I didn’t realize New Moon was a comedy

All this week I pur­posely stayed away from the spoil­ers, the leaked clips, the early reviews, the 3 a.m. tweets, and the rav­ing fan­girl Twi­hards in social­me­di­a­land.  I wanted to see New Moon with­out my already low opin­ion of Stephe­nie Meyer and her ilk taint­ing my expe­ri­ence.  So tonight I cast aside the Twilulz and gave New Moon a chance.

I want my $10.00 back.

New Moon started badly, ended badly, with plenty of suck in between. Now, I real­ize The Twi­light Saga isn’t exactly pro­found lit­er­a­ture.  I also real­ize I’m about ten years older than this franchise’s tar­get audi­ence.  But I also know the dif­fer­ence between good and bad movies, and New Moon is a ter­ri­ble film.  The Twi­hards must be happy, though.  If they were hop­ing for a per­fect smoldering-glare-by-smoldering-glare trans­la­tion of the book, New Moon delivers.

It’s not like the con­cept of vam­pires ver­sus were­wolves is any­thing new, nei­ther is the injec­tion of a trite love tri­an­gle.  But when you take already-ridiculous sub­ject mat­ter and try to turn it into a seri­ous film, usu­ally one of two things hap­pens:  1) You get some­thing akin to Under­world .  2) Hilar­ity.  New Moon col­lapsed under the weight of its own attempt at being seri­ous.  There were some moments when I felt like I was watch­ing One Life to Live .  At other times, an after-school spe­cial.   Sure, I laughed dur­ing the parts where I was sup­posed to laugh.  There were plenty of inten­tion­ally funny moments pep­pered through­out the film, and these I enjoyed.  But I knew the movie was bad when I couldn’t stop laugh­ing at the seri­ous parts.  I wasn’t alone, either.  I heard snorts and sti­fled gig­gles all around me.

I found these bits espe­cially lol-worthy:

• Grandma Swan’s thou­sand yard stare.
• Edward Cullen’s fond­ness for walk­ing in slow-motion.
• CGI were­wolves emote sur­pris­ingly well.  Almost as good as Fal­cor in the Nev­erend­ing Story!
• Throngs of ambigu­ously gay shirt­less wolfmen.
• Cam­era shots that make every­thing seem EPIC.
• Bella and Edward frol­ick­ing through the woods. Yes, frol­ick­ing.
• The Volturi’s drag makeup.
  
• Bella is evi­dently a Mac geek.  No won­der I hate her.

And those were just some of the good parts.  Aside from mak­ing me laugh inap­pro­pri­ately, the film’s music was another sore point.  The score seemed so out of place in most scenes, it was almost laugh­able.  In other places it was weirdly silent.  I really missed Carter Burwell’s beau­ti­ful Bella’s Lul­laby theme from the first movie; I wish they had reprised it here.  In fact there was no trace of any kind of theme at all in New Moon ; just the occa­sional soap opera-ish strings (you know, dur­ing the ” smol­der­ing glares ”) and and end­less playlist of sedate, instantly for­get­table indie songs.  This is one ille­gal down­load I’ll skip.

New Moon has a run­ning time of 2 hours.  By the 90 minute mark, I was pray­ing for it to end.  Say what you want about Cather­ine Hardwicke’s gritty direct­ing style, but she did a hell of a lot bet­ter on Twi­light than Chris Weitz on New Moon .  It’s sad that I have to say this, but New Moon makes Twi­light —a much lower bud­get film, I might add—look like an Oscar nom­i­nee. I don’t sup­pose it’s entirely Chris Weitz’s fault, though, con­sid­er­ing the source.  New Moon is a shitty book, ergo, New Moon is a shitty movie.  I guess you can’t pol­ish a turd.

God, I hate being right all the time!

The New Moon Trailer: OMG Squee!*

*Dis­claimer: I do not ever say things like ” squee ” or other words usu­ally belong­ing to the ver­nac­u­lar of 12 year old  fan­girls, but felt the dis­claimer was nec­es­sary to save me from hav­ing to explain myself to idiots who can’t tell when I’m being sarcastic.

Here’s what all the fuss is about:

If the trailer is any indi­ca­tion, I believe  New Moon is going to suck and suck hard , but it’s really not the filmmaker’s faults.  My lack of enthu­si­asm for the movie can be blamed on author Stephe­nie Meyer’s dread­ful source mate­r­ial.  For your con­ve­nience, and for my own per­sonal amuse­ment, let’s re-cap Meyer’s super-epic plot to the sequel of Twi­light , shall we?

