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.
Showing posts with label mustache dad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mustache dad. Show all posts
January 6, 2013
November 19, 2012
Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part II
When I started this blog, I imagined I might deal with the Twilight film once I was through eviscerating the novel. As it's developed, I've found myself referencing the film version regularly, calling into question the need to address it separately. Writing up the other films hadn't even entered my mind, as I was not (and am not) sure I'll have the strength to dig into their respective source novels. The first one is trying enough.
Yet this blog concerns itself with two things: Twilight and terrible movies. What could be more appropriate, then, than reviewing a Twilight movie? Plus I thought, considering my love-hate relationship with this series, I ought to see at least one of the films in cinema, surrounded by Twihards. So on the film's opening night, I went eagerly to see Twilight, Part 4: Part 2.
Yes, Breaking Dawn, the epic story that could not be contained in one movie, split in two and made shamelessly cheaply to maximize profits. Warning: This review is spoiler-heavy, including the one genuine surprise at the film's climax (along with its subsequent ruination). If you have any intention of seeing this film--and God help you if you do--I strongly recommend you read no further. Those who prefer moving slowly through the novel along with this blog will also want to avoid the rest of this review, as it's sure to give away plot points from throughout the series.
Having said that, let's get into Breaking Wind. Since this is the fifth and final in the series of films that make up THE TWILIGHT SAGA (you have to say it in all caps), let me bring you up to speed on what happened in the previous four films.
Edward and Bella got married and had sex, resulting in Bella's pregnancy.
You can see why they needed four movies to tell such an epic tale. And now we have the finale, and it is every bit the sputtering anticlimax you expect from a series of novels that gave away its inevitable conclusion in the first fifty pages but insisted on dragging the story out across three thousand.
Stephenie Meyer's manipulation of her series mythology--such as it is--to suit her plot comes out in full force in Breaking Bad. Vampires don't blink, or breathe, or eat, but they do continue to produce viable sperm and the semen to deliver it, and their hearts continue to pump blood. That's an odd mix of biological processes there. Why, it's almost as if the author hasn't thought through the whole vampire thing and just makes it work however her plot needs it to work.
The fetus develops so rapidly I thought maybe I'd missed Bella drinking the Water of Life, so the newly married couple decides to conceal her pregnancy from Mustache Dad. It sure is lucky they did, because Bella dies giving birth to the half-vampire child. Edward is devastated, but then he remembers that in the Meyerverse, vampire blood not only turns living people into vampires, but dead people, too! So even though she's already dead, Edward makes like the Re-Animator, and Bella's eyes open, vampire-red. End of Part 4, Part 1.
Part 4, Part 2 picks up directly from there. The power fantasy of Twilight's vampirism reaches completion in this installment, as we're treated to annoying zoom shots of Bella Swan's (Kristen Stewart) super-human senses: She can see the tiniest drop of water, hear the movement of air, see the dust motes between the carpet fibers, smell the slightest of farts. Instead of reacting in horror and despair that she is now condemned to the same damnation of attending high school over and over again until the end of time that Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) has endured for a century, she's ecstatic to be a walking corpse that feasts on the blood of the living. Now she can live her suburban white American upper-middle-class unlife until the end of time! Plus, she can run really, really fast by way of a terribly rendered CGI effect, smash slabs of granite with her bare hands without having to, you know, put in any effort to build muscles, and have sex literally constantly since vampires don't sleep or become fatigued.
And every vampire has a special vampire power, on top of all their other powers, so that Meyer can rely on mind-reading, clairvoyance, and seeing the future whenever she can't think of a plausible way to get the characters out of a situation. If you guessed that Bella's special power (which is that other vampires' special powers don't work on her, except when the filmmakers forget and have a power affect her) is the most special-est one of all, give yourself a cookie.
So Bella's the strongest vampire of all the Cullens, and has the best-est power, and is definitely--with the Twilight vampire make-up job and those red colored contact lenses--the hottest. There's the little trouble of bloodlust, though, since newly-turned vampires in the Meyerverse are very difficult to keep from eating people. Edward takes her out to hunt an animal instead, but she gets a whiff of some poor bastard who's just gashed himself open while rock-climbing, and she's off to eat him. Uh-oh, conflict! But this is Twilight, so conflict is either never brought up at all or brought up and then immediately resolved. This time it's option b: Edward runs after her and tells her she shouldn't eat this guy, so she doesn't, and the idea that she'll eat people is never mentioned in the film again; in fact, she's allowed to meet Mustache Dad (Billy Burke), alone, the next day. Man, Edward's one minute of training sure paid off! Bella is about to eat a deer, but not only are these vampires so neutered they don't eat people, they don't even eat cute cuddley-wuddley animals. So Bella instead eats a mountain lion that was just about to eat the deer. She vampire-jumps and hits the beast from the side, taking it down and tearing its neck open with her teeth. And yes, it looks just as ridiculous as it sounds.
Speaking of Mustache Dad, he is now the only actual human being left in Twilight, since Bella's high school friends are absent this film. Progressively through the series, these friends have become more and more apart from Bella until they disappear entirely after her wedding, since her marriage signified her becoming a full member of theMormon church Cullen clan and so she has no connection to these people from her pre-Cullen life. I don't think Meyer was going for the Cullens as a symbolic dangerous cult, but that's what she gave us. Bella's okay with the Cullens' telling her father she's dead, since she has Edward and is a vampire now and that's all that's important. Spurned suitor Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), though, says she'll want to have her father in her life, so, in a genuinely funny scene--in part due to Burke's acting, which I've already praised elsewhere--Jacob reveals he is a werewolf to Mustache Dad. He does this by stripping off his clothes, making this the obligatory "Jacob takes off his shirt" scene, much to Mustache Dad's annoyance. Somehow this means it's okay for Bella to continue to see her father. Whew, that was...too close. Another conflict raised and immediately hand-waved away!
But why is Jacob there, you ask? Well, the werewolves have this thing called "imprinting". Long story short, it's "there's someone out there just for you" taken to its Meyerverse extreme. A werewolf sees a person of the opposite sex (despite all the shirtless male horseplay throughout the series, these dogs don't roll with teh gay!) and becomes that person's creepy stalker: He has to be with that person, and no other, and the obsession can't be changed or removed. Jacob doesn't imprint on Bella because that would've brought about a genuine conflict with no easy resolution, and we'll have none of that. No, he imprints--and I can't believe I'm going to write this--he imprints...on...the baby.
The baby.
This man witnesses a birth, and upon seeing the bloody, squalling infant, he falls in love with it.
Which means that, throughout the film, he's constantly hovering around the little girl, looking at her with naked longing in his eyes. (It's very, very odd that Taylor Lautner's best acting in the entire series is giving creepy sex looks to a 7-year-old girl.) It was disturbing every time I saw it, astonished that the director filmed those scenes and included them in the final print. I mean, it just has to be seen to be believed. Wait no, because I saw it and I still don't believe it.
The plot, what little there is, is exactly the same as that of Part 3. In that film, Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her horde of vampires were coming to destroy the Cullen family, who had to turn to the underwearwolves for help. In this film, Aro (Michael Sheen) and his horde of vampires are coming to destroy the Cullen family, who have to turn to their other vampire friends for help. Most of these vampires are just names and faces that leave no impression, and they don't have much impact on the story. I laughed when one of them proved to be the Last Airbender, and it was nice to see some of the "good" vampires being vampires (i.e., eating people) when the Cullens go to ask for their help.
Now I've beaten up on Twilight a lot. Certainly it sucks, and it deserves all the scorn that has been and continues to be heaped upon it. But I do want to give credit where I can, and two of these new vampires are fabulous. These are Hanz and Franz--I don't know what their real names are, but to me they're Hanz and Franz--Romanian vampires who used to be in charge of the vampire world until the Italian Volturi overthrew them. These guys, with their best Bela Lugosi accents and the way they finish each other's thoughts, are only matched in the shameless overacting department by Michael Sheen--yes, that Michael Sheen--as Aro, the leader of the Volturi. These three men slice the ham thick, and I love them for it. Hanz and Franz are pushing the Cullens and their friends to fight the Volturi, but nobody but Edward is having it, since the Volturi are so powerful no-one can stand against them. Edward gives a "we few, we happy few" speech (consisting of maybe three lines) that won't have Shakespeare looking over his shoulder, and they're all ready to fight. (Personally, the hell with Edward, but I'd fight for Hanz and Franz.)
Carlisle (Peter Facinelli), the head of the Cullen family, exposits that the Volturi are coming to destroy the Cullens so they can force Alice Cullen (Ashley Greene), the vampire who sees the future, to become part of their clan. To disguise this naked power grab, however, the Volturi need an excuse, and they decide to use as their pretext a report that Edward and Bella's daughter, who has the hilariously stupid name "Reneesme", is an "immortal child". That is, a child turned into a vampire, for such are forbidden by the Volturi as too dangerous to be allowed to exist, since they have all the powers of a vampire but the minds of children. Carlisle decides to gather up as many of his vampire friends as he can to "witness" to the Volturi thatAlia Reneesme isn't an
immortal child. No one points out that this is a fantastically moronic plan, because Carlisle just said the immortal child thing is a pretext. But they carry out the plan anyway, because it's Twilight and Meyer had to fill up four novels despite telling a story that doesn't have a shred of tension or drama.
