How Matt-Dave Writes started out as a 30 day blog challenge but it's now sort of become a place for me to rant and rave about the things I notice in the world. So while you're here, read a few pieces, leave me a comment or two, share it with your friends if you deem me worthy!
You can also find me on Wattpad! https://www.wattpad.com/user/mdstevens0612
Hey, my name is Matt-Dave Stevens. My goal is to make people laugh and maybe teach them a thing or two through my writing.
Anyway, I genuinely hope you have a good time here and feel free to engage with me in the comments and to share!
Full About Here:
https://howmattdavewrites.blogspot.co.za/p/about.html
I was not rooting for this show. DC's Titans is the kind of ill-conceived premise that you'd think would leave a show dead-on-arrival. The marketing for this thing promised a surreal, overly gritty and superficially mature show with all the trappings that come with it.
Except DC's Titans is actually kind of good?
Trust me, I was the last person to expect something like that to happen. I saw the trailers, the same as you did and when Robin dropped the f-bomb and put some disrespect on Batman's name I was ready to hate-watch this thing as it turned into a glorious edgelord nightmare.
Turns out that I got a pretty great version of the Doom Patrol in the sneakiest backdoor pilot I've seen in a while, along with some pretty cathartic confrontations between Dick Grayson and Jason Todd. Hawk and Dove also turned out to be characters I unironically love and oh, man Wonder Girl? Even Wonder Girl was lovable. And I thought I was going to hate Starfire but Anna Diop was kind of acting circles around the rest of the cast and doing it while wearing actual fashion crimes.
It's not all good.
The effects can look cheap, poor Anna Diop's costuming suffers, the show dips into some adorable levels of edginess, Raven's character is kind of incoherent and there are as many gorgeous shots as there are moments of colour palette drab.
But that's as much as I can say. As it turns out, DC's Titans might not be the most faithful to the source material and it sure doesn't have a lot of respect for convention but maybe that's the best part about it. In a lot of ways, it is the superficially mature show that the marketing promised but in a lot of others, it's a clever new spin on a gritty group of characters dealing with a violent world while wearing superhero masks. For all its faults, DC's Titans is actually one of the better versions of the Teen Titans. It's not gonna compete with your nostalgia for the 2003 show but you'd be surprised how well the Teen Titans work when filtered through the lens of Watchmen.
Hard recommend. It might not be for everyone but you'll probably be surprised at how much this is probably for you.
The year is 2019 and had anyone told me I'd be writing about Bring Me The Horizon's new album I'd have hugged them with glee, just knowing the album would be worth writing about.
Now I'm decidedly less psyched.
For what it's worth, I don't hate the album. I think it's great that they're experimenting with new sounds and trying new things. I can think of at least 3 tracks that I love and I'd be damn excited to hear them live if these beautiful idiots ever decide to come to my side of the pond. I'm still a Bring Me The Horizon fan.
I won't say that it was the album I wanted, and it still remains to be seen if it'll grow on me.
That said, the discourse around this thing has gotten me feeling an entirely different way, and that's not helped by the glib tone that Amo can take about not being a metal record. If anything, I wish there was less "sorry, we're not metal, silly scene kids are just mad we aren't" there. I kind of wish they hadn't addressed it at all, because it's probably going to vastly diminish the staying power when the eventual "we're going back to our roots" announcement comes.
And that's just the thing, ain't it?
I don't think this one will have staying power. But now I've gotta deal with a bunch of jerk-offs calling me closed minded because I didn't love a pop album, which infuriates me to no end because it's not that I don't like pop albums, I just didn't really like this pop album. And not even that I didn't like any of it, just that I found a good 60% of it to be a kind of derivative and forgettable. And of that 60% there's bits I actually do like, a part of me just wishes those bits were on a better record. I knew what was coming, hell, I wanted an entire album's worth of songs as good as Follow You but I didn't get that. Sugar, Honey, Ice and Tea isn't just the name of one of the songs.
Which leaves me in the precarious position of being one of the few jerk-offs who gave this record a chance and didn't actually like it.
And what do I say to that?
