Michael Offutt's Blog, page 156

Stories that deserve to be made into movies and a little rant

J.K. Rowling has been talking with Warner Brothers this last year about rebooting the entire series
with an all American cast to see how that works (instead of an English one).
How do you feel about that? "The Great and Powerful Oz" is an upcoming prequel being filmed by director Sam Raimi. It stars James Franco (Oz), Michelle Williams (who plays Glinda), Rachel Weisz (Evanora), and Mila Kunis (Theodora). The three ladies play the witches that Oz has to deal with in the takeover of the yellow brick road. I know nothing about the plot other than that. Oh and it's supposed to come out in 2013.
The first promo picture for The Great and
Powerful Oz. Franco seems like he's trying
to hard to look sexy which is not what I
associate with the Wizard of Oz.
If you aren't familiar with Sam Raimi's work, you need look no further than the show "Drag Me To Hell" (sucks) or the Evil Dead series (good if you're drunk and with stupid friends--IQ 80 required). You'll either love him or hate him. There is no in-between. But for the record, I think Spider-Man 2 was a masterpiece.

Anyway, this is where I shake my fist at Hollywood. Why are you going to ruin a classic? A prequel to "The Wizard of Oz" is going to lead to a sequel which is basically...a REBOOT of "The Wizard of Oz".

Judy Garland is the only person I can see playing Dorothy. And her singing of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" still makes me pause every single time that I hear it.

And yes, as I discussed earlier this week, Lion's Gate is already planning on rebooting "Twilight" with a whole new cast and "Breaking Dawn, part 2" hasn't even been released yet. Plus you have a reboot of "The Hunger Games" being discussed and the Batman franchise has already been greenlit for a reboot after Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises" hits theaters this summer.

Enough already.

There are so many stories that are so amazing that have not been given a silver screen treatment.

Here are just a few on my list:

1) David Eddings' Belgariad could become five blockbuster fantasy movies. As a side note, I hate that Christopher Paolini endorses Eddings on the cover. Eddings is 100 times the writer Paolini will ever be. I tried to read Eragon...what utter crap. Yet it got a movie treatment. R.I.P. Eddings...you did good. I will miss your stories.
2) What about Neuromancer by William Gibson? It won both the Hugo and the Nebula in the year it was released? Talk about the king of cyberpunk, why the hell has this not been made into a movie?
3) For the vampire enthusiasts, how come the Anita Blake series hasn't ever been cast or discussed? This story by Laurel K. Hamilton is superior to the one by Charlaine Harris in my opinion and she is repeatedly a New York Times bestseller.
4) Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.
5) The Dragonlance books by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis. Holy cow...this would be incredible!
6) Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality. The story in this was brilliant.
7) Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. Again, just absolutely mind-blowing in his world-building.
8) Lloyd Alexander's Prydain chronicles. Disney screwed over The Black Cauldron...please, someone with talent make these five books into movies.
This is what I hate most about what capitalism does to art. The artist in me longs for a socialized art/movie industry that uses taxpayer money coupled with money from a fund setup to receive all the profits from successful movie projects to continue to back new projects. In other words, to make the entire movie industry break new boundaries in film.
When this is all that matters, you have to dumb down your
product so that it appeals to as many people as possible to
make the biggest return on investment. To appeal to so many
different tastes in my opinion causes artistic expression to go
out of the window and into the trash can. Hence why Madagascar 3
continuously beat Prometheus in theaters. One is G-Rated and the
other is rated-R. But Ridley Scott took more of a risk with
Prometheus...a thing for which I am thankful. And he made a
far superior and more artistic creation.In my socialized art/movie industry, we would say "No. 'Twilight' has already had a run. It's very successful and generated two billion dollars for the fund. We will not be rebooting it with a new cast. Instead, we are using the remaining funds after all invested parties have been paid handsomely to invest in a book that has never had a movie treatment. An entirely new story if you will. I'm sorry if that disappoints you."

