The Crow: Wicked Prayer

In The Crow: Wicked Prayer, John Connor comes back from the dead as the world's lamest mime in an attempt to stop Angel from having sex with Tara "New-FOUND-land" Reid in order to become Satan, while Dennis Hopper speaks in offensive gangsta patois in his most embarrassing performance of the last five minutes.

Now the original Crow really wasn't that good. I'll pause for a moment while all the goths in the audience immediately cut themselves in rage. (That's why I don't mind insulting goths. They'll hurt themselves instead of me.) Okay, now calm down, turn down the Robert Smith record, and listen to your old pal Carl Eusebius while contemplating the meaninglessness of it all as you crawl in your skin or whatever. The Crow was carried past its weak script and threadbare characters by a charismatic lead. It's got great visuals, fine performances by genre veterans Winston Zeddemore, Kurn, and Luther, and an effective pop soundtrack for its time. It's about a gang of criminals that murder Bruce Lee's Son and his girlfriend. Lee Jr. is so badass that he is resurrected a year later by the titular avian to bring the pain to those responsible. (Girlfriend, despite being raped and dying more slowly and painfully than Lee Jr., lacks the requisite penis necessary for being spectrally reanimated by a bird.) Not complicated or deep, but artistically shot and skillfully done, the film was anchored by an intense if not especially accomplished central performance. All in all, not a bad way to spend 100 minutes.

And Bai Ling doesn't even have to take her clothes off.

The Crow: Wicked Prayer is the third (yes, third) sequel to a film that died along with its star. Lacking any identity of its own, it alternately shamelessly apes the original film and totally undercuts it. Wisely, the filmmakers elected to steal the weakest elements of the original while jettisoning all the artistry and charisma that made it work. So the movie takes place in the American southwest instead of an unnamed Rust Belt city where it's constantly night and almost always raining. (Why yes, the original Crow was directed by Alex Proyas. How did you know?) That's right, a revenant dressed entirely in black and wearing white face-paint is wandering around the goddamn desert in the full light of day. Oh, and instead of Bruce Lee's Son, they got the charisma-free John Connor, who somehow became a worse actor as he grew up. I'm beginning to doubt that he's going to save us from the machine overlords.

This movie does not have fine performances. Instead, it has Bunny Lebowski showing everyone that she's just as terrible playing a brain-dead hillbilly slut as she was playing a brilliant archeologist, and also that she's not anywhere near as weirdly exotic and sexy as Bai Ling. When you make a clothed Bai Ling's acting look good by comparison, you need to re-think your career choice. It also has Angel doing the worst over-the-top Jack Nicholson impersonation this side of Christian Slater. I guess the default setting for your typical bad actor who's getting no direction and playing a character with no backstory, motivation, or recognizably human emotion is to "do Jack", when what they really oughtta do is to do Cage.

The plot of Wicked Prayer is...well, it's the same as the plot of The Crow, really, only dumber and immensely moar confusing. We start with Angel breaking out of his prison chain gang. In his quest to become Satan (incidentally, the career my guidance counselor suggested for me in high school), Angel gets his old gang together: Bunny Lebowski, Tank, Washed-Up MMA Champion, and That Guy I've Seen Somewhere. Being the worst Satanists ever, they capture a Catholic priest and douse him with gasoline and then just leave, without telling him his mother sucks cocks in Hell or anything. They go to the podunk town that John Connor and his hot Quebecois girlfriend are just about to leave on account of some Indian-white miner tension that never has any impact on the events to come. The gang gets one look at JC's godawful hairstyle and hangs both him and his French-Canadian squeeze, but not before Bunny cuts out the latter's (obviously fake plastic) eyeballs and sticks them into her own noggin. (Needless to say, the movie can't afford a shot of Bunny putting these clearly bogus orbs into her face, so you'll just have to trust the movie that this happens.) So now she can see the future, or the past, or something, and yes, Bunny Lebowski has the creepy witch/villain's girlfriend role that Bai Ling had in the original, though they drop the whole incest angle because, hey, that was bizarre and memorable and we'll have none of that in this movie, thank you very much. JC tries in vain to emote impotent rage and crushing sadness after Bunny stabs his Quebecois Indian girlfriend, and he's so bad at it that Angel kills him.

After Tank and W-UMMAC colossally fail at their simple task of "take the corpses into the desert and burn them", JC comes back to life, this time without waiting 3 days. After dragging his girlfriend's corpse back to her bed, he's horrified at his reflection (even though he was hanged so he doesn't even have a mark on his face) and tries to shoot himself, to find that he's now an indestructible zombie. So of course he paints his face in a terrible imitation of Bruce Lee's Son.

Now I know what you're thinking: Did he fire six shots, or only five? I mean, you're thinking, "Gee Carl Eusebius, you sexy beast you, this sure sounds an awful lot like a shitty rehash of the original." And you'd be right, of course. I am damn sexy. But now the movie introduces its original elements, which are even more terrible than its rip-offs. JC, you see, doesn't wanna be a warrior. He hates his powers, doesn't seem to desire revenge, and spends much of the movie whining about being brought back to life. "I'm afraid of what I've become." Uh...why? We're 45 minutes into the film's expansive 99- minute running time, and you've done jack shit! What exactly have you become? At one point he even says, "I wanna die." What the fuck kind of undead avenger is this guy? I kept waiting for the Crow to take its power back. Caw! God, what a pussy! Caw! Go back to the grave, shitnugget! Caw!

Finally, almost halfway through the film, JC confronts Guy I've Seen Somewhere, who understandably is less than intimidated by JC's bad make-up and petulant-teenager glare. When Bruce Lee's Son looked at his killers before he brought the pain, he was genuinely disturbing. The rage was seething and intense, but also cold and distant, as if the horrors that awaited these men were inevitable. John Connor looks like Mom just told him he can't go out on Friday night. I can't stress enough how terrible JC is in this movie. The film never really had a chance to work, but he absolutely torpedoes it with Costnerian finesse, alternately wildly overacting and grumbling out his lines like he's annoyed with the director for pointing the camera at him. He doesn't project anywhere near the emotion, charisma, and badassery necessary to pull off a man so hungry for vengeance that even death itself can't stop him. And he's done no favors by being a foot shorter and proportionally smaller than all of his enemies, especially Angel, which the director doesn't even attempt to hide. If you're going to be a short guy kicking everybody's ass on film, you either have to be the scrappy underdog who wins through guile rather than brute force, or Joe Pesci. Because otherwise, it looks ridiculous onscreen.

The movie then rushes to get through the rest of its "plot". JC somewhat implausibly defeats W-UMMAC in a martial arts fight after W-UMMAC starts bashing up a party with a baseball bat (along with the film's continuity, as the mask he's wearing alternately appears and disappears between shots). Bunny somehow knows the Crow is JC's weakness, despite none of the villains even knowing he was back from the grave until this scene, so they kill the Crow, making our whiny hero even more pathetic and ineffective and so Angel kicks his ass. Then they just leave again, because if they kill him while he's powerless, then the bad guys would win and the movie would be over. They reach the main Satanic temple run by Dennis Hopper, who marries the unholy couple and then gets stabbed by Bunny for reasons that are explained in a flashback that absolutely no one on Earth cares about at this point. Angel becomes Satan, but he has to boink Bunny to make it permanent, because otherwise the bad guys would win and the movie would be over. JC shows up, but he still sucks so Angel kicks his ass again, while a bunch of JC's Indian friends kill Tank in a scene so filled with boredom you'll glance over at the screen and sigh wearily. For his part, Angel, instead of taking Bunny right then and there in the Satanic temple and making himself permanently Satan--I mean, it's a Satanic temple, isn't it?--decides he and Bunny have to drive somewhere else entirely in order to do the deed. Because if they just did it right now the bad guys would--well, you get the picture.

JC, despite being crucified by SatAngel (he's playing "Jimmy Cuervo" in this movie, so the ham-handed Christ allegory is the movie's, not mine) is Only Resting, so he jumps in his stolen car and gives pursuit. (Things a reanimated spirit should never do: drive a car.) He catches up to Angel and gets his ass kicked yet again, because he's powerless without the Crow and Angel is Satan. (Ignore the fact that JC got pretty thrashed by W-UMMAC when he still had the Crow's power, at least until the script said it was time for him to win.) Then Danny Trejo joins the illustrious ranks of Hispanic Guys Playing American Indians Because Who'll Know the Difference, Right? when he leads an embarrassing "Indian" dance to bring the Crow back to life, even though the movie earlier claimed that the Crow's power comes from the Christian God. Okay, the original film's mythology was pretty vague, but it was pretty clearly not Judeo-Christian. We're a long way from the original's "Stop me if you've heard this one: Jesus Christ walks into a hotel. He hands the innkeeper three nails and asks, 'Can you put me up for the night?'" Okay, movie, just go back to aping the first film. Yes, you suck at that, too, but it's far better than your attempts at being original.

Blah blah, the Crow's back, JC starts no-selling Angel's attacks and kills him, and the Sun comes up, which I guess makes Bunny blind since now her plastic eyeballs don't work anymore(?). The End.

