Along with eyeliner, the heroes of New Moon share a dark, ancient secret. Could they be cursed with -- gasp! -- shirtlessness?
Twihards will be OMG, OMG, OMG. The rest of us? ROTFL.
True, last year's adaptation of the phenomenally popular novels about virginal mortal Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and brooding vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) elicited its share of guffaws.
There were the weirdo, chalk-white Cullens, who made me wonder what an all-mime season of Saved by the Bell would have looked like. And the treetop sequence in which Edward scampers about like a lip-glossed koala bear after too much eucalyptus. And the vampire baseball. And the dopiness of a bedazzled cadaver who sparkles in the sunlight.
But I overlooked, even forgave, the goofiness of Twilight and accepted it for what it was: A feverish, heartfelt extrapolation of an adolescent girl's internal monologue. Who was I to judge? Besides, flush with newfound cash and confidence, surely the sequel would be an improvement, right?
Not so fast, tweeting Twitterers. The Twilight Saga: New Moon may have upped the budget, but it still looks bafflingly cheap. It's also sillier, sloppier and stupider than its predecessor. (Example: one character decides to kill himself because of a misunderstanding over the phone. Yes, his name is Jack Tripper.)
The sequel's story picks up where we last left Bella and Edward -- in a gloomy small town in Washington state. She's still a lovesick teen. He's still a soulful, Volvo-driving bloodsucker. She still wants to lose her virginity -- I mean humanity -- to him. He's still so cool he walks in slow motion.
All is well, or at least as well as it can be when you're an asexual 108-year-old corpse destined to be in high school for eternity.
But when a drop of Bella blood sets off a frenzy at the Cullen homestead, Edward concludes she'll never be safe around him -- so he dumps her and bolts to Brazil. Bella is devastated. Not quite as upset? Her childhood friend, Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) who has a secret of his own to howl about. Could it have anything to do with those half-naked dudes he spends time with in the woods? Are they the local chapter of the Matthew McConaughey fan club? Or something even more fake-looking? (Surprise -- they're werewolves, although the dodgy digital effects make them more Pac-men then pack-men.)
While in the book -- or so I'm told -- Edward is absent during these passages, the producers understandably blanched at the prospect of too little Pattinson, so Edward instead sporadically materializes out of thin air in the classic storytelling tradition of Bat-Mite and the Great Gazoo. It's not too long before girl and vamp are reunited -- like you doubted that -- in time to clash with the cruel, blood-eyed royals known as the Volturi.
Not that it adds up to much. Instead, New Moon appears to exist solely to establish the groundwork for future episodes, leaving Weitz and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg to cling to the hope that all the buff man flesh and earnest acting will distract from the fact their film probably should have been burned at the stake.
Judging from the anticipation, they'll be successful. So who's laughing now?
