Okay, let’s try this again. Due to the troubles with the Patreon plugin I’m going to try housing the exclusive reviews on Patreon itself. (Thanks for the suggestion, Shan.) So if you pledge $1 or more to my Patreon you can enjoy the ever-loving werewolf shit out of this exclusive review series. Thanks for your patience!
And here’s a link for the first one, TWILIGHT.
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It’s working! And I’m LEARNING things – thanks Vern.
The thing about hands on the belly from the first one was a bombshell…
This is definitely a bit better than part 1. It’s less awkward (although the big, dramatic climax is about Bella, trying to stop Edward from taking his shirt off in public!!), better directed, the mythology deepenings are a nice touch (if they work or not is a different topic) and the Volturi are the damn greatest characters in this series. Michael Sheen (who unfortunately doesn’t show up in everything anymore, like he did around 10 years ago) is maybe the only actor in the whole series, who doesn’t seem ashamed of being in it and mega-acts the shit out his role, to give all the people in the audience, who were dragged into the theatre by their daughters, dates or younger sisters, something cool.
Missed opportunity: (I might remember it wrong, because it’s been a while) When the villain from the last movie shows up all “Hey, we had our differences last time, but I have to tell you about something important”. I was hoping for him to become an ally, in the great action movie tradition of “You kicked my ass, so let’s be friends”. But nope.
Michael Sheen always throws himself into a role, he especially wanted the one in Tron: Legacy and I think from what I remember kind of gave the game away in letting them know he would have done it for free or even paid them to do it, which potentially could weaken your negotiating position somewhat if contracts haven’t been signed yet.
As for Twilight, originally …
Michael Sheen: I took role in Twilight sequel New Moon to keep my daughter happy
… but once he was in the role, I hear he really threw himself into it with great gusto and really looked to be having a lot of fun. I think I can imagine what it might have been like going by what he did with Tron: Legacy.
Oh great, now something’s up with the html. Kept changing the format when I was pasting links in.
Here it is again then.
AS A RED-EYED, long haired, bloodsucking vampire, Michael Sheen should be used to piercing, ear-shattering screams.
This one doubles down on the awfulness by removing the only semi-redeeming facet of the first one—its ineffective but well intentioned stabs at naturalism—and replacing it with po’faced slickness, more melodrama, more retrograde gender studies, more awkward pauses, and a massive fatty slab of warmed over world-building that could have come from a particularly sluggish session of VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE. To call this franchise’s mythology shallow is to insult puddles. Michael Sheen gives mega-acting a bad name. I forgot Dakota Fanning was even in it. The hilarious werewolf design and eye-rollingly contrived “door-slamming farce on codeine” plotting puts lie to the idea that faithful adaptations are always better. There was a certain naive authenticity to the first film’s modest aims but this is just bloated, cliched disingenuous trash. And I normally like that sort of thing.
You’re doing the Lord’s work here, Vern. Thanks for all the strife you went through to get this piece to us. We appreciate it.
Outside of the trailers, the only parts of this film that I’ve sat down to watch are those with Michael Sheen. Obviously I don’t have the full context to appreciate his insane overacting, but I quite enjoyed it in two or three minute clips.
An interesting fact I learned a couple of years ago is that the director of this film, Chris Weitz is the grandson of Lupita Tovar, a famous actress from Mexico who died in 2016 at the age of 106.
Like I said last time, I think it’s pretty fun that after the first book was such an unexpected hit, Meyer seems to have taken the lesson that what people wanted was way more convoluted worldbuilding. The “who will she choose?” plot makes sense with the forbidden-romance angle of the first film, but she apparently couldn’t think of a way to get there without this crazy convoluted plotline that involves a secret vampire government and telekinesis and prophecies of the future and shit. I have a hard time believing that’s what fans of the original book really wanted, but hey, who am I to tell Meyers her business?
