Today:
im scared of squirrell
I see.
I mean I really, really see. It’s perfectly understandable. Just look at this.
Scary buggers, them squirrels.
Edit: Two days later I got this one:
are there squirrels in the dominican republic
Tons of them. They practically grow on trees there. Wouldn’t go, if I were you, my Sciuridae-paranoid friend. (I’m just going to assume that this was the same person, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fun. And that’s true because I said so.)
I had no idea that chives, patron saint of all boring herbs, could be this beautiful.
Sunday. I have nothing to read. Correction: I have stuff to read, some of it is even quite intelligent, but I don’t have Eclipse. And since I fear that starting another book at this point might endanger the experiment as a whole, I shall resist Iain Banks and Guy Gavriel Kay and Jasper Fforde (I didn’t say that all of it was intelligent).
Still bored, though. So what better way to pass the time until the bookstores open on Monday than to watch Twilight on YouTube?
…
Okay, yes, I see your point. But I’m not going to do that. Or that. Sorry.
…
Where was I? Yes. I had seen Twilight: New Moon in the cinema and my experiences can be summed up with “all that glitters is not gold” – sometimes it’s a vampire. The movie looked great in terms of production values, and some of the actors appear to be theoretically capable of acting, but all in all it was a large pile of horse dung.
On the other hand, I can say that now that I have read New Moon, the movie seems to be a marvel of consistency. So I wonder, what will the adaptation of Twilight be like? Can Kristen Steward be any less appealing? Vampires glitter and they are not gold… so what are they?
Armed with a cup of tea and some cookies I sit down in front of my computer and type “twilight movie” into the YouTube search thingummy. The top result is in good quality and seems to be subtitled in Norwegian, which no doubt would increase the entertainment value of what I’m about to do, but I somehow manage to resist. The next one looks better, so there I go.
Twilight, just like the other three books, is written from a first-person perspective. Usually that’s Bella, and when it isn’t it’s Jacob, which is possibly worse. While they have ignored the first-person style of the book in the adaptation of New Moon, Twilight is in parts narrated by Bella. This wouldn’t be a problem if someone hadn’t told Kristen Stewart to do the voiceovers in her “depressed” voice. Because that’s the only modus operandi that Bella knows. Or maybe that’s just what Kristen Stewart sounds like all the time. What do I know? One way or the other the result is so drab that the opening sequence of Twilight is enough to put you to sleep, despite the nice music.
Yeah, you heard me right: Nice music. As with New Moon, there is one thing that I can’t really fault this movie for, and that’s production values. The images are nice and crisp, the sets look good (too good you might say, but I’ll get to that in a minute), and the score by the shamelessly talented Carter Burwell is quite nice. That doesn’t save it, of course. You can make a movie that has a sterling story but mediocre visuals and it can still be good, but sadly that trick doesn’t work the other way round.
Back to the story. Bella has arrived in Forks. She is wearing a pretty trousers/vest/shirt combination in blue and brown which makes her look like she belongs. Yeah, sounds weird, doesn’t it? Looked weird, too. I didn’t notice at first; my only thought was that something looks strange about the image. But then I realized that she is dressed to match her room. I believe that’s called out-of-control-costume-design. Someone should be shot for that.
Next up: Jacob Black. The filmmakers have pulled a reverse Harry Potter on us and included our favourite werewolf in more scenes, in anticipation of the bigger part that his character will play in the other movies. Unfortunately I hate his guts, so I’m not happy about it. (It would have been nice to see some more Dobby, though.) So Jacob comes, delivers some exceedingly wooden dialogue, and leaves. And Bella goes to school.
Here we meet the Cullens. If one thing is clear from the very first moment that we see them, it is that Bella is destined to be part of this family, because they clearly shop at the same oufitters interior designers. Yes, you guessed right, they are dressed to match the school cafeteria. Which presents some problems in a school environment. Do they change clothes between classes? What to they do on day trips? Questions, questions, so few answers.
But at least the arrival of the Cullens takes some of the focus away from Bella’s new friends, who seem to be trying to rival Jacob in the disciplines of wooden acting and supreme idiocy. To make up for the lack of likability the producers have cast a black and an Asian dude, which is not a problem, technically speaking, but I can hear a tiny voice in the back of my head that whispers: they only did it to get a bigger target audience. Also the black dude is hardly in the movie and the Asian dude is… eh… strange.
Moving on. Biology: the first, tragic meeting where Edward will learn that Bella is the one. Robert Pattinson is supposed to look sick and appalled once he gets a whiff of Eau De Bella, but instead he just looks sick throughout the entire scene. Must be his face. I grudgingly have to admit that Mr. Pattinson is probably a good actor, but I still wonder why the hell they thought it would be a good idea to cast someone as the Adonis-like Edward Cullen who looks like he was run over by a steamroller when he was two and then again when he was five. Well… they also thought the rest of the male Cullens were attractive, so maybe they’ve got taste issues.
Twilight deviates from the story of the book in several instances, and the results are mixed at best. Jacob pops up four times instead of two, and that is definitely a Bad Thing. We also get to see a bit more of Victoria and her buddies, which I think was included a) to introduce the characters earlier and b) to make the movie more violent and thus more appealing to the male demographic (if I’ve ever seen a lost cause then this would be it). Since the book functions (for a given value of “function”) without them showing up every five minutes, I think those extra scenes are just wasted screen time. Just think of all those wasted minutes that we could have spent watching Bella mope a bit more. Victoria and the others also seem to be big fans of parkour.
More things were changed or added. The scene in the greenhouse, which starts out pleasantly enough and devolves into incoherent babble, is all new. We get so see Bella’s mother, a character that is not featured in the book at all except at the end. More wasted screen time and the actress annoys the fuck out of me. But again I can hear a studio executive whisper in my ear:
The audience is stupid, how will they know that that’s her mum at the end?
Gee, exec dude, I don’t know… maybe because Bella says so?
