Interview with the Vampire - fangs out

Overly Serious said:
For the sake of completeness I'll post my comments on the whole thing now I've watched all seven episodes. It's stupendously trashy, endlessly gay, generally not bad. Claudia is alright if you're ignorant of the original books. Still no way she passes as 14. The cast are fairly good all round, actually. And Lestat is excellent.

There's a weird uncertainty about Louis' reliability as an interviewee that I was wondering where they were going with it. In the last episode we get a teaser of why that might be. Armand is with him.

All in all, would give a second season a try.
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Yeah, I’m definitely giving the second season a try. If it makes it. Some people are really pissed off about this show, mostly the book purists.

Anyway, I knew something was up with Rashid. It was still a nice reveal, though I thought he was about to attack Daniel.

I don’t think Daniel knows Claudia is dead. He mentioned something about the first 70’s interview ending well before that came out. Also, he didn’t seem to recognize the name Armand even though Armand killed Claudia. Perhaps that is what he meant when he told Daniel to shut up and he’ll be sorry for asking these questions? I don’t know, but it’s awfully intriguing.

There’s a lot of potential here. I would love it if it turns out the only reason Louis is doing this interview is because Akasha has awoken and shit is about to hit the fan.
 
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I couldn't be arsed making a new thread, so I'm adding this here.

A series based on Rice's Mayfair Witches was released on January 8th in America, and has been renewed for a second season. One of the three most important characters in the book, that of American Michael Curry, has been rolled into British Aaron Lightner, a secondary and very different character, into a completely new character which as a nice big, "Fuck you, fans hoping for a faithful adaption!" is being played by a nigger from Zimbabwae.

Fuck's sake. If they have to hack and slash the source material to shreds before taking a big, steamy dump on what's left, why don't they just write their own fucking book? Instead of Anne Rice: the Wokening for Illiterate SJWs.

I wonder how long it's going to be before they start giving Rice's books the Roald Dahl treatment. Any baby SJW who watches the series before reading the books would probably be so traumatised that they'd need hospitalisation.

EDIT: A word.
 
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Well, the show is back for its second installment. It remains the gayest thing I have ever seen. I watch the blood and gore scenes with equanimity and the romance scenes through my fingers.

They recast Claudia. I couldn't find an age for the new actress but she still doesn't look 14 to me. That she is Black doesn't help with her not looking young enough for the character, but either way I think this actress is an improvement on the previous one.

I should probably mention this show in the "Woke Properties You Have Enjoyed" thread though enjoyment is a mixed bag. More fascinated than enjoyed, really. Some good acting in it, though. Armand has turned out to be very good. And the guy playing Santiago is brilliant, I say without reservation. He's so good that I'm looking for other things he's in. The whole Theatre des Vampires is superb. The writers and visual artists all got really creative with this. It's very effective.

Danial (the interviewer) remains a dick to all and sundry and there's some very weird modern touches which I think definitely add to the story, hints at modern world implications that obviously were never in the novels. I don't actually know where it's going with this stuff which is a very refreshing change.

Without much in the way of budget the special effects are low-key and effective. Armand hovering in the air in the background, the subtle extension of teeth. And for all that it's DEI through the roof the writers have enough sophistication that they don't always go straight for the jugular standard targets. I thought the woman getting hassled in Paris would be because she is Jewish but no - it's because she dated a German. There's enough nuance and such to avoid it being pure propaganda. Other than the endless homoeroticisim, of course.

On that, I actually don't mind it thematically. Anne Rice's novel was saturated with such tones and the cast play it all pretty effectively. It's convincing which is what matters most. But it is a weakness for me because so much of the motivations of the characters is their obsession with physical attraction and to me it just seems a little silly. The writers mean it to be grand love affairs I think, but to me it makes the characters seem so shallow. Still, it's pretty much the genre and I can live with it. Despite the new actress for Claudia being better and generally adequate, she's still too old for the part. I said previously it was alright if you hadn't read the books and just accepted they were doing something different. But the issue with that is that the writers didn't get the memo and dialogue and plot events still depend on her looking like a child, which she just doesn't.

Still, I really want to see where this goes. It's a while since I've watched a show that I genuinely can't predict what is going to happen. Are Louis' memories faulty? If so, why? Is Armand what he appears to be or not? I'm having quite good fun with this, to be honest.
 
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I just watched all of season 2, and I really don’t think it was as great as season 1. The set designs and cinematography are still top notch, and so is the acting, but I have a few issues.

