justTripn wrote:OK, I finally saw the movie New Moon. I read/skimmed through most of Twilight, but not the whole thing. I didn't see any Twilight movies that preceded this one so my minor complaints might not be the fault of the movie.
First impressions: I don't like the looks of the Edward character in the movie. I was very disappointed that the makeup was so obvious. It is an irrational prejudice of mine that I don't want to see obvious makeup on men. (I make an exception for Michael Jackson, but maybe that is the exception that proves the rule. By the way, Bella looked a little like Lisa Marie Presley.) But I can get past that and realize that the actor is a stand-in for the character in the book, who of course was outrageously handsome. I was sorry they couldn't translate that better onto film.
Bella was I guess portrayed very faithfully to the book, but I just wanted to shake her and shout, SMILE ONCE!!!! Just once!!! I began to feel sorry for the people around her because they couldn't do anything for her. And yes, true to form, I was rooting for Jake. I found him an appealing interesting character and I felt that he had a chemistry with Bella. Because I didn't see the previous movie, I didn't understand why Bella was so miserable even before her boyfriend left. I didn't understand why Edward was so miserable and I was hoping he would wow us all with that witty, cocky stuff he would say to Bella in the book. But he left before I could get a sense of his character and get over my aversion to his lipstick.
Anyhow, it was a surprisingly enjoyable movie. I was involved with the plot. I didn't know what would happen next and Jake kind of provided a soulfulness to everything. I loved the CGI with the wolves. The suicide attempt was very dramatic and I hate to say "pretty," but it was with the cliff and the waves and Edward etc. All of the movie was very pretty and achieved the right dark, woodsy, FOOORRKKKS-like atmosphere.
As for similiarities between Edward and Bella and Trip and T'Pol, I just don't see any. Most obviously, Trip and T'Pol were adults and trying to explore the galaxy/save Earth. They have some broad purpose and a focus outside their own mutual attraction. Bella is very young and it is perfectly understandable that she go through a phase where her whole world revolves around the pain of her breakup, but anyway . . . That is the most obvious difference for me. I do want to shout at Bella, you will survive!!! Pick Jake. I also understand if one is writing a romance, that would be a very bad plot choice.
I have a lot of reply
I'm glad you liked it, and as usual, I'm not surprised you liked Jacob more
. While this isn't a universal reaction, it seems like most grown women prefer Jacob and the teeny girls prefer Edward. I think this probably has to do with the central conflict in Bella between Edward and Jacob which basically boils down to the fact that Jacob
is the sensible choice. He's not only the logical choice, she felt quite a bit for him. What I found a little strange, was, initially S. Meyer made it sound like Bella had no feelings for Jacob beyond friendship -- at least any that she admitted to herself, since she was of course the narrator. Later on, she "admits" to herself she loves Jacob, but at no point is she at all conflicted about who she loves
more.
Let me back up and talk a little about Twilight the movie. I kind of wish you'd rented it or something because I think you'd have seen how much better made
New Moon was.
Twilight the movie made a lot of mistakes and left a lot out. I blame the director and the screenplay adaptor, (Catherine Hardwicke and Michelle Rosenberg). Rosenberg redeemed herself with New Moon, and IDK what the hell they were thinking but if you read Twilight and then watch Twilight, you see 1. TONS of scenes that actually SUPPORT the ridiculously head-over-heels romance taking place, and 2. lines in different places that fit a lot better in the book. I realize they can't make a movie 5 hours long, but there's a huge middle ground they could have taken. There are lots of scenes that I'm seeing in the 2nd time through Twilight that really support and develop this romance other than "she loves him because he's beautiful and he loves her because he can't read her thoughts". Unfortunately, they ignored that completely and I think it's because Hardwicke is a teeny bopper trapped in a middle-aged woman's body and had this huge crush on the male cast and just didn't think it was important. Sounds a bit judgmental but after listening to the commentaries, that's my perception of her. She was also just kind of an amateur, really, the last thing she'd done was Thirteen, like 10 years ago, and it was a campy little teeny bopper angst fest: No surprise, then, that that's kind of how the first movie came across. While still good, I'm not all that happy with it as it pertains to connecting to the first book. Some of the problems you would see in New Moon stem from the fact that there was not a sufficient level of backstory and development of their relationship or the supporting characters in
Twilight. New Moon ABSOLUTELY had to do all the heavy lifting of 1. developing the family characters more deeply and 2. trying to just make a better movie, with a more sinuous flow and of course, with action sequences that were... well, actions sequences.
I'm going to also say something brief about makeup. They went overboard w/ the eyes in New Moon and I don't know why. They looked FINE in Twilight. They looked perfect. They struck the perfect balance between beauty/exoticism and believability. They looked like vampires who were blending in as humans. In New Moon, they look WAY out of place. Their eyes are SO noticeable it's impossible to believe these people could really be existing under the radar as humans. It was the rest of the family they seemed to change it for. Edward's eyes seemed to stay the same, and maybe that's because they emphasized them in the first one, too, just because he was the main focus.
