Twilight

There's a Blockbuster a block away from my apartment and about once a month they do a four for $20 DVD sale. I am unable to pass this up even though the inevitable time crunch happens and I have stacks of unwatched DVD's sitting around (a good portion of which are some random titles that I picked up to fill up my four). This is one step in a continual effort to get through the monstrosity.

Okay just bear with me. I figured I should at least give this a chance and see if all the hype was warranted for two reasons. One, I don't mind vampire stories. Blade II was bad-ass, and Buffy and Angel were two incredibly entertaining TV shows, and heck I even enjoyed Van Helsing (on the other hand just about every other Dracula movie has sucked) so the fact that Twilight mixed vampires with a teen angst drama meant that at the very least the potential for blood and/or unintentional comedy was high. The second reason is something I refer to as the Harry Potter corollary. The last media property that I remember seeing this much hype surrounding was the Potter books, and like Twilight I had absolutely zero interest in having anything to do with them based on the story description (I mean come on a teenage wizard in high school, really?) still after much cajoling by some people whose opinion that I actually respected I gave the books a shot and actually found them to be solidly entertaining. So anyway I figured I'd give Twilight a shot to see if the same phenomenon held (spoiler alert, it didn't).

What I will say for the film is that it was no where near as bad as I though it would be. Given the basic plot description (girl moves to new town, meets handsome brooding boy, he turns out to be a vampire, there's lots of angst) the whole thing sounded like a massive bore at best. Therefore the fact that I found it to be watchable and bordering on mildly entertaining qualifies as an upset. Still the story has one massive flaw (and several smaller ones) that keep it from being a truly engaging film.

Before I get into the criticism (and while I'm not going to turn off the no Mocking sign completely I will try to keep it relatively sane) let me go through a few things I like about the film:

i) Kristen Stewart - She's just one of those actors/actresses that I always find entertaining no matter what they do (like Amy Adams and Matthew McConaughy) which is a good thing here because I think if they had thrown the typical actress du jour (Kate Hudson I'm looking at you) to play what is actually a pretty thinly written part my interest level would have plummeted below its already low levels. Seriously though ever since Into the Wild I think I could watch her do a mentos commercial and be intrigued. This makes her inevitable appearance in whatever the 2013 equivalent of Bride Wars is going to be that much more depressing.
ii) The lack of angst. For a film whose premise could generously be described as Dawson's Crypt (I stole that line but its still funny) it actually restrains from having the typical amount of whining and equivocating you would typically expect from a teen themed film. If anything the characters were too locked into to what they were doing (everybody is ve-ry se-ri-ous), but at least they didn't sit around complaining for the entire two hours (probably just a good twenty minutes)
iii) Some of the vampire's at home stuff was amusing. And while I"m still not sure how I feel about the baseball game, it was at least a different approach to show the undead playing sports.

Anyway now onto the problems. I'm going to try to avoid making the easy jokes about the sub par special effects, and plot holes (this is a film about vampires for gods sake, I can't really spend much too much time complaining about flawed plot logic). The biggest problem is that I don't buy at all the heroine's obsession with her vampire lover boy. Their relationship basically unfolds like this: She sees an overly pale guy with what looks to be five hundred gallons of hair spray on his head. He goes out of his way to avoid her (because he's afraid he won't be able to contain himself), yet at the same time stalks her, plays with her head, and ends up saving her from getting hit by a car. She begins to suspect that there may be something different about this pigmentally challenged aqua-net model (other than the fact that he's apparently a sociopath who can stop cars with his bare hands) and with the help of google (ahh google how would any high school student be able to do any research without you) and a native American bookstore she realizes he's a vampire. My favorite part of this research exercise is when she's on a vampire website with different tabs for information about vampires in the usual places, Egypt, Peru, Europe - and the Pacific Northwest (who knew). Even though she's in Washington she avoids clicking on that tab. You think that might have saved her a few minutes of searching.

Anyway so far so good (or so far so mediocre), she goes to confront Edward (vampire boy) and even after he says that he really really wants to eat her and throws her around a bit, she's like 'I don't care I have an epic love for you so lets rock and roll.' She does this with no thought or equivocation, and the rest of the film involves them trying to find ways to satisfy their love, and it even goes so far as to have Bella ask Edward to bite her so she can stay with him forever (oh spoiler alert). I don't mind the fact that she's willing to go all the way to stay with her vampire boy toy, what I do mind is that the background I just gave is all the justification the film really gives for her obsession. Apparently wearing lots of hair gel, staring broodingly at a chick, threatening to rip out her throat, and generally acting creepy is enough to get a woman to want to join the undead for you. I really need to change my dating strategies.

Normally I wouldn't care that much about the romantic aspects of a vampire film, but since the entire story hinges on the idea that the main characters are so inevitably intertwined that being apart would literally kill them (I guess metaphorically in Edward's case), the fact that the whole relationship seems to be entered into as a plot convenience kept me from having any real involvement with characters, and as a result I didn't really have more than a passing interest in the story. Maybe the book does more to flesh this out, but the film left me with no desire to find out (a damning critique for any film based on a work of literature).

So anyway, Twilight - not as a bad as I thought, but still not that great. I must be getting old.