Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Twilight............Zone

Okay, that was forty bucks down the drain. A hundred and twenty, actually, since I dragged both my folks to watch it with me. So where do I begin?

Let’s start with the characters.

Isabella (Bella) Swan, one of the two main protagonists of this tragic story (when I mean tragic I don’t mean Shakespeare kind of tragic, by the way). She moves from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks since she wants to give her mom and her new inamorata some breathing space.

Edward Cullen, the other main protagonist, and who eventually, inevitably, and very predictably lands up with the role of being Bella’s vampire lover.

Filler characters – the characters that mostly take up screen time and space, have no vital roles, are expendable, and are yet indispensible to the plot. Here’s a quick list and their roles:

Charlie Swan – Bella’s cop daddy

The Cullen family – with the exception of Edward, they come in pairs. You know, just like in that alien movie. From memory, their names are somewhere along the lines of Charlisle, Emmett, Rosalie, Jasper, Alice, and the mom of the family called ?? (*hint hint* it’s a bad sign when the audience leaves without remembering the names of the characters)

The villains – James, Victoria, and Laurent

Bella’s friends – they need to exist. Just so that we know that Bella’s school isn’t just made out of her and the Cullen Jrs.

Plot (don’t read this if you’re planning on watching it since it contains practically the entire plot)

Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Girl gets attacked. Boy helps girl. The end. Okay, it’s a little more complicated than that. Bella moves into Forks, meets Edward & co, discovers his family’s secrets, accepts him for who/what he is, and they become lovers. All goes well until another group of vampires enter the stage. James the Sportsman decides to hunt Bella down just for the heck of it after he gets a whiff of her scent at a baseball game (yes, a baseball game. Of all things.), and Bella quickly gets hustled away from Forks with Alice and Jasper as the rest of the family tries to take the bad guys out. She gets tricked into revisiting her old Ballet school in Phoenix, and just when her prospects aren’t looking fantastic, Edward appears out of nowhere and proceeds to kick James’ ass. They tango a little, and somewhere in between, Bella gets bitten by the Big Bad. After that, James’ role is practically over. The rest of the Cullen family arrive, so James bites the dust. The last complication – knowing that Bella’s been bitten and is about to turn into a vampire, Edward has to make his choice – suck away the venom from Bella but risk killing her, or let the venom spread and eventually turn her into a vampire? It’s not even a choice. Edward the Hero gallantly sucks the venom out, and fast forward a couple of scenes and Bella’s attending Prom in a cast. They dance in privacy and Bella tells Edward that she wants to be a vampire, and both refuse to give in. The story ends with Victoria watching them from afar.

Alright, let’s try to be subjective. The good points of the show?

The graduation caps. Love the collection of graduation caps. Always good to be academic, after all.

…………………………

Right. Next, the bad points. I’m going to love this.

Cinematography

I’m no pro when it comes to this, but unfortunately, when an amateur thinks that the cinematography of a show sucks, it’s generally bad news. The special effects. Oh, boy, were they special. You can always tell the third-rate, low-budget movies from five miles away when they deliberately shoot the scene in slow-motion as the characters make a grand entrance, waltzing into scene with slow, deliberate movements and wide strides, their eyes narrowed, their chins tilted to portray confidence. You may think it imparts significance, or that it makes the characters look gangsta. Believe me, it doesn’t. All it does is that it cheapens the character, and makes the movie look even more superficial than ever. The choreography (yes, choreography, since it looked like the actors were instructed to emulate dancing apes) during the baseball scene was fantastic. Fantastically awful, that is. Especially the part where they were trading glares, sliding their bodies sideways and making clawlike motions in a rather feeble attempt to look - I don’t know – animalistic? Didn’t work. Animals have a surprising amount of grace with regards to their motion. That, on the other hand, was ugh. The shining skin. Shining. Skin. The glistening flesh which was portrayed as “beautiful” looked about as appealing as a certain type of fungus (Malasezzia furfur, I think), which produces a certain type of fluorescence under illumination. I’m not even going to talk about the continuity or flow, or rather, the lack of it in the entire show. They hop from scenes to scenes in a rather rough transition that’s painful to the eye, and don’t even get me started on the Bollywood scene. Ugh.

The acting

Just wow. Besides the 95% of time in which Edward spends looking as if he’s constipated, there are so many other things that were just so wrong. The exaggerated sniff, in which the baddie took the effort to make an exaggerated 45 degree turn and took a 10-second sniff in the air. The plastic smiles, especially Edward, who smiled spastically throughout the film. The out-of-the-world 3rd grade expressions. The make-believe I-am-horny looks that our two main characters, Edward and Bella were trying to pull. What was that all about? It looked somewhat like a poor tryout for a 3rd-rate horror movie. Oh, wait. Maybe that’s why.

The makeup

Edward’s introductory scene was far from impressive. The Cullen kids are introduced by Bella’s Friend A as she stalks observes them from afar. After the other filler Cullens are introduced, the main man, the hero, the leading vampire, the all-star Eddie makes his grand appearance, looking as if he woke up with a bad hair day and someone had sprayed his face with talcum powder. So do the rest of the vampires. You couldn’t make their faces any whiter if you splashed a whole tin of white paint onto their faces on Halloween. Seriously. I know there’s supposed to be an element of supernatural in the show, and vampires are always portrayed with a type of chalkiness to their skin, but that was simply just overdoing it.

The plotholes

Plotholes. There were just too many of them. The part about dear old Daddy asking Eddie boy to make a choice, and how Eddie boy was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from draining Bella dry. Why didn’t he just leave that role to Dear Old Dad, who obviously has quite some experience? Lack of development of characters, some got introduced and then completely cast out of sight until the very last scene (*hint hint* Victoria), and even the fact that she was observing them at the end failed to provide any form of suspense. In fact, you could say that it’s relatively easy to see that scene coming from a mile away. And the most appalling thing of all – I can’t say that there was a lack of plot, because it never existed in the first place.

The lines

Hats off to the brilliant people who came up with the dialogue. I coughed and choked a couple of times during the movie while laughing, mainly because the lines were so unexpectedly cheesy. I’ll give several examples:

“You’re like my personal brand of heroin.”

Him saying that with such a straight, serious face, was just….outright wrong.

“I like watching you sleep. It’s fascinating.”

The fact that he said it with such a stalker-ish look and maniacal smile was just disturbing. Even more disturbing than that is the fact that our heroine of the story looked outright charmed.

I could go on for hours and nitpick on all the other ugliness that was compacted into 2 hours, which made it seem rather like 2 days instead, but there’s probably enough disparagement to last a decade. The last time my eyes bled so badly after watching a movie, was like, when I watched Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned.

Bottomline: I’m in a bind. I can’t decide which was worse – the cinematography, the acting, the plot, or the lines. The only salvation I experienced throughout the experience was the cheezels and caramelized popcorn. And reclining gold class chairs. I made a joke earlier about dousing the promotional posters of Twilight with gasoline and setting them ablaze if I found it ridiculously abysmal, and now that I’ve seen it, only Heaven knows what I’ll do if I actually manage to get my hands on fuel.

Verdict: A (Appalling).Earlier Dan asked if I'd rate it a -5/10 if I could. That's way too kind, my friend. Way too kind.