Twilight.

"Adapted from Stephenie Meyer's bestselling novel, which contains trace elements of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, not to mention a few archetypally ancient supernatural overtones, Twilight is billed as 'a modern-day love story between a vampire and a human,' and not to be confused with Let the Right One In, the novel-based modern-day love story between a vampire and a human set in Sweden, or True Blood, the novel-based modern-day love story between a vampire and a human set in Louisiana," writes Jonathan Kiefer. "Twilight's the one set in rural Washington, with Edward (Robert Pattinson) the vampire and Bella (Kristen Stewart) the human.... Having honed her rapport with transgressive-curious shy girls and ruby-lipped pretty boys in Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, respectively, [director Catherine] Hardwicke has no trouble fetishizing the forever young. But in qualifying herself for Twilight, she seems also to have let her basic scene-building skills become stunted." And as for "the screaming girls of Twilight fandom": "a) yes, it probably is the most important thing about this movie and b) social phenomena are as hard for journalists to resist as fresh-smelling humans are for vampires."

Updated through 11/25.

"Security was so stringent at the press screening, not even Roger Ebert got off easy," writes Chicagoist Rob Christopher. "Cell phones had to be turned in prior to admittance and everyone was wanded. So has all the expectant frenzy been worth it? In our view, Twilight may not be the movie everyone has been anticipating. And that's entirely a good thing."

"So you have your against-the-odds teen love, your woman in peril, your vampires and your cult following, but Twilight frenzy still has the capacity to shock." David Carr reports in the New York Times on the PR campaign in the malls of America.

Thomas Rogers talks with Hardwicke for Salon.

Nikki Finke's got pix of people camping out in front of a Hollywood theater, notes that the soundtrack's #1, the trailer's breaking online viewing records and so on and so forth.

Eugene Novikov lists seven of the "Best Horror Romances" at Cinematical.

Online listening tip. James Rocchi talks with Hardwicke for Cinematical.

Online viewing tip. Variety's Anne Thompson interviews Pattinson.

Updates: "I saw the picture last night and I'm not supposed to say anything," blogs the Oregonian's Shawn Levy. "Well, too bloody bad: I thought it was terrific fun and beautifully crafted, acted with credible passion but also with a charming wink. And if the studio wants to get hissy over that, they shouldn't hold their breath waiting for me to retract it."

"In the 17-million-copy land of Twilight, the calling card isn't blood and fangs, but the exquisite, shimmering quiver of unconsummated first love," writes Chuck Wilson in the Voice. "By that measure, the movie version gives really good swoon."

"Give us a fucking break. This embargo nonsense is out of hand," grumbles the Playlist, pointing to Jeffrey Wells - "[W]hat publicist would be upset if a guy like myself, an unregenerate adult-movie, classic-movie, indie-movie, Pasolini-admiring, Kubrick-worshipping fan who hates sitting next to giggling groups of women in cocktail bars - what if a guy like me said that this sucker works? Because it does" - and the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips's "talking point or two in lieu of a review."

"Most television fantasy if more effective," writes Jeffrey Overstreet. "A single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or even Moonlight has better dialogue and stronger characters. Heck, Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog is more substantially romantic than this."

Updates, 11/20: "Defiantly old-fashioned, the film wants viewers to believe not so much in vampires as in the existence of an anachronistic movie notion: a love that is convulsive and ennobling," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "Bella could be any Hollywood heroine in love with a good boy whom society callously misunderstands. She's Natalie Wood to Edward's James Dean (in Rebel Without a Cause) or Richard Beymer (in West Side Story). Cathy, meet Heathcliff. Juliet, Romeo.... The movie's core demographic is so young, its members may not know how uncool this tendency has become. But for them, uncool is hot."

Writing in Variety, Justin Chang finds all this "a disappointingly anemic tale of forbidden love that should satiate the pre-converted but will bewilder and underwhelm viewers who haven't devoured Stephenie Meyer's bestselling juvie chick-lit franchise."

