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.

30 DAYS OF NIGHT - not so scary but suitably moody

30 DAYS OF NIGHT is an underwheming vampire flick based on the Niles/Templesmith graphic novels and directed by David Slade of HARD CANDY infamy. It's set in an Alaskan town so far north that every winter the town plunges into unbroken darkness for thirty days. This allows Slade to conjure up some arresting visuals, in which vampires are sillhouetted against dark grey skies, and blood spatters on snow-covered roads. It's a gloomy, sinister world. The vampires are somewhat less impressive. Their leader, played by Danny Huston in a buzz-cut, white shirt and dark black coat, looks uncannily like Neil Tennant. And in general, there's none of the sexual sub-text that we expect from our vampire flicks. In fact, this is an altogether subdued picture. For the first forty minutes or so, we see rather little of the vampires and the violence is rather discreet. Things do amp up toward the nicely off-centre ending, but it's never jump-out-of-your-seat scary. Josh Hartnett leads a cast of valiant townsfolk trying to hide until sunlight comes and he doesn't do a bad job. But the stand-out character is Ben Foster's psychotic human who wants to be a vampire. He spits out prophesies of death in a Southern accent and is infinitely more creepy than any of the actual beasties. Still, Foster's agent should warn him that he's in danger of becoming typecast after similarly brilliant but similarly, well, similar, performances in ALPHA DOG and 3:10 TO YUMA.

30 DAYS OF NIGHT is on release in the US, UK, Canada, the Philippines, the Czech Republic and Lithuania. It opens in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Iceland next weekend. It opens later in November in Greece, Turkey, Brazil, Estonia, Egypt, Finland and Taiwan. It opens in December in Norway and Singapore and in January in New Zealand and Argentina.

HARD CANDY - trash

It makes me laugh to think what little it takes for a movie to kick up a fuss in the western hemisphere. Take for example HARD CANDY. The content seems provocative. A 14 year-old girl meets a 32-year old fashion photographer in an internet chatroom. He takes her to his house and allows her to mix alcoholic drinks. He wakes up, having been drugged, tied up and threatened with castration as a punishment for his alleged paedophilia. Little Red Riding Hood (no obvious metaphor with the wardrobe there, then!) is now the avenger. The movie should have been a thriller played out literally and metaphorically on a knife edge. Is the man really a paedophile? Will the girl really castrate him? Will a passing neighbour catch her in the act? Who is she anyway? Is what she does heroic or psychotic? Can we justifiably feel sympathy for the man?

But it's just a tease. Well-acted, to be sure. Indeed, superbly acted. And cleverly scripted. We all love those on-the-nose popculture references. But finally, the movie fails to deliver anything other than a moderately engaging did-he-do-it, will-she-do-it thriller. Aside from the opening 10 minutes of the flick, when the protagonists meet for the first time, I never felt uncomfortable with proceedings. The movie entirely failed to play beyond the confines of the thriller-genre. My emotions and intellect were never challenged over how to engage with the character of the alleged paedophile.

Indeed, the makers of this flick should have checked out THE WOODSMAN to see how this sort of material can be crafted into a far more profound and honest investigation of this thematic material. Otherwise, it just looks like they've used paedophilia as a cheap hook on which to hang some pretty trashy, superficial material - in much the same way as the Holocaust was exploited as a backdrop for the similarly sado-masochistic material of THE NIGHT PORTER. And as for the script-writer's use of Roman Polanski's name, I would not be surprised if he is slapped with a lawsuit. Once again, it just smacks of lazy exploitation rather than honest engagement with the issues.

P.S. To any of you wondering if this movie is similar to, or a remake of, AUDITION, the simple answer is no. HARD CANDY has none of the originality, visceral impact or visual style of AUDITION. If you want something genuinely intellectually and physically provocative, you should check out DUMPLINGS instead.

HARD CANDY showed at Sundance 2005 and went on release in the US in April 2006. It is currently on release in the UK and hits Germany on June 29th, Australia on July 6th nd France on September 27th.