The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (Bill Condon, 2011)

Only the most cynical financial motivation could lead anyone to split Breaking Dawn, the conclusion to Stephenie Meyer's embarrassing and tedious tetralogy about a girl's inability to function without the sexual presence of her emotionally unstable lover. There isn't even enough material to fill this film, which goes above and beyond the already over-saturated prevalence of helicopter shots of Pacific Northwest forests, the visual trademark of this film franchise. Breaking Dawn Part 1 starts with a wedding and ends with a birth. It's like Yi Yi, only replace the rationalist evocation of life's pains and pleasures with dialogue so mortally stilted that the actors can only prolong their demises by fighting against it.

Breaking Dawn Part 1 is a film of even mores. It's got even more helicopter shots, even more Edward flightiness, even more Jacob sulking, and, amazingly, even more Kristen Stewart lip biting (how has her lower lip not fallen off?). The one exception is plot, of which there is even less than usual. Director Bill Condon gets us through Bella's and Edward's wedding painlessly enough, but soon the film languishes as their honeymoon bliss turns to crazed pregnancy fears softened by so much religious conservatism that even the occasional newcomer dragged to this film by a fan will know that everything will turn out fine for our empty shell of a heroine.

Red Riding Hood

Walking out of Red Riding Hood, I felt a total emptiness in my soul. I could not rage at the absurdity of the story, the effrontery of its capitalization on the Twilight craze or the stupefying lack of direction, nor could I even mock anything. Cobbled together out of cribbed notes from someone's time-traveling Twilight slashfic, Red Riding Hood splashes its milky shots about in shuddering, arrhythmic spurts. In other words, it's an ejaculation, though to call it one would erroneously give the impression that at least one person involved had fun.

Opening with the same computer-animated "helicopter" shots of chilled, remote landscapes pockmarked with medieval villages and fortifications, Red Riding Hood clearly bears the runny, hastily applied stamp of its incompetent auteur, Catherine Hardwicke, who also helmed the first Twilight. Hardwicke brings the same sleepy tedium to this film, maintaining her sped-up yet monotonously droning montage of trees, snow-covered mountains and streams for the whole of the opening credits, devoting minutes to these repetitive, unengaging shots before finally starting in flashback on a young village girl running around the woods with her friend Peter. The two trap a rabbit in a cage, and the girl eagerly pulls out a knife to cut the bunny's throat, eliciting from myself and my two accompanying friends a simultaneous, involuntary cry of "What?!" before the scene jerks away to a calmer shot and a "Ten Years Later" title appears on-screen over yet more damn shots of more damn trees. It was the Surprise Symphony of crap.

Drive Angry

Drive Angry resides in the No Man's Land between ignorant bliss and smug self-awareness, noxious tar pit that slowly sucks down fun premises into a black morass of lazy winking and absolving self-deprecation. However, it is also the first film in a while to successfully navigate its way back and forth through this trap-filled territory. Drive Angry certainly does not work as a subversive take on grindhouse in the vein of Tarantino's Death Proof; it is not even great trash. But it's damn fun, and as soon as I finished watching it the first time I admit I immediately planned a second trip to the theater.

Having managed to avoid nearly everything regarding the film save for its absurd title, I got to experience Drive Angry's slow mounting of story elements with a degree of unknown I never enjoy anymore, not in the age of total media saturation. The opening scene of the film depicts a CGI prison in a red-coated frame. For a second, I did not even recognize it as hell, though the presence of a muscle car tearing out of the place on a bridge also threw me off the trail. I don't recall Virgil mentioning that when he showed Dante the place.

The first 30 minutes of the film veer wildly out of control, jumping any fluid kind of editing with haphazard introductions for the movie's cast list weaving an unnecessarily ornate web for only a handful of characters. I saw the film two times and was still bewildered at the lack of context for the opening barrage of images, from Nicolas Cage chasing down some rednecks with pentagrams marked on their chests to a supremely tarted-up Amber Heard crushing the testicles of her lascivious, greasy diner boss. And just when you've settled down and accepted the absurdity of the situation, along comes William Fichtner in a suit calling himself the "Accountant," always asking if Cage has just come through the area knowing full-well the answer. Those left alive by the stranger's tears through town ask the Accountant who he is and what the man has done, but he deftly avoids any exposition.

By the time pieces start to fall in place and the character name John Milton drops a huge clue for those of us who remember senior-year English, Drive Angry has amassed such an impressive horde of contrivances, loose ends and overall questions about the physical properties of certain items and people that the whole shebang nearly collapses. Then, it acts as if nothing ever happened and finally gets down to the good stuff: blatant, unabashed fetishism of every body part and overcompensating gadget.

