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Archive for Kristen Stewart

Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2

Nov21

Title: Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2

Director/Stars: Kristen Stewart (Actor), Robert Pattinson (Actor), Bill Condon (Director)

Genre: Fantasy

Watched: November 19, 2012

Summary: Disney Vamps

_

BDP2 is not nearly as vomit inducing as part 1. Sure, I did my fair share of cringing, but mostly the film brought a smirk to my face.

This is the story of a family of carebear vampires. Sure, they have creepy red eyes, but they get to race through sun dapples forests and jump off 8,000 foot cliffs into the Northwestern surf.

The film manages to do an okay job with some of the story’s odder elements, like the fact that Jacob has a love-crush on an infant. That the infant in question is a hideous CGI doll certainly makes it feel less pedophilic. It’s all watchable if you’ve kept up with the series, and there is certainly more conflict than in part 1. The Volturi are up to no good, hail from Tuscany and don’t seem the least bit Italian, but Michael Sheen plays one of those camp villains you just love to hate.

Just as in the previous four films, the overzealous use of CGI and crazy sped up action lends the film an extremely fake look. Act 2, where the good guys recruit “witnesses” to come to their defense, seemed languid. The whole multicultural array of vamps felt extra silly in a film of silly. Stereo-typed Brazilians join up with stereo-typed Russians join up with stereo-typed Irish and the like, but oh well, this is Twilight.

The film alludes to Edward and Bella’s “out of control” sex life, but provides us with only the chastest of scenes. Not only has the royal couple created some kind of weird halfbreed (even if the 7 year-old version is pretty cute – and I mean harmless-kiddy-cute not Jacob-the-pedophile-cute), but the whole vampire nation has cross bred themselves with the X-men.

Everyone seems to have a power. Pain ray, elemental control, clairvoyance, mysterious smelly black smoke of doom, you name it. Mortals may have some trouble keeping track of the rather vast crew of red eyes and their manifold abilities. It doesn’t matter too much. Eventually, they all form up in two lines on a nice big frozen lake for the final showdown.

But the showdown never happens. Or does it? Actually, the final non-fight was pretty cool. Best action sequence in the series so far. Perhaps the only one that was kinda exciting. Michael Sheen can sneer with the best of them.

All in all a fitting end to the “saga.” It is what it is, but it ain’t really about vampires.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti0H-bvMi3I]

And it’s worth checking out this Cracked magazine review of the whole series too.

Read my Twilight review or New Moon or Eclipse or Breaking Dawn, part 1.

For more Film reviews, click here.

Or discover my own paranormal novels.

Related posts:

  1. Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1
  2. Twilight Saga: Eclipse
  3. Twilight Saga: New Moon
  4. Book and Movie Review: Twilight
  5. Breaking Bad – Season 3
By: agavin
Comments (6)
Posted in: Movies
Tagged as: Bill Condon, Breaking Dawn, Film Review, Kristen Stewart, part 2, Robert Pattinson, Twilight, Twilight Saga

Snow White and the Huntsman

Jun11

Title: Snow White and the Huntsman

Cast: Kristen Stewart (Actor), Charlize Theron (Actor), Rupert Sanders (Director)

Genre: Fantasy

Watched:  June 6, 2012

Summary: Surprisingly excellent (9/10)

_

I have to admit that the trailer for this film had me cautiously excited. It exhibits a certain style of fantasy storytelling that appeared cool and unique. Serious, yet referential to the source material. Visually original, but not silly. Still, I was worried. The bit about “from the producer of Alice in Wonderland” did nothing to reassure. That movie was so wretched I turned it off during the mind numbing final battle.

Oh, and despite my distaste for Twilight (I cover all four films and novels in detail) I’m actually a non-so-closeted Kristen Stewart fan. In fact, she’s the only thing that makes the sparkly vampires and talking wolves bearable. Plus, her work in the excellent and underrated Adventureland is top notch.

Snow White isn’t a perfect film, but it is a damn good one with a lot going for it. While the movie is a special effects showcase, the writing is fundamentally story and character driven. It has one of those flashback beginnings like the far inferior Dark Shadows (2012). This part of the film probably could have been cut and replaced with a few quick flashbacks, but once we’re into the present day it’s highly engaging.