The Crow: Wicked Prayer is a shitty cash-in on the tragic death of a break-out movie star that showcases the worst of everyone involved in making it, including people that we know are capable of better and Tara Reid. Fuck this movie with seventeen crow beaks.

Revisit: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is the story of how Alan Rickman can single-handedly redeem a shitty motion picture through sheer force of personality and comic timing.

When Kevin Costner came in at #2 on my list of worst actors in the history of ever, I had this to say about him: "Will be remembered long after his death for delivering the worst Robin Hood of all time. Russell Crowe weeps nightly that his awful Robin Hood will be forgotten while Costner's lives on." I said this because it is absolutely true. The Robin Hood Costner gives us in Prince of Thieves is the unquestionable worst Robin Hood ever. The anthropomorphic fox Robin Hood was more believable. You gave a better performance as Robin Hood when you were 8 years old running around your backyard with an imaginary bow and arrow. Yes, you, even if you're a woman. That's how bad Costner's performance is. It's not just the worst Robin Hood performance in the history of film. It's one of the worst performances period, of any role, at any time, in any medium. It's lazy non-acting that would give William Hurt pause. Orlando Bloom would tell him to step up and act for fuck's sake.

Have you ever tried to put on an English accent? No matter how bad? So bad people didn't even know what accent you were going for? Congratulations, you put in more effort than Kevin Costner in Prince of Thieves. I mean, he doesn't even try. It's so obvious it provided the only funny gag in Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Costner refuses to adopt an accent, refuses to emote, refuses to fucking act. He doesn't even puff up to the level of an epic fairy tale. Instead, he's the mumblecore Adam, wheezing out his lines like he's trying to clear his lungs of ennui. I can think of no one less appropriate to play possibly the most free-spirited, swashbuckling hero in the Western canon.

The only miscasting that comes within a country mile of Costner's is that of professional Jack Nicholson impersonator Christian Slater. What's the deal with this asshole, anyway? I mean, he fails to embarrass himself in one good movie, and that's a career? Slater has exactly one acting technique: He copies Jack Nicholson's distinctive vocal cadence. That's it. That was enough, in Hollywood in the 1990s, to make you a star.

Let's pretend, for a moment, that what the world needed was an actor whose whole schtick is imitating another, better actor. That doesn't explain what the hell he's doing in a Robin Hood movie. I like Jack Nicholson. Hell, I love Jack Nicholson. You could even say I want to have Jack Nicholson's babies. Violent, womanizing babies perpetually high on very fine-grade cocaine. But Jack Nicholson is not a background presence, nor is he appropriate for period pieces. You don't cast him as Richard III or the First Emperor, because he's too modern. A '60s hippie? Right on! A hardboiled '70s private eye? Okay. A murderous hotel caretaker in the '80s? Bam! A hardass Marine colonel in the '90s? Sure. A pathetic sadsack in the '00s? Yep, you can put him there, too. Where you can't put him is in fucking Robin Hood, with Little John and Friar Tuck and Maid fucking Marian. So of course the jokers behind this clunker cast not Jack Nicholson, but a terrible impersonator of Jack Nicholson. What's next, raiding MADtv roll call to cast your movie? Oh wait....

Slater plays Will Scarlet, Robin Hood's long-lost bastard younger brother. Because that's just what the Robin Hood legend needed, right? I guess it's fitting, though, to cast an anachronistic actor like Slater (who simply screams "I'm from the '90s", even more than Neo in Dangerous Liaisons and Bram Stoker's Fucking Not Dracula) in an anachronistic role like Will Scarlet, who's all butthurt about Robin not accepting him as a brother and hates him for it for most of the movie. As if the bastard son of a noble in 12th-century England would harbor that as his Secret Pain. And against Robin, even though it was their father that refused to acknowledge him. He's lucky Robin doesn't have him executed for claiming to be Lord Locksley's son, which is what would've happened in that period if some random asshole suddenly told a lord's legitimate son that he was his illegitimate brother. Instead, Will is resentful and generally dickish to Robin before tearfully revealing The Secret, after which they hug while sappy music plays. It's medieval times, by way of early '90s angst!

I guess I have to say something about the two good performances--well, one good and one brilliant. Morgan Freeman is good in the film as Azeem, the Moor who owes Robin a life debt for breaking him out of prison (though this one can be repaid by saving Robin's life, which Azeem thankfully does so Freeman wouldn't have to come back for a sequel). He's not great, though, and I have a theory (that I absolutely cannot prove) that Freeman did this on purpose. Once he realized that Costner was either unwilling or unable (or, as I suspect, both) to actually act, he decided (correctly) that giving a moving, powerful performance would both 1) show up the movie's star and 2) fail to jive with everyone else on screen. Now Freeman, at least before he was forced at gunpoint to appear in Olympus Has Fallen and thereafter stopped caring about movies, was incapable of giving a bad performance, but he made sure not to be too good here so as not to emphasize how godawful Costner is.

The same cannot be said for Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Director Kevin Reynolds (who would fail to learn from his mistake and go on to direct Costner's lifeless corpse in Waterworld) must have mistaken Costner's lethargy that threatens to tank the entire movie for an artistic decision to make the Robin Hood legend "more realistic" (meaning grim, gritty, and no damn fun at all), so the Robin/Merry Men/Sherwood Forest scenes are all dour, drab, and dingy. Rickman, on the other hand, apparently decided to sod this movie and instead star in his own, better movie. All of his scenes are lively, funny, and endless entertaining. He's both devious and hilarious, slimy yet somehow charming at the same time. Rickman is hardly ever onscreen with Costner (so much so that I wonder if his contract specified a limit to his interaction with the sack of shit in the title role), so he didn't have to worry about showing Costner up or matching the flat nonperformances of everyone else. Or maybe he just didn't care. Either way, the film lights up into being almost decent every time Rickman appears, then sinks back into malaise as we get back to the "action" of Costner not emoting while Freeman struggles to be as bland as it's possible for him to be in order to match. When the Sheriff kidnaps Marian to force her to marry him, it beggars belief that she wants to be rescued by Robin. One of these two men is an international sex symbol, no matter how bad a haircut the filmmakers gave him for this movie, and the other is Kevin Costner. Marian only ends up with Robin because the Scriptmonster demands it.

Every movie could use more Alan Rickman in it, this one more than any other. Dumb as I was when this movie came out, even then the Sheriff was my favorite character and I missed him whenever he wasn't onscreen. Way to understand movies less than a grade school kid does, Hollywood filmmakers. Yes, the kid we're talking about here is me, but it doesn't take my then-undeveloped godlike intellect to tell that Kevin Costner is worse than dick cancer and you should never under any circumstances allow him to be in your movie. We're talking about a man who built a movie around himself as a cowboy and still got blown off the screen by Val fucking Kilmer. That's right, Costner couldn't do a better cowboy that Iceman. It's safe to say that this is when you pack up your balls and leave acting behind.

Mr. Costner, I know you're a cretinous humanoid automaton who used his clout to suppress a decent cowboy movie in favor your own personal shitty one, but as a self-appointed guardian of good taste, I have to impart to you one singular truth: Your movie is bad, and you should feel bad.

The Host

No, not that one, this one.

That's right, it's the new awful film adapted from the latest female disempowerment classic of the greatest setback to women's liberation since Ann Coulter, our own Stevenie Meyer.

The world of The Host is a peaceful paradise, with no suffering or want or discord of any kind. Everyone is perfectly nice and beautiful and healthy. According to the opening narration of Jeb Stryder (A Wooden Plank), "there is no hunger. There is no violence. The environment has healed. Our planet has never been more at peace." I knew it! Mormonism wins out and converts the planet. You heard it here first.

No, it turns out that nearly all of humanity has been wiped about by parasitic clouds of glowing sperm. These aliens take over host human bodies when surgically implanted into the back of the neck while the hosts, after a certain amount of time spent trying to win the psychic war for their own bodies, just "fade away", which sounds suspiciously like "die" to me. Think of a Trill symbiont, only instead of a slug that melds its memories and personality with yours, it's luminous ejaculate that kills you

Just when you thought "Bella Swan" was embarrassingly hamfisted in its symbolism, Meyer tops herself by naming this story's protagonist central character "Melanie Stryder" (Waify McBlankexpression). Get it, strider, because she goes on a journey? (Never mind that Meyer's characters never grow or change in any way.) We meet her fleeing in terror from the aliens as she leads them away from her younger brother (Typical Child Actor) so he can escape. In accordance with the most noble feminine virtue in the Meyerverse, Melanie sacrifices herself by leaping from the building to her death. She doesn't die because if she were killed by a seven-storey plummet to the concrete below, the movie would be over. Instead, she's captured and implanted with an alien that calls itself Wanderer. No, I don't know why the aliens exclusively use English and even give themselves English names like Wanderer. Oh wait, yes I do, because coming up with alien-sounding words is, like, hard, and if there's one consistency of bad writing, it's laziness.

