True Blood's vampires have sex. Twilight's brood about not having it - which for their fans, of course, is an integral part of their appeal.
Meyer's hero, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), is a gentleman vampire. Having been brought up on animal blood, he's sworn off the human kind. He and his mortal girlfriend, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), dare to kiss but whenever they do, Edward quivers delicately, preserving the possibility that smooch could suddenly deepen into love bite.
New Moon, the second film in the series, finds Edward and Bella settling into life as high school sweethearts in Forks, Washington, although she's already worrying about future complications. She wakes on her 18th birthday from a dream in which she's turned into her own grandmother, while 108-year-old Edward has remained his perennially youthful undead self. This scenario has become common lately. We've seen variations on the theme of time playing tricks and ageing men and women at differing rates in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Time Traveller's Wife and Dorian Gray. Welcome to the Botox generation's defining nightmare.
In Bella's case, this fear has strengthened her curiosity about what it would be like to join Edward's team and become a vampire. He doesn't think it's a good idea. Noble as ever, he wants only to protect her and we're not far into the story before he and the rest of his family decide that they must leave Forks. For him and Bella, it's the end, he tells her. She will not be going with them. Instead, she will stay behind to subside into a chronic sulk. Admittedly, this means no more than a slight adjustment to Stewart's performance, which is already arranged around her pronounced gift for slouching and mumbling, but the prospect of watching her carry a large chunk of the film without her co-star is far from enticing.
There is help at hand, however, in the shape-shifting form of Bella's friend Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), a son of the local Native American tribe, the Quileute. He has long fancied her and, with Edward out of the way, he sets out to show her what a nice guy he is. And for a while all goes well. Stewart produces a few flickering smiles of appreciation as well as squeezing out one or two sentences of at least six words. Things are looking good - up to the moment when she discovers she's been dating a werewolf.
The film is a lot more ponderous than the first one, which was directed by Catherine Hardwicke ( Lords of Dogtown). Given the extreme lassitude of her two leads, Hardwicke did have some trouble with the story's potential for co-ordinating a little black comedy with its purple passion but her successor, Chris Weitz ( The Golden Compass), hasn't a clue. For long stretches, it seems as if Edward's sister, Alice (Ashley Greene), is the only member of the cast who has been licensed to laugh. And while the high camp elements haven't been eliminated, it's impossible to tell if Weitz can see them.
Jacob and his fellow wolf men, for instance, are pretty funny, with their buffed bodies and fondness for wandering bare-chested through the forest while lustily picking fights with one another, but I suspect that we're meant to take them seriously. The only certainty is that they make a change from Edward, who can't venture into the sunlight for fear of being coated with fairy dust and made to melt away.
The werewolves occasion a few computer-generated brawls as they go hunting a team of bad vampires but it's not until the denouement that we see any real action. This takes place during a brisk trip to Tuscany, where Bella and Alice head off in pursuit of Edward, who has gone to consult the Volturi, an ancient family of vampire aristocrats. Their leader is played by Michael Sheen, who's done a lot of shape-shifting of his own recently, having been cast as Tony Blair in The Queen and David Frost in Frost/Nixon. This time, he's in 18th-century court dress with white facepaint and red contact lenses. He looks like a hung-over pixie who's spent too long at the bottom of the garden.
There is one thing to be said about the way Weitz handles time travel. He can make two hours and 10 minutes seem like a thousand years.
This article is from www.smh.com.au
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