This is an interesting movie. Ticket sales seem to be huge and the fans of the book are sure to go in droves to see it opening weekend. But then what happens after that? Some say it will fall hard, others say it may have staying power and actually improve over time like Titanic. Here's the place to talk about one of the riskiest releases of the fall...Twilight.
It'll probably make a decent amount opening weekend, but it'll fade. I don't think it'll have the same appeal for adults that Titanic apparently did. This is one solely for the teens.
Also, is it me, or does Robert Pattinson look like he's totally high all the time?
Posts: 3794 | Location: Earth | Registered: April 11, 2005
Originally posted by MissyGal: Also, is it me, or does Robert Pattinson look like he's totally high all the time?
And according to Stephanie Meyer, he is "Oscar-worthy".
2010 Oscars FYC:
Lead Actor - Joseph Gordon-Levitt, (500) Days of Summer Lead Actress - Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds Supporting Actress - Mo'Nique, Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire Original Screenplay - Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, (500) Days of Summer
Posts: 4923 | Location: Why Do You Want To Know? | Registered: November 21, 2006
Because I try and stay up on pop culture I read the first book which was entertaining overall but repetitive and whiny. Every fifty or so pages in the book the main characters have exactly the same conversation ("I can't be with you because I'm dangerous", "But I can't live without you.", "And I don't want to live without you."- blah blah blah) and it's always a damn long conversation. I can possibly see why teenage girls would swoon over that stuff but swoon I did not. Despite the flaws of the first book I did like the main characters so I am now reading the second book and it has been a long slog. I have less than 100 pages to go but never feel like picking it up and ( usually read two books a week- generally books a lot more difficult to read. This book is even more repetitive and story points or even conversations that could be covered in a page go on forever.
Since I bothered to read TWILIGHT I am sure I will the movie eventually but will probably wait for DVD- need to devote my time in Nov. and Dec. to Oscar movies. I don't have much faith in it being good though as the stone faced seriousness of the cast in the trailer appears phony to me and not much fun.
Posts: 27174 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by east/west: I don't get the whole crazed about it,
Neither do I. If people really wanna see a well-acted, brilliantly-written, excellently-crafted Vampire/Human love story... then they should go grab a copy of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Seasons 1-3 (Buffy & Angel) and Seasons 6-7 (Buffy & Spike). Now THAT'S what Vampire/Human love story is supposed to be like.
Vampires and the poor human beings who love them have been a hot onscreen item this season, as evidenced by HBO's lurid hit series "True Blood" and the marvelous Swedish import "Let the Right One In." For less discriminating palettes, there's the much-anticipated "Twilight," a disappointingly anemic tale of forbidden love that should satiate the pre-converted but will bewilder and underwhelm viewers who haven't devoured Stephenie Meyer's bestselling juvie chick-lit franchise. Built-in femme fanbase will lend this Summit Entertainment release some serious B.O. bite, with Robert Pattinson's turn as an undead heartthrob keeping repeat biz at a steady pump. Having showed a real feel for the perilous social and emotional terrain of adolescent girlhood in her 2003 debut, "Thirteen," Catherine Hardwicke seemed as good a director as any to steer this maiden adaptation of Meyer's junior-Anne-Rice phenomenon. (Three more novels -- "New Moon," "Eclipse" and "Breaking Dawn" -- have been released since "Twilight's" publication in 2005, and the movie is nothing if not a prelude to future bigscreen sequels.)
But even with angsty rock songs, lurching camerawork and emo-ish voiceover at her disposal, Hardwicke can't get inside the head of her young protagonist, Isabella "Bella" Swan (Kristen Stewart); consequently, Bella's decision to get hot and heavy with a hot-and-hungry vampire, far from seeming like an act of mad, transgressive passion, comes across as merely stupid and ill-considered. The result is a supernatural romance in which the supernatural and romantic elements feel rushed, unformed and insufficiently motivated, leaving audiences with little to do but shrug and focus on the eye-candy.
