Director: Catherine Hardwicke
Starring: Kristen Stewert, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Ashey Greene, Taylor Lautner
Plot: Bella Swan is a clumsy, kind hearted teenager with a knack for getting into trouble. Edward Cullen is an intelligent, good looking vampire who is trying to hide his secret. Against all odds, the two fall in love but will a pack of blood thirsty trackers and the disapproval of their family and friends separate them? Taken from www.imdb.com.
"You think this is scary, just wait till you see the cage I'll be keeping you in."Remember back in a more innocent time when Trekkies were considered to be the bottom feeders of the fan world? A bunch of otherwise intelligent people with a hard-on for intergalactic diplomacy and pointy ears were considered to be the bottom of the barrel. Well it's only now we realize how very wrong we were.
Thanks to "Twilight" and Stephanie Meyer, our dumb-as-toast ignorant housewife and writer in-that-she-puts-words-on-paper-only, we have seen that fan obsession in women aged 12-30 is so horrifying that it makes us long for the days of chubby fanboys with bowl cuts and elf ears. If you haven't had the distinct "pleasure" of witnessing one of these rabid lunatics check the comments section here.
I digress however. This review has nothing to do with the fact that Stephanie Meyer is a hack, the books are over-rated fluff, or that her fans are a bunch of raving psychopaths with a disturbing and immensely pathetic obsession with a fictional character. I am here to review a movie and pretend that I have some intergrity. I just needed to get that out of my system.
Okay, so it's the story of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) a 17-year-old girl who is so normal and plain that 3 boys are humping her leg like crazed chihuahuas her first day of school and everyone she meets adores her to point of near-idolizing her. She moves to Forks, Washington with her father, the county Sheriff, Charlie (Billy Burke.)
So anyway on her first day of school she meets moody heroin-chic vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) who she immediatly falls in love with because... that's never really explained and he falls in love with her too because he desperately wants to kill her and feast on her sweet neck meats.
So they make goo goo eyes at each other for aboout 40 minutes and the plot goes 15 kinds of nowhere and then the vampires play baseball which attracts the attention of the evil vampires (we know they're evil because we're told they're evil, otherwise we would just think they're Kalvin Clein models from 10 years ago that got lost.) who then decide that they too want Bella's sweet neck meats, though pecularly enough they don't find that a valid reason to fall in love with her.
So she fakes a fight with her dad and fucks off back to Pheonix where she falls for a very obvious trap, ignores any chance to redeem her as anything other than a week dependent waste of space and gets bit. So she's got vampire "venom" in her and Edwards "dad" decides that it can be sucked out even though that doesn't work with real venom but fortunately Edward could suck a bowling ball through a bendy straw and saves her life. They dismiss it as she fell down a flight of stairs through a window and nobody questions why the entire Cullen family just happened to stroll by a hotel in Arizona when they live in Washington.
Then there's a bunch of fluffy romantic shit, Bella asks Edward to bite her, he doesn't, they kiss, and there's a half-assed attempt to tie to a sequel and the credits roll.
Thanks to "Twilight" and Stephanie Meyer, our dumb-as-toast ignorant housewife and writer in-that-she-puts-words-on-paper-only, we have seen that fan obsession in women aged 12-30 is so horrifying that it makes us long for the days of chubby fanboys with bowl cuts and elf ears. If you haven't had the distinct "pleasure" of witnessing one of these rabid lunatics check the comments section here.
I digress however. This review has nothing to do with the fact that Stephanie Meyer is a hack, the books are over-rated fluff, or that her fans are a bunch of raving psychopaths with a disturbing and immensely pathetic obsession with a fictional character. I am here to review a movie and pretend that I have some intergrity. I just needed to get that out of my system.
Okay, so it's the story of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) a 17-year-old girl who is so normal and plain that 3 boys are humping her leg like crazed chihuahuas her first day of school and everyone she meets adores her to point of near-idolizing her. She moves to Forks, Washington with her father, the county Sheriff, Charlie (Billy Burke.)
So anyway on her first day of school she meets moody heroin-chic vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) who she immediatly falls in love with because... that's never really explained and he falls in love with her too because he desperately wants to kill her and feast on her sweet neck meats.
