The Game

"The inning continued before my incredulous eyes. It was impossible to keep up woth the speed at which the ball flew, the rate at which their bodies raced around the field....Carlisle ran into the ball, and then raced Jasper to first base. When they collided, the sound was like the crash of two massive falling boulders."

Maybe it's because I'm in a good mood today. Maybe it's because tomorrow's Friday. Maybe I'm just happy Slayer's finally put out a good album after years of mediocrity. Whatever it is, I actually didn't think Chapter 17 was all that bad.

Relax. I said "all that bad." It's still not good, but it's not the steaming pile the 16 chapters before it are. It's definitely a semi-buffed copper penny buried in a huge mound of shit.

What makes the chapter tolerable (barely) is the idea that when vampires play baseball it's a dramatic, rousing, thunderous (literally) event. These fallen angels smacking the ball thousands of feet and crashing into each other in spectacular fashion is a vision that a much better writer could have made into a subtlety riveting, maybe even classic scene. As Meyer writes it it's perfectly workmanlike. Something an eighth grader (maybe these chicks, who don't know what the word "parody" means?) in advanced English may have come up with. Kudos to Meyer, though, for imagining such a scene. 'Twas the only chapter I read with even a hint of a smile.

I imagined the scene in wide-screen, showing the game being played from afar against the oncoming storm. The bodies tiny specks moving gracefully yet tearing the sound barrier open when they strike. I set the scene up a certain way in my head so thoroughly that I decided to check out Catherine Hardwicke's version (yay Youtube!). While I'm saving the whole movie for after I finish the book, I was actually kind of curious to see it.

Bad move, Pezz.

Set to a so-bad-it's-just-bad Muse song, Hardwicke hyper-edits the shit out of the scene, speed-ramps footage, throws in some unnecessary (and really shitty - seriously, was this a TV movie?) CG, and inserts shots of some Kevin Federline looking douchebag (who I assume is Emmett?) dancing around like an asshole. It's all flash, all spectacle, zero excitement. I have no doubt Hardwicke was told what she could and could not do on this film by people that have absolutely no filmmaking talent and perhaps she bucked them on other parts of the film, but as it stands the game scene is horrendously executed.

I can only hope that this is a turning point in my Everest climb. Maybe the rest of the journey won't be as difficult as I thought.

Maybe. But I doubt it.