The weird mythology and power of the wicked queen is complex and well developed. Visually she’s very effective even if Charlize Theron does deliver some of the cheesiest lines in the film. She looks great but her dialog is hit or miss. Some are great like the “mirror mirror” conversations. Her character is megalomaniacal to the extreme and lends toward overacting.

K. Stew employs her trademark naive and self-depreciating boldness. It works for me as it always does. Hemsworth is big, confident, and evocative of young Sean Bean in his comfortable portrayal of the Huntsman. The Queen’s brother is creepy. The dwarves surprisingly effective (who doesn’t love Ian McShane?).

This film could have easily gone bad in a number of ways. It could have been an incomprehensible and undeveloped special effects fest. We could have had a 45 minute all-CGI all-boring final battle. We don’t. We have a final battle, but it centers around Snow White and the Queen and the mutual nemesis factor. The film takes itself very seriously, yet is full of totally weird mythology. It could have descended into total camp or the incomprehensible. It doesn’t. Snow White strikes a balance between character, action, mythology and the like.

On an effects note, there is some really stunning work here. For all the over-the-top graphics, some of it is very understated. For example, the eight (soon seven) dwarves all have the faces of well known actors like Ian McShane and Bob Hoskins. I don’t know if they filmed real little people and then grafted on filmed faces or formed incredibly realistic computer models of each actor to composite in, but it looks great. Unfortunately, this does have the effect of putting short but talented actors (like the amazing Peter Dinklage) out of a job. Some of the made up sets like the fairy enchanted forest also have a fey quality, somewhat reminiscent of Pan’s Labyrinth or Hellboy II, that frankly took my breath away. Yeah, I’m a Dark Crystal kind of guy, but it’s good stuff.

Overall, it’s nice to have more well done serious fantasy. Bravo.

For more Film reviews, click here.

Related posts:

  1. Book Review: White Cat
By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Movies
Tagged as: Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Fantasy, Ian McShane, Kristen Stewart, Movie Review, Movies, Queen, Snow White, Snow White and the Huntsman

Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1

Dec05

Title: Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1

Director/Stars: Kristen Stewart (Actor), Robert Pattinson (Actor), Bill Condon (Director)

Genre: Fantasy

Watched: December 3, 2011

Summary: Cringe, Laugh, or Barf

_

Besides the shameless grab at our wallets (splitting the movie into two parts) BDP1 is certainly the most cringeworthy episode yet. First of all, from a structural point of view, the first half has no conflict. Therefore no plot.

It’s not that nothing happens. We have a lovely wedding video and then a fully censored honeymoon. But plot requires conflict, and the only two bits of that we have here are a brief Jacob/Edward chest thumping and Edward’s steadfast foot dragging at the notion of banging his wife more than once. This section of the film is pure wish fulfillment again. The perfect wedding, the perfect honeymoon. Plus a few bruises and one unwanted demonic pregnancy.

But the second half is perhaps even worse. Here we have manufactured wolf/vamp conflict that really no one cares about and a bit of a minor quandary for Bella and Jacob. Edward (and pretty much everyone else in the film) just does their thing. The inciting incident occurs at the midpoint. And the entire movie, BTW, lacks a villain. Unless you count the very weak antagonism of Jacob’s pack leader Sam. Yeah, no villain.

I’m not sure what the second half is. Special effects allow Bella a credible impersonation of a pregnant concentration camp inmate. Edward frets. Jacob does a lot of running back and forth in the woods listening to the CGI call of the wild. The birth was disturbing, but also felt censored.

Kristen Stewart, however, does a pretty impressive job with this role. Even more than the previous films this one focused on her. We have long, long shots just of her face — like walking up the isle — and she manages to bring Bella’s character to life. I’m not sure I want Bella to be alive, but it’s actually a really solid acting job considering the script. Oh, and she’s looking even better in this film (first half). Bikinis in Brazil are better than jeans and hoodies in Forks. Way better than the Twiggy-supreme look.

Love the claw prints!

Let’s see, can we list some of the more amusing moments: Edward breaking the marriage bed. His cheesy confession to having killed in the “old days” — except wait — it was only molesters, rapists, and murderers. He’s just too pure for any genuine vampire feasting. The way the Brazilian house keeper is magically an expert on vampire babies, even though none of the vampires know anything about them. The wolf voiceover argument and growl fest. That one really takes the cake. The Volturi camp at the end of the movie. And so, so many more.

I was enjoying myself during the film. I laughed a lot. A real lot. But it was “at” not “with.”

