The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

You Just Don’t Belong in My World, Bella

Dear World, I love you but I just can’t take it anymore.  Because of the Twilight series, I have decided to end my life in the slowest and most painful way I can think of: beating myself to death with a wet Kleenex.  I know, this will take some time, so just settle in and I’ll get started.  I continue on with my reviews of the Twilight Saga, if for no reason other than to show you people how much willpower I can possess when it’s important.  I haven’t yet figured out how to consider this important, but I’m gonna, damnit!  And so, without further ado, let’s talk about The Twilight Saga: New Moon, based on another novel by Stephenie Meyer, written by Melissa Rosenberg, directed by Chris Weitz, and starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Rachelle Lefevre, Edi Gathegi, Michael Sheen, Dakota Fanning, Ashley Greene, Billy Burke, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Anna Kendrick, and Michael Welch.

Isa”Bella” Swan (Kristen Stewart) just turned 18.  Her vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), and his family – Carlisle “Dr. Handsome McFadden” Cullen (Peter Facinelli), Elizabeth (Esme Cullen), Alice (Ashley Greene), Emmett (Kellan Lutz), Rosalie (Nikki Reed), and Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) – throw Bella a birthday party.  It’s pretty nice … until Bella gets a paper cut and Jasper tries to eat her.  Edward saves her … by throwing her across the room and giving her a deeper gash in her arm.  Realizing that he and his family are a danger to Bella, Edward ends their relationship and leaves Forks with his family.  Thus begins Mope Fest ’09.  Bella bitches about it for a couple of months until realizing that risking her life makes her feel a little better.  She invests in two shitbox motorcycles and enlists the help of her newly-chiseled friend Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) to help her fix them.  They start developing some feelings for each other until he randomly freaks out on one of her friends, cuts his hair, and stops wearing shirts.  Then, Laurent (Edi Gathegi) returns and decides to kill Bella as a niceness so that his friend, Victoria (Rachelle Lefevre), doesn’t kill her in a more drawn out and painful manner.  A couple of giant wolves kill the shit out of him.  Turns out Jacob is a werewolf and his pack keep the joint free of non-Cullen vampires.  Edward comes back into the mix when he attempts to get the powerful coven of vampires known as the Volturi to kill him, believing that Bella has killed herself.  Alice retrieves Bella to try to save Edward before it’s too late.

These movies still suck.  Does this movie suck less than the first movie?  I’ll grant that it does suck slightly less than the first movie.  Technically, penile dismemberment is preferable to death, but I still don’t want it to happen.  That’s how I feel about this movie.  There are parts to this movie that are much more interesting.  They throw some werewolves in so that they can ruin another classic movie monster, but they have their cool parts.  I also found the Volturi somewhat interesting.  But that was roughly 20% of the movie.  The rest of it was the same old mopey, vaguely romantic bullshit.  I got to thinking, in this movie, about why the Cullen’s even bother leaving Forks in the first place.  I understand the idea of wanting to get away from Bella (BELIEVE ME, I understand that feeling) because you’re afraid of hurting her, but he does so under the pretense that people are beginning to wonder about one of them not aging.  Why would they move around because of that?  Why not just crash back at the crib for a century and go back to school?  It’s pretty gundamned obvious why he’s actually trying to stay away from Bella, but of course she’s too fucking dumb to figure it out.  And then we get to my least favorite part, the full half hour of Bella being a mopey little bitch.  The scenes are so indicative of everything I hate about stupid high school girls, thinking everything is the worst thing that could happen in the world ever.  “I know, I know … 9/11 and the Holocaust … BUT MY BOYFRIEND THAT WANTS TO EAT ME JUST DUMPED ME!  You just don’t understand, Dad!”  She mainly shows this to us by sitting in a chair and never moving (VERY interesting cinema), and squealing like a stuck pig while she’s sleeping.  Has anyone ever actually reacted to a breakup like this?  If so, kill yourself.  …Harsh?  Maybe.  Alright, I’ll downgrade to “Knock it off, dumbass.”  The next thing Bella starts doing is to start talking to her imagination of Edward … y’know, ’cause THAT’S not crazy. They must’ve realized either that I would hate this mopey shit, or that stupid high school girls would love this mopey shit, because they tossed it in twice.  Jacob turns her into a mopey bitch as well.  Thanks, movie!  The secondary premise of the movie is pretty weak to me.  It’s never really clear why the vampires and werewolves hate each other in the first place.  They reached a civil agreement a century ago and (as far as I can tell) neither side ever overstepped their boundaries.  Yet they just randomly hate each other.  I get why Jacob and Edward don’t get along because they’re both in love with a tree stump named Bella, but there’s really no excuse that I can see why their groups hate each other so much.  I also don’t get the entire problem with Edward trying to kill himself, and not just because I would be much happier if he did it and this whole movie could end.  Why would it mean his death if he walked outside and got all sparklefart on everyone?  If I walked past a guy that looked like that, I would intentionally pay him no mind whatsoever because I would just assume he wanted attention and was a douche bag.  It would never cross my mind that he was a vampire … because VAMPIRES BURST INTO FLAMES IN SUNLIGHT!  When Bella’s mutant power was decided at the end of the movie, it just made me laugh.  Apparently, no vampire’s special powers work on her.  It made me laugh that none of them had any effect on her mind, probably because she is such a blank slate anyway.  Not only stupid, but apparently very self involved since she walks right past a large group of innocent men, women, and children that are about to become a buffet for the Volturi and it never crosses her mind to throw a warning out.  The movie ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, but I’m here to push it over the edge.  Bella’s been trying to get Edward to make her a vampire through this entire fucking movie so that she could spend the rest of her life with him, but she seems completely shocked that he would ask her to marry him.  What the Hell did you have in mind when you thought about spending eternity with him?  Just friends?  Fucking idiot!

