Twilight
You know, I was all prepped with an opening line and everything: "Guess what's the biggest turkey on Thanksgiving? Twilight!" but actually the flick wasn't all that bad. Don't get me wrong; it was perfectly awful as most movies are, but my expectations were low going in. Pulse-low, going in, as regular readers may remember. Instead, Twilight was just as dumb as any other film one might see between now and Christmas, and in some ways a bit more artful. It was a well-done horrible movie.
In the world of Twilight, there are three groups. The first are the Indians, who were cool and thus excused from appearing in 90% of the film. Good for them. (They're also all werewolves or something, so sheer cultural osmosis tells me.) Next are a group of twitching weirdos, congenitally unable to make eye contact or complete a sentence without screwing up their faces and betraying some form of tic. These are the humans. Then there is the third group. They all look just like this guy:
These are the vampires. Thanks to the perennial cloud cover, and the fact that humans don't make eye contact-seriously, you're either The Joker or an Indian werewolf or experiencing a petit mal seizure in this film at all times-the vampires actually blend in. In the world of Twilight, there are many advantages to being a vampire. Immortality for one, the proportionate strength and speed of a squirrel for another. Vampires are also exceptionally good at baseball, unless one is a pitcher. Then every thing you throw gets hit out of the park. The vampire family in this movie, the Cullens, are okay sorts. They are "vegetarians" (as is garden burger-ordering Bella) in that they only drink animal blood, not human blood. At one point this is described as "only eating tofu; it makes you strong, but you are never satisfied." The filmmakers can expect a harshly worded letter from the National Tofu and Soy Council next week.
Anyhoo, there is a vampire named Edward who goes to school with his vampire siblings. He's obviously quite bored there, having been in high school since approximately the First World War. One day a petite yet mannish oaf named Bella shows up, from Phoenix. Bella is attracted to soulless plastic monstrosities. We know this because the film's voice over is hers, and she explains right off the bat, "I'll miss Phoenix." Having bad taste like this will come in handy in filling approximately ninety minutes of this two hour film.
What Bella won't miss is trouble. She gets plenty. Car accidents and boozy would-be rapists, but Edward is there. Edward likes the way Bella smells, and cannot pull himself away from her. He watches her sleep. Bella is fine with this, and why wouldn't she be? There isn't much else to do in the little town of Forks except crystal meth, after all. Then the film stops and for an hour and a half we are treated to a slide show of Edward and Bella peering at one another. In the trees. In the fog. In Bella's overcrowded bedroom. In a car. Like this:
To get the twitchy awkward effect, grab your monitor on either side and give it a good shake. Hey, you're in a movie! Throw some glitter on your face and you're good to go as Edward Q. Cullen Jr his own self.
In the middle of prom preparations-Bella isn't going!-there are a couple of murders. Bella's dad, the local cop (a good man, because he drinks beer and doesn't ever look at his daughter) is on the case. He's a detective of Sherlockian powers as well. Once, he finds a human footprint in the dirt, looks at it, and says, "A human!"
After way too much of this, the movie decides to have a story. Some other vampire sniffs out Bella and Edward, who reads minds, quickly brings everyone up to speed by explaining that this new vampire is The World's Greatest Tracker and loves to play games. Eating Bella and thus annoying Edward is The Best Game Ever, so we're down for some ...escaping. Bella does some acting, and then there is a fight with mirrors and stuff. And then it's time for prom. Bella doesn't get to be a vampire, yet, but she does get to dance. That's about two acts of film right there, eh, but it's about twenty minutes of film time, padded out with a fairly neat coma montage.
More has been made of this movie than it deserves. Only an estrogen-addled teenybopper would think it's a good movie, but the moral panic about passive Bella and domineering, nay abusive, Edward is just the uncomplicated inversion of the moral panics regarding zipless fucks and teen drinking that informed the handwringing of a generation ago. Twilight is a ludicrous fantasy and this is written on the bodies of the protagonists, up to and including the fact that in direct sunlight the vampires sparkle like a mousy girl's inappropriately flashy evening dress:
What makes this movie a bit better than I expected is the photography, the music, and incidental sounds. The blue filters are used overtime, but it works, unlike in Pulse. (Pulse looks like someone took a home camcorder, flipped the lighting button from Light Bulb to Sunshine, and then shot a movie in an office block.) The sonic loundscape is an interesting mix of grungy guitar and piano music, not the pseudo-Mahler mush that every other fantasy film has been issued since Spielberg graduated from film school. During the lengthy slideshow session, the framing feels like both Edward and Bella were slipping the editor five bucks per close-up, but in the school scenes the moving camera and associated sound editing works well with the conversations drifting in and out of our hearing expertly It's rough and ready stuff, and not too bad. Did Twilight's director overhear her parents talking about Robert Altman when she was a kid or something? Perhaps. It's almost good. Twilight's Forks High feels like an overcrowded hothouse of a school in a dumpy little logging town, and that does a lot toward selling the incredible interest all the kids have in Bella when she arrives. There are a couple of neat montages to break the monotony. After all, what else is there to do in Forks but meth till you get too twitchy to hold the pipe?