But for Screen's Mike Goodridge, it's "a highly effective adaptation with an intoxicating blend of breathy romance and mild horror which will be must-see viewing for teenage girls. Faithful to the novel in almost every narrative detail, filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke nevertheless infuses the film with its own visual personality courtesy of the atmospheric northeastern landscapes and the spot-on casting of her young lovers."

Twilight "propels to the center of Hollywood a studio known for obscurities like P2, a horror movie set in a parking garage, and Sex Drive, about a loser who works in a doughnut shop," reports Brooks Barnes in the New York Times. "'It's the first time a little engine that could has come along in a while, and that's getting the attention of people who never thought twice about Summit,' said Tara S Kole, a partner at the entertainment law firm Gang, Tyre, Ramer & Brown, which represents clients like Steven Spielberg and Mary-Kate Olsen. 'Summit has obviously played this very smart in the marketing, but the smartest decision was noticing the property in the first place,' Ms Kole added."

Gina McIntyre talks with Hardwicke for the Los Angeles Times.

"You could also say that Twilight... triumphs because girls are turned on by boys who are bad for them," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "Or because all outsider adolescents want to believe they're not really losers, they're of superior breed. Mainly, though, the movie works because Hardwicke and her soon-to-be-iconic leads take the sex and death and immortality hokum that's as old as Bram Stoker and make the undead live again."

"The feminist critique of the Twilight phenomenon (see this astute reading by Laura Miller in Salon) points, quite rightly, to all that's reprehensible about the Twilight universe," notes Dana Stevens in Slate. "As a life lesson for teenage girls, Twilight (excuse the pun) sucks. As a parable for the dark side of female desire, it's weirdly powerful."

Dan Kois introduces a "spoiler-filled slideshow" at Vulture: "28 Reasons That Twilight the Movie Is Better Than Twilight the Book."

"If only Twilight were more like its spiritual inspiration, Romeo and Juliet, then at least its lovebird protagonists would eventually wind up taking an eternal dirt nap," sighs Nick Schager in Slant.

"Someday a filmmaker will figure out how to shoot intelligence as seductively as a good smoldering look between pretty teens. Until then, we remain at the cusp of darkness." Rob Davis has a pretty good bullet-pointed list at Daily Plastic, too.

James Rocchi talks with Stewart for Cinematical.

Updates, 11/21: Twilight is "a deeply sincere, outright goofy vampire romance for the hot-not-to-trot abstinence set," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "[T]his carefully faithful adaptation traces the sighs and whispers, the shy glances and furious glares of two unlikely teenage lovers who fall into each other's pale, pale arms amid swirling hormones, raging instincts, high school dramas and oh-so-confusing feelings, like, OMG he's SO HOT!! Does he like ME?? Will he KILL me??? I don't CARE!!! :)" Also, an audio slide show, "Biting Passion," a look back on vampires past.

"While the DVD revolution has its merits - for some, the big advantage is not having to rub shoulders with actual human beings in a movie theater - there are certain movies that need to be seen with a crowd," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "If you care about pop culture at all, you owe it to yourself to see Twilight... with an audience full of teenage and preteen girls.... I think I need to see it again in a critic-free zone, if only to experience, once again, the wave of embarrassed titillation that rippled through the crowd when the movie's vampire heartthrob, Edward Cullen... strode into view, a vision of erotic suspended animation."

"What's with all the rule-rewriting? And why are vampires always crowing about it?" Christopher Beam offers a history of a slippery mythology in Slate.

Roger Ebert gives Twilight two-and-a-half out of four stars.

"Twilight is one of those films that falls squarely into the category of 'it's pretty good for what it is,'" writes Kim Voynar at Movie City News, "by which I mean that, while it's not likely to end up topping critics' end-of-year lists, and I wouldn't hold it up against Oscar-caliber material, for the audience it's serving, and the material being adapted, it does its job pretty well."

"While the movie attempts to find an compelling middle ground between gothic supernaturalism and teenage romance, it usually winds up stumbling into the inane territory implied by both descriptions," writes Genevieve Koski at the AV Club.