So they make goo goo eyes at each other for aboout 40 minutes and the plot goes 15 kinds of nowhere and then the vampires play baseball which attracts the attention of the evil vampires (we know they're evil because we're told they're evil, otherwise we would just think they're Kalvin Clein models from 10 years ago that got lost.) who then decide that they too want Bella's sweet neck meats, though pecularly enough they don't find that a valid reason to fall in love with her.
So she fakes a fight with her dad and fucks off back to Pheonix where she falls for a very obvious trap, ignores any chance to redeem her as anything other than a week dependent waste of space and gets bit. So she's got vampire "venom" in her and Edwards "dad" decides that it can be sucked out even though that doesn't work with real venom but fortunately Edward could suck a bowling ball through a bendy straw and saves her life. They dismiss it as she fell down a flight of stairs through a window and nobody questions why the entire Cullen family just happened to stroll by a hotel in Arizona when they live in Washington.
Then there's a bunch of fluffy romantic shit, Bella asks Edward to bite her, he doesn't, they kiss, and there's a half-assed attempt to tie to a sequel and the credits roll.
This picture is scary for all of the wrong reasons.Kristen Stewart is our heroine and while the character of Bella has always been shallow, weak, and a desperate Mary Sue but at the beginning of the book she showed traits of a charming, intelligent, and somewhat likeable teenage girl. This is not what Kristen Stewart plays, in fact she doesn't even play the clumsy, needy, "oh lawdie me I seem to have sprained my ankle" character. She's somehow more pathetic than that and spends most of the movie simpering. Do you remember having a really awkward conversation with someone where they clearly have nothing to say to you so they say a bunch of random things quickly in a breathy frightened voice? That's every line Bella has in this film and it adds to the awkwardness of the dialogue. Though the blame doesn't like solely on Kristen Stewart's shoulders, the cast we have set out before us makes the cast of the average "Smallville" episode look Oscar-worthy.
Robert Pattinson's performance is almost passable at times but he mostly just broods and smoulders for the duration of the film. His line delivery is a slightly less painful version of Kristen's but it's not as annoying with him. He manages to be possesive, threatening, borderline abusive, and genuinely scary. The problem is he's not supposed to be doing any of that. In fact, if Meyer or the film-makers had had the balls to make this into a real horror movie they could've gone the mindfuck angle and made a truly disturbing and good horror movie.
Billy Burke actually does a reasonably good job as Bella's father and stands out as one of the 3 or 4 people who have an acting ability. Another of those, quite surprisingly, is Tyler Lautner who plays Jacob Black a Native American boy who lives on the local Indian reservation. He happens to be the only actor in the entire film who's capable of acting like a real teenager.
Then of course there's the "villain" of this piece. Toward the end of the movie we meet James, played by cam Gigandet who is quite possibly the least threatening antagonist ever. Maybe if he didn't look like he just escaped from an LA night club or looked less like a runway model (that's not a complement) or managed to be half as threatening as Edward is, but he's not. You never feel any sense of danger whatsoever from the character which isn't really the actor's fault but he certainly doesn't help matters by not being scary in the least.
Robert Pattinson's performance is almost passable at times but he mostly just broods and smoulders for the duration of the film. His line delivery is a slightly less painful version of Kristen's but it's not as annoying with him. He manages to be possesive, threatening, borderline abusive, and genuinely scary. The problem is he's not supposed to be doing any of that. In fact, if Meyer or the film-makers had had the balls to make this into a real horror movie they could've gone the mindfuck angle and made a truly disturbing and good horror movie.
Billy Burke actually does a reasonably good job as Bella's father and stands out as one of the 3 or 4 people who have an acting ability. Another of those, quite surprisingly, is Tyler Lautner who plays Jacob Black a Native American boy who lives on the local Indian reservation. He happens to be the only actor in the entire film who's capable of acting like a real teenager.
