Saw the movie over the weekend. Mrs.Coturnix and Coturnietta read the first book (Coturnietta is now reading the second) so we went together.
I am a horrible movie critic - I usually kick back, munch popcorn, and enjoy every piece of crap on the screen. Heck, I love B-monster movies.
So, back to Twilight - first, it was obvious it was a movie made after a book:
- it was too long (Hollywood makes them 90min by design)
- it was choppy and the story was overcomplicated (Hollywood makes simple storylines by design)
- it was missing relevant information, probably something explained in the book, but not possible to turn to the screen.
OK, so this place is, like, in the middle of nowhere and has population of 1200 and some change. That 'change' must be the few adults, as the high school looks like it houses about 1200 students (it was actually a Seattle suburb school where it was filmed), so almost all inhabitants must be high-schoolers.
For a place that small, the school is amazingly big, clean, bright and well-equipped. For a place that small, the diversity is amazing - just the right mix of whites, blacks, Asians, Native Americans and vampires. For a place that small, stats would suggest a total of about 2-3 prettier-than-normal people, but here, every single person is gorgeous - every guy is super-handsome and every woman is stunningly beautiful. Nobody's fat. Nobody's ugly. Nobody's just, you know, normal!
Also, the movie is constantly reminding us how the two main protagonists are hawt, and self-aware about their hawtness, and self-confident about their hawtness, and too busy with their adventure to pay much attention to the mere mortals around them. But there was just a small hint (the scene in the biology lab in which they won an onion) that they are also very smart and educated. I asked Mrs.Coturnix and she confirmed that the books stress this a lot, while the movie completely omits their intelligence.
I checked the IMBD afterwards to see who all those super-beautiful actors were as only one or two seemed familiar. Apparently they all have nice long careers on TV (which I don't watch), the guy who plays Edward also plays Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter movies, the actor who plays the Dad was in a lot of B movies, and the main actress played the daughter as a kid in Panic Room which I loved (so I could not recognize her at all). Apparently, the two main actors each got $2mil for this movie, and will get $12mil for the second one.
Oh, but I loved it, did I tell you that?
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nice review. i've seen the movie too without any idea what it's all about except that it's about vampires.
i would probably get in trouble with all the Twighlight fans out there but i was waiting the whole time for Buffy to show up and slay all them cheesy gorgeous-looking vampires.
anyway, i liked your take on the movie, especially your statistical analysis of the small town population.
~C
P.S. i live near Seattle and yes, the forests are really that beautiful :)
P.P.S. oh, i forgot. you don't watch TV. so in case you don't know Buffy, here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer
LOL! Buffy has been around so long, there is no way not to know who she is - I even saw about half of one episode at someone's house once a couple of years ago...
I happened to spend Thanksgiving in the small town in Oregon where most of the movie was filmed (Vernonia), and I have to concur with your assessment. The people in that town were all average-looking, white, and mortal.
I saw the movie a few days before and I kept thinking to myself that it was an awfully diverse high school. The small-town Washington high school I went to (well, large compared to Forks, our high school had 1600+ students) had two black students and a handful of Asians.
Also, regarding the intelligence thing, they did try to get it across when Edward starting reciting digits and Bella tells him she doesn't need to hear the square root of pi, but it just struck me as a little weird. I was a pretty big nerd in high school and knew pi to a couple hundred digits, but wouldn't have recognized its square root. What are the odds that some random, not especially math or science oriented teenager would?
If you liked Twilight (and I did), chances are good that you'd also like The Craft, an underrated 1996 movie about high school witches.