"Time to Nut Up or Shut Up"

Words of wisdom from Woody Harrelson via Zombieland. "Time to nut up or shut up." Time to put your money where your mouth is (or your mouth where the money is, if you're The Woodster in White Men Can't Jump and the money is somewhere south of Rosie Perez's torso region). Time to stop alternately opening and closing the hole between your nose and chin multiple times and start acting like a man. Or a woman. Or a wo/man.

I walked out of an advanced screening of that flick realizing that it's about time for me to nut up or shut up about some things in my life. First at the top of my Nut Up list? Twilight.

Although I spend plenty of time criticising Stephanie Meyer and her zillion-selling phenomenan, I've never actually taken the time to read the book or watch the movie. Oh sure, I've browsed through pages at Wal-Mart between dropping some Dial body soap and Brawny paper towels in my cart, but I've never read it from front to back. I've had no desire. "I refuse to associate myself with a property popular with teenage girls who frequent Hot Topic and/or Torrid and that features sparkly-skinned vampires who obsess over dreary, depressed chicks", I thought. Francis Ford-Coppola came dangerously close to turning Dracula into a whiny, love-sick pussy with his adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel (thank God Gary Oldman came along and put a stop to that with an outrageous accent and the ability to actually turn himself into a wolf); I was not about to let Meyer rape the vampire mythos for me any more than it already has been.

And then the other day I was forced to defend something that I was a fan of but was being attacked by those who hadn't seen it. "They haven't seen it, how can they judge?", I pined. That, coupled with Harrelson's lovely ball/mouth quote, made me realize that I need to read these novels. Every one of them. Every. One.

And so this blog is dedicated to my experience with these books and, if I can stomach them, the movies. I thought at first it would be easy, but glancing through the first few pages I felt a pang of hopelessness. Not unlike what Sir Edmund Hillary must have felt when, standing at the base of the mountain, he looked up at Everest before his first step.