The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2

What better way to end our hiatus than by saying a special farewell to this s***show once and for all?

For all our coverage on the Twilight series -- because other than the actual movie titles, we refuse to call this insanity a "saga" -- here are links to our previous thoughts:

--Edward Cullen is a fan of breaking-and-entering
--Jacob Black is having a really bizarre time with puberty
--No means no! Bad dog! *swats with newspaper*
--Pro-choice? Pro-life? WHATEVER! Bella's OK with dying, and we're OK with her dying too

Directed By: Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Kinsey, Breaking Dawn, Part 1)
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, and a CGI baby
Plot Summary: "OMG, she should have been a vampire the whole time! This is WAY better than Human Bella and how f***ing pathetic she was!"

When we last saw Bella Cullen, she died in childbirth after a violent pregnancy straight from the anus of Satan's nightmares. Her vampire husband, Edward, tried to save her life by biting the hell out of her and injecting her with his venom. Bella's pet werewolf, Jacob, sat outside on the front porch, howling over her death, until he marched back inside to be angry at someone and imprinted on the newborn baby instead. The rest of her in-laws stood around ominously. Then... Bella's wrecked, malnourished body finally took to Edward's venom, and makeup and hair mousse sprouted out of her, and she awoke, red-eyed and all, as a vampire.

It's about time. Bella's been trying to reach this point since the day she realized Edward wasn't human, and for reasons having to do with saving a soul she clearly doesn't want, and utilizing courting patterns from his Victorian-ish youth, Edward refused to turn her until they were out of school and married. Now that her heart's stopped beating, Bella can't get enough of being undead, and relishes her newfound physical capabilities. We have to admit: we like Bella so much more in this final installment. She's nowhere near a three-dimensional character, of course, as her life's -- death's? -- motivation has never wavered from Edward. But her helplessness was always one of the biggest issues in her character, and now that "protect Bella!" isn't anyone's main concern anymore, we can stop watching her angst and move on.

SEVERAL OBSERVATIONS MADE AS WE WATCHED
--"So, becoming a vampire gives you eyeshadow? She looks great!"
--"I DO NOT NEED ANOTHER CLOSE-UP OF THAT TACKY-ASS RING!"
--"She did NOT just kill a mountain lion. No. That is not real."
--"What's with the f***ing CGI baby?" / "I'm going to have nightmares about this."
--"The baby's growth rate is accelerated. Like a cancerous tumor."
--"This is the best thing she has ever done to Jacob! BEAT THE S*** OUT OF HIM, BELLA! JUST FOR ME!"
--"I know we've had this conversation before, but how does vampire sex actually work?" / "I don't know. No heartbeat means no bloodflow, no bloodflow means no boners. I can't explain it."
--"No, really, the baby HAD to be CGI?"
--"Oh no, she can smell her human dad and she wants to eat him! This is a bad plan! WHAT IF HE HUGS HER? Charlie, no!" / "Charlie is the only one that has made this series worthwhile!"
--"Who the f*** are all these people?"
--"God, that Magic Mike body on Jacob, though."
--"You can tell RPattz is enjoying this so much more, now that it's the last one."
--"Where's Jane? I wanna see Jane f*** people up."
--"Are these the type of vampires who need permission to enter a house?" / "No, remember how Edward used to climb in her window and stalk her in her sleep?"
--"Where are Jasper and Alice? I miss them."
--"WAIT, IS THAT--?" / "IS THAT JOE ANDERSON? OH, JESUSF***, WHAT IS HE DOING HERE?!"
--"Okay, Rapey-Looking Patriot Guy is definitely that adorable man from Pushing Daisies."
--"What the f*** is up with this Transylvanian Draco Malfoy dude?"
--"I think Aro just jizzed in his cloak. Inexplicably, I hope he lives through all this."

"No, for serious, WHY IS THE BABY CGI? SHE'S BOTHERING THE F*** OUTTA ME!"

Renesmee Carlie Cullen, Bella and Edward's baby daughter, named for all her grandparents (Renee + Esme, then Carlisle + Charlie), spends her first chunk of screentime with a computerized face. Presumably, this is to ensure that she is preternaturally beautiful, as Stephenie Meyer no doubt described her, and to ensure she looks as close as possible to KStew, RPattz, and the stunning young actress (Mackenzie Foy) who plays her for most of the movie. It's distracting as all hell, and couldn't possibly look right, even if we'd watched this drunk.