Well, Verena, as you can see Edward is visible in the background of that shot, that will mean that the brains of all the female audience members will be on the blink again and you know that no straight guy will ever go see this movie of his own volition, so they can’t clear the matter up later.
Oh, I’m sorry, exec dude. I guess you’re right.
Right. Sorry. There are two more scenes that were drastically altered from what happens in the book, and I think I need to point those out for reasons of weird. The bookstore scene, which is already plenty strange in the novel, gets another coating of bad in the movie. In the novel Bella doesn’t even get to the bookstore, because she can’t find one and instead decides to wander off into the more disreputable areas of town because that sounded like such a great idea when Stephenie suggested it. And then she almost gets raped, Edward shows and rescues her and we all live happily ever after. In the movie she googles a bookstore, which is run by a very mysterious Native American person, because only mysterious Native American people may sell books about mysterious Native American legends, goes there, almost gets raped on the way back, Edward shows, etc etc, and then she googles the entire vampire thing at home anyway after she’s bought a book on the matter. Maybe she can’t read and needs to find pretty pictures to understand.
Finally, there’s the meadow scene, which is one of the few scenes that I halfway enjoyed in the book. Okay… that’s stretching it. But what happens in the movie is that the scriptwriter realizes that she has already spent too much time on Victoria and Bella’s mum and that bloody greenhouse and now needs to wrap several badly-needed character moments between Bella and Edward into one very strange scene. And I don’t really see why Bella needs to see right now what Eddie looks like in the sunlight, it’s not like he suddenly turned pretty or something. At least in the book he sort of makes fun of the whole sparkly issue.
And the running. The running. Argh! It just doesn’t work. It’s like that dreadful motorcycle sequence in X-Men. It’s atrocious beyond description. It’s… really bad green screen. Stuff like that only works in slow motion or not at all, filmmakers should have learned that by now. It’s all the more horrible since the overall effects used in Twilight are well-done. Good production values, remember?
Okay… moving on. Bella visits Edward’s family, a scene which just for once has seriously good acting by Robert Pattinson in it. I guess, statistically speaking, they have to get it right at least some of the time. The filmmakers are very considerate, however: they think of all those poor people who might, theoretically, only tune into the movie in this scene and thus think that it might actually be good. To prevent permanent misunderstandings, Edward and Bella go to his room and play Crouching Tiger, Hidden Vampire. For any of you who haven’t seen the movie and think that I have just made a really dirty sex joke: I wish. What happens in reality is that Edward and Bella re-enact that tree jumping scene from the above-mentioned movie with shocking accuracy. It doesn’t in any way contribute to me taking this movie seriously, just in case any of you were wondering.
Next up is a bit of pointless drivel between Charlie and Bella, more Victoria, a music montage (music good, montage bad) and… the baseball scene. Now, this is difficult for me to say, especially seeing that the baseball scene in the book was one of the more painful literary experiences of my life, but this scene is actually fun. It doesn’t have much dialogue and even less Edward, which both help, I guess, and so does the score by Burwell. It’s two minutes of movie. Two minutes of a movie that otherwise feels like it’s several days long and you’re watching it while sitting on a bed of rusty nails, and maybe the contrast makes the scene feel better than it is, but it really impressed me. It also forms the beginning of the end, which is a good thing, because the appearance of James and his subsequent vow to have Bella over for dinner cause the plot to get tighter. The end is nigh, and it’s a good feeling. Soon the pain will be over.
Just twenty-odd minutes remain. The book offers a lot of unnecessary complications at this point, plus a speech by Alice which I presume they wanted to save for the third movie, and the screenwriter has made the right choice and cut all of that out. We are left with a vague sense of relief and Bella’s simple and utterly stupid decision to go off and face James alone. But at least in the movie Edward isn’t, like, ten steps away from her, and this makes her decision a little more coherent. Just a little, mind you, because she could still tell Alice, who can sort of see the future. (That might have come in handy.)
Bella goes to meet James. Almost gets killed. Edward to the rescue in the last possible second. She’s already bitten. Carlisle tells Eddie to suck the venom out if he really doesn’t want Bells to be a vamp (perfectly understandable, seeing that he’d have to put up with her for eternity in that case). Then the movie loses me again. Edward sucks out the venom, has trouble stopping, almost kills Bella… and Carlisle just sits there, right next to him, and lets him continue slurping. One would think that it wouldn’t be too much trouble to reach out and pull Eddie away, right? Or maybe Carlisle wants to get rid of Bella just as much as I do, always a possibility worth considering. But let’s say that’s not th case, so why doesn’t he do anything?
Nevermind. Try as Carlisle might, Bella survives the scene, which is really a shame, because that will mean more movies. She wakes up in the hospital and mum is there. Luckily we know who she is, so there is no confusion about that, but we do wonder why anyone still lets Edward anywhere close to Bella, given the story they have thought up to explain all her wounds. Either they believe him, in which case he’s responsible for a whole truckload of shit happening to their precious Bella, or they don’t, in which case he likely as not pushed her down the stairs himself. Nothing makes sense, unless you believe that they all want to get rid of her too.
Not an unreasonable assumption, if you ask me.
Final scene and the next-to-last paragraph of this XXL review. The prom. Bella and Edward look very cool in their interior-design-compatible outfits, but just for once I can’t really complain, because that seems to be the point of a themed prom. Our two lovebirds retreat to a pavilion to do some serious dancing, which wouldn’t be worth mentioning if the other three couples already occupying that space didn’t leave immediately after Bella and Edward get there. Either the director didn’t want to waste time on a slightly longer buildup to the romantic dénouement, or Bells has really bad B.O. issues. You decide.
And that’s it, really. Is this a bad movie? Yes. Is it worse than Twilight: New Moon? No, I don’t think so. This one may have more drastic ups and downs in terms of writing as well as special effects, but at least it only has four scenes with Taylor Lautner, and he even keeps his shirt on in all of them. That has to count for something, right? Also, I registered Bella’s mope factor at 8 on a scale from 1 to 10 as opposed to the 34,7 that the sequel manages to field. The movie may be further from the original book that Twilight: New Moon, and not all the alterations make as much sense (in New Moon they positively elevate the movie to a new level of coherency) but all in all, if faced with the choice of having to re-watch either Twilight or Twilight: New Moon, I would put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. Or maybe I would watch Twilight… yeah, I probably would. Gun still sounds tempting though.
