First Sight

My first few steps up the mountain are complete, and so far it's as cold and blustery as I thought it was going to be.

Poor Bella. Being 17 and able to choose where you want to live has to be downer. On top of that she's got a loving, caring, close mother, a distant but doting father, and a new truck. And it's just not fair that she's making friends so fast at her new school while guys fawn over her. Why did this have to happen to her, God? Why?

This is the main character Meyer has saddled the reader with? This chick makes Robert Smith look like Fred Schneider. Put on My Dying Bride and I bet she'd ask what Brit-pop band you're playing.

Actual passage from the book (conversation between Bella and her father):

"Do you remember Billy Black down at La Push?" La Push is the tiny Indian reservation on the coast. * "No." "He used to go fishing with us during the summer," Charlie prompted. That would explain why I didn't remember him. I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.

She's right! Fishing's INCREDIBLY painful! Especially when it's with your dad and his friend! All that fishing! And being on a boat! And water! And...fishing!

Look, Bells, unless Billy Black popped some quaaludes into your Capri Sun and Polanski'd your ass, I'm pretty sure those fishing expeditions were tolerable.

This is going to be harder than I thought. I don't think it's a coincidence that the movie studio doing the film versions is called Summit Entertainment.


*Gee, I wonder if La Push comes into play later in the book/series? No spoilers, please, Twi-hards. Let me see if SM sucks at forshadowing as much as I think she does.

"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.