Twilight
It turns out that the battle between good vampires and bad vampires all comes down to hair. Eternally 17, vamp dreamboat Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) has a hypnotic head of honey-colored locks that makes him look like James Dean after an aggressive application of volumizer. Evil vamp James (Cam Gigandet) wears his blond tresses in a badass-biker ponytail. Good bloodsuckers use styling product; bad ones don’t. And good hair, pasty skin, a lot of brooding and inexplicable mood shifts are catnip to Bella (Kristen Stewart), the new girl in perpetually overcast Forks, Washington. She’s drawn to Edward, even when he admits that his first urge upon meeting her is to drink her dry. She’s totally ready for that, but he’s trying to save her from her own desires. Do you sense a twisted sexual metaphor at work?
Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen) seems most invested in examining Bella’s teen-girl lust, captured with the director’s usual sympathy for the pubescent perspective. She seems less assured when it comes to the supernatural aspects, and the climactic chase and battle feel rushed and perfunctory. But her earnest, moody approach to Stephenie Meyer’s tremendously popular novel may be just the thing for the 14-year-old girl in all of us.
Hank Sartin
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Adapting a very popular novel for the screen is always tricky. Doing so with Stephenie Meyer's TWILIGHT must have been even more so. Despite its many flaws, the novel works because it tells an earnest story of intense first love. BELLA, the narrator and main character, sees and studies the beautiful EDWARD, who is actually a vampire, as no one else at her school does. And the bulk of the novel is long passages of Bella obsessing and agonizing over the meaning behind Edward's tiniest gestures, words, and actions. And this is precisely where the screen adaptation fails. Without the film equivalent of Bella's obsessing over the object of her first love, the intensity of the obsession/first love doesn't come through on screen. It also doesn't help that the film treats these scenes of fascination-turning-to-obsession-to-purest love quickly and as merely a means to get to some special-effects-driven good vampire vs. bad vampire fight sequences. Despite this shift in focus, which I can only guess must have been made to try to add production value to the film and make it feel more like a movie, the special effects are poor and there’s very little to distinguish the film from a small TV show except that Robert Pattison plays the moody vampire. Overall, the film plays worse than most recent TV shows about supernatural elements mixing with the ordinary populace set in high schools, which as a TV genre, tended to be far more witty and sophisticated. The classic BUFFY THE VAMPIRE series, which also featured a moody vampire love story, is the apotheosis of this. But the genius of that series and its creator Joss Whedon was that each episode also worked as social commentary about familiar issues in high school life (eg. Eating disorders, cliques, losing one’s virginity…) Lacking this sophistication, TWILIGHT disappoints because it fails to show the earnest obsessive intensity of first love that is the book's focus and main strength.
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