2009 in Review Pt. 1

Chaff: The 20 Worst Films of 2009
So far in 2009 I have seen 173 titles I have counted as 2009 films (that is films that have received a regular theatrical release, a direct to either DVD or TV release or that have been viewed at a UK festival during 2009). The bulk have been seen at the cinema (with a few viewed on DVD or online). Overall it’s been something of a middling year for cinema, with most releases falling between the stalls represented by this list and the list of 2009’s best films, which will be posted soon. That said, there have been some dizzying highs, and, as ever, some dark depressing lows, so join me now as I revisit almost 40 wasted hours.


Runners Up [In alphabetical order]

Alle Anderen
[Everyone Else]


It’s not that I mind films that are low on big events, but this German ‘relationship drama’ is powerfully tedious in its absolute dedication to making sure that, for two hours, nothing happens aside from a couple of boring, unpleasant people being petty and mean to one another. The performances are laughable, and the script, though it thinks itself incredibly insightful, has nothing to say and spends far too long saying it.

Away We Go
Sam Mendes’ little palette cleanser, a quirky road movie comedy about a couple trying to find somewhere to call home as they await the imminent arrival of their first child, is perhaps the smuggest film of the year. From the self-satisfied, caricature laden, screenplay to the ‘look at meee’ performances of the usually excellent likes of Maggie Gyllenhaal and Alison Janney to the perma-irritating, myspace reject, singer-songwriter soundtrack, every single aspect of this movie grated on me. Smug, unfunny, unedifying and a real step back for a fine filmmaker.

Enter The Void


“BE OFFENDED”, bellowed Gaspar Noe, for 160 minutes.
“No, Gaspar”, I replied. “Enter the Void isn’t offensive, Gaspar, it’s juvenile. It’s as if you decided that IRREVERSIBLE wasn’t extreme or shocking or difficult enough to watch, so you’ve decided to make the camerawork in your latest film as grating and annoying as possible and you’ve decided to spend every minute goading us into being shocked”.
“But it’s saying something, it’s about the circle of life and death”
“Bollocks. That’s what you’d like it to be about, but anything you may have had to say drowns in a sea of pretension, and your final point, your final shot, is so stark staring obvious that only a moron couldn’t see it coming an hour ahead. Grow up, Gaspar.”

Fantastic Mr Fox
Oh, great, it’s a Wes Anderson family comedy drama, complete with existential jokes, thinly veiled swearing (Cuss you too, Wes) and lots and lots of angst, except it’s got animated foxes, so it must be for kids. Anderson’s first foray into stop motion boasts jerky animation that can’t even stand up to the 1933 King Kong and an unbearably smug leading performance by George Clooney, but worse than that it’s no fun and utterly fails to capture the cheerfully anarchic and very peculiarly English flavour of the work of Roald Dahl. A dismally failed attempt to adapt a fine book.

The Final Destination [3D]


The fourth instalment in the horror franchise made the visual leap to 3D, but as it did everything else was flattened out. The character writing was pathetic, the acting dismal and the death scenes were laughably poor, with atrocious CGI popping out of the screen at every possible opportunity. It’s a shame, because this series had previously circumvented the law of diminishing returns.

Funny People
(Un)Funny People was not just largely mirthless, it wasn’t even really a film. This is Judd Apatow’s $70million home movie, an excuse to assemble a bunch of his mates and his own children in front of a camera and mess around for two and a half unfocused hours. Apatow’s storytelling is broken; there are two films here - both uninspired at best and boring at (frequent) worst. It’s a film made by someone so in love with what he’s doing, and the people he’s doing it with, that he can’t conceive of how powerfully dull it is if you aren’t in the club.

The Haunting in Connecticut


The Haunting in Connecticut is less a movie than it is a digest, it plays like a clip reel, showcasing all the worst bits from all the worst, cheapest, dullest, most by the numbers horror hackery that has followed in the wake of fine films like Ringu and The Others. The scares occur exactly when and as you expect them to (and, just in case this is the first horror film you’ve ever seen, or you happen to be a moron of titanic proportions, the score will let you know when they’re coming). The performances are pretty risible, with Kyle Gallner (who is in 2010’s Nightmare on Elm Street) embarrassing himself with a performance so wooden that if you rub two of his scenes together for long enough, they might make fire. However, it all comes down to this. We’ve seen this movie, many times, and it was almost always better than this.

