Eine Symphonie des Screaming Preteens

I've never read any of the Twilight books. My senior year of high school, some real nerd was nerding all over me and started telling me about how "badass" the book was and how it was full of "awesome" werewolves and vampires. I was totally disengaged and barely listened to him. People always shout the blurbs on the back of books at me and I tend to ignore them. It wasn't until about a year later that my exposure to Twilight was complete. When the film came out I suddenly realized the vanilla-scented stampede Stephanie Meyer had unleashed. I casually thumbed through the first book before trying to crush my head between the pages.

I suppose anyone can write a book, but Twilight is a carefully composed argument for a police state where someone like Stephanie Meyer would be sent to a Siberian gulag and made to mine for ice.

Twilight was a generally pretty boring film filled with people who were pretty first and actors second. I haven't seen it in a long time, but if I remember correctly it was a pretty bland, cookie-cutter script with some obvious mistakes (it was a romance and could have survived as such, but they threw in an antagonist at the end who had no connection to the real story of the film) and I don't even remember the rest.

You know what's the weirdest thing about New Moon? It's EXACTLY the same movie. Here's the story for the first film:

Lonely teenage girl, feeling abandoned, goes about her life and catches the eye of a gorgeous young man. After some pursuit, and some mysterious happenings, she discovers he's a supernatural creature. She feels like the most special little girl in the whole wide world for dating a monster so violent and dangerous that they've kept their own existence a secret. Unsurprisingly, the guy tries to sever ties when he realizes that he has a hard time controlling his supernatural urges (I smell some metaphor!). Lonely teenage girl gets upset and lonely again before proving her worth as a submissive lapdog. Meanwhile, her supernatural prom date is hunting a BAD supernatural monster that's killing hikers in the woods.

The only thing that makes this film's story even a little bit different from the previous film is that they continue to deal with last time's supernatural monster. Edward Cullen is probably in about 25 minutes of the two hour and ten minute film, but THAT'S OKAY, because in the meantime we're treated to Jacob Black, a young werewolf whose abs look like they just wandered off the cover of a romance novel and into an ad about the dangers of steroid use. The idea that the film tries to use to set it apart from the previous installment is Bella's choice between the brooding, boring, but very pretty Edward and the busty Jacob. Except actor Taylor Lautner is seventeen. And he put on thirty pounds of muscle in a less than nine months. If I were to guess what KIND of steroids he was using, I'd imagine it would be blue whale steroids with a rhinoceros steroid chaser.

I get that jean shorts will never go out of style and that shirt factories are a popular target for terrorist attacks, but Jesus Christ I got sick of him greasing his ass and rubbing it in the audience's face. I have seldom experienced more gratuity in the name of exploiting an actor's physique.

That's okay, but what really gets my goat about this series is Stephanie Meyer haphazardly throwing in religious aspects to, first of all, a story about mythical hellhounds and demons being reimagined as plush toys, but to what is borderline pornography. I suppose in a capitalist society we'll always run into people selling sex to preteens, but the Twilight series has never had any shame about it. It's that they have the audacity to then turn around and point to the fact that Bella isn't getting bulldozed by the demons that makes them morally repugnant. Parents buy the books for their nine-year-olds like they're math textbooks. But they won't let their children see a movie rated R for brief strong language.

Chris Weitz's direction is, as usual, disaffected and bored, sort of letting the action happen without adding any real visual flair.

But it's not like he didn't try.

Chris Weitz has unleashed some of the worst fight scenes I've ever seen with his gaudy slow motion and blur effects. Sometimes I wanted to look away, but my sense of journalistic integrity latched my eyes to the screen. And that's the only time he injects the film with any kind of style (aside from an almost-good opening scene). The rest is static or cliched camera work, but when a fight scene starts, Weitz starts running around like a little puppy.

Nothing else in the series has changed. Kirsten Stewart is still a boring actress stuck in a role written specifically to keep her as boring and cipher-like as possible so that any little girl can imagine herself in her place. Same goes for Robert Pattinson, although he's arguably an even worse actor. He has an browline completely resistant to acting, but the filmmakers insist on showing it in closeup all the time as if to remind us that this kid has the emotional range of a character in a motion capture film. Special shout-out to Ashley Greene, who doesn't do much and isn't called upon to show if she's a good actor or even if she's a bad one, but who's as close as this film comes to casting a genuinely gorgeous person. Or at least someone who reacts well to the makeup effects.

It was boring the first time I saw this film when it was Twilight, but this time it's offensively boring. I wanted to fall asleep. I didn't even want to leave 2012 and I was sore for days because of the theater's conditions. I hope I can put myself in the hospital ahead of Eclipse, a film even director David Slade has essentially admitted that he hates and is doing because he's a young director who needs a sure-fire hit to boost his career.

2/10