Anyway, that is my rant. I'm just tired of how we are being spoon fed more of the same. Here comes another Snow White movie...here comes another reboot of "Total Recall"...

Do you have books in a list that you keep in your head for which you'd like to see a Hollywood treatment? If so, please say so in the comments.

How do you feel about reboots of both Twilight and Harry Potter (with an American cast instead of a British one)? Would you go and see them en-masse if they are released in 2014? Do you think the corporate greed is such that it is destroying creativity by only going for projects that are sure to generate some serious cash?

I honestly think I live in a weird time of human history. I never would have envisioned a time when I thought mass produced entertainment would be stuck on repeat. Don't you people out there ever get tired of seeing the same old thing? Furthermore, can you explain to me why reboots seem to make such huge fists of money? A lack of money is the only thing that is going to kill reboots and make greedy corporate pigs look at investing in other projects and taking risks.

I will leave you with Judy Garland singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", mostly because hearing it brings peace to my mind. Have a great weekend.

Wherein I review House on the Corner by Andrew Leon

Cover Art by Rusty Webb, a blogger buddy, who simply kicks much ass when it comes
to this kind of thing. My hat is off to you Rusty.I should have done a review of Andrew's book a long time ago. Better late than never I say, so here it is:

In general, I liked this little yarn spun by Mr. Leon. It took me back to the eighties, had plenty of nerdy D&D references, and really made me remember how cool Star Wars was as a kid. I mean...it was pretty cool (especially the whole Hoth sequence).

I'm 40, single, and don't have kids. This illustration shows what
I wanted to email Andrew during the first 100 pages. But I am
not this book's target audience. However, I stuck with it!I think that the first third of this book will appeal to people who just like to hang out with screaming kids (let's call it "character building" for lack of a better description). If asked for a synopsis of these chapters, I would say "a family with three loud and annoying kids moves into a house". Personally, I could have done with a hundred less pages of "character building" since the story for me didn't start until Chapter 15 entitled "the imagination room".
That's where the story finally got interesting. The imagination room is kind of like a gateway to another world, similar to the wardrobe in Narnia. And there is magic, monsters, strange food, and Arthurian legends enough to make any kids' eyes pop. Now, I LOVE all things Arthur. As a caveat to the naysayers who groan at Arthurian stuff, I know it's been done to death, and I too borrow from the legend in my own writing. But I never get tired of it. Does any guy NOT like knights in shiny armor and magic swords? If you answer yes to this question then WE CANNOT BE FRIENDS :P. Just kidding, but be careful what you say. Morgana is a great villain in the show Merlin.That icy stare
sends shivers down my spine. So you better not be dissin'
on Arthurian legends. We need MORE!
Morgana is watching! =====>>>
We find out later that although there is something special about the imagination room, the true magic resides in a very rare bloodline that produces one wizard and one guardian to a mystical tower that has a lot to do with King Arthur, Merlin, and the sword Excalibur (how's that for a kickass legacy). When I was 7-years-old, I wanted nothing more than my own Excalibur. I read bunches of knight stories and wanted so much to see the movie called Excalibur (it was rated-R). My parents refused to take me because it was "smutty". My parents wouldn't let me watch Excalibur, most likely,
because of this scene which has Uther ravishing Igraine
and includes some pretty hot armor sex. io9 did a
whole article on armor sex HERE .
The book doesn't have any bad language. I would rate it PG-13 because there is a death in it, but only after a nifty fight scene with a troll named Scromb. The book is also written in first person up to Chapter 22. I don't mind reading first person, but Andrew chose to alternate points-of-view in each chapter to one of three children (their names being Tom, Ruth, and Sam) and you never have any idea who is talking until halfway down the first page of each chapter. Then the book shifts into full-blown third person omniscient in Chapter 22 without any warning to prepare the reader. Maybe this is artistic expression? It doesn't work for me. But I think 13-year-olds and younger won't care, and these are the people for whom I believe the book is aimed. And the content of the story is pretty good. You've got magic, monsters, wizards, a spooky house, mysteries, old books, strange neighbors, and a lot of pop culture references, including the old G.I. Joe dolls from the sixties.
So if you're looking for a book that you can read out loud to your class or to your children, you might want to give House on the Corner a try.
I give this book 3-1/2 stars out of 5.
********************
Check out Andrew's blog HERE.
If you want to own House on the Corner, you can buy it on AMAZON . I don't recommend purchasing it on the NOOK at this time as my copy had severe formatting issues. Andrew was kind enough to supply me with a complimentary pdf to read.
You can mark Andrew's book "to read" on Goodreads HERE, if you would like to be supportive.
Have a happy Thursday my bloggy friends :)