Jetsam
This £2500 British thriller starts off promisingly, but after a strong, dialogue free, opening, descends into risible plotting and a miasma of technical faults from poor lighting to a camera that simply doesn’t have good enough resolution to bright pink ‘blood’. Worst of all, this thriller is entirely thrill less, because any suspense that might be generated is undercut by the terrible performances (particularly by The Descent's Alex Reid) and the shoddy technique. You won’t have to work hard to avoid this one, but I recommend you do so anyway.

My Bloody Valentine [3D]


This remake of the not especially well known or regarded 80’s slasher plays like the straight to video rubbish that litters the resume of its director, Patrick Lussier. The acting by cast of attractive young things like TV’s Jensen Ackles, Jamie King and Kerr Smith is an embarrassment to cinema, hell, it would be an embarrassment to porn videos, but that’s to be expected. The killer is the absolute predictability of the film, as well as the fact that Lussier shows no imagination in the use of his 3D effects, which look patently fake and add nothing but poor CGI to the film.

Religulous
Only one filmmaker has two films on either my best or my worst list this year (and Steven Soderbegh had four released). Step forward Larry Charles, the small cinematic mind previously behind the camera for Borat prior to joining forces with not very funny comic Bill Maher for this craptacular ‘documentary’. The problem is that Maher disdains religion, but his film is one long sermon. He suggests that all religion is stupid, but refuses to engage intelligent believers. He lines up against all the bad things religion is part of, but never looks at its good works. This is a fundamentally dishonest film, and were I not an atheist I’d have been even more offended by its cheap tactics and low journalistic standards.

I've had to put the Bottom 10 in a seperate post, which will be up in a few minutes.

Cinematters: You know wht? Fuck Avatar!

For a year it has been looming, like a big, blue, threat. From the second I saw the first leaked character design and thought ‘holy shit, that looks stupid’ I’ve been dreading the advent of James Cameron’s first fictional film in more than a decade; the supposed game changer that is Avatar.

Though I am not paid as a film critic I take what I do very seriously (which I hope shows through this site). I’ve tried, this year, to see as many films as possible. So far I’ve racked up 156 films at the cinema and a grand total of 173 of this year’s releases - each a larger number than ever before - so I don’t think you could accuse me of slacking off. In seeing that many movies I’ve watched a lot of stuff that I wasn’t really looking forward to, largely because I thought it would be a good idea, as a critic, to have an opinion, or that it might make for a fun review (why the holy hell else do you think I saw New Moon). In seeing that many movies I’ve, despite finding the technology and the artistic merit at best underwhelming and at worst downright appalling, seen a good few 3D films and only twice this year has a big film for which I wasn’t especially excited managed to surprise me (those were An Education and Up, which, by the way, I’m confident will be better in 2D, if only because its colour scheme will be correct).

However, when it comes to Avatar I am drawing a line in the sand and saying 'thus far, and no further'. As the promotional campaign has gathered pace I’ve been praying that each new piece of material would allow me to see the potential that people have been talking about. More pressingly than that though, I’ve been hoping that I’d see a movie on the horizon. I can’t, all I see in the trailers (which I’ve seen in both long and short forms, in both 2D and 3D) is a rolling demo for a computer game. I don’t say this lightly, or without some real evidence. A few months back Empire Magazine printed some pictures from the Avatar computer game, which were all but indistinguishable from images from the trailer, pretty computer games are all well and good, but when I watch a movie that what I want it to be; a movie and so far Avatar looks like anything but.

Another problem I’ve had with the trailers is just how plastic everything seems, and here I‘m not just talking about the CGI, which seems to have that odd weightless feel that so bothered me in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, combined with the dead eyes of A Christmas Carol’s characters. The dialogue that wev’e heard so far seems perfunctory at best, and from what I can glean of the plot I feel like I’ve pretty much seen the movie having seen the trailer. Worst of all is the 3D, at least in the trailer it still felt like a distraction, from what I’ve seen I can’t conceive of any reason that this story needs to be told in 3D, and the process seems just as much a cry of ‘look at me’ as it ever has.