Our Bella Melanie is able to resist Wanderer's mind mojo, so she spends the rest of the movie talking in voiceover while Wanderer talks back to her out loud. Why does Wanderer have to speak to Melanie aloud instead of communicating through thought, as Melanie does? Because having the same actress doing both roles in voiceover would be impossible to follow. Instead, Melanderer just comes across as a girl with severe schizophrenia, and the voiceover only gets more annoying as the film drags (and I do mean drags, Oh My Brothers and Only Friends) on, especially since 90% of Melanie's dialogue consists of her mentally shouting at Wanderer not to do something which Wanderer then proceeds to do. Yeah, the alien ignored you the first 300 times, but if you keep shouting at it to stop, no, don't, STOP!, it might actually listen the 301st time!

Wanderer has access to all Melanie's memories, so it reveals the name of Melanie's boyfriend (Trunk Slamchest) to the chief antagonist alien (Diane Kruger). I don't know what position this alien has, if it has any. It just hates and pursues Wanderlanie through most of the film. Later Kruger tells us that this information has been of great help in crushing the human resistance, though I have no idea why. All the aliens wear godawful blue contact lenses, making humans identifiable on sight, and there appear to be no humans who aren't part of the resistance (i.e., collaborators). Nor do the aliens appear to care to spare human collaborators if there were any. So why would the spermaliens need to know Trunk's name?

Wanderer starts to sympathize with Melanie and the humans because...um, and so it steals a car. (Well, it asks a passing motorist if it can just have the car. Being Mormon an alien, the motorist happily hands over the keys and wishes Wanderer on its way.) It drives toward where the human resistance is hiding, until it realizes Melanie is leading it the wrong way. It turns the car around, but before it can head back, Melanie uses her ability to control her body whenever it's convenient for the writers and intentionally crashes the car. Wanderlanie gets up and wanders (hey!) randomly in the desert until she/it/they are found by her/its/their uncle Jeb (the aforementioned Wooden Plank, making its first appearance onscreen) and a small group of humans. Everybody wants to kill Wanderer because of its ugly contact lenses, but Wooden Plank overrules them because if they killed it the movie would be over. He gives it some water and they take it back to the humans' little community hidden under desert rocks. So I guess Melanie was leading Wanderer to the humans, since she let it get more or less within walking distance of the resistance settlement before deciding to wreck the car.

And now the movie gets weird. In the humans' spacious and idyllic underground desert caverns, where they have a river of rushing water complete with bathing pools and a towering waterfall and an entire field of planted wheat, Wanderlanie reunites with Melanie's boyfriend Trunk Slamchest, but Wanderer finds itself falling in love with Another Guy (Smoke Manmuscle). Come on, it's a Meyer work. You knew there had to be a love triangle with absolutely no tension or drama because a brain-damaged centipede knows exactly who will end up with whom.* And do I even need to say that, like Jacob, the "loser" of the triangle gets a happy ending deus-ex-machinaed to her? (Well, it.) In fact, as soon as it became clear that Melanie wanted Trunk and Wandererererer wanted Smoke, I guessed that Kruger's "bad" alien would be removed and Wanderer transferred to its host body, because she was the only other hot girl in the movie and that would wrap everything up in a nice neat bow with no negative consequences whatever. That's how things work in the Meyerverse, where the good guys never really get hurt and no true sacrifice is ever made. The joke's on me, though, since that doesn't happen. No, what Meyer pulls out is even dumber.

But first we have to have some fake drama that we know will immediately be resolved with everybody happy and loving and with no bad things ever XOXO hearts unicorns. Melanie's brother Typical Child Actor is with the survivors, and he gets an infection. Everybody's worried because Doc (Token Black Guy)--come on, you've got to have an older, somewhat grizzled guy called "Doc" in these things--doesn't have the medicine to treat him. Of course Wanderer likes humans now because...erm, right, and she deliberately injures herself so that she can be treated by an alien healer and their magical "fix any disease or injury" device, which she steals as soon as the healer leaves the room. Wow that was...too close. There isn't even a scene where the alien equivalent of cops (yes, they have such, even though they've established that the vastly superior alien race has no crime or disease or bad things of any kind, apart from the deliberate and systematic genocide of entire sentient species for the sake of their own self-empowerment) appear and the audience worries if she'll be able to get the medicine past them. In fact, since the aliens don't use money (we see Wanderer go into an alien store and simply take what she wants and leave), can she even be said to be stealing the medical doohickey? Of course, Wanderer, despite not being a healer, knows both how to operate the thingamabob and how to implant an alien parasite into a human host, the only two things we ever see these "healers" do. So what the hell does it mean to be a healer when the other aliens are just as capable of doing their jobs as they are?

Later there's a highly silly scene that has Wanderer having a fit at discovering the humans have been removing the alien parasites from infected people, effectively killing both alien and whatever's left of the person. Err...what did it think we'd do? Wanderer implies the aliens have conquered at least 12 planets. Has there never been an attempt by conquered species to combat them? And it's okay for the aliens to kill us, but not for us to kill them?

I'm not saying Wanderer should be okay with people killing the aliens or that it shouldn't be angry or upset, but I am saying it shouldn't be so omg SHOCKED! and HORRIFIED!. Let's see, we invaded their planet and murdered literally billions of them, and then when I see two or three of our guys dead, I can't believe it's happening! And this from an alien that has supposedly lived for more than 1000 of "our" years. Why do all Meyer's characters come across as mentally stuck in middle school?

I'm not even going to get into how Meyer once again can't separate herself from her characters. They're all the same as each other, and so are the same as all the Twilight characters, because Meyer doesn't create actual characters, who have their own personalities that emerge in such a way that they move the story in ways she didn't expect it to go. She invents ciphers to march her story to its predetermined conclusion.* This naturally means the characters in this film know things they couldn't possibly know from what we've seen onscreen, but they know because Meyer knows, and having people just know things when they need to know them sure makes the whole writing thing a lot easier.

Let's just get to the end. Kruger gets captured by the humans and her alien parasite is removed by Wanderer in a way that doesn't cause harm. (Wanderer coaxes it out by directing loving thoughts at it. I so wish I were joking.) Kruger, like Melanie, turns out to be resistant to the mind mojo, too, but since this is the Meyerverse, she exhibits no psychological trauma from years of her will being subjugated by an alien presence that invaded her very mind and controlled her own body while she struggled futilely against it, to say nothing of being completely cut off from communication with anyone but her controller, if it ever bothered to communicate with her at all. But with Kruger the human saved, there's no hot young white women for Wanderer to inhabit so it can be with its man Smoke Manmuscle! Oh noez, mild disappointment!

As it turns out, Doc didn't kill all the people he de-parasitized. He's got one braindead human left. (So they can't treat an infected wound, but they can perform invasive surgery and keep a braindead person on full life support.) And that human just happens to be a young, attractive white woman! Just like Melanie! What are the odds? At least 3 to 2 against, gotta be.

So Melanie gets back with Trunk, and Wanderer can be with Smoke without any clutter, like her being in the body of, say, a man, or an old lady, or *gasp* a woman with a high melanin content. And so The Host just sort of limps off the screen, letting everything intriguing about its premise go utterly unexplored, its major characters all blissful and happy (a couple of humans died, sure, but they weren't major characters and are quickly forgotten), safe and consequence free.

Supposedly, Stevenie Meyer doesn't want to write any more Host novels because that world is "a dangerous place" and she doesn't want any of the characters to die. I don't know what's more absurd: that Meyer is so attached to her "characters" that she'd rather not write about them at all than see anything bad happen to them,** or that Meyer actually thinks anything bad would happen to any "characters" in one of her stories.

Forget it, Jacob. It's the Meyerverse.

========================================================
* Meyer claims that Another Guy (the one played by Smoke Manmuscle) had a small part in her original workup of the novel and that his "character" demanded additional attention, including involvement in the romance stuff. I find it hilarious that this "character" who supposedly had his own voice such that she had to alter the story led her to exactly replicate the Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle.

** I mean, not everybody has to be George R.R. Martin, but yeesh.

The Amazing Spider-Man

In my capacity as a random asshole on the Internet, it’s my job to deliver to you, the gibbering lunatics who read this blog, the taglined hatred and bile. Sadly, I couldn’t muster up any hate for The Amazing Spider-Man. It’s kind of crappy and a little pathetic, but unfortunately for the 99% of me that hates humanity, somebody cared enough about this misbegotten project to inject a couple of things I actually liked into it.

A lot of people have bagged on Andrew Garfield’s performance of Peter Parker. Now I don’t know who Andrew Garfield is and I don’t care, but the faults of this movie can’t really be laid at his feet. Peter as written is virtually unplayable--a “nerd” who’s handsome and ripped, dresses well, has a cool-by-high-school-standards hairstyle, does skateboarding tricks--and Garfield made the most he probably could out of the role. Likewise, he can’t be blamed for not having any chemistry at all with female lead Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone). This is the fault of director Marc Webb (Get it? Webb? Spiders? Oh bite me, it’s fun!), a detail confirmed by Webb’s claim that he cast Stone based on her chemistry with Garfield. Both Garfield and Stone were believable as high school students despite looking far too old, and Stone was fine considering her nonsensical character: a high school student who, despite looking like the beauty queen, interns with a cutting-edge geneticist, has apparently never been asked on a “date” before, and is attracted to the clumsy stuttering of the (not actually very) nerdy Peter Parker.

