Posts tagged film reviews

Adventures in Buff Boytown: My review of New Moon

Okay, I think this franchise deserves some kind of intelligent discussion. Hear me out. Firstly, most haters “hate” because of critical heresay and an army of fans that make Palin fans look like reasonable people. Someone has to speak above the childish banter both for-and-against this franchise. On that note, it must suck right now to be a left-wing, learned reader residing in a primarily-female town in an American Red State. These major launches must be killing your soul faster than the cliche supernatural pun that should have preceded that statement.

Scary

Secondly, whilst Hollywood has a great record of ruining good books, it also has an equally impressive record of making bad books good films. Michael Crichton was, in my eyes, a hack who used fiction to explain his stupid scientific theories. Jurassic Park remains one of the best things on the resumes of both Steven Speilberg and Sam Neill (for the latter, probably the only thing on his international resume).

As such, I recall attempting to read Twilight only to conclude that it has as much entertainment and literary value as a ream of Reflex. So I was open to give filmmakers a chance, especially one who specialises in making cold, wooden characters in a dull supernatural plot seem mildly interesting.

Three stars, at best

From what I understand New Moon is all about the vampire whose face looks a bit like a foot (Robert Pattinson) deciding to move out of town to presumably save his lip-hungry humanoid girlfriend (Kristen Stewart) from the threats of other Vampires. While she falls into an unhealthy state of affairs, first crying her heart out then becoming a teen punk, she gets all cougar with a sixteen-year-old Native-American-Who-Actually-Looks-Like-Tommy-The-White-Ranger (Taylor Laurent). Little does she know White Ranger Boy is actually a Wolf Boy.

The film continues on a path of love triangles, almost-kisses, awkward encounters, excuses for men to get their shirts off and supernatural leaps of faith that, apart from breaking from tradition, also just seem way too convoluted. It’s at this point that I notice:

• Wooden delivery
• Vague reference to classical paradigms
• Pretty teenagers
• A liberal take on a very strongly built literary tradition
• Trendy music

WE DID THIS IN 1995 PEOPLE.

And back then it got teens interested in their English classes so that Leonardo DiCaprio could also die for them if they Shakespearean sweet-talked him enough. Upon this revelation I figured we just move through cycles of pseudo-Gothic/Romantic traditions to mooch for the purpose of getting dumb people to pay attention again. And it isn’t limited to females, either. Guys had that thing in the early Noughties of wanting to see Greek/Roman warriors beat the fuck out of each other, probably because it disguised UFC reenactments under historical relevance and lots of men with six packs (meaning they could bring along their significant others without trouble).

Admit it, you didn’t watch this movie to to learn about Spartan history.

“Well those are about a billion times better than the Twilight saga,” I hear you say. And, for the most part, you’re right. But their superiority is overstated. The worst part of New Moon for me was that it was just good enough to make you think they could have nailed it. I felt no need whatsoever to get angry or cringe or even walk out. I started to take in technical elements that worked: the editing and cinematography are crisp, the visual effects are quite nice (yes, even the “sparkling”), there’s a pretty awesome “animal fight” and Dakota Fanning makes a cameo seemingly to just be a plain old bitch.

UberBitch

The Twilight Saga wont die easy, but it will. We are probably at the highpoint of it now; between Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and their countless imitators we have a media empire just about satisfies its fans. It will only last for so long before it will collapse under critical decapitation, commercial oversaturation or both.

How was this movie green-lit?

The only question left to ask is when will Twilight get it’s Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet.