The Sorcerer's Apprentice, 2010

Pro and Conjure

I don’t understand why this movie isn’t five minutes long.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice begins with the story of the great wizard Merlin’s three apprentices, Balthazar (Nicolas Cage), Horvath (Alfred Molina), and Veronica (Monica Bellucci). When Balthazar and Veronica fall in love, the jealous Horvath betrays his friends and sides with an evil sorceress named Morgana (Alice Krige). One epic battle later: Merlin is dead; Veronica and Morgana have been banished into a mystical nesting doll; and Horvath and Balthazar find themselves on a centuries-long quest to find the heir to Merlin’s power.

This heir, it is believed, is the only one who can stop Morgana from escaping the Nesting Doll of Fate, and thus prevent her from destroying the world by raising an army of the living dead.

Did you catch all that? If so, you’re a quicker study than I, because most of that back-story was told in, literally, the first minute-and-a-half of the film—and not an ominous voice-over reading of fancy, serif scrolling text; no, this convoluted plot ramp-up was executed with action scenes. It was the sloppiest, most confusing opening I’ve seen since Jonah Hex, and I’m not giving Apprentice the advantage here.

Let me work back to my point about the movie’s run-time. With any half-way decent film about magic and spells or otherwise otherworldly story mechanics, there are always clearly defined rules governing the characters’ behavior. An unskilled Jedi, for example, will have difficulty swinging a lightsaber at a target droid; while a well-trained Sith Lord can choke out a general from across a conference room table.

In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it is established that Balthazar and Horvath are wizards of equal power. It’s also established that they can destroy anything with powerful plasma bolts, turn gargoyles into living metal eagles, and levitate a dresser drawer from across New York city to the top of the Empire State Building (among other things). So, I have to wonder why:

• It took them centuries to find Merlin’s heir (does it really take that long for such a powerful force to be reincarnated?)

• On learning that Merlin’s heir was alive in present day New York, why didn’t Horvath simply cast a choking spell on him at dinner or conjure up a bus to run him over; conversely, why didn’t Balthazar turn the heir’s skin into impenetrable, glisten diamonds, like those Twilight kids have?

• Why was neither wizard able to successfully hide and protect/destroy the Nesting Doll of Fate?

The simple, lazy answer to all of these questions (much like the answer to any question involving religion) is “Magic!”

The more involved answer is “It’s a Disney movie! Stop thinking so much!”

And that’s where the problems really start. The only way to enjoy this loud, hyper-caffeinated FX romp is to completely ignore a lifetime’s worth of cerebral development. If you can’t do this, you may find yourself asking:

• Why would Dave (Jay Baruchel), a nerdy physics major and the heir to Merlin’s powers, decide to throw his mystical dragon ring off the top of a building—knowing that the ring is the source of his power and a potential weapon in Horvath’s hands?

• How can the Nesting Doll of Fate be opened with a simple drop to the floor in one scene, and then require several levels of magical totems later on?

• When Balthazar decides that the safest place for Dave to hide from Horvath is in his campus laboratory, is he kidding?

• When Horvath asks a campus advisor where Dave’s laboratory is:

o Why does he need to do so?

o Why doesn’t he produce a fake ID when asked for credentials, instead of casting a spell on the young man? I mean, Horvath manifested a human form out of a pile of cockroaches; surely he can pull a laminated photo out of his pocket?

• Isn’t it kind of douche-y for Dave to ask his new girlfriend, Becky (Teresa Palmer) to climb to the top of a building and re-align a satellite dish when:

o Becky has a near-paralyzing fear of heights

o It’s physically impossible for her to do so

• When Morgana arises at the end for the big showdown (SPOILER!), and she faces off against Dave, Balthazar, and Veronica, why does she lose? Is it because:

o Veronica is too busy coddling Balthazar, who, for some reason, was disabled by the same kind of plasma bolt that’d he’d easily absorbed earlier

o Dave needs to stand on his own and use his NEWLY MANIFESTED POWERS to handily defeat THE MOST POWERFUL SORCERESS WHO’S EVER LIVED

Okay, I’ll stop at six questions. There are a ton more I could ask, but I’ve already given this movie more time than it deserves. These points are made more egregious by the fact that the screenplay roots the magical elements in science—and not one line of this movie holds up to scrutiny.

