Movie Review: "Face Punch"

[flowrs4ophelia]

By that of course I mean New Moon. (LOL, you'll get it if you see it.)

This was actually unexpectedly more than decent. Maybe I'm easily impressed this time because this is the only one of the books which I like very much, though I did actually enjoy the first movie in a fun and weird way that only a fan like me who's in the "I can't get out of still caring about this as much as I'd like to" camp could; I saw it twice but just never posted any kind of review for it. But still, by contrast Chris Weitz's handling of the story makes Twilight look even more bad, if that's possible.





— This movie proves that Harry Clearwater is essentially Chuck Norris. His kung fu is strong. Heart attack from getting scared by a vampire? Yeah right, he got that heart attack on purpose because he foresaw the effects and wanted his dying legacy to be giving Edward Cullen reason to go get himself killed in Italy.

LOL really, I should feel kind of gypped because Harry is actually supposed to get the heart attack after seeing Leah and Seth phase the first time and even though I don't even know if that's something that's ever confirmed in the actual books and not just by SMeyer, I've always liked that detail because it helps you understand even more why Leah is so bitter about all the ways this werewolf stuff has fucked up her life. Idk, somehow I don't mind it because that whole scene with Victoria was just awesome and it worked better in a movie to actually see him dying than just hear it explained later.

— I really try to like Rob as an actor since he seems kind of funny and awesome irl, but he always seems so self-conscious and uncomfortable with what he's doing. He was better than in the first movie, at least, but after his whole recitation of the Romeo and Juliet lines I was just like "Whyyy." Edward may be a ridiculously intense character, but he's not unhappy at all at the beginning of the book, and Rob could have played that scene in a way to make him seem like he's actually capable of lightening up and showing off that he knows entire Shakespeare plays by memory without pouring his deep brooding angst over nothing into it.

I do think Kristen is a good actor and I kind of blame a lot of her uneven performance in Twilight on the direction/editing, and I think we saw a lot more of her at her full potential in this one. Definitely nothing cringe-worthy, at least.

I take back everything negative I ever said about Taylor ever since he was first cast (well, besides about how he's kind of WHITE, but that's really just a beef with the people who casted him), not that I ever hated him or anything. For a long time I'd really warmed up to him as a person because in interviews and stuff he just seems like a ridiculously lovable kid, but I still didn't see him as anything close to the ideal for an actor to play Jacob nor was I fangirling him like so many girls at sortofbeautiful had started to. I kind of started hating the idea that lots of fans are actually picturing him in their heads as Jacob now when they read the books or fic....or my fic *shudder* (lol, not that I like it when I'm reading anything that's been adapted and start seeing actors in my head). It wasn't until kind of recently that I started seeing pictures of Tay that made me slowly start admitting he's a pretty good-looking dude, but I still had some concerns about how his acting would be in this movie.

Yeah....no more. LOL. He fucking killed it. He looked so damn good it was kind of embarrassing all the swooning you could hear in the theatre. His chemistry with Kristen is smokin. I don't even notice anymore that he's pretty young compared to Kristen and Rob who not only play characters who are supposed to be a little older but are both older in real life than their characters.

Even Rob is at least worlds better at acting than Ashley Greene. She's so cute and seems like a lovely person and all, but her acting is actually distractingly bad. Though I have to say there was something about her girly and sweet delivery of the line "Well I'm not gonna hurt her" followed by the awkward moment of her and Jacob looking at each other that was really really funny to me somehow. It was just so...Alice.

— The action scenes were kind of fucking off the hook, I gotta say. Especially the wolves pursuing Victoria and the fight with the Volturi. Some special effects moments weren't so great like that horrible bullshitted-tracking-shot of Sam diving into the ocean and the way Bella's Edward visions materialized as a floating head (it didn't look badly done I guess, it was just cheesy), but the way they showed the vampires' speed in scenes like this was really damn cool.

And if somebody had told me two years ago that New Moon would have this awesome prolonged action sequenc along to a Thom Yorke song, I would have been like "Get the fuck out of here." After I've been listening to the amazing soundtrack this whole month I was imagining some lovely calm scenes happening along to some of the prettiest mellow tracks, but as it turned out this was the only memorable standout use of a song in the movie besides maybe "Roslyn" in the beginning.

