BEASTLY- Review

So soon after Red Riding Hood, I find myself delving back into the Twilight zone for another teen-oriented, romantically updated fairytale. On paper, Beastly reads like a TV movie version of the story of Beauty and the Beast. Alex Pettyfer is the Beast, Vanessa Hudgens is the Beauty, and Neil Patrick Harris and Lisa Gay Hamilton round out the cast as the candlestick and the clock.

The Beast in this case is Kyle Kingson, an infuriatingly obnoxious little scrote who's supposed to have gotten the position of Green Party President at high school by sheer attractiveness. This provokes the wrath of conveniently placed Goth-y witch-type Kendra, and she curses Kyle with a spell that uglies him up. If he can't break the spell in a year, he'll look that way forever, and his only hope is the love of troubled teen Lindy.

On balance, it's not quite as shallow as it sounds. Except for the character of Kyle, who is exactly as shallow as he sounds, making him very difficult to root for him. Don't forget that Alex Pettyfer, lately of sci-fi Twilight surrogate I Am Number Four, is not the best of actors. The idea he could get elected to any role through his charisma is laughable, cos there's really none of it to be had. Wisely, the film soon buries him under some ugly make-up, which almost serves as a prosthesis for him to act properly.

Pettyfer isn't the only one who struggles, mind. You see Neil Patrick Harris floundering here as the comic relief, despite the fact there's nothing wrong with his delivery- just the dialogue he's given. The script, written by director Daniel Barnz, is pretty puny. There's no new ground to be broken by another film in the Twilight mold, and despite how recently Stephanie Meyer's books came around, it feels like we've had hundreds of them already. The weird thing is how much the film has to stretch itself to update the fairytale to a modern high school setting. Even Red Riding Hood had similar problems in a period setting, and arguably, Beastly has more work to do.

Those familiar with the story, through Disney or wherever, know that the cursed Beast was once a handsome and wealthy guy who still lives in a big castle, now transformed into a self-imposed prison. Belle, the titular Beauty, has to stay in said castle with him, and the reason why differs between adaptations. For Beastly, the castle is a penthouse apartment, and the reason for Lindy's house arrest there comes down to a contrived and ill-explained sub-plot involving her father and some criminals.

This eventually works itself into a substantial plothole, but one that you're not supposed to look too deeply into because it's just a fluffy teen romance. I'm all for films that appeal to an under-served demographic, but this one still feels slack, and somehow rushed. That's especially weird because of how the film was pushed back from last summer to avoid clashing with Zac Efron's Charlie St. Cloud. You know what though, it was still more enjoyable than Twilight.

Yeah, there are more unintentional laughs in Twilight, but there are also a metric fuckton of things that are wrong with the story and characters, particularly the character of baked potato-brained reader surrogate Bella Swan. Aside from a general sense of moneyed superficiality about Kyle that lasts all the way through his learning curve, there's little in this film that could either piss me off or send a bad message to the target audience. And it didn't leave me totally indifferent either- I doubt I'll remember it come the end of the year, but it's pretty harmless and pacifying. It could have gone darker and been a better film, but then it would cease to serve its purpose.

I can't deny that I expected Beastly to be one of those self-reviewing films where the title says it all. Instead, I was surprised to find Vanessa Hudgens taking that role when she first sees the fugly version of our leading titamaboob and lovingly proclaims "I've seen worse". The script isn't up to much, as you can see, but I appreciate that it's certainly more comfortable in itself than its main competitor at the moment, Red Riding Hood. Although I can only declare that I personally didn't enjoy the film much, I can still see it going over pretty well with the target audience.

Beastly is released in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.
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If you've seen Beastly, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

RED RIDING HOOD- Review

I think the record will show I've haven't ever been overwhelmingly negative about Twilight in the past. Yeah, it's not very good, but there are certainly worse films out there, and I find it harder to dislike the films than to dislike the hype and fanaticism the stories inspire. In the hiatus before the next film, due in cinemas this November, we're seeing a number of films hoping to replicate that hype and fanaticism.

Red Riding Hood takes a fairytale and tries to apply it with the formula of the Twilight films, bringing the first film's director, Catherine Hardwicke, in to do it. The girl in the hood is Valerie, whose affections are torn between the blacksmith with whom she has an impending arranged marriage, and her childhood friend, a woodcutter. More pressingly though, her small township has been plagued by werewolf attacks for generations, and with the rise of a blood moon comes the puritanical and violent Father Solomon, who pledges to kill the big bad wolf.

