Chris Weitz
The Twilight Saga: New Moon

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON

Subtitle: "The Beauty, the Beast, and the Little Puppy"

Plot

Bella is going through a bad time: every night, she dreams of becoming like her grandmother (?), while her hot blood-sucker remains pale and beautiful through the ages. So she has a really crappy birthday: everyone wishes her well and buys her expensive gifts. She, however, acts snooty and only thinks about how to become immortal (??).
Edward, however, isn't doing well either: people have started to notice that his father should look about ten years older (???), so he is forced to move away.
Bella is really upset: at night, she screams worse than the guy who sells coconuts (Nice) and despises her friends (for the record: a shopaholic, a couple of Chinese, and a kind of poor man's Dawson).
Fortunately, there is Jack/Jackob, the Indian boy with the goofy face, who, as soon as Mr. White gets out of the way, starts to hit on Bella.
In the meantime, she discovers that every time she's in a dangerous situation, Edward's head appears to her (????), giving her valuable advice (?????).
So she starts watching only action/horror movies (??????) in the hope of seeing her pale beloved again. One evening, she even decides to act silly with a drunken motorcyclist who revs wildly and does spins on one wheel.
The technique seems to work, so much so that Bella decides to take two motorcycles to scrap (???????) and restore them with Jack's help.
The motorcycle experiment, however, does not go as planned: after not even 500 meters and 30 appearances of Nico Cereghini's head advising "Helmet fastened, lights on even during the day and safety... always!", Bella crashes into a rock. To console her, Jack takes off his shirt,
showing off a turtle shell of abs on his belly that you could grate cheese on.
Bella and Jack are getting closer. He tries hard. She seems on the verge of giving in. One evening, however, while they are at the cinema, Jack starts becoming very hot, as if he has a fever.
The reason is soon revealed: Jack is actually a werewolf, and when he gets angry, he transforms into a vampire-killing wolfman.
But not even knowing she has a giant Trudy at her disposal can console Bella. Desperate, just to see her Edward again, the girl decides to jump off a cliff (????????). Unfortunately, she didn't account for the wave motion and risks drowning: only Jack's timely intervention avoids the worst.
Edward, who is thousands of kilometers away, convinces himself that Bella is truly dead and decides to end it all. Only that if a vampire wants to die, they have to go to Volterra, where an ancient family of bloodsuckers, dressed like participants of the sado-maso party from "Eyes Wide Shut", runs a kind of agritourism for aspiring anemics (?????????).
Learning of her beloved's intentions, Bella takes the first RyanAir to Italy, gets through at least 3 Alitalia flight controller strikes, doesn't care about the baggage lost at Malpensa, escapes the clutches of the fraudulent cab driver already featured in several episodes of Striscia la Notizia, and manages to prevent the worst.
Returning home, Bella confesses to the Indian wolfman that she only wanted to tease him and that there would never be any feast for cats (for wolves, actually). Oh yes: I want to become a vampire too. However, it would be nice if we remained friends and you avoided eating me (??????????)

Characters and Cast:

The Beauty - Bella (Kristen Stewart)

I have to admit: Bella doesn't leave me completely indifferent.
To be honest, in some frames, her face seems elongated to an unsettling emo cross between the Scream mask and the distorted faces of The Ring, but overall the mix of "full lips + milky complexion + long hair" intrigues me a bit.
The problem, if anything, is the muscular/emotional paralysis that must have affected her jaw just before filming started, forcing her to keep her mouth open and gaze incredulous for more than two hours of film, but that's it.

The Beast - Edward (Robert Pattinson)

He has the face of a Greek statue that has had a head-on collision with a truck.
He has a huge jaw, mounted on a huge head, mounted on tiny shoulders.
He has one expression that anyone suffering from chronic obstinate constipation will recognize as their own.
In the first half of the film, he appears as a gaseous head dispensing pearls of wisdom dressed in an Armani dark suit. At some point, they give him some kind of oversized purple robe that stifles any attempt to show even a hint of masculinity.

The Little Puppy - Jack/Jackob (Taylor Lautner)

In some ways the true protagonist of the film.
In the first chapter of the saga, he played the role of the resentful one.
In this episode, he’s the muscular resentful one.
Upon his first appearance, Bella lets slip a "Wow, such muscles!".
By minute twenty, he's already shirtless (he won't put it back on for the rest of the film).
At twenty-one, he secures a "You're really handsome" from the protagonist.
After over two hours of film, he still won't even get to make out.
For reasons unexplained to the viewer, after discovering he's a werewolf, he gets a very tacky tattoo on his shoulder, wears those capri shorts you use for home projects, and goes around shirtless in the forest with a group of slackers who are also werewolves (and also shirtless with capri shorts).

The Film

Certainly worse than the first.
Predictable judgment? Not exactly.
Because okay, the (horrible) plot is taken from the book. Okay that practically none in the entire cast can act (even the special effects are pretty much normal). Okay that it's aimed at a young female audience with a Jared Leto poster and the original DVD of "Scusa ma ti voglio sposare". Whatever you want. But really, a little more effort to avoid serving such a bowl of crap over two hours long could have been made.
I'm talking about a general slowness in the narrative, of inconsistent secondary characters. I'm talking about dialogues of an ostentatious and cloying sentimentality that would make even the inventor of Hello Kitty diabetic, of Jacob's bodybuilding poses that, for much of the film, seem like he's holding in a powerful fart, and a bunch of other nonsense said or done by the protagonists that I don't recall now, but made me laugh so hard.

I can't wait for the third one to come out!