There was an imaginary movie displayed in New Moon that went by the very clever name of “Face Punch”.  The dialogue in Face Punch was intentionally awful, but it also leads me smoothly into a discussion of the dialogue in New Moon.  It still sucks.  I’m beginning to think that Stephenie Meyer is not a good writer.  All the dialogue in this movie remains stupid, mopey, awkward, stupid, annoying, and stupid.  I understand that they would feel the need to remind their audience what each vampire’s power is, but the way they do it is so blunt and stupid that it was reminiscent of the first X-Men movie, except that I hated it.  “I’ve already seen you open it, and you love it!”  DING!  Alice reads minds.  “No fair with the emotion controls.”  DING!  Jasper controls emotions.  “I can’t read your mind.”  DING!  Bella’s an idiot.  I understand that Edward is undead and kills things for sustenance, but does he have to talk about suicide and death all the time in the beginning?  Later, Bella is arguing with Jacob about their emotional age.  She decides that she is emotionally 35 and he’s emotionally 32, and kudos to her for knowing that 35 is greater than 32.  Of course, someone should tell her that her IQ is not the same as her emotional age.  I also got really angry that Bella stopped talking to her friends for a while in this movie.  It definitely wasn’t because their relationships meant so much to me.  It was because she was almost at the point where it would be absurd to even the writer of these movies for her to still talk awkwardly to her friends, but she got to start from scratch with the awkwardness by taking a hiatus from them.  Gundamned loopholes!  When Bella finds out the secret of the werewolves (which, of course, she figured out by being smacked across the face with the obvious a few times), one of the werewolves actually has the gall to utter the statement “Guess the wolf’s out of the bag.”  …I hope you fucking die in a really spectacular and painful way.  When Bella is about to leave to try to save Edward, Jacob tries to stop her by saying “I’m begging you; don’t go.”  Get it?  He’s a dog and he’s begging!  Later on, that twat-basket Bella has the audacity to tell Jacob not to make her choose between him and Edward.  Why?  You want to keep dragging him along, bitch?  I’ll tell you one thing that I really liked about the dialogue, and one thing that made me like my favorite character, Alice, even more: when she points out Bella’s idiocy.  I was already on board with you, Alice, but now I’m yours forever.  Unless you ask me to marry you.  That’s moving too fast…

