New Moon (2009)

New Moon (2009)

Written by Melissa Rosenburg and Stephanie Meyer

Directed by Chris Weitz

            Once again, I would like to give the “I am not in this movie’s target audience” clause.  I know, as a cinephile, I should enjoy all genres of film, and to a point, I do.  I have been known to enjoy the occasional romantic comedy, the drama, horror, thriller, actioner, even children’s films.  But one thing I do not enjoy is bad filmmaking.

            New Moon is bad filmmaking.  How can you make a film WITHOUT likeable leads? I mean c’mon! It terrifies me that Kristen Stewart is considered a role model for young girls.  This movie provides ample evidence to have her convicted as a bad hero.  First, she smiles maybe once in the movie.  We’re supposed to buy that Bella and Edward are in love, but they don’t spend a single second of this film enjoying each other’s company!  It’s dramatic argument after dramatic argument after dramatic argument.  Just because they kiss and hold each other every now and then doesn’t mean that they’re in love.  Especially when Robert Pattinson makes that face like he’s in pain all the time.  This was like a 2 hour version of Dawson’s creek, but with vampires and werewolves.  Second, she’s a straight up bitch, and not in a good way.  She ditches her best friends when she gets a boyfriend.  She’s downright mean to her friend Mike, who has had a very obvious crush on her since day one, going as far as to leading him on to the prospect of a date, and then she’s blatantly rude to him at the end of it.  And it wasn’t just Mike she was mean to!  She used Jacob to help her rebuild a motorcycle so she could try to kill herself later.  She spent months with the guy, and when he fell in love with her, which is understandable and natural, she freaked out and shunned him.  This girl is a Class A Cocktease.  Three, she’s a complete downer.  When Edward breaks up with her (which, we are told, is at the very beginning of the school year, i.e. September), we’re given a montage recapping the months until February in which she mopes in front of a window.  That’s five months of straight moping.  At what point do you get the hell over it?  Four, Kstew spends the first hour and a half of the movie trying to kill herself.  You read that correctly.  After Edward gives her the boot, she tries to kill herself over and over.  She does this because whenever she’s close to death, she has visions of Edward, and she thinks if she dies, then he’ll be there forever.  She gets on a motorcycle with a skeevy biker dude (with no helmet, mind you).  She drives a motorcycle straight into huge rock.  She jumps off of a cliff.  There is no end to her stupidity.  And this is a character that is now a role model for young girls around the world.  The fact that women actually connect to this character is beyond the limits of my imagination.

            Aside from the case against Bella, there are numerous other offenses in this movie.  The dialogue is just plain terrible.  At one point Bella says “Don’t do this for my soul, because I don’t care about my soul anymore.”  Now, I know, that line pales in comparison to the infamous “Spider-monkey” line from the first movie, but this dialogue ran throughout the film.  Another downside was Robert Pattinson.  Really? Women find him attractive?  Why?  Don’t give me that “Oh, he’s dark, and quiet, and brooding, and mysterious” bullshit.  He’s just plain creepy.  The first thing my father taught me was to never trust a man who doesn’t smile.  And in this movie, Robert Pattinson does not smile once.  Also, he appears in Bella’s room without being asked, even when she’s not home.  He has the body of an emaciated heroin addicted twelve year old girl.  My girlfriend wasn’t the only one that made comments about the pre-pubescent pubic hair sprouting from his chest in the one scene where he was shirtless.  Now, I know, it’s not the actors that were terrible here.  Kristen Stewart was cute as hell in Adventureland, Panic Room, and Into the Wild.  I really do not believe that it was her fault Bella was an unlikeable bitch who just jumps from guy to guy.  There was a trailer before the movie for some other movie RPats is in, and it actually looked like he did a decent job.  He was awesome in that Harry Potter movie.  So I blame the screenplay(s) and story for what I didn’t like about this movie.

            I know I’ve beat it up a bit, but there were some things I did like here.  One thing I can say is that it looked great.  The cinematography and locations they used were simply beautiful.  There was a scene in which a bunch of werewolves chased a ginger vampire through the woods, and it was set to a Thom Yorke song and it was exquisite.  I actually enjoyed that scene quite a bit.  I liked all of the characters that were not Bella or Edward.  Edward’s sister Alice (played by the uber-hot Ashley Greene) was adorable and sweet.  Jacob, despite being shirtless for roughly 93% of the movie, wasn’t half bad.  I’m glad they decided to stick with Taylor Lautner, because  he made this movie tolerable.  Anna Kendrick, as Bella’s “Best Friend” Jessica was equal parts bubbly and funny, and I really wish she had more than five lines in this.  I can’t wait to see her in Up in the Air, because I’ve heard she’s fantastic in it.  Billy Burke plays Bella’s dad, and he was awesome as usual, still rockin a pretty mean ‘stache.  Michael Sheen showed up at the end to take a bite out of the scenery, chew it up, and spit it back out in Robert Pattinson’s face.  In fact, that whole sequence at the end invovling the Volturi was pretty awesome, I really liked that.  Dakota Fanning was pretty cool as a evil vampire with mind control powers.  It looked like she had fun.  Basically, what I’m saying is, I liked everything that didn’t involve Bella or Edward.

            I can’t even say that I recommend this movie to 12 year old girls, because, really, there’s nothing good here.  Get rid of the lead characters and actors, and maybe we’ll have a watchable flick.  I will, however, be seeing Face Punch when that comes out, because it sounds frakkin awesome.