"Twilight: New Moon (2009)"
I won't belabor the reason why I chose to watch this, except to say that I have committed a great many sins in the pursuit of cultural literacy. At least, insofar as how debased the notion of "culture" in this country has become.
I'm not sure whether or not I gave the first one a proper review, such has been the breadth and scope of my cinematic self-flagellations. It's like asking a Jew or a Gypsy in Spain circa 1503 whether or not they've been introduced to the thumb screws yet or if so far it's just been the Pear and the mangle. It's something a person would suspect they should remember, but at the end of the day novelty fades into the background of agony.
And it was. Agony, I mean.
The story starts off with Beautiful Graceful getting dumped by her mopey, sparkly boyfriend. Because, actually, of his mopiness and sparkliness. So he fucks off to Italy and there begins the most stunningly tedious sequence in the history of film. Cue a full half hour of Beautiful Graceful - which is what "Bella Swan" ACTUALLY FUCKING MEANS - sitting quietly to the strains of mealy-mouthed acoustic pop-folk...screaming in bed in the throes of suicidal depression...sitting alone at school...and generally acting as if she's the first teenaged girl to ever have been dumped by a boy.
Then, Taylor Lautner saunters into frame. Wearing the most atrocious drag queen-rejected wig I've ever seen. Ever since he hosted SNL last year, I've had a soft spot for the actor. He obviously has a great sense of humor about the unstoppable golem of excrement that has in turn made him a star, and he even parlays that into pretty good comic timing. And, to boot, he's not a terrible actor, though it was hard to tell given the script.
Here is where I will leave off on describing the plot, because anyone familiar with incredibly rote, by-the-numbers storytelling can guess the rest. Bella takes a shine to her new werewolf crush, the plot thickens, and a depressingly forced deus ex machina swoops in and it's happily-until-the-sequel.
I hated "New Moon" infinitesimally less than "Twilight." Which is to say that I prefer the Iron Maiden to being broken on the wheel. Mainly for the supporting cast. Every Cullen but teen-dream Edward was a slightly interesting character, the werewolf clan was funny and, dare I say it, somewhat consistent with the modern, White Wolf interpretation of the werewolf legend in a way that dreck like "Underworld" only hoped to be, and the vampires in the film occasionally upstaged some of the ones envisioned by Anne Rice.
Indeed, if not for the Star Cross'd Lovers themselves, "New Moon" had the potential to not be a terrible story. Unfortunately, that Mormon psycho Meyers and her Vichy collaborator of a director were hell-bent on using the manure of the premise not to grow a garden but to make a bomb.
The acting was bad even by the standards of forgettable teen dramas. Not by any of the supporting cast, though, and even Taylor Lautner seemed like he was trying most of the time. Robert "My Head Looks Like A Foot" Pattinson and that Katie Holmes-wannabe dingy broad they got to play Beautiful Graceful seemed as though they were never handed scripts and, before shooting a scene, were given a outline of what the scene was to contain and then told to ad-lib it. The result is a bizarre hesitance on both their parts, almost like a stammer, which gave their dialogue a stilted, halting cadence.
Furthermore, I have actually seen better special effects on SyFy movies-of-the-week. In fact, I will go on record as saying that more care and love were put into the beasts in "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus" than were the werewolves of "New Moon." The round, human irises of said werewolves were, to be fair, a nice touch, but the rest was a jumble of finger-thick chunks of fur and bizarrely unwolfish movement. It's as if the CG department were given a rough description of a wolf, perhaps including the phrase "like a dog" and then totally cut free to do whatever they thought was cheapest.
One place, however, where the special effects weren't so bad was concerning the vampires. There was a bunch of scenes that illustrated how fast they move: a terrible CG crow flapping in slow motion while the vampires' actors moved at normal speed. And the odd practical effect and camera work, like one vampire moving from the front door of a house to behind the wheel of a car without a jump-cut. Additionally, the use of contact lenses was welcome, especially by the virtue of the fact that not all vampires' eyes looked the same. When I wasn't crying out in agony, I was able to notice that non-human drinking vampires tended to have golden or iridescent green eyes, whereas the ones who did seem to drink human blood had red ones.