Really, most of the stuff that doesn’t involve Spider-Man at all was alright. Great? Hardly, and Garfield is no Tobey Maguire (I can't believe I just had to write those words), but alright. Plus, since I maintain my sanity by blocking out the very existence of Martin Sheen, he wasn’t able to cock up the rest of the movie. There was even some decent Spider-Man stuff mixed in. His costume is okay (apparently replacing spandex tights with “webby latex-type bodysuit” is movie shorthand for “dark and brooding Dark Knight wannabe”), and the filmmakers mostly played straight with the audience, like having Spidey’s web-shooters believably short-out when he gets immersed in water. I liked that Peter at first breaks stuff with his newfound strength, since suddenly being ten times stronger would require adjustment of even such simple tasks as closing doors. Spider-Man’s quips are moderately amusing, and his fights with the Lizard (the Lizard, really?) show him using some innovative ways to get around the giant reptile’s superior strength and toughness. The best scene has Spidey locating the Lizard through vibrations of lines of webbing he has placed throughout the sewer. The shot of Spider-Man sitting in the center of his web detecting vibrations like, well, a spider was a pretty nifty moment. (Which they immediately ruin, but it was fun while it lasted.)

The movie’s biggest problem—apart from its being utterly unnecessary and deeply unoriginal—is that the serious, heady family (melo)drama and high school romance stuff doesn’t mesh at all with the goofy Spider-Man-fighting-a-giant-lizard-monster stuff. This is epitomized by the scene that has Peter going to Gwen’s dad (Denis Leary)—who just so happens to be chief of police in New York City—with a warning that Dr. Curt Connors is actually a giant lizard monster rampaging around the city. Leary reacts as anyone in the real world would, which is completely believable in the My So-Called Life part of the movie, but Peter's reaction is out of the superhero part of the movie, namely utter disbelief that Leary would doubt his giant-lizard-monster story, despite his lack of any evidence to back up that story. (I'm ignoring the fact that earlier the Lizard attacked dozens of people in front of probably a hundred witnesses on a crowded bridge, because the movie does, too.)

In fact, everything with the Lizard doesn’t work. The CGI animating him is cheesy and his look is ridiculous. The actor playing him (some guy I don’t know) is unremarkable, his mad-science dialogue is generic and uninvolving, and his bad guy plot is pedestrian and routine. (Think the Joker’s plot in Batman or, if you have no taste, the villains’ plot in Batman Begins. Or if you have my taste, the man-fish's plot in Zaat!.) Every time the movie might develop a modicum of dramatic momentum, the fake CGI Lizard appears to smash things, or worse, Connors appears to pontificate about how all people ought to become lizardmen before transforming himself into a hammy actor overselling a monster transformation sequence. They also play the oh-so-tired "hero involved in the creation of the villain so that it's personal" card. Actually, Peter says he's responsible for creating the Lizard, but he really isn't. All Peter did was give Connors a bogus equation to finish his turn-people-into-lizardmen ersatz-Predator-blood-serum. It was Connors who chose to then create the serum and inject it into himself in order to turn himself into a man-lizard. Bizarrely, the movie seems to know this, and Peter's reason for fighting the Lizard ends up being more along the lines of "He's the villain, and I'm the hero of the picture, so like, I gotta fight 'im."

Because this movie inexcusably lacks J. Jonah Jameson, Denis Leary's police chief has to fill the role of "authority figure who doggedly hates and opposes Spider-Man no matter how many times Spidey proves himself the good guy". Thus, even after the Lizard begins the movie’s climax by smashing buildings and murdering people, Leary continues to hunt Spider-Man, even as the Lizard is engaged in his rampage. It’s not as if the police are somehow unaware of this, since the Lizard slaughters an entire squad of cops sent to stop him. But instead of making, I don’t know, a second attempt to stop the Lizard from murdering not only police officers but real people as well, Leary orders any number of police helicopters and SWAT officers to capture Spider-Man, currently engaged in the heinous crime of “swinging from buildings by his webbing”. Only when Leary successfully captures and unmasks Spider-Man (oh please) does he finally trust him because, well, he’s Peter Parker, a man Leary met exactly once, when they got into an argument in which Peter, in defense of Spider-Man, accused the police of gross incompetence. If that doesn’t make the chief of police trust Peter/Spidey, what the hell would?

Not content to be merely an unnecessary retread of Sam Raimi’s infinitely-superior-even-at-their-worst Spider-Man films, The Amazing Spider-Man rips off the ending of the execrable Spider-Man 3 by having the villain save the hero from death. Then Leary gets a death scene because, well, somebody’s got to die for some pathos and it sure as hell ain’t going to be the villain a 21^st century superhero movie, so they might as well give the death scene to the movie’s only actual actor. Now I’m a big Denis Leary fan—not the least because he’s a staunch supporter and proponent of the one true sport—but any decent actor can do what Leary does here. Like Christopher Walken, he can be effective in a straight role, but what’s the point? Why hire a man of his particular talents for a role anybody can play? You hire Walken so that his Walkenizing can provide at least a few moments of audience entertainment in your piece of shit cash-grab without your having to do anything that takes actual effort, like doing a thorough script re-write or directing the film with a modicum of flair and style. And you hire Denis Leary for his signature rants. Well, unless you’re the makers of The Amazing Spider-Man, in which case you’re soulless artistic whores of corporate America and I'd like you to leave a comment describing what it’s like to live without a soul.

Oh, and I’d just like to point out, Uncle Ben in this movie is a moron, and not just because he’s played by Martin Sheen. Now, legally, since he had a pistol, the bearded guy who stole money from the convenience store committed armed robbery, even though he didn't use or even reveal said weapon during the theft. (I liked that the robber tosses Peter the milk the clerk rudely refused to sell him when he was exactly 3 cents short. Even better, Peter in turn refuses to help the clerk stop the thief.) Again, he didn’t actually produce said weapon or even claim to have it; he merely tricked the punishingly stupid clerk into looking away from the open register so he could reach over and grab the cash. So at this point, all he’s done is sleight-of-hand some money away from somebody who frankly deserved to get robbed. The fat tub of shit who got robbed chases the thief out of the store, shouting for someone to stop him. Then the thief falls down and the gun tumbles onto the pavement. At this point, Uncle Ben, observing all this unfold, decides to intervene, engaging with the thief in a struggle over the gun. That’s right, a decrepit old man with one foot in the grave thinks he’s going to wrestle a gun away from a man forty years his junior. A gun the man hasn’t used or even shown to anybody. The gun goes off during the struggle, and Ben is kacked. The movie doesn’t even have the thief gain control of the gun and shoot Ben so he can escape. No, it clearly goes off accidentally.

Now as I said, I understand that the Empire's inhumanly harsh "justice" system employs something called the felony-murder doctrine which dictates that, legally speaking, the perp murdered Uncle Ben because once someone has embarked on the commission of a felony, any death that occurs as a result is adjudged murder. But I’m talking about reality here, not the fiction of the legal world. Ben wasn’t protecting any person, or even any property (since the money was already stolen), and the stolen property isn’t even his. No, he was using physical force to stop an alleged petty thief of an entirely unrelated party's property from leaving the scene, which so far as I know is illegal in any jurisdiction of the Empire. The entire chain of events is Ben's fault. He chose to go for the thief’s gun, which the thief hadn’t used or even threatened to use on anyone. Once he failed to reach the gun before the perp, he chose to struggle with him for control of the gun. At this point, Ben is assaulting this guy and attempting to steal his property. The fact that the guy stole at most a couple hundred bucks from the register doesn’t give Ben the right to steal his gun or get into a fight with him. Ben shouldn’t have been involved at all. This isn’t a matter of not having the Courage to Get Involved and Help or not being Cold and Uncaring and Indifferent to the Plight of Your Fellow Man or won't somebody please help the children! This is about not being a fucking idiot and going for somebody’s gun based solely on the word of a fat tub of shit you've never met who didn't even see the guy take the money. Hey Ben, I’ve got an idea: Why don’t you take that cell phone you've been established as having out of your pocket, call the police, and give them the guy’s location and physical description? I mean, nobody is in any danger. The guy isn’t firing the gun or waving it around or yelling that people had better move or he’s gonna blow ‘em away. Frankly, I wouldn’t have cared if the guy had just shot Ben, but the movie doesn’t even go that far because, as noted, the shooting is accidental. Ben shouldn’t have been there, and he got shot due to a situation that he brought entirely upon himself, because he's the one who engaged in violence. There’s a reason the police say things like “Don’t try to wrest a gun away from a petty thief who is currently a threat to exactly no one, because you might end up getting shot in the struggle and dying, you stupid fuck.” Okay, they might leave off that last part. 

And this, this is what inspires Peter Parker to don the mantle of Spider-Man and get repeatedly punched in the face by a lizardman?

Fuck Uncle Ben, and fuck The Amazing Spider-Man. I hate this movie.

Twilight: End of Line

Twilight, pp. 189-195.