Well, for starters, let me just dislike the album, for God's sake. A band is a brand and music is a product and if I don't like what you're selling please stop telling me that it's only because I like spending my money on one thing, maybe I just think what you're selling is a little shit? It didn't make me hopeful for the future of electropop like Lorde's Pure Heroine, it didn't intrigue me like Melanie Martinez's Cry Baby and it for damn sure didn't make me feel what Sam Smith makes me feel. Shit, Dua Lipa's New Rules has been stuck in my head for so long it may never leave. Now, Now released an album so thematically coherent that I'll die before I can finish counting off all the things I love about it. I like pop. I like a whole lot of pop. It's why I keep buying Punk Goes Pop records because nothing makes me happier than my favourite bands covering my favourite pop songs.
Amo kind of just came and went while I had to try very hard not to roll my eyes at it.
And yeah, I'm going to say that I'm disappointed that Bring Me isn't releasing metalcore but that started in 2015 and I've had plenty bigger disappointments since. I wanted to like Amo, hell, the lead singles got me really hyped for the album. But once it landed, once I took the whole thing in from start to end, it's just an underwhelming "meh". All I can really think was that, for an album trying so hard to be experimental, it sure ended up being plain and forgettable.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to hate on it. Quite frankly I expect it to get beaten up any minute now once the true genre warriors arrive. And they will, and I'll roll my eyes at them too. Bring Me wasn't this bastion of greatness in their Deathcore days, in fact, This Is What The Edge Of Your Seat Is Made For is such pure auditory white noise that after all these years I still can't tell you a damn notable thing about it. Count Your Blessings I'll still go in for, even if I think half of that record is also just a structureless mess, but the songs I like from CYB I at least love enough to give those songs a regular listening to.
Bring Me doesn't owe us a metal album, they don't even owe us a radio rock album. They can do whatever they want. But that doesn't mean I have to like what they put out. I don't owe them my undying love just because they released my favourite album in 2013, and I wish the kids who like Oli more for his haircut would get off my case about it.
But to those jackasses who still cling to the deathcore phase, guys, it's okay for a band to undergo a stylistic change. Usually it's better when that change is actually good, see Paramore's After Laughter for more, but I understand that people who make this music might get tired of making it. I'd argue that there's still much more room to explore the genre and recent interviews with Oli shows how deliriously out of touch he is with the scene, seriously, I get time is limited but music is your bread and butter man, you're supposed to be keeping your ear to the ground so you don't become an irrelevant dinosaur like Gene Simmons is trying his best to be.
But seriously, it's okay for bands to change. Not all change is growth but it's alright, sometimes we need to move sideways to move forward.
Just don't expect me to like it.
Also, there's a certain "grow up emo kid" attitude in the discourse, and to that I say, fuck off? No apologies, just, fuck off, you don't know what you're talking about, please stop letting your tastes be defined by the music you think you should like as an adult and have a little childish, unironic appreciation for stuff that's a little silly but at least has some energy to it. Like, when did we grow old, man? You can like the same albums you liked ten years ago, it's okay, it's not a phase, Dad! Just watch less cringe-culture vids and get off your soapbox.
And I'll be doing just that. That sure was a long way to say, the album was fine but not for me and I just wanna be left alone to listen to Avalanche for the 340th time as I cry alone in the shower.
See you next... Month? Or whenever I put the next one out. Sorry. Maybe I need flex tape to fix my upload schedule.
2018 marks my most productive year as a blogger. I wrote more posts than any of the years before and I wrote my most popular posts.
It's been a tough year, and that's fair. All the other years were tough but they made me stronger, and surviving them has shown me that I can take huge blows and still get back up. I've also shown myself that I'm capable. I recorded new music, released a video game and finished a 30 Day Blog Challenge (albeit in more than 30 Days.). I wrote 20 000 words in November and I fell in love and well...
I don't know what more I could have asked for.
I have no idea what 2019 will bring but I do know that as long as there is at least one view on my post, then I'll continue to write.
Do I have plans? Oh, hell yes, I definitely do. Do I have goals? Most certainly. Am I aiming to be a better person, a harder worker, and a better writer? One hundred percent.
But I also aim to be kind to myself and work at my own pace. If I'm given the space, time and care, I know I can do great things. If I handle myself correctly if I apply the right principles and if I take care of myself well, then I know I can conquer the whole world.
So here we are, the first one of 2019.
There's not much else to say. Happy New Year, and hope you had a good holiday.
Ciao for now. And thank you for the lessons, 2018.
Yeah, no. This silhouette is horrifying. Delete this and fire whoever greenlit this character design.
Conventional wisdom says to not judge a book by it's cover but if you've been a long time Sonic fan you can recognize the signs of a bad product, and this film released a poster with a large sign that says that the people behind this don't really seem to know what they're doing.
