Experiment: Reading through "Twilight" (no, really) Part 3

(NOTE: The following post(s) include discussions of plot points from a bunch of books already published but that have not been made into movies yet, much of which can be considered SPOILERS. So no carping at me for not doing inviso-text or something.)

Among the many (MANY) valid criticisms lobbed in Stephenie Meyer's direction i.e. "Twilight" is one that I think is a little unfair - namely pointing to her self-professed lack of familiarity with the genre outside her own work. I'm of the mind that it doesn't matter - if anything, it ought to make the series more original... but instead only serves to make me both dissapointed and a little perplexed that someone who's not a "fan" of the horror/vampire scene puts out an entry that's so incredibly familiar and cliche.

Where it DOES hurt, though, is in the suspension of disbelief. The teenaged characters in the series are - as befits their age - sponges of the popular culture, but seem to exist in a world where no one has EVER made a movie or written a book about either werewolves or vampires... how else to explain how NO ONE picked up the veritable "hi, I'm a vampire!" name-badges the Cullens (good guys) are wearing all the damn time? The only other possible explanation is that everyone in the series is a moron, which is probably closer to likely as demonstrated in...

Eclipse: ...case in point: This, book #3 aka "the 'action' one," turns on two main plot threads. #1: There's a 'serial killer' in nearby Seattle, but it's really a small army of freshly-minted vampires. #2: The girlfriend of the now-deceased vampire villian from Book 1 is still skulking around looking for a revenge-shot at the good guys. It takes HALF THE FUCKING BOOK for anyone to put together that these things are probably related.

Brief sidebar: Most of the "Hm, something's fishy in Seattle" foreshadowing (which the author isn't getting any better at, btw) comes from Bella's cop father, who filled a similar role last time dropping lines about "strange animal sightings." Somewhere amid the slog, it occured to me that this was how Nancy Drew (30s version) often got her more unusual stories set up - save that her father was an attorney (right?) and she usually wound up solving a problem that had either baffled or escaped the (usually male) adults around her. Bella, on the other hand, typically winds up immediately in-over-her-head, bruised and bloody or flat on her back cooing "thank you sir, may I have another?" to the nearest available dominant-male. Aaah, progress ;) Incidentally, new plot point: Edward puts his foot down and refuses to either sleep-with Bella OR turn her into a vampire until they're married, for those wondering if the weird-ass abstinence metaphor kept on going.

Anyway, this means Superhero Team-Up time for the vampires and werewolves, preceeded by a training montage wherein the wolves learn proper tactics for such a situation. I can't wait to see this part filmmed, since given the way the FX and casting has gone for this series so far I imagine it'll look something like the "pose-off" contest in "Zoolander." The "war" is actually a bit of an afterthought - the real focus is on the increasingly dippy love-triangle, culminating in an awkward sequence involving Bella freezing in a tent (don't ask) and only one of her two paramours being capable of generating body heat. This scene will innevitably be an acting challenge for Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward in the films, because he'll have to try and look even MORE like a whiny punk than he already does...

There's also a lot of backstory on the werewolves, unfortunately including lots of mythology-building (which Meyer is lousy at) and foreshadowing (WORSE at that.) The big new plaything is "imprinting," (which MIGHT have been mentioned earlier but I'm not going back to check) the process by which the wolves 'mate for life' by having their entire worldview snap-focused onto their "chosen" woman the moment they run into her. This is, of course, problematic for werewolves already in relationships (or by-the-numbers love-triangles) but it has an ickier side in that there's no set "age limit" on this - so several of the young-adult wolf guys are "locked-in" on pre-adolescent fate-indicated girlfriends, whom they hang around "babysitting" like Daddy Long-Legs (as in the movie) until she's old enough to screw without Dateline showing up. Apparently the girls in question don't object to this, in fact the book goes out of it's way to infer that this kind of stalker-ish fixation is something they ALL either want or ought to want. So... yeah. For those keeping track, you can add "child-brides" to the list of Retrograde Misogynist Relationship Scenarios That "Twilight" Considers The Height of Romance... right next to ritualized-abstinence, technical-exemption incest and marriage-by-contract.

As to the promised dust-up between the goodies and baddies? Not bad (probably going to need a trim for the innevitable film version's PG13, in nothing else) but one does begin to REALLY notice how situational everyone's "power-set" is. Also, for about the sixth time since starting the things, I find myself wondering if Stephenie Meyer's DVR is full of Inuyasha reruns...