Which is what Bella does when she first meets the brooding, intoxicatingly handsome Edward Cullen (Pattinson) at her new high school in Forks, Wash. Bella, a moody, intelligent teen who's just moved from Phoenix to live with her police-chief dad (Billy Burke), is an outsider in this dreary little Pacific Northwest town. So are Edward and his four equally striking (if unnaturally pallid) siblings, who keep to themselves, go on regular camping trips and have an odd habit of never eating.
Bella finds herself utterly transfixed by Edward. (Judging by the screaming tweens in the audience at the screening caught, she's not alone.) Yet devoid of the novel's first-person narration, the chain of events laid out in Melissa Rosenberg's screenplay -- Edward's initial and inexplicable hostility toward Bella, his habit of rescuing her from contrived endangerment scenarios, their playfully barbed flirtation, his revelation of his identity as a self-controlled but still-lethal bloodsucker and, finally, their mutual surrender to their feelings -- proceeds with none of the inner logic necessary even for a tale of the fantastic.
Admittedly, it's a relief that Rosenberg dispenses with Meyer's often embarrassingly overripe prose ("His hair was dripping wet, disheveled ... his dazzling face was friendly, open, a slight smile on his flawless lips"), and pic's selective rewriting of the rules of vampire lore (no coffins, no garlic, no fatal aversion to sunlight) does hold interest. There's a fleeting moment when the two leads -- standing together in a secluded glade, their bodies circled by the camera -- come close to capturing the tale's lush, swooning romanticism.
Stewart (seen recently and most impressively in "Into the Wild") makes Bella earthy, appealing and slightly withdrawn, and British thesp Pattinson (who registered poignantly as the ill-fated Cedric Diggory in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire") is every inch the deadly dreamboat. But as helmed by Hardwicke, the actors' early, awkward interactions feel particularly forced, and the script gives Stewart virtually nothing with which to convince the audience of her transcendent love for a guy who'd just as soon drink her blood as jump her bones.
Burke steals a few scenes as Bella's quietly dependable dad, as does the reliably sharp-witted Anna Kendrick as Bella's busybody friend, Jessica. Questionable casting of some of Bella's other classmates may rile purists, though Hardwicke and Rosenberg generate some laughs from the high school setting. Pic duly introduces Jacob (Taylor Lautner), a Native American youth who looks to rival Edward for Bella's affections in future outings.
In an unwise departure from the book, pic dispels rather than increases the tension by showing random vampire attacks by a sinister trio (Cam Gigandet, Rachelle Lefevre, Edi Gathegi), headed toward a showdown with Edward and his brood. Chase-thriller endgame seems to sputter to a halt when it's barely begun.
Visual effects, used to convey the vampires' superhuman strength, agility and resistance to gravity, are a mixed bag. Shot in moody, washed-out tones by Hardwicke's regular lenser, Elliot Davis, pic makes the most of its Oregon locations .
Posts: 27174 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
It’s love at first look instead of first bite in “Twilight,” a deeply sincere, outright goofy vampire romance for the hot-not-to-trot abstinence set. Based on the foundational book in Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling multivolume series, “The Twilight Saga” (four doorstops and counting), this carefully faithful adaptation traces the sighs and whispers, the shy glances and furious glares of two unlikely teenage lovers who fall into each other’s pale, pale arms amid swirling hormones, raging instincts, high school dramas and oh-so-confusing feelings, like, OMG he’s SO HOT!! Does he like ME?? Will he KILL me??? I don’t CARE!!!
And, reader, she doesn’t, the she being Bella (for Isabella) Swan, played with tremulous intensity and a slight snarl by Kristen Stewart. A sylph with a watchful, sometimes wary gaze who’s often cast in daughter roles, Ms. Stewart transformed from an appealing actress into something more complex with her brief, memorable turn in the 2007 movie of Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild.” As the child-woman whose longing for the ill-fated wanderer Christopher McCandless is largely expressed through piercing looks and sensitive strumming, Ms. Stewart gave form and feeling to the possibility that the search for freedom and authentic experiences can be found in the embrace of another human being. This was a girl worth living for, if not for that film’s lost soul.
