15 posts tagged “twilight”

More Twilight stuff, because I have honestly never anticipated a movie more, and that includes any of the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings installments.

I have no idea what Larry Carroll even looks like, but I think I might love him.

He's the guy MTV has dubbed to do all the major Twilight coverage and he's an admitted fan of the novel, the movie, Stephenie Meyer, and the actors.

Anyway, as today is Tuesday, he has posted an exclusive clip. I actually prefer this to the ballet studio clip that debuted during the MTV Movie Awards because this one actually has a lot of dialogue, interaction between Edward and Bella, and more importantly, it's a scene not in the book. Plus it's cool to see an actual scene shot from start to finish.

I'm sure the weird obsessed fans will cry foul at anything detracted from or added to SM's masterpiece because they obviously don't know how, you know, this kind of thing works. But I trust Catherine Hardwicke and as producer Greg Mooradian informs us, Stephenie Meyer loves the screenplay -- that's enough for me.

But if any of those ridiculous KS-hating fans are anywhere around me in the theater when I see Twilight (at 12:01 a.m. on December 12), I am seriously going to punch them in the neck.

Hard.

I admit. I've been kind of burned out on movies -- well, burned out at going to the theater to see them, anyway. Sometimes the trade-out between seeing a movie on the big screen and getting the full effect of the crowd experience isn't worth stupid crying babies (or rather, stupid parents who a) bring babies to movies and b) let them cry), cell phones, or obnoxious 13-year-olds.

However, I saw Prince Caspian yesterday and it was absolutely amazing. The whole experience was awesome. What a fantastic movie -- I thought it was even better than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and can't wait to see what the Walden Media PTB do with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. CS Lewis was such a fantabulous storyteller.

That led me to do some research on the upcoming summer/fall blockbusters and I realize that there are over a dozen movies that I'm either interested in seeing, excited to see, or ridiculously excited to see premiering over the next few months.

I am still dying to see Iron Man, and I want to see Baby Mama and Made of Honor, although the latter two might end up being Netflix selections, just because I am more anxious to see some of the other big movies.

The six movies that I am positively, ridiculously excited to see are as follows (in order of release date) -- and some will include trailers:

1) The Dark Knight, July 18: I *loved* Batman Begins. Took Kevin and Mia to see it on the IMAX and we all were speechless. Christian Bale is by far the superior Batman, I can't wait to see how Heath Ledger interpreted the Joker, and I'm so glad that Maggie Gyllenhaal has replaced Katie Holmes. That was smart casting. Or recasting, as the case may be.

I knew it would begin with the end, and the end would look like death to these eyes. I had been warned.

Not these eyes. My eyes. Mine. This was me now.

Stephenie Meyer's new book, The Host, dropped Tuesday. I put myself on the waiting list at the library a few weeks ago, and I was perfectly okay with being 11th. I mean, I admit, I wasn't all that enthused to read it. After all, this was wholly separate from the Twilight series. No Edward. No Bella. No impossibly, epically, gut-twistingly angsty romance. No life-and-death situations whereupon death would be more welcome than spending eternity without the one your heart yearns for...

Wait...where was I again?

Oh, yeah. The Host. So anyway, even though I'd heard really good things about it, I still was leery. I mean, it's being described as sci-fi-ish. I'm always leery of the sci-fi genre, even though I have discovered jewels like Battlestar Galactica and Firefly amidst the weird puppet-y Farscape stuff.

And then I got to work, sat down to count drawers and compile the morning deposit, switching on Glenn Beck as I always do. Five minutes after I did this, he starts raving about Stephenie Meyer. His daughters love Twilight, and so he's become quite familiar with the series as well, and then he proceeds to read the first few paragraphs of Chapter One of The Host, including the above excerpt, and I stopped everything I was doing to listen.

And then instead of going to the bank, the other store, and back to the main store to continue about my day, I made a quick detour to Barnes and Noble to pick up my own copy.

