Twilight - Legends of the Slapping Beaver

Right... I just did one of those things, that beforehand seemed like a fairly decent idea (hey, you know), and then afterwards I find myself sitting there, wondering what went wrong in my life.
I have watched Twilight.
Bear with me, this will be a long post.
Now, I knew it was going to suck, I had picked that much up from living in the world where there are occasionally sane people. With taste. Sparkling vampires, baseball and teenage angst, it just couldn't be very good. What I wasn't prepared for, though, was how absolutely, mind-bogglingly bad it was. It was a suckfest, and not in a good way, let me tell you. (Seriously, how am I NOT supposed to make "sucking"-puns with this movie?)

Twilight is a deep, compelling tale about a small-town sheriff whose wife has left him, and whose daughter is suffering from several crippling mental illnesses. He tries hard to get along with everybody, and keep things quiet and peaceful in the place he loves, but no matter what he does, life seems to be out to fuck with him in the greatest ways imaginable. He loves his daughter, but has a hard time showing it, and it seems like everything he tries falls on deaf ears. It's kinda like 'The Wrestler', but with shotguns. Or, well. It should be.
For some bizarre reason, however, we don't see much of the dad. We instead follow his daughter. Belle.

Belle lives in Arizona and is very pale. We never get to know why she is so pale, even though she lives in fucking Arizona. It's probably supposed to make her look haunting and mysterious, but along with the dark rings under her eyes, she's more of a "crackwhore with AIDS"-type pale.
I'm at a complete loss as to how they thought she'd inspire empathy in the audience, because she's a huffy, ungrateful little emo bitch. She moves to this shithole town up in Nowhere, Northwest, to live with her dad, because her mom's going out with a baseball player now and wants to live the good life. But hey, no hard feelings.
She meets her dad, who fights to make her feel at home, along with the rest of the town, who is nothing but friendly, welcoming and open-hearted. Even at school, she is greeted by nice people and within days have friends, who she promptly starts to ignore, avoid and be generally lonely around. (There's of course the mandatory "arrive in the truck my dad just gave me and be horribly embarrassed because it's not as pretty as all the other cars"-scene, but it's forgotten in the very next shot, and all pretenses towards making her actually believably lonely are thrown out the window.)
Then of course, she meets The Boy. He's mysterious, and hangs out with his creepily incestuous family, but he's still the dream boy of the school, since he's Oh, so pretty. Apparently the girls in this town have a thing for constipations, or maybe the constantly recurring "I have a brain tumour"-face. It starts out with him acting like a freak around her, of course, and she's rightfully pissed at him. This all goes away, though. For some reason. Because when they next meet she's gone from "I'm going to bawl him out" to "Oh, he's so mysterious and lonely must know more".
This, then, goes on and on and on and on for two hours.
The guy keeps acting like he has multiple personalities, one of which has mind-numbing headaches that hit him instead of emotions, and the other is a raging bastard. The girl seems to be very quickly developing a dangerous obsession, and by the end of the movie has turned into a full-blown, shrieking "YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME!!!", emotionally crippled retard.
There is no other explanation than severe brain damage. That would also explain the acting. It is quite possibly the worst acting I have ever seen in a leading pair, where tossing ones head and making a little offended noise has to stand in for actual emotion. The only one that actually does a fairly good job is the dad, whose awkward social retardation actually fits the character, unlike all the others, where it just looks out of place.

Oh, and I mentioned the "creepily incestuous" thing? Well, this family of vampires are pretending to be "adopted" by the head vampire, the "dad" of the family. There's five kids. Four of them are dating each other. Yes. This lifts very few eyebrows in the little american town, in fact it lifts no eyebrows at all. Which makes me wonder about their marriage practices.

The dialogue is another thing.
"- I'm designed to kill.
- I don't care.
- I've killed people before.
- It doesn't matter.
- ...I want to kill you. I've never wanted a human's blood so much in my life before.
- I trust you."

