The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2

Year 12, Day 284 - 10/10/20 - Movie #3,671

BEFORE: I made it to the end of the franchise, the last film in the "Twilight" series, within a week's time - I'm pretty much on schedule for October, but I still have to work four more skip days in before the end of the month, if I want the last horror film to line up with Halloween - which I think is on October 31 this year.  But since the next four films are on various streaming services, I want to get through them as quickly as possible, because streaming films don't reduce my main watchlist, which only tracks films I have on DVD or my DVR.  And I don't allow myself to add any films to the main watchlist until I cross some off, so I can't add the new films now on cable until I get through another four films.  So no skip days for a while, even though I need to add them somewhere.  It's complicated.  

Right now, the last "Twilight" film is a bit like those food bits in the sink drain, I don't really want to deal with them, but once they're gone, I'm thinking things will start flowing again.  So sometimes you just have to hold your nose, not look too closely, and bring that drain cover over to the trash can and scrape the gunk out of it.  OK, it's a terrible analogy but maybe you can guess what chore I took care of yesterday.  

26 actors carry over from "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1", but it's not all the same actors who carried over last time - it's very complicated, and it's been a nightmare keeping track of it all.  But the nightmare is over today, and we never need speak of it again, not until the year-end wrap-up, anyway. 

THE PLOT: After the birth of Renesmee, the Cullens gather other vampire clans in order to protect the child from a false allegation that puts the family in front of the Volturi. 

AFTER: If you discount the parts of "Breaking Dawn - Part 1" that were boring, then also the parts that were horribly pro-life, then also the parts where very little happened, you'd essentially be discounting the whole film.  And I'd kind of be OK with that.  If it wasn't narratively necessary to do so, I'd suggest skipping "Breaking Dawn - Part 1" and moving straight on to the last film.  But that might also be my personal opinion, which comes directly from watching all five films in seven days, which I do not recommend anyone else take on.  Remember, I'm a professional, so don't try this at home, you could get seriously hurt.  Me, I'm just frustrated and disappointed, but I'm pretty sure I'll recover.  

This final film is (more or less) a return to form after we got Bella's horrific honeymoon and enigmatic troubled pregnancy out of the way.  Picking the place to divide the final book into two films should have been a no-brainer, but they blew it, and if you're familiar with the films, you know exactly what I'm talking about.  They should have ended the film about 30 seconds before they did, but I guess since most of the people in the theater audiences knew the complete plot of the book, they thought there was no need to cut it there, and in fact what essentially became a teaser for the next film probably seemed like a good idea, but then again, it was also a terrible idea.  Even if there are just a FEW people in the theater who don't know what's got to happen in the next film, they should have tried to preserve a tiny bit of the element of surprise for the non-readers, such as myself.  The ending of "Breaking Dawn - Part 1" should have been more like the ending of "Avengers: Infinity War", if you catch my drift.  Walking home from "Infinity War", it did hit me what would probably happen in "Endgame", but since I'm a comic-book fan, it didn't take much thought for me to figure it out.  

SPOILER ALERT -  stop reading here if you've never read the books or seen these movies, although this is a bit unnecessary if I was indeed the last person to get around to them.  Here there was no lingering mystery, Bella's somehow FINE, and better than ever, after essentially dying during childbirth, thanks to finally getting the change that she's been begging for for three movies now.  She's become immortal, and a true member of the Cullen undead clan, so, umm, yay?  Congratulations on being turned into a bloodsucking vampire, and now she'll live forever and watch all of her human friends and family die while she stays the same age.  Oh, and now she drinks blood and sparkles in the sunlight, and for some reason she'll have to move every few years and keep re-living high school over and over again.  Jeez, can't she just show everybody her diploma and not have to do that?  Also, for some reason she now has to fight the basic urge to kill humans that comes along with her new powers, and drink only the blood of animals, which is quite ironic, because wasn't she like a vegetarian before?  On the upside, if she hangs out with the Cullens she now gets to be really smug and sanctimonious about not killing humans, which seems to be a fundamental part of being a vampire, so why deny it?  

But before the film gets to the exciting bits, there are some leftover agenda items to deal with.  First, it seems that Jacob "imprinted" on the baby Renesmee, which doesn't mean that he's in love with her, it only means that he has a strong bond and would do anything to protect her, even die for her, and who knows, maybe when she's 18 or 20 years older, he'll be romantically involved with her, even though it's very, very wrong to think about a baby that way.  Except it kind of seems like he's totally thinking about having sex with a baby, just trying to picture her as a teenager or an adult, but that's still wrong wrong wrong, right? He couldn't have a relationship with Bella, so he's marking his territory to have one with her daughter?  Again, this just feels super-wrong and icky, but what do I know, it worked out for Woody Allen, didn't it?

We're then shown some very creepy footage of a CGI baby, which I've also got an issue with.  Couldn't they just have used ANY baby, since all babies essentially look alike?  It's true, they do, so I don't understand why anybody posts pictures of their baby, who looks just like every other baby I've ever seen.  All that "She's got your eyes, but her father's nose!" crap is just a bunch of B.S.  It's a BABY, big fat hairy deal.  But not this baby - they somehow deep-faked this baby's face, and it just didn't look right.  Jesus, if you're going to CGI a baby's face at least make it look realistic instead of like an alien baby.  I get that you can't get a real baby to act in a film and give you the facial expressions you need, but still, that's no excuse for what we're shown here.  

Renesmee (still the worst baby name I've ever heard, I think) grows very rapidly, though, in just a few months she looks like a five-year old girl, and suddenly we realize why Jacob is still hanging around, because he's done the math and he's probably getting excited. (Again, EEEEWWWWWW!)  Renesmee's not a vampire, but she's somehow half-vampire?  Only she doesn't drink blood, she eats regular food, and she's apparently the only person in the Cullen family that does that.  Even in the vampire world, she's an anomaly, an impossiblity, so when another vampire sees here, she's easily mistaken for what they call an "immortal child", which is what happens when a vampire turns a small child into a vampire, and you end up getting an unholy creature with incredible powers with the short temper and volatile emotions of a child.  The vampire community had some in the past, apparently, and it didn't work out well - and it doesn't work very well when you elect someone like that President, either.  OK, lesson learned, now we know. 