I’m being careful here not to form a judgement on Avatar, or to make any suggestion that you decide to see or not see it. I took the Daily Mail to task (for 4500 words) this year for doing that in reference to Antichrist. The only judgement I can make about Avatar at this point, and that which I am making, is that not a single thing I have seen induces me to want to see it. Not a single thing makes me believe it will impress me, or that I will even remotely enjoy it. This being the case I really would rather spend 160 minutes doing something else, something I feel that I have some chance of enjoying. You likely won’t be seeing a review of Avatar from me on this site, and if you do it certainly won’t be until the film hits (2D) DVD.

PS: If you go and see Avatar then please feel free to send a review to me at frames24@ymail.com and, with you permission, I may publish it on the site.

Mini-Reviews

I have been slacking off when it comes to reviewing films lately, mainly because I’ve had such a lot of other stuff to work on for the site and because I’ve been out a lot of late. Anyway, time to catch up with some mini reviews

THE IINFORMANT! [15]
DIR: Steven Soderbergh


Soderbergh’s fourth, and last, British release of 2009 is also his best. The Informant! Is as jaunty and slight as the punctuation of its title would suggest, but it’s also rather accomplished, and a lot of fun.

Though this tale of a fantasist (Matt Damon) who sets himself up as a corporate informant for the FBI is set in the early and mid 1990’s, and Soderbergh gets the period detail bang on, the film itself feels more like something out of the 60’s or 70’s. The more formal framing, the slower more classical cutting and especially the bold and upbeat score by Marvin Hamlisch all recall that period of cinema. This is also reflected in the way that Soderbergh refuses to spoonfeed us, unafraid to leave us in the dark as to exactly what Damon’s Mark Whitacre is doing, and what his motives are. It’s easily the most fun that Soderbergh has had, and has been, in a long time.

The cast is as accomplished as it is eclectic, the only real downer being that the talented Melanie Lyskey goes underused in the thankless role of Whitacre’s wife. Matt Damon is fast becoming one of America’s more interesting character actors, and here he really does transform himself gaining 30 pounds and an awful tache to make Whitacre just another schlub. He really does get inside the guy though, and as the film runs on and Whitacre’s mental state becomes clear the increasing desperation of Damon’s performance is both funny and true.

This is a light soufflé of a movie, but it’s enjoyable and extremely well made, and more fun than a lot of what’s been at the multiplexes this year.


A SERIOUS MAN [15]
DIR: Joel Coen / Ethan Coen


I really enjoyed watching A Serious Man as it played out and yet it’s been nagging at me ever since. No Country For Old Men has cast a long and deep shadow - a film that good can’t help but resonate - and by comparison both Burn After Reading and A Serious Man seem a little insubstantial.

The story is apparently the Coen’s most personal. Set in a Midwestern Jewish community in 1967 it sees Larry Gopnik (the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg) trying to cope with stress at work, his son’s impending Bar Mitzvah and the fact that his wife has fallen for their much older neighbour Sy Ableman. For me the problem is that while this is all very funny (particularly the scenes in which Sy tries to be very friendly with Larry, despite the fact that Larry’s wife is leaving him for Sy) it often feels like little more than a collection of floating bits (never more so than with the very odd prologue). As with Burn After Reading, the bits are unimpeachable in and of themselves, but they never quite draw together into a satisfying whole.

It’s certainly a Coen Brothers film, the rhythms are very much their own, both in the dialogue and the storytelling, and Gopnik is a classic put upon Coen hero (see the scene when he’s trying to explain that he didn’t order Santana’s Abraxas from a record club) and, as has been their tradition of late, the ending is abrupt almost to the point of rudeness. It’s not an unenjoyable film, and yet I can’t quite embrace it, I think I may have to see it again to really explain why.


DISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL [3D] [PG]
DIR: Robert Zemeckis


Fuck 3D. Really, fuck it, it’s a pox on cinema and I hope it dies on its ugly, pointless, arse.

