Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Ashley Greene, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Kellan Lutz, Peter Facinelli, Cam Gigandet, Taylor Lautner, Anna Kendrick, Elizabeth Reaser, Edi Gathegi, Rachelle Lefevre, Sarah Clarke

Directed by: Catherine Hardwicke

Summet Entertainment

The Official Site of Twilight

Discuss Twilight on the boards!

Twilight is not a movie about vampires. It’s a movie about love. After seeing both Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, the two young stars of this bold teen romance, explain this as their take on the wildly popular novels that inspired the film, I decided to approach the movie similarly. I’d be less concerned with my expectations of the wicked, seductive creatures of the night and instead just try to enjoy the lovey-dovey nonsense that I probably wouldn’t have wanted to see in the first place if it weren’t for the whole vampire thing.

Oh who am I kidding? I’m a sucker for true love. We all are, and while watching the film trying to see the vampire twist as a secondary element to the love story proved to be a difficult challenge (because all these two talk about is how his being immortal, blood-thirsty and dead will effect their courtship) it’s easy to root for an honest and true love like Bella and Edwards.

The vampire thing is only an obstacle, and if you think about it… every love has its share of problems to overcome. This time it just happens to be that one person desperately wants to eat the other. It’s hard to focus on the love when Twilight is less about finding the perfect person and more about finding the perfect meal and resisting the urge to eat it because you’d like to get to know it a little. It’s like knowing the name of the cow would somehow make your steak taste better.

Bella Swan has just moved from sunny Phoenix, Arizona to the perpetual grey skies of Forks, Washington to live with her estranged father. The fish out of water falls for Edward, the impossibly gorgeous, mysterious stranger across the cafeteria. The two are inexplicably drawn to each other and spend the better part of the movie trying to figure each other out.

In a lot of ways it is a movie that focuses more on its characters than whatever their monstrous qualities may be. If you can look beyond the dark theme this really is just another story about two people falling in love.

Twilight tries to keep things grounded by touching on a lot of high school staples like prom dress shopping, the politics of the cafeteria, and an over protective father among other things, though it does so a little coldly. The constant air of doom and gloom left even the lighthearted moments struggling for humor and ease. Twilight gets so wrapped up in the drama of Bella and Edward’s “doomed� relationship that it forgets to take advantage of celebrating the high school experience. The characters don’t suffer for it but the realism of the world does.

Even if the backdrop feels a little disingenuous, the love story works. It's definitely an exaggerated love, even by the standards of high school melodrama where love was a matter of life and death (or at the very least sex and status). Bella and Edward are corny as hell and say things that not even the most sexually repressed love struck puppy who just saw a his first boob would mistakenly woo his dream girl with, but it fits the film, even if the audience occasionally let out a laugh or two when it probably wasn’t intended.

With all of this, as up and down emotionally as Edward and Bella are, when the big kiss comes up - you can feel the electricity in the theater. A gradual rise of restrained squeals and gasps provided the soundtrack of a bunch of wet dreams coming to life on the big screen.

I believed their love but, as was the case in the book, it’s terribly drawn out. Bella and Edward spend too much time trying to define their relationship. Long enough that the audience could probably come up with a few suggestions before those two even get to first base.

It could be the testosterone in me talking but for me the movie was kind of a drawn out yawn (a nice one though. The kind of yawn that dislodges a piece of food or makes you feel like you just woke up from a long winter’s nap.) right up until we got a chance to see vampires do what we expect them to do. Beating the fangs out of each other, squinting and hissing menacingly at their prey, jumping through the air with their arms arched out at their sides as if to say, “If I had wings, this is where they would be. And they would be awesome.� Every moment from the point where Carlisle (the compassionate leader of the vampire tribe played well by Peter Facinelli) calls his shot on the baseball field is rock solid awesome - because it offers us a real threat.

When the friendly vampire baseball game gets interrupted by a pack of vampire hunters we get a 30-minute lesson of how vampires hunt, how vampires fight, how vampires kill one another and how the different tribes interact with each other in this world. It’s a crash course in another perspective on the classic monster. Love stories, even vampire love stories have been done to death, but I’ll always sit up straight in my chair when someone tells me the only way to kill a vampire in this world is to rip them apart and burn the pieces. It’s just the bad boy in me.

