Director Chris Weitz fails to bring anything aesthetically captivating to his work on "New Moon," the second entry in the "Twilight" saga; compared to Catherine Hardwicke's slimy blue color timing and queasy camera movements; however, his direction is as exciting and breathtaking as Scorsese's.
That's more or less where the positive aspects of this film end, sadly, as "New Moon" is an arduous slog through a mythology that seems as long as a round-trip to Mordor in real-time.
Codependent protagonist Bella (Kristen Stewart) is still in chaste bliss with vampire hunk Edward (Robert Pattinson), though her impending 18th birthday reminds her that she ages, while Edward remains eternally young.
Naturally, she suffers nightmares of being an old lady chained to her eternally teenaged beau, which Edward believes is a bit obsessive (it is important, here, to remember the relativity of perception).
His vampire family invites Bella over to celebrate, she cuts herself on the birthday card, yadda yadda yadda, and tensions (and appetites) are stoked.
Edward decides to leave, to where he does not say, nor did I ask owing to an old saying about gift horses and mouths. Bella suffers screaming nightmares in his absence, her shrieks rating somewhere between a child crying in a restaurant and "Crazy Frog" on the list of Things That Are Insufferably Annoying.
Only the return of childhood pal Jacob (Taylor Lautner) eases her pain. Jacob, a werewolf (oh, like you didn't know), clearly has his own infatuation with Bella, and he spends every moment with her a-wooing. When she cuts her head on a rock, Jacob takes off his shirt.
When Bella broaches the "E" word, he mumbles those "I'd never treat you that way" lines the second-place finisher always says.
And yet Jacob is an interesting character, believably awkward and impatient and more immediately concerned with Bella's feelings than that toothless vamp ever was. Put me in Team Jacob, I suppose, a lesser of two evils situation if ever one existed.
Lautner gives the only decent performance precisely because he gets to speak lines that a person might conceivably say, compared to the sub-poetic musings of Edward, which evoke not Shakespeare, but George Lucas.
Lautner also sports some killer abs, which serve the purpose here that Edward's hair did in the last film: to distract from the plot.
This movie pauses. Its pauses give way to more pauses. Some of its pauses themselves have pauses. Even when the characters go to Italy for an action-packed climax (on Virgin Air, no less; a nice touch), nothing happens.
It's like Antonioni by way of My Chemical Romance.
Its endless pauses are broken up only by a bizarre, often unsettling, undercurrent of desperate sexual fantasy, making this less a movie than an Ambien-induced hallucination.
The closest it comes to its nominal usage of the vampire myth is in its soullessness.
It should be noted, though, that, for all the film's abstinence preaching, Bella wants to be a virgin about as badly as the geeks of every high school movie ever made, yet that hasn't stopped insecure young men from condescending to this series' fanatical female crowd.
Perhaps we should get all the female fans and the male detractors into a room for a civilized debate. Or an orgy, which would get to the root of the matter more quickly.
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