Twilight Is A Big Practical Joke Part II

Ok, I have sushi, a pot of jasmine tea and I took a nap this afternoon, I think I am prepared to finish my scathing review of Twilight.

*takes deep breath*

I think I have fully covered the heinous acting in this first of a series of movies (hooray!), so why don't we go ahead and move right along to the film-making itself.

Visually, the movie makes no sense.  Points for setting a story in the stunning Pacific northwest, but negative points for not using the incredible landscape to it's fullest extent.  And major negative points for shooting so much of the movie on a sound stage.  Just about every scene when characters are in a clearing in the forest is on a sound stage.  You're telling me out of all the expanse of wilderness in that part of the country, you couldn't find one clearing that suited your needs?  I know exactly what happened.  Someone was too lazy to go explore so they said, "Meh, let's just build what we want."

Lazy. Film-making.

I gotta say, I have never found the whole pale-vampire thing attractive.  If I went out with a vampire, it would have to be a black guy, cause a man that is paler than me would make me feel like I was sleeping with a fish.  That makes me think about the Mafia and no one wants to sleep with the fishes.  That's why its a threat.

This vampire makeup is worse than most.  Robert Pattinson is already kinda weird looking (by the way, what happened to him?  He was all kinds of attractive in Goblet of Fire), but with the stark white make up it makes him look like his face has no dimension, thus making it hard for the camera to distinguish any features which results in his mouth looking huge and his eyes looking like they aren't quite even.

The rest of the vampire clan is the same, everyone looks really ill with strange uneven faces.  And you can actually see the makeup, where it's been caked on.

And no one's hair EVER MOVES.  There is so much product and makeup that the vampires look like they spend hours getting ready to leave the house.  No one (not even Bella) looks effortlessly attractive.

The script is absolutely terrible.  Like I said in my previous post, I can't speak to the book and what was written there, but if its anything like the script it is not good promotional material.  For example, here is one of the first interactions between Edward and Bella.

"You enjoying the rain?"

"You're asking me about the weather?"

"Yeah, I guess I am."

"Well, I don't really like the rain?"

Yeah, baby, sparks are FLYING.

At another point, Bella, her two little friends whose names I didn't bother to remember and our flat-faced Edward are standing outside a restaurant.  Here is the exchange that takes place.

"I should get Bella something to eat."

"Yeah, you should."

"Yeah, I should eat something."

"Yeah, Bella, you should get something to eat."

"So yeah, I'll go eat something."

Right after Edward stops those scary men from bothering Bella (barf, a retarded rabbit could have dealt with those guys), they have this exchange.

"Quick, say something to distract me from going back there and ripping those guys' heads off." (Yeah, sure, Edward.)

"You should put your seat belt on."

"You should put YOUR seat belt on."

I will use my powers of super awesome future-telling to suss out their conversation an hour later.

"Well, you should put your seat belt on!"

"Yeah, so why don't you put on your seat belt?"

"Why aren't you wearing your seat belt?  You should put it on."

"Shouldn't you have your seat belt on?"

"Seat belt. Put it on."

And you should never have your characters talking about things that haven't happened.  For example, at one point Edward takes Bella aside and tells her that they shouldn't be friends anymore.  There is nothing leading up to this that would make anyone think there was anything resembling a friendship between these two characters.  They really look like they have an intense problem with each other.  Not great from a couple of people who are supposed to have such an intense love for each other that it rivals the laws of existence itself.  This is like that time a friend of mine told me he had gotten engaged to his girlfriend and instead of being happy I made a face like someone had put earwax in my mouth.

So he brings her over to his house to meet his "family".  Then after another scene of awkward bantering with the fam, Edward takes her to his room, only to toss her on his back and forcibly drag her up into the treetops.  Now, this could have been an intensely romantic scene.  However, it is just a repeat of everything we've seen before, two people being awkward around each other, only now we're at the top of a pine tree.

And during their little "love montage" when we should be seeing the two of them growing closer together, all we see is more floundering.  Edward is sitting there, playing piano.  Bella is sitting off to the side, looking incredibly bored.  And the light is streaming in through the window, but for some reason his glittery acne doesn't show up.

Continuity, people.