So someone drops a dime on the Cullens and the Volturi Council gets involved, making plans to come and visit the Cullens to stop this "immortal child".  Alice has a premonition about this, and so naturally when Alice learns of the coming danger, she disappears to parts unknown.  Wait, what?  The ONE time they need their precog more than ever before, and she takes off?  But she leaves her family members a warning, they have to contact family and old friends, gather witnesses to meet Renesmee, get to know her and realize that she's not a child vampire.  The more witnesses, the greater the chance that the Volturi will listen to reason.  (This seems a bit like the #Metoo movement from a couple years ago, when the court of public opinion might not believe one allegation against a celebrity, but when there were thirty or forty against Cosby or Weinstein, people started to figure out that maybe where there's an overwhelming amount of smoke, there might be a fire.)

Vampires gather from all over to help the Cullens, bear witness about Renesmee, or just to pick a fight with the Volturi - whichever reason they show up, it's all good.  It doesn't matter what they wear, just as long as they are there. So every guy, grab a ghoul - it's just an invitation, across the vampire nation.  Vampires from Alaska, Brazil, India, Russia, Ireland, show up to swap war stories and wait for their chance to either testify or have a really good fight.  It's the showdown in the snow town, the Battle in Seattle, the test in the Northwest.  It's the liberal vampires who stand WITH werewolves against the conservative ones who can't stand werewolves - a fight against closed-mindedness and monster racism, really.  Oh, if only there were some kind of real-world analogy playing out in current events right now...

Ultimately the ending here is very cagey, there's a way for the battle to both happen and NOT happen, and I can't decide if that's really clever or just a phenomenal cop-out.  Since I'm riding high and feeling good about clearing this franchise, I'm going to go with clever for now, but if you want to argue "cop-out", I'm certainly willing to entertain the argument.  

There's an extended credits sequence, which looks like it might have been left over from when "Breaking Dawn" was planned to be one movie, not two - only that doesn't make much sense, either.  It's more of a flashback to all the actors who played vampires in any or all of the "Twilight" films, but this causes something of a cataloguing paradox for me, because archive footage of actors who were NOT in this final film was used.  That's a bit like appearing in this film, even though they DIDN'T appear in the film.  So, do I count those actors as being in "Breaking Dawn - Part 2" or not?  Footage was used, so that should count as an appearance - but it's during a credit sequence, which is not within the film itself.  What to do? 

I've decided to discount these actors - which includes Bella's human high-school friends (Sorry, Team Mike) and the deceased vampires from the first two films (even though one of them counted yesterday, but that was a flashback during the film itself, not the credits)  But I'm not going to include the 15 or so actors whose archive footage was used at the end of "Breaking Dawn - Part 2" because just appearing in the credits doesn't count - it's like that thought problem about the book in the library that lists all the other books in the library.  Should that book list itself?  Yes, because it's a book in the library, too, but also no, because its purpose is really to list all the OTHER books in the library, plus listing itself seems too self-reflexive to me.  So since this visual credit list was something of a tribute to the actors across the whole series, and these appearancess are considered to be outside of the narrative of "Breaking Dawn - Part 2", I'm not listing them here, or in the year-end breakdown.  And if you see Anna Kendrick listing five "Twilight" films on her resumé instead of four, then she's full of it.  

Now that this franchise is off the books, it's full steam ahead with other non-Twilight horror movies.  But what other franchises that I have completely avoided until now should I consider paying attention to in the future?  The "Purge" franchise?  "Transformers" films?  Movies that are both "Fast and Furious"?  "Rambo" movies?  I don't feel like I'm ready for any of those.  I've got to think about this, like a lot more before I take on another series in this manner.  

Also starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Jackson Rathbone, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Billy Burke, Mackenzie Foy, Maggie Grace, Michael Sheen, Jamie Campbell Bower, Christopher Heyerdahl, Casey LaBow, MyAnna Buring, Christian Camargo, Mia Maestro, Booboo Stewart, Daniel Cudmore, Ty Olsson, Charlie Bewley, Julia Jones, Chaske Spencer, Alex Rice (all carrying over from "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1"), Dakota Fanning (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse"), Cameron Bright (ditto), Lee Pace (last seen in "A Single Man"), Noel Fisher, Joe Anderson (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Angela Sarafyan (last seen in "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile"), Rami Malek (last seen in "Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb"), Judith Shekoni, Billy Wagenseller, JD Pardo, Wendell Pierce (last seen in  "Lay the Favorite"), Lateef Crowder, Andrea Powell (last seen in "Ender's Game"), Toni Trucks, Andrea Gabriel, Austin Naulty, Marissa Quinn, Omar Metwally (last seen in "Rendition"), Valorie Curry, Tracey Heggins, Guri Weinberg, Erik Odom, Bill Tangradi (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), Patrick Brennan (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Lisa Howard, Marlane Barnes, Amadou Ly, Janelle Froehlich, Masami Kosaka, Erica LaRose.

RATING: 6 out of 10 Christmas presents

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1

Year 12, Day 282 - 10/8/20 - Movie #3,670

BEFORE: As expected, this franchise is going to wreak havoc on my year-end breakdown, where I usually list all the actors who appear in three or more films.  Now it looks like half of that list will be the cast of "Twilight"!  A full 27 actors carry over from yesterday's "Twilight: Eclipse" movie, and that could be a record, I'm not sure.  My year end re-cap is going to be very boring, just a bunch of "Twilight" actors and a few other people.  But it had to happen, I suppose, in order to clear this franchise off my books.  And linking-wise, this is the way to do it, it would make no sense to spread them out one per year, to mimic the way the films were initially released.  Better to binge them all in a week's time, much easier on the record-keeping, but harder on the old gray matter.  Time to buckle down, because there's just one film left after today - I'll take Friday off and wrap things up on Saturday.  