• It’s Bella Swan’s birth­day and her vam­pire friends throw her a party at their digs.
• At the party, Bella gets a paper cut.
• Jasper, one of the newest vam­pires, can’t con­trol him­self when he sees the blood.
• Pre­dictably, he goes into a rage and lunges for Bella.
• Bella’s sexy vam­pire boyfriend Edward Cullen (pause to swoon here) saves the day…
• …But then tells Bella he must leave her for­ever in order to keep her safe, then peaces out.
• Bella can’t han­dle him leav­ing and goes all emo, bor­der­line suicidal.
• That’s okay though, because there’s yet another sexy guy, Jacob Black, just wait­ing around to take Edward’s place.
• And Jacob just hap­pens to be a werewolf.
• Jacob tries to get Bella to “drop that zero and get with the hero” but she ain’t havin’ none, and con­tin­ues to mope around and do reck­less things, like ride motor­cy­cles and go cliff diving.
• At some point Jacob the Were­wolf saves Bella from Lau­rent and Vic­to­ria, two ran­dom vam­pires turned vil­lians, recy­cled from the plot of Twi­light .
• Then out of nowhere, thanks to some weird, poorly-explained mixup cour­tesy of Edward’s sis­ter Alice, who can see the future but fucks it up som­times, Edward thinks Bella com­mit­ted suicide.
• In true Romeo and Juliet fash­ion, Edward decides he can’t live with­out Bella either, and runs off to Italy to kill him­self too.
• But Edward’s a vam­pire, and sui­cide is eas­ier said than done.  Rather than try to explain about the evil Vol­turi and the other bull­shit sec­ondary char­ac­ters that Meyer pulls out of her ass when she needs a plot, Edward’s sui­cide attempt can best be expressed as: DEATH BY SPARKLES.
• Just in the nick of time, Bella saves Edward from expos­ing him­self thus sav­ing him from the Vol­turi and there’s a big dra­matic reunite­ment scene.
• Some other unim­por­tant crap hap­pens in Italy, then Bella, Edward, and the rest of the vam­pires return home.
• Bella wants des­per­ately to become a vam­pire, and so she calls a Super­friends meet­ing where all the vam­pires take turns vot­ing on whether or not it should happen.
• And like the end­ing of  Twi­light , Meyer recy­cles the same “does Bella become a vam­pire or not?” cliffhanger in New Moon .
• The end!

It’s mind-blowing stuff, I know.  If you really want, feel free to read  my less than glow­ing review of the  New Moon book over at Ama­zon.  It’s just all so ridicu­lous, even for a fan­tasy book based on vam­pires.  Most of the book’s 563 pages is spent with Bella, as she pines away for her lost vam­pire love, and let me tell you, it was hell read­ing through page after page of this:

“I was not allowed to think of him. That was some­thing I tried to be very strict about. Of course I slipped; I was only human. But I was get­ting bet­ter, and so the pain was some­thing I could avoid for days at a time now. The trade­off was the never-ending numb­ness. Between pain and noth­ing, I’d cho­sen noth­ing.”

So by default,  New Moon the film should at least be a slight improve­ment over New Moon the book, if only because the nature of the media spares you the lit­er­ary tor­ture.  But Hol­ly­wood isn’t dumb.  It knows there’s good money to be made by cater­ing to the overzeal­ous female fan­base that made the first film such a suc­cess.   Twi­light fans want hot vam­pires, mushy romance, and plenty of Rob Pat­tin­son screen time.  Make no mis­take, New Moon will be one big fan­girl orgy from start to finish.

But why take my word for it when you can read real reviews of the trailer writ­ten by (what I hope are) teenaged girls?

“ok WOW!!! new moon is going to be AH-Mazing, i love kristen’s face when she say ” kiss me” her eye­brow is funny! and the were­wolf, i didnt even expect it to be that big, but OMg i love it!! but tay­lor GOOOOSSH!! i thought he was Hott, now he like fire! but edward was really sad!cant wait! woooo and bella looked eally pretty”

“The part when she got the paper cut and jasper tried to get her but, edward pushed her was so intensed i was like O.O”

“omg omg omg not going to faint but omg. that as freak­ing awsume. may i faint from how hot jacob is. p.s. i think the wolfy looks friendly”

“OMG! This movie looks even bet­ter than Twi­light! It’s dri­ving me crazy cause I wanna see it so bad! Idk if I can wait for Novem­ber 20 to come! Btw: Jacob, so hot!”

