Teenager Bella, is forced to leave sunny Atlanta where’s she’s lived with her mum to settle with her taciturn, police officer father in the cold north of America.
She accepts this with the same passivity as she accepts everything else that is thrown at her. Bella is quite a little withdrawn but despite having no visible personality of her own, on her first day in her new school she manages to attract the friendly attention of the most charismatic, pleasant and beautiful school kids you can imagine. What great kids – shiny, humorous, affectionate, zit free and really hard working!.
Then one day the cool kids (vampires, of course) stroll into the canteen turning heads and, as one reviewer put it, with the entrance of Edward, the romantic ‘lead’, the camera almost falls over at his good looks.
Hopelessly attracted to each other, the lustful glances and hungry huffing soon transform into lying stiffly (in his case, at least) alongside each other, with one foot on the floor in case he is overcome and slips into his real nature and kills her. They are the most undesirable little dweebs I’ve ever witnessed. Edward wears too much makeup – in these days of CGI you’d think they could afford to go easier on the pan stick. He manages a weak but sustained poor man’s James Dean impersonation Angel wings at beginning. To be honest, he was too young for me to even feel vaguely comfortable finding him attractive. Imagine my relief when the ‘evil’ vampires made their entrance. They were easy to spot because they pouted sexily at the camera and wore great clothes. One of the guys, Jason I think was his name, all Brad Pittish slutty pout and swagger, made me breath one shuddery sigh of girl relief,
“That’s more like it!” I breathed into my friend’s ear.
“I knew you’d like him!” she groaned. She had no computation about fancy the fey, ball-less vampire. I, on the other hand, said I’d feel a bit like a kiddy-fiddler if I even acknowledged that he was dashing.
And what did he see in Bela? It confirms my worst fear about men – they hate women with personality and just want a demure little miss who never says boo. The feminists argue that she behaves like an abused wife, totally subjugating her needs and life to Edward’s ‘ways’. While this may have been true of the books (which I haven’t read), it’s a little more even in the film. Neither of them gets what they want. The Jonas Brothers would be proud.
Dangerous liaisons
As most teenage girls in Britain will already know, Twilight - a tale of love between a young woman and a vampire - has now been made into a movie. It will no doubt be a huge hit. But what a shame it's not more like Buffy, writes Lucy Mangan
Unfortunately, there’s only one remotely Buffy-like line,
“Your moves are giving me whiplash.” Bella says when Edward swooshes past her to save her life. Again.
Another writer argues that the film is a wonderful evocation of female lust and is in fact a study in female sexuality:
Bitten by the female gaze
I wanted to hate Twilight, but it subverted its weak source material and provided a rare vision of female desire
In the end, I didn’t really care about the couple so much. What I did love was the cinematography, the cold, cold landscape and pine forests, the bracing beach scene. There was some fabulous altered reality camera work although the CGI seemed a bit ‘fake’ at times. The very silly baseball game was better than quidditch. And, I found myself becoming a little too interested in home décor at one point.
The concept of the vegetarian vampire was amusing and I loved the little domestic details revealed but, in the end, although
I was pleasantly distracted by Twilight - anything it did well, Buffy did better.