Do you think these shoes are racist?

I pay attention to fashion trends. Folks that have read my book, SLIPSTREAM, have said that I go into "clothes descriptions" probably a little too much. That being said, at $350.00 a pair, this shoe by Adidas called the JS Roundhouse "handcuff" seems like the perfect accessory for the book Fifty Shades Freed by E.L. James.
They hit stores in August and people are getting pretty angry about the shoe, saying that it's racist because it promotes ideas of slavery. You should checkout the Facebook comments on the Adidas page.

Would you be upset to see kids wearing "slavewear"? It's going to happen. They'll probably be the most popular shoe around as boys strut about their high schools in their skinny jeans. I'm saying "boys" because I can't see a real broad appeal for girls in these shoes. But...I could be wrong :)

Opinions? Do you find them insensitive? If money were no issue, would you want your kid to wear these shoes or would you be offended by them?

Have a great Wednesday. I look forward to reading your comments.

I love that I live in the golden age of trash fiction

The website io9 recently did an article on the golden age of trash culture, and I couldn't agree more. You can read the whole article HERE. In the TL;DR version, basically "there is more corporate-funded trash being unleashed on the public than ever before... and meanwhile, there's a huge wave of new-media trash coming as well."
Isn't it glorious?
All the movie adaptation of this book needs is to cast
Alex Pettyfer as the guy. That's it. Ka-Ching. Google
Alex Pettyfer and you'll see what I'm talking about.With free books and or 99 cent offerings on kindle, we have access to wafer-thin characters in just about every paranormal situation you could shake a stake at. The rise of erotica with such offerings as Fifty Shades of Gray and the subsequent sequels are plain awesome. Plus you can read smutty books on the kindle in the subway or on the train because no one can see what you're reading so you don't have to be embarrassed by the fact that you're secretly into whips and chains or possess bizarre sex fetishes.

On television insanity rules. Basically, nothing is too insane or too out there. Really, writing has broken through a boundary where you can literally string together a story from four random dice rolls (roll twice in the first section) and it seems to work. Example:

1 A guy who gets naked a lot
2 A girl who gets naked a lot
3 A vampire who gets naked a lot
4 A werewolf who gets naked a lot
5 An alien from the planet Shmieldorf who gets naked a lot
6 A ghost who gets naked a lot

1 Don't have sex but falls in tortured love
2 Can manipulate fire but is a cheerleader
3 Can read minds but feels guilty about that
4 Can teleport into a person's dreams and realizes they are actually dead in real life
5 Learns magic at a school for magical peeps
6 Drives a BMW hybrid while listening to Chicago love songs

1 Takes Newt Gingrich to a moon colony.
2 Saves the world from Goatzilla
3 Pimps minors out for sex
4 Finds a duck with super powers and prevents an alien invasion
5 Wins a game show in a post apocalyptic setting
6 Gets married.

Okay my rolls using my trusty 6-sided dice are: 3, 4, 4, 6
My new story plot is "A vampire who gets naked a lot and a werewolf who gets naked a lot can teleport into a person's dreams and realizes that they are actually dead in real life and then gets married."

