Wendigo Meets THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN, PART 1 (2011)

Regular readers should know the drill by now, but for the uninitiated, my friend Wendigo is a fan of the Twilight books and rejects the contention that Stephenie Meyer's use of vampires is "wrong" in any significant way. The folklore of the vampire has evolved over time and keeps evolving, and if it evolves to the point that they become often-benign fantasy creatures -- elves in our world, I say -- so be it. That being said, Wendigo's attitude toward the Twilight movies is more tempered. He feels that the series started strong, slipped in the second installment -- the story required more emotional range than Kristen Stewart had at the time, -- and recovered in the third part. He waited for the fourth film with trepidation, knowing that Summit Entertainment had cynically decided to divide the final book into two films, Harry Potter style. We saw Deathly Hollows Part 2 a few days before Breaking Dawn Part 1 and thus were well aware of the pitfalls of splitting a long novel -- the Potter series sadly staggered to its conclusion, we felt. While Wendigo thought that the novel Breaking Dawn did have a convenient dividing point, he wasn't certain that writer Melissa Rosenberg and new director Bill Condon would pick the right spot. He feared that, like Deathly Hollows Part 1, the first Breaking Dawn would feel unpleasantly incomplete.

Part 1 actually takes us about two-thirds through the novel, but Wendigo says that's where it should break if you have to break it. The final third and second film will bring a lot of new characters into the spotlight, some of whom are introduced fleetingly in Part 1 -- most notably a group of Cullen-inspired Alaskan vampires who show up for the long-awaited nuptials of Edward (you know who) and Bella Swan (ditto). In simplest terms, the first film leads up to the climactic moment of the book if not the entire series, the violent birth of Bella's hybrid baby, while the second film addresses the consequences, hinted at in a mid-credits visit to the Volturii, those nasty foreign vampires who've been spoiling for a fight with the kindly Cullen clan.  Part 1 itself divides neatly into halves, the first building up to the wedding and Brazilian honeymoon, the second playing out Bella's unexpected and increasingly nightmarish pregnancy.

Even Wendigo feels that the wedding preparation, the ceremony and the celebration dragged a bit. So if you're not all in for Twilight, the first 45 minutes or so of the picture may be unendurable. Everything is nicely shot by Condon, a proven talent, but the content, especially to the uninitiated, is on the level not even of a Lifetime but a Hallmark TV movie -- less menace than benign numbness. Wendigo stresses that the tone in the novel is less treacly; the wedding in print is a more bittersweet event, more starkly a farewell to the life and the people Bella has known, than the movie's celebratory tone suggests. For moviegoers, the wedding is a payoff, a victory lap, the audience's reward for three film's worth of patience. Few shadows are cast, the most prominent by the sulking Jacob (you know who, too), and Condon leavens the happy tone with Ed's flashback confession to his Depression-era career as a vigilante vampire and Bella's horrorshow dream of her family slaughtered by her bloodstained intended.

 

Above: Depression Edward eyes some action while Bride of Frankenstein plays in an homage by the director of Gods and Monsters to himself. Below...Are you entertained? Is this what you came to see?

Wendigo's big complaint about the first half is less with the wedding than with the silly reception speeches. It's meant to be funny, but he found it generic and tedious -- though I felt that Pattinson was at his most relaxed to date during Ed's slightly tipsy speech. Wendigo felt that time would have been better spent recreating the exotic mystery of the new couple's journey to their Brazilian honeymoon island. Condon pays too much attention to the swanky furnishings of the Cullen vacation house -- including their all-too fragile bed -- to evoke the location the way Meyer does. The landscapes back in Forks may be familiar by now, but that doesn't relieve Condon of an artistic obligation to make it look impressive. Part 1 was the most claustrophobic of the Twilight films so far as far as Wendigo was concerned. That said, Condon pulled off some nice visuals, even if he's more comfortable with interior than with outdoor space, and the action sequences with the superspeedy vampires and the CGI wolves were mostly well done. Condon may be the most prestigious director to take on Twilight, but in Wendigo's opinion Catherine Hardwicke still sets the standard for handling the material right.

Above, the voice of Taylor Lautner stands out from the pack.

Below, the live Lautner bows before the Cullen baby, his "imprinted" mistress.