So we're set for the final confrontation, the climax of Twilight, the showdown between the Good Cullens and the Evil People-Eating Vampires (never mind that the Cullens' allies also eat people) to close out the THE TWILIGHT SAGA. But it's Twilight, so people have to yack first. Carlisle offers Aro his witnesses. Aro's special vampire power is to look into the minds of those he touches, so he says forget the witnesses and asks to touch the child. Of course he discovers the kid isn't an immortal child. Well, she is immortal, and a child, but what she's not is an immortal child. He then declares she is to be destroyed anyway, since they don't know exactly what she is and that makes her dangerous. The Cullens react as if this is some big betrayal, but Carlisle earlier said the whole thing was just a pretext to get to Alice. What did you expect Aro to do? Say "Oops, our mistake!" and turn around and go home? What's surprising is that he's even talking about this, and that he doesn't lie after working the mind-mojo on the kid. But we have to pad, pad, pad, so now Alice shows up and says that she's seen the future and the child isn't dangerous, allowing Aro to touch her and see her visions for himself as proof. He does and sees she's right, but now he does lie about it and declares the child is to be destroyed because the whole thing is a pretext. God, this is so dumb.
The big fight begins, and something impressive happens. No, really. The fight begins with Carlisle charging Aro, and Aro kills him. That's right, in this series in which nothing bad has happened to any of the Cullens, in which no one is ever really in danger, in which none of the good guys has even been hurt except the time Bella was bitten by James in the first movie, the Cullen patriarch gets kacked. This doesn't happen in the Breaking Down novel, and let me tell you, there were gasps in the audience. This film series has so far proceeded more or less in lockstep with the books--changing minor details but forbidden from tinkering with anything important--but Part 4, Part 2 threw the Twihards a curveball, and they didn't know what to do. I myself couldn't believe it was happening (for good reason, as it turned out). Meyer produced this film, so she had to approve Carlisle's death. Not only that, they kill Harpo and some of the werewolves in the ensuing bloodbath, before finally Aro himself falls and the Volturi retreat. Finally, some actual stakes. Finally, genuine consequences. Finally, triumph at least tinged with sadness and loss. Finally, everything doesn't turn out all right in the end, not totally. Even though the good guys won, there was a cost. A price to be paid.
The entire fight was just Alice's vision, showing Aro what would happen if he fights the battle. Since the result is his own death, Aro takes his army and goes home.
Fuck. This. Movie.
The old "it was all a dream" is the cheapest and laziest way to manufacture drama in the hack writer's handbook. No artistic work has ever been improved by it. All it does is piss off the audience because it means everything we just saw wasn't real and so nothing was ever really at stake. That's what infuriates me the most about Twilight. It's lazy. It doesn't even try to be any good. It doesn't put any effort into being believable or memorable or effective in any way. All it does is pander to the fantasies of a particular demographic to rake in the cash. It's the gender-reverse of the Michael Bay Transformers series. And people buy into it. As long as your product works my fetish, I'll pay you for it, no matter how cheap and lazy and sloppy it is. People, I don't hate romantic films. I don't hate action films. I don't hate superhero films. I hate lazy films. And I hate people who don't hate lazy films. Have some goddamned standards, ya heathens! Make 'em earn it!
Some critics are praising the film for its climax, even as they also criticize it for chickening out in the end. But by making it all just a vision, the filmmakers destroy all the interest they've crassly manufactured. In the end, it's the same old Twilight: toothless, neutered, non-threatening, status quo-affirming, consequence-free.
Still, the Twihards' reactions were damn fun. I mean, they even killed Harpo!
Yet this blog concerns itself with two things: Twilight and terrible movies. What could be more appropriate, then, than reviewing a Twilight movie? Plus I thought, considering my love-hate relationship with this series, I ought to see at least one of the films in cinema, surrounded by Twihards. So on the film's opening night, I went eagerly to see Twilight, Part 4: Part 2.
Yes, Breaking Dawn, the epic story that could not be contained in one movie, split in two and made shamelessly cheaply to maximize profits. Warning: This review is spoiler-heavy, including the one genuine surprise at the film's climax (along with its subsequent ruination). If you have any intention of seeing this film--and God help you if you do--I strongly recommend you read no further. Those who prefer moving slowly through the novel along with this blog will also want to avoid the rest of this review, as it's sure to give away plot points from throughout the series.
Having said that, let's get into Breaking Wind. Since this is the fifth and final in the series of films that make up THE TWILIGHT SAGA (you have to say it in all caps), let me bring you up to speed on what happened in the previous four films.
Edward and Bella got married and had sex, resulting in Bella's pregnancy.
You can see why they needed four movies to tell such an epic tale. And now we have the finale, and it is every bit the sputtering anticlimax you expect from a series of novels that gave away its inevitable conclusion in the first fifty pages but insisted on dragging the story out across three thousand.
Stephenie Meyer's manipulation of her series mythology--such as it is--to suit her plot comes out in full force in Breaking Bad. Vampires don't blink, or breathe, or eat, but they do continue to produce viable sperm and the semen to deliver it, and their hearts continue to pump blood. That's an odd mix of biological processes there. Why, it's almost as if the author hasn't thought through the whole vampire thing and just makes it work however her plot needs it to work.
The fetus develops so rapidly I thought maybe I'd missed Bella drinking the Water of Life, so the newly married couple decides to conceal her pregnancy from Mustache Dad. It sure is lucky they did, because Bella dies giving birth to the half-vampire child. Edward is devastated, but then he remembers that in the Meyerverse, vampire blood not only turns living people into vampires, but dead people, too! So even though she's already dead, Edward makes like the Re-Animator, and Bella's eyes open, vampire-red. End of Part 4, Part 1.
Part 4, Part 2 picks up directly from there. The power fantasy of Twilight's vampirism reaches completion in this installment, as we're treated to annoying zoom shots of Bella Swan's (Kristen Stewart) super-human senses: She can see the tiniest drop of water, hear the movement of air, see the dust motes between the carpet fibers, smell the slightest of farts. Instead of reacting in horror and despair that she is now condemned to the same damnation of attending high school over and over again until the end of time that Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) has endured for a century, she's ecstatic to be a walking corpse that feasts on the blood of the living. Now she can live her suburban white American upper-middle-class unlife until the end of time! Plus, she can run really, really fast by way of a terribly rendered CGI effect, smash slabs of granite with her bare hands without having to, you know, put in any effort to build muscles, and have sex literally constantly since vampires don't sleep or become fatigued.
And every vampire has a special vampire power, on top of all their other powers, so that Meyer can rely on mind-reading, clairvoyance, and seeing the future whenever she can't think of a plausible way to get the characters out of a situation. If you guessed that Bella's special power (which is that other vampires' special powers don't work on her, except when the filmmakers forget and have a power affect her) is the most special-est one of all, give yourself a cookie.
So Bella's the strongest vampire of all the Cullens, and has the best-est power, and is definitely--with the Twilight vampire make-up job and those red colored contact lenses--the hottest. There's the little trouble of bloodlust, though, since newly-turned vampires in the Meyerverse are very difficult to keep from eating people. Edward takes her out to hunt an animal instead, but she gets a whiff of some poor bastard who's just gashed himself open while rock-climbing, and she's off to eat him. Uh-oh, conflict! But this is Twilight, so conflict is either never brought up at all or brought up and then immediately resolved. This time it's option b: Edward runs after her and tells her she shouldn't eat this guy, so she doesn't, and the idea that she'll eat people is never mentioned in the film again; in fact, she's allowed to meet Mustache Dad (Billy Burke), alone, the next day. Man, Edward's one minute of training sure paid off! Bella is about to eat a deer, but not only are these vampires so neutered they don't eat people, they don't even eat cute cuddley-wuddley animals. So Bella instead eats a mountain lion that was just about to eat the deer. She vampire-jumps and hits the beast from the side, taking it down and tearing its neck open with her teeth. And yes, it looks just as ridiculous as it sounds.
Speaking of Mustache Dad, he is now the only actual human being left in Twilight, since Bella's high school friends are absent this film. Progressively through the series, these friends have become more and more apart from Bella until they disappear entirely after her wedding, since her marriage signified her becoming a full member of the
But why is Jacob there, you ask? Well, the werewolves have this thing called "imprinting". Long story short, it's "there's someone out there just for you" taken to its Meyerverse extreme. A werewolf sees a person of the opposite sex (despite all the shirtless male horseplay throughout the series, these dogs don't roll with teh gay!) and becomes that person's creepy stalker: He has to be with that person, and no other, and the obsession can't be changed or removed. Jacob doesn't imprint on Bella because that would've brought about a genuine conflict with no easy resolution, and we'll have none of that. No, he imprints--and I can't believe I'm going to write this--he imprints...on...the baby.
The baby.
This man witnesses a birth, and upon seeing the bloody, squalling infant, he falls in love with it.
Which means that, throughout the film, he's constantly hovering around the little girl, looking at her with naked longing in his eyes. (It's very, very odd that Taylor Lautner's best acting in the entire series is giving creepy sex looks to a 7-year-old girl.) It was disturbing every time I saw it, astonished that the director filmed those scenes and included them in the final print. I mean, it just has to be seen to be believed. Wait no, because I saw it and I still don't believe it.
The plot, what little there is, is exactly the same as that of Part 3. In that film, Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her horde of vampires were coming to destroy the Cullen family, who had to turn to the underwearwolves for help. In this film, Aro (Michael Sheen) and his horde of vampires are coming to destroy the Cullen family, who have to turn to their other vampire friends for help. Most of these vampires are just names and faces that leave no impression, and they don't have much impact on the story. I laughed when one of them proved to be the Last Airbender, and it was nice to see some of the "good" vampires being vampires (i.e., eating people) when the Cullens go to ask for their help.