I don't think these kinds of stories could have ever had a place in the 80's or the 90's because people would see through them. But now...bring it on baby. Just look at True Blood. I'm addicted to this show which has about as flimsy a writing as anything. In Sunday's episode, a guy talks to Bill Compton and gestures at a book. He says, "Do you know what this is?" Bill answers, "It's a Bible." But then goes on to say that it's not "THE Bible" but the "original testament"...you know...the vampire Bible and then they go on to say how vampires came first and were really god's children and how Adam and Eve came later and it just shows how humans were meant to feed vampires.
Brilliantly written dialogue? Alcide is awesome. This really isthe written conversation. Not kidding.What did I think of that background? It was both brilliant and incredibly stupid trash and I loved it. The mire of bullshit that flows from writers these days is awesome. In our trashy culture...pure bullshit reigns. You can explain anything away in your plot--plausible no longer matters, just make it up. For television and movies, you don't even need to script it. This kind of thinking can be done on the fly as long as it sounds clever. And being random is now king.
Random True Blood baby eater character that got more lines 
than Alcide Random characters (like those in the above picture) are key to trashy stories. Have you seen Jersey Shore? Random is that cast's bread and butter. That and tanning, big bewbs, and tequila.

From the article, io9 points out that Michael Bay is one of the greatest film makers alive. Have you seen a Michael Bay film? All you need are explosions. That's it. Check out one of the greatest moments in last night's True Blood episode. Jessica (the red-head) gave Steve (a former religious pastor) a "Fang Boner" by describing Jason Stackhouse's butt and cock to him and offering to sell him for $20,000.00 since she technically has the rights to Jason's body. How is this at all great television? I have no idea, but I'm glued to the screen like millions of other watchers in America every Sunday with our bowls of Cheetos and our guts hanging out over our belts muttering, "damn...this show is GOOOOOODDDD. Mmmmhmmm."
So writers...WRITE MORE TRASH! WE NEEDSSES IT. There clearly isn't enough. Twilight, as an example, is getting rebooted by Lion's Gate because they don't want to lose their cash cow. Yep, they are going to cast a whole new group of people right after Breaking Dawn, Part Two shatters records this fall.

I can't wait. I hope they get a better looking Edward. #JustSayin

Falling Skies emphasizes the importance of fathers

There may be some spoilers in this blog post. >,<

Three months of in-world time has passed between last season and the start of this one. First off, I love the alien invasion story of Falling Skies, and I was glued to my seat last night for the two-hour season two premiere. If you are a fan of dystopian apocalyptics, then you might want to give this science-fiction drama a try. It has all the elements. People overcoming huge obstacles to ban together to drive aliens who have already conquered Earth back into space, cute boys and girls (there are no fat people in this show and everyone is in shape despite the scarcity of food resources), and computer generated effects galore. The fact that everyone is gorgeous doesn't bother me. I'm pretty much used to it and have grown to accept/expect it in my television.
Drew Roy plays Hal Mason in Falling Skies.But behind all the glitz of the show's significant budget, good writing, and eye candy, there are solid themes of fatherhood. Noah Wylie plays Tom and the most important thing to him in the world are his three sons. And it's just refreshing for me to see a single dad portrayed in such a good light. On top of that he's an exceptional former school teacher, so he's really smart, reads, and is constantly teaching his sons how to grow into good men with strong moral compasses. The other thing that I appreciate about the show is that it steers clear of religion for the most part. People are conquering their own fears and their insecurities through love, companionship, and dealing with the situations without resorting to on-screen prayer to alleviate despair.
Ben Mason teaching Matt Mason (his little brother) how to shoot skitters (aliens) so that he can defend
himself. I really like Ben Mason. He's probably the most interesting character right now outside of Tom. He's
kind of become a super warrior because he has alien DNA or something inside of him now. He can run
marathons without tiring, can hear and see things no one else can, and is really strong--like the kind
that can bench press a Toyota truck.They've also borrowed a page from H.R. Geiger and the Alien franchise by using creepy body invasion. The alien conquerors control human children with biological harnesses and then last night, we saw the doctor pull a weird worm thing out of Tom's eye that later turned into a metal ball bearing and later still, a butterfly with teeth sharp enough to cut glass.
I really need to add this button to my sidebar. It's just too cool.So if you are a fan of science-fiction, join the saga of the 2nd Mass (Second Massachusetts) as they resist the invaders from another world. It's on TNT on Sunday's this summer. I'm so glad I have a DVR so that I can record True Blood (which shows at the same time).