At a 12A certificate, you probably have a decent idea of what to expect from Red Riding Hood- some romantic monster angst aimed at pre-teens and packaged without any naughty words, sex or violence. What sets this apart is that it actually kept in one out of three, and used it as a boon. It's unfortunate that the violence is still excised, making for largely bloodless onslaughts by this big ravenous beastie. No naughty words either, so what remains is sex, or at least some heavy sensuality, which immediately places it on a slightly more mature level than Twilight.

Amanda Seyfried plays Valerie- my my, what big eyes she has- as a sexually liberated young woman who's naturally ahead of her time so the teenage audience won't get confused. Valerie's not the biggest anachronism in the film, mind- that's the diegetic use of the pop-y soundtrack at a celebration that takes place in the 17th century at the latest. I didn't hate this film, but it's in moments like that that I realised its head isn't entirely screwed on right. But the way that her uncommon personality (for the time, anyway) plays into the plot is related to how anyone in her hometown could be the werewolf, and she comes under suspicion in a manner that can be related to the Salem witch hunts.

Valerie's promiscuity could be what gives her potential suitors wood, but I'd argue that Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons are quite wooden enough in their acting without the comely Seyfried on hand. The pair have one major scene together, which is framed against a backdrop of a log cabin- there has never been so much woodenness on-screen in a single scene as each of them struggles over their angsty and supposed testosterone-laden dialogue. Fernandez and Irons are leading men even more teaky than Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner- an incredible feat, so this film has that going for it over Twilight as well.

To square off against the earnest performance by Seyfried then, we have Gary Oldman, and thank heavens for that. The brilliance of Oldman is that recent years have shown his great capabilities with understated performances like his Commissioner Gordon, but he's still able to carry off some spectacular overacting. His Father Solomon appears to have wandered in from another film, but in a way that actually reveals the film as a piece of high camp. What's good about that is it feels like only Oldman and we, the audience, have picked up on this.

However, there's only so far you can carry camp when you don't know you're making camp, and for the large part, Red Riding Hood doesn't hold together. The Salem witch hunt parallels are intriguing, but because it's a story based on Little Red Riding Hood, these parallels serve to distract from what the film is building towards, which is the mystery of the werewolf's identity. If you're keeping an eye on that while Valerie's integrity and virtue is being interrogated, you realise there's only about two feasible culprits, so the half-hearted attempts at red herrings come off as just that- half-hearted. As a result, the plot twist and ending are harried and, frankly, piss-poor.

Weirdly, the production design seems to have been done by somebody with a cactus fetish, as spiky little spines seem to protrude from every single surface in the film. The buildings, the trees, the bannisters; they all look like they'd do Gary Oldman an injury with all that scenery chewing he's doing. The perpetual snow does little to soften it, and nor do the swooping establishing shots, which I now associate more with Twilight, by their overuse, than with The Lord of the Rings.

There's not a tranny wolf in sight in Red Riding Hood, which takes a well-known tale and spills it into the Twilight mold. Comparable to the upcoming Beastly, it makes a decent approach even if the dreadful script prevents it from landing. So I can't say it's effective in the way the filmmakers would hope, but it did give me a fair bit of entertainment, via Gary Oldman's bravura histrionics, and it also has buckets of unintentional hilarity. It fizzles when it's supposed to smoulder. It's a wildly uneven, castrated teen romance and it's too-cool-for-the-room in a way that means I can't even recommend it for the inadvertent yuks.

Red Riding Hood is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Red Riding Hood, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

I AM NUMBER FOUR- Review

Here's one that's real difficult to write about. It's not a case of hating it for producer and twatbag Michael Bay's involvement, because I recognise that Bay can be said to have a technical aptitude for filmmaking. What makes I Am Number Four such an unsavoury spectacle is that its genesis is entirely what I would previously have imagined the genesis of a Michael Bay project to be- the product of an assembly line.

As to the story, this Twi-lite fantasy flick follows Number Four, one of nine aliens who survived a planetary holocaust in another solar system and fled from the genocidal Mogadorians to Earth. Outright stealing the Doctor's alias, he styles himself as John Smith, a high school student in small-town America. With the Mogadorians on his tail, it emerges that they're killing off the aliens in order, and three have died already, leaving Number Four next in line.