And it’s worth checking out this Cracked magazine review of the whole series too.

Read my Twilight review or New Moon or Eclipse or BDP2.

For more Film reviews, click here.

Or discover my own paranormal novels.

Related posts:

  1. Twilight Saga: Eclipse
  2. Twilight Saga: New Moon
  3. Book and Movie Review: Twilight
  4. Movie Review: Adventureland
  5. Truly Deeply Sick and Twisted
By: agavin
Comments (11)
Posted in: Movies
Tagged as: Bella Swan, Bill Condon, Breaking Dawn, Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Twilight, Twilight Saga, Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Twilight Saga: New Moon

Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Nov19

Title: Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Director/Stars: Kristen Stewart (Actor), Robert Pattinson (Actor), David Slade (Director)

Genre: Fantasy

Watched: June 2010 & Nov 16, 2011

Summary: Livarot

_

Eclipse is clearly the lame duck of the three pre-Breaking-Dawn Twilight films. It’s so cheesy that it makes the original and New Moon seem high art. First of all, the A-story is about as weighty as a sesame seed. We’ve got this entirely lame plot where ginger-haired hipster Victoria is still after Bella because of the ridiculous happenings of the first film. In order to thwart the plot crushing clairvoyance of Alice she has to act indirectly, raising an army of “Newborn” vampires to come after Bella and the Cullens. In this featherweight version of the vampire legend, new vampires are not just crazy (that’s fairly typical) but are extra strong. Well, at least we are told this. What we are shown (in the “final battle”) is that the Newborns die easily without causing the good guys to even break a sweat — only a few ribs. I find this incredibly lame. In my fictional universe, vampires grow in strength with the years, but at the same time very old vampires are extremely rare — and extraordinarily twisted, powerful, and dead. Did I mention they only come out at night and like to decorate their enemy’s houses with body parts?

Actress Kristen Stewart, actor Taylor Lautner ...

But none of Eclipse‘s A-story really matters. It’s the B-story (romance) that holds the focus. This episode is all (I mean all) about the love triangle between Bella, Edward, and Jacob. Which is about as cheesy as Fourme d’Ambert, but again does have a certain charm, and more than a little humor. The “plot” forces ever more competition between our studs, leading to post-modern lines like “I’m Switzerland” or “does he own a shirt?” This trend climaxes (or doesn’t) in the amusing talkfest inside the tent at the end of the movie. Jacob has been hanging outside (shirtless of course) in a blizzard, but he ducks in to check on freezing Bella. Poor Edward just isn’t much help — no heartbeat = no bodyheat. “You’ll warm up faster if you take off your clothes,” Jacob advises when he crawls in the sleeping bag, right in front of his rival.

I must also mention that every time the A-story cuts in my skin crawls. The flashback with the Native Americans and the “cold ones” (vampires) was particularly seizure inducing. The little flash overs to Victoria and the Volturi “plotting” are perfunctory and really make no sense given the essentially first-person nature of the narrative. The plot (cough cough) is really driven (and hampered) by Alice’s corny power. This happens in the entire series. Since she can see the future, most decisions consist of her instantly knowing someone is going to show up or something is going to happen. Then they hop to it. Occasionally, like in New Moon, this screws something up briefly. Truth is, this is an amazingly lazy device on the part of Stephanie Meyer. It’s like a continuous deus ex machina. It even traps the author in Eclipse so she has to invent a whole reason Victoria can sneak up on them via her leaving it as a “last minute decision.” This is totally bogus. If she decided to leave it to the end to decide, she’s decided and Alice would know. BS alert!

But I’m not done. Continuing my theory that the series is teenage girl wish fulfillment we have this big B-story thread where Edward wants to get married but Bella resists. I’m pretty sure this is just to create further reason for him to actually do what she (and by proxy her teen audience) wants him to do: propose. Then there is his insistence on celibacy. But others have certainly gone into the whole vampire = the dangers of sex or whatever is going on here.

I’m not sure if I loathe the movie or actually enjoyed it as an odd sociological study (owing to it being so popular) or liked it because Kristen Stewart is hot. It was definitely not because of Edward’s eyebrows or Jacob’s six-pack.

Read my Twilight review or New Moon or Breaking Dawn, part 1 or part 2.
For more Film reviews, click here.
Or read about my own paranormal novels.