The point is that Nicolas Cage will be able to float on his Sorcerer’s Apprentice money for at least two years, and devote time to projects in which he actually gets to act (Bring on Bad Lieutenant 3, please!). Alfred Molina will hopefully take Cage’s cue and stop slumming it in popcorn land for awhile (I don’t know how many more times I can watch him play Dr. Octopus before I lose all respect for his choices). And this film’s profits will help convince a whole new generation of screenwriters, directors, and producers that family movies can be successful without having to be any good.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about the Jay Baruchel problem. In the last six months, I’ve endured him in She’s Out of My League, How to Train Your Dragon, and now this; it’s a trifecta of irritation. I have nothing against him as an actor, except when he plays to his looks. You’ve seen him: a skinny, awkward-looking doofus with the constant expression of someone who’s just ejaculated in his swim trunks. Lately, he’s played the nerd who needs to learn serious confident lessons in order to get the gilr/save the world.

At issue is the fact that he plays the same character the same way in every movie. Listening to him talk, as I’ve mentioned before, is like listening to a third-rate, stuttering Eugene Levy. If he’s supposed to be the relatable protagonist, I fear those in the audience that find him relatable.

Strangely enough, he wasn’t always like this. Think back to his role in Tropic Thunder. He was awkward, yes, but only in the context of being the only level-headed actor in a troupe of bona fide head cases. He spoke confidently, and knowledgeably, and came off as someone who looked nothing at all like himself. Baruchel’s latest roles suggest that he’s striving for marketability by giving audiences exactly what they’d expect from looking at him on a movie poster. It’s profiling, and it’s wrong.

But that’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice for you: a half-considered idea, fueled by un-invested stars that runs an hour-and-fifty-six minutes too long.

Predators, 2010

Stalk Exchange

Once again, a movie has fallen victim to its trailer. Typically, previews give the audience more information than they need—going beyond who’s in the movie and an idea of what the story’s about, and straying into plot-point territory. Nearly every romantic comedy, epic fantasy, and mainstream weepy of the last five years (at least) has been undone by the fact that the audience knows exactly what they’re getting into from the moment the theatre lights dim.

Predators is special, though. Its trailer showed a good deal of restraint and was a genuine, brain-tickling tease. We see a group of mercenary-types dropped into a jungle; they don’t know each other, and have no idea where they are or why they’ve been assembled. “They’re the best killers on the planet,” we’re told.

“But this…”

“…Is not our planet”.

The screen then explodes with quick cuts of the Predator creatures hunting and fighting their human prey. The trailer culminates in a sci-fi/horror geek money-shot of Adrien Brody standing tall as the famous three-point laser sight circles his chest; then another; and another; until he’s lit up by twenty of them. It’s a wonderful, suspenseful image that—combined with the Alien-like score—convinced me to see the movie. Granted, I would have seen Predators anyway; but this made me excited for it.

If you had the same feeling watching this preview, I warn you now that we’ve been had. Despite Executive Producer Robert Rodriquez’s claims that this was a passion project of his—born of an allegedly bad-ass script he wrote twenty years ago—there’s absolutely nothing in this movie that screams, “A sequel two decades in the making!” If anything, this is a muddled, off-the-shelf rehash of Predator that cynically uses hope and hype to drum up fan interest.

The film’s premise raises two big questions: Who will survive? How will they get off the planet?

Going by the formula of the first film—with Brody acting as the Arnold Schwarzenegger stand-in and Alice Braga playing the part of Survivor Girl—it’s probably better to rephrase the first question as, “Which non-obvious characters will survive?”

For the first half of the movie, I was convinced that other members of the de facto team would make it, and not merely serve as gore props. Each of the cast has a unique look and is fun to watch—particularly Oleg Taktarov and Walton Goggins as a Russian soldier and a death-row inmate, respectively. Like the special ops crew in the first Predator, they’re all hardened and colorful, but they freak out a bit when they realize they’re not the baddest boys on the block. Sadly, at the mid-point of Predators, once we’ve gotten to know the main cast and have seen them work together to fend off traps and a stampede of vicious horned dogs, the Predators show up and turn the rest of the film into a muddled, boring body-count movie that’s no better than the worst installment of the Saw franchise (Part 5, if you’re keeping score).