Look, the story behind the book this was based on can be found on other sites, so I'm not going to recap it and overwhelm my review of the film. However, I recommend that you read about the controversy behind this film because it informs the level of suckiness on which it operates. As I've said, it's Twilight-lite, which means that it's something so insubstantial that it's almost ethereal. It more or less flips around the premise 180 degrees- a boy has supernatural powers, a bored small-town girl falls in love, but this time the boy is our hero.

Presumably, the idea is to try and get the insensible target audience for most of Michael Bay's films, 14 year old boys, to go and see a film that is like Twilight, which in turn appeals to Twilight fans, and thus results in huge profit. Whether or not it will work remains to be seen, but it is nevertheless a product of shameless mathematics, rather than anything even resembling imagination. The various elements are not trans-generic, but intertextual- there is literally nothing in here that is not from another text, but names have been changed to protect the unoriginal bastards peddling it.

Bay's gaze is so fixated on sequels, and on box office success, and on replicating the successful formula of other films, that it is impossible to engage with it. I mention Bay and not director DJ Caruso because there was a long period where Bay was attached to direct this thing. It shows, and it's a shame that Caruso, who previously made the noirish and intriguing The Salton Sea, has devolved into a director for hire. There's no room for much of anything creative, because everybody involved is complicit with the formula.

For their part, the cast do alright- there are no casting gaffes as monumentally shit as Shia LaBeouf or Megan Fox, but they're all in stock roles. Alex Pettyfer is the incredibly athletic and dreamy guy who somehow still gets bullied because he's new at school. Dianna Agron is the cute girl who, in this case, is a little bit stalk-y in her amateur photography pursuits. Timothy Olyphant is Henri (Wan Kenobi), a mentor character for whom the only surprise is whether or not he'll turn out to be the traitor behind it all or the guy who sacrifices himself so Number Four can win the day. Kevin Durand is a goddamn skinhead in a trenchcoat. That's what we're dealing with.

And for all of its predictability, it's deceptively difficult to follow. I get that Number Four's goal is to avoid being stabbed up by Mogadorians, but the world building becomes so convoluted, so intent on dangling loose threads for a sequel hook, that it becomes incomprehensible. When it turns into the Transformers patented action clusterfuck in the final act, the only discernible goal remains "don't get killed". Quite an elementary quest in a fantasy film, right?

At least in other franchise non-starters, there was more self-containment. They bothered to tell stories that established the world and left their unrequited sequel hooks to the final shots. I Am Number Four builds a world with its sequel hooks, because it's so bland and forgettable that it's counting on becoming a massive movie series just so it has some continued significance once the credits start rolling. The film is one that's looking forward to its own ending so it can make some money. I was just looking forward to it ending.

I Am Number Four is now showing in cinemas nationwide,
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If you've seen I Am Number Four, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

The Quickening- VAMPIRES SUCK

UPDATE: You can read my more discursive and rational review of this film on Den of Geek.

Masters of un-funny Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg set their sights on Twilight with Vampires Suck, their latest so-called comedy. Becca Crane moves to the sleepy town of Sporks and finds herself torn between two men- sparkling vampire Edward, whose commitment issues stem from his bloodsucking family trying to eat his prospective girlfriends, and his dogged rival for her affections, Jacob. Hilarity ensues on a rollercoaster through pop-culture and teenage vampire relationships.

Oh, I should probably mention at this point in the review that Vampires Suck is utter dog shit. Surprise!

In all honesty, there's a more full review that I wrote for Den of Geek coming online in the next few days. I'll link to that review then, because there's no different way to phrase how crap this film is. Here are some pictures, with a brief explanation of my position. It's a piss-take of this...

... from the guys who gave you this...

... and this...

... and it looks like this.

Does any of that look or sound appealing to you? It's the film that finally made me abandon my work ethic with reviews and go for picture-based lols over actual analysis and opinion. Why? Because they didn't bother to make any effort making this distended YouTube video that's somehow making it into cinemas come Friday. Why the Mormon-bashing fuck would I bother to write a thousand words telling you why it's comfortably the worst film of 2010? It's such a ringer for that position that it's not even worth the cyberspace this post is taking up. Friedberg and Seltzer have somehow made a spoof that's less funny than actually watching Twilight or New Moon. Jings!

It's a film that almost defies reasonable analysis, like monkeys throwing their faeces at psychologists trying to find Rorschach patterns in the splatter. Once again, for the cheap seats, DO NOT GO AND SEE VAMPIRES SUCK. For the love of sweet Buddy Christ, enough is enough. If you do see Vampires Suck, don't bother coming and telling me, because this is what you'll get...

