Skykid wrote:
what the fuck is wrong with kids today? What happened to all the heroes? The first Twilight was so appallingly bad in every sense
I'm going to try and not go into full-on rant mode, because this shit can whip me up into a near-aneurysm every time. The series is just the biggest crock of shit ever made. I was/still am an old grump with regards to the Harry Potter craze ("Back in my day, we read Lord of the Rings for our epic fantasy, and we liked the fact that the first book was sprawling mess that could understandably make you skip the much better second and third volumes") but that at least seems to be created by something of a storyteller. The Twilight franchise, on the other hand, is the product of an imbecile.
What fires me up the most is the perversion of the literary/film character of the vampire. The western concept of the vampire was pretty much created by Brahm Stoker in "Dracula," where he set forth some of the basic rules for how a vampire lives, its weaknesses, etc. Anne Rice twisted things around enough with her weird Gothic romance take on the creature, where the books were often one Fabio short of a straight-up romance novel, but at least she kept the conventions established by Stoker. Hell, even Buffy managed to be fairly creative while still working within the boundaries of the creature. That hack Stephanie Meyer, on the other hand, completely threw away the rules for her 'vampires', and there doesn't even seem to have been a good reason for doing so, other than it would complicate some of her shitty stabs at romance if everything had to happen in the dark or at night. They
glitter in the sunlight?
REALLY?Look at it this way: Superman as a character is defined by some very specific characteristics. He's of alien origin and gets energy from the sun, is weak against Kryptonite, can fly (that one's a bit more contentious, but still), his secret identity is Clark Kent, etc. Change any of these fundamental properties, and he ceases being Superman. Now, one could obviously argue off into the whole comic book tangent that you could indeed change these for the sake of a spinoff or non-canon story, etc., which is true, but that's not what I'm talking about. What if, from this day forward, all instances of Superman in fiction changed his origins to that of a normal human who was the victim of a tragic radioactive accident and thus gained his powers? That's a huge and fundamental alteration.
It doesn't help that the Twilight movies are populated by some of the most hideous fucking CHUDs ever to invade Hollywood. The actress makes the adjective "homely" seem like something you'd use for Marilyn Monroe, and she's got the same stupid "I'm bitchy/sexy" half-sneer on her face in EVERY SINGLE picture ever taken of her--even for the poster of that terrible film where she played Joan Jett! And the leading man has eyes like he's perma-baked and hair like he just crawled out from under a bridge after wrestling another hobo for the guy's wool socks and last can of beans. You can practically see the grease! My wife (who professes that the books and movies are trashy but at the same time has read all of them and insists on seeing every movie with her friends when it comes out) described some of his shirtless scenes in New Moon as "Remember in E.T., when the government caught him and put him in the coffin-thing, where he was all pale and emaciated? It was like that."
And all these vapid kids are going to grow up thinking Count Dracula is some comical figure who vants to suck your blahd and that this terrible shit is real literatures and real vampires and have no idea what the fuck "Nosferatu" is or who the hell Bela Lugosi was and maybe if we're lucky they'll know that Coppola did a sub-par adaptation of "Dracula" and
*huff, puff*
--------------------------
So I watched Goddard's "Alphaville" the other day, which was my first experience with French New Wave. It hasn't aged terribly well, visually, but was still wonderfully enjoyable on the strength of its originality. The combination of pulp sensibilities in a 1984-esque world of paranoid conformity still managed to feel wonderfully fresh. By the end I was pleased with the way the movie's world unfolded: I didn't get what the hell the scary gravel voice was about right at the start or why people acted like such zombies, but all this was explained in time to the main character, and I felt like I was discovering it along with him--always a tough balance to strike with movie exposition. Very enjoyable.