Drive Angry knows how dumb it is and occasionally shows its hand to the audience to let us in on its cheek, but the sincere, shameless ogling pervading the film makes for a far funnier and more entertaining ride than the occasional plodding moments of overt self-awareness. Cage, toned down from his most manic work, looks increasingly withdrawn in his roles, as if the weight of his recent manic episodes on-screen, be they good (Bad Lieutenant) or bad (almost all the rest). His rage here is amusingly insular given the wild insanity of his actions, a slow burn of resentment and self-loathing that grounds the film's nonsense in the sort of dramatic seriousness that only makes a film like this funnier. Then again, these days it is not always clear whether or not the self-loathing in a Cage character reflects its actor's own feelings.

However, he looks as if he had fun here, delivering his lines with a halting relish as if he wanted to savor every last morsel of such delicious lines as, "I never disrobe before a gunfight." Milton's story unfolds so ponderously that Cage's seriousness pales in comparison to the pseudo-pathos of his character, but Cage comes out of his gloom with enough dry humor to make the convoluted issue of his daughter being murdered by Satanists (led by a Chris Gaines/Garth Brooks-lookin' Cajun Jim Jones played by Billy Burke) and his granddaughter abducted for sacrifice not as cumbersome as the pile-on of narrative could be. Heard has scant to do save shout terrified or angry responses to Milton's dour carnage, and she does not appear to have put up a fight against the too-loving gaze of the camera, which always finds the time to scan over her rear and zoom in on her eye-shadowed face. It's harder to read what she thinks of her role, as she commits to the half-tough, half-damsel Piper but occasionally gives a glance that suggests she went back to her trailer to chew out her agent.

Even if she had a blast, though, she and Cage combined could not equal the unrelenting glee with which Fichtner, a super-solid character actor, plays his role. Delighting in the mysterious yet inevitable nature of his character's origins and purpose, Fichtner ignores everyone sharing the screen with him, walking around side characters asking the Accountant's repeated questions as he consumes every piece of scenery not nailed down, casually munching cud as the characters' bewilderment perhaps reflects the actors' own. Fichtner is one of my favorite "that guys," and to see him get to let loose in a role that does not so much take advantage of his skills as let the more subtle actor get his chance to mug shamelessly. If Cage hilariously meditates on his lines, Fichtner does not need to think before spewing out some ingenious, unmistakably sinister yet delightfully bizarre threat or insult. As a villain, he is not particularly frightening, but he does not want to be. The Accountant chases down his escaped quarry not out of a need for vengeance nor even a sense of duty (though he does need to "balance the numbers"): he's just having fun playing with Milton.

I would file Drive Angry under "guilty pleasure" but it does something I've been begging dumb movies to do for some time now: it never undercuts its thick-headedness with too many winks, never tries to forgive its exposition (and my GOD is the exposition in this movie ridiculous). Because it does not attempt to pass off its bad moments as knowing jokes, they actually work as comedy, and when the actual madness kicks in, Drive Angry has inventiveness to spare. A shootout featuring Milton still inside a bar waitress is one of the most outlandish sequences in years, and the use of slow-motion for the entire sequence is cleverer than anything in a Zack Snyder movie. I continue to prefer 3D in films that use it for the kitsch gimmick it is, and the flying limbs and slow-motion bullets flying at the audience make for as good a time as the schlock of Piranha 3D. I expected to go into this film to feed my ironic love affair with the bad Nic Cage (I have a completely sincere adoration for the man when he's on his game), and instead I got a perfectly delightful bit of screwball amorality. But I have a soft-spoken for chicken-fried crap; I am, after all, from the South. Also, can we get a buddy cop film starring Nic Cage and Bill Fichtner, please?

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Anyone who knows my opinions concerning Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series might wonder why I bothered to see the second film in the four-part saga, perhaps even assuming that I went only to snipe the picture to rain on the fans' parade. That simply isn't true: first of all, this blog doesn't get enough traffic to offend a significant portion of any demographic. Second, I went because, if I expect to be a film critic when I graduate, I should prepare myself now to check out whatever movie ignites the zeitgeist, regardless of whether it interests me. Besides, New Moon is such a tedious bore that anyone who goes in relishing the opportunity to make catty comments and project an air of superiority will be too lulled to do anything.

New Moon picks up a few months after Twilight ended. It's Bella's 18th birthday, but she's so wound-up over her vampiric boyfriend's agelessness that she she openly fears her birthday as a sign of growing old. At 18. Edward assures her that her concerns border on the obsessive (it's all relative, remember; he stands at the foot of her bed at night) and that he'd love her even if she was old, because that's how much he loves her. She pauses. Her pause gives him pause. That night, Bella celebrates the birthday she doesn't want to celebrate with Edward's vampire family. She gets a paper cut from opening her card, and it bleeds like a minor stab wound, awakening the vampires' bloodlust. This reminds Edward what their relationship risks, so he breaks up with Bella and disappears.