I am hooked. So yeah. There will be no vacation recap, no pictures -- I probably won't even unpack (!!) until I'm done.

I'm only on Chapter 2 and although I already know it won't top Twilight -- I'm not sure anything ever will -- it's going to come dang close.

"Oh, come on," I said dubiously. You have to know the effect you have on people."
He tilted his head to one side, and his eyes were curious. "I dazzle people?"
"You haven't noticed? Do you think everyone gets their way so easily?"
He ignored my questions. "Do I dazzle you?"
"Frequently," I admitted.

I'm pretty sure that Kevin convinced his mom to take him to Target to buy Twilight after we were done with Keenan's game today. He once told me that if I read Cirque du Freak, he'd read Twilight, and when I told him that I had the first book ready for pick-up at the library, he turned to his mom and told her she had to buy him Twilight.

This will be the longest book he's ever tackled. And I think the first one whose protagonist is a girl. But he's psyched to read it and already thinks Edward is cool.

I can't say I blame him. Edward Cullen, fictitious or not, pretty much dazzles me, too.

I am so absolutely sick to death about the degradation of morals that has been intensifying for quite some time, yes, but recently has been even more rampant and blatant than usual. I'm not Catholic, but I followed a lot of Pope Benedict's recent visit, and I was so incredibly impressed by his proactive stance on what's been going on, not only in the Catholic church, but in society in general. I love that he referenced Paul when he said that while all things may be lawful, they are not necessarily beneficial. He called -- rightly so -- a lot of the hedonism present "false freedom."

Reading the Time article I've posted below couldn't have come at a better time. It was informative, well-written and encouraging -- that not all popular trends are smutty and there is still honor in being virtuous.

Is it any wonder why I love this series of books?

Stephenie Meyer: The next JK Rowling?
By Lev Grossman, Time Magazine

Five years ago, on the night of June 1, 2003, a Phoenix housewife named Stephenie Meyer had a dream: a young woman was talking to a beautiful, sparkling man in a sunlit meadow. The man was a vampire. They were in love, and he was telling the girl how hard it was for him to keep from killing her.

Meyer had not written anything much before then. Her main creative outlets were scrapbooking and making elaborate Halloween costumes. But the dream was so vivid that she absolutely had to write it down. Then she kept on writing. She wrote the entire story of the young woman and the vampire from start to finish. That story became a young-adult novel called Twilight, and she followed it up with two sequels, New Moon and Eclipse. Together the three Twilight books have sold more than 5.3 million copies in the U.S., 4 million in the past 12 months alone. They've spent a combined 143 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list; when Eclipse was released last August, it bumped the final Harry Potter book out of the top spot on some lists even though it came out only 2 1/2 weeks later. Her first non-vampire novel, The Host, will be published next month. A movie of Twilight will be in theaters this December.

Meyer, 34, is a huge success at selling books, but she's becoming something more. People dress up like her characters. They write their own stories about them and post their tales on the Internet. When she appears at a bookstore, 3,000 people go to meet her. There are Twilight-themed rock bands. Meyer has, like one of her vampires, turned into something rare and more than merely human: a literary phenomenon. How?

There's nothing particularly fantastical about Meyer's life. She grew up in Phoenix, the daughter of a CFO at a contracting firm, and went to Brigham Young University, where she met her husband, an accountant named Christian who goes by "Pancho." They got married at 21 and have three sons. They still live just outside Phoenix in a town called Cave Creek, in a large modern house guarded by towering saguaro cacti. Smart, funny and cheery, Meyer does not seem noticeably undead in person. An observant Mormon, she doesn't drink alcohol and has never seen an R-rated movie. She's not perfect--although Mormons avoid caffeine on principle, she drinks the occasional cherry Diet Pepsi. "It's about keeping yourself free of addictions," she explains, sitting on a huge couch in her living room. "We have free will, which is a huge gift from God. If you tie that up with something like, I don't know, cocaine, then you don't really have a lot of freedom anymore."

