Movie Review: Twilight New Moon
I am not the audience for this movie.
I did not see the original Twilight. I read the novel and was horrified; how many teenage girls truly believe that men like Edward Cullen exist? (Fewer, probably, than the number of boys men who expect to meet a gorgeous independent woman who caters to their every whim and is miraculously attracted to slovenly underachievers, but that’s a rant for another film.) In real life a man who stalks protects a woman the way Edward does will continue to do so whether her life’s in danger or not. Perhaps the majority of Twilight fans recognize this, and treat the stories as wish fulfillment, much as this reviewer does with good romantic comedies (though not, it must be said, The Ugly Truth, which peddled a similar adolescent fantasy).
On that level, New Moon delivers. It reproduces the central appeal of the books: a man who’s faster, stronger, more romantic, better at playing baseball and musical instruments alike and more beautiful than anyone you could possibly imagine falls for Bella Swan, an ordinary, unremarkable-looking girl, and continually professes not only that he loves her, but that he cannot live without her. So protective is he that when his otherworldly urges place her in danger he actually abandons her to protect her.
This is the basest sort of adolescent fantasy, the kind any writer who’s attended university could dream up, and yet it would be undone by a sense of manufactured cynicism if author Stephenie Meyer didn’t wholeheartedly believe in it. She does, and it would appear a wide cross-section of the western world does too.
I haven’t listened to ‘rock’ music for years, but there’s something about Band of Skulls that I can’t get enough of. Baby Darling Dollface Honey has the same rawness and musicality of a White Stripes record, but with a unique and irresistible charm. Add to that a very attractive female bassist and I’m sold. Band of Skulls is featured on the new Twilight soundtrack alongside some of my other favourites like Thom Yorke, Bon Iver, and Grizzly Bear, so clearly they’re doing something right.
The New Moon soundtrack listing is now available. Is it everything Twilight fans hoped?
