Twilight

I'm just back from seeing the movie "Twilight". I'm not going to give away the movie or the book plot, but if you don't like people commenting on the nuts and bolts, you can skip this anyway.





I didn't think I'd like the Bella character after watching the trailers, but I liked her in the movie.

I also liked Alice, and we didn't see enough of her. If there are "Team Edward" and "Team Jacob" (and apparently a warped "Team James"), I'm definitely "Team Alice".

Characters weren't very developed in the movie. One of the things I liked about the book was the character development -- it wasn't deep, but I felt like I got the essense of the characters. That was not well-translated to the movie. I don't feel like I really know any of the people based on the movie.

They ignored Jasper, which given how little development any other characters got isn't so surprising, but I would have hated to have been given that role hoping to make it into something.

I don't like spinning camera shots. I got dizzy a couple of times in the movie -- in both cases NOT during "action" sequences, but when the characters were basically standing or lying still.

In general, I felt the book survived the movie. My son, who has not read the book, said he got lost in the movie, and I guess there are times where having read the book is probably necessary to really understand what is happening.

Sparkling Edward could have used some better CGI or something. I know I'm a guy, but my daughter agrees that he looked worse sparkling, when it was supposed to be "magnificent".

In general, I think they could have spent more money on makeup. The vampires too often looked like people with way too much makeup. I actually think Powder made the guy white better than they did in this movie.

There were a few things that simply didn't match what my mind had imagined when reading the book. The two biggest are that I pictured Bella's house to be in the woods a bit, not on a street with curbs; and I pictured the school as being out on a plain and being a bunch of small buildings you had to walk outside to get from one class to another -- not an urban-looking building in the heart of the "city".

They did catch the essence of the "dreary small-town" otherwise. I loved the logging truck.

I thought Edward's car was sufficiently cool, but my daughter did not.