2007- I just saw Epic Movie. Yes, that is blood.

For Den of Geek, I'll force myself to be reasonable. For my own blog, where I'm allowed to vent about shit that made me physically sick, this is what you get. Fuck this movie.

Vampires Suck is infecting cinemas from Friday. Don't you dare go and see it.

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If you've seen Vampires Suck, I refer you to the previous graphic. Don't worry- tomorrow we'll have a totally rational review of one of the five best films of 2010 so far. I just need to calm down.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Don't Look Directly At It- ECLIPSE Review

As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion here- others are available. While I won't be going out of my way to spoil deliberately, there will be more SPOILERS herein than usual. it's only minor stuff, but if you don't want to see the film without knowing anything about it, don't read this review until after you've seen it. You have been warned.

If you're not caught up with the Twilight series at this stage, or my thoughts on it, you might like to go back and read my reviews of Twilight and New Moon. If you're still with me, you probably know where we stand with Eclipse. As graduation approaches for Bella Swan, she sets a date for her vampiric beau Edward to turn her into a vampire. But as a bunch of serial killings by newborn vampires reveal a sinister plot, an old enemy threatens to tear Bella and Edward's family apart.

You're here for one thing if you know my previous form on this series, and that's to see me take the piss out of this film. There are certain expectations of my reviews that are all too easy to meet in a series like this. For starters, if Bella was a codependent mess in New Moon, she's a manipulative attention whore in this one. The love triangle from New Moon, seemingly resolved when she chose Edward the vampire's sparkling over Jacob the werewolf's robust and puppy-like devotion, spills over here simply by her prolonging it.

You can bandy around epithets like "prick-tease" and sound like you hate women, but it's just a matter of hating Bella. Moreover, she's still so selfish and introspective that she can't account for any of her more normal loved ones beyond saying "I'll think of something" when asked how they'll deal with her new lifestyle. There's a scene when one of her fellow students gives a speech about kids being asked what they want to be when they grow up and saying things like "rock-star" or "princess".

Bella sits uncomfortably in that scene because it's like everyone knows that the character has just graduated from high school but she's still jumping up and down, clapping her hands and going "I wanna be a vampire and get married!" over and over. To Kristen Stewart's credit, she still hasn't been sunk by this dead weight character, but she's still slumming it in this role. Leave scripts like these to Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, who can't really make characters sympathetic either.

If this is Eclipse's biggest problem, then it doesn't bring the film down nearly as much as it did in the previous instalments. This is clearly down to a handover in direction to horror director David Slade, who ramps up the horrific elements as much as he can within the strictures of capturing the teen audience who lap this shit up. There's a palpable tension that was missing in either one of the previous Twilight films, and he finally makes a couple of moments that are dreamy rather than dreary. Hats off also to cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, for making everything look wonderful from rain-soaked city streets to snow-capped mountains, via a lot of sunlit meadows.

That last bit almost sounded positive, so I think the game is up. Bottom line is, I didn't like Eclipse, but I did think it was a much better film than I or anyone else of a sound mind had expected. It never bored me like Twilight did, and it never made me despair for humanity like New Moon. At its heart, there's still a bad story by a worse author, but Slade salvages everything he can from it to make it a more entertaining prospect than Summit has given us in the last three years. He brings tertiary characters to the fore with some interesting flashbacks that less enterprising directors might have traded up for multiple lascivious shots of Taylor Lautner's torso, and finally overcomes the hilariously bad speedy-vampire effects with a much more sensible model.

Sadly, for all of his good work, it's all too easy to believe the rumours that he was locked out of the editing suite late in production. For me, this is most obvious from the soundtrack. Record companies shift huge numbers of the soundtrack album CD and download just by virtue of the Twilight brand, but more than ever before, the selected songs are totally discordant with the action. This would benefit massively from a proper score, by a composer- you don't need John Williams, just something more tailored to the action than Florence + The Machine or Muse. The effect here is like Spielberg signing over Schindler's List to the Village People for the final sound mix.

Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner are still piss-poor actors, and the real talent like Anna Kendrick and Billy Burke are still in thankless roles, but the thrust of Eclipse is very much towards something different. The message-driven plotting of the series isn't ever going to allow sex scenes, even though fellow Kevin Smith fans would probably agree that the Chasing Amy solution would solve everyone's problems in that tent scene with the three leads. And even with Melissa Rosenberg, a scribe who actually does emoticons in her scripts, still on writing duties, the work put into this one is evident.