From that you may have some idea of how I felt about Robert Zemeckis’ latest, his third motion capture film in 3D. It’s a nightmare. First of all; why motion capture? It’s a bizarre halfway house between live action and animation, and it looks awful. There is no denying the quality of either the graphics or the animation, but that’s a lot of the problem. The characters look so close to human that the ways in which they fall short are both disconcerting and creepy. It’s mainly the eyes, which are dead, and give the characters an air of empty soulessness that I’ve only previously seen in Kristen Stewart.

Another problem is with the 3D. The fact that the new glasses are dark presents a real problem, in that they result in a 30% colour loss when you put them on. This is a huge issue for the film, because it’s already very dark and the glasses make much of it almost unintelligible, so not only was I bored and creeped out, I was straining to see very much. Ah, progress.

Some of the performances are okay, but few get over the strange, distancing, look of the film. Gary Oldman would make a great Bob Cratchit, so it was frustrating seeing him play the role through an avatar that looked like a puffy cheeked version of himself, as if he had been crossbred with a hamster. Colin Firth is also good, appealing in the role of Scrooge’s nephew Fred, but he too is drowned by the process. Only Robin Wright really stands out, she’s got a tiny, thankless, featured part as the love of Scrooge’s young life and her sensitive playing is so good that, for a few minutes, the digital barriers seemed to come down and I accepted her character as real.

Sadly the whole film is undermined by Jim Carrey, as both Scrooge and the three ghosts he appears to be in an especially terrible panto. Again, it’s not a bad thought, casting Carrey as Scrooge, unfortunately he plays the whole thing with the ham dial turned up to 11 and that, along with the visuals and the inappropriate and poorly realised (and interminable) added action sequences make this a singularly unappealing Christmas Carol. Stick with the Muppets.


PARANORMAL ACTIVITY [15]
DIR: Oren Peli


I’m often wary when people are saying that something is the scariest movie they’ve seen in… however long. As a horror fan I’m pretty hardened to scary movies, making me jump is tough, because I know enough about editing and pacing to figure out the timing of a scare more often than not. I want to be scared though, because that’s why horror is such an exhilarating genre. The hype surrounding Paranormal Activity suggested that it was going to scare the shit out of me.

There are, to be fair, two scares in this movie. They both come in the last 30 seconds, and one is a near direct lift from endless amounts of Japanese horror. That’s not a lot to hang 86 minutes on and that’s the problem. It just isn’t scary, at all. The subtle special effects are excellent, the performances by Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston are fine and the found footage illusion is extremely well maintained, but none of that really matters because the film utterly fails in its raison d’etre.

People have talked about this film disturbing them for days afterwards. I shrugged it off within milliseconds of its final shot. Quite possibly the most undeservingly hyped film of 2009.


THE RED SHOES [U]
DIR: Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger


Powell and Pressburger’s colour films are some of the most beautiful ever shot (think of Black Narcissus or A Matter of Life and Death) and The Red Shoes is perhaps their, and cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s most stunning work. This new print, supervised by Martin Scorsese and Powell’s widow Thelma Schoonmaker, restores The Red Shoes to its original glory, in fact it probably looks better now than even the original release prints. The colour explodes off the screen, and yet there is still filmic texture to this digital print. It is a beautiful restoration for a masterpiece.

The film itself is a rather simple backstage story set in a ballet company (based on the two rival Ballet Russe companies) and a young dancer (the gorgeous and graceful Moira Shearer) torn between her love for the resident composer (Marius Goring) and the desire of the company patron (Anton Walbrook) to make her a great dancer. The story is somewhat secondary to the spectacle, and what spectacle it is. The dance sequences are stunning, with Powell and Pressburger letting Robert Helpmann’s beautiful choreography and the dancers interpreting it own the frame.

The culmination if the 17 minute ballet of The Red Shoes, with designs by Salvador Dali adding to the slightly surreal beauty. In this sequence Shearer is just stunning, the grace with which she moves is always enchanting to watch, but she and the other dancers really do manage to express character and emotion though their wordless movements, especially in this sequence.