We can argue aesthetics all day and you can hate me for whining about Sonic not wearing his signature shoes and gloves (it'd be like shaving Mario's mustache, what are you doing?), or how weird those blue arms look, or how horrifying the eyes might be based on a couple brightened edits of the poster but we've been here before. We've been here before so many times it's frustrating to see how no one seems to learn their lessons when it comes to messing with Sonic's design.
And this time, it's so bad that Sonic Boom is now one of the more faithful interpretations of the blue blur.
If you've been involved in the Sonic discourse for any length of time you might remember a video by Youtuber Good Blood.
You don't have to read the comments. It was not well received.
I don't begrudge the guy, he recognized that there was a certain staleness and that something was holding Sonic back but like so many others, he just overcorrected. In fact, he did a goddamn U-turn when all we needed was a slight nudge.
Which makes it all the more frustrating to fans because people who don't understand Sonic keep getting put in charge of his major releases.
There are hundreds of Good Bloods out there, and one of them is apparently named Tim Miller and he's helming the first major cinematic release.
If you'd asked us what we wanted, we could tell you without missing a beat that we want a feature-length version of the Sonic Unleashed intro cutscene. Tim Miller's insistence towards not making Sonic look "too Pixar" is tonedeaf because that's all this fanbase wants.
But it's not all bad. Sega was smart enough to have Tyson Hesse storyboard and helm the Sonic Mania Adventures webseries and if you're a Sonic fan, hell, if you just like great animation, you owe it to yourself to watch it.
On the bright side, once this film inevitably fails, there will be a treasure trove of fresh memes. Because as fun as it is, we've been riding Sonic '06 for 12 years now, it's about time this franchise coughed up a new hairball for us to play with.
I've only ever done it once before and it was excruciating. The worst part is that it took forever and wasn't even all that good.
I decided to partake in National Novel Writing Month, which is a challenge where you attempt to write 50 000 words in the month of November, ideally at a pace of about 1700 words a day. Which I know doesn't sound like a lot. And it's not, on any giving day I can blurt out 1700 words and I wouldn't even have wasted an hour of my time.
But doing it 30 days in a row and fitting those 1700 words into some cohesive whole while slowly burning out on the work is hard. Anyone who attempted it with me can attest to that.
And developing the discipline necessary to work even when the work is dull, difficult, tedious and the end product is a little crap is hard. No one likes writing crap. No one likes willfully making bad art. You want to make something that's great. Something notable. Something worthy of the massive time expenditure.
I got about 20 000 words into it when the burnout hit and life just caught up with me. I had exams, something I tried to get ahead of by upping my goal to about 3500 a day in order to stay ahead of the curve enough to give me the time I needed to study, but two weeks in I found myself struggling until I was 10 000 behind, then 20 000, then the task became insurmountable.
At the end of the month, I found myself asking what it was about? Why did I do this? Why have I decided to start writing a book that I couldn't finish, why did I attempt this?
Originally it was to overcome what's called Shiny New Object Syndrome. It's something that plagues creatives, we're always starting a new project and never finishing anything, just laying with a bunch of unfinished works in folders.
I wanted to finish the book in November, edit it in December and then wash my hands of it, January first the novel would be what it would be and I would finally be able to say, this is done, this is finished, I have written a second book.
But I still wanted it to be good.
And at first, it felt that way. I was vibing with the characters, I was fresh and flushed with creative energy, and 3500 actually came pretty easily. Each day the words came harder but I liked the idea and concept of my novel. I made a cover for it because I was starting to enjoy the process of writing.
But then I got burnt out.
Work on something long enough that doesn't want to be finished and you can easily find yourself hating the work for the mere task of existing in an incomplete state. It's irrational but the frustration is more with yourself. You ask why you can't finish the book, why you can't write better sentences, every word you have to coax and snatch and yank and tug and after an hour you'll have written 100 words and you'll hate each one of them and you'll ask yourself why you're so crap.
And your brain is lying to you. Your brain is tired. Maybe you'll take a break but your brain is also lazy, and one day off turns into two days, two days turns into three, three turns into a week, a week turns into two weeks. Your brain doesn't like struggling, no brain does. A struggling brain feels stupid, it starts hating itself. Your brain feels like a bodybuilder lifting half the weight of its contemporaries in its class.