Is it still giving a damaging message to young women? Probably, but there's at least less of Bella being subservient to a guy who could go nuts and kill her, that unintended domestic abuse parallel that made New Moon so fucking interminable. What does get ramped up is Edward and Jacob being over-protective of Bella, at which point many of the females in the audience need to wake up and think about this. Without any allegations of being shallow, if you ever encountered this level of interference from any boyfriend in real life, you'd want to get the fuck out of that relationship. It only further reinforces Bella as a blank surrogate for female readers or viewers rather than a likable character.

Chiefly, I think I took to Eclipse because it feels like an ending. With red-headed Victoria seemingly having ran so much that she morphed into Bryce Dallas Howard, that subplot is finally brought to a conclusion. I don't need to see some of the frankly bat-shit insane stuff that happens in Stephanie Meyer's final book, and I wish they'd ended on a relative high with this one. Instead, they're proving that anything Harry Potter can do, Twilight can do worse, by splitting Breaking Dawn into two films instead of taking the chance to cut some of the crazier shit out of the 800-page book.

The problems with the so-called Twilight saga are on-going, but Eclipse manages to leave its predecessors in the shade as a much more bearable adaptation than you'd expect. If Summit had given Slade free rein and adapted the source material a little more radically, this might have been the Prisoner of Azkaban moment of the series. They didn't, so it's difficult to know who to recommend it to. It's not good enough to get skeptics to go back and endure the first two, and the fans will be going to see this one anyway. For what it is, it's a lot more ambitious than it needs to be, and there's little doubt in my mind that this will be seen as the best of the series when it finally ends.

Eclipse is showing in cinemas nationwide from July 9th.
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If and when you see Eclipse, why not share your comments on the film and/or my review below? If you think a semi-positive review is justification to go back and check out the first two films, it's really not.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Bored Shirtless

There isn't an awful lot of commenting going on on this blog anyway, but in advance, here are some popular rebuttals I won't be accepting about today's post.

1. You're not the target audience.
2. By slating a film I and millions of others like, you're stifling my individuality.
3. You're jealous of the manly abs on show.

Point 3 is particularly amusing- like saying I must hate the Super Mario Brothers because they can jump higher than I can. But as you may have garnered, I've been to see New Moon, the second film in the apparent "Twilight Saga". As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion on here- others are available. As ever, mild spoilers may occur in the process of reviewing, but never so far as to spoil any major plot developments.


So this film being everywhere at the moment, you probably know the story. Bella Swan is a high-school girl who's dating the practically-neutered vampire, Edward Cullen. At the beginning of New Moon, an altercation with Edward's brother falling off the wagon leaves Edward fearing he can't protect Bella from his blood-sucking brethren anymore. He subsequently leaves Bella in a prolific sulk and he and his family move on. Enter the newly... how do you describe someone becoming more wild? Oh, that's a good word- enter the newly bewildered Jacob Black, Bella's best friend, who's gained a supernatural hang-up of his own since becoming more integrated with his Quileute tribe of Native American werewolves. That the film takes about an hour and a half to get to this most elementary level of plot may lead you to suspect that the film ain't that great.

The truth is, I can't hate the films just because of the hype. Twilight was nowhere near as bad as the worst films of last year and New Moon isn't nearly as bad as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It's curious that it's so easy to make that comparison, given how this series has proportionately the same effect on the female filmgoer as Transformers has on the male filmgoer, and both are really nothing to write home about. And thus it would be easier to magnify the flaws of this film just to rail against it. While I'm not entirely willing to take that route, it is fairly clear that this is not the film that its more militant fans are claiming. The Mormon agenda of sexual abstinence remains at the fore throughout the film, but this is not a film that sends a good message to young women. The aforementioned sulk comes out of Bella feeling that she is worthless without a supernatural beau. Although she attends high school, she has no clear plans for the future except for going where her bloke goes. I'm no manner of feminist but that, to me, seems pretty bad.


