Thursday, November 19, 2009
MOVIE REVIEWS: “THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON”
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![Critics all seem to agree that The Twilight Saga: New Moon delivers what it is supposed to deliver -- in the words of Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News, "swooning romance, PG-13 thrills, and enough sharp cheekbones and shirtless boys to carry any adolescent over to the next installment." Few of them even attempt to appraise the movie for its artistic quality, the apparent thinking being, "Why bother?" Hence, Kyle Smith's hilarious review in the New York Post, which begins: "Twilight, which was about a girl and a vampire who don't hook up, is totally different from The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which is about a girl, a vampire and a werewolf who don't hook up. And it's not at all like the next sequel, in which a girl, a vampire, a werewolf and a mummy fail to find romance, nor the one after that, in which the girl gets unfriended by all of the above plus the Invisible Man and King Kong -- yet finds her heart aflutter when she befriends the Bride of Frankenstein." And Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle solves the critic's dilemma in assessing the movie by observing that it's really not a movie at all. "This is a pop culture phenomenon," he writes, "some weird early 21st century aberration, our equivalent of the hula hoop or dancing the Charleston on a biplane's wing. In the future, people will watch this second installment of "The Twilight Saga" and think, 'What was that?'" Clearly, there's not a teenage heart beating among any of the critics. Roger Ebert comments in the Chicago Sun-Times that the charisma of stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart "is by Madame Tussaud." (He has apparently not witnessed any of the teenage hysteria that accompanies their every move.) On the other hand, Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel concludes that the sequel is "more polished" than the original, "and we get the sense that even though a guy directed it [unlike Twilight], he wants the mostly-female fanbase to revel in the overheated romance, the blood-enforced chastity and the sacrifices this toothy Romeo-and-Juliet tale serves up." And Peter Howell in the Toronto Star dishes out quite a bit of praise to the filmmakers: "They well serve an evolving and involving love saga that gives us a lot more to chew on than the typical teen romance," he writes.](19_MOVIE_REVIEWS__THE_TWILIGHT_SAGA__NEW_MOON_files/shapeimage_1.png)