Related posts:

  1. Twilight Saga: New Moon
  2. Book and Movie Review: Twilight
  3. Movie Review: Adventureland
  4. The Sure Thing
  5. Back to the Future
By: agavin
Comments (5)
Posted in: Movies
Tagged as: Bella, Bella Swan, Edward, Film Review, Jacob Black, Kristen Stewart, Movie Review, Robert Pattinson, Stephenie Meyer, Taylor Lautner, Twilight, Twilight Saga, Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Twilight Saga: New Moon

Twilight Saga: New Moon

Nov18

Title: Twilight Saga: New Moon

Director/Stars: Kristen Stewart (Actor), Robert Pattinson (Actor), Chris Weitz (Director)

Genre: Fantasy

Watched: Nov 2009 & Nov 15, 2011

Summary: The Moon is made of cheese!

_

In honor of the upcoming return of everyone’s favorite sparkly vampires, I rewatched the earlier offerings. Oh, where to begin. The cheese is so thick in this series that it might as well be set in a Paris fromagerie. But it does have a certain charm. Hands down the best part of the whole series is Kristen Stewart. I have to admit, I do kind of like her. Here she’s severely hampered by the script, but she still makes the best of it. In better movies, like the brilliant Adventureland, she shines (and I’m not talking the CGI sparkle kind of shine).

One really funny bit is how close the real film is to the trailer for the parody movie, Vampires Suck:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksJvEH-R_ew]

Now, Vampires Suck, really sucks. It’s almost unwatchable and all the good parts are in the trailer. But it does point out some of the hilarious cheese in the real films, particularly New Moon. The original story is structured pretty much entirely around the Bella, Edward, Jacob triangle. There is a certain decency to this core. It’s not mature adult writing, but a sort of codified teen girl fantasy. Bella, the weak normal girl, shy and insecure, is pursued by not one but two hunk hotties. The aloof cool type AND the hot and emotional no-shirt-wearing type. Fermented milkish as this is, it knows its audience. Where the movie totally fails is in paying any decent respect to the traditions of Fantasy and Horror. The dreadlock swirling, furry vested members of the Black Eyed Peas (I mean bad vampires), the zero research Matrix dressed Volturi (although their leader plays the role with a delicious camp), and the sparkles. Although they didn’t film in Volterra, they should have, cool city. But the franchise’s mythological characters, despite their continued insistence on the challenges of their existence, have it easy. Really these vampires and werwolves are just wish fulfillment, stripped of the double edged nature of the original legends that spawned them.

See, those older tales, like most folk stories are cautionary in nature. The focus on the karmic cost of power and pride. In the end, it always brings down the monsters. Twilight isn’t about that. It pretends to be. But this is a giant “tell” where the characters and the story pretend to “tell” us that these powers have costs. It goes to great lengths to pretend so. But in the end it’s just complex machinations to support the central triangle of wish fulfillment.

New Moon is considerably better than Eclipse, but both suffer badly from essentially being diversions. Stephanie Meyer apparently originally plotted the story as two books (what became Twlight and Breaking Dawn). When the first did well she inserted two extra installments in the middle. I can’t fault her that decision, made her tens of millions for sure.

Read my Twilight review or Eclipse or Breaking Dawn, part 1 or part 2.
For more Film reviews, click here.
Or read about my own paranormal novels.

Related posts:

  1. Book and Movie Review: Twilight
  2. Movie Review: Adventureland
  3. Breaking Bad – Season 1
  4. TV Review: Buffy the Vampire Slayer – part 1
  5. Inside Game of Thrones
By: agavin
Comments (10)
Posted in: Movies
Tagged as: Bella Swan, Chris Weitz, Jacob Black, Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, Twilight Saga, Twilight Saga: New Moon, Vampires Suck

Movie Review: Adventureland

Nov30

Title: Adventureland

Director/Stars: Jesse Eisenberg (Actor), Kristen Stewart (Actor), Greg Mottola (Director)

Genre: Period (80s) Comedy Romance

Watched: Sept, 2010

Summary: Touching, funny. Great film.

 

I didn’t really have a lot of expectations going into this film. I knew it was by the same director as Superbad (great film) and starred Eisenberg and Stewart, and that’s about it. It’s a great film. The kind they rarely make anymore where it’s essentially a character movie woven around a romance. The script is great, the acting’s great, and the direction is great. It’s a funny movie, but not in the laugh a minute kind of way, but in a wry more or less real way.

