Of books and movies…
To my writer friends: I know you do this, but does it bother you when you go to the movies (or watch a DVD) and find yourself overanaylizing plot and characters and… everything instead of kicking back for entertainment’s sake?
I do. Here’s why….
Had a chance to watch Twilight the other night. I had…expectations. I hadn’t put them into words, but term cliche would probably be one of them. No–I hadn’t read the book(s). My daughter has. She’s talked about them to a small enough extent that my expectations weren’t swayed. Another vampire plot. How original could it be? I expected to find the heroine TSTL (Too stupid to live) and the hero overbearing, bossy, possessive and…unheroic. Especially since these were teenagers.
I’ll try to do this w/o spoilers, but gee, I’ve got to be the last person on the planet who’s neither read nor seen the movie, right?
It’ll be tricky to say this, but I’m glad Bella and Edward weren’t cast with actors who are….too pretty. I didn’t feel they were the most attractive characters in the film. I didn’t find Edward “drop dead gorgeous”, despite his looks being described that way at least once. Sorry… not for me. But–his looks (especially his eyes) were a perfect FIT for the moody, aged vampire caught in a teenagers body angst.
The characterization surprised and…yanked me in. The push/pull was good. Very good. While watching, I was making mental notes about how it was so clear we could see the attraction between them, and how they fought one another and themselves to stay apart. Their tension was good enough that I thought about it for days. To me that’s the spine tingling, breath catching rush of romance. This made the movie for me. The struggle with self control, the way neither bended or compromised who they were, really, yet still changed by what they learned by being together.
That said, I thought Bella accepted Edward’s near stalking like behavior a little too well. But kept reminding myself the book is huge–and not all that can make it on the screen. I can only hope the book makes up for that bit that makes me cringe. Please. I have a 17 yr old daughter. [side note: I asked--She thinks Edward is uber-creepy. She did say "creepy" several times during the watching of this show.]
Plot-wise I won’t say too much, because while it was better than I expected and didn’t caught in the deep ruts of BTST, I don’t think it would have carried the movie if the characters weren’t so richly developed. There were bits here and there that would have made me slap a big red ? in the margins if I were reading a friend’s (or my own) draft. I felt kind of proud of myself for still enjoying the movie despite those. Now I wonder if I read the series if it’ll be a case of me pulling out certain passages and disecting them or if I could actually enjoy it.
Ah well. If anyone has any idea how to turn off the critical thinking switch so I can go back to simply enjoying a book or movie, I’ll all for it.
I have the books, haven’t read them yet. I think Smart Bitch Sarah commented about the stalker creep factor too. I’ll have to see the movie.
March 27th, 2009 | #
I’ve read all four books, because dd was reading the first one and I wanted to know what she was reading & she said she wanted to read them all. She’s on the second, I read them back to back just because I wanted it over, lol. I’ll say this, I didn’t get ‘into’ the movie because of reading the book, but it was well done with length of movie vs. number of pages of the book, what was condensed was done pretty good in my opinion. I took me a long time to get into the first book, it’s very repetitive for lack of a better description. I really like the 2nd book, which a lot of people didn’t the 3rd one was meh, and the forth one – call when you’ve finished it so we can dish, okay?
I immediately picked up the phone and called my SIL because I just had to talk to someone who’d read it was I was done, omg.
The creepy factor? Was certainly there in the book, but the build up to getting to the ‘discovery’ was longer than in the movie, but didn’t at all diminish the creepy factor – even the 12 yr said creepy, lol
March 29th, 2009 | #