‘New Moon’ = teenage Mormon porn

    Like “Sex and the City the Movie” was for women over 30, “Lord of the Rings” for nerds and “Harry Potter” for younger teens, the “Twilight” series has premiered its own sequel so the young adult females of the world can rejoice. It’s ironic that something as seemingly cult-like as the “Twilight” series can have such an effect on the cinema market.

Grossing nearly $141 million in its first weekend, “New Moon” has proven that vampire abstinence pornography can easily saturate the impressionable minds of teenagers across this very predictable country.

    Is the story at least passable, then? Well, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) reprises her role as the “ice princess” of the film. Bella, after nearly becoming a vampire in the last film, continues to speak breathily about the philosophical nonsense that has nothing to do with her extremely mundane life. Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) plays her vampire boyfriend (drag-queen lover.)

    The movie begins on the morning of Bella’s eighteenth birthday. She wakes up after a nightmare in which she realizes her mortality. Bella, would rather have her birthday end without any mention of her aging body but the Cullen family (vampires) don’t listen.

Instead, they throw her a party. During the celebration Bella gets a paper cut and Jasper Cullen (Jackson Rathbone) attempts to assault her.

    After the entanglement, Edward becomes agitated and decides to leave Bella for her own protection.  Edward breaks up with Bella in the middle of the woods and leaves her to contemplate life, sadness and possibly suicide (this is the “Twilight” series after all). The movie switches to a black comedic montage showing the months soar by as our “heroine” sits in a chair brooding over the guy that dropped her like a hot tamale in the middle of nowhere.     

    Finally, her father, Charlie Swan (Billy Burke), can take no more of her zombie-like state and warns her that if she does not start improving that she will be sent back to live with her mother.

    Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) becomes central to the plot as Bella’s new confidante. It’s sad that so many women whooped and hollered as Black’s shirtless body filled the entire screen with muscle. Move over Zac Efron, Taylor Lautner is the new jail-bait male actor in town for all the “cougars” to rave about. His character, more so than Pattinson’s,  actually made the movie unbearable to watch at times.

    So, after about 90 minutes of teenage drama, (another theme taken from “Twilight”) the real plot thickens when Edward believes that Bella has died and decides to try to commit suicide. Bella and Alice Cullen (Ashley Greene) race to Italy to save him from the vampire elite known as the Volturi. During this portion of the movie Dakota Fanning (“War of the Worlds”), performs one of the most satisfying acts and basically saves the movie from being a complete bore. (Edward is tortured telepathically as Fanning smiles tauntingly.)

Fanning plays Jade, a powerful Volturi member. The scene is both comedic and refreshing.

    The movie does tend to drag near the end. It is over two hours long and I noticed that part of the audience was already on the edges of their seats waiting for the credits to appear.

    Despite the overbearingly critical treatment from film critics, the movie was not as painful as they made it out to be. Try as one might to hate it, it is impossible to resist some of the interactions between characters like Bella and Charlie who convey a very realistic bond between father and daughter. Their interactions remind me of the movie “Thirteen” which starred Holly Hunter, a mother with an increasingly destructive daughter.

    The main problem with the film was Stewart’s acting. At first, her performances seemed like such a breath of fresh air in films like “Speak” and “Catch that Kid” where she was the slightly messed up kid with a horrible past. Unfortunately, Stewart has continued to play this role in every film she has been in. Stewart’s expression, slightly opened mouth and vacant eyes, is frozen in stone throughout the film. I saw two smiles the entire movie and could not tell if Stewart was acting or just annoyed with her predicament in general.

    Also, the Mormon abstinence undertones of the movie really make the relationship between Bella and Edward unrealistic. Is it possible for two individuals who are romantically involved to sleep together in the same bed at night and not have sexual intercourse? Yes, it does happen (just ask married people) but it is unlikely for teenagers.

The book characterizes Bella as almost a seductress trying relentlessly to get into the virgin pants of Edward which clashes with the “puppy love” direction the movie takes. Women get another jab with Disney princess characterized traits when Bella becomes reckless in the hopes to see hallucinations of Edward.  Bella’s character makes women seem clingy and melodramatic after “intense breakups.”

    Vampires are historically erotic creatures on camera. “True Blood,” an increasingly popular HBO series, had explicit sexual content that made vampires a sort of masochistic sexual fantasy in which the individual knew the vampire was an evil being. Even the average female did not mind a little bite on the neck or a few hard thrusts that might leave bruises in the morning as seen in earlier movies like Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Dracula’s character exuded a posh, upper-class charm who lured women and men with his androgynously sexual undertones before killing them in a single bite to the neck. Meyer’s interpretation is filled with Western-European Christian (Mormon) morals that really tarnish true vampire mythology.