Well here's some truth for your brain;
You aren't competing with anyone. You should be heading towards your own goal. Your brain isn't stupid, it's just a little tired, and have you ever tried heavy lifting when you're tired? It's like the weight has doubled, only you're half as strong. Most of those sentences weren't crap, they were just mundane, and your brain focuses on all the rough ones because you haven't spat out a poetic phrase in a long time. And even the crap ones aren't as bad as you think they are, your brain is lying to you. You had an end goal in mind but now the picture is hazy, and when you're lost without a map, or if the map looks wrong, you tend to want to stand still until you can find direction again. But you shouldn't wait, you should go, even if it is the wrong direction. Rather go to the wrong place and get turned around then go nowhere at all.
Maybe you already knew that. Maybe you didn't. I want to tell you to go somewhere, even if it's the wrong direction, there is so much value in being wrong and then learning what's right. I want to tell you that you need 10 hours of sleep and 3 solid meals because your mind is a muscle and it needs fuel to be strong. I want to tell you that you made something, even if it's incomplete, and if you just stuck with it, if you could just pour all that energy you'll inevitably focus somewhere else, you could create a significant and wonderful piece of art.
But if it were that easy, I'd have told myself that too, and we'd both be excellent novelists.
Here's what I can say;
When I finished my first novel it was an iterative process. I'd written about 75% of it when I started giving it to my friends and their feedback encouraged me to continue. I wrote the last 8 chapters in one night in a mad sprint to the end and I never looked back, and it shows in the work. When I finished my first game, I made the scope so small that it had to be something I could finish within 5 days. Each day I'd send off a prototype to a friend and their feedback helped guide my goals.
If you want the clickbait title of this article, here it is. Five Tips To Get You To Finish That Damn Book.
1. Keep It Simple, Stupid
2. Hit The Ground Running
3. Get Feedback As Soon As Possible
4. Take Care Of Yourself
5. Finish Strong
But why should you listen to me? I failed NaNoWriMo 2018. I didn't do anything notable. You want to do something notable. You want the success story, that's the exciting one, the fun one, the exceptional one. You want to be exceptional. I want to be exceptional.
But failing NaNo makes you exceptional. It makes you notable. Failing is okay. I won't beat myself up about it because even if I didn't win, I still won. I now have 20 000 words I didn't have, almost halfway to a short novel. I now have more experience as a writer. Failure is as productive as success, sometimes even more so. We should all fail more, all learn more, and if only we could view failure not as the opposite of where we want to be, but the place we need to be in order to grow.
Would I do it again? Perhaps. There's a Camp NaNo in April and I'd say that'd be a far better fit than the November date, as November tends to clash with my life a lot. And I love a good game jam, I love seeing how much I can do in a short amount of time, it's like a sprint but for your brain.
But if you're where I'm at I want you to know I'm rooting for you, and that you can do it, and I hope we both manage to conquer our Shiny New Object Syndrome.
Stephanie Meyer's Twilight has always been the source of derision among critical discourse. Her books sparked an international trend that went viral like only massive properties like Pokemon have achieved, and the books directly spawned 50 Shades of Grey through Erica Mitchell.
But to say they've been hated and berated would be unbelievably understated.
I remember watching The Vampire Diaries for the first time and the experience of watching a scene where one of the principal characters in the adaptation of a series of Young Adult novels reading and talking down to another similar brand of a Young Adult novel was shocking. It was like a Coke vs Pepsi ad, but played like Pepsi was winning the game of "Who Comes Off As Higher Brow Fiction".
Now to be fair, The Vampire Diaries as a show does outclass the Twilight Saga by a fair margin but you'd think there would be more honour among hated Vampire Fiction Franchises.
But it's been lingering in the back of my mind since, and now that I'm a fair bit older and I'm over the irrational hatred of this schpiel, I wanna examine it. I wanna examine it in good faith. I wanna dissect and understand this series of films in particular.
So to that end, I will be taking Twilight seriously. Starting with the 2008 film, Twilight.
The film starts off with a monologue where Bella says "I'd never given much thought to how I would die, but dying in the place of someone I love seems like a pretty good way to go. The deer is then hunted in a highly edited sequence by a vampire, likely one of the Cullens.
Underneath this opening statement, there's the imagery of a deer drinking water at a pond, and it's clear this is supposed to represent the death of innocence, the deer representing Bella's innocence and the death taking the form of Bella having to choose her mother's happiness over her own. It's not a bad leg to start the film on, a lot of vampire literature does. The stakes are set, and I actually don't hate this shot, so the film at least starts on a strong note. The editing obfuscates a lot of the action and while I'm not a huge fan of the jumpiness and shaky cam, which was prevalent in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I can still enjoy the tension of the scene.