Yes, Rodriquez knows that his audience is thirteen-year-old boys and has no qualms scuttling character development and intrigue in favor of laser fights and impromptu spine removals. What’s fascinating to me is how quickly the story went downhill. When Laurence Fishburne shows up as a survivor from a previous “game drop”, it’s as if the rest of the cast took a cue from him and stopped trying to act. He goes into full Brando-in-Apocalypse-Now mode: mumbling to himself, shuffling his considerable, bald mass from here to there, and eventually trying to kill everyone.

Fishburne was my first indication that the creative force behind this movie really had no idea what it wanted to accomplish, and I began to notice other flaws—like the muddled set design (it was hard to discern what I was supposed to be looking at for half the movie); the fact that the film’s budget apparently dried out somewhere around week three, resulting in the re-use of the same location about six times in the last forty-five minutes; and the evaporation of any real characters, forcing me to not care who lived or died.

Which leads me to Question Two. The one great running mystery of Predators is how the hell anyone will get off the planet (and, when they do, how they’ll get back to Earth, which looks to be several galaxies away). There’s a great turn where Brody’s character’s attempt to commandeer a Predator ship is foiled by a bomb. Watching the movie, I kept thinking, “Wow, they’re really painting themselves into a corner here.”

Amazingly enough, the movie’s answer is that there is no answer. The movie ends with the Predators defeated and a new shipment of game being dropped into the jungle. Brody and Braga stand in a clearing, watching the sky. Brody says, “Now, let’s figure out how to get off this fucking planet”. They turn and disappear into the foliage.

Seriously, that’s how they end the movie.

I was gobsmacked. On one hand, I was glad the movie was over; on the other, I felt utterly cheated out of a resolution I’d suffered two hours to reach. It’s like getting to the end of Jaws and seeing Roy Scheider holster his flare gun (“Man, someone should do something about that shark!”). The end of Predators doesn’t even feel like the gateway for a sequel; it’s more of a shrug, a realization that this was the best that the brain trust at 20th Century Fox kinda maybe sorta could do.

This movie has nothing on the original. Predator rose above the Schwarzenegger-cheese factor by giving us a war movie that suddenly became a sci-fi adventure. It was full of surprises, mostly relating to a creature whose design, actions and purpose were utterly new—and challenging to the protagonists. There’s none of that imagination here; none of that sense of discovery or danger.

The only surprises are that A) Adrien Brody can play a convincing, ripped tough guy and B) that money-shot from the trailer—with the multiple sights on Brody’s body—is a lie. In the movie, there’s one sight. The trailer would have you believe that the human mercenaries must square off against a whole army of Predators. In reality, there are only four in the whole film.

It’s fitting that Predators was directed by a guy named Nimrod Antal. I’m sure he’s a nice guy or whatever, but he and Rodriguez made this movie for idiots.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, 2009 (Home Video Review)

Be Still My Bleating Heart

I can’t blame writer’s block on this one. There’s something about The Men Who Stare at Goats that has made it impossible for me to sit down and put my thoughts into words. This shouldn’t be a Home Video Review, after all: I saw the movie in theatres last fall, and again two weeks ago on blu-ray. But I’m here now, writing, and I’m going to muscle through this bad boy.

Maybe the problem is that I find it hard to recommend or even describe the film to people who ask me about it. Typically, the conversation goes like this:

Random: Hey, did you see The Men Who Stare at Goats?

Me: Oh, yeah! It’s great!

Random: Really? I was gonna check it out, but I heard some not-so-great things. Is it funny?

Me: It’s really funny. But I didn’t really laugh. Maybe the first time I saw it, I laughed a couple times. The second time, I kind of chuckled once.

Random: That doesn’t sound like a very good comedy.

Me: Well, it’s not really a comedy. I mean, it is, but it’s also a political satire, and adventure, and kind of like a newspaper story brought to life.

Random: Oh. Sounds…awesome.

Granted, I’m not that great on selling movies to people in person. My enthusiasm causes me to stammer and talk in half-sentences until I eventually find an intelligible groove. But this movie in particular has given me no shortage of headaches; I don’t know if anyone’s yet listened to my insistence that they see it.

