADS — it's not a laughing matter. People are about to die.

But even without her own magic, Buffy is still a Slayer — the Slayer — and she has to lead the way to victory. Or at least . . . live to fight another day.

Click on the cover to order :

Click on the cover to order :

Nancy Holder - "Possessions" Novel - Ifmagazine.com Interview

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T15:55:17Z

Exclusive Interview : AUTHOR NANCY HOLDER GETS POSSESSED BY 'POSSESSIONS'

The best-selling author of BUFFY books and co-author of the WICKED series talks about her newest novel

Nancy Holder has an enormous catalogue of writing credits. With co-writer Debbie Viguie, Holder has hit the New York Times best-seller list with the young adult horror WICKED series, which has just been optioned by DreamWorks. Holder is also the author of many BUFFY novels and she's one of the writers in the just-published HELLBOUND HEARTS anthology of original stories inspired by Clive Barker's HELLRAISER. Holder's newest young adult horror novel, POSSESSIONS, has just been published. She gives us an exclusive look at the book and her thoughts on writing horror. iF : What is POSSESSIONS about ?

NANCY HOLDER : POSSESSIONS is a young adult horror novel about a girl who goes to an isolated, very upscale boarding school in the mountains of Northern California, and she discovers that it's haunted and that the mean girls are not just mean, they are very, very evil.

iF : Are they in fact possessed ?

HOLDER : Well, it's on the back of the cover, so I suppose I can say "yes." There's gossip that school is haunted, and there's gossip that our heroine lives at the second most haunted dorm, and this seems to be proven out during the book as she walks down the corridors and sees faces in the mirrors and sees statues that move and she quickly finds out that there's a whole other agenda going on with the popular girls and the mean and very cruel pranks that they play on the other girls.

iF : What was the inspiration for this book ? Was it remembering being at school and thinking, ‘These kids are so awful, they might as well be demonically possessed' or did you think ‘POSSESSIONS is a good title and what would be a good story to go with it ?'

HOLDER : My favorite movie of all time was [the 1963 film adaptation of] THE HAUNTING. I loved that you could read more than one version of what was going on into the story and while my young adult book is more overt, I love that understated sense of horror where things weren't always jumping out at you and there weren't a lot of gory special effects, it was just very creepy. I have loved that kind of horror since then. I love a lot of Asian horror, I loved the original Japanese version of THE RING, I love the American RING, too – I love that not everything was explained, although I'll say that in POSSESSIONS, I try much harder to make things more clear for my audience, but I love that sense of freedom to just be scared and freedom to scare people that I saw in THE HAUNTING and Asian horror. That was probably my basic, fundamental desire, to create in a reader the kind of horror I felt, the kind of unease I felt, watching THE HAUNTING and Asian horror movies, and to transfer that onto the printed page. I have written a lot of adult horror. The very first book I ever sold was an adult novel. I admire kids, I like kids – I used to be a Girl Scout leader. I just very comfortable growing up with them.

iF : Does being the mother of a teenaged daughter help you write these young adult books ?

HOLDER : Definitely. I've always felt that adults have the exact same fears and anxieties and hopes that young adults confess to having that adults have learned to rationalize and cover up more. I do think that young adults wear their hearts on their sleeves more than adults do and I think they're a lot savvier than most people give them credit for. So I really like writing for young adults, and my daughter does, too. She quickly sussed out what she's supposed to read, versus what she likes.

iF : What age group is POSSESSIONS for ?

HOLDER : I'd say fourteen and up, maybe somebody who's thirteen and who's ready to be scared.

iF : What is the difference between writing for young adults and writing for adults ?

HOLDER : I think when one is writing young adult that the characters are a bit younger and they're more willing to admit how it seems that everything revolves around whatever they're interested in. So if they like a guy, they really, really, really like this guy. If they want something fixed, they really, really, really want it fixed. Whereas adults can sort of multi-task their emotions and spread them out more, I think young adults feel everything extremely intensely and then move on, and adults spread it around more.

iF : Does that apply to their reactions to horror as well ?

HOLDER : Yeah. I think that one of the things adult horror fans are looking for is to recapture that incredible sense of being scared that they felt when they were younger. Like when they read Stephen King for the first time or read R.L. Stine for the first time and were really taken by it. I think that's why gory horror got popular, because it was shocking, and people could be kind of knocked out of their comfort level by it. I don't know if gory horror for gory horror's sake is why it became so popular, or if it was so novel that that was its appeal – it was something new and different, they're feeling things for the first time. In a lot of horror that I write, I assume that my reader will have known about something, and then I realize, "No, I'm writing for young adults – they won't know about this, it won't be clichéd to them to hear about the Titanic or hear about Roanoke or hear about the Bermuda Triangle. They haven't watched all the movies I have and they haven't read all the books that I have, so they're coming to it fresher." And I really enjoy that, because I feel like it's easier to connect in that way with them. They're not as jaded.

iF : Was POSSESSIONS written with an eye towards possibly making it a series of novels ?

HOLDER : I've sold three more. The second book is called POSSESSIONS : THE EVIL WITHIN and it will be out in June.

iF : Is that with the same characters, or just with the same school ?

HOLDER : The same characters. There's a big cliff-hanger at the end of Book One, the majority of which will be resolved in Book Two.

iF : Does POSSESSIONS have a story that will arc over the four books ?

HOLDER : Yes. There is a major arc over the four books. If you didn't read One, you can start with Two and it will still work for you. We did that on purpose, my editor and I, but there are some overriding mysteries. In each book, the smaller issue or crisis is addressed, but there is an over-arching [question of], what the heck is going on in Marlwood ?

iF : When would you say the resurgence in young adult horror occurred ? Did you notice a particular tipping point in recent years ?

HOLDER : I think that the original wave of what is now young adult horror started with R. L. Stine's GOOSEBUMPS, and I think those readers got older and I think they moved to HARRY POTTER. Although I wouldn't classify it as horror, it's still creepy and eerie. And then they started maturing and a lot of those readers started reading TWILIGHT and I think that whole kind of creepy supernatural otherness really exploded right around TWILIGHT. HARRY POTTER really paved the way and those readers got older and then they needed something to read. I'm aware that people of all ages read HARRY POTTER and TWILIGHT, but that young adult dark fantasy/horror market, as we have it right now, started with those : first R.L. Stine, then HARRY POTTER and then TWILIGHT.

iF : What else are you working on now ?

HOLDER : I'm very excited that [Holder's WICKED co-writer] Debbie Viguie and I have a spin-off from our WICKED series called CRUSADE. It's about vampire hunters.

iF : Do you know why you are so fond of the horror genre ?

HOLDER : I don't know. I would like to have a cogent response for you – it's just something that I'm very drawn to and always have been. I got a wig one year for Halloween, it was supposed to be for a Native American costume, but all I could think about was that it would make a great horror movie. I wrote two movie screenplays about the wig – I was about nine. And that's the way I've been wired my whole life.

Nathan Fillion - Complete Hero Public Artwork Project opens in London

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T15:40:40Z

Click on the link :

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.asp ?b=2&t=40703&newsid=0

"Dollhouse" Tv Series to air tonight in France on TEVA Network Channel

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T15:38:13Z

Click on the link :

http://www.melty.fr/dollhouse-debarque-ce-soir-en-france-actu25607.html

Sarah Michelle Gellar & Charlotte - People Magazine November 2009 - Medium Quality Scans

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T13:58:37Z
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