Vampires and Werewolves 3 - Vampwolf With A Vengeance

[Scene: Jacob and Edward arguing, as per usual]

Bella: Enough! I am sick of you two fighting. From now on I am Switzerland.

Bella voiceover: Edward didn't like that.

Well of course not. Who does like it when their girlfriend comes out as a small European country made of clocks and chocolate. In front of their rival, no less. It's just embarrassing.

Anyway, Twilight 3, or Eclipse as it is also known to some die-hard fans, is a bit of a disappointment. Not because I was expecting anything in particular, but because it actually had a believable punt at being a proper film.

Yes, there was lots of gratuitous exposure of Taylor Lautner, at which someone gave an audible gasp sending the entire audience into hysterics. And the vampires are getting more unconvincingly vampirey as the series goes along, as if nobody has told them that much makeup is bad for the skin. And the message it send out to young women is morally dubious in the extreme.

But it wasn't wall to wall hilarity a la New Moon, or amusingly awful like Twilight. Worryingly it had something approaching a plot, several hints that were suspiciously close to character development, and a couple of apparently deliberate comic moments. The rest of it was a bit mawkish and trite, but neither in an hilariously OTT way nor a manner so slow paced and cloying as to be unwatchable.

Something verging on an average film is not what I signed up for, frankly, so they had better sort it out in time for the next one. (Which I am told they are splitting into two parts. That JK Rowling's got a lot to answer for... OK, they'd better sort it out in time for the next two.) I will not stay the course for the mesmerizing sheen of their shiny shiny teeth alone! I want at least one tortured, cliche-ridden monologue from R-Patz and I demand some terrible acting from somewhere - Kristen Stewart seems like the most obvious choice given her character is the most two dimensional creation since Mickey Mouse.

Taylor Lautner, meanwhile, should carry on as is. He has easily the best lines in this film, and possesses the makings of some kind of accidental comic genius. Is he self-aware? Don't care. Keep up the good work.


PS See Charlie Brooker or The R-Patz Factz for a less disillusioned take on the franchise.

'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.