So we're in the car, flying through the night at 80 miles per hour while Edward doesn't pay attention to the road.

"And after what happened tonight, I'm surprised that you did make it through a whole weekend unscathed." He shook his head, and then seemed to remember something. "Well, not totally unscathed."

Right! The almost-got-gangraped-in-a-dark-alley thing. Bella doesn't seem to remember it, but Edward at least occasionally seems to.

"What?"

"Your hands," he reminded me. I looked down at my palms, at the almost-healed scrapes across the heels of my hands.

Oh, he meant--yeah, minor scratches. Priorities!

Edward says that he annoyed Emmett (Emmett?) on their three-day hunt because he was so worried about Bella getting herself killed while he was gone. ("Will you shut up? I'm trying to drink blood from the pulsing artery of this dying cougar!") This doesn't satisfy Bella, though, because of course she only wants to talk about her own suffering. Yes, suffering is the word Meyer uses. Bella suffered through Edward's three-day absence, and Edward didn't even call. Sure, he just told her he went hunting to slake his bloodthirst to make it easier to not eat her, but he didn't call. Yes, I know he had no reason to call because a three-day absence (two days of which are the weekend, a time they've yet to see each other anyhow) is hardly cause for alarm, and also they're barely even acquainted with one another, but Bella doesn't think about any of that because...well, you know.

They rehash "I'm dangerous [because I'm a vampire even though I don't eat people]" "I don't care that you're a bloodsucking monster" again. If you think my constant mentions of this are excruciating, try reading the same goddamn scene over and over. She tells him it's too late, she's in too deep, just when she thought she was out, he pulls her back in, etc. etc., and he says it's never too late, which makes her cry. I don't know why it does, but there you go. He apologizes and talks about how likely she is to get herself killed some more before he remembers he has a paper due tomorrow. Wait, he's a vampire, so, I guess it's a paper...of the damned! He makes her promise not to go into the woods alone because there are more dangerous things in the forest than him, like raccoons. (Okay, I might have added that last part.) Then he takes his leave.

Bella goes into the house to be evasive to Mustache Dad. She doesn't mention Edward or the attempted rape, and when she talks to Jessica on the phone, she makes sure to clue her in that Mustache Dad is to be kept in the dark. They discuss the logistics of Bella getting her jacket back after having left it by mistake in Jessica's car. Bella then takes a shower and finally has the emotional breakdown that I've been complaining about her not having for the last 30 updates. I see, so I guess she was in a kind of shock before, such that only now does the enormity of what happened to her that night come crashing down upon her. Looks like I have to take back everything I said about Meyer's completely ignoring the emotional issues you'd think would have to arise from an experience like that:

I walked up the stairs slowly, a heavy stupor clouding my mind. I went through the motions of getting ready for bed without paying any attention to what I was doing. It wasn't until I was in the shower--the water too hot, burning my skin--that I realized I was freezing. I shuddered violently for several minutes before the steaming spray could finally relax my rigid muscles. Then I stood in the shower, too tired to move, until the hot water began to run out.

I stumbled out, wrapping myself securely in a towel, trying to hold the heat from the water in so the aching shivers wouldn't return. I dressed for bed swiftly and climbed under my quilt, curling into a ball, hugging myself to keep warm. A few small shudders trembled through me.

My mind still swirled dizzily, full of images I couldn't understand, and some I fought to repress. Nothing seemed clear at first, but as I fell gradually closer to unconsciousness, a few certainties became evident.

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him--and I didn't know how potent that part might be--that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Wait...that's what you're having this reaction about? This reaction?

People, I give up. I just...I don't know how to deal with this. My brain can't process it. This is the end of the chapter, but I...I just can't. I'll have to go into all the reasons this passage is stupid and poorly written next week. For now...I need to lie down for a while.

Twilight: Near Miss

Twilight, pp. 157-164.

When we left Bella, she was too busy moping to pay attention to where she was going. As it happens, she stumbles over to the seedy side of Port Angeles. And baby, you will never find the more wretched hive of scum and villainy. I mean, just check out one of the four dastardly villains that accost Bella in an alley:

Two of them had paused, and the other two were slowing. The closest, a heavy-set, dark-haired man in his early twenties, seemed to be the one who had spoken. He was wearing a flannel shirt over a dirty t-shirt, cut-off jeans, and sandals.

A fat guy in sandals--my God, the horror! Run, Bella! A guy like that, who knows what he'll do? He might offer to sell you marijuana!

Flannel over a t-shirt, cut-off jeans, and sandals were what all the guys in their early twenties were wearing in 1992 2005. Meyer sure has her finger on the pulse of popular culture!

I'd also like to point out that this reprobate, who will be around for all of eight pages, has been given more of a physical description than Jessica, who didn't even get clothes. Hell, we get about as much as for him as we got for Edward. This must be part of Meyer's "don't show, don't tell" writing strategy. The vaguer your characters are, the more they can be whoever the reader wants them to be, and the better to be your wish fulfillment, my dear.

The rapscallions chase Bella around the back alleys of this Port Angeles Skid Row--well, they don't chase her so much as "casually stroll after her as she kind of meanders around". These passages are some of the worst writing yet, such as when Meyer makes it a point that Bella, who is being stalked in the night by four strange men in the bad part of town, feels a chill that "had nothing to do with the weather". (Thanks!) When the hoods finally get her cornered, Bella is choked with fear and just barely musters the energy to demand they stay away from her. One of the four, apparently thinking he's Huggy Bear, responds, "Don't be like that, sugar." This devastating riposte sends the other three into hysterics, and Bella prepares herself for combat, resolving that she isn't going to go down without a fight. Get ready, my little droogies. Bella Swan is about to do something!

Suddenly, just when we most expect it, Edward appears to the rescue!

Headlights suddenly flew around the corner, the car almost hitting the stocky one, forcing him to jump back toward the sidewalk. I dove into the road--this car was going to stop, or have to hit me. But the silver car unexpectedly fishtailed around, skidding to a stop with the passenger door open just a few feet in front of me.

"Get in," a furious voice commanded.

It was amazing how instantaneously the choking fear vanished, amazing how suddenly the feeling of security washed over me--even before I was off the street--as soon as I heard his voice. I jumped into the seat, slamming the door shut behind me.

All right, Bella's going to--oh, wait...but she was just about to...So you're gonna--oh, right. Okay. Right.

Now that a man is here, of course, everything's perfectly all right. One would think Bella would be a little in shock, a little bewildered, a little upset and emotional given she's just narrowly avoided being assaulted or worse. But nope, she's fine. So fine, in fact, that she asks Edward if he's okay! He'll eventually ask her if she's okay, but only after telling her to put on her seat belt, telling her that he's not okay, driving around for a while, and finally stopping the car in the middle of nowhere. Why? Because he's mad, and so of course his anger at these four men for threatening his privileged access to Bella's body (not that he's interesting in actually make use of this access, only in maintaining its integrity against the challenge of other men) trumps any question of her psychological well-being.

But I felt utterly safe, and, for the moment, unconcerned about where we were going. I stared at his face in profound relief, relief that went beyond my sudden deliverance. I studied his flawless features in the limited light, waiting for my breath to return to normal, until it occurred to me that his expression was murderously angry.

"Are you okay?" I asked, surprised at how hoarse my voice sounded.

"No," he said curtly, and his tone was livid.

It's time for your old pal Carl Eusebius to check in with you neurotypicals again: Is this normal behavior? Imagine: You were this close to being physically beaten by four toughs--possibly raped, as Bella earlier feared "they might be something worse than thieves". Would you even give a thought to the fact that you get to see the guy you haven't seen in four days? Would that form even a small part of the flood of relief you felt in the immediate aftermath of escaping that situation? Who's crazy here, Meyer or me? Because one of us definitely is.

And I do de-clare, I believe it's here on page 163 that the word "said" for dialogue first appears. Hallelujah, hallelujah!

"Distract me, please," he ordered.

"I'm sorry, what?"

He exhaled sharply.

"Just prattle about something unimportant until I calm down."

Has anyone been keeping track of how often Edward gives Bella "commands" and "orders"? Because it's fucking often. And it's nice that Bella, upon hearing the word "prattle", doesn't immediately think of Jessica as I half-expected her to do. Bella does talk about something unimportant--so unimportant that I've skipped it up until now and I'm going to skip it again--until we get this.

"What's wrong?" My voice came out in a whisper.

"Sometimes I have a problem with my temper, Bella."

Hold on, just give me a sec, here...I know I've...ah, here it is, The Abuser's Handbook page 34. Allow me to give the full quotation: "Sometimes I have a problem with my temper, and at those times, you might find yourself accidentally falling down the stairs."