Four days. Four days and I am still alive. Still breathing. Battered, though.
My verbal apologies for what I am doing to myself have gotten even better-rehearsed. When we have visitors they don’t even make it through the door before I have told them that I’m doing this for science, for fame, for knowledge. For the love of little apples. How I will get millions of hits on my blog (still waiting, btw.). How the fans finally won’t have any arguments anymore. How I will sleep more soundly, having finally solved the last big puzzle of humanity.
Needless to say, it is a lonely life.
Okay. The morning of Day Four dawns. We haven’t got much in the way of plans, which is a perfect excuse for me to slouch off to the bathtub and read.
Someone very wise once said that spaceships travel at the speed of plot. I guess you have to add that he also was the creator of a sci-fi television show in order for that to make sense, so yeah: he also created a sci-fi television-show. My point is that Bella’s thoughts travel at the speed of what is convenient.
Here’s the thing. In the first book Bella’s pretty fast on the uptake when it comes to the whole vampire thing. Edward’s fast, strong, attractive and he skips school when the sun’s out. What’s missing from the picture is that he doesn’t happen to be the quarterback for the Forks High football team. Enough to make Bella’s devious little mind tick. So she gets suspicious, asks the local mysterious native gullible teen for some inside info on native legends. Bam! The Cullens don’t like to go on the reservation. And they’re cold. A lot. Bam again! They have to be vampires. Easy as pie.
Book two: Jacob Black has these friends. They hang out a lot. Slavishly follow their leader, almost like dogs. The wolf is the sacred animal of the local tribe, as a matter of fact they even have legends about being descended from them. (Sons of bitches, all of them. Let me tell you: cleverly disguised racial slurs lie underneath it all!) Suddenly there’s huge wolves in the woods and Jacob doesn’t want to talk to her anymore (finally an intelligent reaction). And then Jacob comes along and tells her that something pretty strange has happened to him, but he can’t tell her, because there’s some weird shit going down in his head. And Bella is like: “Oh… I guess he doesn’t like me anymore, just like all the other sane people. I mean, he couldn’t possibly be a werewolf, they’re, like, mythical.”
I see.
The only logical explanation is that Bella has the power of Selective Disbelief +3. No, wait, there’s another one: possibly this woman, Stephenie, appeared to her in a dream and said that werewolves don’t exist. Edward’s sparkly shoelaces were with her and since Bella was very ecstatic to see them she believed Stephenie. Yeah, that has to be it. It’s the shoelaces’ fault.
Anyway. Aside from Bella’s highly selective… uhm… mind, the story takes its utterly predictable course. She falls in love with Jacob. Slowly, dragging it out for as long as possible, because otherwise this book would have been 57 pages long instead of the joy-filled 497 that it ended up having. And even then she doesn’t even say it, or think it with that sorry little excuse of a brain that she has, because that wouldn’t make the third book be any fun. Hah! Excuse my brittle and mirthless laugh. So she kinda falls into liking with him. Or something. Loke, I think might be a good term. Because although she is all about how much like a brother he is to her, she also goes on about his russet skin and delectable smell and beautiful eyes. And his biceps, mustn’t forget the biceps. I know that Stephenie Myers has at least one brother and if this is how she thinks of him then yuck. But before Bella can commit mental incest, Alice shows up because Bells finally managed to near-kill herself convincingly enough for it to look really real.
I guess Alice was hoping too.
Alice is disappointed, however. Bella is still very much alive and kicking (unlike the logic centers of my brain) and so they have hot lesbian sex. Okay… not so much. Ninjas come in and kill them both. No. Zombies come… I give up. (Just trying to include more potential target audiences.)
What actually happens it that Alice arrives and points out quite rightly that Bella must be some sort of ultra-dense supernatural magnet. I’ll let you decide what she means by “dense”. Then Rosalie, Edward’s adopted sister (the intelligent one in the family, since she can’t stand Bella) snitches about Bella-baby’s apparent demise to Edward and he decides to off himself. But first he calls, just to make sure that he’s got an actual reason for the vampire-assisted-death that he is about to experience. Jacob picks up the phone, because he happens to be standing in the right place at the right time, and off goes Eddie to Italy to ask the Volturi, some sort of vampire aristocracy, to kill him. To make it more convenient for the reader this contingency plan of his has been mentioned earlier in the book, so no one is confused, not even Bella.
Of course Bella saves him, meets the Volturi and goes back with Edward and Alice to Forks, where she has a lot of explaining to do. Not least of all why she believed Edward’s asinine story about not loving her in the first place and why she continues to believe it for quite a while after they are back. Yes, you heard me right. Doing what only Bella can do, she wilfully misconstrues every. single. thing. Edward says to her after their reunion. If it weren’t so exasperating it would be quite funny, I believe. Funny in a sad, Stephenie-needs-a-higher-word-count way, granted – but funny.
I can see now why the scriptwriter of Twilight: New Moon did what she did. Only way to save the story, really. Because when Bella realizes that she has been seeing visions of Edward in situations of extreme danger because she subconsciously believed that he still loved her, all realism finally goes out of the window. Preposterous, really. The idea of Bella having a conscience, let alone a subconscious… yeah… almost funny, isn’t it?
So the story ends. Bella has finally worked out that Edward still is her very own cuddly vampire and all is sunshine and happiness. There are still questions, true, like for example why no one is cross with Rosalie for almost getting her brother killed. Or why Bella’s father doesn’t put a bullet through Edward’s attractive head. Or why Bella keeps on living without writing “remember to breathe” on her palm. Questions upon questions. Maybe Eclipse will hold the answers to them, although I doubt it. It’s probably all about shoelaces.