Bella and Edward's honeymoon is cut short when the new Mrs. C. finds herself visibly pregnant after only two weks of marriage. This catches all the Cullens flatfooted -- in patriarch Carlisle's centuries of medical practice he's never heard of a vampire impregnating a human -- while it infuriates the Forks wolfpack, who regard the impending offspring as an abomination. It's not so good for Bella, either, since the baby is like a parasite, draining her vitality from within. This leads to differences of opinion -- Jacob defies his pack to protect Bella (for a film focusing on the main pair's wedding, Wendigo felt that Taylor Lautner stole it with a forceful performance), and more importantly, the Cullens are split over whether the baby should be aborted -- if possible -- or carried to term. Ultimately it's Bella's decision, and despite being well-aware of the mortal risk to her, she insists on keeping the baby and -- still more horribly -- naming it "Ejay" if it's a boy and "Renesme" if a girl. Don't ask. A political message might be inferred here, but the movie doesn't really try to make a political issue of it. Both sides of the debate have good arguments, but it probably makes sense in the overall context of Twilight for Bella to carry the baby to term.

Since we started watching the movies Wendigo and I have pondered what metaphoric meaning vampirism might have for Stephenie Meyer. By now we're fairly convinced that it stands simply for coming of age, for the rites of passage that culminate, for females, in childbirth. It seems archetypically right that Bella should finally be turned upon giving birth, on an understanding that vampirism represents the mystery of adulthood, its pains and responsibilities, from the anxious yet ardent perspective of Meyer's target readership of teenage girls. Wendigo would add that the target audience really could extend to anyone capable of empathy with those adolescent feelings. It's a pretty good overarching metaphor -- but we haven't quite figured out where the shapeshifting Indians fit into the symbolic plan.

Cullens must fight for a very good reason,

Punching out wolves like Liam Neeson. Y'heard?

Breaking Dawn Part 1 disappoints Wendigo slightly for being less explicit and graphic, in order to keep the PG-13 rating, than the book. That means we don't get to see Bella nude and we don't see the baby's birth in all its splatterpunk splendor -- Edward discreetly bites through Bella's belly and placenta offscreen, obscured by mommy's belly. It's the main moment when the book lives up to the expectation horror fans bring, rightly or not, to anything dealing with vampires. While I felt the pregnancy and birth were the strongest drama of the movie series so far, Wendigo stresses that the film's birth scene falls far, far short of the horror that might finally have reconciled gorehounds and genre buffs to these much-hated films. Readers actually feared for Bella's survival, but the film's toned-down presentation, and the obvious fact that a sequel's on the way, diminish any anxiety viewers might fear. The cliffhanger becomes not whether Bella will survive, but what kind of vampire she'll be as she wakes up red-eyed in the final shot of Part 1.

Wendigo isn't worried over whether there'll be enough material left in Breaking Dawn for one more feature film. He can't really explain without spoiling Part 2, but suffice it to say that "all sorts of stuff" happens. He's also satisfied with Part 1 as it is, though he admits to a bias in favor of the material that makes him potentially more forgiving than he was with the last two Harry Potter films. But he thinks he could say objectively that Breaking Dawn Part 1 is better than either half of Deathly Hallows. It's still well short of the standard set for him by the first film -- though his wish that Hardwicke had stayed on was dampened after seeing Red Riding Hood -- and he doesn't think it's quite as good as Eclipse was. But at least it didn't make him dread seeing the final film in the series. Despite his reservations and criticisms, he's looking forward to seeing Condon close things out.

Wendigo Meets THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE (2010)

To review: my friend Wendigo is invalid enough that he can't sit in a movie seat comfortably, and so has just seen the third filmed episode of the Twilight series this weekend. And while he yields to no one in his love for the vampire movie tradition, he defends the work of Stephanie Meyer against all comers, rejecting entirely the idea that her portrayal of vampires is somehow wrong or inherently bad. To date, he has liked Catherine Hardwicke's film of Twilight pretty much unreservedly, while finding Chris Weitz's New Moon a considerable slip in quality while still a tolerable movie.