The characters in Meyer's books aren't Mormons, but her beliefs are key to understanding her singular talent. The heroine of Twilight is a girl named Bella who moves from Phoenix to a small town in Washington State (a part of the country Meyer had never visited when she wrote Twilight). Bella feels like an outsider at her new high school, but she is immediately drawn to a strange, otherworldly, ridiculously good-looking group of siblings called the Cullens, particularly to 17-year-old Edward.

The Cullens are actually a local coven of vampires. Edward has been 17 since 1918. He is super-strong and super-fast, he can hear people's thoughts, and he does not breathe or sleep or age. His skin is cold, and when exposed to the sun, he doesn't burn--he glitters. Edward and the Cullens aren't ordinary vampires: they have renounced human blood on moral grounds, feeding instead on wild animals, which they hunt by night. He and Bella are instantly, overwhelmingly attracted to each other, but he is also wildly hungry for her blood.

Resisting that temptation is a constant struggle. Edward's choice--and the willingness to choose a different way in general--is a major theme in Meyer's books. "I really think that's the underlying metaphor of my vampires," she says. "It doesn't matter where you're stuck in life or what you think you have to do; you can always choose something else. There's always a different path."

True. But that does not exhaust the meaning of the Twilight books. Certainly some of their appeal lies in their fine moral hygiene: they're an alternative to the hookup scene, Gossip Girl for good girls. There's no drinking or smoking in Twilight, and Bella and Edward do little more than kiss. "I get some pressure to put a big sex scene in," Meyer says. "But you can go anywhere for graphic sex. It's harder to find a romance where they dwell on the hand-holding. I was a late bloomer. When I was 16, holding hands was just--wow."

But it is the rare vampire novel that isn't about sex on some level, and the Twilight books are no exception. What makes Meyer's books so distinctive is that they're about the erotics of abstinence. Their tension comes from prolonged, superhuman acts of self-restraint. There's a scene midway through Twilight in which, for the first time, Edward leans in close and sniffs the aroma of Bella's exposed neck. "Just because I'm resisting the wine doesn't mean I can't appreciate the bouquet," he says. "You have a very floral smell, like lavender ... or freesia." He barely touches her, but there's more sex in that one paragraph than in all the snogging in Harry Potter.

It's never quite clear whether Edward wants to sleep with Bella or rip her throat out or both, but he wants something, and he wants it bad, and you feel it all the more because he never gets it. That's the power of the Twilight books: they're squeaky, geeky clean on the surface, but right below it, they are absolutely, deliciously filthy.

Becoming Stephenie Meyer

Meyer wrote Twilight in three months flat. "I know to the day when I became a writer," she says. "One day. Which is cool." Once she'd had the dream, she wrote like a woman struck by lightning, barely sleeping, typing one-handed with a baby in her lap. (At the time, she was taking care of three children under the age of 5.) Even now she does her writing in an open office area in the middle of the house. She's not interested in a room of her own. "I can't close doors and write. Even if the kids are asleep, I know that I could hear them if I needed. I feel better if I'm kind of in the center of things and I know what's going on."

Her story reminds one a little of J.K. Rowling's--Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as an unemployed single mom while her baby daughter slept--and Meyer is quick to point out that her success is a direct result of the way Rowling changed the book industry: children are now willing to read 500-page novels, and adults are now willing to read books written for children. But as artists, they couldn't be more different. Rowling pieces her books together meticulously, detail by detail. Meyer floods the page like a severed artery. She never uses a sentence when she can use a whole paragraph. Her books are big (500-plus pages) but not dense--they have a pillowy quality distinctly reminiscent of Internet fan fiction. (Which she'll readily grant: "I don't think I'm a writer; I think I'm a storyteller," Meyer says. "The words aren't always perfect.")

