If the Internet were a blindfolded kindergartener with a two by four and a lust for partially hydrogenated soybean oil, then New Moon, its stomach walls lined with the promise of cynical nectar and sarcastic sugars, is the Internet’s piñata bitch.
If you live on the internet, and if you’re any familiar of mine then stop denying it to yourself you XKCD-reading, stumble-uponing, monitor-light-paled denizen of our growing digital empire, you are honor-bound to despise this film. Even now you’re devising particularly biting tweets to assure your 32 followers that, no, you are not on Team Jacob or Team Edward because Twilight is chocked full of Gay.
However, if you’re go-against-the-flow me, you probably don’t give two This Is Its about a movie that is now more popular than the Lunar calendar event after which it is named. Instead, Lord Morgan finds his manly self impervious to the massive waves of homosexual that are apparently bombarding New Moon’s audience. Your redheaded overman is instead concerned with how little this movie actually has to try in order to be 50%-off-hookers popular. Such ravenouscity defines its fanbase that the words “taste” and “quality” bounce off its supplicants as harmlessly as STDs off of Gene Simmons, and the utter lack of pressure for anyone on the production to staff to make a “good” movie ruins the essence of filmmaking: creative growth.
But for those out there living beneath the Earth’s substrata, using Anne Rice novels to sound proof your cave walls and bombarding your mole ears with TNT re-runs of Angel and Buffy because you fear change, New Moon is based on the second entry in J.K. Rowling Jr.’s goth teen fantasy opus, Twilight. It’s about some hoe and her on-again, off-again relationship with a vamp dude for whom the phrases “brooding,” “tragic” and “glistening epidermis” have been made redundant. Then there’s this other dude who, from what I understand, was about as visible as a Key Grip in the first film that the hoe falls in love with in between Nosferatu fixes.
The characters cry and yell a lot, then the movie ends. 300 Million Billion dollar check, please.
Having never read the books (a term I only use grudgingly to works lacking literatudinal merit, but hey, at least people are reading), never seen the first movie or bothered to read any of the uncountable anti-Twihard blog posts on the subject of New Moon, I went into this a little apathetic. And honestly, New Moon’s not all that bad.
Hey, why’s my Facebook friend counter running backwards?
Really though, ignoring all the excess bile and stink of a million angry webcams crying out in terror, it’s just a boring, mostly average kind of movie. The first 30 minutes are okay because you’re trying to get a sense of the mythology, and stylistically the film really loves slow motion walking, coats and hair blowing in the wind and a lot of long shots of people looking sad. Which is, y’know, cute. Then the melo yelo drama fuel injector kicks in and I basically walk out feeling like a voluntary victim of the CW’s primetime block. All in all, it’s certainly nothing new in the realm of Really Pissing Annoying Stuff (RePAS), but I think most people are worried Twilight is a bad contribution to human culture. We’ve weathered RePAS the likes of Coldplay and NCIS, however, so I hardly think humanity is plummeting down a black hole.
What really bothered me is that for a movie that is, ostensibly, a gothic fantasy story involving vampires and angry big transforming puppies, there’s no blood sucking, very little violence and, quizzically, scant few shots of the Moon. The fantasy horror style is just some poor genre condom the film is donning to keep its tweeny ejaculate from getting in the face of a viewership that’s simply tired of the standard romance dreck.
Movie reviewers the world over have been trying to prove how cool they are by unilaterally despising this movie, but no one aside from you gorgeous individuals read movie reviews any way, and to be honest there were far, far worse films this year, mainly because those films had higher expectations. They were either a continuation of a beloved series (X-Men) or a reboot of something that used to be cool (Star Trek) or, God fricking forbid, a fresh idea (District 9).
Bluntly, the year that has seen the highest gross in movie ticket sales ever, to re-use a Morganism by popular demand, has been a big wet pile of suck. The above movies had invested in them the most important capital of any in film enjoyment, that of hope. I went into New Moon hopeless, and was, at times, not entirely disappointed, nor did I fall asleep as I did during Where The Wild Things Are or The Box. It may have left a bland taste in my mouth, but it was more flavorful than the week-old mayonnaise I’ve been swilling at the cinema all bloody year.
All that said, I feel like I’ve had to point out sexism in films a little more often this year than I’m used to (2012, The Ugly Truth, for starters), and here we go again. Perhaps it’s because I’ve finally gone all progressive and forward-thinkery enough that I’ve accepted the idea that women can not only arrange a spice rack but also build one, but New Moon makes me feel very sorry for the multiple generations of women who will grow up idealizing the relationship between hoe…I’m sorry, Bella, and Guy-Who-Should-Have-Stayed-Dead-After-Voldemort-Smoked-His-Pasty-White-Ass-In-HP4.
Bella’s entire character is defined by her lack of quote-un-quote masculine traits, her subservience to men and her inability to think for herself. She buys them food, apologizes for everything she does, has night terrors and hallucinations when her men leave (and they’re always the ones breaking up with her) and she has to stop their fights or sacrifice herself in their name. One man tells her she can’t be with the other, she has to ask another to change her into his brand of monster du jour, and they always kiss her, not her them.
Even the much celebrated pick-up truck she drives isn’t all that much of a mark of independence because when Jacob or Edward are in the car, they’re the one’s driving. I even applauded the movie for, at first, allowing Bella to move organically from one relationship to the next, movies being notorious for characters that get over relationshits instantly magically. Then, her break-up pains rapidly descend into psychotic delusions and an attempt to kill herself 2/3 of the way into the movie. Why? Because the men in her life ARE her life. Let me tell you, Ladies, for serious not for fake, you need to respect yourselves more than this movie tells you to.
Or I’ll go gay. I swear I will.
2.5/5 stars