The third film has David Slade of 30 Days of Night for a director and a new vampire villainess, Bryce Dallas Howard taking over the role of Victoria, the arch-enemy of the benevolent Cullen clan. The rest of the cast remains the same, while the famous triangle of Bella Swan, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black grows more sharp-edged. The young men and their respective clans, Edward's vampires and Jacob's shapeshifters, must quiet their rivalry to defend Bella from attack by an army of newborn bloodsuckers raised by the vengeful Victoria. Newborns, we learn, are actually more powerful (by virtue of retained human blood) than more experienced vampires, and must be handled with extreme care if you're to kill them. Hovering over the entire scene are the imperious Volturii, who offer Victoria no aid but would be happy to see her exterminate the annoying Cullens before they renege on their promise to turn the promising Bella, as Miss Swan herself desires but Edward would rather not do.

For an outsider to the phenomenon like me, Eclipse clarifies the qualities that make the series controversial to many and hateful to some. The main story is the choice Bella must make between Edward and Jacob, and the secondary choice between remaining human and joining Edward as a vampire. Ed and Jake are given ample time to make their respective cases to both Bella and the audience. Watching their debate over a sleeping Bella in a tent, the thought hit me that if Bella were Anita Blake, there'd be no issue whatsoever; she'd take both hunks to bed, maybe at the same time. At that point I realized that, instead of occupying an opposite extreme from traditional monster cinema, Twilight actually sits uneasily (in the eyes of many) in a middle ground between tradition and transgression. In the old days, one presumes, this sort of triangle would have been resolved by Edward and Jacob destroying each other so Bella could go on to live a proper life. The Anita Blake option, the complete embrace of transgression in all its polymorphous perversity, is the opposite extreme.

Wendigo reminds me of the common reading in which Edward embodies an old (though not to him) ideal of chastity. In past comments he's compared Twilight to fairy tales in which marriage is the gateway to happily ever after, while Anita Blake comes out of a different kind of romantic tradition in which sex itself is the consummation. Edward's embodiment of traditional values is what makes him difficult for monster-movie fans to comprehend or perhaps even like. He's a vampire, but not a monster. Wendigo has read the Anita Blake books and assures me that her boy-toys are monsters through and through, though some are reasonably noble. The idea of a monster doesn't preclude the idea of a noble monster; many such creatures are beloved by horror fans. But monsters by definition have an aura of danger, threat, even tragedy that simply doesn't exist for Edward Cullen, for all he talks about how dangerous his love might be. Monsters can struggle for self-control and win our sympathies by failing in their struggle and regretting their failure. By that standard, Edward isn't just something other than a monster, but someone too good to be "true" for many horror fans.

In the Twilight saga evil is a matter of choice rather than identity. In Eclipse, the noble Cullens (above) face off against the feral newborns (below).

Wendigo tells me that Edward had succumbed to temptation in his past, in episodes he recounts in the novels but haven't been shown yet on film. The film audience thus identifies him with an impossible or even offensive capacity for self-control. Because Edward doesn't seem dangerous, he's seen as a goody-two-shoes who, to the extent that he protests about his dangerousness, comes across as a whiner. Robert Pattinson's good looks don't help matters, either. But Wendigo says that Meyer wasn't consciously writing vampire fiction; she's reportedly not a fan of the genre or a steady reader of it. For her, Edward doesn't represent a folk archetype of horror but the complete alien-ness of the significant other with whom, for no necessarily rational reason, you choose to share your life. As Wendigo puts it, he may not be the "best" person for Bella, but he's the "right" one for reasons only Bella knows. The thing to remember, of course, is that Bella not Edward, is the protagonist of the series, which relates the girl's journey toward love and commitment.

Twilight's werewolves can also choose their enemies. In Eclipse, they warily side with the Cullens (above) against the newborns (below) for Bella's sake.

It occurred to me that people don't gripe as much about Jacob as they do about Edward, though he's no more of a monster than Edward is. I asked Wendigo why that seemed to be so, and he suggested that Jake's instinctive enmity toward Edward keys into the modern archetype of the werewolf as the enemy of the vampire, so that Jacob may seem "right" in a way that Edward doesn't. He also notes that werewolves automatically have a kick-ass coolness because they turn into animals and fight all the time. In the films, Taylor Lautner gets to show a greater emotional range, and especially more passion, for good or ill, and that may explain why the Jacob character gets more of a pass, however Lautner might be mocked for his obligatory shirtlessness.