Now I've beaten up on Twilight a lot. Certainly it sucks, and it deserves all the scorn that has been and continues to be heaped upon it. But I do want to give credit where I can, and two of these new vampires are fabulous. These are Hanz and Franz--I don't know what their real names are, but to me they're Hanz and Franz--Romanian vampires who used to be in charge of the vampire world until the Italian Volturi overthrew them. These guys, with their best Bela Lugosi accents and the way they finish each other's thoughts, are only matched in the shameless overacting department by Michael Sheen--yes, that Michael Sheen--as Aro, the leader of the Volturi. These three men slice the ham thick, and I love them for it. Hanz and Franz are pushing the Cullens and their friends to fight the Volturi, but nobody but Edward is having it, since the Volturi are so powerful no-one can stand against them. Edward gives a "we few, we happy few" speech (consisting of maybe three lines) that won't have Shakespeare looking over his shoulder, and they're all ready to fight. (Personally, the hell with Edward, but I'd fight for Hanz and Franz.)
Carlisle (Peter Facinelli), the head of the Cullen family, exposits that the Volturi are coming to destroy the Cullens so they can force Alice Cullen (Ashley Greene), the vampire who sees the future, to become part of their clan. To disguise this naked power grab, however, the Volturi need an excuse, and they decide to use as their pretext a report that Edward and Bella's daughter, who has the hilariously stupid name "Reneesme", is an "immortal child". That is, a child turned into a vampire, for such are forbidden by the Volturi as too dangerous to be allowed to exist, since they have all the powers of a vampire but the minds of children. Carlisle decides to gather up as many of his vampire friends as he can to "witness" to the Volturi that
So we're set for the final confrontation, the climax of Twilight, the showdown between the Good Cullens and the Evil People-Eating Vampires (never mind that the Cullens' allies also eat people) to close out the THE TWILIGHT SAGA. But it's Twilight, so people have to yack first. Carlisle offers Aro his witnesses. Aro's special vampire power is to look into the minds of those he touches, so he says forget the witnesses and asks to touch the child. Of course he discovers the kid isn't an immortal child. Well, she is immortal, and a child, but what she's not is an immortal child. He then declares she is to be destroyed anyway, since they don't know exactly what she is and that makes her dangerous. The Cullens react as if this is some big betrayal, but Carlisle earlier said the whole thing was just a pretext to get to Alice. What did you expect Aro to do? Say "Oops, our mistake!" and turn around and go home? What's surprising is that he's even talking about this, and that he doesn't lie after working the mind-mojo on the kid. But we have to pad, pad, pad, so now Alice shows up and says that she's seen the future and the child isn't dangerous, allowing Aro to touch her and see her visions for himself as proof. He does and sees she's right, but now he does lie about it and declares the child is to be destroyed because the whole thing is a pretext. God, this is so dumb.
The big fight begins, and something impressive happens. No, really. The fight begins with Carlisle charging Aro, and Aro kills him. That's right, in this series in which nothing bad has happened to any of the Cullens, in which no one is ever really in danger, in which none of the good guys has even been hurt except the time Bella was bitten by James in the first movie, the Cullen patriarch gets kacked. This doesn't happen in the Breaking Down novel, and let me tell you, there were gasps in the audience. This film series has so far proceeded more or less in lockstep with the books--changing minor details but forbidden from tinkering with anything important--but Part 4, Part 2 threw the Twihards a curveball, and they didn't know what to do. I myself couldn't believe it was happening (for good reason, as it turned out). Meyer produced this film, so she had to approve Carlisle's death. Not only that, they kill Harpo and some of the werewolves in the ensuing bloodbath, before finally Aro himself falls and the Volturi retreat. Finally, some actual stakes. Finally, genuine consequences. Finally, triumph at least tinged with sadness and loss. Finally, everything doesn't turn out all right in the end, not totally. Even though the good guys won, there was a cost. A price to be paid.
The entire fight was just Alice's vision, showing Aro what would happen if he fights the battle. Since the result is his own death, Aro takes his army and goes home.
Fuck. This. Movie.
The old "it was all a dream" is the cheapest and laziest way to manufacture drama in the hack writer's handbook. No artistic work has ever been improved by it. All it does is piss off the audience because it means everything we just saw wasn't real and so nothing was ever really at stake. That's what infuriates me the most about Twilight. It's lazy. It doesn't even try to be any good. It doesn't put any effort into being believable or memorable or effective in any way. All it does is pander to the fantasies of a particular demographic to rake in the cash. It's the gender-reverse of the Michael Bay Transformers series. And people buy into it. As long as your product works my fetish, I'll pay you for it, no matter how cheap and lazy and sloppy it is. People, I don't hate romantic films. I don't hate action films. I don't hate superhero films. I hate lazy films. And I hate people who don't hate lazy films. Have some goddamned standards, ya heathens! Make 'em earn it!
Some critics are praising the film for its climax, even as they also criticize it for chickening out in the end. But by making it all just a vision, the filmmakers destroy all the interest they've crassly manufactured. In the end, it's the same old Twilight: toothless, neutered, non-threatening, status quo-affirming, consequence-free.
Still, the Twihards' reactions were damn fun. I mean, they even killed Harpo!
November 12, 2012
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 circa1992 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.
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
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.
October 31, 2012
Drive Angry
Warning: This entry contains much stronger language than is usually found on this blog. It can't be helped, though; the movie is full of it.
Drive Angry is half of the best B-movie in recent years. I sat aghast, unable to believe grindhouse fair like this got a theatrical release without the names Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez attached. And I know who we can thank for that: His Cageness.
Yes, Nicolas Cage, a man who is no stranger to this blog and will no doubt continue to make appearances in the future. Cage, like fellow scenery-chewers Al Pacino and Richard Burton, are capable of strong performances when reined in. But when left to their own devices, they tend to go so far over the top they end up dodging low-flying aircraft. By all accounts, the 2008 financial crisis is the worst fiscal disaster to strike the world since the Great Depression, but it did have one positive outcome, one small flicker of joy in an otherwise catastrophic event: It left Nicolas Cage so broke that he's willing to appear in crap like this.
And since Cage's name retains a vestige of prestige, his involvement meant Drive Angry was given an Empire-wide release. Yes, this played in cinemas. This is a movie in which a man kills a half-dozen assassins who burst into his room, dodging their bullets while returning uncannily accurate fire with his own pistol, all while still penetrating the woman he's having sex with. This is a movie that has a woman catching her fiance in the midst of an act of infidelity, pulling the naked interloper off of her man, pushing the harlot (still naked) out the front door and into the garden, and then beating her into unconsciousness. This is a movie with lines like:
"Oh, baby. Why don't you fuck naked?" "I never disrobe before gunplay."
"But no one reaches the end and says, 'I wish I hadn't fucked so much.'"
"Between now and then, I'm gonna fuck you up."
"If you try and kill me and dump me in the woods, I'm gonna cut your nuts off."
Most of these howlers are spoken by Piper (Amber Heard), a truly revolting piece of southern white trash that is never once believable even in the context of a violent grindhouse flick. She blackmails her loser boyfriend into proposing marriage by refusing to sleep with him, becomes enraged when she catches him getting some on the side (leading to the beating mentioned above), punches loser boyfriend in the face until he finally loses it and clocks her a good one, and then leaves with Cage, never giving so much as a thought to him ever again. That very night she picks up a guy at a club to sleep with. Sure, it could be some kind of twisted revenge sex or an expression of freedom from a man who was, well, a loser, but the way Heard plays the scene (which is presumably how director Patrick Lussier wanted it), it comes across as just another night out for her, something she does all the time.
As for Cage, he stars as John Milton(!), a man who escapes Hell in a 1963 Buick Riviera in the film's opening scene. How does he do this? Apparently by just driving out the front gate. Yes, it seems Hell has a bridge connecting it to the physical world that any old damned soul can drive across if it gets its hands on a sweet American classic muscle car.
Milton is a bad man who has done very bad things--and I don't just mean writing Paradise Lost--but after his damned soul witnessees his daughter's murder and his granddaughter's kidnapping, Milton busts out of Hell and...um, ends up somewhere in the American South, presumably wondering if he wasn't better off in Hell. He's chasing some men in a truck, and when he captures them, he brutally executes all but one, whom he tortures to discover where his granddaughter is. He learns that a cult is taking her to "Stillwater Marsh, Texas" in order to sacrifice her to Satan, but leaves before finding out where in Texas Stillwater Marsh is, or even what it is! Is it a town, a road, an actual marsh, a neighbourhood? (It turns out to be an abandoned prison.) He does this so that he will need to go into Piper's diner to discover this information and decide to commandeer her 1969 Dodge Charger. I was ecstatic at this new development, because it meant I could spend the rest of the film humming "Dixie" and talking in a redneck accent about how them Duke boys done blowed away some cops and ran over a cultist or two. I was considerably less ecstatic when Piper, who you'll recall was whomped a good one by her fiance (a man she blackmailed into proposing to her, yet!), decides to leave with Milton and so will be in almost every scene hereafter.
Loser boyfriend/fiance is thus left to the tender mercies of The Accountant (William Fichtner), a representative from Hell sent to bring Milton back to its fiery pits. The Accountant is our first indication that the makers of this film really, really love The Prophecy, as Fichtner's performance is clearly a riff on Christopher Walken's Gabriel in that film. Now if you're going to rip off a movie, you could do a lot worse than The Prophecy, and normally bad movies are improved when they copy a good film exactly and usually fail spectacularly whenever they stray outside the bounds established by their inspirations. But in this film, it's the opposite problem. If you're going to make a grindhouse version of The Prophecy, which is apparently what they set out to do, then do it. Have a powerful supernatural being come to Earth and be badass. That's all you need, and the first time The Accountant appears, they almost get it right, making the first words out of his mouth a calm and composed, "Hey, fat fuck." He kills anybody who mildly irritates him, in quite gory ways, where Christopher Walken's archangel Gabriel seemed pained whenever he was forced to use violence. But it turns out the filmmakers copy The Prophecy too much, trying to get serious when a movie like this should never been anything but over-the-top.