For now my brain is safe. I’m too lazy to go out and shop and I haven’t bought Eclipse yet. Maybe a day off will give me some time to recuperate. At least that’s what I think. Best laid plans… never happen.
Mhm… yes.
When I wrote “tomorrow” I meant to say “Monday”.
I hate deadlines, therefore I avoid them at all costs.
I’m not very good at this, but:
My husband, Jonas, has released a new game. It’s called Phenomenon 32 and we’ve lost count of how many hours of work went into it somewhere around October 2009. Yes, you read that right.
The game is set in an alternate reality where humanity invented a so-called reality bomb, a weapon of incredible destructive potential, and now, twenty years later, some few surviving humans try to create a future for mankind. It is up to you to help them succeed.
You can read all the important details on Jonas’s blog, but let me just say that Phenomenon 32 is easily the biggest game ever made in Construct and one of Jonas’s most ambitious games to date. And it’s got some bits of voice acting by me (hurrah!).
But seriously: the game is beautiful and intelligent and a real piece of art. And I am very proud of Jonas for creating it. So I hope you’ll give Phenomenon 32 a chance. You won’t regret it.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
Day Three. The headache has passed. It is my birthday. To celebrate I buy a copy of New Moon. I’m really tempted to skip the second book, seeing as I know the movie and all, but then again, in for a penny…
The second book seems to have the least appeal of all of them. That’s saying something, I know, and you may wonder why I think so. The reason, plain and simple, is that although the first book is dreary and bland and has really, really atrocious descriptions (from the thought processes in Bella’s warped little mind to Edward’s attractive shoelaces to, well, everything), it has one redeeming feature. In the rare moments when the two protagonists are in a good mood, something which never lasts for long in this universe of the perpetually depressed, the dialogue can actually be funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but let’s be honest: I’m grasping at straws here. 434 pages. There has to be some good in there. And if I were to be forced at gunpoint to name the best bit about Twilight I’d pick the dialogue. And, to return to the original thought, since I knew that the second book was all about Edward taking off and leaving Bella with the one character that is more ridiculous than herself, Jacob Black, I wasn’t really looking forward to reading about it. Bella was bad enough in the first book, when the love of her dreary little life hadn’t run off to… dunno… be all depressed and emo on a different continent. (The further away from Bella the better, I guess.)
And then there was the thing with Bella going all suicidal on us, over and over again, and never succeeding. If you hate a character with a vengeance this can be very frustrating. A bit like seeing The Care Bears Movie and knowing that all the little blighters will pull through. And boy didn’t I guess what the book had in store for me here…
But, knowing my sacred duty, I sat down and opened up New Moon. (Note the incredibly subtle thing Stephenie is doing with the titles. It’s, like, a progression, dudes. At least it will keep us safe from a sequel. Sunrise doesn’t sound too good. Not if you’re a vampire it doesn’t.)
So. New Moon. Bella is turning eighteen, which is a Problem (note the capital “P”), ’cause Edward is seventeen, you see? Actually… no. Because he’s also 105. And because I’m four years older than my husband and, lo and behold, the world hasn’t ended. If she’s eighteen and he’s seventeen she’s anyway about ten years ahead of him in terms of mental development. No, wait, we’re talking about Bella here, strike that last statement please. And because movies, books and the world in general anyway always tell us that it’s perfectly alright for the guy to be old enough to be his girlfriend’s dad. And just for once I’m going to put my feminist foot down and say that age really doesn’t matter, regardless of who is older than whom. And Bella is a ninny anyway. I rest my case.
*deep breath*
Bella is turning eighteen. The Cullens are throwing a little semi-surprise party for her, which wouldn’t be a problem for anyone who isn’t Bella. Since we are dealing with Bella however, we have to read countless sentences about how unfair it is that people are trying to give her presents, how perfect Edward’s shoelaces are and that everyone hates her anyway. For once Bella is right. Not having a party would have been the way to go, because she comes close to slitting her jugular open on a piece of wrapping paper within five seconds of entering the room and Edward’s brother Jasper tries to have her for elevenses.
I put the book down, massage my temples, and remind myself why I am doing this. Only 46 pages into the book it’s going to get worse. A lot worse. If I thought Bella was insufferable before I haven’t read about her after Edward Goody-two-shoes Cullen has pulled a houdini on her because he’s afraid that his family might have her for dinner.
No one can mope like a Bella. Even the book is disgusted with her after a few pages and jumps four months ahead in something that might have been a clever little piece of formatting in any other book. Here it just annoys me. And if I thought I had hit the bottom I was very, very wrong.
Curtains. Lights. Enter Jacob Black and his biceps.
There’s a rule in Hollywood or in Authorland… in stories, actually … that dude no. 1 will be the dude at the end of any given story unless he turns out to be a serial killer or a homosexual. Now, from the descriptions of the Twilight vampires the homosexual thing might be open to debate, and Edward has certainly offed a few people in his time, but this is not this kind of story, is it? So introducing the *dramatic music cue* rival is pretty pointless. Especially if he is a dick.
Jacob Black is sixteen going on four. He likes motorcycles, steroids and remarks with enough thinly veiled sexual innuendo to kill an elephant. He’s also a werewolf, but he doesn’t know that yet.
Why Bella would, after having so much trouble with dating a seventeen year old vampire, consider dating a sixteen year old moron is anyone’s best guess.
At first she doesn’t want to have anything to do with him anyway, until… well, until the thing with the motorcycles. Bella wants two motorcycles fixed and Jacob knows about technology, and since Bella is nothing if not exploitative she once again zeroes in on Jacob like a vulture on a fallen baby gazelle. Now, where was I?
The motorcycles. Yeeeeeees. Mhm…
You see. I’ve seen the movie. That’s bad enough. There Bella jumps head first into danger and sees Edward’s face and hears his voice and comes to the (perfectly logical) conclusion that she needs to risk her life over and over again for these brief, precious glimpses. Cause anyone would think that, right? And the maddening thing is that she doesn’t even succeed in offing herself. Bella Swan, dead after one and a half books and 566 pages. What a pleasant thought. Doesn’t happen though, so don’t get your hopes up.
