Precious is a new-style weepie but one that is much more bracing than depressing
Precious
Theatre
Ian McKellen is captivating throughout. He delights in the play’s gallows humour, yet is also maudlin and poignant
Waiting for Godot
Theatre
Slight quibbles notwithstanding, this will set the West End’s stock riding high
Enron
Utterly, utterly brilliant. You really are in for a treat
Though 'Trilogy' has won rave reviews, I personally found myself exasperated after about an hour
We went on a quiet sunday evening and the food was excellent, but the experience let down by the service and ambiance
London,
Andrew O'Hagan's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Chris Weitz.
Cast: Billy Burke, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Reaser, Taylor Lautner, Nikki Reed, Kristen Stewart, Peter Facinelli, Kellan Lutz, Ashley Greene
Description: Bella Swan celebrates her 18th birthday and soon after, vampire lover Edward and the Cullen clan are forced to abandon the close-knit community of Forks, Washington if Bella is ever to be safe from harm. Abandoned by her true love, the teenage mortal becomes a shadow of her former self until her relationship with family friend Jacob Black and his Quileute tribe takes an exciting, new turn.
Country: US. 2009. 130mins
Bloodless relationship: Bella (Kristen Stewart) and her vampire boyfriend Edward (Robert Pattinson)
It was F Scott Fitzgerald who said everybody’s youth is a dream, “a form of chemical madness”.
When you read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books, you see how that madness can be forced to conform to a creed of abstinence. Meyer is a skilled storyteller with a talent for metaphysical tension but her stories are as Mormon as she is — little wish-fulfilments, in which beautiful young people are doomed never to satisfy their sexual longings. This has played brilliantly with hundreds of millions of adolescent girls, who specialise in wanting what they can’t have, and it has also proved appealing to their mothers for more reasons than any of them would care to relate.
The first Twilight film made squillions at the box office and turned its heart-throb leading man Robert Pattinson into a global star. Not in a long time has such an effort been made to render a generally blessed young person as being totally unavailable, not only unavailable in real life (whatever that is) but inside the narrative as well, playing a haunted young god who sells seduction but can’t enjoy any.
The books and the film adaptations are ingenious but they are hobbled by their message. Already, we can witness the series being scooped in quality by its own offspring — the vampire TV show True Blood proving both more sophisticated and more exciting in nearly every respect, as well as less cute.
But the film franchise won’t let Twilight fans down. New Moon, the second release in the series, is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and, for some reason, young people can’t get enough of it. I think it has something to do with the impossibility of yearning, especially among young people who don’t know who they are.
In this picture, vampires and werewolves are forever taking their shirts off but, in doing so, they merely underscore one of the most basic truths in the movie business: no man ever went skint by fastening his commercial hopes to the value of the prick-tease.
New Moon is told from the point of view of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), a 17-year-old siren with a mane of dark hair and a ready palette of moody expressions. As we know from the first chapter of The Twilight Saga, Bella is a mortal in love with a handsome vampire called Edward Cullen (Pattinson), and she turns 18 at the opening of the new film. Edward is even more pouty than she is but, despite not exactly having one, he’s a good soul and he worries that Bella will constantly be in danger if she sticks with him.
With this fear in mind, Edward decides to dump her. At this point, Bella becomes like your typical Twilight fan, screaming into her pillow every night and dreaming of Edward’s absent kisses. Stewart carries this off rather nicely, sloping around her school with that sense of lonely existentialist horror that only adolescents can fully understand. At one point we see her looking sadly out of her bedroom window as the seasons pass from spring to winter. She doesn’t change her clothes — which, in an 18-year-old girl, is evidence of insanity.
Fortunately — or not — Bella has a pretty good distraction during Edward’s noble holiday. This is her friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who just happens to have got all buff during the summer break.
Soon we are all missing Pattinson as much as Bella, mainly for his acting skills and for his non-buff way of being interesting. Young Lautner is having the time of his life but he’s straight off a US daytime soap and his camp narcissism topples New Moon down a chasm of absurdity in no time.
Jacob and Bella wonder whether to get it on, while we begin to wonder what his great secret is. Anybody who likes their own naked body that much obviously has a secret of some kind, but, boringly, Jacob’s secret turns out to be yet another complication of the kind that makes ordinary snogging impossible.
From everybody’s point of view, keeping Edward Cullen off screen for so long is a disaster. He’s the mysterious and conflicted one, and he brings old-style movie magic to the feelingful vampire — two parts Marlon Brando, one part Leonardo DiCaprio. Without him New Moon can barely stand comparison to a half-episode of Gossip Girl. By his own admission, Pattinson is struggling with the levels of screaming fandom brought on by playing Cullen, and the sooner he moves on from it the better. Franchises are good news for business people but are not always such good news for talented actors, as Daniel Radcliffe is discovering.
On its own terms, though, New Moon has some ravishing moments of ghostly thrills and spills. Director Chris Weitz makes good use of forests and seascapes, and the screen lights up when the characters go animalistic. The fundamental problem, however, lies in the film’s philosophy, which hankers constantly after a creepy purity imposed from above. It doesn’t seem entirely healthy that sex should be made to appear to be such a savage and terrible an outcome in a relationship, while abstinence is made — in the eyes of millions of impressionable teenagers — to look like the forfeit good people make in order to remain good people. Pseudo-religious nonsense, with fangs.
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I agree with much of your review, but I think you're being too kind. Not only is this series a nod to Mormon/Christian beliefs of "sex is BAD unless it's with a spouse" but it creates a male ideal that includes control, dominance, and general anti-feminism. Bella has no interest in going to university, getting a job and expanding her horizons. She just wants to eternally alter her DNA so she can be with Edward forever. I know, teenage girls don't see past their noses sometimes (I once was a teenage girl), but I don't get the millions of mothers encouraging this dogma. I saw New Moon and almost died when I noticed two girls no older than 6 years watching with their moms. That's insane!
Thanks for the honest review.
- Colleen, Florida
This review shows how much the world has changed and not neccesarily for the better. Its scary to read that you are shocked by sex being presented as something sacred and special. You see abstinance as something out of the ordinary which of course it is these days but the huge fanbase would suggest that it is something that people can connect with.
As for the film. How incredibly depressing!
- Jonny, London
hilarious review, you hit the nail on the head, thank you!
- C. Green, bath, england
It seems abstinence sells based on the squillions the books and films make. Maybe it's time for the free-for-all sex propoganda in media to get a clue.
- Ron, London
Is it as boring as the first one? That really was yawnworthy, I spent the first 90 minutes waiting for something to happen and then the film ended.
Almost as boring as "Capote" another "brilliant, outstanding" yawnfest.
- Jimbob, Kensington
Even as someone who enjoyed the Twilight novels I was relieved to read this review. It's refreshing to hear someone identify these books/films for what they are - a thinly veiled promotion of Meyer's conservative Mormon views. Not only that but I was recently disillusioned to discover that a huge amount of the plot seems to have been taken from True Blood (also mentioned in this article) which was published in 2001, four years before Twilight hit shelves!
So thank you Andrew O'Hagan for bringing a much needed dash of reality to the hysterical chaos which surrounds Edward and Bella's romantic saga.
- Bernice Watson, London
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