We’ll see if my typed words fare any better.

The story centers on a Michigan journalist named Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor). After his wife leaves him for his editor, Bob sets out to find fame and self-esteem as a correspondent in the newly launched Iraq war. His ticket into the combat zone is a gruff security expert named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). It turns out Lyn is a former psychic spy (or “Jedi”) for the U.S. Army, and he’s on a mission of his own—to track down his former commanding officer, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), who sent a distress message with his mind.

On this road trip marked by kidnappings and roadside bombs, Lyn fills Bob in on the history of the Jedi. Formed as Django’s attempt to re-fashion the post-Viet-Nam-War military into a more culture- and planet-conscious entity, he got funding to start a unit of peaceful warriors. He recruited soldiers who displayed psychic gifts and honed their talents into tasks as mundane as developing non-lethal weapons to as extraordinary as psychically locating missing persons and stopping the hearts of de-bleated goats.

Cassady was in Django’s unit, as was the petty and sinister Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey). Hooper was immune to the Jedi’s brotherhood-of-man charms (and its slogan, “Be All That You Can Be”), and instead manipulated those around him to his own twisted ends. This led to Django’s eventual disappearance and re-appearance in Lyn Cassady’s mind.

What Bob and Lyn find in the desert is funny in one sense, but darkly tragic in many others. In this way, the story reflects the way the movie tells it. The Men Who Stare at Goats is based on the non-fiction book by British journalist Jon Ronson. I don’t know how much of the Jedi’s story is true, but it’s a fascinating idea; one that doesn’t need the comic relief provided by the Bob character.

It feels like director Grant Heslov and screenwriter Peter Straughan were pressured to make the movie marketable by injecting every other scene with Bob doing something cute and naïve, or having an overblown reaction to whatever situation he finds himself in (the movie is guilty of this, too: we see Bob get into a fight with his editor, who has a prosthetic arm; this is meant to, I guess, lend quirkiness to the scene, but it just comes off as desperate). Did the filmmakers not trust their audience to come aboard their strange ride unless they were lured in by slapstick?

Speaking of strange, I’d like to take a sidebar here and talk about digital smoothing. I can’t be sure what process was used to make Kevin Spacey look twenty years younger in the flashbacks, but it was distracting as hell. He seemed to have a bright orange glow emanating from his collar, and his lips moved as unnaturally as the talking babies in that investment commercial. The effect was applied to Clooney, too—or maybe it was just lots of makeup—but his early-eighties-drifter haircut drew attention away from his tangerine cheeks.

Anyway, the movie has problems (not the least of which is the fact that it’s an anti-Bush polemic that came out in late 2009; had it been on a double-bill with Heslov and Clooney’s superior Good Night, and Good Luck in 2005, it might have avoided the awkward sting of irrelevance).

But if you can put the goofy stuff out of your mind (huh, huh, Ewan McGregor says “Jedi” a lot, get it?), and dig into the beautiful story underneath, you’ll find a movie that represents what Lewis Black once called a “renaissance of the human spirit”. It’s about men working within the system to heal their own souls and mend the conscience of a nation—and that nation’s infrastructure biting them in the ass for their troubles. There are great ideas and cool twists here, too (meaning you can just enjoy this as a movie, if you prefer to ignore all the hippie nonsense). And, with the exception of McGregor’s hysterics, the movie is anchored by outstanding performances (Bridges was robbed of a Supporting Actor nod last year).

I can’t recommend this film highly enough.

Well, I guess I just did.

Tried, anyway.

The Last Airbender, 2010

Use Your Delusion

In the late summer of 1999, some friends and I got free passes to see a new Bruce Willis movie. A week before the screening, we’d all laughed at the trailer. It was just accepted among my peers that Willis had squandered all the good will and fortune he’d earned with Pulp Fiction—for every Twelve Monkeys, it seemed, there were a half-dozen Color of Nights; and now he was in some silly ghost movie called The Sixth Sense.