But here’s the thing: The woman who wrote the movie script was a genius. She should be awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature (they’re not worth much, anyway). Because what happens in the book is this:
Bella gets into the exact same dangerous situation she gets into in the movie. Sees Edward. Gets a double dose of mope. And goes on with her life as if nothing had happened. And then pages upon pages of mope later she thinks to herself: “You know, Bella-honey, today I really fancy riding a motorbike. I don’t know why, it’s dangerous and I don’t even like the things, but it certainly seems like a spiffing idea all of a sudden. This woman, Stephenie, appeared to me in a dream and said I really should. And I haven’t exploited that stupid Indian kid in such a long time. I think I’m going to buy myself two motorbikes. Yes, two sounds good for me alone.”
And I wish I was kidding.
So she gets the motorcycles, dilapidated enough to get them for free (the bikes, not Bella) and goes off to pester Jacob. Jacob is such an incredible mechanical genius that he manages to fix the bikes up in under a week, cause he knows, like, everything about anything, and in the light of such superior knowledge and bulging biceps Bella begins to fall in love with him. Idiot he may be, but I can still feel pity for him.
That’s as far as I get that day. With Bella beginning to be drawn in by the irresistible gravitational force of Jacob’s abs and no end to the mope in sight (yes, women are good at multitasking, they can mope and fall in love at the same time), I have to give up or be destroyed. One can only take so much stupid in one day.
Tomorrow: Join me for the next installment of the Twilight Experiment, in which we learn that Bella has the power of Selective Disbelief +3.
It’s early in the morning and I’m going shopping. Cat food. We’re out and Cat needs to eat. I’ve got Twilight with me, the book that I think will be my steady companion for the next few days, if not weeks. The rules of the experiment are clear. I only read when I’m out and about, to maximize exposure. Goad the haters, if you will. Destiny is about to take a crap on my plans, but I don’t know that yet.
I’ve got a headache. I don’t think that it is caused by my reading material, especially seeing as I’ve only read for about two minutes at this point, but I can’t be sure. What I am sure about is that I am feeling uncomfortable. I’m walking down Leipziger Straße, a medium-sized shopping street near our place. In the afternoon the streets will be packed with shoppers, but right now it’s relatively quiet, which allows me to read as I walk. Later in the day something like this would be rendered impossible by the necessity of dodging people. I am used to reading as I walk; it doesn’t take much concentration to do both, and I hardly ever run into lampposts. But try as I might, I cannot pull off the trick of holding the book in such a way that no one can see the cover. You remember, the German cover looks the same as the English one, so I’m easily spotted. I remember having read about cloth book jackets aimed at grown-ups who want to read the Harry Potter books without being seen, and resolve to get or make such a device.
The book drones on. Bella is currently busy misconstructing everything in her path. Ah… Bella, what a girl.
Bella Swan: idiot, danger to herself, grump par excellence. Also, and I quote the Wikipedia here:
“Bella is described in the novels as being very pale with brown hair, chocolate-brown eyes, and a heart-shaped face. Beyond this, a detailed description of her appearance is never given in the series”
Aha. I’m on page 57 now and I know that Bella is 5 foot 4, slender but not athletic, that her lips are slightly disproportionate… I could go on for quite a bit. Who writes this shit? Just for once I don’t mean Twilight, but the Wikipedia article. What do these people want when they speak of detailed physical descriptions? Measurements in millimeters?
And Edward is very attractive. Very. Attractive. That’s about as far as Stephenie has gotten, no mention of his shoelaces though. (And I know it’s unfair to make fun of Mrs. Meyer for being called Stephenie, but… really… Stephenie? Next it will be Nychole or Makynzi. When will the mothers of this world learn that they’re not doing their children any favours?)
I get back home. My headache has swollen to inhuman proportions, just like Bella’s stupidity, and I am beginning to suspect that the book is to blame after all. In a desperate effort to save my life I down two paracetamol tablets, lie down on the couch… and continue reading. I never said that Bella had a monopoly on the idiot thing.
Thanks to my extended sicktime I read the entire book in one day. That is, the entire book minus the thirty-odd pages that I got done on the day before. My brain doesn’t ooze out of my ears, so the physical side effects aren’t as bad as I feared.
But my mind… my mind is hurting from deep down in the logic centers.
Bella Swan. Bella. Swan. You see… Bella is sullen, antisocial and clumsy. These are, I swear to God, her dominant character traits. Her only character traits, actually. A real charmer, our Bella. And the two worst things about her are that a) she’ll always, no matter what the situation may be, assume the worst about her fellow human beings and their opinion of her and b) that the woman shouldn’t have lived past her first year given how clumsy she is.
Hypothetical situation: Bella comes home to Phoenix after a long stay in Forks. Her mum is overjoyed, throws her a surprise party, refurnishes her room and gifts her a car. This doesn’t happen in any of the books, but I swear that if it did, Bella would come to the conclusion that her mother didn’t like her anymore. Why? Go figure. But this girl spends about half the book alternately moping or crying over the latest, absolutely imagined insult. And yes, I know, we’ve all been teenagers at some point, and stuff like that can happen in real life, but not that much. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that Mrs. Meyers is only trying to push the word count, but I get the bad feeling that she actually thinks teenage girls behave like this. If that were true then it would be a miracle that the human race hasn’t collectively committed suicide yet.