If only they had stayed grindhouse and hired the actual Christopher Walken. Then this would've been the most awesome movie evar.
The very Jim Jones-esque leader of the cult is Jonah King, played by Billy Burke. Yes, Mustache Dad from Twilight. *sigh* I can't get away from these people. First Harpo in The Last Airbender, then Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman, and now Mustache Dad in this. Now I just need to see Cosmopolis for the Twilight has-beens grand superfecta! Still, Mustache Dad is the only actor, apart from Heard, who truly embraces the movie's nature. He's suitably vile and disgusting while still being at least a little charismatic, reminding us once again of why his is consistently the best performance in all the Twilight films. Heard isn't great, but all she's supposed to do is look hot, freak out whenever Milton is in danger even though she has no reason to give a rat's ass about him, and say the word "fuck" at lot, all of which she handles just fine. Cage is way too laid back, never once letting loose with his patented crazy, which would've been perfect for a film like this.
A film that, for example, has Heard repeatedly taking punches and kicks to the face throughout the movie without so much as smudging her make-up. Whatever, it's a B-movie, I accept that. But the movie tries to have it both ways, and that's why I said Drive Angry is half of a great B-movie. When it has its characters driving fast cars, punching the bejeezus out of each other, and blowing things up, it's B-movie bliss. But then it wants to be serious, as when it has Heard get believably hurt (by movie logic, anyway) when loser boyfriend smacks her in the mouth early on. It tries to get real pathos out of Cage's suffering in Hell. It has a truly pointless interlude with David Morse as an old pal of Cage's. Now I'm always happy to see Morse, but Drive Angry isn't the sort of movie that should have Morse's gentle, sweetheart charisma and quiet human decency. And movies like this aren't about pathos. They're about catharsis, about bad men getting what's coming to them, dealt to them by other men who are almost as bad but have some twisted sense of morality that allows them bring the pain to people that deserve it in a way that we, the Decent People, cannot.
It's true that Cage gets a nice monologue in which he says the worst thing about Hell isn't your own suffering but that you are forced to witness to the suffering of people you care about while being powerless to do anything about it. So when Cage's daughter was murdered, he, in Hell, had to watch it happen. But this moment, while effective on its own, can't make up for the fact that a scene like this shouldn't be in a movie like this.
Once Cage gets shot in the eye (reportedly the scene that made him want to do the movie), it's all downhill from there. The movie becomes more and more a Prophecy wannabe, right down to the forces of Hell helping the hero against the bad guy because Satan doesn't like what the bad guy is up to. That this particular force of Hell is the Accountant, who earlier in the film told two cops to kill Milton on sight, just makes it even stupider. If he was helping him, why does the movie have him act like he's trying to capture/kill him and return him to Hell? The answer, of course, is the filmmakers thought this would be a neat twist. Instead, it lays bare how confused the movie is about what it wants to be. Piper has known Milton for a few hours, yet she is so dedicated to his cause she murders a cop to protect him and becomes hysterical when he is seemingly killed. The Accountant tells the two cops to shoot to kill when they confront Milton, and later The Accountant kills a bunch of cops to help Milton escape. Milton gets involved in a gun battle while never interrupting intercourse in a hilariously cheesy scene that is completely ruined by a later scene showing Milton's paramour as utterly traumatised by the experience as you undoubtedly would be. There's a reason B-movies don't show this sort of realistic fall-out from their outlandish situations.
You know, people make fun of 1980s action films like Commando for being stupid and illogical, and they're right. Commando is stupid, and it is illogical. Yet it's smarter film than Drive Angry and most 21-century action movies even try to be. In Drive Angry, Jonah King, who has known of Piper's existence for at best a few hours, decides that, rather than keeping her alive so he can "break" her, he'll just kill her. He says this as he points a revolver at her, so he puts the gun down and goes after her with his fists. Dude, you just said you're going to kill her. Why do you need to punch her in the face first? What if you, like, lose the fistfight? Boy, will you have egg on your face when she kicks you in the balls, grabs the gun you so graciously left for her, and empties the cylinder into your face!
Now, a similar thing happens in Commando. The chief villain, Bennett, has Arnold Schwarzenegger's Matrix (yes, the hero's name is Matrix) dead to rights, since he has a gun and Matrix doesn't. But Bennett puts down the gun and instead engages Matrix in a knife fight. Same thing, right? Just as dumb?
No. Because throughout the film, Bennett has been boasting that Matrix is such an elite soldier that only Bennett himself can match him. He sarcastically tells his boss that despite the army of soldiers around him, only Bennett can protect him from Matrix. "Matrix and I could kill every one of [your soldiers] in the blink of an eye," he says. Bennett believes only he is Matrix's equal, in fact his superior, and he never tires of reminding everyone around him of that fact. Bennett is also rather crazy, having no compunction about stabbing a young girl to death or betraying and murdering all of his trusted comrades; it's heavily implied he enjoys killing people. So when Matrix says that Bennett doesn't want to just shoot Matrix dead but to defeat him, to prove he's better--and to kill Matrix in a much more up close and personal way, with a knife rather than a gun--the movie has actually bothered to set this up. You can believe Bennett would want to kill Matrix with a knife, that he would want to kill him in a fair fight, just to finally prove that he's better, as he always thought he was.
There, I said it. Commando, the stupidest movie I've ever seen that I still love, is a smarter movie than Drive Angry. If it had stuck to its grindhouse homage roots, Drive Angry could've been the best bad movie I've seen since The Happening. But then it got a case of Something Important to Say, and now all I have are the broken dreams of what could've been.
Drive Angry is half of the best B-movie in recent years. I sat aghast, unable to believe grindhouse fair like this got a theatrical release without the names Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez attached. And I know who we can thank for that: His Cageness.
Yes, Nicolas Cage, a man who is no stranger to this blog and will no doubt continue to make appearances in the future. Cage, like fellow scenery-chewers Al Pacino and Richard Burton, are capable of strong performances when reined in. But when left to their own devices, they tend to go so far over the top they end up dodging low-flying aircraft. By all accounts, the 2008 financial crisis is the worst fiscal disaster to strike the world since the Great Depression, but it did have one positive outcome, one small flicker of joy in an otherwise catastrophic event: It left Nicolas Cage so broke that he's willing to appear in crap like this.
And since Cage's name retains a vestige of prestige, his involvement meant Drive Angry was given an Empire-wide release. Yes, this played in cinemas. This is a movie in which a man kills a half-dozen assassins who burst into his room, dodging their bullets while returning uncannily accurate fire with his own pistol, all while still penetrating the woman he's having sex with. This is a movie that has a woman catching her fiance in the midst of an act of infidelity, pulling the naked interloper off of her man, pushing the harlot (still naked) out the front door and into the garden, and then beating her into unconsciousness. This is a movie with lines like:
"Oh, baby. Why don't you fuck naked?" "I never disrobe before gunplay."
"But no one reaches the end and says, 'I wish I hadn't fucked so much.'"
"Between now and then, I'm gonna fuck you up."
"If you try and kill me and dump me in the woods, I'm gonna cut your nuts off."
Most of these howlers are spoken by Piper (Amber Heard), a truly revolting piece of southern white trash that is never once believable even in the context of a violent grindhouse flick. She blackmails her loser boyfriend into proposing marriage by refusing to sleep with him, becomes enraged when she catches him getting some on the side (leading to the beating mentioned above), punches loser boyfriend in the face until he finally loses it and clocks her a good one, and then leaves with Cage, never giving so much as a thought to him ever again. That very night she picks up a guy at a club to sleep with. Sure, it could be some kind of twisted revenge sex or an expression of freedom from a man who was, well, a loser, but the way Heard plays the scene (which is presumably how director Patrick Lussier wanted it), it comes across as just another night out for her, something she does all the time.
As for Cage, he stars as John Milton(!), a man who escapes Hell in a 1963 Buick Riviera in the film's opening scene. How does he do this? Apparently by just driving out the front gate. Yes, it seems Hell has a bridge connecting it to the physical world that any old damned soul can drive across if it gets its hands on a sweet American classic muscle car.
Milton is a bad man who has done very bad things--and I don't just mean writing Paradise Lost--but after his damned soul witnessees his daughter's murder and his granddaughter's kidnapping, Milton busts out of Hell and...um, ends up somewhere in the American South, presumably wondering if he wasn't better off in Hell. He's chasing some men in a truck, and when he captures them, he brutally executes all but one, whom he tortures to discover where his granddaughter is. He learns that a cult is taking her to "Stillwater Marsh, Texas" in order to sacrifice her to Satan, but leaves before finding out where in Texas Stillwater Marsh is, or even what it is! Is it a town, a road, an actual marsh, a neighbourhood? (It turns out to be an abandoned prison.) He does this so that he will need to go into Piper's diner to discover this information and decide to commandeer her 1969 Dodge Charger. I was ecstatic at this new development, because it meant I could spend the rest of the film humming "Dixie" and talking in a redneck accent about how them Duke boys done blowed away some cops and ran over a cultist or two. I was considerably less ecstatic when Piper, who you'll recall was whomped a good one by her fiance (a man she blackmailed into proposing to her, yet!), decides to leave with Milton and so will be in almost every scene hereafter.
