THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN - PART 1 - Cronenberg meets Christian fundamentalists

THE TWILIGHT SAGA, based on Stephenie Meyer's turgid novels, and starring the pretty R-Patz, gay icon Taylor Lautner, and professionally bored Kristen Stewart, is critic proof. It will rake in millions upon millions at the box office from hysterical hordes of narcissistic and insecure teenage girls, who dream of being fought over by not one, but two dishy boys - but all, let us not forget, in the safest possible manner.  Because these are films and novels about the wisdom of abstinence until there's a ring on your finger. The result in a saga that have been, up until this instalment, utterly anaemic - foregoing a potent gothic mix of subversive sex and death for the bland trite stylings of Sweet Valley High.  

It comes, then, as something of a relief, to find mopy Bella (Stewart) finally tying the knot with rich cool vampire Edward (Pattinson).  To be sure, in order for her to cope with his powerful vampiric sex drive he's going to have to turn her into a vampire too, and this clearly pisses off Edward's hot-blooded werewolf rival Jacob (Lautner) although apparently not Bella's mum and dad.  For reasons I never really understand, though, Bella decides not to be turned before her honeymoon, and so go at it with gay abandon, but after her honeymoon. The implications of this are that she - beaten and bruised by her vampiric husband - still begs him for sex (sex, that we never see mind you, despite waiting for eons of boring abstemious cinema time) - and then falls pregnant with a half-breed child that kills her as he grows inside of her.  Of course, she won't consider an abortion, this being a book penned by a writer with a specific moral agenda, and the denouement of the film is a kind of explicit body horror that comes straight from the cinema of Cronenberg.

The resulting film is both severely tedious, embarrassingly low-rent, but also provocative. The first hour is a drippy super-romantic marriage sequence that feels like an endless montage and advert for interior decorating.  The honeymoon is similarly out of Conde Nast traveller, and annoyingly coy.  The acting is sub-par. The dialogue stilted.  The second hour of the film then trips into all out body horror that was satisfyingly gory - brilliant FX turning Stewart into an emaciated victim of internal vampiricism - followed by a birthing scene that will turn anyone celibate.  How to reconcile the two?  How to sit still through the boring first hour and twenty minutes before you get to the gore?  By pondering the provocative messages we are sending our teenage girls by giving them a popular culture that combines the famous-for-being-slutty Paris Hilton and Snooky and the equally extreme abstemiousness of the Twilight Saga.  How on earth are they meant to have a healthy attitude toward sex and toward their own physical health? What messages are they getting from seeing a battered Bella beg for sex? I mean, for fuck's sake, shouldn't we be telling them that when a guy leaves you battered, you leave? 

The whole thing is frankly at once highly silly and camp, and yet at the same time, deeply deeply disturbing.  Let's just get Part 2 over with.

BREAKING DAWN PART 1 is on global release.

TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE - a world of bad hair colour and worse CGI

So, in an evening of girlie bonding my early twenties cousin and I went to see the third installment of the immensely popular Twilight series, ECLIPSE. Not that either of us could be called fan-girls. I’ve read the first book and seen the first two films: my cousin had only seen the first film. We proclaim no membership of either Team Jacob or Team Edward. But, along we went, open-minded, and if nothing else, happy to be in the lovely big Extreme screens in the Vue Westfield. Two hours later we emerged from a world of bad hair-dye, bad CGI effects and hammy dialogue. For this, my friends, is not a movie of high quality trying to appeal to the neutral movie-goer. Rather, ECLIPSE takes its audience’s buy-in for granted and delivers a workman-like condensed version of the novel, with the cheapest visual effects and wigs it can find. Seriously – the wolves bounce through the forests with little heft, much like Ang Lee’s HULK – and the crimes against hair colour perpetrated by Emmett Cullen and Rosalie Hale disgrace a big-budget film.

As the movie opens, we see our heroine Bella Swan torn between the two boys who love. The first is Edward Cullen – ancient vampire in the body of teen heart-throb – who won’t deflower her until they’re married, and for whom she would have to become a vampire. The second candidate is Jacob Black – ridiculously buff teen werewolf – who is happy to keep Bella warm (sadly, this saga being ludicrously chaste, we can read no double-entendre here) and offer her a romantic life that doesn’t involve dying. So follow two hours of hackneyed dialogue as each boy declares his love for Bella, and Bella looks sulky in response. At the end of which, she declares that the decision was never really about who she loved more but about who she wanted to be. This struck me as a rather unconvincing last minute attempt to give movie that is basically about a chick being dependent on two guys for her physical safety (evil mean red-headed vampire wants to kill her with her “new-born” vampire army) some kind of feminist cred. It would’ve bought into it more if during the course of the film, Bella had talked about this journey to self-realisation with her dad or her friends, or the two boys in her life. Overall then, I remain unconvinced by the whole Twilight phenomenon. The heroine is sulky: the vampires are unsexy: the werewolves on steroids: the CGI sucks: and basically very very little happens indeed. For the life of me I can’t figure out why David Slade, director of edgy indie hit HARD CANDY, would want to helm such a mainstream, banal movie, other than, of course, for the paycheque.

Additional tags: Taylor Lautner, Anna Kendrick, Ashley Greene, Elizabeth Reaser

TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE is on global release.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON - chiz moan groan

I have two problems with the TWILIGHT saga. In my review of the first flick, I summed up the first: "Instead of lashings of sex and death and sexy death and death-inducing sex, we get a lot of holding hands and big declarations of love but precious little rumpy-pumpy. Frankly, instead of all the narcissistic angst I would've far preferred the heroes to go and have some healthy sex and get over themselves. But that, my friends, kills the goose that laid the golden royalty cheques."

