Reimagining Twilight

November 19, 2009 - 2:19am
By Julie Block

OMG!!!! Aren’t you so excited for Twilight: New Moon?! I can’t wait these last 10 hours, 17 minutes and 15 seconds! I’ve been daydreaming about Robert Pattinson’s dreamy pale, non-sexual face nonstop for forever, which, lolz is so funny because he lives forever, you know?!

Okay, no. But wouldn’t it be weird if I was like that? (It would be weird if you were like that.) But Twilight 2: Return of the Sparkles starts tonight, and I figured it’s only fair if I give you a review of what I assume is going to be in the movie: the good, the bad and the bad hair. Since I haven’t seen it, I’m going off of the SNL Taylor Swift spoof, the previews with the CGI wolf and all the crazy fan moms in support groups.

Anyway. The movie begins in really pretty but unheard of Forks, Wash. Appropriately moody green trees swish and rain rains. Thom Yorke (whether you consider him a sellout or not) plays the music. Bella stands outside of her car and breathily does her voice over: “I came back, because I had to know him.”

Oh sorry, wrong vampire reference.

Kristin Stewart: “My sexy undead boyfriend and I had been going steady for awhile, but he still refused to have sex with me ... I mean, turn me into a vampire. Luckily, it was my birthday, so I finally was gonna get me some biting.”

Sorry Bella! That’s not how things go!

The two of them drive her clunker of a Jeep to his huge, beautiful glass house.

(By the by: I saw the first movie, and aside from how blah the rest of it was, that house was truly beautiful. Re: Big lush green forests. Also re: the Cullens’ veggie vamp pad, which may be one of the most beautiful modern houses ever. You could make a whole movie of big lush green forest, veggie vamp pad, have Thom Yorke sing over it, and call it a day.)

Inside of the big green house, they have a huge birthday party. Because if you were a vampire who had been around long enough to meet charismatic humans like Gandhi, John Lennon and Madonna, the person you’d really be blown away by would be an unwashed, kind-of-emo brunette with no personality to speak of. At the birthday party, something HORRIFYING happens: Bella cuts her finger on wrapping paper (oh no!), and then — because she obviously hasn’t seen the previews as many times as me — decides to be all, “Oh, silly me! I cut my finger!”

She proceeds to wave bleeding finger around and all up in the Cullens’ grills, like she isn’t surrounded by a bunch of people who want to kill her. Cue the blonde angsty vamp jumping on her, because … food. Then Edward comes to her rescue (and all the Twilight moms faint in the theater and prepare to run home right after the movie and write fan fiction about it), and lots of things in the big pretty glass house break.

In the lush green forest, Edward clenches his teeth like he really has to go number two and breaks up with Bella. (I’d like to applaud Robert Pattinson with his really incredible acting in this movie. I was seriously blown away by his two facial expressions: tortured soul, and more tortured soul.)

Bella can’t handle any sort of reality without him in it, and instead of celebrating her narrow escape from death, decides to … kill herself. A lot. The music builds to dramatic heights as she drives a motorcycle and crashes it, jumps off a cliff into the sea, eats 20 boxes of Krispy Kremes, buys a ticket for Oceanic flight 816, and then finally decides to knock on a scary vamp’s door and is all, “Please, just eat me already.”

To the rescue: her Native American friend, Jacob! At a really nail-biting moment, Jacob saves Bella’s life by morphing into a huge wolf. Bella, who like most teenage girls, knows the value of a good rebound, decides that this supernatural young man will do. This I give her points for, since the kid playing Jacob actually has some body fat on him. And melanin. You can’t really beat melanin.

Bella and Jacob get it on for awhile, until Edward’s wayward sister with the super pixie haircut shows up to chide Bella for moving on too quickly.

Bella: “I tried to kill myself about 20 times. Is that what you call moving on too quickly?”

Anyway, Edward is apparently in Vatican City and has decided that it might be fun to sprinkle his pixie dust all over the place (i.e. stand naked in front of St. Peter’s Basilica and sparkle, sparkle, sparkle! I’ve met those Swiss guards, and they certainly would not put up with public nudity.) This apparently is going to make scary, blonde vampire children, including Dakota Fanning and “Draco Malfoy,” want to kill him. But Bella, like me, knows that the Swiss guards are going to get to him first.

She freaks out and sprints from Washington to Rome, leaving a cartoonish trail of dust in her wake, and poor Jacob’s head spinning. Once in Vatican City, she confronts Edward, just as he’s standing around Rome in nothing but his skivvies and the glitter lotion the makeup department dressed him in. Edward finally agrees to do it with her, they have a showdown with Draco and Dakota, who decides she finds the two of them too annoying to even care about and runs off to be a can-can girl in Paris. Draco realizes his fallacy in agreeing to sign on for this movie.*

The two abstinent lovers think they’re safe ... except those pesky Vatican guards I mentioned are still pretty pissed about the public nudity. They take their long wooden spears (infer what you will), and stake Edward.

Edward dies.

Bella shrugs her shoulders, realizes this whole thing is way too much drama to care about, and runs back to Jacob.

Ah, young love. Ain’t it just grand?

*Note: I have no idea if Tom Felton is in this. But I read it somewhere, and in the preview, it looks like his blond head is peaking out from behind a corner, so we’re gonna go with it.