Twilight, movie review

My overall reaction to the Twilight movie does not deviate overmuch from that of the book, with the notable exception of exemplary creative collaboration. Coming from a theatrical background, I appreciate the artistic process that occurs when a team of creative professionals throw down with a vision, a budget and a deadline. If one could excuse the source material entirely for the crimes against storytelling, Twilight on film is a satisfying experience. Grand cuts are taken to the dialogue and entire scenes are either tightly edited or excised entirely, leaving us with a rush of first romance beneath the stain of horror. The performers brought qualities to the characters left bereft in written form and made them memorable and sympathetic. Only the special effects marred what otherwise defied my expectations as a quality adaptation to a shitty book.

Still, the tale of a neurotic teenager hooking up with a castrated vampire in the first glimmers of hormone-fevered romance incites bowel obstructing, head-desking, loathsome revulsion in me. No amount of honest body language and heroic hair product could distract me from the kitten-weak premise and insomnia-curing plot. The filmmakers solve the problem of pointlessness until the third act by introducing the evil vampires early and spinning the romance under a constant threat of actual vampires. This validates Edward's genuine fear that his animalistic infatuation with Bella will override his willpower and destroy her, and he will love every minute. Robert Pattison's performance wholly reads as something not human, desperately wrestling with his identity as a monster. Meanwhile, Bella's selfishness in the face of reality softens to the mildly offensive behavior of an emotionally needy teenage girl. I still wished an endless deluge of bus collisions to her person, of course.

The small town feel of Forks, WA flagged in the face of metro-students and calculated racial diversity. Swap any tired high school lunchroom or prom sequence with Twilight's and try hard to notice. But mad props go to any movie that features music by Muse, even if it must accompany a baseball sequence. Special effects jarred the overall pleasant visual style with awkward and goofy movement. Popular panned vamp-sparkle looked more infected than exotic, but the golden lens flare carried the halo image convincingly.

I still hated it.

My favorite riff during my drunken tirade in viewing was at the end. “What, is Edward going to go flinging himself out of his backseat later? It is prom.”

Miscellany

Tonight we'll be screening the Twilight movie for review on this blog. There may be a podcast/youtube, but I'm uncertain. It all depends on how funny we are.

Responses to this blog have been informative, but limited. If you are reading this, please let me know if there is continued interest in me continuing on through New Moon and the rest of the Twilight series? As one of my fellow booksellers mentioned to me, "It's all worth it for the train wreck of Breaking Dawn."

So please, drop me a note her to state your presence and interest. And indeed, thank you for reading.

No Fucking Point (Chapters 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and Epilogue)

The journey. Our main character, especially in narrative fiction, undergoes a journey just like every hero in any story from Grecian epics to pop manga. These stories require five basic things, as described by Thomas C. Foster in his book How to Read Literature Like a Professor.

First, there is the Quester. For Twilight, we have Bella. Lonely, anxious, emotionally handicapped and tragically clumsy. She is our heroine at the beginning of her path. Second, a place to go. The book opens with Bella arriving in Forks from Phoenix in order to make her home. So while the journey isn't necessarily one of distance, she is required to make her way in this new life. Third, a stated reason to go. Bella has plenty of these, generally all ejaculated from her martyr complex; preserve and protect her mother's happiness, take care of her father in his solitary life, and distantly to finish high school. Fourth, challenges and trials. Again the majority of these conflicts are born of Bella's own brainfarts and inability to socialize in any healthy way. Vampires are nearly secondary to this conflict, but are worth mentioning. In comparison to the living, the dead seem perfectly acceptable if not attractive. Bella is seduced by a different system of rules, a new way to be a victim. And finally, the fifth requirement, the real reason to go. This is always self-knowledge. Bella's social spasms and backwards romance should harshly, even dangerously reveal the her true self and allow her to understand that she has the choice to be strong, to be solitary, to be alive and moreover to be numbered among the actively living instead of patiently dying.

At the point I left us last, before a convenient antagonist showed up to shoehorn some conflict into the last third of the book, Bella was actively begging Edward to turn her into a vampire. Edward like any man, isn't ready for that kind of commitment with a girl he hasn't slept with doesn't want to take her oh-so fragile life away from her and pop her jugular cherry. But even when she agrees to stop hounding him to take her throatginity, Bella yearns for this eternal life of being a monster, albeit a beautiful and powerful monster with an undying hottie for a boyfriend. I read this and I see a young woman who wants to die before she even starts living. When the evilvamps blow in to murder her, she runs because she is told to. When the evilvamp finds a way to contact her, he tells her to ditch her vampire friends and come to him willingly, or he'll murder her mother. And you know what? She does.