Questions I want answered this season: 1) What's up with Ben? Is he ever going to be truly safe from the aliens?

2) What did the aliens do to Tom? They really screwed him up. Did they put more of those worms in his body?

3) What does the flying butterfly worm thing do aside from cut glass?

4) Why did they let all the people go at th same time as Tom by just dropping them off in a field? Then they massacred them while Tom walked off? It's clear that they did not value the other humans at all, but put extreme value on Tom. I'm thinking it has something to do with his son Ben. It also seemed like they wanted Tom to see that they spared him.

What does 10.11.12 mean?

David the android on the left; the titan Prometheus as sculpted by an artist on the right. I thought
that this was a neat comparison of the two and obviously done on purpose by Ridley Scott.First off, Cally Jackson put me in the Hot Seat over at her blog today so if you have the time, please go check it out HERE.

In case you are wondering, this is a Prometheus movie post. I apologize to Patrick Dilloway who thinks I talk too much about this movie, but I simply need to get these thoughts out of my head. I will be talking about some things that you could have an opinion about without having seen the film. However, I might "spoil" one or two minor things about the film in an attempt to answer questions that have plagued me for a week now. If you choose to comment, I would appreciate intelligent feedback aimed at the topic I will bring up instead of some smartass snarky thing (glares at Mr. Dilloway).
If you stayed through the end credits of Prometheus, you were greeted with the next stage of Ridley Scott’s elaborate tale. You caught a date – 10.11.12 – and a link to the Weyland Industries timeline. When you scroll down to that date, it reads:

WEYLAND INCORPORATES
Weyland Corporation is recognized as a legal entity and corporation under United States law and receives their Certificate of Incorporation from the Companies House in the United Kingdom. Due to the combined value of Sir Peter Weyland’s various patents and patent-pendings, the company incorporates with a higher fair market valuation than any other company in history.

OCTOBER 11, 2012
There’s a small flag to click on that links you to - http://www.whatis101112.com/ - where you’ll find a new video and book. Each “stage” will be revealed through the various modules.

Sir Peter WeylandAnd then there's a new viral video...presumably Mr. Weyland prior to his TED talk which I discussed in this post HERE. The website if you check it out, features a 3D version of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's work Thus Spake Zarathustra which in summary contains a parable on the death of God and the prophecy of the Übermensch (a super human).

Now it has been a long time since I read Nietzsche, but I dusted off my copy of this book and turned to section X of the work and this is what I found:

"Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me--man is something that is to be surpassed...live your life of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared! I spare you not...my brethren in war!"

And this next piece is from section XI:

"The state...where all are poison-drinkers...where the slow suicide of all is called life..."
"There where the state ceaseth...do ye not see...the rainbow and the bridges of the superman?"

And finally from section XII seems to be an address to the Übermensch himself:

Nietzsche in the voice of Zarathustra compares humans to biting flies in a marketplace wanting to suck the blood from the super human. He says, "Even when thou art gentle towards them, they still feel themselves despised by thee; and they repay thy beneficence with secret maleficence...They are unworthy of thee. Therefore they hate thee, and would fain suck thy blood."

Okay...so to my points.

This is the sacrificial "engineer" who like Prometheus of the Greek legend
destroys himself to give something powerful to man. The container holds poison,
but in his death comes life.1) At the beginning of the movie, we see an alien who could possibly be seen as a super human drinking poison. It slowly kills him and from that presumably springs all life on earth. I'm thinking that Ridley Scott is tipping his hat to Neitzsche in this by stating that the Engineers that created humans had gotten to a point in their evolution that creating life in their own image was the bridge to the next step. In other words, they were becoming gods.
Planet LV-2232) The directive in section X indicates that man is to be surpassed and that to achieve this requires war. Therefore the Engineers were a war-like race. The planet of LV-223 was found to be a weapon's depot for them.