What else was she gonna do? All she did was buy the Intermediate Vampire Mythos Starter Kit and add water. You and I could come up with something more interesting than Committee of Louche Eurotrash in less time than it took me to type “Committee Of Louche Eurotrash” on my phone. It takes more effort to have no ideas at all than to go with that one.
I mean, it seems to me like the obvious thing to do would be to focus on the forbidden romance between these two star-crossed lovers, not to add hundreds of supporting players, each with their own complicated and exhaustively explained factional goals. The whole point of making him a vampire was as a metaphor for how dangerous and irresistible their attraction was, no? Adding all the rote worldbuilding seems to me to confuse the metaphor and actively undermine the thing I would assume is the whole point of the book, and surely the whole appeal to it’s fans.
I obviously can’t say Ive read an overwhelming amount of TWILIGHT fan fiction, but I can’t help but note that the wildly successful 50 SHADES OF GRAY seemed to connect with a large section of the same general audience by doing exactly the opposite of the TWILIGHT sequels — focusing exclusively on the relationship and dumping every bit of elaborate fantasy world nonsense.
Also, I’m sorry to say it, but someone here’s gonna have to start a band called “The Committee Of Louche Eurotrash”
I’m not saying it was a good idea to overbuild the world. I’m saying it’s the obvious idea. It’s what every hack does when confronted with the challenge of continuing a story: they overcomplicate, they embellish, they doodle in the margins. They don’t listen to Poe and confuse the profound with the merely complex. The least imaginative thing to do in this case was to graft on a standard vampire hierarchy to a story whose only positive was its narrow focus. It seems counterintuitive because it is. This isn’t a story that wants all the bells and whistles. It wants to stay intimate. But advancing the story while maintaining that intimacy would have required tact and subtlety and imagination and commitment, and that’s a bridge too far for this storyteller. Much easier to crib from the worst parts of BLADE 1 and create a generic source of exterior antagonism than to find compelling interior/personal obstacles to the central relationship.
To put it in terms we can all understand:
“Committee of Louche Eurotrash” is to TWILIGHT as “The Thorn Cult” is to HALLOWEEN.
The urge to explain the evocative is a sure indication of hackery. It’s what every backseat auteur and Monday morning rewriter does when faced with an unknown: They gaze into the dangerous but hypnotic abyss of dreams and try to make it safe for the general publics with a rickety scaffolding of rules and backstory. Answering questions nobody asked is how we got LEATHERFACE and SOLO: point-missing hackworks that think every lean, mean machine needs spinning rims and hydraulics. These barnacles on the underbelly of the creative instinct don’t write stories; they pimp them.
That’s probably a good bit of advice for writing in general. It’s certainly tempting to speculate that the success of 50 SHADES OF GRAY had something to do with its stripping away the fantasy clutter of TWILIGHT and focusing exclusively on the profoundly unhealthy relationship which should have been at the core of its story, but gradually seems to have become just one more swirling cog in an ever-more-complicated machine.
Thankfully, right at the precipice of offering some faint praise to E. L. James, I’m reminded that the 50 SHADES sequels also spun off into a hopeless mire of complicating subplots. Whew, that was a close one.
Didn’t 50 SHADES even start as TWILIGHT fanfiction?
That is my understanding. Ironic, since fanfiction is notorious for doing exactly what Mr. M is talking about, but in this particular case the TWILIGHT sequels got so increasingly fan-fictiony that it took fan fiction to bring the series back to its roots.
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(NOTE: My ten year contract has passed on the Titan books, so I don't get residuals on them like I do WORM ON A HOOK and NIKETOWN, but I would love for you to read them because I'm proud of them)
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November 23rd, 2018 at 7:23 pm
I’ve sponsored far too many webcomics on Patreon for far too long (I should have known better for my own good) and hence have an inkling of a few things you can do with Patreon as a workaround. On the subject of webcomics, there’s definitely a few which are quite impressively cinematic with their storytelling if you can find them amongst the numerous other ones out there. Much like films and TV themselves, actually …