Apparently I’ve traded drink and drugs for a compulsion to watch shitty movies. I won’t go into all the turds I’ve watched recently; except one: TWILIGHT. My Lord. I don’t even know where to start really… A quick synopsis, I guess: Seventween year-old girl from Phoenix named Bella moves to Forks, Washington to live with her estranged cop father. The new girl at school, Bella overcomes first week awkwardness and makes friends fairly quickly. Enter love interest Edward, a handsomely pale loner. He’s a hottie, but the girls at the school have given up trying to make the other girls jealous by bagging him because he deflects all their advances. (This really works, trust me!) From the outside, he seems like a brooding asshole. Bella quickly infatuated with “young” Edward who seems shaken up by her presence. Eddie gets past his apprehension and sidles up to Bella and the love balloons. When confronted, he informs Bella that, yes, he is a vampire. Hijinks ensue. This is a well enough description in order to get to the meat of my review/questioning. There is a pivotal scene in which Bella and Edward finally begin talking. Fine. The scene takes places in Biology class. Ok. They are lab partners. The teacher informs them that the microscopes on their desktops are for their assignment where they must correctly identify onion root cell phases of Mitosis. The first pair to do so will win the coveted Golden Onion (an onion spray painted gold). During identification, they are having an in depth conversation in order to figure one another out. In the background you can see the other students working vigorously at solving the assignment first. All the while Ed and Bella are whooping it up about Edward’s whereabouts the past week and casually slipping the slides in place and giving their answer. It’s at this point that the actress playing Bella begins to piss me off. Every time Edward talks she looks on the verge of orgasm. His correct guessing of anaphase as the second stage in the cells Mitosis brings about a reaction from her that looks like he pummeled her clitoris with a small set of vibrating, punching fists like a boxer working a speedbag. They guess a few more phases and the scene cuts to them walking down the hall after class with Bella clutching the Golden Onion and still engrossed in a rapidly heating up conversation with Paleface. There is no way they won that Golden Onion. I saw how much harder the other students were getting those answers down. I call bullshit. Once the film starts to root itself in the high school it begins to resemble a trendy apparel commercial. For a small town of 1,320, the kids seem to be well accounted for according to racial background. Their clothing is also very hip for a small Podunk town. The thing about the clothing is that they all dress nearly the same. There are no punks or gangstas. Everyone just kind of hovers between a preppy emo or preppy jockish type. After watching this I started writing a screenplay about a mummy in high school who is lined in rags made by Abercrombie. This girl, Bella is outwardly begging this rogue love interest to throw her the dick. With this apparent, Edward continues to deflect her advances. He drags her lust to the brink of mania up to finally admitting that he is, indeed, a vampire. This had me thinking that, in high school, I didn’t channel my pallor and bashfulness to an advantage with girls. I would have loved, when a girl told me I was mysterious and then asked me why I was so shy or secretive, to have cast a stern, troubled look and then responded in a hushed tone: “I’m a vampire.” Instead of immersing myself in hip hop and basketball I could have conquered half of the girls in my graduating class. At the very least the ones with Daddy issues. We are now at about the middle point of the film and now I’m wondering if kids really are this retarded. Plausibility really begins to sink when Edward rescues Bella from certain rape by a group of drunken teenage boys. Once in the clear, he goes into a monologue about how he had to protect her from the guys who made an attempt on her humanity. He used the term low-lives to describe the group. Potential rapists are low-lives, but vampires foraging humans for their dietary needs are an acceptable part of normal society? It is in this speech that he delivers his first panty-soaking line: “I don’t have the strength to stay away from you anymore.” I can just imagine a theater full of gangly 16 year-old girls slipping off their newly soaked seats. This is a line of awesome shit. Or, maybe psychotic depending on whether or not it is coming from the mouth of chiseled features and a spiky hairdo or a double-chin, acne and braces. One gets a welcome sign for love, the other, pepper spray followed by a ‘no contact’ order. Now that their love for each other has been established, enter conflict. When he tells the resilient Bella to steer clear of him because he is a murderous vampire, she states that she does not care. This sums up women perfectly for me. With her perfect reasoning established they resolve to lay in a mossy field eyeing each other longingly while never so much as fucking or making out. Bullshit. Jump to the next scene where Bella is readying herself for school while giving a current narrative of three things she was absolutely positive: First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him, and she didn’t know how dominant that part might be, that thirsted for her blood. And third: She was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him. What is a word for a MORE perfect summation? Because this just made a better case for my loneliness due to lack of a woman’s love via their insane outlook on life. Men are vampires, Women are insane idiots. Arriving together in the same car at school throws up a relationship flag to the rest of the students, who seem to be fully occupied by this new discovery. It is now that we discover that Edward is the anti-Teen Wolf. Born of incredible strength and prowess, he keeps it all a secret; choosing to remain inward and un-popular. Getting to know the vampire tween, Bella finds that (brushing aside penchant for human blood) the vamp tween has some curious interests. A lover of classical music who plays the piano soulfully, dresses nice, neat, studied, and well-mannered; Bella has found what all women really want: A gay guy who loves pussy. Alone in her bedroom the two star-crossed lovers go in for the make. Edward is overcome with vampire lust and flings himself across the wall to disengage himself from what he interprets as possibly losing control and me losing my half-boner. A surefire abstinence message if I ever saw one. Discovering that Edward’s family is composed of vampires, she begins to learn how he came to be. She also learns the Indians living on the nearby reservation are werewolves. The vampires and werewolves/Indians have a shaky treaty established that they are not to fuck with each other. While their relations seem volatile and with the occasional tension complete with lingering stare-down ensues; the treaty remains intact through the movie. No wonder they can’t overcome oppression. Instead of hating the American government the Indians hate vampires. Once the family and Bella are comfortable with each other, the movie really begins to lose me. Eddie shows up at her house to invite her to watch/umpire his family’s baseball game. Vampires that love and play baseball. No joke. We find out that they can only play during thunderstorms because of the crack of the bat against the ball times the power of their swing produces thunder-like sounds. Doesn’t this interfere with God trying to bowl? There is an ongoing interplay of life and death going on. It might be worth pondering some of the possible symbolic moments of this movie but I lack the seriousness and patience to do so. There is one direct quote that Edward utters to Bella that made me pause the movie and wonder where I had indirectly read this line from before. The line is: “Death is peaceful, life is harder”. I swear some poet, Yeats or, 50 Cent, or someone said something very very similiar to this. I think I remembered the source while watching the movie, but now hours later I am having trouble remembering. When I typed the quote into a Google search, I was flooded with 1,090,000 hits. 1,040,000 are listed as MySpace profile quotes for 14-17 year-old repressed nerds, mostly girls. The rest of the movie follows normal conflict/resolution wherein the protagonist meets antagonist and a battle for Bella’s life takes place. You’ve seen it before. Not worth commenting on. A Radiohead song at the end threw me for a complete loop. Ducats are ducats and none are without blood, but Jessus…this is like PORKY’S closing with a Bowie song. Now, I’m just depressed.