3) The last passage might serve to explain the motives of the Engineers in wanting to destroy humanity. They believed that even though humans were their children, that humans would secretly grow to hate them and therefore they would eventually need to go to war against them.
Prometheus biological weapons in the Engineer shipsNow to the unanswered questions that have bothered me all week. But first, a few facts for you to consider pulled from the movie:

1) The Engineers created man.
2) All of the bodies on planet LV-223 were two thousand years old. This means they started manufacturing weapons of mass destruction (the bio-matter or black goo) at about that same time.
3) They were headed to Earth, so it's clear that the Engineers wanted to destroy mankind. But it wasn't always this way. They changed their minds 2000 years ago as Shaw clearly points out in her dialogue in the film.

My conjecture:
What event happened 2000 years ago? I got to thinking about this and decided that it would have to have been the birth, life, and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. But why would that event have caused the Engineers to change their mind about whether humans deserved to live or die?

Perhaps it has to do with the idea that humans didn't recognize the Engineers as their true Creators. Perhaps they were upset that humans could kill a god and therefore, if one god could die then so could they. Or perhaps they believed that the death of Christ deserved to be punished.

So I ask you, is Ridley Scott saying that the motivation for the Engineers to destroy humanity at all related to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ? There is no doubt that at the heart of this film is a huge existential question which I never thought to encounter in an "Alien" franchise film.

Nightfire by Alyson Burdette will set your kindle on fire

I give this book five stars out of five.

I just finished Alyson Burdette's Nightfire, and I have to say that this is one of the best vampire books I have ever read. Just so you know, I read Anita Blake (Laurel K. Hamilton), Anne Rice (Lestat), and have read the first book in the Twilight series so it's not like I'm a stranger to vampire fiction.

What I loved:

1) Olivia. She's an amazing and refreshing protagonist. This is a vampire novel told from the female point-of-view (as a vampire and something else). I'm going to leave the "something else" as a spoiler free thing. But trust me...Olivia is not a run-of-the-mill vamp. There's a reason she hangs out around all that water in Peninsula, and I can't wait to see Alyson explore this in future installments of the series.

2) Jesse. Although he does something that is pretty terrible, I couldn't help feeling drawn to his obvious charm. It's clear that he loves Olivia, wants what he sees as is best for her, but ends up hurting her terribly in the climax of the book all to prove a point. I wonder if she'll be able to see that Jesse is probably better for her than William, but Olivia is definitely stuck on William.

3) William. The handsome vampire hunter. Aside from being a tough-as-nails guy he's also got the whole swoon worthy blue-eyed boy-next-door thing going on. I loved every scene in which Alyson explores with this guy. It's some of the best romance writing around.

4) Alyson's prose. She is a great writer. Here are examples pulled from the book:

"He's suddenly little more than a memory, and I wonder if my body has remembered how to dream...His deep blue eyes open wide as he pulls me toward him. They are two glass jars full of fireflies that dance in the moonlight."

"I spit the words out at him, wishing they were knives."

"He laughs, and it is the sound of a thousand birds in song."

Pretty amazing, right?

So yeah. Alyson...when can we expect a sequel? Nightfire has left me wanting more :))

If you haven't met Alyson yet, you might want to hit her up on her blog HERE.
If you want to be supportive, mark her book "to read" on goodreads so that others that follow your stream will see that you at least find the book "of interest". Go HERE to do that .
And if you want a sample or can't wait to read it, go to Amazon right HERE.

Beauty does not equate goodness

Seeing this quote gave me pause to think about how so often, humans are lured in by beauty only to discover that the wrapping on the outside does not equal at all what you find on the inside. And for me, beauty isn't just physical beauty. I define beauty as having an ability to appeal to any sense. Something you feel, something you hear, or something you smell and touch.