Some will find the heightened emotion of the film to be somewhat overdramatic, but the acting is largely excellent (though some of the dancers are clearly dancers rather than actors), if of it’s time and Shearer, Goring and Walbrook make for an intriguing triangle, each giving an excellent performance. However, this is largely the Powell and Pressburger show, and there can be few better examples of these masters of their art at work.

Exciting news

2009 came and went without a film from my favourite director Francois Ozon, because Ricky failed to pick up a UK distribution deal but, happily, his next film Le Refuge, starring the brilliant Isabelle Carre as a drug addict who loses her husband to an overdose, and then discovers that she's pregnant already has a UK deal set up with Artificial Eye (who have released most of his films). He's also already at work on his next film, Potiche which stars... deep breath: Gerard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve, Ludivine Sagnier, Cecile De France and more. Please, for the love of all things holy, let it premiere at next year's London Film Festival.

If there are no other films to be excited about in 2010, I reckon I've still got a good year in store with, potentially, three Ozon's to see.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today 24 FPS is one year old. To mark the occasion I just wanted to say thanks.

To begin with I was definitely shouting into the ether, but I’m glad that a few people seem to have discovered the site, and that you seem to be coming back on a pretty regular basis. I don’t make any money from this, I do it because I love movies and because I love to write, so the fact that you guys are reading and responding to what I do really does mean a lot. Thanks.

For the new people, and because it seems appropriate to do, here are a few of my favourite things from the past 365 days and 199 posts.

My Favourite Review [Positive] : Martyrs
My Favourite Review [Negative] : Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
My Favourite Article : The Daily Mail on Antichrist

Review Post 57: Festival of German Films

German Film Festival 2009
This is my fourth year attending the German Film Festival at London’s Curzon Soho. This year I was joined by a German friend (my Brother’s girlfriend Andrea). She picked the films, though they were both films that I would likely have seen if I’d gone on my own.

Neither of these films has been passed by the BBFC as yet.

EFFI BRIEST
DIR: Hermine Huntgeburth
CAST: Julia Jentsch, Sebastian Koch,
Misel Maticevic, Juliane Kohler


Apparently the story of Effi Briest is very famous in Germany, something of a classic novel, and like much of our classic literature, much adapted for the screen (the last version was by Rainer Werner Fassbinder). The story is set in late 19th/early 20th century Germany, and sees young Effi (Jentsch) married off by her family to the wealthy, much older, Baron Instetten (Koch). On moving to Instetten’s house on the coast Effi finds herself bored and takes refuge in an illicit relationship with dashing young Major Von Crampas (Maticevic).

The story feels familiar almost to the point of formula, and some of the plot devices (the letters especially) are so hackneyed that you can see almost every turn of the story coming from a few miles off, even if, as was the case for me, you don’t know the story anyway. The only thing that isn’t especially predictable is the ending, changed from the book quite substantially, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. After spending nearly two hours very properly in period the film tries desperately to cram in some contemporary relevance. It is as if the character of Effi is suddenly flung fifty or sixty years forward in time, such is the change in her attitude. It’s odd, and doesn’t work at all.

This isn’t the big issue though. The real problem with Effi Briest is that it is a curate’s egg. It looks beautiful, the acting is strong, most of the scenes work in and of themselves and yet this ornately made thing doesn’t add up to very much, doesn’t do very much. It just sort of sits there, lovely to behold, fleetingly engaging, but ultimately forgettable and unable to connect on any real emotional level.

Julia Jentsch is surely one of the finest German actresses working - for the proof see her performance in Sophie Scholl - and she is customarily brilliant here. One of her best moments comes when she isn’t even facing the camera. When Effi is visited by her estranged 6-year-old daughter, who almost immediately asks to go home, the devastation that Effi feels registers viscerally even though the reaction shot is of her back. Much of Jentsch’s best work is done in the absence of dialogue, of which she actually has surprisingly limited amounts, she has an interesting face, which can be either beautiful or boyish depending on the angle, and while her work is always subtle she is always highly expressive, laying bare her character’s emotions at all times.