Bella rejects every single life raft, every mote of human companionship and leadership, every instinct that encourages her to stand the fuck up for herself, and walks straight to her death.

I wanted that bitch to die nearly as much as she did.

If your reader's sensibilities aren't frothing as the mouth yet, let's continue through the climax! Meyer's evilvamp is … oh wait, she never describes him. I can't even remember his name. When Bella waltzes into her deathtrap, the bad guy can't even be given an interesting visualization or monologue. He merely threatens vaguely at the doom awaiting her mother. "Stuff will happen! There will be things! OoooooOOOOOooh!" Way to castrate your villains, Steph.

When it comes murderin' time, Evilvamp doesn't conceive of a terrifying test of her will or haunting series of questions like Anton Chuguhr in No Country for Old Men. He doesn't revel in her fear or debasement by threatening her with horrifying trauma and listening to her beg and weep, like the assassin in the book version of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. No pseudo-crucifixion like Fiore's in the Sailor Moon R Movie, no elaborate death trap the likes of any James Bond villain. The best he can do is a dance studio, a VCR and the Bobby Brown school of ho-slapping. Bella breaks her leg falling into mirrors, which may or may not be the bad guy's fault, and generally gets her ass kicked. Finally, he bites her hand to inject the excruciating vampire venom into her system.

Yes, her hand. Not her throat, not her breast, not the naughty femoral artery. Her dainty little hand. He can't even bite off a few of her fingers for good measure before Edward shows up and kills him OFF SCREEN.

Because the climax of this story isn't about the ignoramus telling it to us, it's the god of all things sexy and divine Edward deciding if he will test his own control by sucking the venom from her hand. (Her fucking hand? Really?!) If he fails, he drinks her dry and leaves her a a sad, deflated blow-up doll. Or he could wuss out and allow her three days of writhing agony before she dies and becomes a fellow vampire, just like she's been begging him all this time.

I … I can't even go on. We know what happens, despite how it should have happened. He saves her, she recovers and he fucking takes her to prom and they STILL DON'T HAVE SEX. The End. I hate you, Stephanie Meyer. Do us a favor and go eat a cannoli, fuck off and die in a fire. I loathe your book because it only teaches girls their value in is what they can sacrifice to others, specifically men, and should be thankful for what they get out of it. This is not love. This is systemic abusive control of women.

Twilight is trash beneath a sugary veneer masquerading as romance. I wouldn't use the paper to wipe my ass.

Thinking About Baseball Won't Help (Chapters 17, 18 and 19)

Conflict. Without it, there is no reason to tell a story. Thus far in Twilight, we've had little genuine conflict other than Bella's paranoid anxiety that everyone BUT the vampires is out to get her. However, Chapter 17 unfurls an engaging background issue that deserves so much more attention than it gets. Even accepting that I as the reader haven't seen the trailers for New Moon and somehow escaped the inanity of Team Edward of the bloodsucker set verses Team Jacob the fuzzy and wolfish, the fact remains the Cullens brokered a peace treaty with the local Native Americas on the reservation in Forks a few generations ago. This means Jacob's father, Billy "Meals on Wheels" Black, not only knows the Cullens are vampires, but like his fathers before him, doesn't trust them any farther than he can throw them. The Indians clearly delineated their territory from the undead in exchange for not whistle-blowing and triggering a good old fashioned angry mob.

For years, the Cullens lived within Forks, but apart. Like any good recovering alcoholics, they know better than to hang out in the liquor store for any length of time. Now, the batshit crazy daughter of the white folk's police chief is dancing her seventeen year-old single malt self around one of the AA boys. Black knows it only takes one drink to drop the lot of them off the good vampire bandwagon. After that, it's on like Donkey Kong; wholesale hunting and murder, pitchfork and torch-wielding justice. I could see the younger generation of Native Ameriwolves going for it on the pretense of getting enemies to slaughter the white folk who took their land. But the older, wheelchair-bound ones know better than to invite the Feds to a situation, risking more land getting seized and the loss of all those handicap accessible places like Walmart and McDonalds.