And, ok, I understand that these books were written by a Mormon who is trying to convince teenagers not to have sex before marriage.  But a vampire movie without awesome, nasty sex?  Not even any real kissing?  Fuck.  That.  Not to mention that to actually be in a relationship where you can't kiss the other person is completely stupid.  And no sex until marriage?  The reason we have sex before we get married is 1) there is nothing more natural than sex and it is not evil and 2) if we don't have sexual compatibility with the person we marry we sign up for a living hell.  I can't think of a worse fate than being married to someone who was bad in bed.  The message of this movie seems to be, "We don't have to touch each other at all, we can just talk!"

That is abnormal and hugely upsetting.  Not that I am eager to see either one of these actors in a carnal situation, but let's be honest.  They'd be fucking like rabbits.

Ok, and the notion that Carlisle is a doctor who only changes people who can't be saved is ridiculous.  This man has been a doctor for hundreds of years.  Doctors lose patients all the time.  How many thousands of people has he changed into vampires over the years?  This is a huge problem!  The man is a menace.  And if he is just indiscriminately turning people in vampires all willy nilly, how does he know he's not changing someone who'll be a real danger to society?  Just because he can't stand to loose a patient.  

See, that would be a much cooler story.  A vampire who changes someone who turns out to be a serial killer and then he has to stop him/her.  That's copyrighted by me, by the way.

Not to mention that he doesn't really seem to be doing any good.  For example, Edward was changed because he was dying, and now he is a whiny little shit who laments his immortality all the time.  That's another thing, why is it that all vampires are so torn up about being immortal?    Why don't they have the most awesome life?  I would travel and learn and read and experience life in every way I possibly could.  But no, the whole vampire guilt thing takes hold and apparently all you can do is pretend to be a teenager and go to high school for the rest of eternity.

The baseball scene.

What.  The.  Fuck.

That's all I have to say about that.

Let's just go ahead and skip to that final "battle" scene.

When Bella is getting the shit beat out of her in her old ballet studio (um, why?), again, the movie fails.  For almost two hours, the movie has emphatically failed to make us connect to the main character, so when she is nearing death, I couldn't care less.

Vampire venom?  Like, vampires are snakes?  So, suck out the poison?  I hate to point this out, but that technique doesn't even work on snake bites.  Its like someone heard about this "cure" second hand and thought it would be a good idea to use it in the story.  Um, no.

But, ok, we're going there.  Edward is going to suck out the vampire venom from Bella's arm.  While he's doing that, he gives the impression that not draining her blood completely is very difficult for him.  All this time, Carlisle is all, "Find the will to stop."  Um, why don't you just make him stop?  Perhaps this is a bad time to have him find the will within himself.  How many times has this happened before?

Ok, let's keep going forward, we're almost done! 

So she gets the shit beat out of her.  She wakes up in the hospital and the discovers that the official story to explain what happened is that she fell down a flight of stairs and hit a window.  Fell down a flight of stairs.  The go-to explanation of the domestic abuse world.  Cause let's teach America's youth (especially girls) that its OK for the person you love to hurt you.  Because if you really love him, it doesn't hurt, right?

And Edward is a total cock tease with the vampirism thing.  We all know you change her.  You have to, because vampires can't be with all old, wrinkled-up ladies.  Cause that's all weird and no one wants to think about old people having raunchy vampire sex.  Just turn her, for fuck's sake.  End the story!

And the soundtrack is nauseating.

Ok, there we go.  Done.

I watched New Moon as well.  Its shit.  Let's just end that there.

Twilight Is A Big Practical Joke Part I

**Editor's note** I will only be speaking about the movie "Twilight" in this post, not the books.  I have not read the books and therefore cannot speak to them.

Last night I sat myself in front of the TV with a large pot of tea and manacles to keep me on the couch and forced myself to watch the first Twilight movie.

This is the result.

Right from the beginning, there are major problems.  The first five minutes of the film made me wonder if I was watching a bad student film, but then I heard Kristen Stewart's halting speech and the unlit quality of the footage and I thought, wait, yes, I am watching Twilight.  

Cause everything's all twilight-y.  Oh.  I get it.

Its time to face it, ladies and gentleman.  Kristen Stewart is a blight upon the performing world.  She always looks like she is about to fall asleep, and in some shots she looks like her eyes are completely different sizes.  Those things I can forgive, that's genetic, she can't help that she looks like she has a developmental disease.  The biggest problem I have with her is her absolute, flat out refusal to even slightly connect with another actor.  She is like a black hole of creativity.  See, I don't actually think that Robert Pattinson is that bad of an actor.  I think (thank you, Bryan) that when he stops trying to be James Dean, he might be a good little performer.  But every single time he tries to create anything resembling story or interest, she emphatically denies him.  She is the cock block of acting.