Sebastian Koch, so good in Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, has perhaps the most difficult role. Instetten seems to be a man devoid of, or even unaware of, emotion. Playing what is essentially a blank vessel without becoming boring is a hard task, but Koch just about squares the circle. The real issue with his performance is perhaps inherent in his casting, and that simply that Instetten doesn’t really come off as the villain I suspected the story wanted to cast him as. The rest of the supporting cast generally does good work, but the film does create a major problem for itself by casting such a non-entity as Misel Maticevic as Crampas. He looks as if he’s just left high school, and Matcevic never really gives him much personality. I never really bought the love between him and Effi. However, Julian Kohler, Barbara Auer and Andre Hennicke all contribute strong character work.

Hermine Huntgeburth’s direction is generally fine (with the exception of some bizarre scenes involving Effi’s nightmares, which seem teleported in from another film). The period detail is beautiful and there are some nicely designed shots, while the scenes in a deserted shack where Effi and Crampas meet are especially attractive, with the light spilling in through cracks in the walls and roof. The thing is Huntgeburth never really stamps much identity on the film, it’s a film that looks as if it could have been made by 100 directors (if, for example, Joe Wright had done it, I can imagine the only real difference being the presence of Keira Knightley).

It isn’t that Effi Briest is a bad film, and actually if you’re a fan of Julia Jentsch (and if you aren’t, why the hell not?) it’s worth seeing because her performance is exceptional, but it’s one of a very few things to raise this largely forgettable film out of the extremely ordinary.


ALLE ANDEREN
[EVERYONE ELSE]
DIR: Maren Ade
CAST: Birgit Minichmayr, Lars Eidinger,
Hans-Jochen Wagner, Nicole Marischka


NOTHING happens in Everyone Else, but that’s not why I hated it, after all, nothing happens in The Dreamlife of Angels, nothing really happens in Before Sunset. The people in Everyone Else are horrible, but that’s not why I hated it, after all, there’s nobody remotely sympathetic in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, there’s nobody especially likable in Pulp Fiction. I hated Everyone Else for one overwhelming reason: I didn’t give a shit.

It doesn’t matter if you love or hate a character in a movie, just as long as you are interested in them, and none of the people in Everyone Else are even remotely interesting. For two hours we spend almost every moment with late 20’s couple Gitti (Minichmayr) and Chris (Eidinger) and yet in all that time all that we really learn about them is that she's in A and R, he’s an architect and both of them are selfish navel-gazing wankers. The couple are staying in a villa belonging to Chris’ parents, while he supposedly works on plans for a renovation, though we only see blueprints fleetingly. Most of the film consists of the petty bullshit of a disintegrating relationship.

I’m not sure what Maren Ade wants us to take away from this film, which amounts, most of the time, to a pair of pretty bad actors being sniping at one another. In La Seperation I cared about what happened to the characters played by Isabelle Huppert and Daniel Autueil, not because they were likable, but because the whole thing felt horribly real and raw. Everyone Else doesn’t, the stiffness of the acting (particularly Minichmayr’s) undermined any identification I might have felt with the story because I simply didn’t believe that these people were a couple, and I especially didn’t believe Gitti when she (repeatedly) begged Chris not to leave her.

Every time something interesting threatens to happen the film works against it. Gitti and Chris meet a couple who have invited them on a boat tip. These people are never seen again, Gitti and Chris never go near a boat. Gitti and Chris have dinner with another couple; Hans (Wagner) and Sana (Marischka) and Gitti essentially spends the entire dinner abusing them. Nobody says anything. The next time they have dinner Gitti threatens Sana. Nobody says anything, and Hans and Sana go home. It’s almost as if Ade has decided to evade drama at every turn.

Every scene is brutally overextended, speaking to a meandering, improvisatory style and an unwillingness to edit. Worst, perhaps, is a scene in which Gitti, Chris, Hans and Sana listen to a terrible song together. It goes on and on and fucking on, I wondered if they were just going to sit there for the whole damn thing. Everyone Else is a mind-pulverisingly tedious film, two hours that seem to last forever. Don’t waste your precious time on it, spend it with someone you actually like instead.

