Then I remembered: the new Twilight film waShakespeare-ing theaters.
So on opening day, I got in line for the very first showing, along with all the other Twihards, and didn't stop until I sat through an entire day of watching Twilight: Breaking Dawn. Again and again. Thirteen hours watching Twilight, observing the crowd, and fighting an overwhelming nausea.
Like a prisoner of war, I had to do something to keep my mind busy. So I began to catalog all the ways this movie fails. I present to you what I learned from thirteen hours of nonstop vampire torture: the five failings of Twilight.
Arriving at the theater for my first showing of the day.
Why Twilight Sucks #1: The Story
This movie takes two hours to go absolutely nowhere. It first makes the sin of assuming that we know about the plot lines, so why bother to have even a throwaway line explaining what's going on half of the time.
Here's the plot in a nutshell: Bella the blank and Edward the abusive wuss get married. This takes up an incredible forty-five minutes of the movie -- clearly milking the final installment of the franchise into a two-parter.
Eddie and Bella go off, and have rough honeymoon sex where we get some heavy innuendo about how Edward is mostly impotent and prone to premature ejaculation. Then we find out Bella missed a period, thanks to the Tampax product placement. (Exactly how many tampons does she need for her honeymoon, by the way? She has this enormous, Sam's club-sized box of tampons.)
No wonder vampires are so attracted to her.
Then she has a baby and becomes a vampire.
As a story, the flaws in this movie are massive. The dialogue finds a new bottom of terrible, with lines like "It's a miracle or whatever." When the central conflict finally emerges, it's resolved in five minutes with a lame-ass deus ex machina.
The final insult is that at the very end of the film, there's a one-minute clip featuring Michael Sheen and two other characters that's actually funny, engaging, exciting. These are the antagonists who are apparently all over Breaking Dawn: Part Two.
I hope they win.
Why Twilight Sucks #2: A Waste of Talent
Let me just say this up front: if this movie really cost $110 million, Summit Entertainment is laundering drug money on their books. Either that, or the award-winning professionals who made this movie decided to go straight up honey-badger on this one, because it's pretty clear nobody gives a Frost.
Kristin Stewart delivers everything in a flat, toneless voice, and does her best acting in the movie playing a corpse. Robert Pattinson will do absolutely nothing to quell those gay rumors with Breaking Dawn. And there's one guy who delivers one line ("Possibly.") so badly that the entire audience cracks up. Nor does it help that he looks like David Spade.
The direction is by Bill Condon, who made Dreamgirls and Gods and Monsters, so he's not a hack. Yet here, all he does is shoot people talking boringly. I've seen more camera movement and style in YouTube videos. He doesn't even give the actors standing around in the background anything to do; this movie looks like a J. Crew shoot with dialogue, unless it's the Native American tribe of werewolves, who apparently are members of the Abercrombie nation.
During the wedding, when Eddie and Bella play tonsil hockey to celebrate their union, there's a shot where the wedding guests disappear, and I couldn't figure out whether he did that deliberately, or if he just thought the audience wouldn't notice.
Needless to say, I didn't.
The cinematographer, Guillermo Navarro, has worked with Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo Del Toro. He's won Oscars. Yet everything in this movie looks like a crappy soundstage. I'm trying to figure it out: gambling debts, or did he just need to finish paying off his house?
Even the makeup sucks. I get that the vampires are supposed to have pale faces and red lips, but on the dudes, it comes off like very light mime makeup. It gets distracting, because they're delivering lines in a flat affect about the future of a baby, and you just want to ask them to pretend to be stuck in an invisible box, or all fit into a Smart car.
This entire movie comes off like it cost $30 million, max. It uses three sets and some location work. Where'd the other $80 million go?
Why Twilight Sucks #3: It's Anti-Feminist
Here's the thing: Bella is a crappy human being. She's selfish, shallow, bitchy ... and defined entirely by the men around her. One of the creepiest things about the wedding is the fact that she has no bridesmaids. She's defined entirely by her father, and her passive-aggressive abusive husband.
She doesn't even have control of her own body: the entire plot hinges on her not using any form of birth control, resulting in the creepy vampire baby.
At least the movie establishes that women can play chess (even if they can't win).
The entire movie is like feminism got wished into the cornfield. Eddie's "mom" is pretty much June Cleaver with fangs, Alice the future-seeing vampire is a shallow fashion-obsessed bimbo who whines at Bella's wedding about how she doesn't like handbags, and Rose is an Operation Rescue fangirl. Which brings us to the most offensive part of this movie.
Why Twilight Sucks #4: Its Treatment of Abortion
Your opinion on abortion doesn't really matter: no matter what you believe, this movie is happy to make you look like a mindless assclown!
The second half of the movie is a lengthy anti-abortion screed that has something to offend everyone. Are you against abortion under any circumstances? Watch Bella, who clings to a baby, even as it slowly eats her from the inside out and crushes her bones! Think a woman has the right to decide what to do with her body? Here's Edward, screaming at Bella about how he gets a vote too, because apparently he has a lien on her uterus. Not sure? Here's everybody else, arguing over whether to call it a "fetus" or a "baby." Unless you're Rose, who was a huge bitch to Bella until she started growing a vampire baby, and now they're besties. Babies make everything better!
The birth is portrayed in a ridiculously gory scene for a PG-13 movie (one viewer at the second screening actually gagged). There were twelve-year-olds at this movie. So, remember kids, once you have sex, without using birth control, you immediately will get pregnant with a parasite that will suck your life force, before leaving you a bleeding corpse on a table after your husband rips your child out of your womb with his teeth.
I don't know, I'm a little conflicted about whether this is a message we should be sending to children. It seems a little muddled.
Obviously, the theater was chock-full of teenage girls. But there were preteens in the theater, and I even saw a few grade schoolers. I'm not one of those ninnies who thinks anybody under the age of eighteen is a mindless dolt; kids can think for themselves. And honestly, most of the audience was laughing at this movie; even the teenage girls were obviously not taking it seriously.
But imagine for a minute that Hollywood makes a movie about a woman who gets pregnant and stands by her anti-abortion beliefs, even though it's going to kill her. Let's say it's a straight-up Hollywood drama, with Angelina Jolie as the pregnant lady, Matt Damon as her conflicted husband, Morgan Freeman as her supportive and concerned doctor.
Is there any way in hell the MPAA would rate that a PG-13, like Breaking Dawn? But because it's vampires and makes lots of money, suddenly it's appropriate for kids.
Conclusion
Suffering through my marathon of misery, there was one thing that lifted my heart: laughter. Yes, there was applause and tears when Eddie and Bella got hitched, and laughing at terrible jokes ... but also laughter at bad acting, overwrought scene construction, and just about everything else. Most of the funny parts, in other words, were unintentional.
The audience may like the movies ... but thankfully, they don't take them seriously.
Then again, they don't have to sit through them five times in a row. After this marathon, even I wanted to drink some blood.
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