While reading the novels, Wendigo leaned toward "Team Jacob" because even he got tired of Edward's self-pity in print. But after reading Breaking Dawn he switched to "Team Edward" for reasons he can't divulge without spoiling the films yet to come. He still likes Jacob better as a character, but felt that, in the end, Edward was the "right" one for Bella. Wendigo still likes to insist, however, that he belongs to "Team Bella," since Twilight is her story, and he'll stand by the character's ultimate preference.

So much for setting the stage. I agree with Wendigo that Eclipse is a big improvement on New Moon. The direction and the acting is more relaxed; all three lead actors are more casual and personable than last time, and Pattinson is the best he's been in the series so far. Slade makes more of the spectacular locations and the story seems better paced. Where New Moon seemed impersonal, perhaps because it was rushed into production, Eclipse, though just as rushed, has more style and personality. Slade has advanced as a director from 30 Days of Night, but he has more material to work with and plays more to his original material's strengths here than he did when adapting the graphic novel. One flashback scene (the film has three) is imported from another novel, and some of the mechanics of supernatural combat are altered (in the novels, you can only dismember a vampire with your teeth), but the movie is reasonably faithful to the book.

Flashback-a-rama: From the top, the "Cold Woman" battles ancient Indians; Rosalie Cullen remembers a fatal wedding; Civil-War Jasper is beguiled by a vampiress.

Bree Tanner, who became the heroine of her own novella last year, is a somewhat more prominent figure in the film than in the book, but that's no cause for complaint. Victoria's new boy-toy Riley, her puppet-leader of the newborn army, is built up more here than in the novel, but that's only to the story's benefit. The battle scenes with Cullens, werewolves and newborns are violent without being gory, thus keeping the movie safely PG-13, since under Meyer's rules vampires break rather than bleed.

Bryce Dallas Howard as Victoria is an adequate replacement for Rachelle Lefevre, though Howard's big eyes make her inevitably less menacing than the original actress. She acts the part well enough, though she's kept in the shadows a lot early on, as if Slade wanted to hide for as long as he could that Victoria wasn't quite herself. Among the returning actors, Jackson Rathbone as Jasper gets much more to do, both as a tactical leader in the present and in a Civil War flashback recounting a newborn relationship with his maker that parallels Riley's with Victoria. But at this point in the saga Wendigo believes that more credit than ever is owed to Billy Burke as Bella's dad, Charlie.

In the most mundane role, Burke steals every scene he's in in casual fashion. Charlie grounds Bella in the real world even as she discovers more of the fantastical world around her, and there's an understated pathos in his attempts to tell Bella the facts of life when she knows that there's so much more to life (or un-life) than he's ever dreamed of. Since the movies tend to downplay Bella's mundane classmates, Charlie becomes a more important figure reminding us of what Bella stands to lose, and Burke makes the role work.

There's one book and two films to go as Summit Entertainment goes the cynical Harry Potter route to maximize revenue from its tentpole series. Breaking Dawn Part I comes out next November, followed by the conclusion a year later, with Bill Condon directing both installments. Wendigo wonders whether the final novel can be split in a way that doesn't leave the first film empty or the second film nothing but a big fight scene. He also doubts whether Summit will sacrifice the all-important PG-13 to do justice to the novel's more explicit sexuality, violence and childbirth. To date, the film series, in Wendigo's opinion, has been more good than bad, stumbling in the second round like the Potter series did but back on solid ground by the third episode. He'll have to be more patient than most folks waiting for the final films, but for now he's still looking forward to them.