Review Post 56: The Twilight Saga: New Moon

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON
DIR: Chris Weitz
CAST: Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson,
Michael Sheen, Dakota Fanning



You may have noticed that I’m a big horror fan, and thus I’ve been very much in favour of the resurgence of the genre, and of vampire stories in particular, in mainstream culture. It’s just a shame that this resurgence is largely on the back of something as monumentally dreadful as the Twilight series.

In the interests of full disclosure I should say that I haven’t read Stephenie Meyer’s books. This is despite rather enthusiastic endorsements from both my brother (amazingly, despite being 24 and liking both Twilight and High School Musical, he doesn’t appear to be gay) and my mother. Because of these recommendations I cracked open the first book. I got half way down the first full page before tossing it aside. The concept of the Twilight series isn’t so bad; in fact it’s actually sort of intriguing. A human girl who falls in love with a vampire and then becomes involved in a love triangle with that vampire and a werewolf is filled with potential for drama. Sadly the execution of the idea is botched at every possible turn.

New Moon is spectacularly terrible. You may recall from my review that I hated Twilight (calling it “an unholy mess”). Well, almost impressively, New Moon is considerably worse. It’s tempting to blame Chris Weitz for this, after all, he’s the only significantly different element but when you’re handed a sows ear it’s always going to be difficult to turn it into a silk purse. Even if Weitz were a great auteur - which he is emphatically not - I can’t imagine this film being much better.

The big problem is perhaps inherent to the story. NOTHING happens. Literally. For at least 100 of this film’s 130 painful minutes there is nothing to see except an 18-year-old girl (Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan) moping. This is because her 109-year-old vampire boyfriend Edward (Pattinson) has dumped her unceremoniously, and told she’ll never see him again. New Moon covers about six months during which this boring, self-obsessed, girl does nothing but pine, and treat everyone else about her like crap. We’re meant to buy into a burgeoning relationship with Jacob (Lautner), but can’t because the script and the character of Bella are so completely obsessed with Edward that the potential for a love triangle never heats up.

As well as being dull, Bella’s a pretty awful character, which is a major problem for the movie, because the entire story revolves around the idea that this girl is so amazing that everyone is obsessed with her. Nothing in the world even exists except in relationship to Bella. You don’t always have to love a movie’s protagonist, but it helps if you don’t actively hate them. And I hate Bella. She’s unspeakably selfish; for six months the entire world is expected to revolve around her (totally unconvincing) pain and she seems to expect people to bend entirely to her will (when Jacob reveals that he’s a werewolf she says, in a completely ham-fisted metaphor for lycanthropy as homosexuality, “it’s wrong. Can’t you just stop?”). More to the point she never considers anyone else in her desire to be with Edward - not even Edward and his family, despite the fact the she is forcing a family of drug addicts to sit idly by while one of their number is basically dating crack. Point of fact you could make a compelling case for Bella being a psychotic erotomaniac. This is what the tedium of New Moon does to you; it forces you to think up your own, considerably more interesting, films.


This series is crying out for camp. Warring vampires and werewolves, all consuming star crossed love (as if the parallels weren’t already hammered home, Romeo and Juliet features in this instalment), the vampires council, the melodramatic emotion. If it were funny - on purpose - New Moon might be bearable, but screenwriter Melissa Matheson, Weitz, and the cast have all clearly been told that Meyer’s work is sacrosanct, and must be treated with a gravitas that it utterly fails to earn. This is a film that wants to be seen in the same earnest light as the Shakespeare that it references but, to put it mildly, Meyer and Matheson aren’t Shakespeare. I think they’d be found out even if they tried to pass themselves off as William’s talentless twin brother Ted Shakespeare. Lines like “The absence of him is everywhere I look. It is like a big hole has been punched through my chest.” read and play as if ripped from a depressed 14 year old’s journal, where it tries desperately to be emotional New Moon only ever manages sickly and slightly worrying.