So the next thing Bella does is go out and become an adrenaline junkie, undertaking reckless activities because they give her hallucinations of her departed ex, staring blankly and warning her to stop. I'm not a doctor either, but that also seems bad. I'm actually pretty sure that counts as some kind of schizophrenia. In the course of that, she grows closer to Jacob, which I presume has nothing to do with the fact that Taylor Lautner has spent most of his time since the last film in the gym, and not enough learning to act. While Kristen Stewart is a very capable actress with limited material, Lautner's idea of intensity, coupled with his canine nature, put me in mind of Dug the talking dog from Up. He could feasibly have pounced Bella at any moment and said "I have just met you, and I love you!" Even more goofy is the necessary adoption of Stephanie Meyer's self-masturbatory notion that these buff young men must wander around shirtless and wearing jean-shorts, making the tribe look like a werewolf boy-band. I hear they do a mean cover of "Bad Moon Rising".

With all this shirtless nonsense going on, there's little screentime for the female audience's pale and wooden idol Robert Pattinson. Edward's going-away is the impetus for the whole plot, so we're mercifully spared most of the Hayden Christensen School of Acting. He was an unproven actor before this, and he remains unproven. And worse, he occasionally does this tic when he's acting like he's in pain that's more akin to someone spontaneously ejaculating- where was Andy Samberg in this film? That's not to drub all of the cast- as I've said many times, Kristen Stewart is a remarkable actress who makes the best of what paltry amount of character development she's given. She's more watchable than any character as two-dimensional as Bella has any real right to be, carrying the film through much of its stultifying running time. Things only really kick into gear in the last half an hour, much like the first film, but with much more promising results.


For the last half hour is when the Volturi show up. The Volturi are vampire royalty based in Italy, and they're headed by Michael Sheen! Michael Sheen! Brilliant actor, and utterly brilliant in this as Aro, a kind of vampiric Tony Blair with no regard for human life. And he's in the film for... all of ten minutes. That, for me, was New Moon's biggest crime. For all of the angst and aimless wandering, there was nothing worse than seeing this character and this performance wasted in the way it was. Similarly, Dakota Fanning turns in her only performance to date that didn't make me cringe as a young but scarily powerful vampire charged with enforcing the family's will. The worst thing about their negligible screentime is that I'll actually look forward to more Volturi in the two films that are left to go, and I suspect they'll receive little prominence. Still, you can't judge these things sight unseen, and that was enough to get me in the cinema to see New Moon.

I've already said I didn't hate the film, but neither is it very good. While its predecessor was an indie film, Twilight also paid for most of Summit Entertainment's output for the next two years, and the glossy blockbuster look and marketing campaign for New Moon jars slightly. It's not an action film, nor should it be. Director Chris Weitz does bring more CGI eye-candy to proceedings than Catherine Hardwicke did, and the fight scenes that are included are a marked improvement upon what has come before. But that can't justify the film as what it seems to have become. It's a fantasy romance and it didn't seem comfortable as a low-budget indie film, nor does it entirely fit into the blockbuster mould. David Slade is taking the helm for the next film, due out in July, and with his credits I can imagine the film changing again, taking more of a horror slant. This kind of inconsistency can't really be good for a series that has weak source material to begin with, especially as screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg has resolutely plowed through two helm changes without changing her approach by one iota- "I'm not some car you can fix up, I'm never gonna run right" sounds more like a bad song lyric than a credible piece of dialogue.


The acting is largely wooden, the writing is vanilla and uninspired, and they still haven't got the tone down, but New Moon isn't any worse than its predecessor. It's definitely not going to convert anyone who doesn't like the series, to whom this will still be the film about the werewolf boy-band and their mortal enemies, the sparkly vampires. But I can honestly say I was expecting a lot worse. The fans of the books seem to enjoy the films, and fair play to them, but they could really hope for something better. The film's ending best summarises the polarising nature of this series- it's a cliffhanger that made several people in the cinema squeal in delight and everyone else rush for the exit. It's not out-and-out bad, but we're halfway through the planned four films and it looks doubtful this series will leave any lasting impression after it's over.

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I certainly feel I've given much harsher reviews than that, but the day the Twilight series really gets me to sit up and pay attention will be the day it takes the central love affair a lot less seriously. I wish half the people who go to see New Moon would go to see An Education, a film that deals with the intensity of first love, and the loss of that love, with much more aptitude than Stephanie Meyer could ever muster. Still, if you've seen the film, and want to share your thoughts without telling me I'm out-and-out wrong, why not comment below?

Next up, it's coming up to Christmas, so I'll finally be taking a look at Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol and giving that a critique, as well as talking about various other festive films.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Vampires- Why Do They Suck Lately?