I'm sure the boys who were victimized by Sandusky in the Penn State scandal felt really good about themselves prior to their molestation because something beautiful had finally come into their lives through the Second Mile charity. The same goes for the Horace Mann School which got a tell-all expose written in the New York Times this week from author Amos Kamil. It's a long article, but I couldn't tear my eyes away. By the time I'd finished reading, I just about threw up in my mouth.

If you haven't read the New York Times article, please do so unless real life details of pedophilia and boys being raped by the teachers that they trusted offends you. It's horrific what happened to those kids in that place of such great beauty and promise. You can find it HERE. I guess the same can be said nationwide as more and more of these stories surface from elite schools, athletic institutions, churches, and scout troops.

In an interview on NPR this week, comedian Joan Rivers (I like Joan...say what you will about how fake she looks...I think she's a good person and keeps it real) said in defense of all of her plastic surgeries something akin to, "We live in a society where appearance is everything."

Do you agree with that statement? I know that I do. Just living in Salt Lake City, my ears get bombarded with advertisements to remove unwanted hair, to get liposuction, and to basically create a better you. I want to ask...what was wrong with the natural you? Is the way I am or the way you are not good enough anymore?

And then there's the other thought that creeps into my mind. As a society, are our children growing up in a world where they are learning that if something is beautiful, that it is inherently good and should be trusted? If so, I think that this is a terrible mistake.

Can you think of specific examples where something beautiful ended up being something evil? Is your villain in your book beautiful?

Do you judge a book's goodness by the beauty of its cover? And if so, have you ever been surprised by the "sour grapes"?

What's the deal with incest?

I watch True Blood, so I think those of you out there who watch it know where this blog post may be heading. But first, a few words. As far as the vampire series goes, it took a long time for me to really warm up to it. But there's just something hypnotic about all that white southern trash as a vampire setting. Girls walking around in Daisy Dukes with some hoodoo in the bayou and protagonists with awesome names like Sookie. And let's not forget Jason Stackhouse who's in the series for one reason...to be naked.
Eric and his sister just got done having sex while Bill (on the right) listened in.So in the premiere on Sunday, Eric Northman banged his sister. And it makes me ask the question, what's the deal with incestuous storylines? In Game of Thrones, Jamie Lannister has an incestuous relationship with his sister Cersei (both are HBO Series by the way). Are writers using incest because it's shocking?

RECENT OBSERVATIONS:
I've heard Cassandra Clare has an incestuous relationship in her novel City of Bones (which will probably be turned into a movie one of these days).

In a Big Bang Theory episode, Howard Walowitz tells everyone that he lost his virginity to his cousin.

On one episode of Boardwalk Empire (another HBO show), a flashback-heavy installment revealed a sexual relationship between Gillian (Gretchen Mol) and her son, Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt).

So anyone else notice that incest seems to be cropping up a lot lately? Or is this an old hat and has been explored for decades and I'm only just noticing it?
I remember when I was much younger overhearing a conversation in a store where a high school kid playing a video game in an arcade bragged to another kid that he was having sex with his own sister. I remember feeling quite repulsed by that statement. And I still think I'm a little repulsed by it.
I guess I should try to be more open-minded. But yeah, each time I come across one of these plotlines, it shocks me.
Are any of you writers out there using incest in your books? If so, why?
And to celebrate the return of True Blood I give you the following gifs :))) Lafayette staring down Alcide. Too awesome for words. Go Lafayette. For those that don't
follow this show, Alcide is frickin' huge. Like seriously...take an MMA fighter at the peak of their
fitness and you'd have Alcide. He's also a were-wolf. Jason Stackhouse playing Rock Band. He seems undamaged psychologically
from the fact that he was raped for an entire day last season by were-panthers.
In True Blood, sex with anyone, anytime goes hand-in-hand with grits in the a.m. 