— God I love the Volturi. Maybe I'm 130% Team Jacob, but I actually really like all the stuff that happens in Italy just as much as all the Jacob/Bella stuff in this book and was really looking forward to seeing it on screen. All the actors they got to play the Volturi were great.

A long time ago I was considering writing my own fan screenplay for an adaptation of New Moon, and I was going to describe there being relaxing classical music playing in one of the halls of their creepy underground lair just to emphasize the funny weirdness because it would seem so out of place while Bella's scared out of her mind being here. So when there was opera music on the elevator I was like "OMG YES." Haha. (Seriously, is this actually something mentioned in the book that I just forgot about?)

I wonder what it was that Aro said in Italian after Bella says the thing about "Bitch you ain't got no soul" or whatever. Not la tua cantante since we all know what that means, but the second thing.

— One of my favorite scenes ever in the series is the whole thing with Bella, Jake, and Mike going to the movies. Mike trying to be impressive and being lame is hilarious and when he gets sick it just seems so completely random though it contributes to Jacob pretending to be sick later. I was so happy they kept in the "What a marshmallow" line and everything awesome, and it was so funny that they made the movie sound like the shittiest non-stop-bloody thing ever.

— Okay, so I don't think I've heard of any audience not laughing at Alice's vision and yeah, it was loltastic. But I really did like the idea of actually showing it and seeing a preview of vamped Bella in this movie was something I totally wasn't expecting so it was sort of cool in a "hey woah what is this" way. And there might as well be that unbelievably cheesy slice of cheese inserted in order to warn people about how much of a cheesy ending this series is progressing toward.

Random things that were awesome:
— Charlie. Charlie. And more awesome Charlie.
— As much as I'm all "imprinting, yuck" I thought Sam and Emily were pretty adorable in their one little scene.
— "It would be nice not to want to kill you all the time." LMAO, probably got the biggest laugh of anything in the movie. Oh Jasper. ♥
— The way Bella fucking grabs onto Jacob's hair all protectively and frustratedly when he's sitting on her bed and she's saying "I hate this, I hate what they did to you." It was so perfectly THEM I kind of died.
— Paul joining the others at Emily's after fighting Jacob suddenly all smiley and feeling fine and just saying "I'm sorry." LOLOLOL.
— "It's a wolf thing." "No, it's a Jacob thing. You're just warm." fdmknfjkldnsfkjehwnjhnbdnsybfkhjfbnfjlgknflkdm hello line that wasn't in the book but is perfect.
— Oh, and also the "I'm not a car you can fix up" one. They actually worked in a line illustrating the whole metaphor in Jacob the mechanic fixing the bikes with her. I approve.

— Besides the big change that Edward doesn't pretend to be Carlisle on the phone, pretty much the only thing I was really disappointed in was the final scene. It worked fine in its own context, but as far as setting things up for Eclipse it's entirely misleading because it actually gives a sense that the whole love triangle conflict has run its course. When Bella tells Jacob "I love you" she doesn't mean it that way, because then there's pretty much no conflict for the next movie, and I'm surprised how many fans of the books actually took it that way. When she says "Don't make me choose" she just means he has to accept that she's back with Edward now if they're going to keep being friends; if she meant she loves him she'd know that actually she kinda does need to choose. But I can totally see why Jacob looks so hurt after that because of how it sounds coming out. I mean, ouch.

Jacob's only shred of hope that he has any chance of winning her over despite her complete rejection of him so far is that he can see she doesn't know yet she's in love with him. Not to mention his main motivation for fighting for her despite knowing he has almost no chance is that he finds out in this scene that she plans to be turned and that's supposed to be something that very unpleasantly takes him by surprise and makes him flip out a little. When I saw in trailers that he actually phases in this scene, I thought that would be what sets him off, but instead he's just like "Hey Bella, I came by to say I would kind of prefer if you weren't committed to becoming undead, actually, but that's just my two cents."