To be concluded tomorrow.

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Experiment: Reading through "Twilight" (no, really) Part 2

(NOTE: The following post(s) include discussions of plot points from a bunch of books already published but that have not been made into movies yet, much of which can be considered SPOILERS. So no carping at me for not doing inviso-text or something.)

I should start setting weekly "projects" for this thing more often - when's the last time I updated the very next day. Anyway...

New Moon: Since the whole point of putting myself through this was to try and get inside the head of where this "phenomenon" is coming from, I made it a point to hit up a quick sampling of fan opinions. One main recurring point: Apparently Book #2 "New Moon" is the "love it or leave it" installment - regarded either as the series high-point or a fundamental low; no middle ground. It doesn't take long to discern why...

(incidentally, tip for making it through these at top-speed: Every time Meyer starts in on a positive description of male beauty, flip ahead five pages. Trust me - ALL you're missing is about eighteen paragraphs worth of synonyms for the words "hard," "cold" and "pale.")

...anyway, the whole story turns on Bella (female lead) getting a paper cut, the blood from which makes one of the good vampires momentarily flip the hell out and nearly attack her (visualized with unintended hillarity in the film's teaser trailer with a slo-mo sequence of pale skinny dudes throwing eachother through a piano.) She lives, but Edward (male lead, vampire) pulls a Bruce Banner - i.e. throwing a masochistic "I've got to protect you from me!" hissy-fit and running away, for whatever reason taking the rest of his crew with him. Bruce Banner, incidentally, is a reference Edward probably wouldn't "get" - since if he did, he'd know that doing this is the surest way to garauntee that one or more of the two not-as-nice vampires still living after #1 turn up again. Anyway, Bella gets mopey(er) and (more-specifically)-suicidal over this; but perks back up by reconnecting with old-buddy Jacob, fun-loving grease-monkey and member of the local Indian tribe... who's spent the interim between books growing into what my mother's generation called a "hunk." Oh, and he's a werewolf. See: title of the book plus pages upon pages of amusingly clumsy foreshadowing.

This, I infer, is where the "division" in the fandom comes from: Edward basically VANISHES for about 90% of this installment, supplanted by his diametric opposite. Fangirls, help me out here: This is like Twilight's version of Kirk-vs-Picard or Mike-vs-Joel, right? You're either a "Jacob Girl" or an "Edward Girl," in which case "New Moon" is either oasis or desert? Are there 'nicknames' for the two 'sides?' Anyway, though for what I imagine are profoundly different reasons than the target audience, I'd have to cast my lot in on the "Jacob side." Not that he's any less a one-dimensional cliche than anyone else in the series... but having suffered through a book and a half (plus a movie) of this stuff I'm inclined to be sympathetic to ANY character who's checklist of motivations includes "wanting Edward to die."

Moreover, though, I can say with some certainty that I'd call this the highlight (such as it is) of the series. The cartoonishly-unlikable male lead isn't around to bother me, that's part of it, but it's kind of the first (and, it turns out, LAST) time that the series makes good on it's own apparent hook of reworking mythic monsters into teen-romance archetypes - i.e. the vampire is the rich classy suitor vs. the blue-collar "fun" werewolf guy, fire vs. ice, a gender-swapped Archie/Betty/Veronica thing... but with monsters. Okay. Not really my "thing," but at least I'm getting a rough idea what the point is. This is - speaking of foreshadowing - the closest I'll ultimately come to enjoying this...

...too bad it doesn't last. A 3rd-act plot-contrivance drags Edward back into the mix, but mainly serves to introduce the franchise principal supervillians: A vampire self-policing aristocracy called "The Volturi" (cute) who hail from the vampire city Volterra (oh, gawd... y'know, even as a five year-old noting how for example the Thundercats came from Thunderra or Crystar came from Crystalium I thought that kind of naming-scheme was dopey.) They've got more exotic names and better super-powers than everyone else, basically, and their main function here is to hand the good guys an ultimatum to either turn Bella into a vamp sooner than later or off her before she spills the beans to someone. "That's light Team Amelica! A TICKING CROCK!!"