THE PLOT: The Quileutes close in on expecting parents Edward and Bella, whose unborn child poses a threat to the Wolf Pack and the townspeople of Forks. 

AFTER: SPOILERS AHEAD for the "Twilight" franchise, even though I'm probably one of the LAST people to take in this whole franchise.  Though now that I'm four films in, and the fourth film takes such a drastic turn, I think maybe if you're like me and you haven't seen these all yet, you may want to stop after three.  "Eclipse" kind of felt like the high-water mark, story-wise, and it doesn't look like it gets better from there on out, it's just kind of...MORE.  

What's worse is that this franchise spent three films clearly setting up the rules of human and vampire relationships - even though those rules themselves established something of an impasse.  Edward, being a super-strong vampire, can't have a typical physical relationship with Bella, for the same reason that Superman can't get it on with Lois Lane.  It's just too dangerous if he should lose control, and in the movies, sex is apparently all about losing control.  An orgasm, by definition, is a form of temporary insanity, but without being graphic, I think it's a big leap from a temporary brain-burst of pleasure to "Whoops, I accidentally crushed her."  If Superman or Edward Cullen can pick up a glass of water and not break it, then they can probably both make sweet love to their partners without harm.  Right?  Then again, I'm currently watching Season 2 of "Jessica Jones" on Netflix and when she gets drunk, she tends to break a lot of glasses at her local bar.  So maybe there's something to this. 

Anyway, for three movies, we'd been led to believe that Edward and Bella couldn't, you know, DO IT until she'd also been turned into a vampire.  But that just wasn't enough for precious Bella, was it?  She begged and begged to become a real member of the Cullen family, and then even though she was just on the cusp of getting everything she wanted, she suddenly wanted more.  Right?  So finally Edward agreed to do the thing that supposedly impossible, just to make her happy, and yeah, she ends up scratched and bruised.  This is some weird, backwards take on an abusive relationship, I think.  He loved her enough to hurt her, only not as much as he could have?  Anyway, that's effed up - and not a positive move forward for intersex or interspecies relationships.  

Worse, we get to spend like an hour with Edward and Bella on their honeymoon, which, aside from the occasional forbidden coupling, was filled with a lot of beach-combing and playing chess.  Right.  Who the FRICK plays chess on their honeymoon?  All right, now if you haven't read the books or seen the movies, I really really urge you to stop reading now.  Go away - get lost, tatty-bye.  

As mentioned in the logline, and as everyone else but me probably knows by now, Bella gets knocked up on her honeymoon.  Not just pregnant, like super-pregnant, super-FAST pregnant that is, she's already starting to show like a week later, instead of the usual three (?) months.  This baby's coming with vampire super-speed development or something.  Now, a couple of issues with this, first, of course WTF?  First we were told that sex between a human and vampire was not recommended, and from their reactions, it would seem that conception in this instance would be impossible, or at least that's what they were told.  BUT, did they even ASK?  Or was it never even brought up, because what IDIOT vampire would have sex with a human woman when she'd probably die in the process?  So, very likely, they didn't even ask. Or it's technically impossible, which brings me back to WTF?  How can it happen if it's impossible, if Edward's no longer human, or not technically alive.  But then again, somehow vampires are both undead AND immortal, and that's a blatant contradiction if ever there was one - so this pregnancy is both impossible AND it's happening.  

Still, shouldn't somebody have used protection?  Even if they thought the pregnancy was impossible, there's still all kinds of human-to-vampire or vampire-to-human STDs that could be possible, right?  OK, maybe nobody ever gave Bella "the talk" about protection, plus she was a virgin up to her wedding day, I guess, but didn't she ever do like over-the-pants stuff with anybody?  Totally clueless?  OK, then I would expect Edward to know better, but I guess if he's like 110 years old then he's got a really outdated view of morality, hence marriage before sex, and he was probably last sexually active before they invented the pill and diaphragms and maybe even latex condoms.  But again, without getting graphic, couldn't they have just fooled around without risking conception?  It HAD to be intercourse?  This is what we get for having a backwards sexual education system in our schools that doesn't inform teens about anything but missionary, when really, there's a whole wide range of stuff that doesn't lead to pregnancy. 

But I'm taking this out on the characters, and they're not even real.  It's really the simplistic view of the author, who is, in a sense, represented in all of her characters.  It HAD to be this way, because that's what propels the storyline forward in the most dramatic way.  When Bella gets back to Forks, suddenly it's a whole new controversy between the Cullen vampires and the Native American werewolves, who perceive her unborn baby as both an abomination and a threat to their culture and community.  Really, it's a whole pro-choice/pro-life argument laid out symbolically, only with a twist - the mother's on the pro-life side and the community wants to terminate the pregnancy.  And once again, Jacob's caught in the middle, he wants to support Bella, but this puts him on the opposite side as the rest of his werewolf clan, and of course, again he blames Edward for everything.  He's not totally wrong, but he's not totally right either.  

By comparison, this one's incredibly slow, and very little happens, at least in the first half.  Even then, there's barely any action even when the werewolves attack the vampires in the second half.  To say that this film makes little sense almost goes without saying, and NITPICK POINTS abound - like how come a man who turns into a werewolf, and presumably hunts and kills animals as one, gets sick just watching a human drink a little blood?  And all the ones I listed above concerning inter-species pregnancy...but at this point, I just want to soldier on to the end and be done with it all. 

