Cinematic torture

So my niece has been waiting with great anticipation for the new Twilight film, called “New Moon”, and now it is finally here. I had seen the first one, and while it was “ok” I had found it pretty cheesy, so I was wary about seeing the sequel. However, the various reviews I read of the film were actually quite positive. In general, the consensus was that the movie was better than the first installment of the series, and that the performances really let you get into the mindset of the main character Bella. Granted, she’s an angst-filled teenage girl, so I wasn’t sure it was a mindset I wanted to explore all that much, but I figured what the heck. After all, how bad could it be?

Oh my gosh. Pretty bad, as it turns out. After almost falling asleep after the first half hour (it was so slow) the movie became a complete caricature of itself. I mean, it was really painful. A friend sitting beside me whispered to himself aty one point, “This is torture!” And it was, it really was. Now I have seen bad cheesy movies in the past and thoroughly enjoyed them (Army of Darkness comes immediately to mind), but this film suffers from the fatal flaw that typically prevents a movie from elevating its cheesiness to an art form: it takes itself WAY to seriously.

As it turns out, we weren’t the only ones to think this: several times people in the theatre burst out laughing at moments that you can tell were not meant to be funny. And I must also confess that those of us who went to see the movie together wound up spending a considerable amount of time talking about the movie or, more accurately, our experience of the movie. We were merciless, and I laughed so hard I actually cried. Ah well, it was a good excuse for us to get together after and share a good scotch.

This post is dated Monday, November 23rd, 2009 and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.