Two hours later, we left the theatre buzzing about this creepy little movie with the greatest twist ending since The Usual Suspects. Those of you who claim to have seen it coming, I’d wager, probably saw the movie after it had become popular; The Sixth Sense is a film that demands to be seen without the slightest knowledge of what the twist might be—or that there even is one. It’s a deftly told, tight supernatural thriller with a big, beating heart and an even bigger brain behind it. The visionary writer/director M. Night Shyamalan had delivered a modern masterpiece.

The next year, Shyamalan teamed with Willis again for Unbreakable, a film that was 15/16ths perfect. A brilliant, grounded play on superhero mythos, the movie soared towards a climax that was so dreadful, so unforgivably ham-handed that I’ve not been able to watch it since. The big showdown between hero and villain turns out to be a really long dialogue scene in an office—followed by a fade to black and paragraphs of white text explaining all the cool battles the two rivals had after the first part of the story (i.e. the two-hour movie that was ending) wrapped up. I’d never felt so cheated and duped.

Until I saw Signs. You know the drill: Aliens travel millions of light years to conquer Earth without taking the time to figure out that it’s comprised of seventy percent water—which the aliens are deathly allergic to. Oh, and Mel Gibson’s character’s wife’s dying words are somehow a psychic blast into a future where her brother-in-law uses them as a prompt to beat an alien to death with a baseball bat.

Fucking please.

On and on, Shyamalan went, churning out failure after failure in a Human-Centipede-like journey to crawl as far up his own ass as possible. After the near-hate-crime level beating he received in the press following The Lady in the Water and The Happening, I was stunned to hear that Paramount handed him the keys to the kingdom: a $280 million live-action adaptation of a Nickelodeon kids’ show.

Which brings me (exhaustedly, finally) to The Last Airbender. I’d never seen the series (which is called Avatar: The Last Airbender), but it came highly recommend by friends whose opinion I trust. So, in the name of empowered criticism, I called up the first two episodes of Season One on Netflix Instant Play.

The best word to describe the show is enchanting. A sublime blend of humor, adventure and big ideas, it dresses up all the clichés of The Hero’s Journey in a painstakingly rendered mythology that presents the illusion of originality. It’s a complex, multi-cultural show that drops the viewer right into the middle of a sprawling plot and allows them to discover the mysteries of its world organically.

Even if you don’t care about the warring elemental nations or the elusive master spirit Aang—re-incarnated as a spunky boy fugitive—you could spend an entire episode admiring the wardrobes, landscapes and weaponry of the characters. Avatar is the kind of smart children’s entertainment that I didn’t know still existed.

The Last Airbender movie, however, is a heavy, dull mess; the only film I can recall whose every single line of dialogue is a piece of exposition. Sure, the first two episodes of the TV show are re-played here, as clipped story points that ignore the sharp writing that breathed life into the beats. Even the introduction of the two main characters, Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) gets botched with a sterling example of piss-poor directing.

This is not a matter of perception, mind you. It’s a fact that we meet Katara as she practices “waterbending”—basically levitating water. She brings a wobbly orb out of the tundra and loses control of it, drenching her brother in the process. Having watched this an hour earlier on television, I knew what was going to happen; what I didn’t know was that Sokka would be completely missing from the scene until he popped up out of nowhere, complaining about getting wet. It’s an amateur mistake, unless you take it as an omen of where Shyamalan intended to take the rest of the story.

I won’t go much further into the plot because I really want everyone reading this to check out the cartoon show. Essentially, Katara and Sokka discover Aang (Noah Ringer) frozen inside a glacier. They believe him to be the one person who can defeat the evil Fire Nation in their attempt to take over the world; the trio embarks on a treacherous journey through exotic lands, as Aang learns to bend elements other than air. I’m glad I didn’t watch any more of the series, because I’m looking forward to seeing what co-creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have up their sleeves.

For his part, Shyamalan has only tired special effects and ponderousness to offer. I don’t understand why he didn’t just make a two-hour cartoon for a quarter of the budget; or why he insisted on casting the worst child actor I’ve seen in some time as his protagonist; or why he didn’t hire actual martial artists to choreograph his fight scenes, instead of that lightsaber kid from YouTube.

