This week for anyone who pledges $1 or more on Patreon I have my third Twilight review, ECLIPSE. This is the one directed by David Slade (30 DAYS OF NIGHT), who added some interesting new weirdness. I particularly had fun with this review because of some Seattle-specific details I noticed.
Thanks everybody!
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While I wouldn’t call this one “good” either, I would say this is the 2nd most watchable of the series. It helps, that it at least partly focuses on a serious threat, instead of just throwing a villain in as an afterthought, because the movie needs a last act. Also I forgot, is this the part where we learn about the backstory of one of the Cullens and that her spin-off movie would basically be I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE with vampires?
Anyway, in terms of David Slade: I just leave this anno 1995 directorial work by him here and wait for the WTFs. That shit is so weird, it even only triggers my arachnophobia a little bit.
I’ll be honest, they pretty much start to blur together at this point. It’s just one manufactured crisis after another getting in the way of The Universally Accepted Single Most Important Event In The History Of The World, which is that someday the most boring underage drip in the world will trick her abusive elderly boyfriend into fucking her. Everyone in the entire universe agrees that there is no more pressing issue facing of society, which is why they are willing to throw down and do battle in the Sacred Clearing Of Momentous Happenings whenever the Forces Of Cockblocking Evil align to stand in the way of True Angsty Brooding Love Or Whatever. At no point will anyone bring up the entirely reasonable point that neither of these two sadsacks are worth the effort, and that life would be better for everyone in their circumference and beyond if they decided to maybe see other people who don’t start blood feuds every five minutes over love interests they barely know and haven’t even gotten to second base with yet.
What’s Bella’s favorite movie, Edward? I bet you never even bothered to ask.
The thing that kills me about the Dumb Shirtless Love Triangle portion of this idiotic story is that this is supposed to be a fantasy. You got these two oafs displaying the kind of on-the-nose macho patriarchal bullshit behavior you might expect from the rednecks in a rape-revenge picture, yet it’s been written as if this is every girl’s ultimate dream. These are supposed to be two Solid Dudes who are just Boys Being Boys because they want to fuck me so bad and isn’t that so romantic? “Oh, to have two mansplaining shitheads have a dick-measuring contest over little old me!” we can assume the intended audience is thinking instead of “Run, girl. Run as far away as you can, and when you get there, learn how to love yourself.” The internalization of patriarchal values on display here is simply maddening.
Once again, there is nothing to recommend. It’s as wheel-spinning and redundant a narrative contraption as has even been developed. It’s an unending ouroboros of proposals and breakups, like a dramatization of the worst girl you know from high school’s Facebook relationship status. It might be complicated, but the participants are as basic as humanly possible.
Okay, fine, the cracking porcelain vampire flesh was pretty cool. Mostly because every time we see it, it means there are fewer of these awful characters around.
I want all movies to have a mandatory GI Joe-style “Majestyk’s Morals” clip at the end, where Mr. M comes out and explains to the kids what lesson they just learned.
Lars von Trier used to talk to the audience at the start of episodes of The Kingdom. Just warning you that it can be a bit of a double-edged sword.
I’m sure Majestyk will be fine, though I should have hastened to add.
I mean, I don’t want to tell anybody what they’re supposed to get out of this story. This is just what I get out of it. But I would be very interested to hear a spirited defense of the themes on display in TWILIGHT. Even the fans I’ve spoken to or read comment from tend to fall into the “Yeah, it’s crap but boys like crap too and nobody makes fun of them” category, not the “Your reading is wrong. Please allow me to explain why there is another way of viewing this material” category. If there’s a level of appeal or meaning here beyond “Golly, I wish these dreamy shirtless jerks were stalking ME,” I have not been made aware of it. To my knowledge, nobody has even attempted to reframe Bella as a stealth feminist heroine, which, considering the hot take culture we live in, is kind of incredible. I mean, Vern does his best to be nice but his goodwill seems stretched to the breaking point in trying to come up with anything positive to say about this story other than “Well, I bet if you were the kind of person who likes this stuff, you’d probably like it, I guess.”