But no, Edward's not an abuser! (Well, he is, but his is emotional abuse.) He just means that he desperately wants to kill the hoods. Wait, why does he want to do that? All he saw was four people standing around Bella. This is a crime that warrants death? As I've noted, Edward can read thoughts, so presumably he saw in their minds that the scum were going to do something terrible. But Bella doesn't yet know he can do this. Since she isn't particularly affected by what should be at the very least an experience to shake you up a little, isn't she curious how he knew to come screaming around the corner at that exact moment? Because that's what happened. It isn't like he was just passing by, happened to see what was going on, deduced it was something terrible almost instantly, and put pedal to metal. He comes around the corner already driving like a maniac and heading right for them, so actually he didn't even see what was happening. Bella, of course, doesn't ask about this, just like she didn't ask how he can stop a speeding van with his bare hands. (No, I'm not going to let that one go.)

Once again, the Twilight film improves on this scene by having Edward almost immediately say that he saw the lowlifes' thoughts and so in a sense saw what they were planning to do. This also drops movie-Bella another clue that Edward isn't what he seems (because movie-Bella, as I've noted, has to piece together Edward's vampire nature on her own). Here, though, he doesn't say that, so we're left with Edward in a murderous rage over events he didn't witness, and Bella doesn't think to ask. She clearly isn't traumatized by her experience, and so why doesn't she ask why he's there, how he knew she was in danger, how he knew what was happening, and how he knew so certainly that he's in a murderous rage about it?

She doesn't ask because, of course, she knows. Because Stephenie [sic] Meyer knows. No one in this novel behaves like a real person, or even a believable character in a trashy vampire romance novel.* They never behave in any way other than to move the plot (such as it is) forward. In fact, Bella won't ask why he was there for another eight pages. During that time, they meet up with Jessica and Angela, blow them off (what, you expected them to spend a single moment with other people?), go to a restaurant, and talk about nothing for several minutes, and then Bella wonders how Edward was suddenly right there right when she needed him, because that's when Meyer is ready to tell us. And Bella never asks why he's as angry as he is, why he's having the emotional reaction she should be having.

I'm beginning to wonder if Bella could pass a Voight-Kampff test.

=================================================================
* I'm rather surprised that necrophilia is not only as popular as it is today, but as socially acceptable as it is, if only in the realm of fantasy.

Twilight: Unreliable

Twilight, pp. 152-156.

Jess drove faster than the Chief, so we made it to Port Angeles by four. It had been a while since I'd had a girls' night out, and the estrogen rush was invigorating. We listened to whiny rock songs while Jessica jabbered on about the boys we hung out with. Jessica's dinner with Mike had gone very well, and she was hoping that by Saturday night they would have progressed to the first-kiss stage. I smiled to myself, pleased.

Our Bella is glad her friend is getting on the rebound the man she herself rejected. I'm sure she finds the whole thing amusing. I'm surprised she doesn't flat-out tell Jessica that Mike only asked her out because Bella turned him down, since Mike hasn't shown any interest in Jessica at this point. You might say that we wouldn't know since Bella doesn't register any male interest in anyone except herself, but I would counter with Mike's confused reaction when Bella suggests Jessica to him.We're also back in our comfort zone of Jessica "jabbering on" and Meyer's clunky, unnatural narration ("first-kiss stage", "estrogen rush"), but I have to wonder what Jessica's waiting for, here. Honey, this isn't a blind date. You've known this guy for a long time, and you've obviously been pining for him for a while, too. I don't think one kiss is exactly moving too fast. Of course, in Stephenie Meyer's Mormon-tacular universe, maybe it's Mike who's refusing to get to first base. You know, because of his True abstinence Love for Jessica that he discovered deep in his heart only moments after Bella turned him down.

But wait, whoa, hold on a minute. "Jess"? When did she become "Jess"? Bella has never once listened to anything Jessica has had to say that wasn't about Edward. As I pointed out before, Jessica's only dialogue printed in the book is Edward-related. Any other time, she, well, she "jabbers on". Bella hasn't done anything with her outside of pretending to listen to her at school. Jessica was at the beach thing, but Bella went there on Mike's invitation and never spoke to Jessica once during the whole thing. This is a girl she's known for two months and has continually ignored over that entire period....and now all of a sudden she's "Jess"? Get real.

Oh well, to be fair, Jessica does get some dialogue here that isn't about Edward. Instead, it's about how Bella is a character who doesn't make sense on her own terms:

Both Jessica and Angela seemed surprised and almost disbelieving when I told them I'd never been to a dance in Phoenix.

"Didn't you ever go with a boyfriend or something?" Jess asked dubiously as we walked through the front doors of the store.

"Really," I tried to convince her, not wanting to confess my dancing problems. "I've never had a boyfriend or anything close. I didn't go out much."

"Why not?" Jessica demanded.

"No one asked me," I answered honestly.

That's right, it's once again time to indulge Meyer's penchant for having it both ways. Bella, the girl that every boy wants and every girl wants to be, has never had a boyfriend "or anything close" (whatever that means). And why not? Because she's uppity and judgemental and thoroughly unlikeable? No, silly, it's because no-one asked. At a (presumably) relatively large public high school in Phoenix. Sure, every male we've seen in Forks has asked or will ask her out (except Edward, but when he's ready to take her out, he'll tell her), but apparently she was a social pariah in Phoenix. I guess Arizonans have an inborn hatred for transparent wish-fulfillment author self-insertions.

I do like that Bella "answered honestly". I could lambast this as yet another example of Meyer's egregious overuse of adverbs or of her pathological fear of using the word "said" in her dialogue, but I'd prefer to think Meyer's finally starting to catch on that Bella does like to lie and so she needs to point out that Bella is actually telling the truth here. But to no avail, since even Jessica's not buying it.

[Jessica] looked sceptical. "People ask you out here," she reminded me, "and you tell them no."

I think we might have an instance of Meta-Jessica here. Somehow, despite Meyer's incredible writing ineptitude, she accidentally created a character, one that refuses to dance to Meyer's tune. Meta-Jessica recognizes Bella's passive-aggression for what it is and calls her on it. But Meyer is strong in the Dark Side of the Force, and Meta-Jessica is quickly hushed up by the power of faux-emo moping. After all, it's been two pages since Bella last moped about Edward's not being around, so we get this:

The girls'-night high was wearing off in the wake of my annoyance at Tyler, leaving room for the gloom to move back in.

Whew! I thought for a minute Bella might be able to go a few hours without spiraling into an Edward-inspired depression. Zis bullet has been, how you say...dodged!

Bella then exhibits her narcissism (or typical teen-aged selfishness, according to some comments) by interrogating the other girl on this girls' night out about whether or not the Cullens missed two days of school because of her, specifically. Not just Edward, apparently, but all of them.

"Um, Angela..." She looked up curiously.

"Is it normal for the...Cullens"--I kept my eyes on the shoes--"to be out of school a lot?" I failed miserably in my attempt to sound nonchalant.

"Yes, when the weather is good they go backpacking all the time--even the doctor. They're all real outdoorsy," she told me quietly, examining her shoes, too. She didn't ask me one question, let alone the hundreds that Jessica would have unleashed. I was beginning to really like Angela.

So, why do you like Jessica again? Oh that's right, you don't.

Meyer really needs to stop calling attention to how ridiculous it is that the Cullens have integrated themselves so thoroughly into their surrounding human society if they can't even be viewed in direct sunlight. I guess world-class surgeon Carlisle isn't on call during these "backpacking trips" to avoid the sun. How lucky for him; I'm sure many doctors in the world would love to know how he manages to avoid being on call whenever he wants. And the Cullens must miss a lot of school in the spring. Even in the Pacific Northwest, there are lots of sunny days in May. And the Cullens have somehow lived in Forks for four generations without anyone noticing that none of them ages. (Remember, Jake's great-grandfather made a pact with the Cullens, the same ones.) This just doesn't make sense on any level. But Meyer wants to have it both ways, so by authorial fiat, she gets it. The Cullens have lived in Forks for about a century, a tiny town that doesn't have nearly enough high schools for them to graduate from a different one every four years, without even changing their names, and no-one notices because Meyer doesn't resolve contradictions in different parts of her novel; she just fails to notice they exist because she doesn't bother to edit. Connor MacLeod survived in plain sight as an immortal for decades, but that was in New York City, where it's a lot easier to hide, and under different names. He didn't move to a town of 3000 and live as "Connor MacLeod" for 200 years without aging a day. Oh, and he could come out during the day.

Bella goes off alone to find a bookstore while her friends go do something else. Bella does this because, she says, she likes to go to bookstores alone. This isn't surprising, since she likes to do everything alone. The only reason she came on this trip at all was to distract herself from moping about Edward. (And of course it didn't work, because she likes moping about Edward.) If Edward had appeared in school that day, you can bet she wouldn't be on this little excursion right now.

In the Twilight film, Bella goes inside the bookstore she finds and purchases a book about folklore, as she's still doing research to determine if Edward is a vampire. In the novel, naturally, even this bit of proactivity is denied her, in part because she already knows Edward's a vampire by means of her privileged access to the author's mind, but mostly because Meyer can't bear to write her fauxtagonist actually doing things.

I wasn't paying as much attention as I should to where I was going; I was wrestling with despair. I was trying so hard not to think about him, and what Angela had said...and more than anything trying to beat down my hopes for Saturday [when Edward is supposed to take her to Seattle], fearing a disappointment more painful than the rest, when I looked up to see someone's silver Volvo parked along the street and it all came crashing down on me. Stupid, unreliable vampire, I thought to myself.