Infant Renesmee's weird-ass face isn't the biggest problem in the story, of course. The real issue is that some hater-bitch named Irina, one of Edward's coven-cousins, spots little Renesmee frolicking in the snow and thinks, "Holy roasted balls, the Cullens made a vampire baby!" This is a crime punishable by death, as vampire children have been outlawed by the Volturi due to their uncontrollable nature. (It's hard to teach restraint to a super-powered, bloodthirsty four-year-old, after all.) Irina rats to the Volturi, who decide immediately that the appropriate price must be paid, but here's the catch: Renesmee is NOT an immortal child, as she was born, not turned, and grows every day -- like, really grows, becoming an elementary-age child in a matter of months. Anyway, it's a classic tale of misinformed gossip folks f***ing things up for everybody.

Now that Jacob has imprinted on Renesmee as his soulmate (which he insists isn't weird, and that his imprinting is platonic, like a devoted older brother), he's her chief protector. Initially, Bella's enraged when she finds out he imprinted, because for the first time in this whole series, she finds something as creepy as the audience does. (If you missed the link on imprinting above, check the madness out here, particularly the stages of this process.) Alice and Jasper are nowhere to be found, having run off somewhere to take care of something. So the Volturi show up to murder everybody: Renesmee, all the rest of the Cullens, and all the vampire witnesses they've gathered to attest to the fact that Renesmee isn't what the Volturi think she is. Bella's in protective-mommy mode, which is totally helped by her newly-discovered power: the ability to shield herself and whoever she wants from supernatural influence. (This is why Edward and Aro could never read her mind, and why Jane can't inflict pain on her.)

After the Volturi and their army show up, Alice and Jasper reappear on the battlefield to provide evidence that Renesmee won't be a threat to vampire secrecy. They present another human-vampire hybrid, some dude from Brazil, who stopped aging once he reached physical adulthood and can live off either human food or blood. Here's a special set of reactions from us around this point in the game (and a reminder that this is not a spoiler-free blog), when things escalated into a full-on war and everyone was dying violently:

OUR REACTIONS TO THE SUDDEN DEATH SPREE:
--"Carlisle! CARLISLE! OMG, NO! YOU ARE F***ING S***TING ME! NONONONONONONONONO!"
--"THAT DID NOT JUST HAPPEN!" / "WHAT THE F***?!"
--"Oh no, not Jasper, not him, nooo..." / "NOOOOO!" / "ARE YOU SERIOUS?! NO F***ING WAY!" / "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I DON'T UNDERSTAND!"
--"I AM SO UPSET! WHY DID THEY KILL MY TWO FAVORITE CULLENS!?" / "WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? I CAN'T DEAL WITH THIS!"
--"AWW, was that the wolf puppy they killed?!" / "I think so!" / "Why do they keep killing children!? COME THE F*** ON, TWILIGHT!"
--"Bye, Jane!"
--"It's strange that they can just pull off their heads..."
--"I'm less eager for the Volturi to live." / "Me too. Aro's not safe with me now. He can't kill Carlisle like that and get away with it."

But wait! As we were way too relieved to discover, the big battle that the promos have alluded to doesn't actually happen. After this crazy carnage, when Aro's head is off, it flashes back to the semi-calm battle field, before the fighting, when Alice has appeared. It turns out that Alice, with her ability to see the future, was just showing Aro, a mind-reader, what would happen if he didn't let them all go safely. So, having seen his own decapitation at the hands of Bella Cullen, Aro rethinks his judgement and everyone gets to walk away. Edward and Bella go back to the meadow, and since Bella has reached enough proficiency with her shield that she can turn it off, she lets Edward into her head and shows him how much she loves him. Everybody lives happily ever after, and we never have to do this again.

The Best Part: Bella's vampire transformation made her so much more likeable. Her aggravating damsel-in-distress status was gone, nobody had to watch out for her, and she wasn't whining about being human. Vampire Bella was far more rational and proactive. Plus, the hypothetical fight sequence was insane.

Also, Aro unleashes the most outrageous, creepy, crazy laugh when he finally meets Renesmee and discovers she's a natural hybrid, and it is the greatest thing to happen in any Twilight movie, ever. If you thought Voldemort was awkward about expressing delight, here's a grainy comparison we found, because, of course, Summit laid the smackdown on nearly all footage of this hysterical Aro situation:

The Worst Part: That f***ing CGI baby. And you can't tell us that imprinting on a newborn infant isn't disgusting. Stephenie Meyer Jacob, stop trying to rationalize it, because you sound like a pedophile.

We feel fantastic about this being over. While the Twilight series has provided us with more hours -- nay, DAYS of amusement than we ever thought possible, it's best for everyone if this continues no further. With that said, we give Breaking Dawn, Part 2 an A-. So, to recap:

Twilight: B
New Moon: D-
Eclipse: B+
Breaking Dawn, Part 1: D
Breaking Dawn, Part 2: A-

We'll leave you with Robert Pattinson's blatant hatred for the bats*** crazy, pop culture behemoth that has consumed his life since 2007. Bless you, Rob, and may you never lose your existence to anything like this ever again. We like you. Fly free.

