Diamonte

This review is brought to you by Spanman, whose comments are italicized, and Diamonte, both of whom spent money, time and, more importantly, a couple of IQ points between them to make sure y’all are informed.

New Moon is just as lifeless as the vampires it portrays, and yet I willingly volunteered to go to the New Moon premier. I was stuck for two hours in a theatre of chattering fan girls. At least I wasn’t the only one who despised the experience – many of the teenagers had dragged along their utterly bored boyfriends, probably to teach these poor men how to be more like Edward.

I had the somewhat less harrowing experience of going to see New Moon on opening day. The audience was generally split between fangirls and people who were just there for the lulz. I saw no males, and for that I am relieved. No self-respecting guy should ever have to go through what went on in that theater.

In the row behind me, two teenagers were using swear words so excessively that I wondered if they just discovered the art of cursing yesterday. They sounded more like gibbering parrots than humans. Sadly, they seemed to be two of the more intelligent people in the room, as the rest were having vapid discussions of “Oh em gee, like who is hotter?” With every passing minute, my desire for brain bleach and a bottle of vodka grew stronger, and the previews hadn’t even started rolling yet. The fan girls howled like carnivorous hyenas as the previews began to roll, and when the title sequence flashed onto the screen, the squeals reached almost deafening proportions. I made a mental note that if I ever attend another Twilight film, I will bring earplugs.

How glad I am that I ended up going a day later with all the only moderately interested folks.

When the moon had vanished from the screen, Bella’s opening monologue began, and Kirsten Stewart’s lines are just as dismally dry as last time around. She sounds as if she’s reciting a grocery list, and with every word, you can hear her asking herself, “Why am I in this film?” The movie opens with Bella’s dream sequence, as she sees herself as an elderly woman with Edward next to her. The sparkling still looks like Edward got involved in a glitter fight with a pack of preschoolers.

I thought the dream sequence didn’t convey any of the horror Bella attested to feeling in that same scene in the book. Oh, but I’ve forgotten; Kristen Stewart has a very hard time conveying any emotion at all in this film.

A dismal start to a boring movie of pausing. And pausing. And some abs. And more pausing.

“Why don’t we add in a little more pausing there, and ramp up the awkwardness a bit, just to see how much we can get away with?”

When Bella wakes up, it’s her birthday and her father Charlie is there with a couple of presents. Bella reacts to this with a little bored smirk and says something to the effect of “I thought I said no presents.” When Charlie makes an excuse, Bella accepts the gifts with no emotion and little gratitude. Charlie remains one of the best characters in the way that he manages to still be endearing when he encounters awkward situations where he simply does not know what make of Bella. Everyone else just adores her no matter what, apparently.

When Bella is at school the next morning, she’s utterly bored by her friends. No wonder they give up talking to her, as she’s too busy watching her boyfriend, whose make-up makes him look like the love child of Bozo the Clown and a Drag Queen. This movie, apparently, has a sick sense of humor. There are plenty of hypocritical lines within it, offering themselves up like easy bait for snark. “Maybe I shouldn’t be dating such an old man,” said Bella. “It’s gross.” Truer words have never been uttered, but as we all know from the first movie, It’s Okay To Date 109 Year Old Men If They’re Hot And It’s True Love ™. So Edward and Bella continue on after the line, ignoring any implications of the truth that Bella has spoken.

Jacob shows up to wish Bella a happy birthday, and they exchange some playful, sometimes painfully awkward banter. Bella comments on how buff Jacob’s gotten all of a sudden, reminding us all that he’s only sixteen. He gives her a dreamcatcher as a gift. Let me just pause here and give the screenwriters a high-five for being so imaginative.

As they wander through the utterly bland halls of Forks High School, Bella looks like a robot. Her face appears to be incapable of forming any emotions other than utter boredom. She must be either a robot designed to take over the world by boring humanity to death, or she’s just started earlier than most with botox treatments. As the narm levels of this movie grow to toxic heights, I can no longer contain myself and burst out laughing while Bella and Edward are watching Romeo and Juliet in their English class. While Edward talks about how difficult it is for a vampire to kill himself, he sheds a single tear, a crystalline diamond that trickles out of the corner of his amber topaz-hued orb.

How could I have missed the tear?!

Bella soon swoops in with a line about how she will protect Edward. But before you think that this movie might actually give Miss Fragile Swan some backbone, Edward shoots her a condescending grin, like the expression I use when looking down at a puppy.

Oh silly moviegoer, how naive you must be if you thought that this movie might be an improvement!

It is in this Romeo and Juliet scene that the teacher spots Edward and Bella talking, and irritably asks Edward to recite the last six or so lines of the play as punishment for disrupting, which he does without hesistating or, indeed, even thinking, which appears to greatly unsettle the teacher. Oh, Edward. Your exhaustive knowledge of tragic romances must be foresight into your relationship with Bella. Or so we wish.

Even the fan girls begin to crumble under the utter stupidity of this movie. After the whole scene of Bella’s birthday and Jasper going into kill-mode, she and Edward share a kiss. Snickers rose in the theater as they start to moan.