This story here is interesting! But it's not the one that gets told. No, instead Bella comes home and finds Black and Jacob on her porch like cigar store Indians (in a wheelchair). Faced with the survival of his tribe, his land, and the white folk of Forks, Black approaches to give her the vaguest warning imaginable. Bella, like any brainless, romance-addicted ingenue, resists his advice and intimidates (??!!!) him and his son off her property. Really. When Charlie gets home, Bella fills her father's ears with lies and then introduces Edward. This scene too, promising all kinds of thematic elements, falls as flat as Calista Flockhart.

The book wholly limits itself with Bella's narrative. The stories I want to hear are bullied out of the way by the insipid, sexless romance. Where is the win here?

It bears mentioning that Meyer takes one last chance at giving EsmeDaphne a personality. Sometime during the next scene, Bella is approached by the motherly vampire, who tells her randomly that her baby died in childbirth and that's why she jumped off a cliff. I can totally see Jane Leeves doing this and owning every awkward moment. But just as I feared, vampire baseball is exactly as mind-numbing as major league baseball. Thank god the evil vampires show up. And, oh surprise! They want to eat Bella.

Bookwench: Oh hi, conflict! It's been so long since you've had a part to play in this rancid, sad sack of shit. Now that the three new evil vampires are here and plan on cracking the wax on Bella's single-malt, what are the other five good vampires going to do about it, on their home turf?

XTwyLyteRavynXFTW: OMGWTFBBQRUN!!!1one!!!1! lol

I once played in a table-top game called Slasher Flick in which the players are rewarded for actions that contribute to their characters dying; like fleeing up the stairs from the killer, or wandering off alone to take a shower. Seriously, even when the math changes and one of the evil vamps cuts his losses and bails, the Cullens decide splitting up and running with Bella for Phoenix is a good idea. Hunt in packs, jackasses! *hurls popcorn at the screen*

This plan requires Bella not only go home first to pack her belongings, (despite her lack of beloved mementos or vital possessions. There must be no Old Navy's in Phoenix,) but to convince Charlie she is leaving Forks for a benign reason, like hating her life and wanting to be her own person without the constant fetters of familial duty and social martyrdom move back in with her mom. Every moment Bella lacks Edward's presence, she nics hardcore, which should make the moment she chooses to willingly hurt her father and call upon his memories of his wife's divorce to sell her intent, both riveting and heartbreaking.

Lacking that, at least it's brief.

The manly hunting team of Edward, Niles and Lion-O go to track down the evil vampire dude. Daphne and Lindsey Lohan go after the evil vampire dude's evil vampire bitchy girlfriend. And Bella flees with Moaning Myrtle and the Rock as they speed towards the safety of a sunny, desert city, four states away. Even driving at vampire speeds, a thousand miles is no short distance and stopping for road beers doesn't seem likely. Good thing they brought Bella.

Lame Expectations (Chapters 14, 15 and 16)

I firmly believe that one's greatest weakness is also, in turn, one's greatest strength. This goes for vampire stories. Capturing an honest personality affected by decades upon decades of development proves a serious challenge. This crowns as the golden moment of awesome for the writer. Not only can one find the coolest stories in history to attribute to the beloved vampire, but it allows for period flashbacks and amusing colloquialisms to sneak into speech patterns. Impossible questions become endless opportunities; Edward lived through the roaring twenties, the great depression, two world wars, the rise of the atomic age, the British invasion on the music scene, the Civil Rights movement, Women's Liberation, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the rise of corporate greed and the fall of the Twin Towers. The passage of time and the frailty of life is no more distant from him than the lifeblood that rushes to his beloved Bella's face when she blushes beneath his gaze.

So what does Stephanie Meyer do?

If you guessed FAIL, you win a gold star.

On the way back from their unromantic romp in the forest, Edward rags on music not recorded in the 50's. Really. Keep in mind, he's still a violently disposed teenager who lectures Bella on her wisdom and then gets her alone in the forest for a chat. I feel my fanfic senses tingling here when the only creative works or artists mentioned in the Twilight universe are Wuthering Heights and Debussy. Even when Bella listens to the mix CD one of the Ron Weasly's made for her, there are no band names or song lyrics. Just noise.

