'Why Are You Apologising For Bleeding?' And Other Salient Points

I just saw New Moon, against my better judgement and the counsel of my elders ("that's three hours of your life you will never get back," my boss informed me darkly when I mentioned this was included in what I intended to do with my weekend off.).

When you go into a cinema expecting absolutely nothing, and have spent the trailers wondering whether in fact this was a terrible idea and how feasible it would be to bail, it’s quite hard for things to get worse. And fortunately, New Moon is more of the same old shite that Twilight was, but much funnier.

R-Pattz, as we surely all gleaned from the adverts, loves Bella so much that he dumps her and flees the country, thinking she’ll be safer that way – not least cuz his brother keeps trying to eat her at all their family gatherings. Awkward.

You might think she’d notice something amiss after he bursts into tears at the prospect of giving her a birthday kiss, but apparently she sees this as normal behaviour. Maybe it is for vampires, I dunno. Anyhoo, a most excellent emo montage ensues, as she sits in the same chair for three months with the camera panning around her as the seasons change outside. One imagines this was the most succinct way they could find of covering an estimated third of Meyer’s book… Correct me if you know this to be wrong (e.g. you know it to be more like half).

Out of the narrative necessity of a blockbusting film including more than a pouty girl sitting in a chair for two hours, Bella then discovers that whenever she puts herself in danger, R-Pattz appears as a floating head giving helpful advice like "aw no, don’t do that." So naturally she decides to take up biking - the most dangerous of all the sports - in order to see the floating head of Edward Cullen more often. To do this she must enlist the mechanical aid of her childhood friend Jacob – the now buffity buff buff Taylor Lautner you’ve seen on the posters. He’s put on five stone of pure muscle, one of which is just on his neck. Naturally the film makers want to show this off at any cost, and one of the funniest scenes I have ever seen in a film is when she wangs her head off a rock and he rips off his t-shirt to wipe the blood from her tender face. It’s not gratuitous nudity, incidentally, there is simply NO OTHER WAY TO STEM THE BLEEDING.

My other favourite part is when R-Pattz thinks Bella is dead (echoing a tenuous Romeo and Juliet theme that runs throughout), and crushes his mobile phone in sheer grief before heading off out to annoy the king of the vampires into killing him. It was fucking heart wrenching – there was not a dry eye in the house. By which I mean we were not the only ones killing ourselves laughing.

So, in summary: buff werewolves (so buff, in fact, that one of my companion’s contact lenses popped out in apparent protest at said buffness) show up mopey vampires (God knows I'm not immune to the charms of the skinny white man but you do not want to be looking at the torso of R-Pattz after all the wolf tiemz, he looks like an extra from Trainspotting), but very little actually happens. For hours.

Kind of what you'd expect, really.