But anyway... yeah, compared to the first one, this one I didn't mind - to the point that, until Act 3 rolled around, I was struck by the sinking feeling I had a lot of "perhaps I misjudged this" crow to eat. It's tempered, however, by the fact that the stuff I liked I think I liked for the wrong reasons - it's obvious that the book intends for the reader to miss Edward, whereas I couldn't have been happier to not have him hanging around. Also, now that this is officially a "fantasy world" story instead of just a "vampire story," a problematic flaw rears it's head: While the teen-romance stuff works in fits and starts... ALL the mythology stuff is bad. All of it. The vamp/werewolf backstories are dripping in tired cliche, and the new stuff (like the "shiny" vampires) is pretty awful. And since "mythos" tends to get MORE dense as these things wear on... well, spoiler alert: That's goin' where you think it is. Starting tomorrow.

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Experiment: Reading through "Twilight" (no, really) Part 1

(NOTE: The following post(s) include discussions of plot points from a bunch of books already published but that have not been made into movies yet, much of which can be considered SPOILERS. So no carping at me for not doing inviso-text or something.)

Something that never really made it into the well-known movies (and probably won't be in the new one) about Sherlock Holmes is that the title character is a habitual abuser of cocaine (intravenously, even!) and other narcotics. The reasoning behind this - aside from "Hey, YOU find a way to give this smug, antisocial, asexual intellectual show-off whos ALWAYS right some depth!" - is that Holmes is so cerebral he can't bear to be mentally disengaged even for a moment and will take the synapse-stimulating haze of a "high" over not having any cases to solve or chemistry to dick around with. (If he'd lived today - or at all - Holmes would've been forced-fed handfuls Ritalin as soon as he was old enough to talk back to this teachers and Professor Moriarty would be ruling half of Western Europe right now.) There's an amusing element of truth in this: Nerds HATE to be bored. That's why we turn casual leisure activities like movie-watching or gaming into marathons of endurance, why we "collect" instead of "aquire," and why we'll take bad stories that are "in continuity" over good ones that aren't (looking at YOU, everyone who's sooooo psyched about Ben Reilly coming back.)

Which is kind of a long-ish way of explaining that Bob works in a used book store, and occasionally Bob has NOTHING to fucking do for hours on end, so Bob will read just about ANYTHING to pass the time. As a rule, I avoid anything I expect to really LIKE because I want to be able to drop it once work actually rolls around and I'm "that guy" who can't put a good read down. One day, for example, I read Sean Hannity's book. Guess how I feel about Sean Hannity. Go on, guess. By far my favorite "snack" in these cases is bad "genre fiction" - read: scifi and fantasy of the type so brilliantly parodied with Stephen Colbert's "Tek Jansen" bits - because it's usually a quick read and even when it's REALLY bad at least I get some aliens and/or sexually-aggressive amazons. A little while back the store made a big thing out of finally carrying the "Twilight" books, so I figured... well, only a matter of time. Plus, I needed to take a break from the lesser works of R.A. Salvatore at SOME point ;)

Frequent readers and/or fans of my Escapist stuff may recall that I quit shortly through book #1 and HATED the movie (dubbing it "Mormon Vampire Abstinence Porn") and I honestly had very little intention of ever reading these save for a rare attack of negative introspection. See, they've been teasing the release of movie #2 "New Moon" with glamour shots of the Indian Werewolf dudes (hey, I warned you at the top of the page) standing around shirtless looking like a parody of early-90s designer-jeans ads. Like everyone else in the web geekverse, this struck me as immediately hysterical but also gave me a subsequent pause: There's nothing INHERENTLY "funny" about this, other than the blatant sexualization of mythic characters... in which case, am I now on the "other side" of seeing my female compatriots roll their eyes at the likes of Power Girl and Fathom (okay, thats not fair, EVERYONE rolls their eyes at Fathom...) etc? In other words, am I missing the "point" here by not at least trying to engage the rare genre-entry that's actually AIMED at women (instead of aimed at ME with some girl-power bones thrown to a female audience - looking at you Joss Whedon.)?

So I figured... what the hell? I'll read the damn things, maybe get a run of blog entries out of it and MAYBE I'll have to revise my feelings toward the franchise as a whole (spoiler: that didn't happen) and in doing so further endear myself to the she-geek set (fingers still crossed on that one - hey ladies, did I mention I ALSO happen to love chocolate, flavored-alcohol and Tina Fey?) So I did. Took about a week reading in-between customers and stocking duty, probably coulda done it in about twelve hours uninterupted (see above i.e. nerds and boredom.) Overall verdict: Shoulda gone with my first instinct - yeesh, this goes from not-very-good to holy-shit-what-a-train-wreck more profoundly than the last three M. Night Shyamalan flicks. BUT can I wring some blogging out of it? Um... yeah, actually, since I've already banged FIVE paragraphs out of "so, I read some bad vampire books recently...") So here's how this "experiment" is gonna work: 4 books, 4 days. I'm gonna collect and post my insightful recollects (read: mean-spirited sex jokes) regarding each; and then YOU'RE going to read it, hopefully laugh and not be too angry with me when I recycle/cannibalize 90% of this material for reviewing the subsequent movie adaptations ;)

