Vampire Movie Review Roundup

Underworld Evolution
If you didn’t find Underworld unnecessarily confusing enough, you’ll love the sequel.  In it we get to meet Marcus, an unpleasant vampire elder who has wings for some reason and flies around impaling people with his wing-bones for basically the whole movie; he’s trying to rescue his brother William, who is a giant, crazy white werewolf who looks unfortunately like a giant, crazy sheepskin rug.  Back in the dark ages, it seems, Bill Nighy and his team of totally apeshit crazy vampire knights imprisoned William because his werewolf antics were becoming an embarrassment to the family (exactly like Ted Kennedy).  As per vampire LARP regulations, they had to lock the werewolf away in his gothy casket with a ridiculous amulet (the same ridiculous amulet from the first movie).  This leads to a lot of amulet-investigating, interrupted very frequently by extremely violent battles.
Perhaps fortunately the movie allows this plot relatively little screen time, wisely choosing to stick with awkward, bitey vampire sex, trucks driving into things, and Kate Beckinsale leaping off tall ledges and landing in her ridiculous Hot Topic boots.  Watch it for a surprisingly pornographic sex scene with Beckinsale and Felicity alum/insane blue monster Scott Speedman, followed by a delightful plot twist in which Beckinsale and Speedman search the vilest, most dilapidated highway maintenance garage in Romania for a vehicle and manage to come up with a dusty but serviceable 2005 Land Rover.  Also, some vampire who drives around on a giant black boat and is not explained until about forty minutes in.

Blade Trinity
     Classic vampire movie review action!  This is now on Starz On-Demand, which as many of you may know is my Harvard and my Yale.  Basically, this is the sad story of a quirky, interesting vampire movie starring Parker Posey (I know, right?) and Ryan Reynolds which is trapped inside a colossally stupid vampire movie starring Wesley Snipes (Jessica Biel is also in it, but she is neither funny nor stupid).  Also, Ryan Reynolds looks exactly like Matt Goldberg, if Matt Goldberg decided to put his capoeira skills to use fighting the thirsty dead.  Ryan Reynolds dispenses so many wisecracks that the balance of funny-to-embarrassing comes out in his favor, and Parker Posey is exactly what I would imagine a completely drunk and crazy vampire to be like.  She also sprints off-screen every time Wesley Snipes shows up, which seems wise.

Frank Rich Editorial
I don’t care what you say about Frank Rich, this editorial on truthiness (I’m linking to a blog that apparently copied it from the NYT website, it seems accurate) is pretty much rad/chilling.