Well there you have it.

The Twilight Effect

Last Fri­day night, I dragged three of my girl­friends out to the movies to see a lit­tle film called Twi­light . Per­haps you’ve heard of it?

If you haven’t, I will assume you’re either a shut-in or a male.  After all, it was a 75% female-dominated audi­ence that con­tributed to Twilight’s stag­ger­ing $70 mil­lion open­ing week­end , a huge coupe for direc­tor Cather­ine Hard­wicke and Sum­mit Enter­tain­ment.  To help put that fig­ure in per­spec­tive, Twilight’s suc­cess ranks in the top 4 Novem­ber box office fig­ures of all time–ahead of sum­mer block­buster Trans­form­ers, and the lat­est James Bond flick . As it turns out, Twi­light also boasts the high­est rank­ing box office debut ever for a female direc­tor.  Con­sid­er­ing the eco­nomic cri­sis we’re sup­posed to be in, these num­bers are even more impres­sive.  So impres­sive, in fact, that Sum­mit Enter­tain­ment has already announced plans to begin pre-production on Twilight’s sequel, New Moon.

But none of this news comes as a sur­prise to Twilight’s legions of diehard fans , whose fierce dis­play of buy­ing power pre­vi­ously helped pro­pel all four books of The Twi­light Saga onto the best­seller list, and keep them there, mak­ing author Stephe­nie Meyer a huge suc­cess.  Even Eclipse, Meyer’s third book of the series, dethroned Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hal­lows from the best­seller list.

But let’s back up to a few months ago, before I had so much as read a sin­gle page of this hugely pop­u­lar series, before I saw the movie (twice), and before I knew I was on Team Edward, or that there even was a Team Edward.  I remem­ber casu­ally surf­ing the inter­webs, mind­ing my busi­ness as usual, and com­ing across an occa­sional Twi­light glim­mer: a movie ad, a book review, some obsessed fangirl’s glit­ter­ing “Bella ♥‘s Edward” forum sig­na­ture.  It was easy enough to ignore–at first.  But it wasn’t long before Twi­light pro­pa­ganda seemed to creep into every facet of every web site I ever vis­ited.  (My hat’s off to whomever is behind Twilight’s aggres­sive web mar­ket­ing cam­paign, by the way.)  So I guess it was inevitable that I’d even­tu­ally click one of the ads and watch the movie trailer, right?

My reac­tion went some­thing like this:

• That looks pretty cool, I guess…
• And that vam­pire guy is pretty hot!
• Oh hey, it’s Cedric Dig­gory from Harry Pot­ter and the Gob­let of Fire.
• I’m a Harry Pot­ter fan, maybe I’ll like this movie too?
• And Paramore is on the sound­track!? I LOVE Paramore!
• Novem­ber 21st? What a coin­ci­dence, because that’s the same week­end Half-Blood Prince was sup­posed to come out…

The next thing I knew, I was headed for the local library to check out the first book, which I soon dis­cov­ered was a com­plete impos­si­bil­ity.  Checked out; on hold; back-ordered; trans­ferred to another branch–every sin­gle one of the fifty-something copies fell into one of these cat­e­gories.  What was going on here?  Why is Twi­light so pop­u­lar?  Like many unini­ti­ated fans before me, I set out to unravel this mys­tery.  Hell, I thought, maybe if the books are that good, I should just buy them.

So I did.

And that’s how I dis­cov­ered the secret sauce, if you will, of what makes The Twi­light Saga so suc­cess­ful.  The recipe con­sists of teen angst, sex­ual ten­sion, impos­si­bly good-looking main char­ac­ters liv­ing impos­si­bly ide­al­is­tic lives, and a heavy dose of romance deliv­ered to the sap­pi­est degree pos­si­ble.  Sim­ply put, these books are pure escapism.  No real sub­stance, but no real need for it, either.  I could elab­o­rate fur­ther, but I’ve already done that  here , here , and here .  Yet despite how unre­mark­able these books really are, I spent an entire week con­sumed by them.  And I’ve already seen the movie twice.  And I’m anx­iously await­ing its sequel.

What the hell have I got­ten myself into?