Overall, bringing vampires to life on the screen is not among the worst things the "Twilight" franchise does. Someone in the production design department clearly knows what they're doing. And that is the most charitable thing I can say about this film, and I say it in the same manner one might say that Mussolini really made those trains run on time. It by no means excuses everything else.
The biggest thing I lamented about "Twilight" was Beautiful Graceful. How she is the perfect anti-Ripley, the paradigmatic ant-Valeria. This is a girl, apart from being an even worse authorial self-insertion than Sookie Stackhouse, who is utterly spineless. No matter how she is threatened, endangered, abandoned, denigrated, fed upon, insulted, and neglected, she's hopelessly in love with her demi-pedophile boyfriend. She is a girl that makes the useless mousey flurge in "The Devil Wears Prada" look like Officer Anne Lewis from "Robocop."
But the worst is that nothing is said to denote how much of a stereotypical, trite damsel-in-distress she is. In fact, distress is the only thing this damsel is in throughout, from what I can tell, the entire series. There is nothing strong, resilient, or redeeming about her character. Her constant lack of initiative and self-responsibility is her single defining character trait.
This, friends, is more damaging to young girls in this country than Paris Hilton's promiscuity or Lindsay Lohan's excesses. It teaches girls that it's acceptable to be totally beholden to the object of their desire regardless of how they're treated. It's basically a primer for girls looking to enter the exciting world of being abused. And it's sold as romance, a thing teenagers are historically bad at processing in the first place.
Stephanie Meyer is the Typhoid Mary of feminine weakness and the Pied Piper of tragically impressionable young women. I don't think it's hyperbole to blame a slight uptick in domestic abuse a few years down the road on her, if there is one.
By executive order, Stephanie Meyer should have her First Amendment right stripped from her. She is yelling 'fire' in the crowded theater of adolescent gullibility.
The Twilight Saga: New Moon: F-
I'm not sure whether or not I gave the first one a proper review, such has been the breadth and scope of my cinematic self-flagellations. It's like asking a Jew or a Gypsy in Spain circa 1503 whether or not they've been introduced to the thumb screws yet or if so far it's just been the Pear and the mangle. It's something a person would suspect they should remember, but at the end of the day novelty fades into the background of agony.
And it was. Agony, I mean.
The story starts off with Beautiful Graceful getting dumped by her mopey, sparkly boyfriend. Because, actually, of his mopiness and sparkliness. So he fucks off to Italy and there begins the most stunningly tedious sequence in the history of film. Cue a full half hour of Beautiful Graceful - which is what "Bella Swan" ACTUALLY FUCKING MEANS - sitting quietly to the strains of mealy-mouthed acoustic pop-folk...screaming in bed in the throes of suicidal depression...sitting alone at school...and generally acting as if she's the first teenaged girl to ever have been dumped by a boy.
Then, Taylor Lautner saunters into frame. Wearing the most atrocious drag queen-rejected wig I've ever seen. Ever since he hosted SNL last year, I've had a soft spot for the actor. He obviously has a great sense of humor about the unstoppable golem of excrement that has in turn made him a star, and he even parlays that into pretty good comic timing. And, to boot, he's not a terrible actor, though it was hard to tell given the script.
Here is where I will leave off on describing the plot, because anyone familiar with incredibly rote, by-the-numbers storytelling can guess the rest. Bella takes a shine to her new werewolf crush, the plot thickens, and a depressingly forced deus ex machina swoops in and it's happily-until-the-sequel.
I hated "New Moon" infinitesimally less than "Twilight." Which is to say that I prefer the Iron Maiden to being broken on the wheel. Mainly for the supporting cast. Every Cullen but teen-dream Edward was a slightly interesting character, the werewolf clan was funny and, dare I say it, somewhat consistent with the modern, White Wolf interpretation of the werewolf legend in a way that dreck like "Underworld" only hoped to be, and the vampires in the film occasionally upstaged some of the ones envisioned by Anne Rice.
