White House Down (2013)

Special Agent Todd Keeps Making Those Sounds, I’m Gonna Start Looking at Him.

I decided that I needed something to watch, and my response to that whimsy is ever to check with my old friend RedBox.  The movie I was most excited about is one we’ll get to later, but I also saw today’s movie and decided it needed to be done as well.  Some people might argue that I’ve already reviewed this movie when I reviewed a movie called Olympus Has Fallen.  Many have argued that this is the exact same movie.  And I’m always excited by the proposition of reusing old reviews.  It makes my life so much easier.  Well we’ll find out if that’s a possibility as I review White House Down, written by James Vanderbilt, directed by Roland Emmerich, and starring Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Joey King, Richard Jenkins, James Woods, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Jimmi Simpson, Michael Murphy, Nicolas Wright, and Rachelle Lefevre.

John Cale (Channing Tatum) tries to repair his damaged relationship with his daughter Emily (Joey King) by getting the job that she would think is the coolest job in the world: Secret Service to the President of the United States, James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx).  He interviews with a former college acquaintance who heads the Secret Service, Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and even gets a pass for Emily to come with him into the White House, but Carol decides that he’s unqualified for the job because of his tendency to show a lack of respect for authority and lack of follow-through as mentioned in his military record.  While on the tour, John and Emily get separated when the Head of the Presidential Martin Walker (James Woods) leads a raid on the White House with ex-Delta Force operative Emil Stenz (Jason Clarke) and hacker Skip Tyler (Jimmi Simpson).  John must try to save Emily AND the President before all Hell breaks loose.

Sure, this wasn’t that great of a movie, but I would say I found it preferable to Olympus Has Fallen.  They are basically the same movie, but this is the more fun version of that movie.  Sure, it was dumb, but Rolland Emmerich has a great gift for winning me over with plenty enough fun to overcome the potentially crippling stupidity in the scripts that he chooses.  I’m even able to ignore the super-obvious moments in the scripts.  Like this whole played out “Daughter calling her father by his first name until the time is right for an emotional moment to call you Dad” thing.  That’s been done to death, and the second I heard her call him John I started a mental stopwatch for my smug satisfaction at being right yet again.  The same could have been said about the part where the President is talking about the pocket watch he carries next to his heart that was a gift from his wife.  The only reason I didn’t realize how that would turn out at the end of the movie is because it had been so long since they initially introduced the watch that I had forgotten that I had already predicted the result of it.

Most of the performances in this movie were decent.  They got some great actors to be in the movie, and most of them seemed like they were giving at least 50%.  Good enough!  Channing Tatum manages to be funny and charming enough.  I don’t get some of his character’s choices though.  What does John have against picking up guns from the people he’s killed?  He’s always running out of ammo.  Those guns probably have bullets.  Those dead bodies probably have extra ammo on them as well.  Is it a moral thing?  I think most people would be okay with this particular form of theft.  Jamie Foxx is usually entertaining, but I felt he was a little tuned down for this.  Also, he got bitch-smacked unconscious by an old ass James Woods.  When Jamie had the drop on him!  Thug shit, homie!  I found myself entirely unconvinced by Joey King as Tatum’s daughter.  She just didn’t do a good job, and I tried to give her a pass.  But every time she tried to emotionally yell, “DAD!” I just wasn’t buying it.  It’s never good to be able to see someone trying to act when they just should be acting.  Also there was that flag-waving thing she did at the end of the movie.  That shit was cheesier than Mac and Cheese commercials act like their product is.  And that is the cheesiest.  I did like that girl Jackie Geary, who played the assistant to the VP, but her negotiation skills need work.  She said her payment for getting Tatum an interview for the Secret Service was a date where Tatum had to at least attempt to get to second base.  When he upped that favor, it is only fair that you up your compensation to at least a finger blasting.

White House Down (much as almost everything Rolland Emmerich does) was stupid, but it was enjoyable in how aware of its stupidity it was.  Emmerich is gifted at overcoming stupid with fun, which sets this movie above Olympus Has Fallen, where the director did not possess such gifts.  The story is predictable, but most of the performances are decent, and I had enough fun watching it.  I could at least recommend this movie for a RedBoxing, but just barely that.  White House Down gets “I lost the rocket launcher” out of “As the President of the United States, this comes with the full weight, power and authority of my office.  Fuck you.”

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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!

Twilight (2008)

What a Stupid Lamb

I knew this moment would come, but I crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t.  When I introduced the idea of taking people’s recommendations for my reviews, I started the timer on when today would actually arrive.  It actually took a lot longer than I expected.  From the start, most people reacted to my request for recommendations with movies I would probably hate (Hannah Montana: The Movie, for instance), but not until just recently did someone actually unleash true punishment on me.  They requested it almost a month ago, and I put it off as long as I could, but it’s time has come.  I decided to start doing it on March first somewhat arbitrarily, but I decided that the reason I started in March was because I want everyone involved in this movie to march off the nearest cliff.  All that being said, Chris, Krunchee, and Ashley requested it, so I begrudgingly present you with my review of Twilight, based on a series of novels by Stephenie Meyer, written for the screen by Mark Lord and Melissa Rosenberg, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Sarah Clarke, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Cam Gigandet, Rachelle Lefevre, Edi Gathegi, Anna Kendrick, Christian Serratos, Michael Welch, Gregory Boyce, Justin Chon, and Taylor Lautner.

Though no such back story was given, I assume that Isabella “Bella” Swan (Kristen Stewart) was dropped on her head as a child by her father, Charlie Swan (Billy Burke), which caused her mother, Sarah Clarke (Renee Dwyer), to taker her away from him.  Cut to age seventeen and, even though Bella’s speech impediment has not cleared up, momma has a new man now, so she pawns Bella off on her father and hits the road in search of adventure.  Bella moves in with her dad in a town that is somehow named Forks and starts going to high school there, quickly meeting and befriending Jessica (Anna Kendrick), Angela (Christian Serratos), Mike (Michael Welch), Tyler (Gregory Boyce), and Eric (Justin).  They tell her about the strange family that hangs out together (and probably gets busy together) called the Cullens, comprised of father Carlisle (Peter Facinelli), mother Esme (Elizabeth Reaser), Alice (Ashley Greene) who is probably fucking her “brother” Jasper (Jackson Rathbone), and Rosalie (Nikki Reed) who is probably fucking her “brother” Emmett (Kellan Lutz).  But Bella decides to get all kinds of hot and bothered over Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), roughly around the same time hundreds of thousands of 12-year-old girls do.  Bella gets intrigued by Edward.  There was just something about his pasty white skin, pointy teeth, pitch black eyes, and his bat wings that catches her attention.  He, however, looks like he wants to throw up whenever she comes near.  Britney Spears’ new perfume really doesn’t smell that good, I’m with you Eddie.  She starts getting closer to Edward after he shoves a car away to save her life.  She still hasn’t caught on yet.  Well eventually it turns out that he’s a vampire, along with all of the Cullens.  But they don’t eat people.  The other three vampires – James (Cam Gigandet), Victoria (Rachelle Lefevre), and Laurent (Edi Gathegi) – do.  A lot.  It’s beginning to cause trouble for the Cullen family (apparently.  It’s never really shown in the movie) but Bella and Edward can’t be concerned with that because they’re having some angsty love situation.

Fuck this movie.  You know what made me hate Drive so much?  It’s not ONLY that the movie itself was awful, but it was how many people tried to explain to me that I was wrong.  And when that happened to Drive, it made me think about Twilight, and Heaven help anyone that makes me think about Twilight!  The story of this movie is high school drama bullshit in the background, vampire movie in the foreground, and neither one worth watching.  Much as with Ghost Rider, I took too many notes watching this movie, so I’m just going to have to go in order with the things that pissed me off about this movie.  One of the first irritants I came across in this movie was Edward’s reaction to Bella.  At first, it was never explained why he looked like he was going to blow chunks the second he smelled her.  As a member of the audience, I couldn’t tell what her hygiene was.  I completely understand getting sick when spending time with Kristen Stewart, but it wouldn’t show up in a physical manifestation for me to get irritated with her and want to punch her in the face … unless I DID punch her in the face, then I guess that would be physical.  When Edward stops the car from hitting Bella it served to make me very angry that he didn’t let the movie end right then, but it also pissed me off at Bella’s stupidity even further.  Her first question is “How did you get here so fast?” and not “How is your pimp hand so strong that you just bitch-smacked that car away and dented it’s side?”  There are people that could run fast enough to cross that parking lot, especially since your attention had been turned towards the car and he could have reacted faster than a tree sloth as you did.  What humans CAN’T do is bitch-smack cars out of the way.  But Bella’s denseness was not for only this scene.  I wondered through the first half of this movie if Bella would eventually catch on to what’s going on by the third movie.  Thankfully, they decided to throw that in here so we could move on without this shitty attempt to keep it a secret.  His paleness, sharp teeth, inexplicable absence when the sun was out, ability to run inhumanly fast and bitch-smack cars, not eating, showing up when she was in danger; none of this helped Bella.  Jacob had to practically say it to her face and then she figured it out about 20 minutes later.  I grant that I went in to this movie knowing he was a vampire and she was stupid, but I think I would’ve figured it out when I first saw them.  Why does everyone in monster movies seemingly live in a world where no one has ever made a monster movie that they can connect the dots to?  At some point in the movie, the random deaths of people around town causes Bella’s father to give her a bottle of mace to carry with her, and she seems really put off by this.  YOU JUST ARRIVED HOME FROM A TRIP THAT ALMOST HAD YOU GETTING GANGRAPED!  And THEN you followed that up by going to he scene of a homicide with a vampire.  God, you’re thick, Bella!  I laughed to myself when Edward and Bella started dating officially because he decided to wear a pair of sunglasses and act like “the cool guy” because of it, but it just reminded me of Tobey McGuire in Spiderman 3.  The whole relationship between Edward and Bella is a little icky because it’s roughly the equivalent of me dating a hamburger, and people called me weird for doing that so we had to break up … plus, I ate her.  And Bella isn’t much smarter than Patty was before her untimely death, so don’t give me that shit either.  The ending of the movie didn’t really make sense to me either, but I’m not going to throw up a spoiler alert because I don’t want you people watching this movie anyways.  At the end of the movie, Bella has been being hunted by James and is cornered in a ballet studio where he starts torturing her for his own amusement, and to film and send to Edward as a fuck you.  But wasn’t his only driving factor the hunt?  If that’s the case, then the hunt was over and he should’ve eaten her by the time Edward even arrived.  What’s worse than that is that Bella gets beaten up, has her leg broken, has a piece of glass stuck in her leg, and was bitten on the wrist.  How do they explain this to the world?  She fell down the stairs!  AND out a window!  (I just realized that smashing the buttons on the keyboard doesn’t properly express my frustration)  This explanation is exactly the same one that victims of abuse use, but much more stupid.

I’m not quite done with the writing yet.  It’s so bad that it gets it’s own paragraph, but here comes the dialogue part.  Completely shitty!  SURPRISE!  In the beginning of the movie, Bella exclaims “It’s perfect!” when her dad gives her the gift of a the very first truck ever made.  It’s every teenaged girl’s fantasy come true!  When Bella finally starts talking to Edward (his inexplicable gagging compulsions having gone away) she goes on about how much she hates the rain, and this speech is very reminiscent of the famous “I hate sand” speech from Star Wars Episode 2.  Both made me yell out “WHY AM I LISTENING TO THIS?!”  This is a movie!  I want to be entertained, not listen to two people talk about their thoughts on the weather and how rain makes things wet.  I don’t remember the context anymore (thankfully my brain is already relieving me of this movie like a splinter being pushed out), but at one point Edward and Bella are talking and she says “Pretend that I am dumb”, and I just giggled to myself for obvious reasons.  One of the biggest problems with the dialogue was how shitty Edward was at keeping his HUGE FUCKING SECRET!  When he’s in the car with Bella, he basically says “I read their mind and they were going to rape you.”  Add that to the other times he let slip something stupid, and the time he saved her from the car, and a peanut butter sandwich would’ve figured it out by now.  Bella got it about 10 minutes later.  It’s pretty easy to figure out why you can’t read someone’s mind when the answer is “Because they lack the necessary equipment to hold up her end of the deal.”  It’s the same reason I can’t watch TV when the power is off.  But how did Edward manage to only have conversations with people with negative IQ’s for 108 years, or have the Cullen family just had to pick up and move after massacring an entire town because Edward said something stupid.  Later, Bella’s stupid little narrations indicate that there are only three things she’s absolutely positive about and they’re all basically that she loves Edward and he wants to eat her.  Really?  Those are the ONLY things that you’re sure of?  You’re not sure that you’re a girl?  Or that your hair is brown?  Or that you’re an idiot?  After Bella knows that Edward is a vampire, they waste a good 10 minutes in the middle of the movie with Bella asking him questions about being a vampire that are stupid, serve no purpose, are unnecessary, and slow the already molasses-like pace of the movie down to almost a stop.  Edward also admits to Bella that he’s been sneaking into her room for the past few months and it just makes her love him more, as opposed to being creeped out.  Bella’s narration also says twice in the movie that she’s “never given much though to how she would die”, but after this movie, I can tell you that I’ve thought about it.  A lot.

I’ll talk briefly about the look of the movie.  It also sucked.  Everything in the movie was gloomy and morose.  I’m sure that’s what they were going for, but it also depressed me to look at it.  That could have just been because I knew I was watching Twilight though.  This movie probably didn’t have a very large budget and I understand that, but adding blurriness to a woman pulling a boat closer or kicking a guy in the chest doesn’t automatically make it look supernatural.  It just makes me think she had a tit fall out.  Speaking of that, the fast running and fast climbing things that Edward did with Bella were some of the least convincing effects in recent memory.  Even worse than that was what they did to the entire vampire mythos: when they decided that vampires don’t walk out into the sunlight and explode into flames, they just become FABULOUS!  Turning vampires in sunlight into glittery sparklefarts pisses me off to no end.  What makes it worse is that Edward reacts to Bella saying he looks beautiful by saying “This is the skin of a killer!”  Really?  Are you sure it’s not the skin of someone who’s spent the entire night in a gay nightclub?  Not that it would matter to Bella anyway since she follows that up with “It doesn’t matter.”  That’s kind of true though; I’ve dated lots of serial murderers.  It doesn’t really matter if the love is there.  I guess about two thousand words into my review is the appropriate time to say something that wasn’t that bad in this movie, and the baseball game and final fight of the movie were somewhat interesting.  The baseball game served next to no purpose, but it was fun to watch superpowered things play baseball.  And James and Edward throwing down at the very end was kind of cool, but too little too late.

Next to the story, the worst thing about this movie is the performances.  And the worst thing about those performances was Kristen Stewart.  Every conversation in this movie was awkward and uncomfortable to watch, and Kristen Stewart was mostly the reason, as she was involved in almost every conversation.  90% of the things coming out of her mouth in this movie was some strange, stuttering, embarrassed, sigh noise that I can best express in text as “Tsh” and “Chuh”.  It’s like someone ran up to her and flashed her their dick right before she started talking so that she was flustered and confused.  Someone argued with me that this was how Bella was written, and I grant that everything else in this movie leads me to believe that Bella was a moron, but Bella was also not written into EVERY Kristen Stewart movie that I’ve seen.  She did the same thing in Adventureland and in The Runaways, and I’m pretty sure Joan Jett was more articulate than this.  It comes to a pinnacle when she’s in the hospital and Edward is talking about leaving her or something and the next 20 “words” out of her mouth are “tshchuhgahchuhgahtsh ….. guh”.  It finally stopped when I slammed my head down on my computer desk and the DVD skipped forward a few seconds.  Robert Pattinson didn’t do much to particularly anger me with his performance, but it wasn’t really good either.  I guess mediocre looks a lot better when you’re mainly acting opposite Kristen Stewart.  Probably the best part about the cast was the girls in the movie.  Nikki Reed, Anna Kendrick, Rachelle Lefevre, and that one Asian friend of Bellas were all pretty nice to look at.  Their characters weren’t interesting, but they sure were purdy.  Technically, Kristen Stewart is attractive too … right up until she talks.  Well, I use “talk” loosely there.  Ashley Greene was the best one, by far.  Not only was she the best looking, but I found her character interesting because of her precognitive abilities, and she acted it in a quirky way that I found cute.  The movie’s reaction to me finally liking one of the characters in the movie was to not have her around very often.  I did have a funny thought on Peter Facinelli as the Cullen “father”, but it was only funny to me because the way he enters when Bella is in the hospital after the car incident made me laugh and change his name to Dr. Handsome McFadden in my mind.  Taylor Lautner wasn’t in this movie very much (probably ’cause he didn’t have them abs yet), and the few times he was in the movie he made me think it was a Native American version of Jason Mewes.

I just got carpal tunnel syndrome from this review.  I hope that the next three movies will be better (or at least that I’ve released the majority of my bile), allowing the next reviews to be shorter and less hateful.  But, judging by the scores on Rotten Tomatoes for the other movies, this will most likely not be the case.  This is actually the highest rated of the four Twilight movies, and that statement just made me very nervous.  But I will go on.  The next three reviews will either be reviews of the remaining Twilight movies, or my suicide letter.  Perhaps both.  My recommendation is that no one should ever watch this movie.  My sincere hope is that no one will ever try to justify their love for this ungodly movie to me again.  At least, if they do, I have almost 3000 words prepared for why I hate it so much.  Women, I know this is a romance movie, but have a little self respect and like one that doesn’t make their heroine look like it would lose a debate to a tree stump.  You’re not required to like everything that has romance in it.  With that, I give Twilight “Well then I hope you enjoy disappointment” out of “Bella, you hit your head.  I think you’re confused.”

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!