Sarring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Billy Burke, Sarah Clarke, Julia Jones, Booboo Stewart, Chaske Spencer, Gil Birmingham, Anna Kendrick, Christian Serratos, Justin Chon, Michael Welch, Alex Rice, Kiowa Gordon, Tyson Houseman, Bronson Pelletier, Alex Meraz, Tinsel Korey, Daniel Cudmore, Charlie Bewley (all last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse") Michael Sheen (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: New Moon"), Jamie Campbell Bower (ditto), Christopher Heyerdahl (ditto), MyAnna Buring, Maggie Grace (last seen in "Supercon"), Casey LaBow, Mackenzie Foy (last heard in "The Little Prince"), Christian Camargo (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Mia Maestro (last seen in "Savages"), Olga Fonda (last seen in "Real Steel"), Ty Olsson (last seen in "The Shack"), Tanaya Beatty (last seen in "Hostiles"), Sienna Joseph, Carolina Virguez, Sebastiao Lemos, Ali Faulkner, Christie Burke, with a cameo from Stephenie Meyer (last seen in "Twilight") and archive footage of Edi Gathegi (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: New Moon")

RATING: 4 out of 10 unnecessary wedding toasts

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Year 12, Day 281 - 10/7/20 - Movie #3,669

BEFORE: Well, I knew things were going to get pretty weird, as far as my record-keeping goes.  Most of the actors (but not all) from the second film in the series of course carry over to the third film, just as most (but not all) of the actors from the first film carried over to the second.  But each time there are a few notable newcomers.  One prominent character seems to have skipped Film #2, but she's back for Film #3, and so on.  And it's bound to get even more confusing as I get close to wrapping up the series, and the week - one actress did NOT return for Film #3 but her character did, and was played by a different actress.

By my count, 25 actors carry over - see the breakdown below, no need to list them twice. 

THE PLOT: As a string of mysterious killings grips Seattle, Bella, whose high school graduation is fast approaching, is forced to choose between her love for vampire Edward and her friendship with werewolf Jacob. 

AFTER: Let me point out, though, that this is NOT the way the series is meant to be viewed - at least, I don't think it is.  This is not for binging, like in just four days I'll be already 3/5 done, and I'm ready to start the two-part finale tomorrow.  It's too much mopiness, too much drama, and I'm somehow both exhausted and bored.  I made a genuine mistake yesterday by drinking caffeine-free ginger ale instead of my usual Diet Mountain Dew, and I managed to fall asleep with 30 minutes left to go in the movie, which was JUST when the big battle was starting to take place.  Yep, the most important part of the film, stuff was finally HAPPENING, and I fell asleep.  But I did this for the sake of my stomach, which has been feeling out of sorts.  Two Tums and a glass of ginger ale were definitely in order, but that won't help me stay awake - but it was either my stomach or my head, I had to make a difficult choice. 

The solution, of course, was fairly simple - I got up this morning, signed in to Hulu again (after being forced to read and sign yet ANOTHER update to the Sony PlayStation agreement, exactly how many does this make, now?) and fast-forwarded to just before the big battle, and re-watched what I missed.

But my difficult choice is well-timed, because Bella STILL finds herself trying to make the difficult choice between Edward and Jacob.  Only she MADE her choice already, she keeps telling us (and Edward) that she wants to be a vampire, why the hell is she still perceived as being on the fence here?  Does the film just not want to alienate the Team Jacob contingent?  This eternal/immortal love triangle should have been resolved like TWO movies ago, what possibly could there be left to debate? In other words, they're really stretching this thing out - it's amazing how much this film series has NOT accomplished in the first three movies, things that it keeps talking about but not DOING.  Clear violations of the famous "Show, don't tell" rules - we've had so much telling about Bella wanting to join the vampire family, to be turned by Edward and spend eternity with him, but it's always several months in the future, isn't it?  Jesus, just do it already - or does it not happen?  Wait, wait, don't tell me.  Look, I'm starting to not give a crap whether it happens or not, just pick a damn lane already!  

Each episode seems to move the relationship drama ahead, but just in tiny, tiny increments - it's the old soap opera "tune in tomorrow" bit, right?  Or for guys, comic book storylines that always make you buy the next issue to find out what's going to happen next, they're both examples of classic non-terminating narratives. Most agonizing of all was probably the original "Twin Peaks" series, where you could watch a whole hour-long episode and at the end of it, be absolutely no closer to any answers or resolutions than you were before, in fact you might even be further away.  I remember watching an episode of the original series and then realizing that nothing, in fact, HAPPENED during that hour of television - it was just delay, delay, delay - and the re-boot series on Showtime was even worse in this regard!

But let's get to the story, such as it is.  There's a new series of brutal killings in Seattle, which makes me wonder why the Seattle tourism board approved this storyline - why would I want to visit Washington state if it's plagued by brutal attacks from vampires and werewolves?  Yes, of course, I know it's not the local vampires, they only drink artisanal small-batch animal blood that's locally sourced, cage-free and organic.  Ah, but is it cruelty free?  I'm guessing not.  It's those damn tourist vampires visiting Seattle who just aren't as woke as the hipster ones, they're the problem!   And because the local vampires are so well-behaved, the city doesn't even have an SVU - that's Special Vampire Unit, of course. 

So, it's up to the Cullens, they follow the news from a distance as vampires ravage the city, because they figure it's probably a group of vamps formed by Victoria, who still blames Bella and the Cullens for the death of her vamp-mate, James.  Sooner or later, the vampire army forming in Seattle will be heading out to Forks, you can count on it.  (Plus, Alice conveniently had a vision about this.)  Victoria's been chased by vampires through their territory on one side of the river, then by werewolves on THEIR side of the river - she doesn't seem to get the message, does she?  But she gets away because the two factions are mortal enemies, and refuse to work together.  Umm, until they do.  