Much has been made of the fact that the “good guys” in The Last Airbender are mostly Caucasian, while the villains are all of Asian descent. Is there a subversive racist message? I doubt it, unless M. Night Shyamalan is actually Steven Spielberg in brown-face. The real controversy here is how this guy keeps getting jobs. It’s true that, as of this writing, the film has taken in over $40 million (!), but after the stink sets in, Shyamalan will be lucky to get a PA job on a Kellogg’s commercial.

I want to believe that there’s a great filmmaker somewhere deep, deep down inside this once-great auteur. I remember being engrossed in every moment of The Sixth Sense; in The Last Airbender, I was constantly distracted by questions like:

Why didn’t the Production Designer use the specs for Sokka’s weapon from the cartoon show, instead of that dorky ivory question mark he kept swinging around?

Did Shyamalan intentionally frame the introduction of the Water Princess (Seychelle Gabriel) so that her head looked like a magnificent blonde penis?

Are there really so few Indian actors in America that Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi had to be recruited as the heavy?

The only answer that will allow me to sleep tonight is that Shyamalan is an artist in the sense that Andy Kaufman and Andy Warhol were artists. They made every facet of their existence into a must-watch performance. Part of me believes that good ol’ Night is pulling a fast one on us: launching a spectacular career as a potentially very important director and then gradually sabotaging his subsequent efforts until they culminate in an avalanche of despair-evoking shittiness.

He may be working on the greatest twist ending Hollywood’s ever seen.

Note: While it’s true that M. Night Shyamalan hasn’t directed a quality film in eleven years, I must give props to The Happening—a movie so awful and so hilarious that I own it on blu-ray. If you’re wondering how anything could be worse than The Happening—and The Last Airbender certainly is—keep in mind that even constant, derisive laughter during a movie is better than an hour and forty-eight minutes of yawning.

Additional Note: I just remembered that DiMartino and Konietzko were executive producers on this movie--which leads me to believe that there's a (ahem) fifth element in The Last Airbender: the too-easily-bent Artistic Principle.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

Team Victoria

Last night, I had the best surprise birthday party ever. There were no blindfolds involved, and no one jumped out from behind the couch to sing.

My wife and I had a party of two.

A Twilight party.

She gave me a birthday card from the first movie, complete with a Pouty Edward sticker insert. As a present, I finally got New Moon on blu-ray (the director’s commentary should be amazing). And because I was told I could do anything I wanted for My Special Day, we headed out to Old Orchard Mall and saw The Twilight Saga: Eclipse on opening night.

It was the perfect audience, too. We were surrounded by giddy girls—ages pre-teen through past-the-age-of-knowing-better—most of whom refused to stop whispering, chatting, or texting during the film. During the passionate kissing scenes, loud whoops and cheers erupted, culminating in enthusiastic applause at the end credits. Oh, and there was a fussy baby at the show, too.

“Ian, we don’t care about your birthday! Get to the movie!”

Fair enough. You caught me sloppily trying to pad this review. But I have my reasons.

If you’ve sat through the previous two-hundred-and-fifty-two minutes of the Twilight series in anticipation of the action-packed, high-stakes drama of the third book…well, you’re in for about twenty minutes of new, good material; the rest is everything you’ve seen before, acted slightly better.

For the uninitiated, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) lives in the nowhere town of Forks, Washington with her Wacky Sitcom Dad (Billy Burke). Bella is caught in a love triangle between vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). Complicating the relationship is a feud between the mythical species, which must be kept hidden from a family of ancient vampire police called The Volturi.

At the end of the original Twilight, Edward killed the head of a bloodsucker posse named James; James’ girlfriend, Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) vowed revenge and proceeded to spend the next movie-and-a-half literally running away from vampires and werewolves.

Realizing, I guess, that their audience might catch on to the fact that her three main characters have done nothing for two books/movies except whine, pout, and glisten, author Stephanie Meyer and co-screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg decide to inject an actual plot into Eclipse. Victoria returns with an army of newborn vampires from Seattle, whose ranks are apparently the most dangerous vampires one might encounter (likely ‘cause they’re jacked-up on caffeine and Grunge).

Normally, this would set the stage for a thrilling revenge picture; but, no, Eclipse is still part of the Twilight franchise—meaning that audiences should leave their hopes for seeing a real movie far, far behind.

