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MTV

Oh my Edward. Stephenie Meyer has announced she is publishing a new book called “The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner,” due in bookstores June 5 and available for free at BreeTanner.com from June 7 to July 5. The novella will act as something of a companion piece for the “Twilight Saga: Eclipse” film. But it begs the question: Who exactly is Bree Tanner?

It seems a bit surprising that Meyer would choose to write a novella about a character who shows up for such a short period of time in the novels. Don’t worry about hauling out your copy of “Eclipse” to find the surprisingly few pages Tanner appears on, because we did all the dirty work for you. Here is a cheat sheet telling you everything you need to know about the short-lived Bree Tanner.

An “Eclipse” Exclusive:
If you’ve only been watching the “Twilight” movies or read the first two books, don’t be shocked that you have no idea who Bree Tanner is. In fact, don’t be upset if you read “Eclipse” and still have no idea who she is. Tanner is a character introduced a startlingly short amount of time before she dies in “Eclipse” and could be considered (to everyone except Stephenie Meyer) to be a throwaway character.

A Short Life:
Tanner is only introduced 10 pages before she is killed off in Victoria’s war against the Cullens and the Quileute werewolf tribe. However, of all the newborn vampires discussed in “Eclipse,” Tanner was one of the few to be named and introduced to the readers. Unfortunately, it didn’t take very long after she was turned into a vampire for her to meet her end … again.

Dramatic Death Scene:
It turns out Tanner isn’t the best newborn vampire among them all, and she isn’t a big fan of killing innocents and drinking their blood. She tries to join forces with the Cullen clan and adapt to their “vegetarian vampire” lifestyle, but ends up being killed by Felix on the orders of Jane, a member of the Volturi guard (played by Dakota Fanning in the film), in the final battle.

Newborn Vampires:
A big part of the story in “Eclipse” surrounds the bad-girl vampire Victoria creating an army of newborn vampires in the Seattle area so she can wage war on Edward Cullen, who killed her beau James way back in “Twilight.” When a vampire is first created, it is at its strongest, so Victoria went around recklessly creating vampires so she could have an extremely powerful army behind her. Tanner was just one of the fatalities.

Seattle:
The trouble with the first-person perspective of “The Twilight Saga” is that the reader can’t read what is happening firsthand beyond what Bella Swan sees with her own eyes. Much like “Midnight Sun” gave (some) of the details behind what happened elsewhere in “Twilight,” “The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner” will show what happened in Seattle with Victoria during “Eclipse.” But since much of “Eclipse” is devoted to the characters wondering what exactly was going on in Seattle, seeing it through the eyes of a secondary character like Tanner is a smart companion piece to the book.

Unseen First Life:
Unfortunately for Tanner, the world will never know what happened to her before she became a vampire. She was introduced into “Eclipse” after she was a newborn and “The Short Second Life” will start off the same way. There is a chance of flashbacks telling about her life before becoming a vampire, but the way Meyer described the novella on her Web site made it seem as though Tanner was the narrator solely so the reader could see what went on in Seattle, not to learn her past.

In The Movies:
“Eclipse” director David Slade at least had more of a heads-up than fans and retailers did about “The Short Second Life,” and he cast 14-year-old Jodelle Ferland in the role. Slade and Ferland, as well as Bryce Dallas Howard (Victoria) and Xavier Samuel (Riley), were given advance copies of the book to read so they could have a complete knowledge of what went on in Seattle for the film.

Mike Fleming from Deadline had some interesting info on the movie ‘The Host’, read below:

I can report some forward progress on the movie version of The Host, Meyer’s first adult novel which she optioned last fall to producers Nick Wechsler and Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz–the trio behind the terrific screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Steve Schwartz tells me that Andrew Niccol is working on the third draft of a screenplay which he’s writing in close consultation with the author. The Australian-born Niccol was once the hottest screenwriter in town after his groundbreaking script The Truman Show, and he has followed by writing visionary films like Gattaca and most The City That Sailed—the latter is a project that Will Smith has been attached to for more than a year. Still, Niccol wouldn’t qualify as the hottest director in town and would normally get overlooked for such a plum project. He originally wrote The City That Sailed as a directing vehicle. But Smith, who’d play a New York-based father with a London-based daughter who misses him so much that it causes her seaside town to break away and float toward Gotham, brought on his I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence, until the filmmaker jumped to direct Robert Pattinson, Reese Witherspoon and Christoph Waltz in Water for Elephants for Fox 2000. Fox is now looking for another filmmaker.

Because the producers used their own money, they were not hostage to choosing the flavor of the moment, but rather the right guy. Schwartz said the search went like this: “We asked Stephenie what her favorite science fiction movies were, and one of them was Gattaca,” he sald. “We spent time with Andrew, listened to his vision, introduced Andrew to Stephenie and she responded. There is very good chemistry in this group. Stephenie is a very smart collaborator, and she had an intuitive strong hunch he would be the right guy. Based on the script we’ve seen, we think she was right. We’re thinking this will be shot in early 2011.” They haven’t gone out for production financing—they might put together a cast first and come to the table with a complete package. But Meyer is a viable brand because of Twilight, and based on the incessant inquiries by distributors, Schwartz doesn’t think they will have trouble. “We are budgeting right now,” he said.

The Host is a love story set in the near future, when the Earth has been overrun by benevolent alien parasites that call themselves “souls” and take over the consciousness of humans. The book is about a “soul” called Wanderer, which fuses with a dying woman named Melanie Stryder, bent on discovering the whereabouts of the last pocket of surviving humans. Wanderer, a veteran assimilator, struggles with the dogged determination of the woman to retain her identity and values.

Read full article here.

MTV

In M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender,” actor Jackson Rathbone plays Sokka, a teenage warrior from the Southern Water Tribe who lacks the water-bending powers of his peers but has the makings of a great leader all the same. On a quest alongside his sister, Katara, and the last remaining airbender, Aang, Sokka’s mettle is tested as the small group tries to restore balance to their warring world.

MTV News caught up with Rathbone while he was promoting his new film, “Dread,” and managed to slip in a few questions about the special effects in store for “Airbender” audiences and how Sokka stacks up against his “Twilight” character, the vampire Jasper Hale.

“My character’s more of a sardonic figure,” Rathbone told MTV News. “But he’s a budding young warrior, so I got to do a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, which was really fun. I had to go through about two-to-three months of kung-fu training, that was just… Oh, man, that was a workout.”

“But it was fun, I learned a lot,” he continued. “I’m a lot more flexible now. It was really cool to get to do a lot of the hand-to-hand fight scenes where you’re walking through this war zone and suddenly somebody jumps out at you and you have to kind of block and hit them in the head. It was pretty crazy. My character is armed with a boomerang.”

As for what audiences will see when “Airbender” hits theaters, Rathbone gushed about the film’s FX-heavy moments.

“I’ve seen clips and bits of the scenes and the CGI, and they’re both going to be incredible, and they’re going to blow people away,” he said. “What modern technology’s able to do is just mind-blowing, it’s such an honor and a privilege to be part of these films.”

However, when pressed to admit who’s tougher, Sokka or Jasper, Rathbone declined to even consider the two characters squaring off — but he did admit to feeling the pressure to pick a favorite.

“It’s actually kind of funny, because my friends were ripping me about that last night,” he said. “Now that I have these action figures, these Jasper action figures, and they’re coming out with the Sokka action figures for ‘Airbender,’ they’re saying they’re going to buy both of them and fight them.”

“Who would win? I don’t know,” he said. “I kind of want to stay out of that one. I’m not really a betting man. … I’ll be Switzerland.”