Indeed, if not for the Star Cross'd Lovers themselves, "New Moon" had the potential to not be a terrible story. Unfortunately, that Mormon psycho Meyers and her Vichy collaborator of a director were hell-bent on using the manure of the premise not to grow a garden but to make a bomb.
The acting was bad even by the standards of forgettable teen dramas. Not by any of the supporting cast, though, and even Taylor Lautner seemed like he was trying most of the time. Robert "My Head Looks Like A Foot" Pattinson and that Katie Holmes-wannabe dingy broad they got to play Beautiful Graceful seemed as though they were never handed scripts and, before shooting a scene, were given a outline of what the scene was to contain and then told to ad-lib it. The result is a bizarre hesitance on both their parts, almost like a stammer, which gave their dialogue a stilted, halting cadence.
Furthermore, I have actually seen better special effects on SyFy movies-of-the-week. In fact, I will go on record as saying that more care and love were put into the beasts in "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus" than were the werewolves of "New Moon." The round, human irises of said werewolves were, to be fair, a nice touch, but the rest was a jumble of finger-thick chunks of fur and bizarrely unwolfish movement. It's as if the CG department were given a rough description of a wolf, perhaps including the phrase "like a dog" and then totally cut free to do whatever they thought was cheapest.
One place, however, where the special effects weren't so bad was concerning the vampires. There was a bunch of scenes that illustrated how fast they move: a terrible CG crow flapping in slow motion while the vampires' actors moved at normal speed. And the odd practical effect and camera work, like one vampire moving from the front door of a house to behind the wheel of a car without a jump-cut. Additionally, the use of contact lenses was welcome, especially by the virtue of the fact that not all vampires' eyes looked the same. When I wasn't crying out in agony, I was able to notice that non-human drinking vampires tended to have golden or iridescent green eyes, whereas the ones who did seem to drink human blood had red ones.
Overall, bringing vampires to life on the screen is not among the worst things the "Twilight" franchise does. Someone in the production design department clearly knows what they're doing. And that is the most charitable thing I can say about this film, and I say it in the same manner one might say that Mussolini really made those trains run on time. It by no means excuses everything else.
The biggest thing I lamented about "Twilight" was Beautiful Graceful. How she is the perfect anti-Ripley, the paradigmatic ant-Valeria. This is a girl, apart from being an even worse authorial self-insertion than Sookie Stackhouse, who is utterly spineless. No matter how she is threatened, endangered, abandoned, denigrated, fed upon, insulted, and neglected, she's hopelessly in love with her demi-pedophile boyfriend. She is a girl that makes the useless mousey flurge in "The Devil Wears Prada" look like Officer Anne Lewis from "Robocop."
But the worst is that nothing is said to denote how much of a stereotypical, trite damsel-in-distress she is. In fact, distress is the only thing this damsel is in throughout, from what I can tell, the entire series. There is nothing strong, resilient, or redeeming about her character. Her constant lack of initiative and self-responsibility is her single defining character trait.
This, friends, is more damaging to young girls in this country than Paris Hilton's promiscuity or Lindsay Lohan's excesses. It teaches girls that it's acceptable to be totally beholden to the object of their desire regardless of how they're treated. It's basically a primer for girls looking to enter the exciting world of being abused. And it's sold as romance, a thing teenagers are historically bad at processing in the first place.
Stephanie Meyer is the Typhoid Mary of feminine weakness and the Pied Piper of tragically impressionable young women. I don't think it's hyperbole to blame a slight uptick in domestic abuse a few years down the road on her, if there is one.
By executive order, Stephanie Meyer should have her First Amendment right stripped from her. She is yelling 'fire' in the crowded theater of adolescent gullibility.
The Twilight Saga: New Moon: F-