Is one human girl really that important, that both cultures will put aside their differences and their centuries-long feud?  For ONE human?  Seems like a bit of a stretch, but that's where we find ourselves.  Or maybe it's a case where the werewolves are willing to team up with THESE vampires so they can take down THOSE vampires, a bit like the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" gambit.  So stick with this one, because there's a lot of vampire carnage in the last half-hour, heads being ripped off, arms going bye-bye and so on.  And nobody uses a good old-fashioned wooden stake any more? Geez, what happened to the classics?  

Bella is removed from the battleground in advance, for her own protection, and taken to the top of a mountain, to sleep in a very flimsy tent.  Come on, this is a terrible idea - was this plan thought up by two groups of monsters who don't feel cold weather?  Oh, yeah, maybe.  But this really just seems like an excuse for Bella to cuddle in a tent with a warm-blooded werewolf boy while her cold-blooded fiancé gets to be all moody and jealous.  The two men will never see eye to eye, so by all means, let's make the romantic situation more complicated for everybody.  And NITPICK POINT, wouldn't it have been better for Bella to snuggle with Jacob in his wolf form, where he's, you know, all furry?  Just sayin'. 

Now I've got all kinds of questions about the nature of vampires and werewolves, like are they still considered the same species?  Are they mutants, or do they think of themselves as the next step in human evolution, like the X-Men?  And if the Native American werewolves think of themselves as shape-shifters, can they turn into other animals, or just wolves?  And if so, why just that?  And in the older movies, weren't vampires able to turn into bats and wolves, too?  What happened to that?  How come none of these new vampires can turn in to bats, or fly?  Sure, they can run very fast and super-climb trees and mountains, but wouldn't flying be much more efficient?  For that matter, is vampirism a disease, a virus or a mutation?  And how come there are male and female vampires here, but only male werewolves?  

Much like our nation, the monster world seems to be divided into a two-party system - the vampires seem a bit more like the liberal-elite Democrats, I think, with their high-and-mighty diet, and they just feel more like the type who would drive electric cars and think about their fellow man, even though they've got base desires to drink that fellow man's blood.  And the werewolves here seem a bit more like the down-home country-boy Republicans, who just want to be left alone while they're stockpiling guns and food down in their apocalypse shelters, or am I reading all of this wrong?  Though it feels like there's been a real shift in America, a few decades ago I would have associated good old boys with Democrats and elitist city-folk with Republicans, and it almost feels like they've sort of switched places over the years.  Like when we were down in Texas two years ago the urban areas felt very liberal and we saw signs supporting Beto O'Rourke, but once we left the city and drove through the farmlands, you could just feel it was more like Trump country.  

Possibly I'm reading too much into this whole vampires/werewolves thing, but I wish that Americans weren't so divided, that we could find some approaches to issues that weren't all so clear-cut, right now everything's all "I'm right and the other guy is wrong", and it doesn't have to be that way.  You'd think that a national crisis like a pandemic would unite everyone against the virus, and it just hasn't been that way at all.  Every issue, from wearing masks to working on a vaccine to how to re-open the country has been given a political bent, so it's no longer possible to determine who's taking action based on reason and good sense instead of just toeing their party's line.  We could have knocked out the whole pandemic in six weeks if everyone followed all the proper guidelines, wore masks, didn't travel anywhere or infect others.  But they didn't, people went to water parks and motorcyle conventions and political rallies, so it's taken six weeks, then another six weeks, another six weeks and so on.  Then kids had to go to schools and college classes started, so we're back-sliding again, when we should have been done with this by August. I'm very disappointed, because how many people have paid for that with their lives?

Anyway, we also get to learn Jasper's and Rosalie's back-stories in this film, and it was more action-packed than the last two, so these are all good things.  But really, I blame four parties for extending this love triangle past any reasonable limit.  I blame Jacob for holding out hope that Bella will change her mind, when she's already made her choice, and not settling for being placed in the "friend zone".  I blame Bella for not making things clearer to Jacob, and being all wishy-washy about having to choose - be more decisive!  I blame Edward for not laying down some clearer ground rules about being exclusive, and "accidentally" letting Jacob hear about the engagement, that's some dirty pool.  And, of course, I blame the author for failing to resolve this whole situation, again and again and again.  

Starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Billy Burke, Dakota Fanning, Cameron Bright, Anna Kendrick, Michael Welch, Christian Serratos, Justin Chon, Daniel Cudmore, Alex Meraz, Kiowa Gordon, Chaske Spencer, Bronson Pelletier, Charlie Bewley, Tyson Houseman, Gil Birmingham, Tinsel Korey (all carrying over from "The Twilight Saga: New Moon"), Sarah Clarke (last seen in "Twilight"), Bryce Dallas Howard (last seen in "Rocketman"), Xavier Samuel (last seen in "Fury"), Jodelle Ferland (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), Catalina Sandino Moreno (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Julia Jones (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Booboo Stewart (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past"), Paul Jarrett, Iris Quinn, Alex Rice, Peter Murphy, Monique Ganderton, Byron Chief-Moon, Jack Huston (last seen in "The Irishman"), Leah Gibson, Kirsten Zien

RATING: 6 out of 10 missing persons reports

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Year 12, Day 280 - 10/6/20 - Movie #3,668

BEFORE: Well, you can't say I wasn't warned about these movies.  I'm already looking forward to being done with them, which makes it harder to add skip days and space them out until I hit the weekend - it's tempting to just race through them and be finished more quickly so I can move on to other films.  But then again, maybe it's better to pace myself and do five "Twilight" films in seven days, better for my mental health and slightly better for my sleeping schedule.  We'll see.

Speaking of health, I made a doctor's appointment for today because I've been feeling queasy in the mornings, I often get the dry-heaves after brushing my teeth, and I've been assuming that this was all somehow stress-related because it tends to occur as I'm thinking about what I need to do that day, but then I started getting stomach pain too, which I also assumed was stress-related.  But then I took some antacid and felt better, so now I'm thinking I've got acid reflux again, and it's worse in the mornings because I've been lying down horizontal, which is not a great way to sleep if you're prone to heartburn/reflux.  So the past couple nights I've slept sitting up, and my condition seemed to improve - also I've tried to eat less acidic food.