If only the script were the only problem. Despite Hitchcock’s famous maxim that the three most important things to a movie are “the script, the script and the script” a strong look and a clutch of great performances can, to some degree, rescue a film from a poor screenplay. Oh well. The performances in New Moon are almost uniformly terrible. I’ve previously noted that Kristen Stewart strikes me as one of Hollywood’s most expressionless ‘talents’, well she outdoes herself here. Bella has two expressions ‘huh?’ and ‘can’t act, blinking’, both of which are rendered almost entirely in close up. The only emotion that Stewart registers is ‘scared’, never when it’s appropriate though, actually I think she’s just afraid of the camera. In a part that is supposed to overflow with emotion, Stewart’s total blandness, her utter vacancy, undermines every frame of New Moon. She reads every line with the same dead-souled lack of expression, the emotional content of her work redolent of an alien who has just landed and been handed a script. She either doesn’t understand the concept of what Bella is supposed to be feeling or, despite having been acting professionally for nearly a decade, she completely lacks the tools or the ability to portray any human emotion at all. I’ve seen a lot of movies, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a leading actress as consistently poor as Kristen Stewart.

Cinemas are apparently largely divided between two sets of fans ‘Team Edward’ and ‘Team Jacob’, two sets of teenage girls, each squealing for a different plank. Both Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner are, I suppose, handsome but equally both appear utterly devoid of talent. Pattinson isn’t helped by his role, which is essentially to brood, largely as an apparition, but he doesn’t help himself by doing every scene with what appears to be a poor attempt at Derek Zoolander’s blue steel look on his face. One especially laughable moment comes as Edward tells Bella “This is the last time you’ll ever see me”. Clearly this line should be devastating for both of them, but Pattinson delivers it with all the weight you might employ to tell your wife that you are just popping down the shops, and Stewart receives it with an exquisite blankness, suggesting that she can’t choose between ‘huh?’ and ‘blinking’ for this important moment. If Pattinson acts with his… nothing, Taylor Lautner does at least go one better, he lets his (mightily impressive) abs do the acting. His abs, sadly, utterly fail to deliver any sense of the longing his character is supposed to feel for Bella, or the conflict between that and his true wolf (read gay) nature. For such a major character, with such extensive screentime, Lautner’s abs contribute very little.


There are some small compensations in the form of the supporting cast, but they are all criminally underused. The beautiful and extremely talented Anna Kendrick gets about six lines as Bella’s friend Jessica (I’d much rather see a film about her than Bella). British actor Michael Sheen does his best as vampire king Aro, he does get the fact that the film needs to be campy and does his best to inject a little fun, though you can almost hear the internal monologue saying ‘I’m doing this for my daughter’. Sadly he, along with Dakota Fanning, who also works hard and puts a great deal into about three lines, has less than five minutes screentime.

From a visual standpoint Chris Weitz doesn’t stamp much identity on the film. It looks a little different to Twilight - more golden browns in place of the steel blues of Catherine Hardwicke’s film - but the film looks no better, or less silly, than the first. The vampire make up is appalling; with the exception of Ashley Greene, who is spared for the sake of making her look especially beautiful, all the vamps have skin so white it is almost marbled. Oddly a bluish green appears to have been mixed into Edward’s make up, which makes him look constantly like he’s about to be sick on Bella. This too undermines the attraction between Bella and Edward, because Edward looks dead. The effects are notably terrible; the glowing is as silly and unconvincing as in the first film - expensive CGI doing a job that would have been as well done with body glitter - but that is the least of it. The film’s big effect is the family of werewolves, and they look appalling. Their physical presence is totally absent, they lack weight, and are horribly integrated into the picture, as if the effects are two passes away from being ready. Yet another problem is the film’s action, even leaving aside the fact that what little there is amounts to perhaps three minutes of film, it is poorly designed and shot, especially in a fight with the Volturi, which has all sorts of bizarre frame rate effects applied, which add nothing to the experience.

Look, I know what these films are, and I know they aren’t really for me but honestly, that’s not the problem. It just feels as though so little effort has gone into this film at every conceivable level. Every aspect of it is embarrassingly poor from script to acting to visuals. I just object to anything so slapdash, so lackadaisical, so explicitly an exercise in commercial cynicism, being vomited into cinemas. I object to the fact that Summit Entertainment is able to expend so little effort and still make a hit movie. We deserve better than this. Perhaps David Slade will deliver, come July’s Eclipse, but I doubt it somehow.