In the world of Twilight, there are three groups. The first are the Indians, who were cool and thus excused from appearing in 90% of the film. Good for them. (They're also all werewolves or something, so sheer cultural osmosis tells me.) Next are a group of twitching weirdos, congenitally unable to make eye contact or complete a sentence without screwing up their faces and betraying some form of tic. These are the humans. Then there is the third group. They all look just like this guy:
These are the vampires. Thanks to the perennial cloud cover, and the fact that humans don't make eye contact-seriously, you're either The Joker or an Indian werewolf or experiencing a petit mal seizure in this film at all times-the vampires actually blend in. In the world of Twilight, there are many advantages to being a vampire. Immortality for one, the proportionate strength and speed of a squirrel for another. Vampires are also exceptionally good at baseball, unless one is a pitcher. Then every thing you throw gets hit out of the park. The vampire family in this movie, the Cullens, are okay sorts. They are "vegetarians" (as is garden burger-ordering Bella) in that they only drink animal blood, not human blood. At one point this is described as "only eating tofu; it makes you strong, but you are never satisfied." The filmmakers can expect a harshly worded letter from the National Tofu and Soy Council next week.
Anyhoo, there is a vampire named Edward who goes to school with his vampire siblings. He's obviously quite bored there, having been in high school since approximately the First World War. One day a petite yet mannish oaf named Bella shows up, from Phoenix. Bella is attracted to soulless plastic monstrosities. We know this because the film's voice over is hers, and she explains right off the bat, "I'll miss Phoenix." Having bad taste like this will come in handy in filling approximately ninety minutes of this two hour film.
What Bella won't miss is trouble. She gets plenty. Car accidents and boozy would-be rapists, but Edward is there. Edward likes the way Bella smells, and cannot pull himself away from her. He watches her sleep. Bella is fine with this, and why wouldn't she be? There isn't much else to do in the little town of Forks except crystal meth, after all. Then the film stops and for an hour and a half we are treated to a slide show of Edward and Bella peering at one another. In the trees. In the fog. In Bella's overcrowded bedroom. In a car. Like this:
To get the twitchy awkward effect, grab your monitor on either side and give it a good shake. Hey, you're in a movie! Throw some glitter on your face and you're good to go as Edward Q. Cullen Jr his own self.
In the middle of prom preparations-Bella isn't going!-there are a couple of murders. Bella's dad, the local cop (a good man, because he drinks beer and doesn't ever look at his daughter) is on the case. He's a detective of Sherlockian powers as well. Once, he finds a human footprint in the dirt, looks at it, and says, "A human!"
After way too much of this, the movie decides to have a story. Some other vampire sniffs out Bella and Edward, who reads minds, quickly brings everyone up to speed by explaining that this new vampire is The World's Greatest Tracker and loves to play games. Eating Bella and thus annoying Edward is The Best Game Ever, so we're down for some ...escaping. Bella does some acting, and then there is a fight with mirrors and stuff. And then it's time for prom. Bella doesn't get to be a vampire, yet, but she does get to dance. That's about two acts of film right there, eh, but it's about twenty minutes of film time, padded out with a fairly neat coma montage.
More has been made of this movie than it deserves. Only an estrogen-addled teenybopper would think it's a good movie, but the moral panic about passive Bella and domineering, nay abusive, Edward is just the uncomplicated inversion of the moral panics regarding zipless fucks and teen drinking that informed the handwringing of a generation ago. Twilight is a ludicrous fantasy and this is written on the bodies of the protagonists, up to and including the fact that in direct sunlight the vampires sparkle like a mousy girl's inappropriately flashy evening dress:
What makes this movie a bit better than I expected is the photography, the music, and incidental sounds. The blue filters are used overtime, but it works, unlike in Pulse. (Pulse looks like someone took a home camcorder, flipped the lighting button from Light Bulb to Sunshine, and then shot a movie in an office block.) The sonic loundscape is an interesting mix of grungy guitar and piano music, not the pseudo-Mahler mush that every other fantasy film has been issued since Spielberg graduated from film school. During the lengthy slideshow session, the framing feels like both Edward and Bella were slipping the editor five bucks per close-up, but in the school scenes the moving camera and associated sound editing works well with the conversations drifting in and out of our hearing expertly It's rough and ready stuff, and not too bad. Did Twilight's director overhear her parents talking about Robert Altman when she was a kid or something? Perhaps. It's almost good. Twilight's Forks High feels like an overcrowded hothouse of a school in a dumpy little logging town, and that does a lot toward selling the incredible interest all the kids have in Bella when she arrives. There are a couple of neat montages to break the monotony. After all, what else is there to do in Forks but meth till you get too twitchy to hold the pipe?