Review: New Moon

Since I know Mike won't review it, I will. This Saturday I sat through the amazingly entertaining New Moon, the second installment in the Twilight saga. Though I have not read the Twilight books, I've heard about them all from my girlfriend and I've read all there is to read on Wikipedia. I'm also a sucker for stories, lore, and mythology so I have to admit I would have seen this movie even if my girlfriend hadn't wanted to go. Note: my girlfriend is not a 13-year-old although about 95% of the people we saw the movie with were 13YOG's.

To start, let me say that this movie was unintentionally hilarious and worth seeing. I would rate it a -7 on JL's Absolute Value Movie Scale which ends up being a solid 7 (out of 10). For someone unfamiliar with New Moon I would explain it by saying that watching it is like watching a soap opera about vampires. The score is intermittent at best so there are long silent shots of people staring at each other longingly/lovingly/hungrily. The "hungrily" comes because some of the characters want to alternately eat each other and make love with each other and it's often hard to tell which. This is but one of the reasons this movie is very funny. The barely-restrained kissing/biting is a fantastic metaphor for abstinence. This lack of sex makes (and biting) fits in nicely with the movie as well as with Meyer's Mormonism.

The soap opera feel pervades the entire movie which actually felt long at times. The use of CGI was fine but at this point, acceptable CGI is more of a hygene factor (see A Sound of Thunder). In my view, the best parts of the movie surround the extremely buff werewolves.

As you can see in this promotional photograph, these dudes love to run arond in board shorts and not much else. This picture is entirely true to the movie in that they only wear board shorts in the movie as well! Somehow no one questions their lack of clothes, as when the big one (pictured above) runs out of the woods carrying the main character, drops her off at a police barricade, and retreats back into the woods. No questions are asked of this big fella.

In all this was an extremely entertaining movie and I would recommend it. It's much more fun than hanging out in the freezing woods with no clothes on.