Why break it up over 4 days? Because this particular blog format doesn't let you do the space-saving "click to read more" teaser-paragraph thing, and I'd rather not have loooong posts vanish from prime viewing space the moment I find a new youtube bit to link to. Anyway, onto #1...

TWILIGHT: Thanks to the media-blitz, the story you already know: Mopey high-school girl moves to overcast town, falls for whiny douchebag who's actually a vampire. It's most infamous for the way it reworks the typical fetishism of the vampire myth into a kind of pro-abstinence/"surrendered wife" thing; but there's a few more levels of "huh?" to it - part of the main vamp's apparent attractiveness to the heroine is that, being a century or so old, he's basically a worldly old man pursuing an inexperience high schooler. That in an of itself is nothing new to vampire stories, but usually it's played as a dark metaphor for predatory behavior - HERE, it's treated like the most dizzyingly-romantic thing evah. Quick tip, girls: In real life, the phrase "he's soooo much more MATURE than guys my own age" is often followed by an Amber Alert ;) There's also a slightly-icky vibe of incest-fantasy hovering over the vampire "family" and their romantically-paired adopted "children," though given that the female-authored-vampire-romance has Anne Rice and Laurel K. Hamilton as it's major touchstones I guess one should be thankful it remains just a "vibe" instead of a book-length digression. There's also some bad guys, who aren't especially interesting, some Native Americans who have kind of a "wolf" thing going on, and apparently vampires get one specific "super-power" in addition to everything else. Lead guy, for example, is a mind-reader... except it doesn't work on the girl. Incidentally as to those last two bits... recurring theme for the series: Stephanie Meyer "foreshadows" like Michael Bay "utilizes pyrotechnics." Overall, my impression of this one - book and movie - remains that it's "this generation's" answer to V.C. Andrews: Cheezy as all hell, not especially artful in it's prose and feels a lot like reading the Myspace pages of it's target audience. In book-form it's a little less embarassing than the movie, but given the choice I'll take the movie because Ashley Greene (who plays "Alice") is fucking GORGEOUS.

So... tune in tomorrow, where I'll either continue this OR sober up to the point that I realize this is a stupid idea to blow 4 days on ;)

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Jennifer's Body

Below, the R-rated "redband" trailer for "Jennifer's Body," screenwriter/blogger Diablo Cody's followup to "Juno," evidently based on the STUNNINGLY original premise of a murdered/beaten (raped, also, I infer?) high school cheerleader who "comes back" as a literally man-eating demon (or maybe she was always that way and this "woke it up?" I dunno.)



Here's what's bugging me: Diablo Cody is ONLY famous for ONE thing - her dialogue. Nobody cares (so far) about her plotting, her stories or her characterizations - she's a "brand" based on her ability/prediliction for a writing style in which characters blurt out quippy, ironic, reference-laden dialogue like a belt-fed machine-gun hooked up to Liz Lemon. And that's great, good on her, I liked "Juno," yadda yadda. But in this....

...look: if the whole "hook" of this movie is that it's a teen horror deal but with a focus on Cody's celebrated dialogue... what would possess you to hire a talentless, personality-deficient non-actor like MEGAN FOX for the lead role? I've seen this woman trying to deliver dialogue... it's like watching a quadraplegic try to moonwalk. I understand she's mainly here to stand around wearing vaugely post-orgasmic expressions and possibly pop the twins out... but geez, there are Youtube videos of "talking" cats who can form coherent sentences more ably than Megan Fox can.

And speaking of the dialogue...

"I thought you only ates boys!"

"I go both ways."

Yikes. See, here's the other problem: Cody's style is often afflicted with David Mamet's Disease - in that it ONLY sounds really, really good when spoken in the right way by the right actor. Nobody in this seems to be "the right actor."

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Asteroids, Viewmaster, etc.