Further, Meyer decides to introduce Edward's family to the reader without them actually being in the scene. So not only are we bereft of descriptions and body language to help us retain each individual character, there are five of them, we get to hear Edward's brief synopsis. I don't know who these fuckers are and am well beyond caring. Thing is, I'm nervous that it's going to be important to the remaining half of the book I have yet to sift through.

Edward doesn't sleep. And since he has no reason to break his regular habit of stalking Bella and watching her in bed, he doesn't. Bella spends the rest of the chapter spinning lies to her understandably untrusting father about why she's home, where she's been and why she isn't attending the socially acceptable school dance with the living. Once abed, she and Edward make with the cringe-worthy snuggles and our first bedroom scene closes as it opens; first base.

The next morning, Edward kisses Bella and she faints. All through this and the drive to meet his family, Bella fizzles and sparks in her addiction-fueled haze of frenetic mental gyration. Edward once mentioned that he can't read Bella's thought, and I believe this is due to the storm of interference clouding her synaptic actions from his vampESP. And fuckit, Edward taking Bella to meet is family is the equivalent of bringing a gigantic bottle of scotch into an AA meeting.

Since I'm failing so hard at keeping the individual vampire siblings straight, I will once again chose images from pop culture. Already, we have Dr. Carlisle Cullen played by Niles Crane. Let's just make his main squeeze Esme look like Daphne since she has no real defining character traits as it is. Next is Alice, the slightly batty seeress vampire with a pixie voice, as played by Shirley Henderson of Moaning Myrtle fame. (If you haven't seen her in "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day", then you must. Also Amy Adams runs around half naked a lot, which should be reason enough.) Jasper is described solely as "tall and leonine", so he's Lion-O. Rosalie was originally meant to be Edward's girl and is as such another catty bitch, so I'm leaning towards the soon-to-be incarcerated Lyndsey Lohan. Finally we have Emmett, cut like a cheese-grater and twice as shiny. Enter Dwayne Johnson's the Rock.

God grant this may give ease to the suffering that approaches; Vampire Baseball. As if Twilight needed to be any more boring.

Hemorrhaging Interest (Chapters 10, 11, 12 and 13)

In a concerted effort to complete this Twilight project before I must return my copy to Borders (or risk paying for it. God. No.) today's post covers the next four chapters. I hesitate to admit that the generally readability has increased with the acceleration of teasing romance. But this comes as further insult. Bella and Edward trade awkward banter while deviating heavily from their established characterization thus far. Body language is dominated by soggy descriptive contrivances centering on Edward's forehead; where he looks, how he frowns and what shade of caramel ripple his eyes are today. Essentially, this could represent the blossoming of true self in their shared moments, but I doubt that as much as I do BP's overall success in stopping the wholesale pollution of the ocean.

Bella and Edward start dating. This is an easy statement to make, but not so simple for Stephanie Meyer to write. Every attempt our lovers make at developing a shared understanding of each other is hijacked by neuroses. As if Bella weren't paranoid enough, Edward brings a litany of dangers to the table for her to be mindful of but must press Edward to explain. Unhelpfully, he pops each new horrific revelation about his vampirism up in the worst way imaginable without actually latching onto her throat. Despite his aching fear of hurting her, Edward seems to revel in his wicked if desultory details. It's like the bad boy who offers popcorn to his girlfriend at the movies, having secretly poked his penis through the bottom of the box. I can imagine Edward snickering when Bella grabs a handful of vampirecock and shrieks, glaring hotly when he points at her face and yells, “Gotcha!”

To sum up four chapters of dragging exposition, Edward has a mad, blood-fueled lust for Bella's brand of hemoglobin. In fact, he calls her his kind of heroin, which I cannot say is anything less than shit terrifying. The siren call of her pulmonary squeezins drove him nucking futz since she moved into his town. Edward admits to bailing off-screen, lighting off to Alaska only to decide he's not a pussy and come back to face his desire, divide his vampire family, and date the battiest bitch in Forks. Nice move, dick.

Bella finds a curious strength in the face of all this that I can only assume is her backwards mental programming suffering a fatal error and crashing her entire nervous system. Coasting in safe mode, Bella calmly weathers each and every one of Edward's emo-paroxysms and tempter tantrums. In her few opportunities to be away from him, she proceeds along the familiar tropes of losing her shit over tiny things and analyzing Edward, her father, her friends, and Jacob (given too brief a scene to preserve anything else but a place in the sequel,) and their motivations so furiously she must drug herself with cold medicine in order to sleep.