It cuts to Bella waxing lyrical about how she'll miss Phoenix and her mother. "So I can't bring myself to regret the decision to leave home" is a weird sentiment to follow up that first statement with. The implication here is that Bella sees moving in with her father as the end of one life, but she "dies" in place of her mother who wants to travel with her new boyfriend. This sets up Bella as kind of a martyr figure and honestly makes her mother kind of a bad parent. But Bella is making the adult decision to leave her old life in Phoenix for a new one with her father, and that's actually one of the few endearing qualities she has as a protagonist.
Cue travel montage, indie folk song, helicopter shot and title card.
So, Forks Washington.
Phoenix Arizona is sunny and hot, Forks, Washington is cloudy and miserable. Contrast. Allegorical for Bella's view of her new life.
Also, that shot where the truck oddly has no driver comes in. Always weirds me out.
Bella's back in her estranged Dad's house and Charlie is trying to make a connection in his estranged dad way, and can I just say that Billy Burke as an awkward moustache dad is my favourite part of this whole production. Charlie comes off as very human and likeable. Bella also refers to her dad by his first name. Unsure if this is supposed to add to his estrangement, but I know a lot of kids from divorced parents and even the most estranged still call their biological parents Dad or Mom. There's nothing to really indicate that Bella and her father have any lingering animosity, it just seems mostly like two people who fail to connect.
Enter Jacob and Billie Black. I'll give props to Taylor Lautner for making the scene that extra bit awkward with an attempt at a handshake with him then retracting it because... They've already met. No really, they used to play together as kids so this is oddly endearing, although it makes Jacob into more of an ass knowing what's to come. But right here, about five minutes into the film, it's not nearly as offensive as I remember it on first viewing. Also, Billy Burke as an awkward moustache dad pretend-fighting in the background still makes me laugh. Can we have more of him, please? He's like a grown Michael Cera.
Next is Bella going to school I think there's also a relatable feeling here, being the new kid coming halfway through the semester in a shitty second-hand car, that, while well meant, kind of makes you stand out as the outsider.
Eric, the eyes and ears of this place, is immediately kind of an ass. He comes off way too strong and you gotta really feel for Bella, five minutes at this place and someone's already given her shit for the car her dad bought her and her childhood friend painstakingly fixed up, then this douchenozzle is asking her on a date after knowing her only from the myspace account he probably stalked her on. And also makes her front page news. Which means this school must have the absolutely slowest news days. Like, even my small town school paper had like, people winning awards, or regional snakes, or something on the front page. "New Girl Transfers To School" is the opposite of news.
Bella's remarkable unatheleticism is also hilarious to me. Like, they're not doing anything super involved, this is a casual game of volleyball and her face is magnetically attracting the ball.
Mike Newton, the jock dude, is the second person she's met and he's already trying to hit on her, which makes the attitude of boys at this school alarming. Yo, give them woman like a minute to breathe before you hit on her.
And here comes Anna Kendrick as Jessica to try adorkable the scene up a little. Also, Jessica, you can't just ask people from Arizona why they're not tan, come on, get it together.
Okay, lunch room, and then the dude who gave Bella shit about her car then kisses her on the cheek, which is like, dude, you need to learn a thing or two about consent before you Kevin Spacey yourself out of a career.
If you're wondering why I'm spending so much time on Bella's friends, it's because the film spends an inordinate amount of time introducing these characters who are ancillary at best. They're props in the background and The film would probably have been better if this was made more concise. Also, Bella's friends are all kind of shitty people.
Anyway so onto the introduction of the Cullens.
So allow me a weird tangent; This whole set up is really awkward.
Like, I get it, they're supposed to be hundred-year-old beings trapped in the unaging bodies of adolescents but it still baffles me as to why anyone would want to return to highschool. Also, the "foster kids" story they cooked up is unnecessarily convoluted. I mean, a boarding house run by eccentric rich folk would have worked just fine.
Jasper played by Jackson Rathbone was also in The Last Airbender as Sokka. That's a reminder I did not want to sit with alone.
So just, as a human who once was a teenage boy, the scene where Edward sees Bella and gets a whiff of her scent is... Hilarious.