Whereas Rowling's works maintain a certain English reserve, Meyer's books are full of gusting emotions. Bella never stops gasping and swooning and passing out and waking up screaming from nightmares. Her heart is always either pounding or stopping. (Bella's histrionics don't feel at all unrealistic. When you're writing about adolescents, melodrama and realism are the same thing.) Rowling labors over her intricate plots, but Meyer's stories never bend or twist or branch. They have one gear, and she guns it straight ahead till the last page. The way she manages the reader's curiosity, maintaining tension and controlling the flow of information, is simply virtuosic. She creates a compulsion in the reader that is not unvampiric.

Meyer and Rowling do share two important traits. Both writers embed their fantasy in the modern world--Meyer's vampires are as deracinated and contemporary as Rowling's wizards. And people do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there. James Patterson may sell more books, but not a lot of people dress up like Alex Cross. There's no literary term for the quality Twilight and Harry Potter (and The Lord of the Rings) share, but you know it when you see it: their worlds have a freestanding internal integrity that makes you feel as if you should be able to buy real estate there.

Meyer first realized something was afoot when she gave a reading in Seattle and somebody drove 4 hours and took a boat to get there. At twilightmoms.com a website for fans over 25, there are more than 200,000 posts. Last year there was an Eclipse prom in Tempe, Ariz. "It's not like Harry Potter, where you can wear a wizard's robe," Meyer says. "But they do what they can. One girl even had colored contacts!"

Beyond Twilight

You wouldn't want to live in Meyer's next book. Her fourth Twilight novel, Breaking Dawn, will be out in August--it's already No. 8 on Amazon.com--but on May 6 she will publish The Host (Little, Brown; 619 pages), a science-fiction novel being marketed to adults. It's set in the near future on an Earth that has been conquered by parasitic aliens who take over the bodies of humans, annihilating their hosts' personalities. One human host resists; she lives on as a voice in the head she shares with the alien. When host and parasite (who goes by Wanda) meet up with the host's old lover--now a resistance fighter in hiding--the alien falls for him too and joins the humans. It's a love triangle with two sides, a ménage à deux. Like Twilight, The Host is a kinky setup--two girls in one body!--played absolutely clean.

And like Meyer's other books, The Host is about love and choice and demi-human creatures. ("I rarely write about just humans," Meyer says. "You can get humans anywhere.") The Host is also set on the same slow burn as Meyer's other work: while there's hot kissing, it's a strict PG. But The Host is a grittier read--much of the book is set in a hardscrabble resistance hideout. Nobody has nice clothes. There's romance, but much of The Host is about Wanda's attempts to fit in with her new human bedfellows, about feeling alone and different and unlovable--literally alienated.

If there's a formula to Meyer's work, it holds true here: she rewrites stock horror plots as love stories, and in doing so, she makes them new again. She writes vampire novels without the biting and science fiction without the lasers. Instead, she slows down the action, tapping it for the pent-up emotional drama that's always been present in it but had been all but invisible until she came along. "That's what I like about science fiction," Meyer says. "It's the same thing I like about Shakespeare. You take people, put them in a situation that can't possibly happen, and they act the way you would act. It's about being human." And sometimes there's nobody quite as human as somebody who isn't.

I am often jealous (a perfectly normal, healthy amount) of movies and TV shows because ordinary and not-so-ordinary goings-on are backed -- and usually enhanced -- by music. In the past few years (I think I first noticed when Dawson's Creek and Felicity premiered, and then re-noticed with the advent of The OC), the trend of using popular and not-so-popular-but-who-become-popular-with-all-the-exposure artists and songs with actual lyrics has emerged.

Scrubs and Grey's Anatomy are largely responsible for launching the career of Joshua Radin. The OC made Death Cab for Cutie and Rooney household names and gave then-brand-new The Killers a ton of exposure.

Anywho, so I always have music on the brain in some form or fashion.

When I was reading the Twilight series -- I read all three books back-to-back twice -- I was constantly thinking of different songs. As in, hey, this would be great on the movie soundtrack. Or I'd hear a song and think, hey, this reminds me of Bella. Or Edward. Or Edward and Bella.