First of all, this show can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a horror drama or a horror comedy. The funny in S1 mostly came from Daniel, which worked perfectly because his biting sarcasm was a great contrast to Louis’s melodramatic bullshit. This season is all over the place with sight gags and dark jokes, and while that can work (certainly AMC has done it before with Preacher), it just comes off as cringe here.

S1 was over the top, I even called it campy but enjoyable. S2 is worse. There were a lot of scenes of Armand and Louis being a stereotypical annoying gay couple. Daniel has went from bitter but funny to almost clownish (yet still my favorite character). They make Claudia a lesbian, although thankfully we were spared any love scenes.

Louis’s relationships are fucking awful, filled with extreme violence and emotional abuse. I get it, they’re vampires. If they’re immortal and heal quickly, I guess dropping them from one mile in the air is okay as long as you love each other or something. Except it isn’t, and I don’t think this was in the books, at least not to this level.

Anyway, next season is focused on Lestat becoming a rock star, so I’m just going to expect it be full of even more cringe. It can’t get much worse than that awful Queen of the Damned movie, right? …right?
 
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@PotatoSalad4711 I knew somewhere out there on the Farms was someone else who'd sat through this. So pleased to find out who it is! :)

PotatoSalad4711 said:
They make Claudia a lesbian, although thankfully we were spared any love scenes.
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That's both weird and not weird. I haven't read the books since I was little so I don't recall if it was explicit in there, but as a permanent child who will never grow into a woman there's a thematic sense to her becoming obsessed with adult women's bodies. And they toy with that in the movie. But to make it sexual attraction is deeply fucked up. It keeps coming back to this key flaw which is that the script presumes Claudia is a child but they cast an adult to play her. It's not a subtle disconnect either - so much of the plot and dialogue is explicit about her being an actual child. But she is clearly an adult when she shouldn't even be pubescent. It just doesn't make sense when you change that.

I don't know if I agree with you about the S1.1 being worse than S1.2. (Are they two seasons? One season in two halves?). It's such a mixed bag. 1.2 at least has less of two naked men cavorting. And it has Eastern Europe and the theatre. I like getting more of actual vampire history. But at the same time it ramps up the melodrama even further.

I also liked the increasing mystery of what else was going on - who was feeding Danial the information, whose memories were accurate, etc. But turns out I was wrong about that not being from the books. I hit the wikis afterwards and it's all stuff from the later books which I never read. I myself stopped after finishing the third. It was a little bit of a deflation overall. Although I didn't see coming and enjoyed Louis' realisation that it was Lestat that saved him, not Armand. I liked that it was Danial who figured that out.

I don't know if I'll watch S2 or not. I feel I nailed my take best when I said that I watch the horror scenes with equanimity and the romantic scenes through my fingers.

We will see.
 
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Yes, it’s 2 seasons. The last 8 episodes were S2.

Overly Serious said:
I also liked the increasing mystery of what else was going on - who was feeding Danial the information, whose memories were accurate, etc. But turns out I was wrong about that not being from the books. I hit the wikis afterwards and it's all stuff from the later books which I never read. I myself stopped after finishing the third. It was a little bit of a deflation overall. Although I didn't see coming and enjoyed Louis' realisation that it was Lestat that saved him, not Armand. I liked that it was Danial who figured that out.
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I haven’t read the books in years, so my memory is fuzzy. From what I recall, Louis did IWTV, which pissed Lestat off and he did his own books. And later Armand did one too. That’s one thing the TV show was good at: Memory is fallible and up to interpretation.

I sort of figured out the Lestat reveal, probably because Armand just seemed like too much of a giant pussy. Like I said, Louis’s relationships are trash. I don’t know why they bothered leaning into a whole DV storyline when Lestat may be an asshole but he’s suppose to be the anti-hero we all love. Hopefully we’re done with that and they can just let Sam Reid do what he does best with the character.
 
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Anne Rice's vampires are not inherently gay or lesbian or whatever. The male vampires can't get a hard-on - Lestat could only get laid after he temporarily became human in The Tale of the Body Thief so the most these guys get into in those books are making out, cuddling, and licking the blood that double as tears when they cry. They are protrayed as basically into each other for companionship as immortality is mind-numbingly boring and can drive you insane. The gender doesn't matter.

As time passes, even companionship ceases to matter. The eldest vampires such as Maharet and Mekare (Queen of the Damned) spend most of their existence hibernating and ignoring the rest of the world because... what's the point?

Having all this turned into yaoi fuel just feels... wrong, but then again, this is something that plagued this series for so long. So many straight women see omg two hot guys into one another and immediately assume it's all about sex. Rice's point about the torture and meaninglessness of immortality fly right over their heads.
 
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