20 Nov 2011

Bella / The Brawl: "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1" and "Happy Feet Two"

By Mike Schulz

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN - PART 1

We're now four films into the five-part series of Stephenie Meyer adaptations, and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 is the first one that I wouldn't hesitate to call unpredictable. As someone who couldn't care less about the tortured love triangle involving the human Bella (Kristen Stewart), the vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson), and the lycanthrope Jacob (Taylor Lautner), I was confident that this moody romance would perk up with an added dash of Rosemary's Baby, once the now-married Bella found herself pregnant with Edward's child. (So the undead have living sperm, then?) But how could I have guessed this would be the exact moment that, at least for me, the movie stopped being interesting?

02 Jul 2010

Still Vamping: "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" and "The Last Airbender"

By Mike Schulz

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE

At roughly the halfway point in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse - the third of four books (and eventually five movies) in author Stephenie Meyer's frighteningly popular series - we're given a flashback that details the vampiristic recruitment of Rosalie (Nikki Reed), a character constricted to the sidelines in previous Twilight installments. Set in what looks to be 1920s or '30s America, the brief sequence finds this pretty blond-turned-bloodsucker exacting revenge on her hateful fiancé while sporting a wedding gown and a nightmarish grin, and it's a total kick; several scenes later, another enjoyable flashback shows us how the similarly undeveloped figure of Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) joined the ranks of the undead while performing a heroic service during the Civil War.

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