So I made myself a mix. I sent Erin and Steph copies since I knew they'd appreciate it. After all, they are the only people I know besides my sister who have read this beyond awesome series.

But as I was listening to it today at work, I realized that not only is it kind of eclectic, but it's very emo. If I'd had the chance, I'd have added a ton more Secondhand Serenade. I am obsessed (a perfectly normal, healthy amount) with their (okay, his, in the Chris Carraba/Dashboard vein) latest CD. It is awesome. I listen to it non-stop on repeat while I'm at work. It's the perfect music to a) turn up loudly and b) sing along loudly.

Secondhand Serenade, The All-American Rejects, and Boys Like Girls are just about my favorite bands right now and I don't think I ever get tired of them.

Even if my dad calls them "whiny."

(I think I listened to the first track five times in a row today; the second is my favorite of all of his songs.)

02 - Fall For You

Secondhand Serenade

It's Not Over

Secondhand Serenade

I've decided this type of fun, superficial posting -- unfiltered, for everyone to see -- is much better than the "personal" stuff I've been posting this week. Yay, superficiality.

I finished Twilight for the second time and am about to start New Moon again, although I'm tempted to skip over the part that makes me want to curl up under the covers for a week.

Anyway, because I'm bored and avoiding packing (I managed to pull all of my dishes out of the cabinet; of course, they're still sitting on the bar and not in a box), I was surfing around for random things and found a couple sites about the upcoming movie.

Ashley Greene sounds awesome, which is appropriate, as she's playing the oh-so-awesome Alice. I'd post the interview, but it was done by a fan site, and so there are a bunch of dumb questions. I didn't feel like editing. Anyway, she's thrilled to play Alice, she is cutting her hair, she'd read all three books multiple times before she was even cast, and they are having Robert Pattinson do an American accent. Although it would be so frakking awesome if he used his own...I'm such a sucker for an English accent.

The guy who's playing Jasper (I, er, got Jasper and Emmett mixed up in that cast photo) is apparently not wearing that horrible weave after all, and according to Greene, their looks have all evolved since that photo was taken. Good to know.

Robert Pattinson is awesome, and even before I knew he was cast as Edward, I more or less pictured someone who at least looked like him.

Robert Pattinson

Someone who lives in Portland snapped this picture of Bella's truck(s) being delivered to the set...totally pictured that, too. It's kind of a cool truck.

Bella's truck

Entertainment Weekly published this picture from the set. It's the throw-down between Edward and James. The quote cracked me up. And kind of grossed me out, too.

Edward james

Okay, I'm going to take a bath and start New Moon and hope I don't fall asleep and drown.

So I've been tagged by Slow Learner to do the following book meme. (It circulated through a while ago, too, but I never did do it.)

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Well, it should come as no surprise to any of you (and especially since I confessed to my weakness on the blog) that I'm reading Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer. (Again.) Because of that, I can't post only three sentences.

Context: a conversation between protagonist Bella Swan (one of my favorite fake people ever) and new friend Jacob Black about the heretofore mysterious Cullen family.

    "That's Sam -- he's nineteen," he informed me.
    "What was that he was saying about the doctor's family?" I asked innocently.
    "The Cullens? Oh, they're not supposed to come onto the reservation." He looked away, out toward James Island, as he confirmed what I'd thought I'd heard in Sam's voice.
    "Why not?"
    He glanced back at me, biting his lip. "Oops. I'm not supposed to say anything about that."
    "Oh, I won't tell anyone, I'm just curious." I tried to make my smile alluring, wondering if I was laying it on too thick.
    He smiled back, though, looking allured. Then he lifted one eyebrow and his voice was even huskier than before.
    "Do you like scary stories?" he asked ominously.

As for tagging, hmm, I can't remember which of you already did this! I'll go with Erin, Steph, Eli's Dad, Steve Betz, and Kelly S.

I started Twilight again last night.

I couldn't help it.

I'm weak.