Nah. I’m an unashamed romance novel enthusiast and there is nothing here. It’s not original. It’s not well-thought, well-written or well-anything. It’s got the emotional depth of a werewolf piss puddle.
You’re right that the only defense is how it’s criticized. It pisses me off just how condescending the criticism can get because it so easily veers into misogyny, but it’s still dreck.
Ironic that the only defense one can offer for TWILIGHT’s shallow misogyny is how quickly that criticism descends into shallow misogyny. Right about when that happens might be a good time to notice something is really seriously wrong with us.
It’s funny how Buffy the Vampire Slayer pre-emptively showed how toxic these sorts of situations were. If anything, this series was quite the regressive step backwards in that department, wasn’t it?
Twilight just got 50% better for including a shot of Vern’s house!
For those who weren’t following Twilight news in 2010, Rachelle LeFevre lost her role because she committed to an indie movie filming at the same time. She thought they could work around her because Victoria is a supporting role. This of course was in violation of her Twilight contract and they figured Bryce Dallas Howard was just as good (if not better!)
I hope appearing in Barney’s Version was worth it to Lafevre. I mean, If it had turned into the next Big Fat Greek Wedding it could’ve been worth it. Her agent certainly should have explained to her that a big studio franchise doesn’t wait around. I’d suspect breaking contract may have cost her more jobs than not being in Twilight 3: Tokyo Drift although she still works so it wasn’t a career ender.
I’ve only seen the first Twilight. Stayed away from the rest of the series because there are better uses of my time than watching crap like this.
What are do you all think of the Fifty Shades franchise? The premise is dumb and Dakota Johnson & Jamie Dorman have no chemistry together, but i sorta enjoyed the first film for some reason.
This was the first TWILIGHT movie that I found entertaining, though not for positive reasons.
I launched into the series when either 4 or 5 had come out, because I was intrigued by the degree to which everybody seemed to unite around how disgracefully the Ed/Bella romance was portrayed. Even Stewart and Pattinson eventually denounced the relationship of their on-screen counterparts, if memory serves.
Anyway, it’s obviously an ill-conceived partnership from the jump, but I think this installment really starts to deliver the goods in terms of making me actively appalled instead of just rolling my eyes in boredom. It gets much, much worse in the last two films…can’t wait for Vern’s take!
Did you know that Fifty Shades of Grey started life as Twilight fan fiction?
Much has been made over the past few years of Fifty Shades Of Grey’s origins as a web-based Twilight fan fiction. Christian Grey was once a fictionalized non-vampire version of Edward Cullen, and wan, gamine Anastasia Steele was once a wan, gamine Bella Swan. That Twilight fan-fic has long since disappeared from the Internet, but PDFs of it remain, floating around the fan communities that first made the story successful.
Unlike TWILIGHT, which I watched out of morbid curiosity when a pay TV channel held a marathon a few years ago, I didn’t watch 50 SHADES and don’t plan to. Mostly because if you think that TWILIGHT is already toxic to the max, 50 SHADES is even worse, because it apparently portrays abuse as something romantic.
Now hear me out! I’m not anti-BDSM. I don’t get the full appeal of it on a personal level, but thanks to being friends with a couple who lives a 24/7 BDSM lifestyle and my own healthy curiosity, I know enough about it to say that it may look like abusive and degrading behaviour, but is actually about trust and respecting each other’s limits. Yeah, we all know the cliche of the bad guy, who has his own rape dungeon and uses it to torture innocent victims from a million movies, but again: This is not what it’s about. Shit, my friends are a super sweet and normal couple, only that they love to “punish” each other. But again: With the maximum amount of trust and knowing your partner’s likes and limits!
Now 50 SHADES seems to be written by a rape apologist, who only knows BDSM from when Bruce Willis lost his job as bodyguard in LAST BOY SCOUT. Only that she thought that Bruce must have been an asshole for interrupting that “act of love”. In 50 SHADES the guy is using BDSM because of some kind of emotional damage (The old “If you are doing anything else than vanilla sex in your dark bedroom, you should see a shrink”), pushes the girl more or less into that lifestyle and on several occasions ignores her wishes and even her safeword! And of course getting your ass plugged although you said clearly “No, I don’t want it!”, is the most romantic thing ever in this world, according to this series.