Since living really isn’t an option for Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the moody, darkly brooding vampire who catches Bella’s eye and then her heart, she becomes the girl worth fighting for, a battle that, as in the book, involves not just malignant forces, but also ravenous appetite. Like all vampire stories, “Twilight” is about repressed desire and untamed hunger and the possibility of blood, the blood that flows from violently pierced necks and that, from John Polidori’s 1819 short novel “The Vampyre” to Alan Ball’s new HBO series, “True Blood,” represents ravishment of a more graphic kind. This is the ravishment that, in its pantomime of seduction and surrender, transforms innocence — like that of Bram Stoker’s sacrificial virgin, Lucy, in “Dracula” — into “voluptuous wantonness.”
Ms. Meyer’s contribution to the vampire chronicles, the trick that transformed her into a best-selling brand, has been to stanch this sanguineous emission, turning a hot human flow into something less threatening and morally sticky. Edward, you see, burns but doesn’t bite. As in the book, he leads a numbingly quiet, respectable life with his vampire family in Forks, a small Washington town under a near-permanent cloud cover. His father, Carlisle (Peter Facinelli), a doctor with a ghostly pallor and silky gait, tends to the living, while the rest of the brood, including his monochromatic mother and siblings, strike pretty poses, play baseball (in thunder and lightning) and occasionally hunt for animals. We think of ourselves as vegetarians, Edward jokes.
It’s no wonder he looks famished. When Edward first meets Bella, who has moved to Forks to live with her father (Billy Burke), he glowers at her threateningly, his hands clenching into fists. Bella is mystified, and you might be too, if Melissa Rosenberg’s screenplay didn’t turn up the volume as the teenagers grow closer and Edward hints at his true nature. “What if I’m the bad guy?” he asks. (Cue the shrieking virgins.) “I still don’t know if I can control myself,” he later confesses, as someone’s guitar gently weeps. A self-described monster, he has all kinds of cool, superhuman powers (running, leaping, mind-reading), but nothing compares to how he masters his universe: he keeps his fangs in his mouth.
That may make him catnip to anyone with OJD (obsessive Jonas Brothers disorder), but it also means he’s a bore, despite the efforts of the capable and exotically beautiful Mr. Pattinson. (The actor first broke hearts as the martyred Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter cycle.) Though her filmmaking can be shaky, the director Catherine Hardwicke has an eye for pretty young things and a feel for the private worlds that younger people make for themselves. But she’s working in shackles here. In her best movie, “Lords of Dogtown,” about the birth of the modern skateboard movement, a teenage boy sneaks out at night by slaloming off a roof while holding a surfboard. It’s a blissful declaration of freedom, including freedom from the big parental no.
Though Edward and Bella reach certain heights in “Twilight,” notably during a charming scene that finds them leaping from piney treetop to treetop against the spectacular wilderness backdrop, the story’s moral undertow keeps dragging them down. If Ms. Meyer has made the vampire story safe for her readers (and their parents) — the sole real menace comes from a half-baked subplot involving some swaggering vampires who like their steak saignant and human — it’s only because she suggests that there actually is something worse than death, especially for teenagers: sex. Faced with the partially clad Bella (who would bite if she could), Edward recoils from her like a distraught Victorian. Like Ms. Hardwicke, the poor boy has been defanged and almost entirely drained. He’s so lifeless, he might as well be dead — oops, he already is.
“Twilight” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some violence, little viscera.
Attention, all 13-year-old female readers of this newspaper: Run, do not walk, to the nearest multiplex playing "Twilight," the screen version of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling potboiler about a principled vampire and the teenage girl who loves him. Others needn't run. Or walk.
