Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 of Something Super - The End

I am writing about this film, even though EVERYONE else is also writing about it.  I have nothing original to say about Breaking Dawn, I am sure, but its always easier to rip a film apart and be negative and hyper-critical...easier and therefore more fun.  I didn't want to miss my chance to jump on THAT bandwagon.  Honestly, I just want to get this post over with.

Let me begin with this bold statement:
NO I HAVE NOT READ THE G.D. BOOKS. so stop asking me
Yes, thank you, that bold statement was actually in bold.

Ok So, Don't read this if you don't want confirmation that yes yes they get married and yes yes the have the much anticipated and longed for coupling.  Yes, Jacob is so very sad, and Bella is so very mumbly and nonverbal, while Edward is so very dreamy.  And everyone else gets there little cameo's too, and fill in the cracks in an otherwise unworkable screenplay.

Here is the deal:
The dialogue is of no substance.
The acting is infantile, angsty, uncomfortable and melodramatic.
The plot is packed to the ceiling with family values subtext.
The direction is so weak, I couldn't help but wonder if they just used a robot.
The CGI was woeful. If you have seen it...the scene with the wolves (you know what I'm talking about).
...and no one got naked. 

Yet, the audience - packed to the rafters with Twihards - screeched in delight as the film opened with Taylor "Daffy" Lautner ripping his shirt off and running toward the camera like a teenage wet dream.  They screeched again as the film ended with Bella reawakening as a vampire.  This leads me to conclude that we the audience of theTwilight series don't care about substance or artifice or any of that crap, we just wanna see the hot kids do sexy stuff. Whether you are a tween, a teenager, a 20 something or an actual seasoned adult, sometimes it fun to let go and embrace the melodrama of the teenage realm - the urgency and immortality of youth; the lusty silences of first love; the silly decisions made by the unrequited and rejected. 

In conclusion: this movies blows serious chunks, but for you, the Twilight fan, are getting EXACTLY what you have been waiting for.           

Submarine - The Weird Tale of Love, Welsh Style

Submarine. 

This is cinema.  Truly a piece of cinematic art, cinematic ingenuity, cinematic magic, cinematic genius - this is cinema.  This is why we love film - to be transported away from the mundane, the trivial, the ritualized, the route, to be swept into the impossible, improbable, the unlikely and believe.  We the audience are left with goose flesh at the stage of this artistic flurry - colors, perspectives, dialog like notes left penciled in on the edges of a epic poetic masterpiece - wild, lovely, comforting and chilling in its innovation, its tiny grandiosity, its limitless restrained timelessness.    

Other than some music videos for Sheffield's finest, the Arctic Monkeys, director Richard Ayoade has not done much directing...Submarine, then, will be the first of hopefully many feature length projects to come from this visionary and liquid aueture.  The lucidity of the nearly twilight'ed tonality is nothing short of visual deliciousness.  Bold in one moment and muted in the next, Ayoade's vision plays on emotional cues using editing, highly stylised mise-en-scene and the strangely lovely narrative voice of the protagonist, 15 year old Oliver Tate.  Oliver is in boyhood love with Jordana Bevan.  Neither is very popular, but neither is unpopular either.  Both suffer from being teenagers.  Both have parental fears - Oliver, afraid that his mother is having an affair with a long lost love who has recently returned to live next door fails to post for Jordana as her mother battles cancer.  What we get is a coming of age, love story humored through the mind of a teenage boy of rare intelligence.

Why is this film so luscious?  Let me show you:

           The above still is of Oliver and Jordana, who are about to unceremoniously hold hands for the first time.  Oliver pale and dressed in black is in bold opposition to Jordana dressed in vibrant red.  His hair is floppy and free, while she don's a sharp angled frock.  Both stair straight ahead, Oliver looking dazed with anticipation and Jordana the smirk of being in complete controll.  She is a smoldering ember and he is repressed, controlled careful.

The care with which scenes have been constructed, edited and shot create an experience that is highly cinematic.  No other medium could tell this story in quiet this way.  Submarine a fun, free, fresh, poignant, high calorie, British dark comedy and well worth the $1 at RedBox.