Yes, that just happened.

Our last chapter opens with the revelation of the oft-mocked "sparkle vampire" effect, accelerates with a display of Edward's strength, speed and
assholishness as he taunts Bella with how helpless she is against him, and culminates with their first kiss. It is by no means epic, save for the fact Bella's babymaker kick starts and initiates the molesting sequence and Edward is forced to stop her.

I hate this book. Perhaps, if it were a darkly romantic cautionary tale about the dangers of impressionable girls being seduced by mysterious, emotional and manipulative men, the latter represented metaphorically by the vampire concept, I might get be able to enjoy the sadistic resonance and ignore the crimes against narrative storytelling. But it isn't, and I can't. Edward is as seductive as a barnacle, reminding me too much of the bi-polar boy who confessed his devout adoration and proceeded to suck the life out me for for five years of marriage.

The same excitement I feel for the completion of my divorce rivals that of reaching the end of Twilight.

You Say Misanthropy, I Say Misogyny. (Chapters 8 and 9)

A solid third of the way through the book, Meyer is finally getting to the big revelation. And I don't care. I writhe with ambivalence. Sheer willpower alone keeps me on task to crack this damn book open, let alone choke down the fetid prose. I approach each pair of chapters like an amateur pornographer in her first film, filled with trepidation, nausea and shame.

This would be a better story if Edward were Batman.

So take the time to mentally adjust your filters, as I have in order to preserve sanity, and tune out Kurt Hummel in favor of Batman, as made popular in the mid-nineties Batman: The Animated Series, which I was in love with when I was Twilight's target audience. All of Edward's dialogue will now be read by Kevin Conroy's dark and midnight voice.

Chapter 8 takes us shopping with Bella and some "girls", out of town. She ditches them in order to spend a wandering hour of meditation on her insane fascination with Edward while trying to find a bookstore. Instead she wanders into a rape gang. Or perhaps just some boys. One can't be too sure. Either way, Bella readies her purse to bust some heads when Edward's Volvothe Batmobile pulls a Tokyo drift and rescues her.

EdwardBatman is furious. So blinded by rage, he orders Bella to entertain him with inanities so his righteous indignation won't send him plowing down the quartet of wandering boys who showed interest in her. Finally, EdwardBatman forces his temper under control, and decides now is a good time to reveal his secret identity.

Okay, maybe Batman wouldn't do that. But for someone desperate to keep his vampirism a deep, dark secret, Edward drops the topic into Bella's lap like a freshly caught catfish and watches her squirm. Not only is he a bloodsucker, he can read minds, complain about how ironic it is that he can't read Bella's thoughts (lucky bastard) and drive recklessly over the speed limit.

That's the true crime in all this, that someone would be stuck as a whiny, insecure, hormonally imbalanced 17 year-old with psychic powers for all eternity.

I think the hipster vampirism is the cause for Edward's fascination with weak-willed women. He comes apart at the seams for the Victorian wilting flower act of Bella's, gratified and aroused by her dainty bound feetpropensity to faceplant. Bella expertly plays into this with a piece of sage wisdom she delivers about his patience.

“But you're not hungry now … I've noticed that people – men in particular – are crabbier when they're hungry.”

Because that's a conversation you want to start with someone who considers you a credible food source. "Oh, it's my fault he's crabby, I've haven't fed him. I'll just remove myself to the kitchen where I feel comfortable. Don't mind my small, womanly feet. They allow me to stand closer to the stove."

Loathe as I am to admit it, as a fan of romantic sequences and dramatic tension, I felt the singular pull of indulgent interest as Edward and Bella revealed their truths to each other, taking up solid and brave roles heretofore un-characterized in the book thus far. Thankfully, Chapter 9 closes as Bella returns home and reflects upon her conversation with a roundhouse to my feminist sensibilities.

“About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him – and I didn't know how potent that part might be – that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.”

Oh, the battered woman's trifecta! Just swap out vampire for violent offender and you're set.

In closing, I would like to share a story one of my friends presented as his Facebook status today.

I'm an asshole? Ok so after small talk with the Taco Bell staff, a woman chimed in with, "My man punched me all over my FACE and broke my glasses." Another stranger added, "I hope he isn't a man anymore!" The woman, I swear to God said, "Nah, I'm still living with him." So I said, "Bet you'll have dinner ready tonight." as I received all kinds of dirty looks.