She has this habit of expelling her breath right before she speaks, in the middle of her sentences and at the end of her lines, giving her a Christopher Walken-esque way of speaking.  There are many things wrong with this.  First off, the only person who can do something Christopher Walken-esque is Christopher Walken, and sometimes it doesn't even work for him.  So she just sounds like a halting idiot.  Another reason this is very wrong has to do with a basic acting tenant, one of the first things I learned as an actress.  If you have this habit of huffing out a sigh at the end of lines, you are losing any kind of emotion or feeling that you were building.  Breathing out like that is an escape from what you are feeling.  So anything that could have been going on in Miss Stewart is immediately negated.  

Whats more, the character that Stewart has created and expects people to watch and like has the least attractive personality and is the biggest buzz kill of anyone I have ever encountered.  She is never happy or excited about anything.  If anyone else is happy or excited about anything, she will give that person reason to not be happy or excited with one droopy-eyed stare.  If I was a teacher in this school, or an adult in her life, or just a person passing her on the street, I would take her aside and honestly recommend that she get counseling.  Think about it, today a teenager who acts like Bella would be a candidate for a school massacre.

There is a fundamental truism in creating a film that draws in the audience, that intrigues a large group of people to the extent to invest themselves in a clearly unrealistic set of circumstances.  That is, if your characters honestly care about what is going on, so will the public.  For two hours, Kristen Stewart doesn't give a flying fuck what is happening.  The fact that a movie is being made around her just seems like a growing annoyance for her.  Robert Pattinson senses this, that his scene partner couldn't care less, so he tries to compensate by investing himself 300%.  This makes him look like he is in a completely different movie and a terrible over-actor.  This comes across in anger (the easiest emotion to go to when you are pushing something out that you don't really feel) and petulance.  That is about as deep as we get with Edward Cullen.

You never want a character talking about emotions that no one sees, in either character.  At one point, Bella starts talking about all these things she sees in Edward, that he's really a good person and that she can trust him and all that bullshit.  We, as the audience, have no idea what she is talking about, because we have seen none of this.  All we've seen is a moody, distant man who is extremely mentally abusive.

Edward is also terrible at keeping his vampire-ism a secret.  The only reason Bella is able to figure out Edward's secret (script-wise, of course, I don't believe that Stewart would find her way out of a station wagon with a windows rolled down) is because he is really shit about keeping this secret.  Out of all the secrets a person can have, the one about you being an immortal who must feed on the blood of living creatures should be the one most closely kept.  He fucks up all the time, its a wonder that the whole country doesn't know that he's a vampire.  If I was a vampire, I would be subtle.  In over a hundred years, he still hasn't learned this.

I find it strange that when she figures it out, nothing in her behavior changes.  She doesn't seem to feel any closer to him, there is still a major amount of awkwardness between them.  You could see that he was expecting things in this awful relationship to improve, whereas nothing changes.  The revelation of his other-worldliness doesn't strike her  as awesome (the original definition) or incredible.  It was like he told her that he sometimes drinks Coke instead of Pepsi.

Let's think about that scene for a moment - the one where Edward is revealing himself in all his glory to the awestruck Bella. 

The idea that vampires have no problem with the sun but are revealed as different when in it is actually an interesting notion.  The idea that they glitter in sunlight is asinine and inane.  The visual created in the film doesn't look like diamonds, it looks like he has a very special and dangerous strain of cystic acne.  Not attractive.  

In this scene, he should be trying to scare Bella.  The role of this scene in the grand scheme of the story is to show that Edward is so in love with Bella, that scaring her away to spare her a life loving him is his primary goal.  He should be trying to scare the piss out of her.  He should be scared that he might actually succeed.  Apparently, the director thought they should forgo all that story shit and just have him dance around the woods, hitting trees and rocks like a petulant child, wailing about how much immortality sucks.  Not scary.

 . . . . 

Ok, this is going to have to be a two part-er, cause I don't have the energy to finish the rest of this diatribe tonight.  It's wearing me out, all the awful.

So, yeah, tune in tomorrow.