The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Last night, I braved throngs of lycanthrope lovers, vampire maniacs, screaming teenagers, sensuality-starved adults, and squeamish tweens and went to see New Moon on opening night. Yes, I realize that puts me squarely in the sensuality-starved adults category, but I’m okay with that.  I’m not starved for sensuality in my everyday life – that’s something one needs to appreciate on her own – but I am a little starved for it in the entertainment world. 

Yeah. So. I’m still hungry.

Anyone who bothers to read this has read the book so there’ll be no surprises regarding the plot which bugged me.  That whole, “You’d be better off without me” thing.  Does that ever work?  Apparently, some people love it (see Casablanca). I’m not one of those people.   

If you’ve ever seen the “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob” t-shirts, but are uninterested in reading the four books, or ever seeing any of the movies (two out now) let me help you out.  Edward is a serious vampire who is intensely in love with a quirky klutz named Bella.  Jacob is a laid-back kind of American Indian boy next door who is also in love with Bella and happens, as he discovers in New Moon, to be a werewolf.  The vampires and the werewolves live side by side in a city called Forks and have a tentative truce not to kill each other. Got it?

Fans of the books and movies are apparently divided in allegiance between the two male leads.  Until last night, I was totally a Team Edward player. Now, I’m conflicted. Why?  In a word: pecs.

Seriously, if you plan to go see the movie, do it soon just to enjoy the full audience reaction to the scene where Jacob takes off his shirt to wipe the blood from Bella’s head (see – klutz) revealing his perfectly tanned and hairless sculpted pecs and washboard abs.  There was a low hum reverberating throughout the auditorium that started off as a sharp inhale and slowly released into a cross between the word ‘yum’ and a deep exhale.  I smiled.  Okay, maybe I even chuckled a little.

Then much later, when Edward thinks that Bella is dead, he decides to expose his sparkly skin in the middle of a busy street carnival as a sort of suicide by cop stunt.  In a terribly cruel contrast, Mr. Pasty-White is forced to disrobe (at this point, I can only imagine the actor had not yet seen the dailies on his cast mate’s disrobing) exposing not only his sparkly skin, but further his flaccid pecs and sort of messy, hairy flatness.  (Honorable mention on the iliac furrows, though I did wonder, “where the hell is the top of his pants” at that point.) I don’t know if it was a collective lack of memory or what, but the audience did not seem to react to what I thought was an unfavorable yet unavoidable comparison.  I winced.

[By far the most distracting feature of the movie was seeing Tony Blair as the head Volturi.  It wasn’t really Tony Blair, but the actor who played him, superbly, in The Queen. It was freaky.]

Overall, I rather enjoyed the entire movie-going experience: buying tickets early, anticipating the night, standing in line at ten o’clock at night with a ton of young people all of us wanting to get a glimpse of a serious hero or really some good chest muscles.