Prometheus Review With Spoilers

This is a picture of Shaw's baby (the tentacled monster) taking out the lone
 space jockey on the planet that the crew awoke from a 2000 year-old hyper sleep.
 When the space jockey woke up, he was pissed and started killing everyone.
There was no explanation. He shares the same genetic code as a human, but
 clearly was very unhappy that humans had landed on the planet and had
 one thing in mind: pilot a ship filled with biological weapons to destroy Earth. Shaw
stopped him and basically opened a door that had the monster tentacled creature
 behind it that grabbed the space jockey that would have killed her. This was the biggest
face-hugger I have ever seen. It was really impressive.Well I saw Prometheus at the midnight showing last Thursday, and I absolutely loved it. Here are the elements that fired my imagination:

1) The 3D was stunning. It wasn't too dark or too light, and it didn't feel like they were purposely going out of their way to make trick shots for a 3D audience. This is definitely a "big screen" film, and I feel that if you are a fan of these movies, you definitely want to invest the money to see it in IMAX if you can.

2) Michael Fassbender as David was the most interesting android ever. There are parts where he is on the spaceship, engaging in sports by himself to clearly wile away the time and then he also emulates Peter O'Toole's character in Lawrence of Arabia (by the way Fassbender looks a lot like a young Peter O'Toole, and I had previously not noticed this connection). Anyway, why would an android need to use old movies and sports to entertain himself unless he was bored? And this begs another question...can computers be bored? I have no idea. But it's an intriguing concept. Roger Ebert pointed out in his review that Peter Weyland referred to David as the "son I never had". Charlize Theron plays the daughter of Peter Weyland and there was definitely sibling rivalry there as well as a startling physical appearance (both blond, both tall, etc.). But Peter Weyland strips David of humanity by declaring him soulless. Is this statement true though? I don't know.

3) The concept of parents. David the android says in one scene that "all children secretly want their parents to die". I thought this was fascinating that someone would even say this. I for one don't want my parents to die. I kind of feel that having my parents die will be the thing that makes me really aware of my mortality--that I too can and will die. And I kind of wonder if David said this because he's essentially immortal and wants to know what it will feel like to die and doesn't believe he can do so UNLESS the ones who created him perish.

Additionally, in Prometheus, one of the characters named Shaw is obsessed with finding an explanation of "where do humans come from?" She's Christian in the movie, which suggests to me that she already has an answer. So why then is she doing all of this searching? Does she want proof? Is belief not enough for her? Maybe there is something to the statement "All fanatics hide a secret doubt". What do you think?

Basically, I see Shaw's quest as a search for parentage of some kind and when she finds it, the parents are not what she was expecting. In fact, they're pretty terrifying. Physically, the "space jockeys" look like the most muscular humans on earth, only half again as tall. Take the offspring of NFL superstars like Eli Manning and Tom Brady and couple that genetic code with really tall supermodels for about three hundred years and then smack that offspring with an ugly stick, and you'd probably end up with a space jockey. So really...not all that far-fetched.

And the gist of Prometheus is that this "super race" created humans (basically destroying all of her beliefs in one fell blow) and to top it off, they're jerks. They offer no explanation for what they did, and it looks like they changed their mind about humanity. In other words, the stuff on the world that the Prometheus visits is a biological weapon. The alien xenomorph is a creation manufactured in a lab somewhere and meant to deploy against the human race to wipe us out. But why?

4) The unanswered questions. The end of the show has Shaw zooming off in a space jockey ship with David along for the ride and she isn't going back to Earth. She's going for the Engineer's (space jockey) homeworld. But what does she hope to find there? They clearly wanted humans dead. However, it's been 2000 years since the engineers on this world were in touch with their core civilization. Did something happen to them? Did they get wiped out by their own biological weapons? Or maybe they were designing a weapon to take out their own parents (the ones that created them).

All in all, Prometheus is the magnificent film that I was hoping for, so I'm pleased. I just hope it makes enough money to warrant a sequel. I want answers that the film didn't provide. And I would also like to see how the first Alien movie and the events in Prometheus connect. Where did the derelict spacecraft on LV-426 come from as well as the huge cargo of eggs. The end of Prometheus showed the birth of a xenomorph, but that's basically a harmless lifeform as the planet had no indigenous population really (unless the alien could learn to pilot an empty ship).