Movie Review – Maiming Meyer [Twilight: Eclipse]

Dark clouds have been gathering for months now. The nightmares have been growing stronger and more vivid,  as the collective unconscious has sensed a growing, menacing force on the horizon. Cinema-goers have been huddling together for safety, reverting to an instinctual sense of safety in numbers against an ominous threat.

And finally the storm broke. A message went out yesterday afternoon, through the only medium evil enough to carry it – a Facebook status update:

Going to see Twilight this evening. Come along – we’ll have frappes, hold hands & snuggle while Jacob smears Edward in baby oil. WHO’S IN?!

Context
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I’d had an awesome weekend. I spent most of Saturday with a good friend who runs a major comedy festival; chatting, drinking coffee and talking about life and the universe till late. Sunday morning I saw some of my oldest and best friends in diving, and they let me try out a closed-circuit rebreather for the first time – something I’ve been desperate to try for years now. I was feeling pretty good.

And out of nowhere, I got the idea of seeing Eclipse. And not just see Eclipse – I was going to see it in a special beanbag cinema, and I was going to drink the gayest thing you can order from a coffee shop while I did. Clearly, I’m some sort of closet masochist

Now before we go too far, I have a small disclaimer to share – before I walked into the cinema yesterday, I fully believed the entire Twilight series was a violent stain on the literary world. I would try and convince people that the films were the reason intelligent extraterrestrial life hadn’t made contact with us yet – they saw it as evidence against humanity’s advancement. In short I would have gladly have thrown Stephanie Meyer in front of a bus, then prayed that her punishment in the 8th circle of hell would be to have her own novels read back to her by Pee Wee Herman.

So why would I go and see Eclipse on a beanbag drinking a caramel frappe?

Nearly 9 years ago, a high school friend and I flew to the US a few months after September 11th. Friends and family told us not to go -”They’re crazy” “There’s so much gun crime” “It’s like Fortress America at the moment, they’re so scared of foreigners”. But we went regardless, because how can you judge something unless you’ve experienced it to the fullest? And we couldn’t just go to the US for that  - we had to spent Christmas with a fundamentalist Baptist family in Louisiana, who held hands and sang happy birthday and had a cake for Jesus on December 25th.

I shit you not

So in answer to your question – I saw Twilight for you, dear readers. Because how can I honestly review a film a) without seeing it, and b) without fully embracing the experience by turning into a squealing 12 year old girl at the same time?

And I really wanted a caramel frappe.

Review
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I’ll admit it – I walked in late. You could say it was because I was waiting for my frappe for 15 minutes (no no – Fuck you, Dome Coffee at Southlands Shopping Centre. It’s ice, caramel and coffee – what’s so fucking hard about it). You could say it was the dipshit at the ticket counter smirking at me and then putting my credit card number in by hand (Don’t try and embarass me, tiger: I’ve got 3 days stubble and wearing a Life Aquatic t-shirt. I’m not the one working at a cinema wearing a Twilight shirt for a living, you little shit stain). Ultimately, I was late because I was afraid I might walk in there and actually like it.

And like it I did

The opening, pre-title scene (the one I walked in on) is awesome – dark, well shot and tense. A young man is being stalked by something on a dock, there are flashes. Suddenly he’s struck and starts bleeding from two distinct bite marks on his hand, and falls to the ground wailing. Cut to black. Eclipse title fades in and out.

And then… Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart making out in a field of daffodils?

And unfortunately for this reviewer, Eclipse peaked in the first minute. The remaining, traumatising 123 minutes were like having director David Slade lazily punching you in the face with a dead cat. Haven’t seen any of the previous films? Too fucking bad. No attempt is made to catch new viewers up on the “story” at all. Which in retrospect is probably a deliberate choice by David Slade, since it wasn’t exactly difficult to piece it together – the douchebag who needs a suntan (and who sucks more cock than blood) and the shirt-less, motorbike riding bellend have both had their balls cut off by the empty husk, devoid of any personality whatsoever, that they all refer to “Bella”. Other vampires are coming to kill this “pretend” person to return said nads, so douchebag and bellend get their families together to protect her.

Why do they care? Why does anyone care? I don’t know, but my best guess is because Kristen Stewart looks like she could suck the Gulf of Mexico clean in a week if someone told her it tasted like fresh semen – given she has the cold, dead eyes of the whore of Babylon

I believe the term you’re looking for is “Cum Drunk”

I honestly had no idea what was going on for 90% of this film, yet at no point was I frustrated by it since I didn’t give a shit about anyone. Pasty white brunettes with a taste for man-yoghurt are very much my thing, so in fairness I should have been bashing one out over Bella right there on my beanbag – caramel frappe in one hand, my fluorescent orange pork steeple in the other. But all I could think about was how much this whole thing would be improved if Stephanie Meyer stepped on screen, apologised to humanity for creating this, then put a .38 revolver to her temple and sprayed brain-matter all over Bella. Atleast that way Kristen Stewart would have something remotely interesting about her. When Jacob declares “You can love more than one person at a time”, I honestly hoped it would cut to a tacky porn set with Bella sucking the hell out of that cold, life-less worm on Edward;while wolfboy went all “Doggy-style” on her pale pasty white pooper. THAT I would have paid $39 to see on a beanbag.

Ultimately, I just wished something interesting had happened – AT ANY POINT IN THE ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FOUR MINUTES I ENDURED WITNESSING THIS ABORTION. I just wish someone would fucking act. I was so glad they kept repeating everyone’s names too, because if they hadn’t I may have started to realise I was watching a film composed entirely of zero dimensional filler characters. Even the music was soulless, and it was here that my biggest gripe with Eclipse reared it’s head – the title track is by Metric.

Metric… Canadian indie rockers, fronted by Emily Haines – who I worship because they’re just an awesome band. A band that I have every album ever released. A band I saw live in Edinburgh last year, had my mind blown, and still have the ticket stub. Fucking Metric. The people who make Bob Dylan sound good. And it gets worse when you see the full list of soundtrack contributors – Vampire Weekend, The Black Keys, BAND OF FUCKING HORSES. These are good indie bands, and they’re down on all fours while Stephanie Meyer queefs in their face. What did they pay you? WHAT DID THE PAY YOU EMILY? What is your artistic integrity worth? What does a Mormon’s minge taste like?

Clearly, there is no god