NEW MOON is two hours plus of Bella (Kristen Stewart) resisting kissing another guy other than Edward (Robert Pattinson). The story requires her to act ashamed or withdrawn time and time again, and when she makes a “suicide attempt” you want to smack your forehead. This time Jacob (Taylor Lautner) wants to be her hunky caretaker, and if you’ve read the book, you probably know before I did that he has a secret that makes him, you know, the opposite of Edward. Why do these guys feel so protective over this very sulky girl?
For reasons explained later, Edward deserts from the town Forks to fulfill an obligation, thus, breaking Bella’s heart in what is one of the few good dialogue scenes. He reappears in a mist, an awful repetitive special effect, and Bella of course can’t figure out by the fifth time that he’s not really there – it’s only a mist! And when you talk back to the mist it appears to others that you are really talking to yourself!
At the risk of sounding presumptuous I am starting to really get tired of Kristen Stewart who seems to be twitching her eyebrows (in despair? in self-pity? in angst?) through every damn scene in the movie. Has she made a movie yet where she doesn’t bring her bag of moody facial tics to the screen? In the first movie it made sense that her character arrives to a new town, not knowing anybody, afraid that she wasn’t going to fit in, etc. But even surrounded by a crowd of friends on her birthday she does the eyebrow twitching thing, and the sulky thing with her mouth.
A year ago I actually wrote a marginal positive review for the first “Twilight” which I liked on the grounds of using the vampire context as a metaphor for the subculture of high school outsiders. Following the early scenes, Bella and everyone else stops going to school. What you get is never-ending soap opera-ish scenes of boys and girls having trouble expressing their feelings for each other. Is there anything more dull than observing the indecisiveness of a girl like Kristen Stewart, eh, Bella? Jacob is told by Bella that he is beautiful. Which leads to one close call in surrendering inhibitions: a near-kiss interrupted by a ringing telephone.
We also get a scene of Bella inviting trouble to herself by hopping on the back of a motorcycle with a local hoodlum, assuming that Edward will return to save her, but only negatively reaffirms that she is willing to put herself in a vulnerable situation where she can be attacked. Not just by one hoodlum but by a gang of them. Never mind. I’ll leave that one alone. But I will mention that yeah, Edward’s mist shows up.
Yes, I liked the original “Twilight” but a little of this goes a long way, and anymore of this stuff is vaporous. Are we really fooling ourselves by branding this is anything more than a Tween Vampire Flick? I am left thankful that, praise the Lord for some sophistication, Chan-wook Park’s “Thirst” and Tomas Alfredson’s “Let the Right One In” have delivered potent vampire thrills in recent times.
GRADE: D+
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