Subscribe to Our Feed!I’ve written about my love-hate relationship with the Twilight series
Last night my crazy friend Mandy (@fouragainsttwo) and our other friend (@outnumberedmom) stood in line (with Mandy’s mom and two of her guests) for the New Moon premiere. I should start out by saying that I still haven’t watched the first movie
I’ll admit to having a nice evening into early morning. We ate at the Olive Garden, got kicked out of Starbucks (why do they close at 9:30 on a weeknight?), found out that Kohl’s is currently open until 11:00pm due to the holidays, purchased things we didn’t need and then made our way to stand in line. Mandy made us goodie bags with Twilight candies, calendars, the New Moon
Were the Cougars as bad at your showing as they were at mine?! They were worse than the teenagers.
There was a WINNEBAGO full of them in the parking lot!
I laughed. Out loud. There were quite a few “Twilight Moms,” as an article in our local newspaper put it yesterday. The crowd was comprised of a lot more teenagers than I expected (didn’t they have school today?) but the “cougars” were out in full force. I do suppose that our group qualified as such. Great.
As for the crowd, they weren’t too obnoxious while we were waiting though I do admit to thinking that anyone who left their water/pop/juice bottle and other assorted pieces of trash on the floor needs to be taught a thing or two about manners. In the theater, there was the initial squeal of delight when Edward, the vampire everyone seems to adore, came on screen. A similar gasp of approval came when Jacob, the werewolf, was first seen and, of course, again when he took off his shirt. I still maintain that his head is too small for his body and shoulder span and do not see the attraction. I prefer my men to be thin and rather pale. (Have you seen FireDad? I mean, honestly.) Also, head proportion is key.
The movie? Oh yes, we were there to see the movie and not just experience the crowds and stay up way, way past my bedtime. I liked the movie. Hush now, don’t judge or flog me. I liked the movie more than the book, which is something I rarely say as I almost always hate book-to-movie adaptations. This is the rare exception as I so thoroughly hated the book that the movie simply had to be an improvement. It was greatly improved in the fact that it flowed better and didn’t drag on as unnecessarily as the book did. There were bits of annoyances for me, however, including the very awful sparkle-and-dazzle effect for when the vampires hit sunlight. It’s worse than a 1980’s special effect. Very bad. Some of the acting was annoying. I love Bella but if I had to listen to her breathe one more time I was going to laugh out loud.
All in all, I had a thrilling time. I still don’t see what my one friend sees in Jacob but I love her all the same. Mandy owes me some coffee and a nap for dragging us out. (Just kidding, I think.) All that said, I really don’t think I’ll be making the midnight premiere for Eclipse. I might go see it in the theater but on a Tuesday afternoon when swooning teenagers are in school or still sleeping (as I think it’s planned as a summer release). I’m still tired as I write this at 2:17pm. I’m just grumpy because I’m sure the teens that were in attendance last night are up-and-at-em today while I feel like I got hit by a truck. Cougar, maybe, but I’d allow Edward Cullen to bite my neck if it meant I never again felt this old and tired and would never need sleep again.
You can read Mandy’s thoughts on the whole event here. But really, she owes me coffee.
I didn’t want to read it. It, of course, being the Twilight series. Oh, that’s right. I ended up reading all four books. But it’s really not my fault. The fault rests on the shoulders of my friend’s husband. Here’s how the story goes:
He got her the book for Christmas. It wasn’t her style but she didn’t want to return it either. So, she started reading it. She liked it. After she finished it, she brought it to our weekly friend coffee get-together and tried to pawn it off on me. I laughed and said a firm no. Our other friend (whom some of you are getting to know) said that she’d read it first. I said, “I’ll read it if she likes it.”
Fail. That sentence would come back to haunt me.
Not only did she like it, she loved it. She immediately devoured the rest of the series. I was trapped. I put off reading the first book for about a month as I finished up some review books and procrastinated to the best of my ability. One night I found myself with no books left to read. At that point, I figured I wouldn’t get past the first chapter or two and could say that I tried. The first night found me 100 pages in and not hating it yet. I eventually liked it and finished it. Don’t judge me.
That’s not to say that I feel the book is well-written. It wasn’t. It drove the writer-and-editor portion of my brain slightly insane. But I finished it. I then began the second book, New Moon, and struggled through it for longer than it usually takes me to tackle a book, however long. I hated it. I mean, I hated it with the passion of a thousand suns. My two “friends” (if you can call them that) encouraged me that the third book, Eclipse, was much better and that the third and fourth books wouldn’t make sense if I didn’t read that (horrible) second book. I think the pages of the books must be laced with crack cocaine to make my two very intelligent friends spout such nonsense but, as per usual, I trusted their opinions. Perhaps the crack cocaine laced pages got to me as well.
I got to procrastinate the reading of Eclipse for a few weeks as I had to endure show week and three performances and the necessary time for recuperation. Once able to keep my eyes open, I read the third book in the teen vampire series. I didn’t feel one way or the other about this particular book. It was in this book, however, that I decided that I don’t really like vampire fight scenes. While not overly gory in this series, I just don’t enjoy the anxiety that builds with the setup of the fight and the worry that accompanies it all. While these vampires are “vegetarians” in their own right, I’d really prefer if they were also 100% pacifists. Make vampire love, not newborn war and all that jazz. But, alas, I survived Eclipse and immediately began Breaking Dawn.
Now, I didn’t hate Breaking Dawn. In fact, when it ended, I felt pleased. Everything wrapped up nicely with a tight little bow surrounding the words, not used in the other three, “the end.” Then something washed over me. It wrapped up too neatly. Like when family sitcoms dramas try to solve the problem by the end of their 30 to 60 minutes, minus commercials. It just doesn’t seem possible. Of course, one might argue that it is a book about vampires and therefore any legitimate form of possibility is tossed out the window. Still, it was too neatly closed and speaks volumes about the simplistic writing. Furthermore, this book, perhaps more than the other three, left such huge gaps in the story-telling that I wanted to scream. All four of the books, of course, annoy me in this way but this last book really had some glaring gaps that left me rolling my eyes.
And so, the question remains, what did this sci-fi-genre-avoiding, non-young-adult think of a young adult series in what I would call the “Sci Fi Light” genre? I didn’t hate it. I maintain that I never would have read them at all if it wasn’t for my friend’s husband. It’s just not my thing. I do, however, talk about sparkling in the sunlight now and make too many references to being a vampire. As such, you could probably say that I liked the story. I will clarify that by saying that I liked the story but almost hated the writing. One of my friends said that they were books that didn’t make you think and that’s why she liked them. For me, my editor brain was on overdrive. The writing really killed the series for me. Thankfully the story itself kept me afloat until that last page.
So, why did I keep reading? What won it for me? When it comes down to it, couldn’t we all use an Edward? I did feel kind of swoony about how he looked in my head. (I refuse to watch the movie even yet because I find the actor who plays Edward to be in desperate need of a haircut. The vampire in my mind was clean cut, for Pete’s sake.) If FireDad was a vampire, I’d change for him. (I said the same thing about the movie City of Angels. If he was a human and I was an angel, I would have fallen.) And that, in the end, is why I kept on keeping on through the last page of the four book series. I don’t regret having read it as I can now annoy my husband with references to vampires. But I wouldn’t read them again. I’m still not sure that I’ll watch this movie either. Or the next three.
But, seriously, have you ever seen my pale skin in the sun? Are you sure that I’m not a vampire?
