Movie Review - Twilight

Oh yea, I know, this movie came out years ago, but I don't go to the theaters and I don't rent DVD's so this weekend was the first time it came on cable and I had time to waste watching it. Sad state of my affairs at the moment that I had nothing better to do on a saturday night than watch Twilight, but there it is, and if anyone is actually reading this, you get to benefit from my lack of a social life. Aren't you lucky?

I don't know if normal people do this, because I haven't been anywhere close to normal in so long that I have no idea what normal people do, but I tend to psychoanalyze the writer when I watch something on TV or read a book. I mean seriously, if you know someone and all they talk about is sports, you might guess that they enjoy watching ESPN, you know what I am saying? So while watching Twilight, I came to a few educated guesses about the writer. And keep in mind, I only saw the movie version, so if it's wildly different from the book, I could be completely off. I think the writer's name was stephanie meyer or something like that.

So apparently, old steph here is in love with gay guys. Yea, I haven't even got to the movie review part of this blog yet and I can already tell. She may possibly even be a necrophiliac. All the guys in this movie seem to be zombie-like, uncommunicative and lifeless to the point of brain death. On the other hand, it's entirely possible she's just a lesbian and finds guys completely uninteresting, but that doesn't explain the females in this movie being just about as lifeless, so I'm fairly sure she likes dead gay guys. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, in this day and age, as long as she has a good relationship with a coroner or something where she can get easy access to dead gay guys, that's entirely up to her and that she may be breaking the laws of man nature and the lord almighty above, has nothing to do with me, so I could care less. Each to his or her own, as I always say, even if it's dead gay guys.

A short summary of the movie, for those of you who haven't seen it, which, I had not until this weekend, so there would probably be a few, goes like this... Emotional basket case moves to new school, meets dead gay guy, she falls in love, they end up hanging out. Other dead gay guy gets jealous and uses her as an excuse to get a rise out of the first dead gay guy. Movie ends. Yep, that's about it. And if you haven't seen it, spoilers may follow, so if you care, you have been warned.

There's no sex, no nudity, very little violence, and in fact the closet thing i could find in this movie to something actually happening is this emo girl bonding with her parents and the dead gay guy's parents. Or fake parents, as the case appears to be. In fact some of the only interesting parts in this movie were where this emo girl goes to visit the dead gay guy's "parents" and they end up trying to use the kitchen for the first time in this vastly large and expensive home, because of course, they don't eat. But she's already eaten, because she knows they are vampires and don't need to eat, so they've gone to all that trouble for nothing. I'd have killed her then and there for making me try and fix italian food in my own kitchen and her not eating it, the lying, cheating, non-eating slut. And she actually does eat, which makes her choice of not eating in my kitchen just ridiculously unfeeling! Even for a human!

I did actually find her relationship with her dad to be kind of endearing in that he doesn't hover, talk to her, try to understand her, or any of the above. He just lets her be, which makes for some awkwardness but makes the part of her father (who also happens to be the sherriff) probably the only real part in the movie, and the actor who played it did an excellent job, I think. If this movie was just about this emo girl who moves to washington and renews her relationship with her estranged dad, it might be a perfectly fine lifetime movie of the week, and I'd have nothing bad to say about it at all (if I even watched it, which I probably wouldn't have). But of course, it isn't.

The rest of the movie is just silly. The writer doesn't break any new ground as far as vampires are concerned. Super strength, speed, reading people's mind, yea, we've heard it all before in a thousand other movies. Possibly the only difference is that instead of bursting into flame in daylight, they glitter. Which, when you consider how the writer likes dead gay guys and doesn't want them to burst into flame while emotionally enchanting 15 year old girls in high school, it just makes sense. I mean, seriously, they GLITTER. You can't get any gayer than that.