The most compelling thing about this love story ends up being the very thing I was trying to overlook. I walked out wishing they'd spent more time dealing with actual life and death situations instead of two teenagers looking for roadblocks to make their relationship more appealing. But who knows. If I were 15 years younger with a different set of genitals I’d probably be making the reverse argument. Let the Twilight fans enjoy their moment in the sun.

Rating: 6 out of 10 - It’s hard to be too mad at a movie that delivers everything it promises and ends on the right note. Had it began with the vampire battle and closed things with the hour-long courtship this would be a very different review.

I realize that this is a very special book to a lot of people so I tried to give it the fairest shake I could in the review. It seems like the easy thing to do would be just tear apart all its flaws but I know if someone went into Iron Man with a chip on their shoulder and kicked Tony Stark right in the can because it was the easy thing to do, I’d be pretty pissed. Every movie is special to somebody. Somebody put their heart and soul into The Wicker Man. It seems a shame to disregard that completely.

Not for me but I wouldn’t dream of denying the Twiheads the guilty pleasure. As the series grows, if it does so well, then this introductory tale could become a vampire staple, especially among the Ann Rice/Lastat fans, but that’s a pretty big if? While Twilight could easily go on to become the biggest vampire franchise of all time, will it actually be good?

I wanted to get in on the ground floor with Twilight. Weeks ago as the hype began to swell I decided, even though it doesn’t feel like my cup of tea, I would embrace the story and try to find the same connection that so many others have. Step one was buying the book. My first reaction resulted in a comic where I tried to express my frustrations with the slow-paced opening of the novel.

I’d hoped to finish the book before seeing the film but only managed to get through to chapter 15, a full 280 pages short of the ending. The good news is that it looks like I’ve got nothing but action ahead of me. The bad news is that after seeing the film I’m feeling less and less interested in cracking this book open before bed every night.

I’m sure I’ll get to it, but in the meanwhile, please feel free to share your thoughts on the book, the film and the comparisons between the two in this thread on the boards. I’m anxious to hear what genuine fans of the series thought about the big screen translation.

Dance Flick - This seemed like an odd trailer to accompany such a serious love story but it certainly got a strong, positive reaction from the crowd I saw Twilight with. No accounting for taste right? Just kidding.

Dance Flick appears to offer nothing new than the Wayens Brothers offered with the first two Scary Movie films, nor any of the terrible genre spoofs that followed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be worthless. These movies as a whole should be stopped, but I’d be the first to admit if one were actually good. The “No I in team� gag from the trailer actually got a laugh out of me so – you never know.

Edward and Bella’s love might be genuine but it’s built on the primal reaction that she is just his dinner of choice. He has an uncontrollable urge to drink her blood and as the movie (and book) meander on, the two lovebirds seem to confuse hunger for love.

I suppose it comes down to the same fundamentals of attraction in the real world, that pheromones and smell is the real thing that indicates who we fancy, but to an extreme of course. It’s still different though. Does he love her because of the music she listens to or her thoughts on the presidential race? No. Not even close. For that matter, why does she like him? Bella seems to be in a trance that had me thinking throughout the book that seduction was just another power Edward possessed as a vampire.

Either way, none of it is properly made clear in the film and that stinks.

I hope you liked the Twilight strip. If you did I’ve got one more planned for you. Be sure to stop by later this week when I’ll take a closer look at the comparisons between the book and the film.

But that’s later. For now - how was everyone’s weekend? I went into Manhattan and had lunch with an old friend, then went to the comic bookstore and bought the latest issue of Wolverine: Old Man Logan. Seems like it takes forever for that book to come out, but it’s insanely awesome no? I also considered getting this Hulk Bank but decided against it in hopes of saving some money.

While in the city I saw Twilight with a pretty decent crowd. There was one other guy and he was with his girlfriend so I was the official weirdo pervert in the group. Something I felt kind of terrible about until I got up to leave and had to walk over piles of garbage left on the theater floor. I’d never seen a mess like it and was beyond surprised it came from a pack of sophisticated, metropolitan young ladies.

Yeo and I caught Bolt over the weekend (which we’ll be discussing at length on tonight’s Triple Feature) and I was a little disappointed. It’s definitely got the spit polish of a Disney family fun piece, but it felt tame compared to what we’ve been given lately. I’ll have more to say in the full review later this week.

Other than that it was a pretty standard weekend. Oh except we got a new cat and I shaved my head. But you could already get that much information from panel one of today’s comic. Thanks for reading. More tomorrow morning!