We’re led to believe that Bella is worried that Edward is drawing away from her, and that Edward is getting as much make-out time as he can before he quits her.

By this time, I feel like I’ve been stuck in this movie for at least an hour. But it’s only been twenty minutes. The next scene is Edward finally leaving Bella, and when he leaves, she curls up into a little ball on the ground as the camera spins around her. A note to future moviemakers: Rotating the camera in circles while zooming in on an actor does not make up for the actor’s inability to express a human emotion outside of ennui. When she is shown back inside her room, the director again resorts to this rotating the camera around her. It makes me feel like I’m inside some love struck teenager’s ode to the Matrix, if the Matrix came chock full of rainbow goodness and unicorns.

Once the months have passed by after Edward leaving, we see Bella screaming into her pillow, and the narm once again spikes. I had to stifle my laughter with my hands, because she sounds like she’s in the midst of childbirth or really good sex, rather than filled with sorrow.

I don’t think even I can scream like that. It sounded like she was ripping apart her vocal chords to crank those out. And every time a scene like this pops up, Charlie runs in to wake her up and comfort her. She doesn’t deserve you, man.

Soon after this, Bella goes to a zombie movie with Jessica, who along with the rest of her Forks High School friends, has become more extreme than she was in the last movie. Though it seems like the director was working very hard to make her friends seem normal, he may have gone a little bit overboard with them. Bella catches a glimpse of Edward’s smouldering visage when she walks a little too close to some dangerous-looking bikers. Promptly, she jumps onto one of the motorcylces and asks to be taken on a ride. You make your own conclusions.

And off goes Bella to Jacob Black’s loving arms. To express her depression, Kirsten Stewart punctuates her dialog with as many sighs as possible, and her eyebrows crinkle together a little, but not enough to ruin her perfect forehead with a wrinkle. If you haven’t already noticed, the film at least has a very good grasp on the intelligence of its watchers. By this time, it has bashed you in the head with metaphors and comparisons to Romeo and Juliet. These references are as deep as Bella’s personality. The moviemakers have also began adding in references to werewolves, just to make sure that you aren’t at all surprised by Jacob’s transformation when it comes.

Bella and Jacob begin spending time together, and they rebuild some rusty motorcycles that Bella bought. When they’ve prepared the bikes, Bella tries test-driving one, to get her ‘adrenaline rush’ in order to see Edward. As her defining personality trait, clumsiness, makes its entrance into the film, Bella crashes on the side of the road and collapses into a crumpled pile. Jacob speeds over to her, and her forehead is marked with some blood. So he pulls off his shirt to clean off the scrape, issuing more fan-service to the howling teenagers that litter are the audience. This movie probably contains more minutes of shirtless men traipsing around the countryside than soft porn movies (not that I’ve seen any).

Jacob: Your head!
Bella: I’m bleeding…Oh… sorry.
Jacob: You’re apologising for bleeding?
Bella: Yeah, I guess.
Jacob: Don’t worry. It’s no big deal. pulls off shirt and dabs Bella’s wound with it
Bella: You know… you’re sorta beautiful.
Jacob: How hard did you hit your head?

I’m sure most of you have seen this scene already, but I couldn’t help writing it down here to convey exactly how Bella gets herself into deep shit by saying dumb things spur-of-the-moment.

As Queen Bella finally stoops down to talk to some of the lowly high-school mortals she used to sit with, most of them are smart enough to ignore her banter, but Mike is once again suckered in. So she goes to the movies with him and Jacob. While Mike is off worshiping the porcelain king, Jacob and Bella have a heart to heart about their feelings, and the scene makes me wonder if I accidentally entered some movie theater playing a Days of Our Lives marathon (complete with painful silences and angsty sighs). The dialog itself is clunky, and there are probably third-graders who could write better scenes. Actually, George Lucas wrote more entertaining love scenes than this drivel.

This was actually my favourite lil’ romantic scene in the entire movie, mostly because for the entire duration of it, no one makes out with anyone else. Taylor Lautner has bad and good acting moments interchangeably throughout the the film, but especially here.

Once Mike emerges from the bathroom, Jacob loses control and acts very aggressively toward Mike, his mood swinging in an instant. Not exactly like an angered dog, more like a PMSing woman.

Jacob then proceeds to not answer any of Bella’s calls, and his father makes excuses for him, saying he has mono. But when Bella shows up at Jacob’s house to see him whether he’s sick or not, he tells her to get lost. It’s the first and last really smart thing Jacob does in this film, but you can’t help but like him anyway.

After the movie (that one, not the one I’m watching, the ones the characters we’re watching were watching uh – you know what I mean), Bella wanders into a meadow alone and suddenly decides to add another gesture to her small pool of expressions when she encounters Laurent. She flutters her eyelashes madly while talking to the vampire with the dreadlocks who is not in any way portrayed as a stereotypical black person. Not at all.

But his hair was amazing, you must admit.