Comedy varies across the spectrum of dark to realistic to slapstick to abstract. This is realistic. The humor is partially in the fact that these situations are real situations that we did or could have found ourselves in — and hence, it’s a kind of bittersweet humor. The tone is not so different than the excellent Freaks and Geeks TV show, and in fact there’s at least one actor in common (the excellent Martin Starr). They don’t make a lot of comedy romances like this anymore, the kind where there’s no gimmick, just real people, and hence real romance.

The plot is fairly incidental. We have the likable Eisenberg (playing on type, but great as a Geek who isn’t really shy) who has money troubles and needs to take a lousy summer job at a crappy Pittsburg theme park. Having grown up in the 80s this is exactly my generation (I’m perhaps 4 years younger than the characters) and the music and outfits are nostalgic and amusing. None of the people he meets are exactly stereotypes, and they have a delicate underwritten quality. The core that holds the film together is Eisenberg and Stewart (who proves she can do better with a script that isn’t terrible… I mean Twilight — CLICK FOR MY REVIEW). Not just the acting but the writing. He’s the kind of guy I could imagine being friends with, and she’s the kind of girl I could imagine having fallen for in college. There relationship feels real. This makes it sexy even though there isn’t much sex. And isn’t that one of the main things that fiction is about? Depicting real people. It seems all too often forgotten.

Related posts:

  1. Movie Review: Centurion
  2. Book and Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
  3. Book and Movie Review: Twilight
  4. Book and Movie Review: Let Me In
  5. Book and Movie Review: The Road
By: agavin
Comments (5)
Posted in: Movies
Tagged as: Adventureland, blu-ray, Comedy, DVD, Fiction, Film, Freaks and Geeks, Greg Mottola, Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Martin Starr, Movie, Pittsburg, reviews, romance, Superbad, Twilight

Book and Movie Review: Twilight

Oct31

TwilightTitle: Twilight

Author: Stephenie Meyer

Genre: YA Romantic Supernatural

Read: January 2008 and Oct 2010

Summary: Confused.

_

Since I’m such a vampire fan, having seen or read vast untold volumes of the stuff, I thought I should put my formal two-cents in on the strange source material that spawned the Twilight phenomenon.

First the book. I read it before the movie came out. There was a lot of buzz about it already, and I was excited about it. Generally, things that are really popular have a kernel of quality about them, and I love vampires and teen heroines. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite TV series of all time — I will blog about it one of these days. So I started reading Twilight in the Vegas airport while waiting for a flight. Despite the clunky prose (more on that later) I was actually pretty engaged in a low key way during the first half. Then Edward revealed to Bella that he was a vampire (not that I didn’t know) and the whole thing went to shit. I had to force myself through most of the rest, and the ending left me baffled. “Wait, where’d the fight go?  What about the climax?”

Back to the writing: It’s really clunky. I won’t go into too much detail, this other blogger did. But let me say Meyer is the anti Cormac McCarthy (I’m in the middle of The Road right now). He eschews punctuation, she loves it. Every long improper sentence is peppered with a random assortment of commas and em-dashes. She adores the em-dash, using it in approximately 50% of sentences, and usually not for its proper purpose of offsetting a parenthetical. Maybe she felt she had too many commas (she does), and needed to replace some of them with em-dashes for the hell of it. Oh, and she loves certain words or word combinations, like “cold fingers” and uses them several times a page in places. And she clearly choses random synonyms from the thesaurus without being aware of the connotations of said words. For example: “His expression shifted instantly to chagrin.” Can the word be used that way? I don’t think so. But none of this really matters when reading the book, you adjust and just role with it. I guess if you’re 14 and haven’t read a lot you don’t notice to begin with.

The plot and content: Given what actually happens in the first book, it’s pretty long: 118,000 words. Not much really does happen. We have a LOT of words devoted again and again to how pretty Edward is and how much Bella loves him. This isn’t really SHOWN too much, or justified, but she sure TELLS us about it a lot. But again, the first half was okay. However, once the reveal came in, it gets really silly. Basically they go play this ridiculous baseball game and the Black Eyed Peas (oops, I mean the evil vampires) walk onto the field, sniff Bella, and decide the most important thing in the world is to sink their fangs into her blood. There is no real attempt to sell anything in this plot, to provide any believable reasons, it just happens. You couldn’t possibly have more one dimensional villains — although they do compliment the one dimensional heros nicely. Then my all time biggest gripe, we close in on the unbelievable “final” confrontation of the book and Bella gets knocked unconscious (she is after all the narrator) and we miss the whole thing. It’s told to us by Edward after we know it came out okay so as to minimize tension. I had the feeling that the author didn’t know how to write an action scene, so she just chickened out.

