Jeff Wiggins

Movie: Twilight
Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Thriller

To start off, I was going into this movie with big expectations since 2008 seems to be the year of the vampire. I wouldn’t consider this a good representation though.

A quick summary: Girl (Bella) moves to new town and becomes the new girl in high school. New Girl falls in love with outsider kid (Edward Collins) who is a vampire.New Girl and Vampire have strange relationship, girl almost gets killed by evil vampire. End.

The nitty-gritty that bothers me of this movie is not only the inconsistency within itself, but the fact that the attributes of these vampires seem to be lacking towards those that we commonly know. For example, these vampires do not sleep at all (aka no coffins). I can live with this I suppose, it doesn’t effect the plot. However, they also are able to survive sunlight. In fact, not only does it not harm them at all it makes them shiny. Worse off, the Collins’ family states they only drink animal blood and it is left at that. Well there goes the entire vampire aspect of these people.

The plot itself that annoys me is that for the first hour and twenty minutes of this movie you could replace the ‘vampire’ factor of Edward (the male love interest) with just a pale emo kid and it wouldn’t change the plot at all. There is no real vampire-human obstacles that they’re overcoming here, just a lot of him saying “I don’t know if I resist myself”. *yawn* Now at this 1h20m point, it does a complete 360 degree turn here and suddenly they’re being chased by an evil vampire (who was awkwardly placed in the story might I add) and they’re trying to kill Bella. So it was 1h20m of high school emo garbage then the final 30 minutes is a horribly cliche fight scene.

As an added bonus to this pathetic attempt of a movie, Edward is able to read minds. He can’t, however, read the mind of Bella. He also often refers to her as ‘the one’ or similar there of because she has a different scent from the rest of the humans. It might just be me, but I’m pretty sure I already saw this before…Oh yeah, on True Blood. Suki (the female on True Blood) has the different scent and she can read minds. She is also in love with a vampire named Bill. It looks to me like somebody stole somebody else’s idea and just mixed it up. I think I like True Blood better.

Final Summation: Avoid this movie, watch True Blood on HBO instead. If you don’t have HBO, run over your face with a lawn mower, it’s still more entertaining than this movie.
Score: 4/10

This was awesome. Firstly just the style of it as a whole with the previews and film scratches was fantastic, it really set a good theme for the movie. I loved the fact that they used old-style effects for this entire movie. Honestly, if they had taken this same plot with the same actors and tried to make it ‘modern’ as far as effects and everything goes it wouldn’t be as entertaining.

To explain myself further, take the gore. Being a zombie-based movie, there was a scene where a group of zombies ripped apart a body and it broke into was looked like puzzle pieces (as one was a perfectly straight line cut from shoulder to bottom rib on the other side of the chest) as well as resulting in tons of blood just spraying everywhere. Were that done with today’s mindset, I’m sure they’d have ripped the limbs off and left the torso as well as less blood that was shown. Another great thing was the way they did the explosions: it actually looked real. I find personally that today’s “special effects” are just that, effects and not realistic looking so was a nice change.

Did I mention that it had a sex scene and boob shots? Well it did. As well as a melting penis, which almost made me vomit. It also had very subtle comedy thrown in. There was one section where the girl said “I don’t fucking care” (or something along that line) and the guy replied “I like the way you say fuck”, and she retorted “fuck you” followed by him taking his shirt off.

So as far as an awesome movie goes this had zombies, a sex scene, explosions, blood and zombies. It’s definitely a “guy’s movie” if there ever was one.

Total: 9/10 I dare you to watch this and try not to say “Duuuuuuuude” or “Oh my god!” at least once.

Sticking with drama reviews, lets have a look at Interview.

To spice things up, lets have a look at the actors before we get into the plot details. Going into this movie I was expecting to see Steve Buscemi be funny. When I try to make a note of where I know him from some of the first movies that come to mind are Mr.Deeds and Armageddon, both of which he played a fool. This role however wasn’t funny and because I haven’t seen enough of his work it came off as a change for me to see him in such a serious position. Not to let my ignorance take from his performance, he was a very believable journalist.
I’m ashamed to say on that same point that I’ve only seen Sienna Miller once previously in Stardust as a minor character so I can not give much say on her abilities there. As for her role as an actress in this film I don’t feel it leaves much to say that an actress should be able to portray an actress fairly well.

That brings us to the plot, which I’m going to attempt to write without spoiling. Pierre (Buscemi), a political journalist, is forced by his editor to interview the leading soap opera actress Katya (Miller). After getting off on the wrong foot when Katya shows up over an hour late, Pierre calls off the interview and leaves only to end up needing her aid after hitting his head. The two then conduct a very social, unprofessional interview throughout the night questioning each other on very personal subjects. As both characters are found to be ‘not all there’ and neither living the life the other expected, the movie ends on a twist that the viewers didn’t see coming.

That’s about all I really want to say about the movie, as I think it would be best if I didn’t spoil too much of it. The movie is simply very well done and entertaining. Unlike many recent films where multiple locations and scenarios are needed to advance the plot, this movie focuses on one instance that is played by strong enough actors to carry the movie through to the end without ‘beating a dead horse’; an admirable quality from any director that can pull it off as nicely as was done here.

Final: 8/10 “You have to change that ringtone.”