I'm lately finding myself a bit of a rare species here on the interweb, in as much as I'm not reflexively aghast at each new "low" in the current trend of greenlighting major movies based on brand-name properties of dubious narrative potential (usually video games or old toys.) The problem is probably with me, being that I'm A.) a film geek born in 1981 and thus the textbook "mark" for these films and B.) not concerned with artificially-increasing my percieved coolness by being a snide douche and pretending these things don't still occupy a place of affection in my psyche.

For awhile, this particular trend confined itself to action figure lines from the 80s, most of which had nominal stories attached that could be plausibly adapted to film. Recently, though, it's branched off into stuff like random playthings or board games that don't really have any attendant "story" or "theme," which has gotten people all hot and bothered about "the end of cinema" and other such hyperbole. Current most-punchline-y cases: Viewmaster and Asteroids (as in the photo-viewing visor toy and the minimalist late-70s arcade game.)

Frankly, the aquisitions of THESE kinds of properties makes me a lot LESS apprehensive than the stuff that was already narrative. 80s action-figure backstories, with the mandatory dueling teams of good and evil characters fighting over some mythical widget or another, don't exactly mandate the most complex stories be told. Stuff that IS "just a hook and a brand," on the other hand, seems to me to hold more possibilities. Asteroids, for example, is "about" a spaceship tasked with blowing up space debris. Something you could build a decent scifi movie out of? Sure, I think so.

Elsewhere, Ridley Scott apparently wants to make a "Monopoly" movie - as in the board game. Now... a Ridley Scott movie about wealthy people fighting dirty over real-estate? Yeah, I wanna see that - and if he has to slap the Parker Bros. brand on it to get it made... still deserves a chance, as far as I'm concerned. Same deal with the proposed "Battleship" film. Viewmaster? How many movies have already been made about looking-glass type devices having some extra-natural function? Does the cheezy branding make it an AUTOMATIC "don't" regardless of the outcome? (Oh, in case your wondering, YES, someone already grabbed up the rights to make a horror movie out of "Oujia Board," probably the biggest 'duh' property in this cycle.)

I can certainly see, if nothing else, a kind of perverse creative "fun" to be had if one if the guy (or guys) tasked with coming up with narrative contexts for these things. Lemme try some out...

SILLY PUTTY: Terrorists pursue a kid who's unwittingly used his Silly Putty to "copy" the only known text of missle launch codes.

CREEPY CRAWLERS: Rubbery insects come out "alive," chase people.

EASY BAKE OVEN: Girl makes surprisingly-good amateur pastries, often with comically magical results (so, "Simply Irresistable"/"Like Water For Chocolate" but with a kid.)

OPERATION! Disgraced surgeon must perform delicate operation on a man who has been wired by terrorists to explode if bomb parts not removed precisely (This Summer: Don't blink. Don't breath. Don't... touch the sides!)

HOT WHEELS: That unused script for "Fast & Furious 5" might as well get used for SOMETHING, right?

TWISTER: Teen sex-comedy. Vaugely-dweeby guy re-evaluates life after round of titular party-game accidentally lands him in semi-compromising position with longtime female friend he'd previously not thought of "that way." (Paging Mr. Cera...)

RADIO FLYER: Oh, yeah. Nevermind.

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Ong Bak 2 trailer

What I like most about the Tony Jaa "cycle" of Thai martial-arts movies is that they all affect this seemingly straight-faced kind of fairytale moral naivete amid all the head-kicking. Jaa - a simply incredible physical-specimen of a fight-star if certainly NOT the most charismatic figure the genre has ever seen - generally plays a Thai version of Lil' Abner: An old-fashioned, reflexively-patriotic, churchgoing country bumpkin who happens to be a superhuman ass-kicking machine and puts those skills to use against unscrupulous "big city folk" who make trouble for his rural compatriots... usually by disrespecting their religious customs or screwing with their resources. In "Ong Bak" he beats up about 1/3rd of Bangkok trying to find a stolen Buddha statue, while in "The Protector" he has to save a baby elephant from a crime syndicate that's running an illegal resturaunt that serves endangered animals to evil gourmets. Read that last one again.

Which might be why, while the rest of the web is losing it over the shot in the new trailer for "Ong Bak 2" where Jaa appears to be fighting a live crocodile; MY favorite part is the sublimely ridiculous shot of him standing on the rock while what looks like an army of elephants GENUFLECTS in front of him like he's fucking Babar or something:



Incidentally, this looks to be a period film; which leads me to believe that it doesn't actually have anything to do with the first one - which makes sense, since "Protector" was actually already called "Ong Bak 2" in some territories.

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Escape to the Movies: Public Enemies

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