What's supposed to be happening is that Bella's scent sends Edward into a lustful state where he wants to feed on her so bad his fangs pop out, but the implication here, was he looks at Bella, leans awkwardly in his seat and the pulls this face like he's seconds away from puking his lungs out because he smelled her hair.
And that's unintentionally hilarious. Why was this shot this way? Why was this written this way? Why was this edited this way? It's so tonally dissonant from the meet-cute that I'm expecting to happen that Twilight almost neuters all of the romantic intrigue in this one scene.
Also, there's the angel symbolism which is a little weird. Like, thematically, Edward Cullen supposedly saves Bella from the humdrum of her boring life with her father. Within the narrative, he's lined up in front of angel wings in a shot where he can't contain his vampire boner and Bella thinks he wants to puke because her hair has a dank stank. I cannot reiterate enough how tonally confused this scene is.
After that, we're in the diner with her dad and there are two parts of this I wanna draw attention to. The waitress mentions that her dad has the berry cobbler once a week, her favourite dessert on the menu when she was a child. This happens to be the second time where we're told about how much her dad misses her, but the next shot, Charlie reaching for the ketchup as to hand it to Bella at the same time she does? That actually worked. I like how it shows that Charlie still does on some level know his daughter, even though it's awkward and he struggles to close that gap. Honestly, I think Twilight inadvertently began a much better story of a girl and her dad reconnecting after a long period of estrangement but instead opted to start this fantasy romance which is, unfortunately, not as strong.
Bella's mom calls, Edward doesn't show up to school for a couple days, nothing super interesting happening here.
Cut to the shaky cam of the antagonists of the film claiming their first victim, a factory worker. Already said my piece on how I am not a fan of the way this was shot, but the pacing of the scene is decently quick, almost making it seem like an action movie for a second. While their introduction is necessary to forward the plot, they're going to have one more scene where they kill another ancillary character from the diner and then won't be mentioned again until the last 40 minutes of the film. And these three vampires are going to attempt to fill out the drama of a lot of Twilight's ongoing narrative, despite being kind of an afterthought.
Bella's dad replaces her tires and can I yet again just say that Billy Burke tries his hardest to carry this film, bless him.
Cut back to Bella's friends being the literal worst and now the actual plot of this movie starts. We're about 20 minutes in and this is what we've been setting up for, girl has met boy, boy has met girl, and now the inciting incident happens where our protagonists speak.
The first thing that happens is this whole scene is interrupted by the science professor promising a Golden Onion to the first partners who can separate and label the cells into the phases of mitosis correctly.
Also, Edward keeps awkward pushing shit along the desk towards her which serves very little narrative purpose and honestly, Robert, not one of your best performances.
So Bella and Edward make a connection, and while I hate the way Kristen Stewart just doesn't finish half her sentences in this scene, there's almost the glimmer of some chemistry here. Guy has been weird around girl, girl is stand-offish, guy asks about the weather, girl is nonplussed but answers anyway, girl lets something personal slip and guy asks about it.
Formulaic but it does get our protagonists where they need to be. Some decent J-cuts to keep the conversation going.
Edward shows some emotional intelligence by honing in on the fact that moving for the sake of her mother's happiness has made Bella unhappy, and that observation is surprisingly keen for the guy who had a vampire boner just a couple scenes ago. Edward's flip-flopping between charming highschooler and near sociopathic behaviour is a running theme and it muddies the character of Edward Cullen a lot. I'd personally have leaned more into his charm, and Robert Pattinson can do charming really well. Edward exits the scene in a huff when Bella notices his eyes changed colour, which is honestly such a narrative footnote that it's barely worth mentioning.
Next, the black van nearly hits Bella, Edward stops it, Bella ends up fine but in the hospital Doctor Carlisle Cullen is there and can I just say that vampire doctor is basically an oxymoron.
Carlisle, Edward and Esme have it out because of Edward's recklessness, but Bella overhears. After some back and forth about the accident, Edward tries to gaslight Bella and that's always the sign of a healthy and emotionally stable person to enter a romantic relationship with. And for the next bit, we have Edward just... Just being the worst.
More flip-flopping between being stand-offish and the film really doesn't know how to portray Edward's inner struggle with wanting Bella but also not wanting to hurt her. There's some good drama in there somewhere but the script doesn't carry it, Pattinson can't sell the little he has to work with and it all falls flat in the worst way.