Wendigo Meets NEW MOON (2009)

Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight was one of the last films my friend Wendigo saw in a theater, due to his advancing invalidism, and one of the first films reviewed (based on his report) on this blog. He had to wait until this week to see Chris Weitz's sequel when the DVD arrived in his mailbox, and to an extent he's been spoiling for a fight with all the Twi-haters out there. He yields to no one in his vampire fandom, and his isn't bound by any notion of what a vampire should be, since there is no such thing as a vampire. It's essentially a fantastical creature, and from his reading and viewing Wendigo finds that vampires fit as well in fantasy or romance stories as they do in horror films. Horror fans don't have to like non-horror uses of vampires, but they have no business arguing as if such uses are inherently wrong. Folklore from the Middle Ages forward, he claims, is full of vampire lovers who are not simply bloodthirsty bogeymen, so today's trend is really nothing recent or decadent. Call either film bad if you must, or all of Stephanie Meyer's books, but be sure you mean that they're badly written or directed or acted, not simply that they're stories you're not interested in.

Wendigo's fighting spirit is dampened a bit, however, because he must report that New Moon is not as good as the Twilight movie and doesn't live up to its source novel. More than the first film, the sequel seems intended for book fans only. It offers less of a hook for people like me who haven't read the novels. My own feeling was that the novelty that kept the first film interesting had worn off, despite the introduction of new elements. Wendigo objects to the new film's overemphasis on Taylor Lautner as Jacob the werewolf, whose coming of age, so to speak, is the main novelty of this episode. At the same time, it seriously overemphasizes Robert Pattinson as Edward the vampire, who is absent from most of the New Moon novel.

The scariest men in movies today? Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner certainly seem to give lots of folks the willies for some reason or other.

In the book, Wendigo says, Bella Swan often hears Edward's voice when she approaches dangerous situations. To keep Pattinson on screen as much as possible, Weitz visualizes these interventions so that Edward appears as a ghostly image who serves as Bella's personal GPS system. It's one example of Weitz's too-obvious approach to the material. There's little visual imagination here, especially in the special effects scenes of vampire-vs.-werewolf battles. The novel itself keeps the violence mostly offstage, but the film does nothing to make these scenes more dramatic or cinematic.

A potentially big scene in which the werewolves chase Victoria the evil vampire through the forest is slowed down to tedium in order to go with the chosen soundtrack song, for instance. The movie always cuts to the obvious to the point of being primitive. One well-designed shot meant to illustrate Bella's despair after Edward's departure sends the camera circling around her thrice over as she mopes in her room while the seasons change from summer to winter outside her window. Nicely done, but it gets overstated by the addition of titles announcing the passage of each month. Wendigo actually excuses this scene a little because it's the closest translation possible of Meyer's portrayal of Bella's despair with three blank chapters, each headed by a month of the year.

Overall, though, Wendigo faults New Moon for losing focus on Bella, who has to be the central figure of the series despite all the Team Edward/Team Jacob hype. You lose track in the movie of the fact that the story is supposed to be told from Bella's point of view, but there aren't enough moments here to establish her viewpoint. Instead, the camera drools over the two supernatural hunks without similarly glamorizing Kristen Stewart. The proper fairy-tale aspect of the story is lost, Wendigo says, if you don't keep her at the center. In New Moon she seems like just one of many characters careening about, and not the most interesting. For my part, I don't think Stewart was well served by what struck me as a rushed screenplay by the same writer who adapted Twilight. The dialogue seems more wooden this time, more expository, maybe because there's more mythos to reveal here.

While Wendigo is disappointed by the sequel, he doesn't disapprove of it entirely. He's happy to see Kristen Stewart on screen, for starters, and he thought the film fairly portrayed the novel's werewolves, instant transformations and all. Weitz's direction isn't all inept, and Taylor Lautner did come through with what was meant as a star-making performance. Wendigo was happy to see that Weitz took the trouble to shoot the Italian scenes in Italy, but for the little the production took advantage of the landscape and the red-robed extras I felt they may as well have done it all on a soundstage. Dakota Fanning makes a promising appearance as pain-inducing Jane, the Volturii's precocious minion, but Michael Sheen isn't as menacing as he should be as Aro the Volturii spokesman.

Future bandmates Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, among others, in New Moon. You simply can't go wrong with sticking a bunch of mismatched people in an elevator. Below, vampire Tony Bla--I mean Michael Sheen asks, "What are you looking at?"

Wendigo is a little worried about the choice of David Slade, the director of 30 Days of Night, to direct Eclipse, the next film in the Twilight series. While he liked Slade's earlier film, that was more an action film than anything else, and with him at the helm Eclipse may well lose even more of the distinctive viewpoint that defines the whole Meyer series. Summit Entertainment may have doomed its long-term project, in his opinion, when it insisted on too fast a schedule to accommodate Catherine Hardwicke. He intends to stick it out and see them all, but he doesn't plan to look at New Moon again anytime soon.

