Saturday, January 17, 2009

What Was I Thinking?

I probably shouldn't have dragged my husband to any movie just two hours after he finished a 70+ hour work week. I especially shouldn't have brought a man who is a devout Tolkien fan (Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, etc). The Tolkien movies were so superbly done and the books are in an entirely different category than "Twilight", therefore, not much can touch them. What was I thinking?

Twilight, the movie, was not very good (In my opinion). We've all seen it before. The book is good, the movie doesn't do it justice. I was disappointed for a few reasons:

  • The book series has a huge teenage and adult following. The directors appear to not have taken the adult followers into too much consideration.
  • The make-up used to make them look like vampires was done badly. Some vampire actors looked so painted up, I thought I was sitting in the first row of a Broadway show.
  • The actors clearly had more potential and the director didn't take the time to reign in that potential in order to make some scenes as good as they could have been.

It's difficult to turn a book into a movie. We've all seen movies that have failed, miserably, to do a book any justice. I think it's especially important to be careful when a book has large teenage and adult followings. The director has to find a good balance in order to hold both audiences. Some scenes were over the top and made me really uncomfortable. When Bella walked into biology class and the fan caught her hair and sent her scent Edward's way, a mild look of astonishment and a turn of the head would have been better than his hand flying up to his face and look of disgust. Scenes like that make even teenagers say, "that was cheesy."

Matt thought the movie was so ridiculous, he accused me of wasting two weeks of my life reading trashy children's novels. Books he will never allow our girls to read because, in his opinion, they will deplete brain cells, not add any. He was especially upset that said books were responsible for the laundry getting behind.

I'm not going to spend time arguing with him about it. They are really good books, written for teenagers, and despite some immature spots and "cheese," written well enough for an adult following. If he read a few chapters, I think he'd see what I mean.

The movie sequel will have a new director. I hope he will be able to reign back in any adult followers who decided the first film was too much of a teeny-bopper film and decided not to continue following the film series. I, myself, will be a bit wary of the next film and probably decide to wait until I can rent it before I go see it in a theater.

2 comments:

Tricia said...

I thought the book was better too...although Amie and Jay both liked the movie better.

House Dad said...

I'm with your man on this. And I say that from the smug perspective of having neither read the book nor seen the movie.