Loser boyfriend/fiance is thus left to the tender mercies of The Accountant (William Fichtner), a representative from Hell sent to bring Milton back to its fiery pits. The Accountant is our first indication that the makers of this film really, really love The Prophecy, as Fichtner's performance is clearly a riff on Christopher Walken's Gabriel in that film. Now if you're going to rip off a movie, you could do a lot worse than The Prophecy, and normally bad movies are improved when they copy a good film exactly and usually fail spectacularly whenever they stray outside the bounds established by their inspirations. But in this film, it's the opposite problem. If you're going to make a grindhouse version of The Prophecy, which is apparently what they set out to do, then do it. Have a powerful supernatural being come to Earth and be badass. That's all you need, and the first time The Accountant appears, they almost get it right, making the first words out of his mouth a calm and composed, "Hey, fat fuck." He kills anybody who mildly irritates him, in quite gory ways, where Christopher Walken's archangel Gabriel seemed pained whenever he was forced to use violence. But it turns out the filmmakers copy The Prophecy too much, trying to get serious when a movie like this should never been anything but over-the-top.
If only they had stayed grindhouse and hired the actual Christopher Walken. Then this would've been the most awesome movie evar.
The very Jim Jones-esque leader of the cult is Jonah King, played by Billy Burke. Yes, Mustache Dad from Twilight. *sigh* I can't get away from these people. First Harpo in The Last Airbender, then Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman, and now Mustache Dad in this. Now I just need to see Cosmopolis for the Twilight has-beens grand superfecta! Still, Mustache Dad is the only actor, apart from Heard, who truly embraces the movie's nature. He's suitably vile and disgusting while still being at least a little charismatic, reminding us once again of why his is consistently the best performance in all the Twilight films. Heard isn't great, but all she's supposed to do is look hot, freak out whenever Milton is in danger even though she has no reason to give a rat's ass about him, and say the word "fuck" at lot, all of which she handles just fine. Cage is way too laid back, never once letting loose with his patented crazy, which would've been perfect for a film like this.
A film that, for example, has Heard repeatedly taking punches and kicks to the face throughout the movie without so much as smudging her make-up. Whatever, it's a B-movie, I accept that. But the movie tries to have it both ways, and that's why I said Drive Angry is half of a great B-movie. When it has its characters driving fast cars, punching the bejeezus out of each other, and blowing things up, it's B-movie bliss. But then it wants to be serious, as when it has Heard get believably hurt (by movie logic, anyway) when loser boyfriend smacks her in the mouth early on. It tries to get real pathos out of Cage's suffering in Hell. It has a truly pointless interlude with David Morse as an old pal of Cage's. Now I'm always happy to see Morse, but Drive Angry isn't the sort of movie that should have Morse's gentle, sweetheart charisma and quiet human decency. And movies like this aren't about pathos. They're about catharsis, about bad men getting what's coming to them, dealt to them by other men who are almost as bad but have some twisted sense of morality that allows them bring the pain to people that deserve it in a way that we, the Decent People, cannot.
It's true that Cage gets a nice monologue in which he says the worst thing about Hell isn't your own suffering but that you are forced to witness to the suffering of people you care about while being powerless to do anything about it. So when Cage's daughter was murdered, he, in Hell, had to watch it happen. But this moment, while effective on its own, can't make up for the fact that a scene like this shouldn't be in a movie like this.
Once Cage gets shot in the eye (reportedly the scene that made him want to do the movie), it's all downhill from there. The movie becomes more and more a Prophecy wannabe, right down to the forces of Hell helping the hero against the bad guy because Satan doesn't like what the bad guy is up to. That this particular force of Hell is the Accountant, who earlier in the film told two cops to kill Milton on sight, just makes it even stupider. If he was helping him, why does the movie have him act like he's trying to capture/kill him and return him to Hell? The answer, of course, is the filmmakers thought this would be a neat twist. Instead, it lays bare how confused the movie is about what it wants to be. Piper has known Milton for a few hours, yet she is so dedicated to his cause she murders a cop to protect him and becomes hysterical when he is seemingly killed. The Accountant tells the two cops to shoot to kill when they confront Milton, and later The Accountant kills a bunch of cops to help Milton escape. Milton gets involved in a gun battle while never interrupting intercourse in a hilariously cheesy scene that is completely ruined by a later scene showing Milton's paramour as utterly traumatised by the experience as you undoubtedly would be. There's a reason B-movies don't show this sort of realistic fall-out from their outlandish situations.
You know, people make fun of 1980s action films like Commando for being stupid and illogical, and they're right. Commando is stupid, and it is illogical. Yet it's smarter film than Drive Angry and most 21-century action movies even try to be. In Drive Angry, Jonah King, who has known of Piper's existence for at best a few hours, decides that, rather than keeping her alive so he can "break" her, he'll just kill her. He says this as he points a revolver at her, so he puts the gun down and goes after her with his fists. Dude, you just said you're going to kill her. Why do you need to punch her in the face first? What if you, like, lose the fistfight? Boy, will you have egg on your face when she kicks you in the balls, grabs the gun you so graciously left for her, and empties the cylinder into your face!
Now, a similar thing happens in Commando. The chief villain, Bennett, has Arnold Schwarzenegger's Matrix (yes, the hero's name is Matrix) dead to rights, since he has a gun and Matrix doesn't. But Bennett puts down the gun and instead engages Matrix in a knife fight. Same thing, right? Just as dumb?
No. Because throughout the film, Bennett has been boasting that Matrix is such an elite soldier that only Bennett himself can match him. He sarcastically tells his boss that despite the army of soldiers around him, only Bennett can protect him from Matrix. "Matrix and I could kill every one of [your soldiers] in the blink of an eye," he says. Bennett believes only he is Matrix's equal, in fact his superior, and he never tires of reminding everyone around him of that fact. Bennett is also rather crazy, having no compunction about stabbing a young girl to death or betraying and murdering all of his trusted comrades; it's heavily implied he enjoys killing people. So when Matrix says that Bennett doesn't want to just shoot Matrix dead but to defeat him, to prove he's better--and to kill Matrix in a much more up close and personal way, with a knife rather than a gun--the movie has actually bothered to set this up. You can believe Bennett would want to kill Matrix with a knife, that he would want to kill him in a fair fight, just to finally prove that he's better, as he always thought he was.
There, I said it. Commando, the stupidest movie I've ever seen that I still love, is a smarter movie than Drive Angry. If it had stuck to its grindhouse homage roots, Drive Angry could've been the best bad movie I've seen since The Happening. But then it got a case of Something Important to Say, and now all I have are the broken dreams of what could've been.
August 17, 2010
Twilight: When an Irresistible Plot Device Meets an Emotionless Object
Twilight, pp. 53-57
I threw down a quick bowl of cereal and some orange juice from the carton. I felt excited to go to school, and that scared me. I knew it wasn't the stimulating learning environment I was anticipating, or seeing my new set of friends. If I was being honest with myself, I knew I was eager to get to school because I would see Edward Cullen. And that was very, very stupid.
You know, as I go through this book a second time, I hate it a lot more. With the tide of badness washing over you, it's easy to miss the little things. Take this paragraph here.
First, I had no idea the phrase 'throw down' referred to eating. I know its literal meaning, and I know it's a seldom-used euphemism for fighting, but I didn't know people referred to eating food quickly as 'throwing down'. I got a good laugh, though, by my literal reading of the phrase. I pictured Bella, in a chipper mood for the first time in the story, cheerfully making a bowl of cereal and then throwing it on the floor. Then, rather than throwing the carton of orange juice down after it, she pours some juice into her hand and throws that on the floor. Go ahead, picture it. Might as well get some amusement out of this thing. (No, I didn't picture her fighting with her cereal, but that would've been awesome.)
Notice how, yet again, Bella utterly dismisses people she calls friends, who have been nothing but considerate and friendly despite her generally gloomy demeanour and cutting remarks. Maybe this is an accurate portrayal of an average teenager (though I remember liking my friends, and even wanting to see them on occasion), but it comes off as a kind of psychosis. Edward is the only thing that matters, and every other contact is all but shut out. Whenever she's not talking to Edward, she's thinking about Edward, even when other people are talking to her. I don't know how she continues to pass her classes, since she treats schoolwork the same way she treats her friends (as distractions from Edward). In fact, this is yet another point at which I can see an interesting direction the novel might have taken. (Go ahead, try it yourself.) What if Bella, the socially inexperienced girl with excellent marks, falls so hard for Edward that her grades start to slip, jeopardising her future?
But no, that would introduce some conflict into the story, since Edward would then not be perfect for Bella. It really is a mark of how much vampires have been neutered in contemporary culture. Edward can lust for human blood, but he can't cause Bella to get a B in chemistry!
I'm beginning to suspect Charlie is a very private man and is also constantly busy so that Meyer doesn't have to portray Bella shutting him out as she does her friends. Throughout the book (and, I'm given to understand, in future stories as well), Charlie comes off as the most sympathetic character. We see another example of this here:
Charlie had gotten up who knows how early to put snow chains on my truck.
Chief Swan comes off as a decent, loving father, and Bella remains self-centred, deceitful, and ungrateful.
We also see also another instance of Bella's maddening contradictory traits. She breezes through all her classes, an advanced prep, straight-A student, but she is 'scared' because she is 'excited about going to school'.
And I was suspicious of [Edward]; why should he lie about his eyes?
Bella here is referring to Edward's evasiveness about his eyes changing colour--to what end, I've no idea--but I still find it amusing that his lie about not having a chance to introduce himself gets a pass. Then there's this gem:
...Mike's puppy dog behaviour and Eric's apparent rivalry with him were disconcerting. I wasn't sure if I didn't prefer being ignored.