But I still kept the appointment, so I could get a flu shot, and I got a physical as well.  But I got concerned after an e-mail from the doctor's office, which recommended that I postpone the appointment if I had any COVID-19 symptoms, and there are a lot of those, from fever, cough and loss of smell and taste to more basic ones like fatigue, nausea, sore throat and such.  Nausea, check, fatigue, also check, and just the thought of a sore throat makes me feel like I have a sore throat - great, so now I think I've got COVID and I should cancel my exam, and go get tested instead.  But I went anyway, they took my temperature at the doctor's office and I've got no fever, so probably not the virus - I'm just fatigued because I haven't been sleeping well, and it all goes back to being stressed out.  Honestly, with the pandemic and election news I'd be a bit concerned about anyone who WASN'T stressed out at this point.  So I'm just going to chew on some more Tums and try to think about better days ahead, maybe.

Nearly the whole damn cast of "Twilight" carries over, but I've still got to keep track of it all down below...  As I figured, this makes parsing out my linking both easier and more difficult at the same time.

THE PLOT: Edward leaves Bella after an attack that nearly claimed her life and, in her depression, she falls into another difficult relationship - this time with her close friend, Jacob Black.

AFTER: I feel sorry for Charlie Swan, Bella's father, this was not the life he envisioned for her when she came to live with him, that she'd end up dating one monster after another.  I assume in future installments he'll have to deal with her having a relationship with the Invisible Man (if she can find him) and maybe a roll in the hay with Frankenstein's Monster.  And what does this say about Washington state, the new home of various monster clans?  (Though this was filmed in Oregon, I believe, which has similar forests, the same always-cloudy weather plus the very photogenic Cannon Beach...)

Yep, as the title indicates, this film introduces the werewolves to the "Twilight" saga (and it's now "The Twilight Saga" in the title, I'm not sure why they changed the format in only the second film, instead of just adding a colon, like most franchises do.  "Twilight: New Moon" would have made more sense, but the book this film is based on was just "New Moon", so there's zero consistency across the various mediums).  Since I never read the books, I can sort of pretend to be surprised by this, but the fact is that these films were so pervasive about ten years ago that all of the major plot points were discussed in one review or another.  It barely even seems worth issuing any kind of spoiler alert now, because either you're a fan of these stories and know them inside-out, or you avoided them like I did, you must have at least seen clips on TV of that cool CGI werewolf transformation.

So, this is how it's gonna be?  Each episode starts with Bella feeling moody, then she seeks out some companionship and gets a renewed outlook, then finds out her new boyfriend is a monster?  Only he's not really a monster, because he has a moral code - plus maybe that hits a little bit too close to home for the fans who find out that their boyfriends are symbolically monsters, and not actual ones.  Isn't that always the way, ladies?  Am I right or am I right?  This is the pattern for the first two films, but I hope they came up with something different for the third installment, or Bella will be dating mummies and zombies before you know it.

This is supposed to be where I decide if I'm "Team Edward" or "Team Jacob", right?  What about neither, can I be "Team Mike"?  Mike's just been waiting in the wings, hoping to date Bella after each of her relationships goes south, and he seems like a decent enough fellow.  Perhaps he's reaching too far out of his league, I mean, Jessica's RIGHT THERE and seems to have the hots for Mike, so what's the problem?  Is Jessica no Bella?  Really, come on, is Bella really that great compared to Jessica?  At least Jessica has an upbeat outlook on life, while Bella just sits in her room for MONTHS (apparently) staring out the window.  That's hardly constructive - come on, Bella, I know the first cut is the deepest (umm, literally in this case) but there are all sorts of monsters out there that you could pair up with.  So you fell off the monster, you've got to get back up on top of it!  Umm, so to speak.

Again, as with the first film, there's just not a lot happening in the first hour.  Are the books the same way, nothing really happens for the first half of each book and then all the action is hurriedly loaded into the second half?  More to the point, didn't I see this whole "vampires and werewolves are sworn enemies" rap in the "Underworld" films?  (Man, I got suckered into those films good - the first was OK, but then the sequels totally sucked, I couldn't make bat-heads or werewolf-tails out of the later films...)

Things do happen, just not very exciting things - Bella learns the art of motorcycle maintenance, and then tries her hand at cliff-diving, and it does not go well.  Actually, nothing really goes well because she sees the spectre of Edward everywhere, and it's super unclear whether she's imagining this, or he's found a way to speak to her remotely from far away, or he's dead and his ghost is haunting her.  Choose your favorite, I suppose.  But it turns out that Edward had to get away from Bella because he loved her TOO much, which I think is something that only happens in the movies.  Obviously if he doesn't age and she does, then someday she's going to be old and gray and he'll still look 17, so everybody sort of racks their brains here and can't seem to come up with the very obvious solution to this problem.  Oh, well, I guess it wasn't meant to be then, and they become the first couple in human/monster history to break up because their love was just too darn strong.  (BARF!)

Finally, we get some werewolf action, as the gang of beasts has been secretly protecting Bella, and keeping that female vampire from the last film from reaching her to seek revenge for her mate, James.    This is followed by a misinterpretation of a psychic vision, Edward's sister Alice saw Bella cliff-diving in her mind's eye and assumed she drowned, and after learning this Edward went to the Volturi (a bunch of Italian vampires, sort of a ruling council) and asked them to take his life, because some writer made it impossible for him to commit suicide by just stepping into a ray of sunlight.  Those writers are always thinking about keeping their characters alive just to sell more books, right?

