Twilight: The Longest 73 Hours of My Life

Those of you who have been living in Amish country, or have taken a vow to avoid all contact with teenagers, might not be familiar with this latest teeny-bopper sensation Stephanie Meyers has puked into our pop culture. Until Governor X gave me the novel for Christmas, I had been only vaguely aware of the movie's existence, and little more. After several painful hours of page turning, I finished the "novel." It was not the worst writing I had ever seen. Planet X, a book I once read on a dare, holds that honor. I imagine that at the age of thirteen, I might have found Twilight entertaining. It would have blended well with my days of writing bad poetry and fantasizing about Wil Wheaton.

The movie, however, managed to take a dull, contrived novel and make it into an abysmally rotten flick. At slightly longer than two hours running time, "Twilight: The Movie" felt as though it lasted three days. As Governor X stated after our viewing, "That movie has been on since 'Nam."

Edward Cullen, played by Robert Pattinson, is a teenage vampire. He was 17 when he was "turned" and is now about 80 years old. Bella Swan, played by some pale chick, is a whiny teenager who has to move to Washington to live with her father. Bella smells tasty to Edward, but he is a "vegetarian vampire" who only eats animals, not people. (I know that makes absolutely no sense, but the book itself uses that term.) Edward and Bella fall into a teenage infatuation they call love and stare at each other all the time. Edward saves Bella from a car accident, a roving horde of rapist frat-boys, and a vampire stalker. He does not get to bone her for all his trouble. Not yet, anyway.

The movie is filmed almost entirely in a grainy, gray, sad manner, working off the assertions of Ms. Meyers that the sun never shines in the state of Washington. The vampires of this fantasy universe do not burst into flames when exposed to sunlight; they sparkle and shimmer like junior high lip gloss, revealing their paranormal nature. While one could hope this black and white imagery would give rise to some very creative and interesting artistic opportunities, one would be setting oneself up for disappointment. The camera simply jerks around for two hours, back and forth between characters, using extreme close-ups at an almost perverse frequency. Does this director have a nostril fetish?

Bella and Edward are deeply, irrevocably, forever, super-duper, zomgcallme in love with each other. We get it. The movie spends at least 90 of its 122 minute running time hammering this fact into the audience's heads with footage of the protagonists staring at each other intensely. The remaining thirty minutes of movie is full of terrible clichés. We have the token black guy who calls Bella "guuuurl.". The local Native-American tribe provides the story with the necessary "sage old person of origins exotic to suburbia." All of your typical high school cliques happen to be present, despite the fact that a town of 3000 could scarcely provide a student body so diverse.

Then we have the acting. Whether the acting is terrible, or the direction is terrible, or both are terrible is up in the air for me. The constant close-ups and dragging pace of the movie indicate that the direction is floundering. At the same time, Mr. Pattinson's previous role in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire does not indicate anything positive about his acting abilities. A ridiculously pregnant pause before each and every line is a bad habit that Mr. Pattinson needs to shake before he can ever hope to be the next Orlando Bloom. The young lady playing Bella Swan was so unremarkable, I haven't bothered to look up her name. She was neither terrible or great. She was meh. Her performance was wooden and useless. A puppet could have delivered her lines with more feeling and presence.

I never held much hope for the content of the movie, though I could not have predicted it would be as bad as it was. I had hoped the special effects would, at least, make the movie remotely interesting. Again, I was wrong. How could any film, especially one so "anticipated" use effects that look like they were ripped from a 70's sci-fi flick?

Whatever happened to movies like "Lost Boys" and "Brahm Stoker's Dracula" where the vampires were only a little effeminate? Now, instead of turning into bats and eating people, vampires are wearing designer jeans and becoming vegetarians. I thought vampires could not get less manly after the works of Anne Rice. Twilight has proven me wrong.

Overall, the movie was the most horrible pile of steaming crap Governor X has ever forced me to smell. To put this in perspective, the man has made me watch Time Bandits and Mamma Mia. If you are emotionally thirteen and believe true love occurs whenever a weirdo with large eyebrows in tight black jeans tells you that you smell tasty, then this is the film for you. If you are a grown woman or a male in possession of a pair that you hope to some day procreate with, avoid Twilight at all costs.