Let's for the sake of an intro assume that you have never heard of a vampire. A vampire is an undead being who survives by drinking the blood of the living. They're imbued with natural charm and good looks so as to lure in their victims, they're generally pale and have sharp fangs. Vulnerable to religiously symbolic items, sunlight, stakes through the heart, and for some reason, garlic.

Apparently, the most elaborate way of identifying them in the olden days was by sending a virgin boy riding on a virgin horse through a graveyard and watch the horse throw up when it trots by the grave. Not a genius ritual, and given the mess of horse vomit to clean up thereafter, I'd suggest looking for the other symptoms I listed instead. The modern vampire myth was born generally of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula, and there have been countless films, television series and books featuring these creatures of the night ever since.

HOW CAN YOU GO WRONG WITH A PREMISE LIKE THAT?!

I'll tell you how! By generally beating the shit out of the idea over the course of so many years that vampires just aren't cool anymore. Most of these producers that claim to have a visionary new outlook on the vampire myth are talking out of their arse. What's prompted this rant is the particularly frequent shitting upon the idea from a great height recently, and also the over-powering urge to have a rant about one of the biggest afflictions upon teenage culture in the 21st century.

Yes, of course, I refer to Twilight. Or The Twilight Saga, as the probably-not-very-popular-when-she-was-at-high-school Stephanie Meyer and the profiteering Summit Entertainment would have it. Again, for those unfamiliar, here is Bullshit 101. Twilight is the story of a vampire's relationship with a human girl in a small town in America. Said vampire, Edward Cullen, is... well, he's supposed to be a perfect character. Converted at the age of 17, he's going through high school over and over again for no real reason other than to be admired by the female populace from afar, given how he's decided to abstain from drinking human blood. The latter is used as a metaphor for sexual abstinence, which brings some tension to the relationship he starts with Bella Swan (the biggest Mary-Sue in recorded history), who has all the charisma and sympathy value of a baked potato.

There have been four books to date, the first of which, if the film is anything to go by, centres largely around Edward and Bella getting together. Indeed, besides a few mentions of how repressed and lonely Edward's been until he decided he liked the smell of Bella, (not a joke, this is really why he likes her) they don't really play on the vampire angle until the end of the film when some obligatory baddies come in, apparently from nowhere. And teenage girls love this shit. They lap it up.

So yeah, that's a quick summation of my thoughts on the story and general approach, but let's have a look at how Stephanie Meyer has fucked up vampires. First and foremost, vampires stay out of the sunlight for a different reason in this story. Rather than being scorched alive because the sun is emblematic of holiness or whatever, a scene midway through Twilight reveals that the skin of vampires apparently sparkles when exposed to sunlight. Wait, WHAT? That's the lamest thing I've ever heard, and I've heard some DOOZIES in my time. Secondly, Edward is apparently more human on the virtue of his being a "vegetarian". Oh, he and his family still drink blood, but only from animals. Sorry, but that still makes you an undead parasite. Very anthropocentric- I'm at least reassured that the "I'm a vegan and if you're ok with that, I'll argue with you anyway" caste of teenage girls probably don't like that about this series, even though they seem to make up the target audience.

Finally, with Bella being as apparently perfect as Edward- see how she's instantly loved by everyone at her new school, contravening every social convention in existence- I'm still halfway convinced that vampires were just shoehorned into Meyer's masturbatory sub-Mills and Boon story just to make it interesting. Instead, it just made vampires boring. The success of Twilight means it's likely we'll see vampires being characterised the same in future films, because it's a formula that's proven to make big bucks at the box office. And sadly the sequel is due in November this year, and the third in July 2010, having hastily had a "The Twilight Saga" label slapped on as a prefix to their titles to cash in. The cash cow will hopefully be put down in a few years, or perhaps "sucked dry" would be a more appropriate metaphor, because this series does suck.

As much as I've laboured to make a point about the contradictory nature of Edward as a vampire who doesn't feast on humans, it brings me nicely to Being Human, an absolutely brilliant series aired by BBC Three earlier this year about the lives of three housemates in Bristol- a werewolf who's actually quite nerdy and mild-mannered for 27 days of the month, a ghost who's pining after her still-living fiancee and perhaps most importantly to this post, a vampire who's abstaining from blood-drinking. All blood-drinking.

Yes, it wears him down to the level where he's perhaps not as able to do all the usual things that come with super-vampire powers, but he's fine with that. And more importantly, the show always portrays vampires, even our protagonist Mitchell, as parasites. Although Mitchell is possessed of the natural charm and good looks that enable vampires to capture their prey, the weaning off blood is very much a parallel with trying to get off drugs. It's odd how Mitchell's sex life being strangulated due to his fear of relapsing is a far more accurate representation of how a teenager would feel about such abstinence than Edward Cullen is, given how the latter is in fact, teenaged.