So it's off to Italy to save Edward (pretty convenient, does Bella even HAVE a passport?) - I just hope she can get there in time?  And we meet a whole new group of vampires there, a group that isn't all hipster-vegetarian "I won't eat people because it's wrong".  Plus they have some new powers, so I assume they'll be important later?  Actually, you can infer a lot about how the plot might develop just by looking at the cast lists in advance, which is what I do.  Of course, this is a double-edge sword, because I may discern things using this method that I'm not supposed to know just yet.

Back tomorrow with another installment of "Hipster Monsters and the Humans Who Love Them, for Some Reason..."

Starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Ashley Greene, Rachelle Lefevre, Billy Burke, Peter Facinelli, Nikki Reed, Kellan Lutz, Jackson Rathbone, Anna Kendrick, Elizabeth Reaser, Edi Gathegi, Michael Welch, Gil Birmingham, Christian Serratos, Justin Chon (all carrying over from "Twilight"), Michael Sheen (last seen in "Blood Diamond"), Dakota Fanning (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Noot Seear, Chaske Spencer, Tyson Houseman, Kiowa Gordon, Alex Meraz (last seen in "Bright"), Bronson Pelletier, Graham Greene (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Tinsel Korey (last seen in "The Lookout"), Jamie Campbell Bower (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Christopher Heyerdahl (last seen in "Stockholm"), Justine Wachsberger (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Cameron Bright, Charlie Bewley, Daniel Cudmore (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past"), Christina Jastrzembska, Michael Adamthwaite,

RATING: 5 out of 10 clueless tourists

Twilight

Year 12, Day 278 - 10/4/20 - Movie #3,667

BEFORE: Yep, I'm here and I'm going to do this - I've been avoiding this franchise for years, but I saw an opportunity to work this franchise in, so I figured I had to take it.  It became such a pop culture phenomenon over the last 12 years that there's just no use in avoiding it any longer.  I tried to ignore it when these films were in active release, and now it almost seems like it's too late, but I guess not for me, instead it's become a bit of a hindrance that these films are so ingrained in the fabric of horror/fantasy films that it's a glaring omission on my record, and in my knowledge banks.  So really, this is just to clear the decks and get this franchise off my "to-do list".  But just in the watching and recording areas, watching the five "Twilight" films comes with some unique challenges for me.

For watching the films, the first question was - how?  I noticed over a year ago that the whole series was streaming on Hulu, but then one time when I signed on, they were way down on the bottom of my list, which usually means that the films are no longer available - yet, for some reason, Hulu chooses not to remove a film from your list when it leaves the platform, like Netflix does.  This is great if you want to keep track of films you didn't get around to viewing, but it can also create the illusion that those films are still available there, when they're not.  So, between then and now, I saw that the whole series became available on Cable on Demand, so I rented them all for $2.99 or $3.99 each and dubbed them to DVD - which is still the most convenient way for me to keep and store films, but not the best way to watch them, because digital streaming is obviously better than a DVD that got burned from a VHS tape. So lo and behold, these films are back on Hulu, with better resolution and captions, so I'll probably watch them all that way.  If the scenes are dark, like in "The Cabin in the Woods", my DVD player will not react well, and it will play back the scenes even darker, and I won't be able to tell what's happening.

Next problem, keeping track of the huge cast.  As you'll see below, there were almost a dozen ways I could have gotten here, based on my 2020 viewing history.  But since February and October are specialty months, I can only link horror movies together if someone in the cast was also in another horror movie - except I get one intro link and one outro link to the month's chain from non-horror films, that's just the way it goes.  Hitting a five-film series like this makes linking incredibly easy, but then keeping track of a huge cast where some of the supporting actors weren't in every film is a different challenge - some actors were in three films, some in four, and some in five.  I'll work all that out, but then anyone in three or more films usually makes my year-end breakdown list, so that's nearly the entire cast that will have to be contact-traced again in December.  And any cast member in all five films who's also made a previous appearance or two in 2020 is going to instantly vault up to top-tier status for the year - not win the year outright, but 6 or 7 appearances right now is enough to make it to the Top 20.  It's just a lot of work to keep it all straight, that's all I'm saying.  But what the hell else do I have to do right now?

Also, in case I get franchise fatigue, I'll try to space these out - with only 24 films for the 31 days of October, I need to insert skip days, and it doesn't make sense to be more inactive as we get closer to Halloween.  So I'll try to go slowly and just devote the whole week to this franchise, if I watch the last one next Saturday, five films in seven days, I can still stay on target.   Jose Zuniga carries over from "The Dark Tower".

THE PLOT: Bella Swan moves to Forks and encounters Edward Cullen, a gorgeous boy with a secret.

AFTER: Sure, I've been warned away from these films, again and again - and as recently as last week by a co-worker.  When even the fans of the films say, "You know they're...bad, right?"  Eh, I've watched worse.  Much worse, probably.  I've probably watched worse vampire films, for that matter.  Some of those "Dracula" sequels from the late 1930's, and the Hammer Studio films from the 1960's are just plain bad in a different way, they can be cheap and dumb - like, who the hell thought it was a good idea to kill Dracula every time?  That really lessens the sequel chances, or forces a re-boot, or inspires the writers to keep coming up with more outlandish reasons why he was only "mostly dead" in the last film, and now he's back.

But so much of that old vampire lore is no longer applicable in modern times.  Dracula may have been the "big bad" at one point, but now he's old hat.  It used to be you could kill a vampire with sunlight, or a wooden stake through the heart, or running water, or by tricking him into eating the garlic bread when you take him out to the Olive Garden.  Those days are gone - something shifted around the time of the Anne Rice novels like "Interview With a Vampire", I'll bet.  Suddenly there was a whole underground vampire society, men and women who just worked the night shift and hid almost in plain sight, but were really apex predators who looked at all of human society the way that we humans look at a chicken coop or a herd of cows.  Evilness is therefore subjective, because if vampires are just another species trying to eat and stay alive, then they don't want to kill all the humans, or else then they'll starve, or have to just eat really, really rare steaks.