As to the clumsiness charge: yes, you heard right, Bella should have died of dropping a piano on herself at the age of fourteen months and three days. The world would be a happier place if she had. But she didn’t, and so we get Twilight. And a scene where she hits herself in the face with a badminton racket. Herself. Face. Badminton racket. For those of you who are just asking themselves what my problem is: please, pretty please, go to the garage, or the attic or wherever your family keeps sporting equipment, and get a badminton racket. Everyone has one of those lying about somewhere. Softball will do at a pinch; ask the neighbours if you must. Hold it in your hand… and try to hit yourself in the face with it. You’ll see that it is a lot harder than you think. Bella must be some kind of contortionist genius. For someone who seems to take unearthly delight in minutely planing and describing every movement needed by Edward to scratch his perfectly attractive bum, Stephenie Meyer could have put a little more thought into that one. And I’ve had enough phys ed classes in my life to know that there are a lot more creative, not to mention likely, ways to do yourself harm.
But it’s not only sports. Bella also breaks into a sweat when she is faced with walking off the beaten track, literally this time. A short, five-minute hike through the forest and the girl is all bruises and cuts. Which makes the idea that she faints if she sees so much as a single drop of her own blood even more ridiculous. There are some sights that even the excessively squeamish will get used to after the two-hundredth time. But I suppose it’s just so funny to have a protagonist that is afraid of blood and falls in love with a vampire. Hahaha.
I won’t go for the feminist angle here because… I just don’t care. Bella is weak and stupid and deserves to die, but I would feel the same about a male character like that. And I don’t care that this is an often-propagated stereotype that gets overapplied to the fairer sex. Don’t. Care. Just saying that. In case you’re wondering.
It’s late now. Past midnight, and I’m getting closer to the end. Bella has finally gotten all the myriad misunderstandings that were keeping her from her favourite hematophile out of the way. Everything is peachy except that she also is being chased by a tracker named James. A tracker, as we learn, is a vampire that specializes in finding people and won’t give up until he has found, killed and eaten them. And Bella’s got a dinner invitation from him. She’s the main course. Edward Cullen doesn’t want to tell us why his family of seven strapping vampires won’t stand watch over Bella’s house until the creep shows so that they can kill him; I suspect his reasons can be summed up as: because the author said so. And because Mrs. Meyer said so we get the extra bitter-sweet parting scene and Bella gets whisked away to Phoenix, because getting her away from her (vulnerable) father and closer to her (vulnerable) mum makes, like, sense. In Phoenix, Bella lays on the sullen extra thick because her favourite Cullen isn’t there, and because that’s not embarrassing enough she also gets it into her head (let’s be fair here, yes, I know, she actually gets tricked) that James has her mum and the only way for Bella to save dear old mum is to go to James alone for a hostage exchange. All because James has been such a reliable and trustworthy fellow all along. Bella is full of great ideas…
…
… can anyone explain to me why she doesn’t tell anyone? I mean Alice can, like, see the future, maybe she can help
…
Oh, I get it. It’s because the author said so. Sorry. My bad.
The rest is easily told. Bella almost gets killed. Edward comes to her rescue at the last possible moment (probably waiting in the wings until James has his teeth in her, for maximum dramatic effect) and everyone lives happily ever after. Everyone except me, because I know now that I will have to read the other three books as well.
Call me a glutton for punishment. Call me a woman of science. Call me an idiot. But, to quote Babylon 5: Never start a fight, but always finish it. Stephenie Meyer started it. I will finish it. And besides I really, really want to know how that whole demon-baby thing will work out.
I slide the book over the counter, cover down, and look at the cashier. A middle-aged woman – very short red hair, glasses, and the distinct air of a book-snob about her – looks back at me. My ruse hasn’t worked. She knows immediately what I’m buying. My mind is racing, imagining that the only thing that’s keeping her from saying something is the fact that the copy of Twilight that I’m about to buy is in English while she is German. I want to blurt out that I’m buying this thing, this literary abomination, for the sake of an experiment. For the sake of science, so to speak. Really quite self-sacrificial of me. But in the end I don’t say anything, not even hello/thank you/goodbye. Better to let her think I don’t speak German.
Outside of the bookstore I don’t have much time to look at the slim paperback that I just bought. I need to meet someone and I’m in a hurry. Also I’m not that keen on actually starting this little experiment of mine. Someone could get hurt.
My brain, for example.
Rewind… I’d seen Twilight: New Moon a while ago and thought that it had possibly set a new record for storyline-atrocity. But only just possibly, there’s always Bloom. Looked good though, can’t deny that. And then there was the thing with the other readers, sane people one and all, people whose judgement I trust, people who seem to have taste (you know who you are). And they had read Twilight. And New Moon. And the rest. Not only had they survived the experience, they had also said things like “reads well” or “it’s sort of fun, in a guilty pleasure kind of way”. And that planted the seed of doubt. Twilight, scourge of high fantasy, read by millions upon millions of teenagers. Was it really that bad? Did I have a right to participate in the ongoing Twilight discussion trashing without having read a single word of it? Does Bella Swan have a single redeeming feature? I don’t believe in guilty pleasure, at least not very much. If someone says something is a guilty pleasure he or she usually means that it is good, but doesn’t want to admit to thinking that in the company of others. Here in Germany Harry Potter is a guilty pleasure, see?
We have a saying in Germany which roughly translates as “eat shit, millions of flies can’t be wrong”. It doesn’t translate very well, but still serves to illustrate what is at the core of this little experiment: What if millions of flies aren’t wrong?
Back to Day 1: I meet the person I was going to meet and get a very disapproving frown when I mention what I have just done. Twilight, well actually fantasy literature as a whole, has a bad standing in Germany. Escapism, nonsense, childishness, these words are spoken much quicker and with less kindness here in the country of sheep. Intellectual people read suspense novels, because when the gardener kills Lord Adolfstein by shoving him into the paper shredder that’s, like, real, you know.
I’ve heard all of it before and gotten inured to the attacks of the literary elite by now. Still I try to explain. “It’s because I finally want to have an informed opinion. I don’t want to be talking out of my arse all the time.” Only three days later I will be ready to launch into a well-rehearsed speech on the subject of why reading Twilight was such a spiffing idea.
In the train on the way home, I open the book for the first time. I keep it on my lap, bending over in order to still be able to read. The cover of the German edition is identical to the English one; if I hold the book up like I normally would, people might notice what I’m reading.