So when Mike sat next to Bella and escorted her to her next class while Eric looked on with jealousy, 'that was flattering', but now the exact same behaviour is 'disconcerting'. What's happened here?
Well you see, Oh My Brothers, now Bella has Edward, who is higher up in the food chain. So now the other two boys' desire for Bella and their rivalry with each other is meaningless, and hence their antics now annoy Bella.
Now we get another moment that made me laugh out loud the first time I saw the Twilight film. But first, the set-up.
Edward Cullen was standing four cars down from me, staring at me in horror. His face stood out from a sea of faces, all frozen in the same mask of shock. But of more immediate importance was the dark blue van that was skidding, tires locked and squealing against the brakes, spinning wildly across the ice of the parking lot. It was going to hit the back corner of my truck, and I was standing between them. I didn't even have time to close my eyes.
But a lot of other people had time to hear the sound of the brakes, turn to look, recognise what is happening, and assume shocked expressions. Unless 'a sea of' people were already all looking at Bella. And surely that wouldn't be the case.
Just before I heard the shattering crunch of the van folding around the truck bed, something hit me, hard, but not from the direction I was expecting. My head cracked against the icy blacktop, and I felt something solid and cold pinning me to the ground.
I hope you see the romance in 'Edward violently shoves Bella into hard surfaces', because this won't be the last time we'll see it.
I was lying on the pavement behind the tan car I'd parked next to. But I didn't have a chance to notice anything else, because the van was still coming. It had curled gratingly around the end of the truck and, still spinning and sliding, was about to collide with me again.
A low oath made me aware that someone was with me, and the voice was impossible not to recognise. Two long, white hands shot out protectively in front of me, and the van shuddered to a stop a foot from my face, the large hands fitting providentially into a deep dent in the side of the van's body.
Wow, two unnecessary adverbs in the same sentence! Meyer has outdone herself. (Plus, 'providentially' is used incorrectly, given what Bella says about the dents [sic] later.) Bella is fine, of course, and there are some words exchanged to this effect, during which Edward speaks in a 'low, frantic voice' and assumes a 'concerned, innocent expression'. Some vampire. When Father Callahan lamented the world no longer had Evil for him to confront, just evil, the vampire Barlow showed him the error of his thinking in 'Salem's Lot's most powerful scene. ('Come, false priest. Learn of a true religion. Take my communion!')* One gets the feeling Callahan's faith would be more than adequate to send Edward fleeing back to his coffin--err, crypt--err, stately Cullen manor just outside of town.
Then we get the novel's version of one of my favourite moments in the Twilight film:
'How in the...' I trailed off, trying to clear my head, get my bearings. 'How did you get over here so fast?'
'I was standing right next to you, Bella,' he said, his tone serious again.
I'm not sure exactly why I find this exchange so hilarious, but I do. After Edward stops a speeding van with his bare hands, Bella demands to know...how he reached her so quickly. I can't tell you how hard I laughed once I realised she was never going to bring up his superhuman strength and durability, not to Edward or to anyone else. She will pursue him relentlessly about how he got from where she saw him standing to where she was, but she never thinks to herself that it's a wee bit strange that he was able to stop an out-of-control vehicle barrelling towards him just by pushing on it. No, the reason her puzzler hurts is that he seemed to be standing far away. He mentions that she has a concussion and that's why she doesn't realise where he was (frankly, not a bad explanation), but she's convinced.
To be fair, the novel does have Bella bring up his leaving hand-prints in the side of the van from pushing it to a stop, but only later, in the hospital, and after she's harped on the 'how were you there so fast?' bit.
I'm sorry, but I'd sooner demand an explanation of 'you stopped a speeding van with your bare hands' than 'I thought you were standing over there'.**
===========================================================
*We'll just ignore Callahan's appearance in the later Dark Tower books. Should be easy to do, since after reading the later Dark Tower books, I slammed my head into the desk until I dislodged all memory of them.
**Good thing nobody notices the van has two hand-shaped dents in it, eh?
I threw down a quick bowl of cereal and some orange juice from the carton. I felt excited to go to school, and that scared me. I knew it wasn't the stimulating learning environment I was anticipating, or seeing my new set of friends. If I was being honest with myself, I knew I was eager to get to school because I would see Edward Cullen. And that was very, very stupid.
You know, as I go through this book a second time, I hate it a lot more. With the tide of badness washing over you, it's easy to miss the little things. Take this paragraph here.
First, I had no idea the phrase 'throw down' referred to eating. I know its literal meaning, and I know it's a seldom-used euphemism for fighting, but I didn't know people referred to eating food quickly as 'throwing down'. I got a good laugh, though, by my literal reading of the phrase. I pictured Bella, in a chipper mood for the first time in the story, cheerfully making a bowl of cereal and then throwing it on the floor. Then, rather than throwing the carton of orange juice down after it, she pours some juice into her hand and throws that on the floor. Go ahead, picture it. Might as well get some amusement out of this thing. (No, I didn't picture her fighting with her cereal, but that would've been awesome.)
Notice how, yet again, Bella utterly dismisses people she calls friends, who have been nothing but considerate and friendly despite her generally gloomy demeanour and cutting remarks. Maybe this is an accurate portrayal of an average teenager (though I remember liking my friends, and even wanting to see them on occasion), but it comes off as a kind of psychosis. Edward is the only thing that matters, and every other contact is all but shut out. Whenever she's not talking to Edward, she's thinking about Edward, even when other people are talking to her. I don't know how she continues to pass her classes, since she treats schoolwork the same way she treats her friends (as distractions from Edward). In fact, this is yet another point at which I can see an interesting direction the novel might have taken. (Go ahead, try it yourself.) What if Bella, the socially inexperienced girl with excellent marks, falls so hard for Edward that her grades start to slip, jeopardising her future?
But no, that would introduce some conflict into the story, since Edward would then not be perfect for Bella. It really is a mark of how much vampires have been neutered in contemporary culture. Edward can lust for human blood, but he can't cause Bella to get a B in chemistry!
I'm beginning to suspect Charlie is a very private man and is also constantly busy so that Meyer doesn't have to portray Bella shutting him out as she does her friends. Throughout the book (and, I'm given to understand, in future stories as well), Charlie comes off as the most sympathetic character. We see another example of this here:
Charlie had gotten up who knows how early to put snow chains on my truck.
Chief Swan comes off as a decent, loving father, and Bella remains self-centred, deceitful, and ungrateful.
We also see also another instance of Bella's maddening contradictory traits. She breezes through all her classes, an advanced prep, straight-A student, but she is 'scared' because she is 'excited about going to school'.
And I was suspicious of [Edward]; why should he lie about his eyes?
Bella here is referring to Edward's evasiveness about his eyes changing colour--to what end, I've no idea--but I still find it amusing that his lie about not having a chance to introduce himself gets a pass. Then there's this gem:
...Mike's puppy dog behaviour and Eric's apparent rivalry with him were disconcerting. I wasn't sure if I didn't prefer being ignored.
So when Mike sat next to Bella and escorted her to her next class while Eric looked on with jealousy, 'that was flattering', but now the exact same behaviour is 'disconcerting'. What's happened here?
Well you see, Oh My Brothers, now Bella has Edward, who is higher up in the food chain. So now the other two boys' desire for Bella and their rivalry with each other is meaningless, and hence their antics now annoy Bella.
Now we get another moment that made me laugh out loud the first time I saw the Twilight film. But first, the set-up.
Edward Cullen was standing four cars down from me, staring at me in horror. His face stood out from a sea of faces, all frozen in the same mask of shock. But of more immediate importance was the dark blue van that was skidding, tires locked and squealing against the brakes, spinning wildly across the ice of the parking lot. It was going to hit the back corner of my truck, and I was standing between them. I didn't even have time to close my eyes.
But a lot of other people had time to hear the sound of the brakes, turn to look, recognise what is happening, and assume shocked expressions. Unless 'a sea of' people were already all looking at Bella. And surely that wouldn't be the case.
Just before I heard the shattering crunch of the van folding around the truck bed, something hit me, hard, but not from the direction I was expecting. My head cracked against the icy blacktop, and I felt something solid and cold pinning me to the ground.
I hope you see the romance in 'Edward violently shoves Bella into hard surfaces', because this won't be the last time we'll see it.
I was lying on the pavement behind the tan car I'd parked next to. But I didn't have a chance to notice anything else, because the van was still coming. It had curled gratingly around the end of the truck and, still spinning and sliding, was about to collide with me again.
A low oath made me aware that someone was with me, and the voice was impossible not to recognise. Two long, white hands shot out protectively in front of me, and the van shuddered to a stop a foot from my face, the large hands fitting providentially into a deep dent in the side of the van's body.
Wow, two unnecessary adverbs in the same sentence! Meyer has outdone herself. (Plus, 'providentially' is used incorrectly, given what Bella says about the dents [sic] later.) Bella is fine, of course, and there are some words exchanged to this effect, during which Edward speaks in a 'low, frantic voice' and assumes a 'concerned, innocent expression'. Some vampire. When Father Callahan lamented the world no longer had Evil for him to confront, just evil, the vampire Barlow showed him the error of his thinking in 'Salem's Lot's most powerful scene. ('Come, false priest. Learn of a true religion. Take my communion!')* One gets the feeling Callahan's faith would be more than adequate to send Edward fleeing back to his coffin--err, crypt--err, stately Cullen manor just outside of town.
Then we get the novel's version of one of my favourite moments in the Twilight film:
'How in the...' I trailed off, trying to clear my head, get my bearings. 'How did you get over here so fast?'