.... wait, what?
And bear in mind, this is just after the girl has realised that yes, this guy's a vampire. Him or his family are most probably the ones responsible for the two murders that have occurred here lately. Let's run off into the woods with this guy, alone, and declare our love. This guy that has really done nothing but acting like an asshole one moment and a retard the next. I mean, telling a girl that you don't want anything to do with her because you don't think you're good for her, fine. But running after her repeatedly the next day to tell her that you don't think you should be friends (because hey, you know, she might change her mind), is just creepy.
I also think he might be setting the girl up for "dangerous situations" so he can jump in and save her. Seriously, it just happens way too often to be coincidental.

The whole thing reads like bad fanfiction, I kid you not. It reads like the author has put herself in the guise of a high school girl who is lonely and emo, but still popular!!! I cannot stress this enough. She's just naturally popular and everybody loves her for who she is and she can get any boy she wants really, and I'll show them all when I'm rich and famous grumble grumble...
And the guy... Oh god, it's actually the first time I've seen a female author having trouble portraying guys realistically. It's not hard. You just put him there and make him say things that aren't horrendously stupid all the time, and you got a guy. This one though, just can't seem to pull it off. There's just emo angst, and quite possibly the worst "endless love" scenario in existence.

And also, when you've been a vampire for about a hundred years, don't you think you should have come up with a better excuse for the fact that your eyes change colour now and then, than "It's... er.. it's the... flourescent... *runs off*" (Actual quote from the movie)
If you're trying to pass as human, it might be a good idea to answer Yes to the question "Are you wearing contacts?"
And when you "accidentally" tell people that you can read minds, don't act so shocked. Looking at his empty, empty face, I'd be very surprised if these little slip-ups didn't happen all the time.

There's also the Thunderstorm Baseball. Yes. This is apparently a vampire tradition. Whenever there's a thunderstorm, they play baseball. Because they hit the ball so hard it breaks Mach 1, and make a loud bang. So they can only play during thunderstorms. Because gunshot-like noises in the middle of the forest outside a small american town must always inspire suspicion of supernatural causes in the local law-enforcement. What, "We have a gun range" wasn't a good enough excuse for you people?

The whole setting is also completely off-the-wall bad. Apparently making a vampire happens every time you bite. Unless you kill them outright, because of a venom in their fangs. This always happens, if you have enough restraint to hold back and not drain the person completely. Unless they suck hard enough.
Literally.
I'm not making that up, the entire end of the movie is based around that.
GAH! How am I supposed to not making stupid jokes out of this?!
They can also be out in daylight on cloudy days. (That's how they can all go to high-school, see? Because it's a cloudy town.) But watch out so you're not hit by direct sunbeams!! What happens then, you ask? Do they burst into flame? No. They show their true vampire-form. Oooh, demonic visages, like in Buffy? Do you see their current point of decomposition, like in Pirates of the Caribbean? No.
They sparkle. Like diamonds.
Apparently this is a bad thing. People will know they're different.
But hey, if you didn't want humans to know you're different, maybe you shouldn't act like fucking retards all the time, and blurt out things about your secret powers to every crack-whore that comes along? Hm? HM? Just a suggestion.

There was one good thing about this movie, though. One quite amusing little thing. At one point the heroine (Or shall I say HEROIN? Geddit? Eh? EH?! ...It's because she sucks.) is searching on google for local indian legends, because of... oh god, I can't even be bothered to tell you. It's stupid. Anyway, one of the hits, the one that she clicks on, has a couple of example booktitles below it, one of which is... yes, you knew it was going to come.
"Legends of the Slapping Beaver."
I tell you, if they had gone out in a blaze of glorious self-distance, and named the entire movie THAT... It would have been good. That thing alone.
But hey, maybe there will be a porno version soon...



...at least pornos have comparatively believable plots, good acting and decent scripts.