My second fundamental problem with the TWILIGHT saga is that it's completely dishonest. It's meant to be about pure love and abstinence but at the same time it makes no bones about showing buff guys stripped to the waist. Far from being about spiritual, emotional love, it's as much about the objectifying lust-objects as Baywatch. The only PC touch is that it's the men rather than the women who get their kit off.

These twin problems result in books and films that are as constrained as their characters: teens who want to jump each others bones but can't. And that leads to frustration on the part of the characters and the viewers.

NEW MOON opens with teen vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) abandoning his human girlfriend Bella Swann (Kristen Stewart) because he fears he can't keep her safe. So follows about ninety minutes of Bella going being depressed and boring. The only time she breaks off from this emo behaviour is to say something assinine to the newly buff teen were-wolf Jacob Black (newly buff Taylor Lautner). "You've gotten...um...really buff" etc. Unfortuntely (ironically?) given the lack of on-screen chemistry between Bella-Edward or Bella-Jacob the whole love triangle thing never gets off the ground. In the final half hour we get something that looks like narrative momentum. Edward's sister has had a vision of Bella committing suicide, which has prompted Edward to do the same, Romeo & Juliet stylee. Aforementioned sister and Bella thus rush to Italy (for no other reason than that it looks picturesque) to prevent Edward from inciting some powerful vampires from killing him. All this might have been quite dramatic were it not for the fact that Michael Sheen is evidently taking the piss and hamming up his performance as the super-powerful Vampire king or whatever he is meant to be.

All in all, a movie that is dull, assinine, dull, picturesque, camp, dull.

And there are how many more of these to go?

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON is on global release.

TWILIGHT - sugar-free gum

Where to begin? Maybe with the commercially successfully but critically more equivocally received teen novels from Stephenie Meyer. TWILIGHT is the first in a series of novels that spice up the typical SWEET VALLEY HIGH obsessions of teen dating and who's going to take who to the Prom with a hint of vampiricism. And boy is it merely a hint. Instead of lashings of sex and death and sexy death and death-inducing sex, we get a lot of holding hands and big declarations of love but precious little rumpy-pumpy. Frankly, instead of all the narcissistic angst I would've far preferred the heroes to go and have some healthy sex and get over themselves. But that, my friends, kills the goose that laid the golden royalty cheques.

Then we get to the movie. Now, I suspect that the movie will be super-popular with the target demographic because it stays very faithful to the book. (And yes, I did read the novel. It's slight - takes around 3 hours - not well-written - but it's fairly engaging. Most disturbing, every one of my tween nieces had a copy.) Our heroine Bella Swan moves from sunny Phoenix to gloomy Forks to stay with her dad when her mum remarries. Soon all the local boys are asking her out, but she only has eyes for a moody but dazzlingly good-looking boy called Edward Cullen - a member of a family of vampires who choose not to hunt humans and fight against their monstrous nature.  The book spends a while going through the "does he like me or doesn't he" angst but the film admirably compresses this material. On the plus side we get right to the action, wherein some less enlightened vampire trackers decide to devour Bella and incite Edward into the mother of all fights, but a big negative is that we miss/skip over one of the nicest scenes in the book, where Edward tests how far he can be intimate with Bella and not be overcome by his desire to suck out her blood. If anything there is less intimacy in the film than in the book! 

Arguing the merits of the film to the fanbase is quite simply a waste of time, judging by the oohs and aaghs than greeted the title card! But for the parental units suckered into a viewing (I was designated driver for eight hormonally charged tweens) what hope is there? Not much I have to say. The direction, from Catherine Hardwicke, is pretty ham-fisted, closer to the abysmal THE NATIVITY STORY than the brilliantly scabrous THIRTEEN. She clearly can't direct action, her camera swoops where it should be still, and the CGI effects - notably Edward's dazzling skin in sunlight and the rapid running - are all very low-rent. The acting is similarly clunky. The lead actors are devoid of charisma and depict angst as constipation. Hardwicke does herself no favours by casting natural brunettes and then bleaching them to within an inch of their lives - it just looks cheap and unnatural. And, frankly, the vampire family are meant to look stunningly beautiful, and these actors don't. IMDB says the role of Edward was originally going to Henry Cavill till he was deemed too old. True, but at least he has the requisite classical beauty. 

Other than the problems with the individual nuts and bolts, my big problem remains that this is a vampire movie that lacks any passion. And so, you're just left with a really dull movie about self-obsessed moody teens. It left me hankering for the vampire movies of my youth - movies with passion, comedy and peril - movies like THE LOST BOYS. Apparently I wasn't the only one. The DVD store next to the movie theatre was sold out, having had a run on copies and requests for more from disgruntled olds!

TWILIGHT is on release in the US, Canada, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Malaysia, the UAE, Estonia, Latvia, Thailand, Indonesia, the UK, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Portugal, Iceland, Poland, Spain, South Korea, Australia, Russia, Lithuania, Taiwan, Vietnam, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, Brazil, the UK and Venezuela. It opens next week in Croatia and New Zealand. It opens on New Years Day in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Finland, Romania and South Africa. It opens on January 8th in France, Switzerland, Greece, Norway and Poland. It opens on January 15th in Germany, Slovakia, Austria and Bulgaria. It opens on January 5th in Turkey, Denmark and Ecuador and on April 4th in Japan.