Video review: "New Moon"

"The Twilight Saga: New Moon" is soft-core romantic fantasy for tweens: An unremarkable girl is pursued by two intense, dreamy guys with super powers and a penchant for doffing their shirts, but who are content with holding hands and smooching.

I vividly remember at the screening for this movie, I was surrounded by hundreds of teen girls and their middle-aged mothers cooing appreciatively whenever 17-year-old Taylor Lautner's frequently shirtless, chiseled torso appeared onscreen. I kept wanting to ask the moms how they'd feel if I started slobbering over their semi-nude, underage daughters.

Anyway.

In a sequel to the hit vampire romance, high school senior Bella (Kristen Stewart) is abandoned by her blood-sucking boyfriend Edward (Robert Pattinson), who departs with his family from the tiny, cloistered town of Forks out of fear they'll be discovered. Local boy Jacob Black (Lautner) fills in the amore gap, despite dealing with the mother of all adolescent transformations -- in his case, into a huge, snarling wolf.

"New Moon" is actually a bit of an improvement over the first "Twilight," but it's still often draggy and much too long.

New director Chris Weitz (taking over for Catherine Hardwicke) has a better flair for the action scenes, which are more frequent, too. At least the fighting scenes have a little bite to them -- that's certainly more than you can say for these glum, dull teen protagonists.

To build the video release into an "event," "New Moon" is debuting this Saturday (March 20) instead of the usual Tuesday.

Video extras are the same for both Blu-ray and DVD versions.

Weitz and editor Peter Lambert team up for a feature-length commentary track. A making-of documentary is split into six parts, each concentrating on a different aspect of the filmmaking process.

There is also music videos from soundtrack bands Muse, Death Cab for Cutie, Mute Math and Anya Marina.

Movie: 2 stars
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "The Twilight Saga: New Moon"

What's more stressful than dating a vampire? Being dumped by one.

That's the premise of the sequel to "Twilight," the movie about a girl who falls in love with a nosferatu.

In "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is abandoned by undead love Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who leaves with his family of fellow vampires because they decide that the tiny town of Forks, Washington has become too dangerous for them.

Bella predictably pouts and even wakes up screaming in the night, the pain from having lost Edward is so bad. Fortunately, there's a hunky new man-child around to offer comfort and a very broad shoulder to cry on.

In the first movie, Jacob Black was a slightly nerdy 15-year-old American Indian who helped clue Bella in to the fact that Edward and the other Cullens are vampires (although the "vegetarian" kind that only dines on animals, not humans). Now he returns as a heavily-muscled hunk who woos Bella persistently. He also has a habit of turning into a wolf, part of the vampire-hunting tradition of his tribe.

At the "New Moon" screening I attended, the audience was filled with lots of teen-age girls but also plenty of their middle-aged moms, who cooed appreciatively whenever Lautner's frequently shirtless, chiseled torso appeared onscreen.

Lautner himself said he put on 30 pounds of muscle in just eight weeks before the filming of "New Moon" started. Call me a steroid conspiracist, but such things simply do not happen naturally. Lautner's transformation is equivalent to a starlet pressured into getting oversized breast implants so she can land better roles.

The acting of Stewart and Lautner hasn't improved since the first movie, and Pattinson is absent from most of the movie, except for some visions that appear in Bella's head. New director Chris Weitz (taking over for Catherine Hardwicke) has a better flair for the action scenes, which are more frequent, too.

Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg hasn't gotten any better at fixing author Stephanie Meyer's clunky dialogue, such as: "Carlisle told me how you feel about your soul."

Still, all things considered "New Moon" is an improvement over the original film, which was draggy and dreary. The werewolf plot is pretty interesting, especially Jacob's ambivalent feelings about his newfound powers.

If you're expecting a huge throw-down between Edward and Jacob, you're apt to be disappointed. Yes, Edward reappears near the end of the film, which leaves the love triangle slightly unresolved: Bella's heart is with the vampire, but she clearly has feelings for the wolf-boy.

2.5 stars

DVD review: "Twilight"

“Twilight” is one of those movies that lives better on the page than the screen. Stephanie Meyer’s novel about a teenager who falls in love with a vampire was not exactly literature, but it was a fast-paced, fun read that got tween girls’ hearts going pitter-patter.

Despite a solid performance by Robert Pattinson as immortal Edward Cullen, the tortured heartthrob who’s forever 17, the movie is a mostly bloodless affair. It’s great-looking as directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and Melissa Rosenberg’s screenplay was extremely faithful to the novel (perhaps too much). But Bella, the protagonist who returns to her childhood home in the perpetually rainy town of Forks, is simply too passive a character to anchor a movie. She has little to do except wait for Edward to turn up again and do something amazing, like leap through trees at bullet speed or stop a careening van with one hand. Kristen Stewart’s glum, vacant performance doesn’t help.

Luckily for the movie’s teeming legions of female fans, the two-disc DVD comes packed with enough extras to keep them entertained for hours. It will be released Friday at midnight.
There’s the usual theatrical trailers and other promotional material, like a Q&A between the cast and fans at Comic-Con, plus three music videos by bands whose songs appear in the movie.

There’s a decent hour-long making-of documentary that shows how Hardwicke eschewed computerized imagery to film as much live action as possible, plus quite a raft of deleted and extended scenes.

Hardwicke, Pattinson and Stewart also team up to do a feature-length commentary track. It’s a pretty giggly affair, as Hardwicke coos warmly over her young stars, and Pattinson repeatedly remarks on vital topics like how much they had to pluck his eyebrows. A few interesting tidbits emerge, such as the fact that a then-17 Stewart attended classes in the same high school where they shot the film.

Disappointingly, there’s no mention of Hardwicke’s very public split from the sequel, which was announced shortly after “Twilight” came out. DVD extras isn’t the place to air dirty laundry, apparently.

Movie: C-minus
Extras: B-plus