The vampires: Oh my. It’s totally clear (particularly in later books) that Meyer doesn’t do research. This includes even watching a few vampire films or perhaps reading Dracula. Her undead aren’t really vampires, or even undead, except for being immortal and having a taste for blood, and “cold fingers.” They don’t seem dead, or particularly evil. They sparkle in the sun, they apparently have like, oh my God, no real weaknesses. And they’re all really pretty. We hear about that a lot. Let’s not forget their smorgasbord of cool psychic powers like seeing the future, and reading minds. These make hack plot construction really convenient. I actually started my novel a year before even hearing of Twilight, but reading it certainly motivated me to make sure my vampire heavy was a really bad-ass undead in a nasty evil way. He doesn’t sparkle in the sunlight but he will leave your entrails hanging from a tree to make a point — and he certainly wouldn’t ever concern himself to learn current High School vernacular.

Publishing mystery: Twilight had a very aberrant publishing history. As a first time novelist it was picked up by Jodi Reamer of Writers House really quickly. This is a very prestigious agency and that’s very rare. It was then sold quickly to a great publisher for a really huge advance. That Reamer showed interest in it is not what surprises me. There is a mysterious something about the first half of the book — it had potential. But what surprises me is that it was never edited — or if it was I’ve never heard of an editor that lax. The standard length for YA books is more like 50-70k, and there is a LOT of fluff in the book, not to mention the bad grammar and the flaccid ending that would be easy to fix. Having been through rounds and rounds of revision myself, the book was held to none of the standards my editors have exhibited. Of course it turned out to be a great decision for Jodi, but I still don’t understand why it was never edited.

The movie: Catherine Hardwicke directed the first movie. She actually did a really good job with the source material, and I think the movie is actually better than the book. Not exactly great, but better. The casting was excellent, particularly Kristen Stewart who does have a soft charisma, and she’s hot in a non obvious way. If you see her in some of her other films like Adventureland or Speak you realize that she’s actually a very fine young actress in certain roles. Twilight doesn’t provide a lot of room for subtle acting. I myself had casually known Hardwicke from when she did production design for Insomniac’s Disruptor in the mid 90’s (Insomniac was located next to my company Naughty Dog in those days). So I’d noticed when she started directing with Thirteen, which is a depressing but brilliant movie — particularly given what must have been a VERY low budget. Hardwicke brought the same kind of hand-held-documentary style to Twilight, and it worked well to offset the inherent cheese factor of the material. Not totally offset, but the result was somehow watchable. She did a nice job capturing Bella’s POV. This is tricky because in a novel, particularly a first person one like Twilight, so much of the book is dominated by the voice. With a combination of diary style voice over (more-or-less quoted from the book) and a peeping-over-the-shoulder viewpoint (as also used in Thirteen) Hardwicke pulls it off. For some reason, they ditched her with regard to directing the sequels, and the those devolve into further cheesiness. Of course so do the later novels. Can I just say Volturi?

Conclusion: I’m kinda baffled. Twilight isn’t particularly good, or well done, but it does have a certain appeal. However, the overall magnitude of success has left me totally confused. Harry Potter is ludicrously popular, but at its core rest three stunningly good initial books. The first book is really well written, the central premise is very novel and sold with incredible style. Even the ridiculously melodramatic Vampire Dairies is more fun than Twilight. I’m just left scratching my head and hoping the anti-vampire backlash isn’t too bad.

My reviews of New Moon and Eclipse or Breaking Dawn, part 1 or part 2.
For more Film reviews, click here.
Or read about my own paranormal novels.

Related posts:

  1. Book and Movie Review: Let Me In
  2. Book Review: Hex Hall
  3. Book Review: Personal Demons
  4. Book Review: The Passage
  5. Book Review: Forever
By: agavin
Comments (16)
Posted in: Books, Movies
Tagged as: Bella, Bella Swan, books, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Catherine Hardwicke, Cormac McCarthy, Fiction, Kristen Stewart, reviews, Robert Pattinson, Stephenie Meyer, Supernatural, Twilight, Vampire
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