So the gang goes to the beach, Bella invites Edward, he says no, Jacob spins Bella a story that makes her curious. Bella's friends invite her to go prom dress shopping, and then after a trip to the book store, Bella finds a group of rapists ready to rape as they get their rapey friends and alcohol for the raping. I mean, you can watch this scene for yourself and decide how problematic it is, but the overbearing threat of sexual violence is so lazily inserted that this would knock an entire point off my final rating were I to review this film.
Edward comes and stuntmans in his fucking Volvo and then is like, "I should have ripped their heads off" and Bella still somehow doesn't see Edward as the twelve red flags in a trenchcoat that he is.
After that, they end up at a restaurant, where Edward switches from murderous maniac to cool suave guy, and this date is almost charming, despite the lazy attempt at infusing tension in the previous scene. This could also have been made more concise by just having Edward and Bella meet in the book store, and there could be some intrigue with Edward knowing his way around the store and charming Bella with his book knowledge, but no, Edward Cullen, Volvo Stuntman. So unnecessary but it got a good laugh out of me.
Inside Edwards acts cute for a second but then turns the stalker to like, 11. Edward talks about his mind-reading powers for a bit but then accidentally makes it out to be that Bella is vapid, then mocks Bella for thinking he insinuated that she's vapid. Classy.
This is the point where there is some decent albeit cheesy romantic dialogue thrown in, but Pattinson botches the delivery so badly that what would have been an endearing line just comes off as terrifying.
I'm going to jump ahead of time to Edward and Bella finally getting over the initial barrier to their relationship. There's a scene where Edward comes to pick Bella up and her narration here is probably indicative of how unbelievably out of place it is. Bella's entire character could probably have been improved by cutting out most of her voice over, save for the opening lines, and the ones where the vampire James pretends to kidnap her mother. But I'll get to that in a moment.
Eventually, Bella's mom calls, and we have the return of the thematic throughline; The room is brightly lit, and Bella admits for the first time that she likes living in Forks Washington, albeit only because Edward also lives in Forks. Edward interrupts and the two have a scene where they stay up late talking. Notably in this montage, Bella falls asleep, and Edward gently strokes her cheek. Bella then cuddles up closer to Edward. Moments like these are ones that the film needed more of, just to really sell Edward and Bella's relationship.
It's goofy and silly and it might be the one time everyone on screen is having any actual fun. There's some sloppy wirework and you can physically see the actors gear up to jump on a trampoline. But, it's still fun, despite the relatively low production quality of the scene.
That's cut short by the arrival of James, Victoria, and Laurent. For what are essentially our main antagonists, they've all been extremely uninvolved in the plot. Sure, they committed two on-screen murders, but they were of characters we didn't really know or care about. And that's the biggest downfall of these characters. The Cullens don't know anything about them, they've really only been making Charlie's job hard, and their reasons for wanting mess with Bella is... Contrived. Actually, only one of them actually wants to mess with Bella.
They start and Edward gets super protective over Bella, but as they're about to leave, James ends up down wind of Bella's dank stank, which makes the man go full-on hunter mode. Which makes him get the most characterization out of the three. It's also notable that Laurent is the third black character, and I think he might be the only named one in the film, which is emblematic of other problems in the film, but at least there's some representation of Native American characters. Notable that this isn't only a problem with Twilight, it's also a huge problem with shows like Buffy, and the Underworld movies.
Anyway, James begins to hunt Bella and she decides that in order to keep Charlie safe she has to come up with an excuse to leave. Bella interprets this as an opportunity to then repeat the same hurtful sentiments her mother used all those years back. It's notable that this is the kind of reckless thing a misguided teenager might do, but watching Charlie try his best to hold onto his daughter who, by all accounts, thinks martyring herself for the benefit of others is still the correct thing to do.
James, being a smart person, listens in on the conversation, and figures out Bella is going to her mother's or is at least pretending to. He then uses a recording of her mother from a videotape from her childhood to trick Bella into thinking he has her mother, and she must now abandon the safety of the Cullens and confront him.
So the thesis of the film is then fully met as Bella goes to meet James, now narratively coming to a head as Bella chooses once again to die in place of her mother, although the death is now literal rather than allegorical. She's also chosen to try to protect her father from James, which has brought her further unhappiness.
To me it seems that the logical conclusion here would be to have Bella learn a lesson about how martyrdom doesn't pay off, and that she has to focus on her own safety and happiness, instead of trying to keep others from sharing the burden with her.