Also, there's been a shift in fiction to treating vampirism as something more akin to a disease, spread by blood transmission, and I can't help but wonder if the AIDS crisis of the 1980's got sort of reflected in the mirror of horror fiction.  If you share needles with someone, you could get sick, and if someone bites you, you could become a vampire, those don't seem too far off from each other.  Now with a global virus pandemic still going, it's easier to draw a parallel between the spread of vampirism through sharing one bodily fluid with the transmission of Covid-19 through another.  But that couldn't have been the intent of the "Twilight" series, unless they were referencing SARS or Ebola or whatever was going around back in 2008.

Yes, we have go back tonight, through the mists of time to a different election year, when Barack Obama beat John McCain, the Democrats maintained a majority in both houses of Congress, and the Summer Olympics were held in Beijing instead of postponed.  The Golden Globes were cancelled, but it was due to a writer's strike, not a virus, and the biggest danger to kids at schools came from other kids with guns.  Unemployment was high, and the U.S. economy was in trouble because of the sub-prime mortgage scandal, and only a few states had legalized same-sex marriage.  (This was so long ago that I think Kristen Stewart was straight!). And it was a change to re-visit the rules of vampires, who previously could only come out at night, had to sleep in a coffin during the daytime, and then feast on people's blood until daybreak.  But the "Twilight" series said, "What if they COULD walk around during the day, in a perenially cloudy Washington state?  What if they just didn't sleep?  And what if they only drank the blood of animals, not people?"  Essentially, they've become just like vegetarian hipsters!  And just like hipsters, these vampires are incredibly self-righteous about their lifestyle choices, and they look down on the vampires who didn't get the memo about not feasting on humans.

But really, not a lot happens here - or perhaps I should say, it takes a long time for the story to get moving, things don't really perk up until they get to the vampire stuff, and that's really only in the second half.  So much time is wasted on Bella moving to Washington, trying to fit in, making a few friends, and then there's this dance with her biology lab partner over does he like her, and if so, why does he keep avoiding her, and really, this is all typical high-school movie teen drama, and it only has any deeper meaning if you go into the film with the advance knowledge of what Edward's all about.  Which, of course I did, because I avoided the film for so long and heard everybody make references to it over the years.

Edward's part of this whole vampire clan, maybe it's more like a blended family because nobody's directly related to each other, but Dr. Cullen, the patriarch, must have turned these people over the years instead of outright killing them, and from what I remember about those Anne Rice books, that's supposedly a long, difficult, painful process, for both parties.  They expand on that here, because while drinking human blood supposedly a frenzy comes over the vampire, and they don't want to stop - but only by stopping can they spare the life of their victim, and/or start the process of turning that victim into another vampire.

"Interview with the Vampire" also had a young girl character who got turned, and she was forever stuck in the body of a young girl, though I suppose she could have matured mentally, she stopped maturing physically.  Edward and his "siblings" are sort of an extension of that, forever stuck in the form of moody teens.  This is an improvement?  Each one's been through high-school many times, apparently (umm, why?  They're not going to learn anything new the 10th time...) and then the whole family will move again so they can start the charade again in a new city.  Sorry, but high school was hellish enough the first time through for most people, why wouldn't they just say they were home-schooled so they wouldn't have to go through that again?  Jesus, at least get them some doctor's notes that says they're anemic, so they don't have to take P.E. again...

But the family does like to play baseball, at least their version of it (must be all the bats...) and they can only play during a thunderstorm, but I for one didn't understand quite why.  I must have missed something.  But during the family game the Cullens are approached by three nomadic vampires, who've been feasting in the same town, and the two groups (bevies? covens?) of vamps have very different attitudes about morals and diets, so this leads to a throwdown.  Finally, some action!  One of the roaming vamps has his eye on Bella (again, I was unclear exactly WHY, maybe I missed something again...) and from that point, he would do anything to feast on her, despite the fact that she was under the protection of the Cullens.  So the last part of the film is a vampire road trip to Phoenix, in order to keep Bella's father and friends safe, I guess, and a showdown between the Cullens and this rather rude rogue vampire.

I'm going through the IMDB trivia page now, and of course, I missed most of the in-jokes and references to the books, too.  Just like with "The Dark Tower", that's the price I'm willing to pay when I watch the movies first and skip the books.  It's just easier, you know?  But now I have to go back and read about all the Easter eggs to find out what I missed.  Most of this seemed like pretty tepid stuff, so my score will be right down the middle, I think.  Hoping for much more action in the sequel films, but I may be hoping in vain.  Still, for a film with a $37 million budget to take in more than $408 million worldwide, that's an impressive return on an investment.  It's hard to argue with success, right?

Also starring Kristen Stewart (last seen in "Charlie's Angels"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "The King"), Peter Facinelli (last seen in "The Wilde Wedding"), Elizabeth Reaser (last seen in "Liberal Arts"), Ashley Greene (last seen in "Bombshell"), Kellan Lutz (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), Nikki Reed (last seen in "Thirteen"), Sarah Clarke (ditto), Jackson Rathbone, Billy Burke (last seen in "Untraceable"), Cam Gigandet (last seen in "Burlesque"), Rachelle Lefevre (last seen in "White House Down"), Edi Gathegi (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Taylor Lautner (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Christian Serratos, Michael Welch, Anna Kendrick (last seen in "Drinking Buddies"), Gregory Tyree Boyce, Justin Chon, Solomon Trimble, Kristopher Hyatt, Gil Birmingham (last seen in "Hell or High Water"), Matt Bushell, Ned Bellamy (last seen in "The Paperboy"), Ayanna Berkshire, Katie Powers, Trish Egan, Catherine Grimme, with a cameo from author Stephenie Meyer.

RATING: 5 out of 10 cans of Rainier beer