This brief bit of plot setup takes long enough, but that's nothing compared to what's in store. Bella spends three months or so locked away from the world, wracked by inhuman grief. Chris Weitz took over the director's chair for Catherine Hardwicke, and he appears to have made the bold auteurial choice to make the passage of these three months feel as close to real-time as possible. Bella is not simply sad; she's devastated. She suffers screaming nightmares constantly, her shrieks rating somewhere between a child crying in a restaurant and "Crazy Frog" on the list of Things That Are Insufferably Annoying. Eventually, she discovers that adrenaline rushes fuel visions of Edward and, desperate to see even an apparition of the moody sparkler, she buys two rusted old motorbikes and takes them to her old friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner) to repair. Jacob tries his best to be there for the girl he loves: Bella hits her head on a rock, Jacob takes off his shirt.

Naturally, with Edward gone and Jacob standing in that "I never knew you were so handsome" light, Bella must decide between pale,sub-poetic stalker vampire Edward and kind, friendly werewolf Jacob (oh right, forgot to mention: Jacob is a werewolf). But Bella can't help herself: when presented with the nicer, more supportive and, frankly, better-looking Jacob, she can't stop thinking about Edward as his professions that seem to come less from Shakespeare and more from George Lucas. Not that her choice really matters: everyone involved in this love story is so repressed that I kept waiting for one to explode in a sticky blast of backed-up sexual effluent.

If it seems like I'm summarizing this film, know that I'm simply writing about the few things that actually happen. This movie is interminable: the pauses have pauses. It's like Antonioni by way of My Chemical Romance. In my review of Twilight I did my best to defend its stars against the material they had to speak, but I've run out of excuses: Pattinson, his part mercifully reduced, reads his few lines as if embarrassed by them (though who could blame him?). Stewart, so intriguing in Into the Wild and Adventureland, is dead-eyed and vacuous; Bella intrigues the vampire cult known as the Volturi (lead by Michael Sheen in an over-the-top performance that genuinely made me wince) because they cannot read her thoughts, but that's only because she's an empty cipher of a character, there to stand-in for its audience to project themselves into the story. However, Bella, fawned over by gorgeous men and scrutinized by elite vampires, doesn't so much represent the normal girl discovering her inner beauty but the popular girl with the body image issues. That's a perfectly valid person to study, but there's something unsettling about propping this type of character up as a role model when Bella sets herself up as a beacon of helplessness and incompetence . At the end, she stands between Jacob and Edward and begs Jake not to make her choose between them. Well, you have to, Bella. What are you supposed to be, a Morm-oh, right.

Only Lautner gives a decent performance, one rooted in some semblance of reality as the boy who can only ever be just a friend. Having put down the first book a hundred pages in out of anger, I never got to this aspect of the story, so I was surprised to see how much better in every way Jacob is to Edward. If that places me in "Team Jacob," so be it. I actually felt sorry for Lautner when his character had to turn into Meyer's idea of a werewolf, which is essentially nothing more than a large dog (I shouldn't have been surprised; look at her idea of a vampire).

Visually, New Moon bests its predecessor, as it dropped that sickening blue tint that Hardwicke inexplicably used for Twilight. Otherwise, however, nothing about Weitz's direction is particularly pleasing, and I feel like I only appreciated his aesthetically neutral touch when compared to Hardwicke's tinting an laughable camera movements. He does give us one good moment though, when Bella flies to Italy on Virgin Airlines. Weitz was given a script in which almost nothing happens, and he does nothing to pass the time, only tilting and panning his camera near the end in a vain and ill-fitting attempt to breathe some life into the film. New Moon follows a circuitous path, opening with a vision of what's to come in the climax, but by the time we get there it's impossible to care anymore; I'd been so lulled into delusion by that point that I worried for a moment that the whole thing would just start again, a never-ending spiral that led down to some level of hell Dante could not conceive. New Moon is simply one long, sleepy pause interspersed with the odd sexual fantasy. This isn't a film; it's an Ambien-induced hallucination.

In the end, though, I do not wish to project onto the fans, as many of the series' detractors have. I certainly don't agree with the characterizations, but I also don't think that any but perhaps a minuscule few would accept someone behaving like Edward in real life as romantic. This is merely a venue for young girls to vent all their obscene, shrieking excitement, which is just fine. Many seemed bored by the end of this seemingly endless film, but they'll be back, just as all of us men hated The Phantom Menace and still showed up for Attack of the Clones, which was even worse. To be honest, I find the Twilight phenom fascinating and revelatory: the rampant hysteria over the franchise and the degree to which women across a surprising age range connect to this admittedly questionable vampire lover opens up interesting dialogues concerning not just female under-representation at the cineplex but also a national feeling of sexual repression that should not be so casually dismissed by a bunch of chortling men who conveniently ignore the Star Trek and Star Wars conventions that endure to this day. Ignoring these feelings is what led to Twilight in the first place.