I have drunken ALL the
Twilight Kool-aid, every last processed red sugary drop of it, and licked the inside of the cup. It is some good cheesy fun and I do not feel ashamed of indulging my inner (eternal) 17-year-old. I confessed to Ashley a few weeks ago, when she was at my place helping me redecorate the living room, and she told me that Courtney (Kochuba) had turned HER on to the books. Yes! Two other intelligent women who love this shit--I'm not alone!
I've now read the first two books, and seen the first two movies. And yes, and also read what there is of
Midnight Sun, which is
Twilight from Edward's POV. YUM. In my opinion, the first movie (
Twilight) is better than the book, and the second book (
New Moon) is better than the movie. However all four are thoroughly enjoyable. I like the first movie better because 1) I love Catherine Hardwicke as a director and she found the edgy darkness and the oh-so-necessary HUMOR amid that gooey tale of Twue Wuv. Stephenie Meyer has obviously hit a nerve with her narrative but damn, she overwrites. Okay, SM, Edward looks like a Ralph Lauren model/god/angel, WE GET IT. But you know, these books are from the POV of a teenage girl--of course she's all dreeeeeeamy about his looks! Anyway, I love the humorous scenes in the first movie like the grin on Edward's face as they walk through the crowd at school for the first time as A Couple as everyone whispers around them--that grin is pure teenage boy, it says "hey you guys, I finally got a GIRLFRIEND." Also love when he introduces her to his family and they just do and say
all the wrong things and he's completely mortified. ("
Mom! Stop embarrassing me!")
And I liked the changes from the book, because the book has almost NO plot--it's 300+ pages of breathless exchanges between Edward and Bella, until as one site puts it
the plot arrives late to the party, drunk, in a beat-up '53 Chevy pick-up truck. It drives away about fifty pages later and crashes into a tree, gets sent to the hospital, and is rarely heard from again throughout the course of the series. The movie remedies this somewhat, as they show the nomads attacking humans throughout the story. (And looking aw-ful-ly tasty, I gotta say. The nomads, not the humans.) And a lot of the characters are frankly more interesting in the movie--Bella, Charlie, Edward and James are all vastly improved by the acting. Charlie and James in particular--in the novel James is just this overly-polite sadist, a trope that has been beaten into the ground, but he's given all sorts of extra creepiness in the movie. And Charlie! LOVE him in the movie, the guy who plays him is just so damn awesome. Even Bella has more of a personality. Really, the one thing I didn't like was casting Nikki Reed as Rosalie--NR is a terrific actress and with her natural brunette she's very attractive, but she doesn't look remotely believable as a blonde, her coloring is just too dark.
And finally I must mention the awesomeness of the baseball/nomad confrontation scene. At first glance you might think that a scene involving vampire baseball stands an excellent chance of being completely lame. Fortunately Hardwicke avoided the pitfalls by 1) dressing them all in old-fashioned, striped baseball jerseys and hats, 2) scoring the scene to Supermassive Black Hole and 3) escalating the tension between the Cullens and the nomads with a seemingly endless sequence of tight-eye closeups, culminating in a crouched-stance face-off between the two sides when James tries to attack Bella. It is a total
vampire baseball rumble and completely awesome. All it needs is a jazzy Leonard Bernstein score.
One more final note--Alice's neck-twist in mid-leap during the fight at the ballet studio? SO AWESOME. She really is a great character.
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