I only skim the acknowledgements. Usually not my style, I tend to assume that authors have put some thought into whom they thank, but Stephenie Meyers’ acknowledgements are longer than some books I’ve read. It takes Jonas to point out that she thanks her “online family” at fansofrealitytv.com. That explains so much.
“I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me.”
It’s not the first sentence of the book, that honour goes to something bland and incredibly convoluted, but if it were it would easily win the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, probably for several years in a row. It’s just that kind of sentence. I can’t even begin to describe what is wrong with it, there’s just too much, although the part about “pleasantly looking back” certainly makes up a good deal of the overall horribleness.
Two paragraphs down, 434 pages to go. Suddenly I’m not sure if I can do this. Yet I turn the page and read on. Once I’m in the flow it isn’t too bad. The atrocities keep coming, but they somehow get drowned out by all the filler. And there’s a lot of that. Mostly descriptions of how Bella hates the world in general and human beings specifically. Such a charming, vivacious personality! I already want to adopt her. Still, the filler isn’t thick enough to submerge the very, very frequent descriptions of Edward’s attractive voice. And his attractive skin. And attractive hair. He probably also has attractive shoelaces, but before I get to that part I need to stop reading in order to get off the train. I’m glad to stop – this book is so full of attractiveness that it makes my brain ache.
I have done my scientific duty for today. It doesn’t make me feel great, but at least I don’t feel too dirty.
First of all, I need to come out of the closet. Come clean. I think I owe that to you. It might hurt, but the world needs to know my secret. I’ve kept this bottled up for too long. Okay… here I go:
I like musical theatre.
So. That’s better.
Why say this now? Because my first love, speaking in terms of musical theatre, is The Phantom Of The Opera. If you think a thirteen-year-old girl who has just discovered the Jonas Brothers is obsessive, you haven’t seen me when I was deep in Phantom-lore. (Don’t call me a Phan, not if you want to live.) Of course, these times now lie more than ten years in the past. I still like musicals and I still think fondly of the time when I saw a different one every month or so, but they’re no longer the main focus of my musical interests. But, just like the first book that you read or the first CD or DVD that you bought (Emil of Lönneberga, ABBA Gold and Gladiator), the passions of your early years kind of stick with you.
Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, the thing is this:
Andrew Lloyd-Webber, the Duracell bunny of the British music industry, recently composed a sequel to his 1986 hit The Phantom Of The Opera. And even more recently this, let’s call it a musical for now (just for the sake of convenience), premiered in London’s West End. I think you can guess where this review is going, yes?
The show, entitled Love Never Dies, has been long in the making. And the Phans (don’t get me started… ) have been caterwauling about how bad it’s going to be for just as long.
I was of mixed opinion about the sequel. I thought it would be really rotten, but was holding out some little, microscopic sliver of hope that it might turn out not to be. But things were looking more glum by the day year. Frederick Forsyth was the first person to collaborate with Lloyd-Webber on the script. Later, when the whole collaboration thing turned apeshit, he turned his ideas into a book called The Phantom Of Manhattan. I am not kidding when I say that this is one of the worst novels I have ever read. And I read The Green Rider. And The Sword Of Truth. So the phans (no no no!) fans might have had some reason to be concerned. After the Forsyth debacle things turned quiet around the sequel. A song emerged, which I thought was pretty (if you listened to it long enough) and around 2007 Andrew Lloyd-Webber reported that his cat had eaten the score, causing much hilarity and happiness in the fan-camp.
And then, after I had forgotten all about the show, it happened. A cast was announced. A venue. A premier date. And before I could go and hide in Antarctica the CD was lying under the easter bunny tree. (Or something.)
I had a lot of snide comments prepared for this part of the review, but I fear what they all boiled down to was: the show isn’t very good. I had read several reviews, both by phans (bad blogger!) fans and theatre critics, and what they all seemed to say is that Love Never Dies is nothing special. It was interesting to hear the way in which these opinions were expressed. The fans would say stuff like “the show wasn’t very go… I mean it was spectacular, but the story was cra… absolutely stunning if you ask me.” Whereas the critics would say things like “Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s newest offering is a gem, nay an instant classic of the musical genre, with inspiringly unremarkable tunes and a libretto that is so stunningly bad and unevocative that I think I never heard anything more brilliant in my life”. And I wish I was kidding. They were vomiting praise all over the page while at the same time some sort of deep dissatisfaction seemed to linger under all that they were writing.
And what did I think?
Lloyd-Webber has lost his edge. That’s what I think. While the show has some good melodies, unlike his The Woman In White from 2004, which mostly sounded like two hours of a cat dancing on a piano, it lacks that tune. The tune that you’ll be humming when you go out of the theatre and will still be humming the next morning under the shower. The two most successful songs are The Beauty Underneath and Devil Take The Hindmost. People who know the show will notice that I am naming the only fast songs in the show here. That is not surprising, since the entire rest of Love Never Dies is back at The Woman in White‘s cat piano dance lessons.
I lack the vocabulary to make myself clear, I’m afraid. All the other songs are bland. No climax, no tension, no nothing. Just a dancing cat. And a libretto that is so unspeakably bad that words fail me. How about I just let it speak for itself? And I touched you/ and I felt you/ and I heard those ravishing refrains… or how about All of the bonds in between us now torn/ all of the love that we gave him forsworn/ if that bastard had never been born. So, what do you think? I especially liked the “ravishing refrains,” that song (Beneath A Moonless Sky) is full of such gems, what with being the musical equivalent of softcore porn and all.
There’s good too, of course. The Beauty Underneath is an amazing duet that combines a haunting, sweet melody with really strong e-guitar riffs. And it has a message that is comprehensible. It’s about the beauty of song, of music and not about the beauty and allure of the most stupid, insipid creature to ever walk this earth, Mrs. Christine Changny née Daaé. That is one of the central problems of this show: Christine, the woman that everyone is fighting for, is as thick as a brick. Her only assets seem to be a pretty voice and nice booty. No one ever compliments her intelligence or her wit or even her kindness. She’s a blank slate, a doll. And thus it becomes even more incomprehensible when in the second good song of the show, Devil Take The Hindmost, both the Phantom and Raoul sing their talented little throats raw telling each other how much they want her. (Not very much at all, actually, because the whole thing seems to boil down to a pissing contest between the two of them. Who’s got the bigger musical… talent.)