You know, that's the trouble with vampires. They're unreliable.

Twilight: Warm-up Moping

Twilight, pp. 147-151.

Before I start this week's analysis, I just wanted to point out that Twilight never gives us any clear idea of exactly when it's supposed to be taking place. The year we've already established is circa 1992 2005. But what time of year is it? We know school's in, but is it fall? Heading into winter? Heading out of winter? Springtime? No idea. It's probably not spring since nobody went swimming when Mike and the gang went to La Push beach, but that's all I've got for you. Meyer knows what her readers need, though, so a quarter of the way through the book, we find out (well, sorta) what season we're in! As near as I can figure, it's around the end of winter and the beginning of spring, meaning Bella probably arrived in Forks in February and it's now mid-March.

Note to aspiring writers: Don't force your reader to piece together when your story takes place by assembling a dozen teeny bits of information scattered throughout the story. Oh, and don't make your main characters sociopathic narcissists and superpowered control-freaks. And before you fankids start throwing out the names of authors X, Y, and Z who write good stories involving such things, pay attention to what I said: aspiring writers. Make sure you've managed the basics before you try to move on to the hard stuff.

Anywho, Bella whips out her battered Jane Austen compilation and sits down to do some serious English literature-major pleasure reading!

My favourites were Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. I'd read the first most recently, so I started into Sense and Sensibility, only to remember after I began chapter three that the hero of the story happened to be named Edward. Angrily, I turned to Mansfield Park, but the hero of that story was named Edmund, and that was just too close....I snapped the book shut, annoyed, and rolled over on my back.

We're supposed to believe Bella is so super-special that a vampire who has eaten human beings in the course of more than a century on this Earth is smitten with her, yet her two favourite Jane Austen novels are the two that everybody knows. And remember, it's been exactly three days since Bella last saw Edward, yet she can't read a novel containing a character whose name even resembles his. Mark Kermode thinks this girl is an independent young woman. Mark Kermode is also a gigantic twat.

Yes, Edward's absence (which so far consists of one day of school) means our Bella is, in her own words, depressed, no doubt as Edward intended since he's a manipulative, emotionally abusive arsehole. With Edward away, Bella is forced to talk to her father for the first time since Chapter Three. Mustache Dad earns my gratitude by finally, seven chapters in, giving Jessica a last name. Bella deigns to get his permission to go dress-shopping with Jessica in Port Angeles the next night, even though she's not getting a dress herself. Mustache Dad, despite being in his forties, is confused by the strange, unfamiliar notion that a female would accompany another female shopping. Between this and the creepy pictures-of-the-ex-wife-all-over-the-house thing, Mustache Dad really needs to get out more.

Cut to the next day:

It was sunny again in the morning. I awakened with renewed hope that I grimly tried to suppress. I dressed for the warmer weather in a deep blue V-neck blouse--something I'd worn in the dead of winter in Phoenix.

I had planned my arrival at school so that I barely had time to make it to class. With a sinking heart, I circled the full lot looking for a space, while also searching for the silver Volvo that was clearly not there. I parked in the last row and hurried to English, arriving breathless, but subdued, before the final bell.

It was the same as yesterday--I just couldn't keep little sprouts of hope from budding in my mind, only to have them squashed painfully as I searched the lunchroom in vain and sat at my empty Biology table.
...
I was anxious to get out of town so I could stop glancing over my shoulder, hoping to see him appearing out of the blue like he always did.

No doubt because if he did, you'd drop your 'friends' like so many used tampons and get into another boring, pointless conversation in which he's alternately hostile and patronising and you vacillate between impotent anger and blank indifference.

Is this what you normal people do? Purposefully arrive somewhere late so you have a plausible cover story as you drive around the car park looking for somebody's car? Are you constantly on edge, glancing around furtively in the hope of seeing someone you've had two or three conversations with after an absence of a few days? Were you ever like this?

I just want to know how typical this sort of behaviour is, because I find it frankly appalling.

And with that, Chapter Seven comes to...well, a close would be giving it a little too much credit. A stop. Right, that's better: With that, Chapter Seven comes to a full and complete stop, allowing me to release the safety arm, exit, and collect my belongings. So, my little droogies, you'll have to wait until next week to find out what happens during Bella's thrilling dress-shopping trip to a town slightly larger than Forks. Sadly, I'm serious. One hundred and fifty pages into this novel, and something finally, finally is going to happen on this trip. It doesn't have any connection to the main plot (which, if you can believe it, won't start for another two hundred and fifty pages) and doesn't in any way build toward any sort of climax, but it is a thing that does, in fact, happen.

But not today. It's going to take a bit longer. And you know, I can't think of a more fitting way to impart to you, my droogs, what a chore it is to read Twilight.

Twilight: Non-Appearance

Twilight, pp. 139-146.

Upon effectively acknowledging (if not openly admitting) that Edward eats people, Bella does what she does best: nothing. As we saw last week, she immediately ruled out communicating the knowledge that Edward is a vampire to others because they might think she's, like, crazy, and a girl's got to watch out for her image! Another option was to "go back to ignoring him...tell him to leave me alone--and mean it this time." But that would also require Bella to do something, so this option is out, too. The only choice for our Bella is to take no action at all. Passive female docility, thy name is Bella Swan!

I did get a laugh out of this passage:

I didn't know if there was ever a choice, really. I was already in too deep. Now that I knew--if I knew--I could do nothing about my frightening secret. Because when I thought of him, of his voice, his hypnotic eyes, the magnetic force of his personality, I wanted nothing more than to be with him right now.

Ah, those three or four conversations between Edward and Bella so far mean Bella is "in too deep". And I love the bit about the "magnetic force" of Edward's personality. Bella must have a deep and powerful attraction to "guys who are kind of a jerk", since that's the only "personality" Edward has displayed so far. That would explain a lot, actually.

Bella returns to her house, relieved that she's finally made a decision. That her decision essentially amounts to refusing to make a decision doesn't, of course, bother her in the least.

I should be afraid--I knew I should be, but I couldn't feel the right kind of fear.

The reason Bella isn't afraid is that she knows what Meyer knows, and Meyer knows Edward is a Good Vampire (*blech*). If Bella truly believed Edward was a vampire and had the experiences we readers have seen her have, she absolutely would be afraid. When she was struggling to "decide" what to do, she noted that Edward saved her life as a point in his favour. But he can't eat her if she dies in a car accident, so that really shouldn't be very reassuring. (I don't dare suggest that though he might have saved her life, he may very well be eating other people, because we all know that Bella's life is the only life that matters to her.)

It amazes me how this novel goes out of its way to avoid having any teeth. (Get it? Teeth? Vampires? Oh, write your own jokes.) The story is set up as an example of the venerable "nice girl reforms the bad boy" trope, except the bad boy isn't even bad. So of course Bella isn't afraid. There's nothing to be afraid of! Edward keeps going on and on about how dangerous he is, but since he's basically a poseur, it only gets more laughable every time he does it. I'm not buying it, and Bella's not buying it. This is how low vampires have fallen. They can't even scare high school girls anymore.

The next day, after noting that her mother married at 19 (oh those Mormons and their high school marriage!), Bella goes to school. Because there's no-one else at this school, she immediately runs into Mike.

He was so delighted to see me, I couldn't help but feel gratified.[sic]

"I never noticed before--your hair has red in it," he commented, catching between his fingers a strand that was fluttering in the breeze.

"Only in the sun."

I became just a little uncomfortable as he tucked the lock behind my ear.

Mixed message much?

I didn't edit anything out. Bella goes from feeling gratified at Mike's obvious interest in her to feeling "uncomfortable" when he expresses it. That's our Bella: Want me, and make it clear you want me, but don't, like, do anything. (And it only gets worse with Jacob in the later books, my little droogies.)

"I was going to ask if you wanted to go out."

"Oh." I was taken off guard [sic]. Why couldn't I ever have a pleasant conversation with Mike anymore without it getting awkward?

Because you're leading him on. Next question!

And really, taken [sic]* off-guard? You're shocked that the guy who has expressed obvious interest in you for almost two months is asking you out? Good lord, Rosebud must have knocked you on your ass.

Bella has to spell out to Mike that Jessica likes him, because Meyer can't get her characterisation right and Mike somehow hasn't figured this out. He proves to be a quick study, though, since Jessica is "bubbling with enthusiasm" in the very next class. Bella is "indecisive" (no shit!) about going dress shopping with the girls, despite being in a good mood (which is also why she didn't greet Mike "half-heartedly", as she implies she normally does). Why she's "in a euphoric mood" is a bit less clear. Is it because she's firmed up her commitment to doing nothing? That hardly seems like something to be euphoric about.

As was my routine, I glanced first toward the Cullens' table. A shiver of panic trembled in my stomach as I realised it was empty. With dwindling hope, my eyes scoured the rest of the cafeteria, hoping to find him alone, waiting for me. The place was nearly filled--Spanish had made us late--but there was no sign of Edward or any of his family. Desolation hit me with crippling strength.