***

While the big-budget vampire show was a bit of a letdown, Wendigo would like to send you home with a low-budget recommendation. He recently saw Mark James and Phil O'Shea's Vampire Diary in an edited-for-TV broadcast on the Chiller channel. It's a British pseudo-documentary about the accidental discovery of a real vampire that is pound-for-pound (or dollar-for-dollar) much more effective than New Moon. An unedited version includes a lot of hot lesbian action, which makes it something I'll watch some day, but Diary isn't just prurient. Wendigo saw some real imagination both in the writing and the direction that New Moon was too often sorely lacking.

Take a look at a trailer for Vampire Diary, uploaded by monarch movies:

And as a change of pace, here's the Eclipse trailer, uploaded by clevverTV

A Vampire Connoisseur Contemplates TWILIGHT

One of my best friends is a vampire buff. He's an omniverous consumer of vampire fiction in all media. His fascination with vampires dates from childhood, but he's developed a connoisseur's appreciation of the genre. "What I like about vampires," he tells me, "is the way the myth has evolved over time, from the bogeyman in the night to the immortal romantic fantasy." At the movies he's firmly rooted in the Anglo-American tradition. The few European vampire films he's seen have left him cold.

In anticipation of Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight, my friend "Wendigo" bought Stephanie Meyer's novel and its sequels. Judging the movie as a literary adaptation, he rates it above average. Inevitably, the movie alters the story structure, but in most cases he thinks the changes were fair. In particular, he cites the inclusion of a subplot involving a murder spree as a corrective to the first novel's relatively unthreatening presentation of vampires. The "bad" vampires, as opposed to the "good" Cullen clan, are emphasized more in the movie than in the book, and the climactic fight between hero Edward and villain James is more graphic on film -- necessarily, since the book fight takes place offstage.

Wendigo credits screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg with a sensitive adaptation that renders Meyer's dialogue more cinematic. Too literal an adaptation would leave the characters sounding relatively stilted, he claims. A telling difference he noted is that, while in the novel Edward and Bella are constantly declaring their love for one another, neither character in the movie ever says "I love you" to the other. This was probably done to make it more palatable to audiences beyond the target market of teenage girls. There's also more outright laugh-out-loud humor in the movie than in the book.

Hardwicke's direction, in his view, is generally well done. She stages scenes to include background details that readers will recognize even when she doesn't have time to bring them to the forefront. She works well with her actors, particularly Kristen Stewart as Bella and Billy Burke as her dad, who reportedly does a lot with very little material. The relatively low-budgeted (and thus destined to be very profitable) movie shows its limits occasionally in effects that are "sometimes hokey," including the usual obvious wirework.

Overall, Wendigo rates Twilight "pretty good, actually, and better than the reviews I read." How should horror fans approach it? "It's more of a horror film than the book is a horror novel," he says, "but the movie is still more a romance than a horror story. It isn't really a 'vampire film,' since it adds nothing new to the concept apart from 'sparkling in the sunlight.' It's really a fairy tale with vampires in it. Edward is the handsome prince under a curse. Bella is the classic romantic heroine who finds someone who loves her for what's inside. Together, they're iconic star-crossed lovers. I'd rate it relatively low as a vampire film, but much more highly as a romance."

If anything, my friend views the movie as a retrograde vampire film, but to some extent he considers it a step in the right direction. As readers get deeper into the novel series, he says, Meyer drives home more forcefully than in the first book that there's a downside to being a vampire. Too many vampire stories today, including some movies he's liked, present vampirism as if there were no downside, and vampires themselves as nothing more or less than cool fantasy creatures who only benefit from their condition. Twilight, my friend concludes, partially bucks that trend while re-romanticizing the vampire concept.

I have no plans to see Twilight, so I'll let Wendigo's comments stand as the final word unless someone wants to post a different viewpoint. In the future, I hope to convince Wendigo to contribute a list of favorite vampire films along with further thoughts on the genre and the directions it's taking.