A couple things that generally annoy me about this movie and vampire movies in general... One, emo girl is driving in a car with dead gay guy and brushes her fingertips against his accidentally. She immediately recoils in horror at how chilly he is despite how warm it is inside the car. And yet 20 minutes later she's kissing him. I have heard vampires are supposed to be romantic or something, but if brushing his fingers in a broiling warm car makes you recoil in horror, and you find yourself kissing his cold lifeless wet lips and getting turned on, you are definitely a necrophiliac. I'm sorry, there's just no other explanation. Get over it. That is something i have never really understood in vampire lore, I mean, unless you've been charmed or entranced or whatever it is they can sometimes do depending on the tale, you are literally kissing a cold decaying corpse. If you've been charmed or entranced, at least you have an excuse, you are not in your right mind. But if you haven't been, yea, you need counseling at least. It's like me letting a frozen steak thaw out on my kitchen counter, and then before it actually warms to room temperature, I use it to masturbate with. Which, while it sounds fun in theory and i may try it later, it's probably not a mentally healthy thing to do. Oh supposedly after a recent feeding, vampires are warmer, or so some of the mythology goes. Well, let's see, when you consider 98.6 degree blood being sucked into a 40 or 50 degree vampire, physics would dictate the temperatures evening out, assuming the blood and vampire were of equal volume (which they wouldn't be, but for the sake of argument, let's say they are), would raise the average vampire temp to maybe 70 degrees (Fahrenheit) or so. So assuming the vampire's cold dead hands were the same temperature as his blood after a feeding, they'd be about room temperature. So, it'd be more like leaving the steak out until it actually thawed to room temp, and then kissing/jerking off with it. I suppose that's marginally better. Still, while eating decaying dead flesh in the steak's case is a good thing, especially when you sear it on the grill for an hour or so, falling in love and wanting to spend the rest of one's existence, or even worse, eternity with it, well, let's just say I have always found that disturbing to say the least.

Two, why are the vampire "good guys" in these movies always abstaining from drinking blood? Think about it, every vampire good guy in every vampire movie has always either completely denied himself from drinking blood or has survived on rats, pigs' blood, stealing blood supplies from hospitals, or the like. Why? Why should abstaining from eating what your body is telling you to devour make you an instant good guy? I think of myself as a pretty decent guy, and while I may be a little twisted, when I see some ice cream sitting in a bowl in front of me, I down that stuff so fast I'd give myself a permanent ice cream headache, if I had a brain. Come to think of it, I haven't given myself an ice cream headache in a long time. I wonder why? I eat ice cream just as much. I just never get a headache from it. Maybe my brain has entirely frozen over at this point and further injections of iced heaven no longer have any effect. It is possible, I suppose. but in any case, let's say I make myself a bowl of ice cream, and set it down on a table, and instead of eating it, I walk away from it. Does that make me instantly a good guy? Why should I be considered a paragon of virtue because I showed a modicum of self control? There's tons of villains in other movies that don't go around shooting people that randomly piss them off, and yet they are still villains, right? I don't get it. Must be something to do with that whole christianity thing, where you deny yourself all the pleasures that life has to offer so you can be closer to some mean old deity that wants to deprive you of heavenly bliss if you piss him off. So if you deny yourself, you are more christian than the other vampires. lol It sounds so ridiculous when I type it out like that, but that's probably how people think of it. I think it's just ridiculous, I mean if blood makes you stay young and healthy forever, for god's sake, bathe in rivers of it. When was the last time you denied yourself a burger just because you could? Let's face it, when you are hungry, you eat. Unless you are some sort of anorexic who is constantly starving yourself to stay thin (fat is a problem vampires don't have to worry about, apparently), then you eat when you are starving. It's just something you do to live, and how people can relate to a dead thing that starves itself for no apparent reason and can't stand the sunlight... wait, I think i just described every emotional teenage girl in existence. Hmmmm.

From a geek's and a guy's point of view, this movie is pretty worthless. Kristin Stewart, while moderately cute in some situations, doesn't get naked at all in this movie. Neither does anyone else. The extent of the violence comes in a swiftly done and forgettably ridiculous "climax" wherein dead gay guy #1 and dead gay guy #2 get in a fight in, of all places, a ballet school. Perfect setting for it, I grant you, but there's very little blood, no lost limbs, and the actual fight consists of a couple throws and a little choking before the evil dead gay guy gets his neck snapped and is burned. Alive, I would presume, because snapping a vampire's neck seems ridiculously easy to do and has never resulted in their death in any movie I have ever seen before. But alas, they don't really show any of that, the movie is too busy focusing on dead gay guy #1 to bother with showing how dead gay guy #2 is disposed of. It's almost an afterthought, really, which just seems wrong to me. Vampires are supposedly hard to kill; they are already dead, but ending their unnatural existence should be harder than SNAP and lighting the corpse on fire with a bic lighter. Every vampire's death scene i have ever seen has been explosive and dramatic, and the various ways they go out is usually pretty interesting. Not so here. Very uninteresting. Frankly, I was rooting for the bad guy, but not because the bad guy had a great part or he was an excellent and full-of-character villain, but because he'd have ended this stupid series of movies before it got started. Sigh.

Well, obviously, I wasn't very fond of this movie. I'm sorry i wasted my saturday night watching it, but in my defense, I was really bored and i was already paying for the cable, anyway, so i figured eh, it's only 2 hours of my life. In comparison, The Legend of Chun Li with Kristin Kreuk , which i saw right after Twilight, was slightly better. But now I want those two hours back. I WANT THEM BACK, DAMMIT!!!