Comments

[ninety6tears.livejournal.com]

They pretty much changed the whole tone of the relationship in a way that, since it's a movie, is kind of understandable. In the book it's a very nuanced unique friendship which has a mostly unspoken mutual attraction; if you watch it imagining that you didn't read the book, it made me feel like it was more like two people fully aware that they would be dating if one of them wasn't messed up about somebody else and just taking it really, really slow. There's kind of a very thin line between those two things anyway, but there just is more awareness on Bella's side of the attraction, considering that the almost-kiss in the truck is like WE WANT TO WE WANT TO BUT - uh...Well. Thanks.

Yeah, I was upset about Harry's heart attack until I remembered that was just something Meyer confirmed in an interview and they can't really be held to that. Seriously, though, that *event* is like the most angsty-ass thing Meyer concocts in the entire series (well, besides The Rape of Rosalie) and it kind of sucks that even an implication of it won't get into the movie. I didn't even realize until afterwards that we don't see Leah (I may have already known this but completely forgot). What happened to Q'orianka Kilcher? I thought she was being considered for a role?

[flowrs4ophelia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's hard for them to tell the story so much in Bella's POV in a movie as it is in the book, which makes it so much more clear how she really feels about Jake at this point. Even if you can tell by reading between the lines when she's being an unreliable narrator in her denial, the denial is pretty key to where their relationship stands. As it is the only real reason we hear in the movie for why she's hesitant to be with him is that she's "never going to run right" and just thinks he doesn't quite understand how messed up and bad for him she is. (Which is probably the only reason that matters much before Edward strolls back into the picture, but still.)

I didn't even realize until afterwards that we don't see Leah (I may have already known this but completely forgot). What happened to Q'orianka Kilcher? I thought she was being considered for a role?
Leah only appears once in this book when the Clearwaters are having dinner with the Blacks and it would have been kind of pointless bothering to cast her already. You might have heard those casting rumors about Eclipse. They've already finished filming on that.

[ninety6tears.livejournal.com]

I don't know, for some reason I feel like GIRL WOLFS LOL is going to seem a lot more WTF if it's like, "So you know this girl you haven't met yet? Well her name is Leah and epic history with Sam and bitchiness and oh uh WEREWOLF." I know it's silly to care that she wasn't in NM...

[flowrs4ophelia.livejournal.com]

It's not like they revealed much about Leah in NM, she was just kinda there talking on the phone in one scene to establish that she exists. The main point of the scene seemed to be to introduce the Clearwater family and have an off-handed mention of Sue saying Harry needs to watch what he eats because of his heart just to set things up for him dying.

[ninety6tears.livejournal.com]

I'm aware. Just imagine having never read the books, and how different the reveal about her being a werewolf seems if they haven't even introduced the character yet. I think it will feel cheap.

[flowrs4ophelia.livejournal.com]

In Eclipse Leah first comes in because she's at the little bonfire where the pack hears the legends, but Bella doesn't find out until later that she's actually one of them. They could still make it kind of a surprising reveal by keeping it like that.

[rollerager.livejournal.com]

Nobody in the audience of my theater laughed about the Bella as a vamp thing except me. I found it hilarious because Bella would never wear that in a million years. Lol

[flowrs4ophelia.livejournal.com]

I know! She looked like a Disney princess, LOL.

[lezah-hctiw.livejournal.com]

My friends are all Team Edward, but when they saw the movie, "Oh, hell. I'm Team Jacob!"

By the way, after the vision, they now call Edward, Gaydward.

[ooshady-girloo.livejournal.com]

hey good review... i would have to say i agree on the Victoria chase scene, it was badass. the score and soundtrack throughout was really awesome, kudos to whoever is in charge of that.

i also liked the bike montage when Ok Go's "Shooting the Moon"'s (my favorite on the OST) playing and they time Bella throwing a pizza at the back of Jake's head to coincide with the song's pause... and he inexplicably catches it... another point to his then-unexplained strength and agility.

just before Bella's pulled from the ocean is pretty hauntingly beautiful as well. IMO

[tommy50702.livejournal.com]

I thought it was an action movie. lol