Yeah, it sucked Hulk balls.

[seriousfic]

Twilight and the first Terminator movie would actually make for a good double feature. Terminator has an action plot and a surprisingly meaty romance subplot, while Twilight flips it around (while still nakedly ripping off Terminator for the third act). Otherwise, Twilight is like an overly schmoopy fanfic that sticks around long after the drama has been resolved and the fade to black should've been cued. And it's adapted from a book! If that's what they left in, what they cut out must be pure... wait, I misquoted Simpsons.

Halfway through they're in love, and so we just get a bunch of treachy montages of them talking and hanging out set to treachy music (including one jaw-droppingly laugh-worthy scene of Edward playing the piano).

What's most shocking is that Twilight is like two movies in one. There's a cinema verite sorta movie about high school and a disaffected teenager and her divorcee dad (who I cannot stop thinking of as Sheriff Michael Biehn, even though he's not played by Michael Biehn) trying to reconnect. Then there's this vampire movie, with shockingly cheap special effects (MOTION BLUR!!!) and swooping camera angles and far too little fun for a subplot about a vampire foster family to have.

Oh, and the dude from Fastlane is the character who's built this surrogate vampire family, which is so interesting that it gets no explanation whatsoever. Man, I loved Fastlane. Speaking of my love for bad old TV shows, Alice looks so much like a young version of Ashley Scott's Helena Kyle that it becomes hilarious. And she jumps on people and breaks their necks. It's like a really weird BOPtv vampire AU.

The only scene with any real energy is the vampire baseball scene, which is the good sort of cracky, even if for some reason the future-seer isn't the one who bats (c'mon, she could oracle the pitch!). Then the bad vampires show up and the Mormons good vampires invite them to play a game of baseball. it climaxes in all the vampires hunched over, making jazz hands and hissy faces at each other like the director just shouted "Crazy!" "Cool!"

Oh, and there's a discretion pan away from their first kiss. Which just makes the underlying assumption that they had sex all the funnier. Must be way hardcore if they can't even show the kiss.

Sadly, the movie never follows through and Verheidens Stephenie Meyer's Heinlein. It kinda dips its toe in the water, like with a they-cannot-be-serious scene where Edward and Bella meet for the first time. Bella steps in front of a van, causing her hair to fly out like she's in a music video. It also causes a sheet of paper Edward is writing on to shoot up, so he has to suppress it. I am not making this up. It's the world's lowest-key erection joke!

Comments

[cissie-king.livejournal.com]

I find Internet Masochism fascinating. Here is this movie based on a crappy book for people who don't ask for much out of their vampire masturbatory aids. Everybody seemed to be dreading the existence of this thing from the get go, and yet it looks like half the people in my F-list went to see it just to see if their dread was justified. I don't get you, people.

Me? I'll rather see videos of my loved ones being beheaded by al-Qaeda than this thing.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I work for a theater, so I can see it without giving a dime to the Mormons.

[derawr.livejournal.com]

It...surprises you that this was bad?

On another note, my friends who have bad taste and love Twilight went to go see the movie last night and loved it. D:

The guy who plays Edward is awesome though. He says the funniest shit about the Twilight books and how much he hates them. I think he is trying to get fired.

[milleniumrex.livejournal.com]

It's probably not a good thing when the most investment the audience will have in a new release this week comes from the cartoon about the stage dog and the hyperactive hamster.

[scriviner.livejournal.com]

I personally really, REALLY don't want to watch this movie, but my wife on the other hand is insisting we see it.

I'm doomed.

[v5-vendetta.livejournal.com]

As I said to a friend of mine, I'm going to write my own Twilight. It'll be a deconstruction, in which I make it very clear --- hell, I'll beat the reader over the head with my point --- that the characters are very, very, very screwed up in the way they think, the way they interact with each other, and the way they respond to the world. The female romantic lead is pathologically insecure to the point that she's a doormat for anyone that shows any genuine-seeming interest in her. The male romantic lead is a raging psychotic who deals with centuries of bitter sorrow by becoming a raging psychotic with attachment issues. The "bad vampires" are simply trying to rid themselves of the pain of having human hearts even if their bodies are simultaneously less and more than human. Et cetera. And everybody I just mentioned will be called out on it, repeatedly.