(Poster and trailer © Summit Entertainment)

The High School Musical trilogy

It seemed like the logical next step, after our Cheetah Girls excursion. Guys, get ready: this is a long one, but, as usual, we are attempting to entertain you where we mostly found despair.

Directed By: Kenny Ortega (Newsies, This Is It)
Starring: Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel, Corbin Bleu and Monique Coleman
Plot Summary: "Let your freak flag fly, Troy!"



The massive song-and-dance number above is the core conflict of High School Musical, and also, the synopsis for the first season of Glee. (Let's just acknowledge that right now and move on.) Albuquerque's East High is constricted by hierarchies and an alarmingly high frequency of personality disorders, resulting in a school full of students unable to accept change. When the balance is overthrown, s*** hits the fan. Our crew for this evening:

--Troy & Gabriella = The charismatic jock and the shy, brainiac new girl, who meet by chance and discover their mutual love of singing and shared desire to break out of their cliques
--Sharpay & Ryan = The theatrical queen bee and her gay-but-everyone's-ignoring-it-because-this-is-Disney twin brother, who conspire against Troy & Gabriella to keep Sharpay in power
--Chad & Taylor = Troy & Gabriella's respective BFFs, a fellow jock and brainiac, who don't appreciate their friends trying to do anything different and also conspire against them

In movie 1, the leads for the winter musical ("Twinkle Town," they're calling it) are totally on lock for Sharpay & Ryan. OR SO THEY THINK! If Troy & Gabriella win the roles at callbacks, Troy's top-dog influence as captain of the basketball team will combine with his relationship with Gabriella to create a world where athletes, mathletes and theatre kids can inter-mingle, and that is just UNACCEPTABLE if Sharpay is going to remain a star. Nevermind what her brother cares about, but we'll get to that later, because their strange relationship is going to be important.


(Brother and sister auditioning with a couple's duet to play romantic leads, folks.)

Chad & Taylor, who are the Chris Brown to Troy & Gabriella's Rihanna, are some of the worst friends in the history of the world. They go so far as to work in tandem with Sharpay & Ryan, just to break Troy & Gabriella apart and keep things in line. (This was actually a smart thing to do, script-wise, because the people who fight hardest to keep you down are rarely the obvious villains.) Taylor's hold on Gabriella isn't too difficult, since the girls have just met this year and their clique's more open to progress, but Troy is being held hostage by Chad, and Troy's own father, Coach Bolton. Their collective bullying has created a fragile boy so crippled by internal conflict that he has intense emotional breakdowns on the regular. (The severity of these freak-outs will get worse and worse as the movies go on.)

Of course, once their friends realize what they've done and stand behind them, Troy & Gabriella triumph at their callback.



In part 2, IT'S SUMMER! School's out, and everyone's constantly chattering about finding summer jobs to pay for college (even though all of these kids appear to be loaded to the point that scholarships shouldn't exist for them). Appropriately, Sharpay & Ryan, whose family owns an entire country club and some other stuff, are the only ones not talking about it, because that would just be silly and Sharpay's never worked a day in her life. She decides that what she wants this summer is Troy, so she gets him a job as a favor. Troy agrees, as long as all his friends can have jobs too, so the whole class starts working at the country club.

Sharpay's focused on her schemes and throws Ryan by the wayside, so he joins up with the rest of his classmates and becomes friends with them. Sharpay starts elevating Troy's status in the club and dangling college networking connections in front of him, so he gets blinded by riches. (We don't know why Troy needs help networking, since he's apparently got so much pull in Albuquerque that he got an entire class of highschoolers hired in a country club without applications or interviews.) His friends get pissed about him ignoring them, and Gabriella dumps him because nobody knows who he is anymore. And then Troy breaks down, and his crisis is so much harder than ever before that it results in -- for lack of a better descriptor, as we're struggling to see it any other way -- the gayest scene in the history of the Disney Channel. This is only unfortunate because half of Troy's freak-out is about his now-ex-girlfriend.


(To be honest, if this choreography had been different, the song might've worked. But we just kept laughing. We can't figure out how they managed to shoot it seriously.)

In the end, Sharpay's put in her place and everyone forgives each other. (Yeah, yeah, we know.) The most important thing that happens in the second movie is that Ryan starts to forge his own identity, and here's where we discovered the greatest part of the entire trilogy. Since Gabriella's been who she is the entire time, Troy's still crying about the same things, and Sharpay's still as selfish as ever, Ryan's character gets the only arc from movie #1 to movie #3. He goes from his sister's bitch to a star in his own right. Plus, he's the only one who finally succeeds in uniting the cliques.