Which brings us to the question of casting: Ramin Karimloo is surely a talented singer. His voice has the raw emotion that made Michael Crawford so memorable as the original Phantom. I might say that he looks too soft for a part that is traditionally portrayed by tall, thin people, but looks don’t really matter, the voice does. Joseph Millson as Raoul is also very good. Certainly above average, even if not remarkably so, but his acting is really good. Sierra Boggess as Christine is perfectly cast… not. Unless you think that what you need to portray a bland character is a bland singer. It’s all note perfect, sure, but when she raises that pretty soprano of hers to sing Love Never Dies (a six-minute centerpiece so boring that I had to force myself to listen to all of it) all you can can do is wonder if it ever lived to begin with. Summer Strallen as Meg Giry is as good as Sally Dexter as her mother is bad. Which is to say that she is very good. And, to be fair, Miss Dexter would be good too, if some maniac hadn’t come up with the idea of saddling her with that ridiculous French accent of hers. A solitary, lonely French accent in a play where every single character is from France. And finally: I can see why Niamh Perry won that I’m-Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-Get-Me-Out-Of-Here reality-TV thing, because her voice is very nice, but it’s a shame that her character has all the depth and stage time of a badly-written Christmas pantomime henchman.
I talked a lot about the singers and the long, painful birth by caesarean section of this show, but what about the story?
I can see what you were trying to do there, Mr. Lloyd-Webber, I really can. But it doesn’t work. It is a valid approach for a sequel to mirror, echo the structure and elements of the first installment. So we do the time warp again and start with a prologue that is set in the future. A visibly aged character comes on stage and waffles on about how everything went wrong, but in a very mysterious way. Just when we think it will never end we are transported to Coney Island in 1907. The Phantom is scheming to get Christine back, although you sort of get the feeling that he just came up with the whole plan yesterday afternoon. Soon after Christine, her husband Raoul (who has been transformed into a drunken, gambling loser) and her darling son Gustave arrive. After they spectacularly fail to grasp who it is that invited them to sing at Phantasma (nudge nudge, wink wink, get it?) we get to hear them quarrel a bit, just so that there is no confusion about just how unhappy Christine is with her lot, and then the fun begins in earnest.
The Phantom reveals himself, causing Raoul no end of dismay (understandably so, seeing that last time he saw the Phantom, Mr. P tried to kill him dead), but in the end he’s a good old chap and doesn’t complain too much. Instead he goes off to have a stiff drink. Meanwhile Gustave gets treated to a nice tour of the premises, during which the Phantom discovers that apart from obvious differences in the facial department Gustave seems to be rather similar to him. Then he comes up with a bright idea and shows the kid his face, the effect of which is similar to what is was on Gustave’s mum just ten short years ago. Genetics, I suppose.
Speaking of genetics, the Phantom then has a nice chat with Christine, in which they basically say: “Oh, did we forget to mention this? We slept together about… how old is Gustave again? 10?… about 10 years and nine months ago.” Yeah, I know. Other people call it retconning, Andrew Lloyd-Webber calls it plot. And that might have been the end of the first act if Uber-Villain Madame Super-Bad Giry didn’t have to say her ten cents’ worth, which can be summed up as: “Curse you all, you’ll rue the day you crossed me, you strangely non-accented people from France.” Because she has somehow turned into a vengeful, scheming bitch. Cause that makes, like, sense.
Second Half: The Return of the BAD. Raoul has spent the interval getting pissed and is thus absolutely receptive when the Phantom steps up to him and offers him a bet. If Christine sings tonight she’ll stay with the Masked Avenger; if she doesn’t, Raoul can keep the ninny and all their debts get paid by a mysterious benefactor. Raoul thinks: “Piece of cake, I’m sure Christine will like totally understand if I tell her that the debts I caused when I gambled away all our money are high, but that we don’t need her fee for singing tonight, because I’d really rather if she didn’t.” The Phantom thinks: “Idiot”. And so they gamble and Christine sings. In a perfect world the show would be over now, but Meg Giry, who has a thing for older men whose face she has never seen in her life and who have a good reputation as a serial killer to uphold, has other plans for us. She kidnaps Gustave because… because… the script-man said so. A tragic showdown ensues. Christine gets shot. The Phantom doesn’t wring Meg’s scrawny neck because he too is secretly relieved to be rid of her and everyone lives happily ever after Coney Island burns down and everyone is miserable and alone.
Now, as I said, I see what you’re doing there. Flash forward. Creepy dolls of Christine, premature unmaskings, fights and frights over whether Christine will sing or not, everything but the god-damn falling chandelier. They have tried to do their best to mimic the original show. Homage, I suppose. Only it doesn’t work, because the whole time you’re thinking: “I know what you’re doing and it’s crap”.
Love Never Dies fails. Not because I want it to, because I really long for another good work by Lloyd-Webber, but because it is terminally mediocre. The story seems to go nowhere, as it all centers around Christine and how everyone would like to kiss her ass. (Except Meg, which lends the final scene unintentional hilarity when the Phantom tries to talk her out of shooting Gustave by telling her that no one is perfect except her love-rival Christine. Smooth, real smooth, Mr. P.) The music wavers between strangling a cat and truly nice, i.e. it averages out into a puddle of gray musical goo, and the hummable-tune-factor is 0,oooo2%. I can’t speak for the sets, but I hear that they are beautiful and rather steampunky, which is appropriate enough.
I really want to see the show, but it’s more the kind of want to see that is related to the want to read that I feel for the latest offering by Piers Anthony. I started it, so I will finish it. Childhood infatuations never die. Just like love.
Verena Kyratzes 