Instead, Edward comes in and saves her, she nearly dies, then the movie ends with her at the prom. Also, Jacob shows up to remind us that he's still in this story.
To be fair, Bella kinda does get put through hell for deciding to martyr herself once again, but Bella never really learns from her mistakes. James humiliates her, threatens her, breaks her leg, tosses her around, bites her and thereby injects her with a venom that puts her through excruciating pain, but all of this builds up to a moment for Edward, in which he learns to find the willpower to exercise restraint. Which, honestly, kind of sucks as a climax.
It's clear that this isn't Edward's story, it's Bella's. The filmmakers have essentially robbed Bella of her great revelation moment. And she didn't learn to find happiness on her own terms, the closest thing she finds is the desire to die and end her human life in order to find happiness in a life with Edward.
This discovery within Bella isn't one of character growth, it's the same mistake in a different flavour. I think this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the themes the filmmakers brought up.
If I had to rewrite this ending, I would have had Charlie be the one to burst in and save Bella, and the two of them together then find a way to beat James. Edward could then be too late to save Bella, and the ultimate lesson here for Edward could be that he can't keep pushing Bella away as a means to protect her.
Bella would then make a meaningful connection with her father, tell her mother that she'd like to remain in Forks, and the death of her innocence could be capped off with a shot of like, a baby deer learning to stand by itself and become an adult, that from the death of innocence there can be the birth of adulthood.
But the planting of themes that the filmmakers never follow through on is kind of the gist of Twilight. It's not thematically driven, and it's trying to be character driven but the only character that's even remotely worth watching the film for is Charlie.
The first twenty minutes of the film actually does set up a strong premise, but within the three acts the film meanders too much in a premise it doesn't follow through on, which is Bella coming to terms with and finding happiness in Forks, and when the supernatural elements pick up, it's like the end point of a 40 minute pilot episode rather than the midpoint of a two hour film. The romance between Edward and Bella is almost believable but Edward's damage comes off so strong that his relationship with Bella is just toxic, with very little admittance of how toxic the relationship really is.
But there exists a good film in there somewhere. If you remove the supernatural elements, there's a strong narrative about reconnecting with an estranged parent and not taking the happiness of others as your responsibility. And if you cut out more of the creepy scenes with Edward, with a couple changes there is the germ of a fun teen romance hidden in there.
I will say that there's a lot of newfound appreciation that I have for Twilight in a lot of regards. There are things I like, this isn't a total garbage fire of a script and plot, there's something in there that in the hands of the right director and scriptwriter, could be a good film. There's probably a way to still marry the supernatural elements and small-town drama.
Maybe in a couple years, there'll be a worthwhile reboot.
This is about 4 days late, considering, well, I'm already 4 days into NaNo and at about 8000 words. But, hey, better late than never.
So one thing I've always wanted to do was participate in National Novel Writing Month. It's always been kind of this cool concept that people can do this thing.
Having already finished 2 blog challenges (I know, I know, the second one took me half a year) and one game jam (which was about five days) I figure my next big thing should be NaNoWriMo.
Which might mean that 1700 words in fiction on top of extra blogging work might be a little too much to handle. If blog posts slow down in November (even though I usually only post about one a month) I do apologize, but it is because I'm doing something worthwhile.
But to answer some other questions:
Does that mean I'll publish my novel once it's finished (if it gets finished)?
A big maybe. Publishers are especially weary during the December/January months precisely because of NaNo. Any first draft written in just a month is usually not a masterwork and I spent years on a book only to have to turn out kind of shitty anyway.
So official big publishers are probably out.
Buuuut if I'm up to editing it, releasing the novel on Fiction Press, Wattpad, as a standalone document, hell, even going through the hassle of publishing it on Kindle as a free piece? That might be more on the cards.
Will there be updates on my progress during November?
My personal Facebook page has it, but no. I will post a piece at the end of November with a graph of my progress, along with my thoughts on the whole experience.
You'll just have to wait until then.
Can I even do this, seeing as the last 30 Day Blog Challenge took ages?
The tricky thing about the blog challenge is finding engaging topics. On my best day it's already hard to do that. I didn't just want to repeat the same stuff I usually write and that's why it took so long. But I was determined to finish it, and I did finish it. My November is surprisingly clear, so this is a pretty do-able challenge. Plus, I'm already far ahead of where I need to be, just in case life happens.
So that's all I have to say. Wish me luck, and I hope you have a fantastic November, and an even better December.