As Laurent moves in for the kill, the werewolves show up in the nick of time, and the badly done special effects cause me to lose my composure once again. They want to be large, frightening monsters, but they look like stuffed animals moving around. I’m convinced that teletubbies are more ferocious than these oversized poodles.

Most of the animation was so-so throughout the film, but the very first time that we see a wolf coming out of the woods towards Laurent, the special affects were what can only be described as abysmal. Now I know which corners they cut in order to get New Moon released only a year after Twilight.

There’s some more running around shirtless by the chest hair-lacking Calvin Klein models, and it appears that the producers of this movie seriously believed a handful of shirtless men make up for a non-existent plot. As they chase around Victoria, I realize that this movie has one redeeming quality: The vampires no longer look like windmills as their legs swoop and hit the ground. It’s disappointing, really, as I was looking forward to laughing at that part.

Fragile Swann now goes to her perform her famous cliff dive. When she jumps in the water, the klutz bumps her head against a stone, proving once again that she’s Too Stupid to Live. Now, narm kicks into overdrive. Soft rock begins playing as Bella sees Edward drifting by her, and some of the fangirls join in the laughter.

I wondered why the music sounded so lighthearted at that moment, since Bella was drowning and all. Jacob rescues the moment from becoming a reasonably happy and complete death scene by grabbing Bella out of the water and asking her what the hell she was thinking. The answer, we must assume, is that she wasn’t thinking at all.

As I mentioned before, this movie actually has some truth-filled lines within it, however, they are utterly ignored by Bella. Alice, once again solidifying her place as my favorite of these vampires, calls Bella out on her “life-threatening idiocy”. Thank you, Alice. Thank you for instilling this pathetic movie with some sense. Unfortunately, the moment of intelligence fades too soon. Edward makes his phone call to see what happened to Bella after her cliff-diving. The fan girls start screeching once more as Jacob tells hims Charlie is at the funeral. Alice whisks Bella off to Italy to go save Edward. But not before Jacob pops in once more, to show that he’s taken some tips from Edward Cullen on how to be over-protective! Even one of my Twilight fans leaned over during Jacob’s speech to whisper in my ear about how he was like a “little puppy dog that just won’t go away”.

Or like a guy who doesn’t want Bella to go ruin her life chasing a control-freak vampire.

It’s amazing how little I care about Bella as she and Alice race to Volterra to stop Edward from running into the sunlight and exposing himself to the humans. Sigh.

Bella saves him. Sigh.

But Edward still is taken off to the Volturi. Sigh.

And this is where Jane finally steps in. I thought she was a compelling character, but her portrayal by Dakota Fanning is as unconvincing as I expected it to be. Although she’s loaded up with black makeup layered around her eyes like soot, I can’t buy her as Jane. Sigh. Edward has somehow acquired one of those scarlet cloaks that everyone is wearing, the ones that look a lot like a bathrobe. He stands there looking sullen as Aro approaches him and begins talking about Bella and her awesomeness. The logical part of my brain (which I thought was on its way to dying), kicks in and asks why Aro is discussing this now, rather than when he first met Edward. Oh well. I’m too bored to care.

It is still not explained why none of the vampires’ mind powers work on Bella, which is a bit tiring since it’s one of the only plot points that isn’t explained by the end of the movie. Also, besides Aro and Jane, the Volturi are stiff and unbelievable, like someone pulled them out of a closet and brushed a hundred years of dust off them before propping them around the room at symetrical points.

After this comes an added fight scene between some of the members of the Volturi clan and the two Cullens. I again have the sensation that I’ve been thrown into an awful remake of the Matrix, with slow-motion moments that utterly fail and add nothing to my interest. Even some of the fan girls are getting bored by New Moon, and they’re fidgeting in their seats

The fighting comes to an end and Alice promises to make sure that Bella is changed into a vampire. Aro approaches her and grabs her hand to see if she’s correct, if Bella will turn into a vampire. The scene that Alice shows Aro is my favorite moment in the whole movie. I swear it’s pulled from Headtrip’s illustration of “Let us Frolic!”, because Bella and Edward are skipping through the forest, Edward in some faux-sweater vest, and Bella clothed in a dress inspired by the fifties. It’s the crowning moment of narm, and for a moment, I actually felt that my laughter was worth the $6.50 ticket.

But the moment ends too soon, and Bella travels back home. She once again acts like a brat to Charlie, and skips out to the woods to see Jacob.

Edward and Jacob have an ignore-that-Bella’s-right-here discussion, in which Edward attempts to be nice and Jacob does not. Bella, inevitably, chooses Edward over Jacob. After Jacob leaves, Bella makes an attempt to persuade Edward to turn her into a vampire. He agrees, on one condition.

I couldn’t believe it. I swear, everyone in the theater was laughing their heads off by that time. One thing I will say about this film – the new director knows how to crank out the lulz even better than Catherine Hardwicke did.

The movie is, overall, just as disappointing as I expected, but more narm-filled than I expected. Between the long pauses of absolute nothing, there’s plenty of male objectification, long pauses of absolute nothing and bland, lifeless actors.

So long, Twilight Saga, until next time.

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