Elsewhere, the head of the vampires is Herrick, a pudgy-looking and, on the surface, quite friendly police officer. The first episode finds him doing magic tricks for elderly hospital patients, of all things. But underneath all that, he has that really creepy lord of all darkness thing going on. It's a wonderful use of the mundane being made scary, and that's what makes Herrick so effective as a character- the contrast between someone like that being head vampire, and between someone like Bill Nighy's Victor in the Underworld films. The first series' arc saw Herrick co-ordinating a world vampire revolution, from Bristol of all places, and trying to bring Mitchell back over to the side he's been on for about 90 years. Herrick makes one of the most menacing and brilliant villains on telly in a long time, and he dominates every scene he's in.

I do feel bad for covering Being Human in an blog about vampires because it means I'm naturally going to neglect the representation of werewolves and ghosts, both of which are also done splendidly by writer Toby Whithouse. But if you feel I haven't quite explained what's so good about it, just go and watch it on DVD or Blu-ray! Thank me later! The series is one I would recommend to absolutely any vampire fan seeking an antidote to Twilight, but just to sweeten the deal, there's one other recent film I saw after I had the idea for this blog, but a film that is absolutely essential to mention now that I have seen it.

I refer of course to the Swedish vampire film, Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In). You can forget your Twilight, your Underworld and your Count von Count. This film has one of the best screen vampires I've ever seen and she's a twelve year old girl. This is Eli, the new next door neighbour of a bullied and subdued young boy called Oskar. He's oddly enamoured of this peculiar young girl who he only sees at night, in the play area outside their housing estate, and it's through her that he finds revenge on his tormentors. Behind closed doors however, Håkan, the man who everyone believes to be Eli's father, is actually her very own Renfield- he protects Eli's secret by going out and murdering young men. Draining them of their blood for Eli to drink, he facilitates her survival out of utter devotion to her.

THE NEXT PARAGRAPH FEATURES MAJOR SPOILERS FOR LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

What makes Eli so creepy is not the transformation of the mundane into something more sinister a la Herrick in Being Human, but something far more subliminal. Håkan botches one attempt to gather blood for Eli near the start of the film, and in her subsequent hunger, she goes out hunting herself and kills a local man. Håkan is both worried that she'll be caught and jealous of her burgeoning friendship with Oskar, and so tries again. This time, he's caught in the act, but pours acid on his face- he can't be identified, and thus Eli stays safe.

The most chilling scene of the film soon follows, as Eli scales the wall of the hospital that Håkan is taken to, and he opens the window to let her drink him dry. She then lets him fall to his death, and never so much as mentions him again. What's disturbing is that while the very end of the film has a positive spin, with Oskar and Eli on a train, living free and together, the audience may find it difficult to shake the feeling that Håkan was once like Oskar, aging while the object of his devotion remained young. And thus as much as it's a love story between two young souls (or at least one young soul), Eli remains a parasite, and one of the creepiest order.

END SPOILERS

Creepiness aside, Let the Right One In is in equal measures creepy and thought-provoking, and the prospect of an upcoming Hollywood remake fills me with dread. Not to say that Hollywood is always in the wrong, but I can't imagine it retaining even a trace of the subtlety that Tomas Alfredson's film is so rife with. The idea of a post-Twilight US version of Let the Right One In seems like the stuff of cinematic nightmares, but as far as that goes, whatever happens, happens. The simple fact is that Let the Right One In does vampiric adolescents with a beauty and, though I shudder to use the word, magic that Stephanie Meyer and Summit Entertainment could only dream of matching in Twilight. While Being Human offers both a comedic and dramatic take on these creatures, Let the Right One In does it seriously but without the po-faced nature of Twilight.

Had enough of my Twilight bashing? Well, tough, because incongruous with the title of this blog entry and with my thoughts at the outset of writing, vampires don't suck lately- they're just utilised by sucky writers sometimes. Vampires haven't become any less inherently creepy or frightening through the romanticisation that some films and books have put them through. They're just fine when used right. Though with so much use in the media today, I suspect that they just need to be rested a little. Take them out of the spotlight, because the light will disintegrate them. Not make them fucking sparkle.

Until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch,
Mark