'I was standing right next to you, Bella,' he said, his tone serious again.
I'm not sure exactly why I find this exchange so hilarious, but I do. After Edward stops a speeding van with his bare hands, Bella demands to know...how he reached her so quickly. I can't tell you how hard I laughed once I realised she was never going to bring up his superhuman strength and durability, not to Edward or to anyone else. She will pursue him relentlessly about how he got from where she saw him standing to where she was, but she never thinks to herself that it's a wee bit strange that he was able to stop an out-of-control vehicle barrelling towards him just by pushing on it. No, the reason her puzzler hurts is that he seemed to be standing far away. He mentions that she has a concussion and that's why she doesn't realise where he was (frankly, not a bad explanation), but she's convinced.
To be fair, the novel does have Bella bring up his leaving hand-prints in the side of the van from pushing it to a stop, but only later, in the hospital, and after she's harped on the 'how were you there so fast?' bit.
I'm sorry, but I'd sooner demand an explanation of 'you stopped a speeding van with your bare hands' than 'I thought you were standing over there'.**
===========================================================
*We'll just ignore Callahan's appearance in the later Dark Tower books. Should be easy to do, since after reading the later Dark Tower books, I slammed my head into the desk until I dislodged all memory of them.
**Good thing nobody notices the van has two hand-shaped dents in it, eh?
July 22, 2010
Twilight: O Edward, Where art Thou?
Twilight, pp. 29-36
We have arrived at chapter 2. It gets a little better for a while, because Edward is absent. He's already begun to take over the story, since Bella has to moon over him, but at least he's off-screen for a few pages. Still, we have to read about Bella thinking incessantly about a man who has so far acted like an utter tool towards her for no discernible reason.*
First, we get a little reminder of how thoroughly unlikeable our main character is.
Mike came to sit by me in English, and walked me to my next class, with Chess Club Eric glaring at him all the while; that was flattering.
Oh, just ignore the incorrect comma use. And the pretentious (and unnecessary) semicolon. I'm talking about the 'I like it when guys fight over me' attitude. It's all the more interesting because Bella has no interest in these two boys (she will 'successfully evade' Mike when she leaves school for the day), but she's still flattered by one's resentment towards the other. There's an element of foreshadowing here, as Bella will have precisely the same reaction in Book 2 when Jacob Black enters the picture as a romantic rival. (Only in that case, she is interested in both men, so she...well, I'll steal a line from The Foywonder's hilarious and spot-onEclipse review and say that what she does rhymes with 'rock peas'.) When good writers use foreshadowing, it's intentional, but we're talking Meyer here, so it's probably unconscious (i.e., she only knows one type of twisted relationship behaviour and so that's the one Bella has).
Bella's confidence boost from the jealousy of one person she doesn't want towards another person she doesn't want is disturbing enough, but it's compounded by chapter 2's beginning with day 2 at Forks High. These two boys have known her for at best a couple of hours and have talked to her for, what, five minutes? Ten minutes? Each? And one of them is already shooting the other jealous looks? I feel like I'm reading the Cliff's Notes of The Great Gatsby.
Do I even need to mention that neither of these guys (but especially Eric) got anywhere with Bells on day 1? They didn't exactly hit it off right away.
Bella then proceeds to whine about what makes today worse than yesterday before we reach this bombshell.
And [today] was worse because Edward Cullen wasn't in school at all.
In the name of Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming in the sunken city of R'lyeh, why? I really don't understand this. Why is she sad he isn't there? He's been inexplicably cruel for the whole hour or so that she's seen him. She has never spoken a word to him, nor he to her. Please, someone tell me how this day could possibly be worse than the previous day because the guy who looked at her like he wanted her to die at every opportunity is absent?
Yes, she is clearly physically attracted to him. In fact, as TheSpoonyOne has pointed out in his wonderful reviews ofNew Moon and Eclipse (warning: strong language), Edward and Bella's attraction never goes beyond the purely physical. We'll delve into this more later, but trust me that these two never share anything deeper than the desire to have sex with one another because they're both hot. (But Meyer is Mormon and, as I noted in my first entry, her writing keeps The Faith even though her characters inexplicably don't profess it, so they Wait.)
This is totally out of place for the goth subculture, which rejects relationships like this, but I'm sure the pseudo-goths eat it up. All the sexy black clothes and dark eye shadow and freedom from having to go outside or exercise without any of that 'hard' stuff like writing bad poetry and suicide attempts.
The next page has Bella ignoring her supposed friends' conversations (get used to it) while she pines for the stranger that looks at her with hate-filled eyes, hoping he will appear to ignore her rather than barely tolerate her very existence or, worse, not appear at all (oh come on, now). This comes complete with the worst simile** I've read in a published novel: 'I made the Cowardly Lion look like the terminator [sic].' Oh, ho! What a hilarious bon mot! How about this one: George W. Bush makes Hitler look like Mother Theresa. Zing!
Blah blah Edward doesn't show up, blah blah Bella 'had no practice dealing with overly friendly boys' (this from a girl with whom this entire school is instantly smitten), blah blah Bella gets home and goes immediately to the kitchen to do her female duty of preparing a meal for her man, that being her father** as she's yet to get hitched. (A Mormon aged seventeen and not engaged? For shame!)
There's also another bit of (presumably unintentional) foreshadowing here. Bella opines that '[i]t seemed excessive of [the Cullens] to have both looks and money.' Money? Where was there any indication the Cullens had--oh, right, the Volvo. Anyhow, remember this bit when I talk about the vampires' powers in a few weeks.
Charlie comes home and he and Bella chat, but not much. Each character is private, we've been told (though indirectly, for once), and they're each more comfortable being silently in the other's presence rather than chatting. This page-and-a-half works okay. It's natural and conveys the emotional distance between father and daughter without having either the characters or the narrator recite clunky exposition. But then the Cullens have to show up and torpedo any sense of realism or humanity.
'Do you know the Cullen family?' I asked hesitantly. [Again with the adverbs!]
'Dr. Cullen's family? Sure. Dr. Cullen's a great man.'
'They...the kids...are a little different. They don't seem to fit in very well at school.'
Charlie surprised me by looking angry.
'People in this town,' he muttered. 'Dr. Cullen is a brilliant surgeon who could probably work in any hospital in the world, make ten times the salary he gets here,' he continued, getting louder. 'We're lucky to have him--lucky that his wife wanted to live in a small town....'
So much wrong in only a few lines. Where to begin?
First, why is Charlie's voice getting louder as he talks? It could be a mark of Charlie's anger issues, just as Edward's future alternating attitudes towards Bella are indicative of his being an abuser, but again, it doesn't come across that way.
Second, what about Dr. Cullen makes him 'a great man'? He's a really good surgeon who gets paid less than he might. Swell. Somebody get Obama on the phone. We've got a Real American Hero here!
Third, in the very last exchange Bella and Charlie had, which happened all of five seconds before this one, Bella mentioned Mike and Charlie instantly declared that Mike was from a 'nice family'. Okay, so you judge Mike's family, but 'people in this town' are wrong for judging the Cullen family. (It's a minor point, but I love that Charlie immediately knows which 'Mike' Bella was talking about when 'Michael' tops the list of American male names, but he adds a 'Dr. Cullen's family?' to make sure she wasn't referring to some other Cullen family in this tiny town.)
Fourth, how does Charlie know that Cullen is a 'brilliant surgeon' who 'could probably work in any hospital in the world'? Surgery isn't exactly a skill that the untrained can easily evaluate. I had a fantastic surgeon in Malaysia who took care of an eye infection I had, but I'm no expert and simply judged him by the ease of that particular procedure. There's no way I would go from 'I thought he was a great surgeon because my operation went off without a hitch' to 'he could work anywhere in the world if he wanted, he's so good.' And in my case, the procedure was observed by my girlfriend, who has had surgical training, and I still wouldn't resort to this level of breathtaking hyperbole. What's Charlie basing his lofty opinion of Dr. Cullen on? I think Charlie has a direct line to the author of the novel.
Fifth, ten times? Now, my mother worked with medical doctors. My close friend's parents are both doctors. These people earn a lot of money. But honestly, ten times is just absurd. I find it difficult to believe that, barring some kind of circumstance that has nothing to do with skill (such as being the personal physician of someone of great wealth), in America, any surgeon in a particular speciality would ever make ten times what another surgeon in the same speciality makes. That means that if Dr. Cullen makes $60,000 (a pretty sad sum for any medical doctor, much less a surgeon), he could be making $600,000 somewhere else. That's what a neurosurgeon makes. Neurosurgeons do not earn $60,000 no matter where they are, unless they're not doing neurosurgery. And if they aren't, then they're doing the world a disservice, since there aren't many people who have the talent to do it, and even fewer who have gone through the extensive training to acquire the necessary skills. If you have a skill the world desperately needs that it took you almost two decades to acquire at great cost in resources that few people can acquire even with the necessary time and resources...you'd better use it. Not to do so would be a callous act of inhumanity--but wait, you say, Cullen's a vampire! He is inhuman.
Oh just you wait.
So, Dr. Cullen could make twice what he's making in Forks? Sure. Three times as much? Pushing it, but conceivable. Ten times? This is where Meyer's hyperbole for her nothing characters is particularly embarrassing. Bella can't just be a quirky smart girl who's cute but a little stand-offish; she has to be beautiful and smart and deep, the girl that every boy wants and every girl wants to be. Edward can't be a handsome but socially awkward fellow whose crippling self-doubt makes it difficult for him to establish an intimate relationship; he must be the sexiest boy at school who runs fastest and jumps highest and is strong and brave and reads minds and knows all kinds of stuff about stuff and doesn't want to do...you know...it. Even Dr. Cullen can't be just a doctor; he has to be a surgeon in a town too small to need a surgeon (and who appears not to be a surgeon in Forks, instead serving as your typical GP). In fact, he's the bestest surgeon evar, so that he could make ten times what he makes now if he went, y'know, anywhere.