In conclusion: Fuck that shit. I just hope that all those teenage girls and soccer moms, who suddenly discover their hidden kinky side because of these books, are smart enough to consult with real BDSM pros, before they all die from internal bleedings.
It is my understanding that 50 SHADES is to actual BDSM as Steve Carell’s description of what he imagines breasts feel like in THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN is to legitimate sexual experience.
While that may be so, I think we can acknowledge that both DEATH WISH and 50 SHADES OF TWILIGHT offer fantasies that would be completely horrible in the real world, but it’s not a movie’s job to remind its audience that fantasy and reality are two entirely different things. It is, however, their job to make those fantasies appealing and cinematic.
Not only is 50 SHADES fanfic of TWILIGHT, but I’ve heard TWILIGHT is fanfic of the tv show Roswell. My head is spinning with the lack of originality. Or maybe it’s the fumes of mediocrity.
Yeah, but being a vigilante is pretty different from having kinky sex. I mean, if you beat the shit out of your sexual partner and don’t intend to give a shit if he/she says “stop” or “Don’t even start”, you are not doing BDSM, you are the kind of guy that Paul Kersey would hunt and kill! And while we all agree that vigilantism is wrong, at least he has a better justification for killing you, than you have for doing in your bedroom!
Hopping onto the latest thread to ask if anyone else here’s gone to see new Kollywood flick 2.0?
Seems to have got an unusually wide release in the West – is screening near me in Scotland in 3 different languages. Anyway, it is beyond batshit and I think a lot of people here would love it.
It’s about a rogue computer virus (but there’s more to it than that) that causes everyone in the city’s phones to fly into the air and form a giant bird. They’ve got to adapt to life without phones while also learning to deal with this giant evil bird tearing up the city. Shit gets so bad that they have to think about reactivating a really horny robot played by this 67 year old slightly paunchy dude, who went rogue and got shut off in a previous movie but might be controllable now. There’s also a female robot detective. And that’s all in the first 30 minutes, it is unbelievable where they take this.
The trailers marketed it as really goofy – and sweet jesus it is goofy – but its surprisingly hardcore and violent too. Some of the deaths early on are so striking and unusual, and genuinely awful, that it put me in mind of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. Bahubali 2 is still the gold standard from what I’ve seen (legit one of the best action movies I’ve seen this decade) but this one had a similar degree of “I cannot believe they have made this”, which is a big win for me. Time and time again over the 150 minutes I was absolutely staggered by what I was seeing.
Worth catching in the cinema if you can for the 3D, which is major stuff-poking-at-out-thru-the-screen in a way that is gimmicky and unfashionable but I love. One of the things that gets the 3D popping-out-the-screen effect is literally someone committing suicide by hanging, not something I ever thought’d get that sort of treatment. It made me laugh.
I really, really think that action movie in the US and Europe fans overlook Indian cinema for a whole bunch of reasons, which is a shame cos a lot of what is coming out there atm owes a lot to – or bares similarities to – the 80s heyday of action movie cinema. Production value and and sheer madcap ambition beats your Wolf Warrior 2s by a mile. There’s probably a lot to unpack there. Availability aint even the issue cos a lot of the best ones are on netflix globally (watch bahubali).
If you usually sit Indian action movies out cos you’re not into musicals or whatever be aware that this one doesn’t have musical numbers any except over the credits.
Twilight was inspired by Roswell fan-fic? If that’s accurate, it really is turtles all the way down. Not the kind of turtles you’d want to keep as pets, either.
I’ve seen the trailer to 2.0 thanks to this article. It looks suitably bonkers.
If your brain is already feeling a little fried by the week’s end, you might want to skip the trailer for a Tamil film called 2.0. But if you want to try to wrap your brain around one potential outcome of our hopeless addiction to smartphones, this trailer’s got robots, explosions, and a gigantic cyborg eagle made from millions of hijacked mobile devices.
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November 29th, 2018 at 12:50 pm
I’m just here so I don’t get fined.