Then of course there's the "villain" of this piece. Toward the end of the movie we meet James, played by cam Gigandet who is quite possibly the least threatening antagonist ever. Maybe if he didn't look like he just escaped from an LA night club or looked less like a runway model (that's not a complement) or managed to be half as threatening as Edward is, but he's not. You never feel any sense of danger whatsoever from the character which isn't really the actor's fault but he certainly doesn't help matters by not being scary in the least.
It was bound to happen. T-shirt!Okay so the whole point of this story taking place in Forks, Washington is because there's rarely direct sunlight and it's the optimal place for vampires to reside. (Yes, this movie is nothing but the punchline for a joke about the Pacific Northwest.) Yet every shot we see is brightly lit and overexposed and bleached out like a British TV drama. And while we're on the subject of sunlight, when we finally see the whole "vampires sparkle in the sun like diamonds" (Note to everyone, David Bowie is a vampire) it just looks like Pattinson rubbed crisco on his face, it's a horrible effect.
Then there are the flashbacks periodically throughout the film some that have happened, some that haven't, are all played like the murder scenes in an episode of "CSI." In fact the one of Edward's turning is rather unintentionally hilarious as Carlisle gently whispers in his ear and then appears to give him a hickey.
One of the big selling points for parents everwhere is that "Twilight" is free of sex which goes against the retarded stereotype invented by writers who are far worse than Stephanie Meyer like Anne Rice and Laurel K. Hamilton which are nothing but fangs and buttfuckery. But for a series so free of sex each touch, look, kiss, and moment between the two protagonists is so deliberately sexual it's hard to miss. In fact toward the end of the film as Edward is sucking the venom out of Bella's hand and she is apparently in excruciating pain the look on her face and body language make it look as though she's having a particularly earth-shattering orgasm.
It also suffers from what Hollywood seems to think a small town is. Small towns are not just small cities with less people, they are not populated with an ethnically diverse crowd of upper-middle class yuppies. They are redneck villas with maybe one or two people that aren't white and everyone calls everyone "ya'll." Get it right for once.
Also let's talk about vampire baseball. Vampire baseball sounds like an idea that Tracy Jordan off of "30 Rock" would come up with for a movie. But even Tracy is more intelligent than to make such a blatantly ridiculous thing the cause of the conflict in the movie. It is a dumb segway from romantic build-up (of which there is none, Bella thinks Edward is hot, Edward thinks Bella looks tasty, that's it) to the "danger" of the film.
One problem the movie shares with the novel is that it's too damn long. The movie is over two hours which should be reserved for movies with deep involved storylines, not something that can be told in an hour-long TV show length. I was begging to movie to stop by the time it ended.
Now this is not to say that "Twilight" is ALL bad. Director Catherine Hardwicke does seem to have a good grasp of how to direct a film (which she showed in spades with "The Nativity Story" and "Lords of Dogtown") and polished this turd as best she could. I'm kind of glad she got the shaft and doesn't have to be stuck with this horrible series for the next few years of her career. Then again, imdb.com has her next film pegged as an adaptation of James Patterson's "Maximum Ride" about experimental bird-teens. Yeah...
"You gon' get raped."So there you have it, "Twilight" is a bad movie. This is nothing to be surprised about, shitty movies based on shitty young adult books are a dime a dozen (look at "Eragon.") But I don't feel compelled to review most of them because we have an unwritten agreement that they don't bother me and I don't bother them. But nobody can shut the fuck up about the "Twilight" movie, and having read the book I knew there was no way it could be any better than the novel and I was right.
I however, don't hold this agains't the film. As I said, it's a bad book and thus a bad movie is natural, what annoys me is that everyone's treating it like it's the greatest thing ever made. There is nothing wrong with liking something bad so long as you realize that it has lots of shortcomings. I like "Street Fighter" with Raul Julia and Jean-Claude Van Damme but I don't even begin to think it's a good movie.
I give "Twilight" a 1 out of 5. So "Twilight" fans, I'm sorry if I pissed you off but one day you're going to grow up and realize that this movie and this book really is, at best, incredibly mediocre. Or maybe not, maybe you'll always think ti's the best thing since Jesus invented sliced bread and you'll remember this review as the most insulting moment of your life. But for me...
...it was Tuesday.
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