Oh. That. Bella's "in a euphoric mood" because it's been, gosh, two whole days since she last saw Edward, but her long personal nightmare is about to end. Nearly forty-eight hours after she last saw him, she's going to see him again! Only, he's not there! Oh no!

I shambled along behind Jessica, not bothering to pretend to listen anymore.

Bella's so despondent she can't even pretend to listen! It must be True Love.

I'm sure there was a period in your life, my little droogies, when someone's two-day absence could be a cause of friend-ignoring despair. There certainly was in mine. A period around age fifteen. I don't mind teens and 'tweens going gaga over this tripe. (Well, at least not for this particular reason.) What I don't get is how anyone outside that bracket can read passages like this without burning the book to ashes and then doing a haka on the smoldering remains.

And there's more. So, so much more....

Angela asked a few quiet questions about the Macbeth paper, which I answered as naturally as I could while spiraling downward in misery. She, too, invited me to go with them tonight, and I agreed now, grasping at anything to distract myself.

I realised I'd been holding on to a last shred of hope when I entered Biology, saw his empty seat, and felt a new wave of disappointment.
...
I was glad to leave campus, so I would be free to pout and mope before I went out with Jessica and company. But right after I walked out the door of Charlie's house, Jessica called to cancel our plans. I tried to be happy that Mike had finally asked her to dinner--I really was relieved he finally seemed to be catching on--but my enthusiasm sounded false in my own ears.

He's probably "finally catching on" because you finally told him clearly that you aren't interested. I don't know, that might just have helped him get the message that you aren't interested.

Now, it's clear that, because Meyer likes Bella and wants us to like her, too, we're supposed to understand that her enthusiasm sounds "false" because she's depressed about going an entire day without seeing Edward. But because Meyer is a bad writer (and because Bella is a bad person), it's equally likely in this context that Bella's enthusiasm sounds false because, even though she straight up told Mike no thanks, she thought he would continue to pine for her. Hearing that he's now asked Jessica out, Bella tries to feign enthusiasm, when she's really disappointed that Mike will no longer be shutting Jessica out in order to fawn over her.

It's all because of that "I really was relieved he finally seemed to be catching on". (Well, that and the Bella-is-a-bad-person thing.) It's almost, almost a bit of self-awareness on Meyer's part, this extra effort to assure us that Bella's really really glad Mike won't be pursuing her anymore. No really, I'm so happy for you. Just so, like, happy. For you. Y'know? That's great. That's...that's really great.

 ================================================================

 *Meyer's grasp of the English language is so bad I keep feeling like Sylvester Stallone's character in Demolition Man, constantly having to correct Sandra Bullock's malapropisms. "It's taken aback and caught, caught off-guard!"

Twilight: Non-Action

Twilight, pp. 68-70

Lots of bad on these two-and-one-half pages.

In my dream it was very dark....

Ha! Don't worry, we're not going to bother with Bella's dream of Edward. The description of it is so flat and lifeless I wonder why Meyer included it at all. I'll only note that the following

After that, he was in my dreams nearly every night...

is pretty creepy, maybe pathological. Instead, we'll look at the ludicrous aftermath of Edward's Superman save. The driver of the van involved in the incident, one Tyler Crowley*, continues to apologise over the course of the next month, and Bella picks up on the signals from this unsurprising new suitor.

Tyler Crowley was impossible, following me around, obsessed with making amends to me somehow....He followed me between classes and sat at our now-crowded lunch table. Mike and Eric were even less friendly toward him than they were to each other, which made me worry that I'd gained another unwelcome fan.

I think this is way past 'making amends', and that last part lets us know that Bella think so, too. This is where, if she had any concern for her so-called friends or even just for other human beings, she would tell Tyler (and, really, the other two boys as well) that she's not interested and that he can either be her friend or be nothing. But of course, as we've seen, Bella likes being the object of boys' desire, even though she has no intention of ever reciprocating. She doesn't want to be bothered by their attention, so she does 'tr[y] to convince [Tyler that] what I wanted more than anything else was for him to forget all about it', but she stops short of telling him to leave her alone entirely because, well, then she wouldn't be flattered by his attention.

This is another area in which the Twilight film manages to make the teeniest of improvements over the book. With Meyer having final approval over what goes into the film and the danger of Twihards howling over any deviation from the source, improving on the novel must have been a Herculean task. (I don't feel bad for the screenwriter, though, since she was handsomely paid for her effort and apparently considered it sufficient reward to return for the sequel.)

In the film, there is no indication that Eric--Hollywoodised into an Asian**--has any interest in Bella. Nor does Tyler, who in my recollection does not appear after apologising in the hospital. (He does appear very early to sexually harass her, but the scene makes it appear he's more into Mike than Bella.) I'm sure the filmmakers explained to Meyer that these flirtations had to be cut for time, but I like to think they were as put-off by the Bella character as I am and tried to trim at least some of these obnoxious moments.

Meyer then proceeds yet again to beat the reader over the head with the 'he moved so fast' business. Here we have confirmation that, not only did bystanders not see what happened, they buy Bella's lies about happened, even though what she says flatly contradicts what at least some of them must have seen. She claims he pulled her out of the way, and none of the dozens of eyewitnesses refutes this. They simply Stepford-chorus that they didn't see Edward at all until it was over.

'You didn't see him push the van away?' she asked incredulously.

Actually, no, she didn't ask that. But I bet with the unnecessary adverb there, you were fooled, if only for a second.

Instead, she wonders 'why no one else had seen him standing so far away'. Her conclusion?

With chagrin, I realised the probable cause--no-one else was as aware of Edward as I always was. No-one else watched him the way I did. How pitiful.

I've read this paragraph a few times, in context, and I can't tell whether Meyer means Bella is pitiful for paying too much attention to Edward or everyone else is pitiful for not paying enough. Context leans towards the former, but the wording strongly implies the latter, and Bella has certainly shown contempt for all the non-Edward people around her (and even Edward gets some contempt on occasion). So I'm going with Bella thinking it's pitiful that everyone doesn't constantly keep track of Edward's location.

That's our Bella.

And so the 'girls have cooties' grade-school boy-girl interaction continues, as Edward resumes sitting next to Bella in biology class

as far away from me as the table would allow, [and] he seemed totally unaware of my presence. Only now and then, when his fists would suddenly ball up--skin stretched even whiter over the bones--did I wonder if he wasn't quite as oblivious as he appeared.

The bloodless corpse turns paler with exertion. Edward comes off more like a creepy guy LARPing a vampire than a genuine creature of the night. I'm also very put off by the 'wasn't' in that last clause. I suppose it's still correct, but man, it goes over as smoothly as a Che Guevera t-shirt at an American Legion meeting.

He wished he hadn't pulled me from the path of Tyler's van--there was no other conclusion I could come to.

I suppose that's true, when you think only of yourself as Bella does. There's 'no other conclusion'; it must have something to do with you.

I wanted very much to talk to him, and the day after the accident I tried. The last time I'd seen him, outside the ER, we'd both been so furious. I still was angry that he wouldn't trust me with the truth, even though I was keeping my part of the bargain flawlessly. But he had in fact saved my life, no matter how he'd done it. And, overnight, the heat of my anger faded into awed gratitude.

Hmm...I'm thinking he might not trust you with the truth because he has no reason to do so. Maybe I'm no longer hip or with-it like the hepcats in high school these days, but I don't reveal intimate details to people with whom I've had precisely one conversation, no matter how angry they might get about it.

He was already seated when I got to Biology, looking straight ahead. I sat down, expecting him to turn toward me. He showed no sign that he realised I was there.

'Hello, Edward,' I said pleasantly, to show him I was going to behave myself.

He turned his head a fraction toward me without meeting my gaze, nodding once, and then looked the other way.

And that was the last contact I'd had with him...

No, you didn't miss anything, and I promise I cut nothing from this page so far. Bella really considers saying 'Hello, Edward' to be trying to talk to him. For someone she dreams about and obsesses over (her words!), that's a pretty limp effort, but apparently it took all the energy she could muster to take any initiative at all. Spent from this exertion, she

...gave no more notice that he existed than he showed toward me. I was miserable.

Here's a thought for how to deal with your misery at not being able to talk to Edward: Talk to Edward. It's worth a shot, I think.

But no, our fauxtagonist has to remain inert while things happen to her. Remember, ladies, there's no need to do stuff when there are males around. They'll do all the stuff. You just sit and look pretty and be all emotional.

Despite my outright lies, the tenor of my e-mails alerted Renee [her mother!] to my depression, and she called a few times, worried.

Five pages ago, Bella doesn't like to lie. Now 'outright lies' are the order of the day. '[T]here'd better be a good reason why I'm doing it,' she told us then.

Well, she can't very well let her mother know she's sad that a boy she won't talk to won't talk to her, can she? I mean, if this got out, where would the trail of bodies end?

===============================================================
*If Meyer showed any awareness at all of the genre she's working in, I'd wonder if this were a 'clever' reference to Aleister Crowley.
**Why, yes, Eric the Asian does end up romantically involved with the only ethnic-looking girl evident in the film. What are the odds of that?