The bleached-faced bloodsucker, Edward Cullen, attends high school in Forks, a singularly gloomy little town in Washington state; he's played by the young English heartthrob-in-the -making Robert Pattinson. Edward first meets his inamorata, Bella (Kristen Stewart), when she moves to Forks, where her father is police chief, from her mother's house in Phoenix, where she had managed, fatefully, to avoid getting a tan. In a film that has the courage of its absurdity but not much else, Mr. Pattinson gets the best of what passes for style. He's been fitted out with an upswept rat's-nest hairdo, along with a thin coat of clown-white makeup, and photographed with special attention to his cantilevered brows and his gift for growing a gaze into a glare or, when the occasion demands it, a leer. Ms. Stewart, on the other hand, hasn't been directed so much as permitted, or maybe incited, to indicate anxiety by spitting out her lines in a rat-tat-tat that can be borderline unintelligible.
Not that "Twilight's" fate hangs on intelligibility. It hangs on fangs that aren't bared, and on a bloodlust that isn't indulged. Edward is, as he explains to Bella patiently, the vampire equivalent of a vegetarian. Like ordinary people living on tofu, he and his family restrict their diet to animal blood, though they still consider the human variety a treat to die for. Indeed, the movie pushes undead abstinence while its director, Catherine Hardwicke, indulges in klutzy extravagance that misfires as often as it fires -- a Cullen family baseball game is to howl at -- and gets little blood pounding until the climax, when Edward clashes with the slavering scion of a carnivorous vampire family in some no-tofu kung fu for the custody of Bella's soul. "Twilight" has targeted the collective soul of teenage America, and will surely have its way.
TWELVE-year-old girls have a lot to answer for: Clay Aiken, exclamation-point abuse, "Twilight." What's more worrying, though, is how the bubble-gum lip-glossers seem to rule national taste standards. How else do you explain baby-doll tops, Tobey Maguire as a superhero or major corporations begging for an allowance without even agreeing to do the dishes in return?
"Twilight," which combines the plot of HBO's "True Blood" with the intensity level of "Saved by the Bell," is a vampire romance.
It takes a full hour to deliver its exposition before it gets going with the story line: In a small-town high school in Washington state, there are good vampires who don't attack humans and bad vampires who do (as in "True Blood"). The cute good one, Edward, keeps saving the virginal mortal girl Bella from the bad ones; the mortal girl might just rather skip the prelims and become Mrs. Dracula. But that would kind of spoil the Sam-and-Diane will-they-or-won't-they suspense and turn things into "The Munsters." "Blood pudding for dinner again, honey?"
A big difference between "Twilight" and "True Blood" is that in the latter, the girl can read every mind but the vampire's, whereas in "Twilight" the vampire can read every mind but the girl's.
Also, the violent and sexy "True Blood" at least tries to be cool. In "Twilight," the vamps work off the tension of permanent un-deadness and social ostracization by . . . playing baseball? Is that really the most interesting way to show off their super-strength and speed? The ballgame in this movie, played in Abner Doubleday/"Eight Men Out" uniforms, is the weirdest sporting use of superpowers since Batman and Robin played hockey with Mr. Freeze.
Nicely played by Kristen Stewart, who has excelled in several real movies including "Into the Wild," Bella is a lonely girl of the type who broods alone in the cafeteria. In an earlier era, she would have read Sylvia Plath, but today she is probably content to have an emo ringtone.
She's just moved from Phoenix to live with her cop dad in Forks, Wash., where the weird kids in school are these mime-pale foster siblings, the Cullens. One of them, her lab partner Edward (Robert Pattinson, who looks like Brendan Fraser plus lipstick, eyeliner and the hair of a plastic troll doll), is strangely rude to her, except when a car suddenly lurches in her direction. Then he flies to the rescue and leaves the car dented and confused. "I have adrenaline rush," he lies. "It's very common. You can Google it."
He's so attracted to her he has to keep clear, lest he break his vow not to suck human blood. His crew only goes after animals in the nearby forest, in accordance with the local Indian lore. Gradually, Bella starts to piece it all together: "Your skin is pale white and ice cold. You never eat or drink anything. You don't go out in the sunlight." Oh, no - he's . . . Morrissey?