The look managed to take a step up in some parts of this movie.  The director (apparently a REAL director this time and not someone who’s probably only made commercials for Lady’s Speed Stick) pulled off a couple of transitions that I thought were really well done.  I barely managed to catch that I liked something during one of Bella’s mopey bitch scenes, but the way they showed the passage of months by having the camera rotate slowly around Bella, seemingly without cutting, was very nicely done.  Later, their transitions during the montage (of sorts) of Bella and Jacob working on the motorcycles, were nicely cut as well.  I got angry at Bella during that scene because who throws a slice of pizza to someone?!  Even if they catch it, they might get sprayed in the face with hot grease or something.  I still didn’t like their little lame attempts to show that things were moving fast in this movie.  When the vampires are running, it barely seems like anything faster than a normal human running speed, but we added motion blur!  Go fuck yourself.  The big fight near the end of the movie where Edward was trying to keep the Volturi away from Bella wanted to be epic really badly, but it used the same blur too much, making me think it was a shitty version of the awesome teleportation fight from the beginning of X-Men 2.  …I sure hope that watching the X-Men movies from this point on doesn’t make me think of these movies as much as these make me think of them.  If you ruin this for me, Twilight, I swear I’ll write hateful things about you online … damnit …

I still hate almost everybody involved in this movie.  I wasn’t a fan of most of them going into the movie, but they did what they could to ruin two actors I actually like.  I like Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning a lot.  Why are you trying to ruin them for me, Twilight?  I know that you’re a black hole for all that is good in the world, but can you not leave me some things?  Thankfully, they were solid in their parts, so I will just have to remain focused on what I’m truly angry at here.  The same can be said for Ashley Greene.  I still appreciate the quirkiness of her character, and it’s made so much better when you compare her to everyone else in this movie.  This brings me back to Kristen Stewart.  I still hate her, and not just because I hate Bella so much.  She’s still awful.  She’s Paul Walker with a vagina.  Someone really should tell her that she doesn’t have to sigh out of her nose before she says anything in the movie … unless that might cause her to pass out and crack her head open on a marble counter top.  She also does this strange thing that was never explained by holding her stomach a couple of times in the movie like she ran afoul of some jalapenos or something.  I think she even squatted down while doing it.  Maybe she was just doing her impression of what Stephenie Meyer does over an empty journal before scribbling the name of one of the phases of the moon on it and making billions with it.  Bella’s also a bitch in this movie.  She leads on Jacob through the whole movie, but the slightest sign that Edward’s back and it’s all “Fuck off, doggie.”  Robert Pattinson again made no impact on me one way or another.  I did get annoyed at the choice of the makeup artist later in the movie because she changes his makeup to show that he’s depressed, but it just make him look like he’s been crying or is sleep deprived and it’s my understanding that he’s not capable of either.  Taylor Lautner earns a much bigger part in this movie by spending the entirety of his life between the first movie and this one by working out nonstop.  The guy’s ripped.  I would totally fuck him … no homo …  He’s the Vampire Hunter Van Hunksking!  And, since he worked so hard, they apparently decided to ban him from t-shirts for the majority of the movie.  He’ll find any old excuse to take the shirt off, won’t he?  Like when Bella crashes her motorcycle and is bleeding from the head.  There is no way there’s anything within 100 miles of our present location better to clean your open wound than my dirty t-shirt!  What’s this?  It was covering up my sweet bod for some reason!  Oh well.  This is the kind of guy I would not be shocked to find his main picture on Facebook to be him taking a self portrait in the bathroom mirror.  I just want to lick them abs … okay, a little homo …

I’ve managed to keep a certain degree of optimism throughout this review because I know that I’m halfway through the Twilight films that are presently available.  This optimism is completely based on the fact that I’m not thinking about the fact that the next two movies are rated as badly (or worse) than the two I’ve already reviewed.  …Damnit!  I just remembered it!  New Moon is slightly better than the first Twilight movie, but not nearly the improvement necessary to make the movies watchable.  The story is still shitty, the dialogue is still awful, and there’s always Kristen Stewart.  The slight visual improvements, Ashley Greene, Michael Sheen, Dakota Fanning, and Taylor Lautner’s sweet sweet bod cannot fix this thing.  Seriously, ladies.  Don’t delude yourselves into thinking these movies aren’t shitty.  Don’t watch this movie either.  The Twilight Saga: New Moon gets “It’s like a huge hole has been punched through my chest” out of “It’s my birthday, can I ask for something?  Go fuck yourself!”

Hey, peeps. Why not rate and comment on this as a favor to good ole Robert, eh? And tell your friends! Let’s make me famous!