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Nov. 27th, 2008 08:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI have finally watched the sparklypoo vampire movie, the proper one, the one that Kids These Days are watching.
The movie (Twilight, based on the novel Twilight) is a fairly reasonable condensation of the book. Some of the more memorable dialogue (okay, the "Do vampires have, y'know, sex?" discussion, which I found totally hysterical) has been omitted but the thing is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the book as far as the plot goes.
I cannot blame the movie for crappy source material. That's not the fault of the movie.
I can't blame the movie for a certain amount of editing. To make a book fit into a movie, there has to be cutting going on. I can whinge about the cutting CHOICES but I can't really pick on the cutting. (Look at some of the HP movies to see what happens when there isn't enough cutting going on.)
I did not particularly like the interspersed bits of random character slayage to show us the approach of the three bad vamps. i could have done without that, entirely. It was distracting and, unless you'd read the book beforehand, made no fucking sense.
I was not in love with the zinging around on trees thing and it just looks silly to have Edward carry Bella around piggyback. Yes, I know that's what he does in the books, but it's still silly looking. It is.
Because this was a cam video instead of a DVD rip, it was fuzzy, with strange color balance and less than optimal video quality. Therefore, I can't offer an authoritative opinion about the sparklypoo skin of our vamps but it did seem to me that Edward gets a bit dramatic sometimes.
Surprisingly, I *did* like the baseball. (The vamps, they play baseball. If you haven't read the books or seen the movie, you can mentally substitute quidditch for baseball -- it's about the same thing.) They play enthusiastically and to the fullest extent possible. I did not THINK I would like the baseball, but I did. It was fun, a small island of dorky and whimsical delight in an otherwise way-too-serious film.
For an undeniably chaste film, there was a whole lot of eyefucking going on. If one is a teenaged girl who likes her angst thick enough to slice and wodge between two pieces of bread, this would probably work nicely. In my more jaded and shopworn state, though, I was split between "Aww!" and "Get over yourself." Not everything is high drama or deserving of high drama and sometimes I thought to myself that Edward was taking himself too seriously.
Vamp makeup and depiction: I didn't have a problem with that. They're vamps, they need to look vampish. So they're interestingly pale. I'm okay there. The hair choices for the guy vamps, not so sure I'd go for that but what the hell. It's not my hair. I also loved that they drove like complete assholes. I'm not in love with the speeded up video of them in vamp motion (this also bothers me in True Blood, btw.) but didn't have as much of a problem with the wire work flying. (I am a fan of modern wuxia films and therefore have an appreciation for the asthetics of wire work. I want to believe, there.)
For the record, there is absolutely no way at all to make it not look gay when a guy vamp bites a human guy. On the neck. (In the movie, we get a flashback where Carlisle (the patriarch of the vamp family to which Edward belongs) turns Edward.) Yep. If you accept that the vamp neck biting deal is a stand-in for intercourse (I think this is a pretty reasonable reading, particularly as a specific metaphor for defloration b/c you get pain, blood, penetration, loss of innocence... and it's most often done in a Worldy Guy Vamp bites Innocent Human Girl framework.), then there is no way at all to have a guy biting another guy on the neck not look gay. Plus the guy vamp bites human guy thing is all guy in other guy's personal space, which is totally wrong as a visual if you want it to look straight. I am not mentioning this as a problem, more as a rumple in the otherwise smooth fabric of this movie's chaste metaphor.
It must be said, at the end, that I like my vamps with more evil and less angst. There's no point being an immortal predator of the most dangerous game if you don't get to have any *fun* with it.
The movie (Twilight, based on the novel Twilight) is a fairly reasonable condensation of the book. Some of the more memorable dialogue (okay, the "Do vampires have, y'know, sex?" discussion, which I found totally hysterical) has been omitted but the thing is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the book as far as the plot goes.
I cannot blame the movie for crappy source material. That's not the fault of the movie.
I can't blame the movie for a certain amount of editing. To make a book fit into a movie, there has to be cutting going on. I can whinge about the cutting CHOICES but I can't really pick on the cutting. (Look at some of the HP movies to see what happens when there isn't enough cutting going on.)
I did not particularly like the interspersed bits of random character slayage to show us the approach of the three bad vamps. i could have done without that, entirely. It was distracting and, unless you'd read the book beforehand, made no fucking sense.
I was not in love with the zinging around on trees thing and it just looks silly to have Edward carry Bella around piggyback. Yes, I know that's what he does in the books, but it's still silly looking. It is.
Because this was a cam video instead of a DVD rip, it was fuzzy, with strange color balance and less than optimal video quality. Therefore, I can't offer an authoritative opinion about the sparklypoo skin of our vamps but it did seem to me that Edward gets a bit dramatic sometimes.
Surprisingly, I *did* like the baseball. (The vamps, they play baseball. If you haven't read the books or seen the movie, you can mentally substitute quidditch for baseball -- it's about the same thing.) They play enthusiastically and to the fullest extent possible. I did not THINK I would like the baseball, but I did. It was fun, a small island of dorky and whimsical delight in an otherwise way-too-serious film.
For an undeniably chaste film, there was a whole lot of eyefucking going on. If one is a teenaged girl who likes her angst thick enough to slice and wodge between two pieces of bread, this would probably work nicely. In my more jaded and shopworn state, though, I was split between "Aww!" and "Get over yourself." Not everything is high drama or deserving of high drama and sometimes I thought to myself that Edward was taking himself too seriously.
Vamp makeup and depiction: I didn't have a problem with that. They're vamps, they need to look vampish. So they're interestingly pale. I'm okay there. The hair choices for the guy vamps, not so sure I'd go for that but what the hell. It's not my hair. I also loved that they drove like complete assholes. I'm not in love with the speeded up video of them in vamp motion (this also bothers me in True Blood, btw.) but didn't have as much of a problem with the wire work flying. (I am a fan of modern wuxia films and therefore have an appreciation for the asthetics of wire work. I want to believe, there.)
For the record, there is absolutely no way at all to make it not look gay when a guy vamp bites a human guy. On the neck. (In the movie, we get a flashback where Carlisle (the patriarch of the vamp family to which Edward belongs) turns Edward.) Yep. If you accept that the vamp neck biting deal is a stand-in for intercourse (I think this is a pretty reasonable reading, particularly as a specific metaphor for defloration b/c you get pain, blood, penetration, loss of innocence... and it's most often done in a Worldy Guy Vamp bites Innocent Human Girl framework.), then there is no way at all to have a guy biting another guy on the neck not look gay. Plus the guy vamp bites human guy thing is all guy in other guy's personal space, which is totally wrong as a visual if you want it to look straight. I am not mentioning this as a problem, more as a rumple in the otherwise smooth fabric of this movie's chaste metaphor.
It must be said, at the end, that I like my vamps with more evil and less angst. There's no point being an immortal predator of the most dangerous game if you don't get to have any *fun* with it.