(Sarah: "Does Ryan know Chad can dance because HE CAN SEE HIM DANCING LIKE WE CAN?!")

In High School Musical 3: Senior Year, the crew's doing their usual, except Chad & Taylor have faded into the background a little, and Sharpay and Ryan now operate as fully separate entities. Impending Future Freak-Out is the big situation in this one. Troy's still trying to figure out what he wants to do. His dad's got him pegged for University of Albuquerque, for a basketball scholarship, but Troy also wants to go to other schools -- one of which is Juilliard, where he's a scholarship candidate as well. The rest of the plot isn't important, but we can't watch Troy be sad for two hours without other fluff to break it up. The point here is that Troy's inability to make decisions comes back in full force from the first movie. Sports or theatre? SPORTS OR THEATRE?! He loves playing basketball, but HE'S JUST GOTTA SING, DAMMIT!!!


(The theatre director finds him at the end of this number, but if she hadn't, we have a strong suspicion that the East High Wildcats would've come to school the next morning to find their leader hanging from the rafters in the auditorium.)

Troy decides to go to the University of California, Berkeley, because there, he can study theatre AND play basketball. We find it unfortunate that no one has the heart to tell him how intense college theatre is, and how all-encompassing college sports teams are, and that he won't have time to do both like he did in high school, which will surely lead to another breakdown when he has to make this decision again, mere months from now. (He will inevitably choose theatre, because what does he turn to when he's having a crisis and subsequent violent outburst? SINGING ABOUT IT, not playing a few games of H.O.R.S.E.)

(Several) Observations Made As We Watched All Three Movies:
--"This whole thing could be a coming-out speech."
--"SAY 'MUSICAL' CORRECTLY, YOU BATTY OLD C***!"
--"Basketballs must be awfully uncomfortable to masturbate with."
--"Come on now, Sharpay, what if someone had been changing her tampon? You can't kick open bathroom stalls like that."
--"Why is Chad acting like they're in a cult? Drinking the Kool-aid, planning the group suicide?"
--"OK, 'thunderclap' is OBVIOUSLY an STD."
--"This song woke [Sarah's dog] Oskar up." / "That's because Vanessa Hudgens is so goddamn pitchy."
--"This is like a wild Greek orgy. Who brought the vuvuzela?!"
--"That's where serial killers put the bodies."
--"I'm sorry, I just can't get the visual of blow job circles in the basketball locker room out of my head."
--"You a**hole, you are gonna get this girl fired because of your obsession with frolicking."
--"His dad must want him to know how much hookers cost, especially if he's going to have all this pent-up homosexual energy that he can't share with Gabriella."
--"OH, HI ZAC'S BARE TORSO, YOU LOOK NICE TODAY!"
--"Ryan almost teabagged Chad right there." / "Oh, good, you saw that too."
--"TROY, YOU ARE DRUNK ON SORROW!"
--"I can't think of anything that makes this scene more gay." / "Dancing dildos, maybe?"
--"See, my mom would be mad if my high school boyfriend had suddenly shown up in my room, because she would assume I was letting him f*** me senseless."
--"This is worse than a Hamlet soliloquy, because this won't end in murder... just more dancing."
--"I'm not an expert on basketball, but I don't think they're doing it right."
--"Troy is not gay! He just has so many feelings!" / "I disagree."

The Best Part: The journey of Ryan Evans. He's super-likeable and we cared to see him finally get what he wanted. (He ends up being a winner of that Juilliard scholarship, for choreography.)

The Worst Part: The music. It's musical-appropriate in the first movie, clearly written for the purpose of being sold as pop singles on iTunes in the second, and then irritating by the time we get to the third. Especially because the third movie mostly consists of three sentimental bulls*** songs that each get repeated one or two more times throughout, and a few others that don't contribute to anything.

The original movie is legitimately cute, and as such, it is now the first vindicated movie to make it through the blog! CONGRATS, WILDCATS! You made it through on the basis of being better than our formerly best-reviewed bad thing, Twilight!

However, High School Musical 2 and High School Musical 3: Senior Year both get Ds. The first one, which has such a different spirit from the second two, can't save the downhill nature of the rest of the trilogy. So, it's a C for the whole shebang.

Sarah: "Truthfully, I always want to watch Love Actually after every Camp or Crap? excursion, just to remind myself that there is hope in the world."
Me: "I just want to watch The Virgin Suicides."
Sarah: "We appear to have opposite reactions."

(Posters and video clips © Walt Disney Company)