Like the grimmest l'il Goth in eighth grade, the movie is at pains to be extra obvious and almost completely humorless. Before the big clash, Edward makes sure to send Bella off on her own for no good reason - except he needs to come roaring back when the moment is ripe. When Bella is bleeding, how do the good vampires manage to hold back from feasting on her - do they think of Bea Arthur's neck to cool down?
Bella and Edward are so chaste together that the movie seemed to be aiming for a PG rating, and I'm not sure how it missed; "The Ten Commandments" was racier than this. When the two first acknowledge their attraction to each other, Edward takes her on a nice piggyback ride up the hill and the two lie peacefully next to each other in the grass looking up at the sky.
Later, they're alone in his room together, so what do they do? Go flying around the piney forest. Edward is more like Bella's Ewok than her boyfriend, and the one time they do make out he hurls himself to the other side of the room to break it off. "I want you so badly I still don't know if I can control myself," he says.
It is refreshing, though, this metaphorical undercurrent about the importance of preserving virginity, a point underlined during a prom night scene where, for the first time in the history of the institution, all dresses stay on. Edward's a remarkable young gentleman when you consider the hell he's been through: It turns out he's always 17, his fate to keep repeating high school, forever and ever. If that's my only option, kindly burn me at the stake.
kyle.smith@nypost.com
TWILIGHT
Where's Buffy when you need her?
Running time: 120 minutes. Rated PG-13 (mild violence, mild sensuality). At the Lincoln Square, the Kips Bay, the Union Square, others.
Per Deadline Hollywood Daily, $7 million earned in midnight screenings. Fandango.com is selling 5 Twilight tickets *per second* and is the online ticketseller's fastest-selling movie since The Dark Knight. It's now #3 on its all-time Top Advance Ticketsellers list, behind TDK (#2) and Star Wars Episode 3 (#1).
Posts: 4238 | Location: SE Pennsylvania | Registered: May 27, 2005
I can say that I have seen the movie twice in three days. And I actually really liked it.
One thing that was very curious was how everyone was freaking out over the casting. However, the entire cast was very good (standouts include Kristen Stewart, Billy Burke, Nikki Reed and Anna Kendrick). The two main players (Stewart and Robert Pattinson) had very good chemistry and I enjoyed the movie. Even if you hadn't read the novel (which I had), you could still follow along. It had a good mix of comedy in there (even parts that were unintentionally funny like when Alice snaps the kneck of James, yeah I think I was the only one laughing in the whole theater) and the romance wasn't too bad. It was very cheesy and some of the dialogue was bleh, but it was a pretty good movie.
And has anyone heard the soundtrack? I'm really digging it.
I've seen it too, and liked it. I read the first book last week, and was trying to read the 2nd book this week, but just got stuck about 100 pages from the end. (though I read the very end - I'm too impatient to wade through stuff that doesn't appeal, and the 3rd act "damsel in peril" part of both books isn't the selling point of the books).
I understand how people can say, "I am not the target audience for this. I hate this kind of book and this kind of movie". Fair enough. But when it veers into the territory of "I hate this target audience and I feel nothing but scorn for the craftspeople who work on this kind of film", well, let's just say, they aren't going to be the ones laughing all the way to the bank.
A number of reveiwers have been very gracious in their reviews, like Kenneth Turin in the LA Times and Richard Corliss in Time. They acknowledge they are not the target audience, but they have something thoughtful to say anyway.
The director and screenwriter did a very good job of adapting the book - it can't be easy adapting a book that has millions of fans, right now. Especially a teen Gothic romance, written in the first person. Like Corliss says, this kind of non-ironic romance was a cinematic staple for 60 years (before it bcame passe). They made good use of their 40 million budget. I also like that they kept the humor of the book, although adapting it into cinematic jokes, rather than literary ones.
And I was surprised to see groups of teen boys in the audience (we thought at first we'd gone into the theatre showing James Bond), but we realized that they were Native teens who came to see the character of Jacob (who becomes the male lead in the second book) and is from the Pacific Northwest tribe that has werewolves in it.