Now if Charlie were just the best cop in the world, who could be making ten times what he makes in Forks if he went to New York City, I do believe all of our characters would be The Best.
So, um, where is the conflict is this story again?
=========================================
*It should be noted that he will at no point provide any explanation for his behaviour.
** Similes suck anyhow, unless you're Raymond Chandler or part of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 cast. Metaphors are where it's at. And if you're going to reference something, don't make it so obvious. Like the translation of Classical Chinese I just submitted in which I worked in an entirely appropriate 'We will crush the rebellion with one swift stroke!' Now that's how you drop references, Steffy!
*** Because the poor guy, well, you see, he's a man and men can't cook, a-hyuck!
We have arrived at chapter 2. It gets a little better for a while, because Edward is absent. He's already begun to take over the story, since Bella has to moon over him, but at least he's off-screen for a few pages. Still, we have to read about Bella thinking incessantly about a man who has so far acted like an utter tool towards her for no discernible reason.*
First, we get a little reminder of how thoroughly unlikeable our main character is.
Mike came to sit by me in English, and walked me to my next class, with Chess Club Eric glaring at him all the while; that was flattering.
Oh, just ignore the incorrect comma use. And the pretentious (and unnecessary) semicolon. I'm talking about the 'I like it when guys fight over me' attitude. It's all the more interesting because Bella has no interest in these two boys (she will 'successfully evade' Mike when she leaves school for the day), but she's still flattered by one's resentment towards the other. There's an element of foreshadowing here, as Bella will have precisely the same reaction in Book 2 when Jacob Black enters the picture as a romantic rival. (Only in that case, she is interested in both men, so she...well, I'll steal a line from The Foywonder's hilarious and spot-on
Bella's confidence boost from the jealousy of one person she doesn't want towards another person she doesn't want is disturbing enough, but it's compounded by chapter 2's beginning with day 2 at Forks High. These two boys have known her for at best a couple of hours and have talked to her for, what, five minutes? Ten minutes? Each? And one of them is already shooting the other jealous looks? I feel like I'm reading the Cliff's Notes of The Great Gatsby.
Do I even need to mention that neither of these guys (but especially Eric) got anywhere with Bells on day 1? They didn't exactly hit it off right away.
Bella then proceeds to whine about what makes today worse than yesterday before we reach this bombshell.
And [today] was worse because Edward Cullen wasn't in school at all.
In the name of Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming in the sunken city of R'lyeh, why? I really don't understand this. Why is she sad he isn't there? He's been inexplicably cruel for the whole hour or so that she's seen him. She has never spoken a word to him, nor he to her. Please, someone tell me how this day could possibly be worse than the previous day because the guy who looked at her like he wanted her to die at every opportunity is absent?
Yes, she is clearly physically attracted to him. In fact, as TheSpoonyOne has pointed out in his wonderful reviews of
This is totally out of place for the goth subculture, which rejects relationships like this, but I'm sure the pseudo-goths eat it up. All the sexy black clothes and dark eye shadow and freedom from having to go outside or exercise without any of that 'hard' stuff like writing bad poetry and suicide attempts.
The next page has Bella ignoring her supposed friends' conversations (get used to it) while she pines for the stranger that looks at her with hate-filled eyes, hoping he will appear to ignore her rather than barely tolerate her very existence or, worse, not appear at all (oh come on, now). This comes complete with the worst simile** I've read in a published novel: 'I made the Cowardly Lion look like the terminator [sic].' Oh, ho! What a hilarious bon mot! How about this one: George W. Bush makes Hitler look like Mother Theresa. Zing!
Blah blah Edward doesn't show up, blah blah Bella 'had no practice dealing with overly friendly boys' (this from a girl with whom this entire school is instantly smitten), blah blah Bella gets home and goes immediately to the kitchen to do her female duty of preparing a meal for her man, that being her father** as she's yet to get hitched. (A Mormon aged seventeen and not engaged? For shame!)
There's also another bit of (presumably unintentional) foreshadowing here. Bella opines that '[i]t seemed excessive of [the Cullens] to have both looks and money.' Money? Where was there any indication the Cullens had--oh, right, the Volvo. Anyhow, remember this bit when I talk about the vampires' powers in a few weeks.
Charlie comes home and he and Bella chat, but not much. Each character is private, we've been told (though indirectly, for once), and they're each more comfortable being silently in the other's presence rather than chatting. This page-and-a-half works okay. It's natural and conveys the emotional distance between father and daughter without having either the characters or the narrator recite clunky exposition. But then the Cullens have to show up and torpedo any sense of realism or humanity.
'Do you know the Cullen family?' I asked hesitantly. [Again with the adverbs!]
'Dr. Cullen's family? Sure. Dr. Cullen's a great man.'
'They...the kids...are a little different. They don't seem to fit in very well at school.'
Charlie surprised me by looking angry.
'People in this town,' he muttered. 'Dr. Cullen is a brilliant surgeon who could probably work in any hospital in the world, make ten times the salary he gets here,' he continued, getting louder. 'We're lucky to have him--lucky that his wife wanted to live in a small town....'
So much wrong in only a few lines. Where to begin?
First, why is Charlie's voice getting louder as he talks? It could be a mark of Charlie's anger issues, just as Edward's future alternating attitudes towards Bella are indicative of his being an abuser, but again, it doesn't come across that way.
Second, what about Dr. Cullen makes him 'a great man'? He's a really good surgeon who gets paid less than he might. Swell. Somebody get Obama on the phone. We've got a Real American Hero here!
Third, in the very last exchange Bella and Charlie had, which happened all of five seconds before this one, Bella mentioned Mike and Charlie instantly declared that Mike was from a 'nice family'. Okay, so you judge Mike's family, but 'people in this town' are wrong for judging the Cullen family. (It's a minor point, but I love that Charlie immediately knows which 'Mike' Bella was talking about when 'Michael' tops the list of American male names, but he adds a 'Dr. Cullen's family?' to make sure she wasn't referring to some other Cullen family in this tiny town.)
Fourth, how does Charlie know that Cullen is a 'brilliant surgeon' who 'could probably work in any hospital in the world'? Surgery isn't exactly a skill that the untrained can easily evaluate. I had a fantastic surgeon in Malaysia who took care of an eye infection I had, but I'm no expert and simply judged him by the ease of that particular procedure. There's no way I would go from 'I thought he was a great surgeon because my operation went off without a hitch' to 'he could work anywhere in the world if he wanted, he's so good.' And in my case, the procedure was observed by my girlfriend, who has had surgical training, and I still wouldn't resort to this level of breathtaking hyperbole. What's Charlie basing his lofty opinion of Dr. Cullen on? I think Charlie has a direct line to the author of the novel.
Fifth, ten times? Now, my mother worked with medical doctors. My close friend's parents are both doctors. These people earn a lot of money. But honestly, ten times is just absurd. I find it difficult to believe that, barring some kind of circumstance that has nothing to do with skill (such as being the personal physician of someone of great wealth), in America, any surgeon in a particular speciality would ever make ten times what another surgeon in the same speciality makes. That means that if Dr. Cullen makes $60,000 (a pretty sad sum for any medical doctor, much less a surgeon), he could be making $600,000 somewhere else. That's what a neurosurgeon makes. Neurosurgeons do not earn $60,000 no matter where they are, unless they're not doing neurosurgery. And if they aren't, then they're doing the world a disservice, since there aren't many people who have the talent to do it, and even fewer who have gone through the extensive training to acquire the necessary skills. If you have a skill the world desperately needs that it took you almost two decades to acquire at great cost in resources that few people can acquire even with the necessary time and resources...you'd better use it. Not to do so would be a callous act of inhumanity--but wait, you say, Cullen's a vampire! He is inhuman.
Oh just you wait.
So, Dr. Cullen could make twice what he's making in Forks? Sure. Three times as much? Pushing it, but conceivable. Ten times? This is where Meyer's hyperbole for her nothing characters is particularly embarrassing. Bella can't just be a quirky smart girl who's cute but a little stand-offish; she has to be beautiful and smart and deep, the girl that every boy wants and every girl wants to be. Edward can't be a handsome but socially awkward fellow whose crippling self-doubt makes it difficult for him to establish an intimate relationship; he must be the sexiest boy at school who runs fastest and jumps highest and is strong and brave and reads minds and knows all kinds of stuff about stuff and doesn't want to do...you know...it. Even Dr. Cullen can't be just a doctor; he has to be a surgeon in a town too small to need a surgeon (and who appears not to be a surgeon in Forks, instead serving as your typical GP). In fact, he's the bestest surgeon evar, so that he could make ten times what he makes now if he went, y'know, anywhere.
Now if Charlie were just the best cop in the world, who could be making ten times what he makes in Forks if he went to New York City, I do believe all of our characters would be The Best.
So, um, where is the conflict is this story again?
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*It should be noted that he will at no point provide any explanation for his behaviour.
** Similes suck anyhow, unless you're Raymond Chandler or part of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 cast. Metaphors are where it's at. And if you're going to reference something, don't make it so obvious. Like the translation of Classical Chinese I just submitted in which I worked in an entirely appropriate 'We will crush the rebellion with one swift stroke!' Now that's how you drop references, Steffy!
*** Because the poor guy, well, you see, he's a man and men can't cook, a-hyuck!
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