The crux of the debate between whether she would be better off with Edward or Jacob is whether a person is receptive to this idea of a semi-tragically all-consuming, irrevocable romance. "Star-crossed" and all that. Older people tend to be less receptive to it because they've lived lives where they've had to compromise and they've seen their worst fears muddled into manageable micro-tragedies and despite our direst concerns... we go on. We survive, even though it doesn't feel like we will. Teenagers are still in the place where it feels like you could really sit in a chair and stare out the window for 3 months and literally
do nothing the way it's made to look like Bella feels right after Edward leaves. She's beside herself with grief. It's like the way that Arwen dies of pure heartbreak in LOTR, or is it is told that she does, after Aragorn's death -- some 120 years or so after the storyline of LOTR ends (it's in the appendix). In fact, there was a line in
New Moon that I was very upset that they left out that detailed a little more about what happened to Bella from the time we see Charlie carrying her inside to the time she's standing in front of her truck 3 months later and he says "Arright. That's it, you're going to Jacksonville." The line was, when Alice comes back, she actually stays the night before Jacob shows up and the phone call from Edward sets off everything to Italy. Basically, Bella's pretending to sleep on the couch and Alice is talking to Charlie at the table (another little dimension they've left out of the films, probably for lack of idea how to shoot it without it seeming weird, is that Charlie has a small crush on Alice). Alice asks "was it really
that bad?" because she also said to Bella earlier, "Jesus, Bella you're a mess!" after Bella went into hysterics thinking Alice was about to leave. In reply, Charlie tells her the whole story... things we didn't see, since we saw from Bella's perspective. Things Bella doesn't even
remember about her "near-catatonia". How she was dead silent for days, didn't eat, didn't sleep, just looked like a zombie until her mother flew up from j-ville to help them pack her things. As they started to pack, she went into an absolutely hysterical fit and started screaming and crying like she'd never done. She cried for days until she finally passed out and then after that was just the zombie-like person we saw moping around, doing her homework, eating, never speaking. What I liked about what Charlie said was... "It wasn't like he just
left, Alice. It was like... it was like somebody
died." I liked that.
This idea of absolutely inseparability comes up in Trip and T'Pol fanfiction, as well, and how authors treat it or how readers receive it is a good indication of how they'd feel about it in Twilight. It's this question of how T'Pol would deal, and how Trip would deal, if circumstances came between them. If, somehow, they got split up by circumstances that had nothing to do with them rejecting one another. Some people have them moving on... some people have them wallowing in anguish... usually T'Pol suffers silently, dignified: not unlike Bella in New Moon, aside from the screaming nightmares of course. Which, btw, I found to be the most moving part of it. I wanted to see how they did it... after reading it... and I was very happy with it. Found it very disturbing, which was the point.
There are parts of
Eclipse that talk specifically about how Bella feels about Jacob and Edward and how those feelings conflict or don't conflict. Edward's very gracious about her feelings... he is, in fact, chivalrous to
a fault. If Bella had decided she wanted Jacob, Edward would let her go. I imagine the line where he says that is going to be in Eclipse. He could not stand to deny her what she loved, if in fact she said she loved Jacob. Well that's ridiculous, one might say... no man could be that gracious, that completely free of jealousy or territoriality. Then again, he's not exactly "a man"; but, I think it has a lot more to do with the character of how they feel about each other.
It's said in Eclipse that if Edward didn't exist, Bella could have married Jacob and had his kids and lived happily ever after. That she
truly would have been happy. One might be tempted to read that as saying that
because of Edward, she's not happy. This isn't true at all. What S. Meyer meant here, I think, was that had this world of the supernatural not existed, a "natural" love is the best Bella could have expected to hope for. It's the best any of us can hope for. That's, I think, one of the most brilliant triumphs of this writing is that the tippy top of fantasy expectations that a romance author can produce for their "sighing" reader is to display for them a love story that is
the absolute most perfect they could hope to find in this world. S. Meyer took that and turned it on its head and said, 'you know what, Jacob is 'the best she could hope to find
in this world'... but there's another world out there, one no human has ever been a part of. Bella can have [i]that[/b].' It basically says that this feeling is so strong that it overrules anything natural, anything 'of this world'. In fact, there's a beautiful "title line" from Jacob in Eclipse (however a little too rosy for his character, it's a little OOC - one of those things Stephenie Meyer would say but Jacob would not say
that's an author's prerogative sometimes, though)... where Bella tells him again that he's her Sun, that he just exudes warmth... (not literally like his skin is hot, even though that's true, she means friendship and kindness and familarity)... that he pushes all the clouds away... and he says, "Clouds I can do. But I can't fight an eclipse." or something like that.
To me, it's characterizing Bella as someone looking up at this beautiful sun, this warm, iridescent presence that you can't escape -- and she could
have that if she wanted it. But then along comes this remarkable figure, in darkness no less, that despite all its... archetypal diminutives as far as coldness and hardness and death and unnaturalness, it's what she's driven for. Edward describes the Quillete (sp) imprinting process as "like the magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream", like the spells the fairies put the humans under. I think, in a way, S. Meyer was using that to talk about the two of them. He says at one point, "It's very nearly as strongly as I feel about you." I think that's as close as she gets to basically saying, their love is like a spell, it can't be broken by anything, and it overrules anything - sensible or not.
There are so many angles and dimensions to the depth of how... backwards and self-sacrificing the aspect of her feelings for Edward are that I can't possibly go into all of them without boring the hell out of everyone but one of my favorites is how the 'sun' and the clouds come to affect her life. There's a lot of symbolism in the fact that Bella was from Phoenix, where it's bright and sunny all the time, everything is open to the light. She goes to Forks where it's dark, dank, wet, cold (
sorry EP
) and she's miserable. After meeting Edward and becoming enamored of him, and then discovering he won't be at school or around in the sunlight, but he will when it's overcast and miserable, her entire perspective of the weather changes. There are mornings in the first novel when she wakes up and it's overcast and horrible out and she is just consumed with joy over it; just as there are mornings, once she's found out they skip on sunny days, that for once, the sun is out and it's beautiful - and she's miserable.
I've been re-reading the first book, Twilight, for the first time in awhile and I'm seeing a lot of things I never noticed before and I'm considering reading Midnight Sun now because I'm seeing some places where, no doubt Edward thinks that Bella's reacting in a different way than she is -- like when she first sees him sparkle and she is mesmerized by the beauty of it. I think he thinks she's terrified.
(Why so much talk about breasts???) 