The film’s best new story elements get eclipsed by the recurring drone of love pronouncements. We get glimpses of the origins of Edward’s vampire family (most hilarious is that of Jackson Rathbone’s Jasper, who develops a dodgy Southern accent when talking about his time in the Civil War; for two movies, this character was a feral mute, and now he’s a dinner-theatre General Custer).

There’s also Victoria’s army, led by a kid named Riley Biers (Xavier Samuel). The movie frequently cuts from Forks to Seattle, and we’re meant to see Riley recruiting and training vampires; but each scene looks like it was filmed in the same dingy parking lot, with extras from Rent performing scenes from Cats.

Had Eclipse made better use of its two-hours-plus run-time, we might have learned about why Riley is devoted to Victoria way before the five-minute burst of expository dialogue in the climax. As it stands, the big showdown happens in a wide open field and on a nearby mountaintop on the same afternoon. The evil vampires all show up at the exact same time and have a big rumble with the good vamps and their reluctant werewolf allies. There’s no tension or question about who will prevail—just a long fight scene reminiscent of The Outsiders.

In fairness to director David Slade, Eclipse has one hell of a climax. The earlier action scenes don’t work very well. One of the drawbacks of modern special effects is that moviemakers can now make actors do, literally, anything. So when I watch a pack of vampires chase a leaping, blurry Victoria through the woods, it has the same effect on me as playing Super Mario Brothers did when I was eleven: they’re all just cartoon characters whose actions are incapable of eliciting an emotional response. The big battle in Eclipse, however, is pretty cool.

For a PG-13 movie, I was surprised by the amount of decapitating and arm-ripping, and Slade makes great use of staging and practical stunt-work (or so it seemed), giving the battle the illusion of consequence. It also helps that when Twilight vampires die, their bodies turn to diamonds—making every fatal chomp and limb cut look like a liquid nitrogen accident.

Oddly enough, my biggest problem with Eclipse is that, as a movie, it is the strongest of the trilogy. The first film was so laughably bad—with its atrocious acting, basement-grade special effects, and relentless Teen Vogue posing—that it became an instant Bad Movie Party classic. The second film was all about Jacob not wearing a shirt and sulking in the rain, which spawned a million drinking games. Eclipse looks better; its actors are fighting through the shitty, repetitive dialogue to deliver something like actual performances (Stewart has even cut back on her Respiratory-Infection-Method-Acting; though she still does that squishy-brow thing before delivering lines, as if the words hurt journeying from brain to mouth).

These movies are trash written for pre-pubescent girls; lonely, middle-aged women; and people in between who don’t know what good storytelling is (don’t think you’re off the hook, Harry Potter fans). The fact that the production quality is improving just means that the franchise’s base flaws are becoming more obvious and less tolerable. Watching sixteen scenes of hot teenagers professing their love through bad poetry is awesome, if the movie is all-around bad; watching the same sixteen scenes interspersed with decent and sometimes exciting scenes is squirmy torture.

So, for my money, Eclipse is not the best of the Twilight saga; that honor goes to New Moon—which has its furry feet firmly planted on either side of the cheese/not-bad border. If you’re in doubt, please consider the end of Eclipse: Victoria and Riley are dead; the Volturi have returned to their palace in Italy; Edward and Bella are engaged. Perfect end to a trilogy, right? Nope, we still have TWO MORE MOVIES LEFT TO GO.

The only way I’m likely to make it through parts four and five is to buy tickets to the midnight screenings; being locked in an auditorium with genuine Twi-hards, I imagine, is like being a war correspondent. And that’s where I am with this franchise: seeking bizarre thrills that the movies themselves can no longer provide.

All in all, though, it was a great evening.

We got home and passed out in the middle of The George Lopez Show, as he wrapped up an interview with Kristen Stewart. We watched the perfect storm of an awkward interviewee clashing with a comedian who apparently dropped “Talk Show Hosting 101” in order to take “Ethnic Comedy for Easy Audiences” as an elective (with a minor in “Advanced ‘Oh No He Di’n’t’”).

At the end of the segment, Lopez surprised his multi-millionaire guest starlet with a set of golf clubs.

Stewart looked confused and kind of flattered, much like me at the end of the best birthday ever.