"I am not now nor have I ever been a 13-year-old girl," confesses Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, "but Twilight made me wish I could be, at least for a couple of hours, the better to appreciate a movie that has been targeted to that demographic with the delicious specificity of a laser weapon."

Hardwicke's "earnest, moody approach to Stephenie Meyer's tremendously popular novel may be just the thing for the 14-year-old girl in all of us," writes Hank Sartin in Time Out New York.

"Twilight may not add up to much more than the sum of its parts, but those parts can be mighty entertaining, especially when handsome Edward (Robert Pattinson, oozing uncertain charm) is whooshing through the woods with plucky Bella (Kristen Stewart, self-assured and determined) on his back," writes Peter Martin at Cinematical. "Still, the romance at the heart of the book has been shorn of some of its heart in the translation to the big screen, sacrificed on the altar of a broader demographic. Readers of the book could feel somewhat shortchanged by the relentless emphasis on forward momentum rather than romantic fantasy; the flip side is that newcomers can enjoy the whirlwind pace and the brooding, ominous atmosphere, and everyone can revel in the spectacle of flying vampires playing a pinball version of sandlot baseball."

"In the final analysis, Hardwicke has shrewdly made a film that will appeal to the audience that could make or break it," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "But there's little here to win over those of us without dog-eared copies of Twilight under our beds."

"[D]oes it work purely as a vampire movie?" Eric D Snider at Cinematical: "Oh, heavens, no. Noooooo. This is not a vampire movie. This is a somber teen romance that happens to have some vampires in it."

Alicia Van Couvering talks with Hardwicke for Filmmaker.

At the SpoutBlog, Christopher Campbell takes "a look at the many vampire love interests that literature and cinema have given us over the years in an attempt to find out their sexy secret."

Online listening tip. An AV Club roundtable.

"Meyer's prose is skimmable, but her dialogue hits all the right beats; experiencing these two beautiful creatures' enforced sexual suppression on the page made me feel like I was 17 again," blogs David Edelstein. "But Twilight the movie is cautious, a sort of Tiger Beat-ified Twin Peaks. In its undercooked way, though, it's enjoyable."

More "Cinematic Predecessors of the Vampire Renaissance," this time from Mike Rennett at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope.

"It may be no world classic, but Twilight is better than expected, and probably better than it needed to be, considering its built-in audience and inevitable sequels," writes Robert Horton. "The ending leaves no doubt of future bloody adventures."

Update, 11/22: Twilight is "the first book that seemed at long last to rekindle something of the girl-reader in me," writes Caitlin Flanagan:

In fact, there were times when the novel - no work of literature, to be sure, no school for style; hugged mainly to the slender chests of very young teenage girls, whose regard for it is on a par with the regard with which just yesterday they held Hannah Montana - stirred something in me so long forgotten that I felt embarrassed by it. Reading the book, I sometimes experienced what I imagine long-married men must feel when they get an unexpected glimpse at pornography: slingshot back to a world of sensation that, through sheer force of will and dutiful acceptance of life's fortunes, I thought I had subdued. The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven't seen that tale in a girls' book in a very long time. And it's selling through the roof.

Also at the Atlantic, a bit of online viewing. "Caitlin Flanagan brings a camcorder and a savvy 14-year-old girl to a premiere of the new vampire movie."

"Ultimately, Twilight is silly and melodramatic and hard to dislike in much the same way as its target audience, with a distinctly teenage sense of tragedy," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "Before you know it, Bella is begging Edward to make her a vampire too, so they can be together forever. Evidently she has already forgotten the multitude of graduation caps lining Edward's wall, the fruits of the eternal 17-year-old's need to matriculate and re-matriculate every few years. Repeating high school on and on into infinity - now that is truly the fate of the damned."

Update, 11/25: Kathleen Bell and Paul Matwychuk discuss the movie and the pop cult phenomenon.

Posted by dwhudson at November 19, 2008 10:27 AM