Sparkling stupidities and bloodless chastity

Rating: 4/10 (15 April 2010)

New Moon is a first base porn movie. There's no sex, but kisses in slow motion. There's no obscenities, just "Oh. Kiss me". The perspective is kind of "female", that is to say that the male characters are introduced and continuously shot in slow motion. The young men in the film don't like shirts very much. If you count the number of abs in it, I'm sure you'll still be counting around the time the third Twilight movie shows up.
Oh, enough jokes already. New Moon is not a good film, but I admit I did enjoy it a lot more than the first Twilight. That one left me confused and frustrated. I imagined something that had become such a phenomena should at least aspire some element of amusement. It was very un- amusing, though, since it took itself with a kind of phoney seriousness that felt speculative rather than sincere. It felt as if it assumed the audience were idiots and wouldn't care that nothing made any sense or that there was no consistency in anything that happened. It was a foggy, shining, sparkling mess of epic proportions. If you knew nothing of the novels this franchise is based on, you were left totally excluded. That is a film making crime. Not a small thing either, I consider it a big felony. It's junk food cinema that doesn't even bother to give you a list of ingredients.
That being said, New Moon was an easier burger to swallow. A lot of the inconsistencies of the first one applies here too - the characters act contradictory, you often have to guess what is actually going on in the plot and sometimes the film takes for granted that you won't ask basic questions of logic. There's this whole bit about the Vatican for instance, that is like taken out of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I went "What am I even watching?". Pattison's hunky sparkling vampire decides he wants to tell the world he's a vampire. His plan is to strip nude and walk out into the sunshine in the middle of the crowds around the Vatican. Right.... because then he'll sparkle, right? And.... then everybody will understand he's a vampire.... Hum hum....
Most of the movie is nothing more than a teenage melodrama, though, and for about half of the movie I did follow along before it, well, continued and went on, and went on some more and, yawn, kept going. In any case, at least I wasn't constantly annoyed as in the first one. Teen soap opera is after all less ambitious than fantasy adventure so when it's silly, dumb and inconsistent it's easier to just take it for amusement. The story involves poor Bella being dumped by hunky Edward and instead befriending Jacob, who transforms into a CGI werewolf when he gets upset. We don't really get to know much of what she's up to, her heart is broken and she is confused and perhaps suicidal but maybe only destructive. I'll get to this in a while, but in the peachy world where Twilight takes place, "destructive" means riding motorcycles with strangers (scary!) and jumping into the water from cliffs (nooo!). What, not even a single cigarette? Oh no, that would have been Way Too Destructive! We'd NEVER forgive THAT! Anyway, she might be going a little crazy too, because Edward is at times appearing like some kind of Obi-Wan Cullenobi exclaiming "Bella! No!" or "Bella! Do this!" or "Bella! Don't do that!". This isn't really explained further. It doesn't really matter either. The point of New Moon is really just to exhilarate it's target audience. I get it now. It's bad, but at least it's not totally inept film making, which the first film was.
I could have recommended New Moon for all future teenage audiences to come. But what's really ugly about it is the poorly hidden, church like conservative, 7th Heaven kind of message that goes with it. To put it simply, New Moon is really about two peachy, healthy, heteronormative teenagers who wants to have sex for the first time but need to get married first. I know this sounds far out for some innocents, but you listen to the dialog and you tell me I'm wrong. Edward is the male patriarch, he can do as he please with Bella, leaving her here, leaving her there, she will patiently suffer with about as much independence as a child left behind by her parents. Her destiny is to be his conveniently obedient wife slave. The werewolf character is not a threat to the other male patriarch either, because he is so obviously supposed to be the homosexual monster in the outskirts of the normal world. His werewolf friend tease him for having "a girlfriend!" and there's even infamous lines like "Can't you find a way to just... stop? I mean it's... wrong" and "It's not a lifestyle choice, Bella, I was born this way, I can't help it" and Bella's slightly disgusted reply "It's not who you.... aaare, it's what you... dooo!" I could pass it off with a laugh, and I do, but at the end of it these are not the kind of vampires and warewolfs I want kids to relate to. I think Bella is a charmless idiot. I like what warewolfs do. And for the record, Edward isn't all that hot anyway.