norwich36: (Vicki Nelson)
norwich36 ([personal profile] norwich36) wrote2008-11-26 05:45 pm
Entry tags:

sparkly vampires

[livejournal.com profile] rsadelle and I went to see Twilight today, mostly for mocking purposes (though we were good in the theater itself and didn't talk and mostly covered our mouths when we were giggling hysterically, to spare the sensibilities of the 13-year-old girl sitting in front of us). But to be fair, I actually enjoyed large chunks of the movie on its own merits, and thought the parts that were bad were so over-the-top bad they actually landed in the "good" category again.

I went into this experience with only a basic idea of the plot in my head--I never made it past the first chapter of the book--and I had very low expectations, given the number of feminist critiques of the books I had read. That probably helped my enjoyment of the film, because while it did seem true that Bella was mostly in the film to look Gothicly lovely, she was actually less passive than I was expecting, which was a plus. And I had already had a discussion with [livejournal.com profile] rsadelle where she argued that Robert Pattison was too Hollywood-lovely to convey the right unearthly beauty of Edward, but I actually thought Edward--and the whole Cullen family--were well-cast (and well made-up): they were attractive yet extremely creepy.

In fact, the visual look of the film was one thing that was perfect, I thought. The Pacific Northwest has never looked lovelier, and the green-grey-windsweptness of it all gave it a very "Wuthering Heights" air that seemed appropriate to me for the sensibility of the film. (The heroes were Wuthering Heights meets fanfiction.net; the villains on the other hand were straight out of Lost Boys.) Contemplating all this unearthly beauty--whether natural or (un)human--made for a pleasant distraction when the melodrama got too over-the-top.

Which it did with great frequency, but in a very stylized ways. I swear, the length (and visual symbolism) of some of the more "romantic" scenes with Bella and Edward could have come directly out of the silent film era. (Certainly none of the kisses exceeded the length approved by the Hays code). These were usually the scenes where the audience was supposed to be swept up in the grand passion between the two of them, and I was giggling hysterically behind my hand.

Still, there were some moments that rang true to me that I enjoyed a lot--most notably all the scenes of Bella with her dad, which captured the awkwardness of teen-parent relationships very well. God, the scene where Bella, to save her dad's life, had to pretend to be fed up living with him and abandon him, while he was desperately begging her to stay, just about broke me. And I actually thought the contrast between Bela's relationship with her parents and Edward's relationship with his was nicely drawn. I had read about the Mormon influences on the Twilight series before, but I hadn't realized quite what an (unconscious, I assume) self-parody this was: the creepy-yet-wholesome Cullens who live together as a family(despite the adolescents being over a century old) and have family home evenings playing baseball and take a kind of voyeuristic pleasure in the idea of watching Bella eat the first meal they have ever cooked together are a weird sort of advertisement for "families are forever." (Not to mention Bella's desire to be married for time and eternity, not just her mortal lifespan be with Edward forever). And like good Mormons forswear coffee, tea, and alcohol, the Cullens forswear human blood. I hadn't realized that the LDS sensibility went beyond the "no premarital sex" thing.

I also really liked Bella's interactions with her female friends at school, who I wish had gotten a little more screentime. They were surprisingly sweet to her, considering that pretty much every male at school seemed to be making a play for her.

My only real complaint is I wanted Bella to have more of a reason to fall for Edward forever-and-always than the fact that he was dark, brooding and mysterious.(At least we know that he was drawn to her because her mysteriously yummy scent. Which I understand is never actually explained in the books?)

Well, and I wanted to see her reconciliation scene with her dad, since their relationship was one of the few points of realism in the film.

Odzywki

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