Edward Cullen is a polite vampire. He's the main male protagonist in "Twilight," the laughable new movie made from Stephenie Meyer's hugely popular novel for teenagers, a film so against the spirit of everything we know about vampire lore that you wonder if, as a child, Meyer had a bad experience watching Bela Lugosi in "Dracula" on television late one night and decided to steal the concept, but make everyone who's a vampire really good-looking.
Because she doesn't like her stepfather, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) moves from arid Arizona to misty, foggy Washington state to live with her actual father. At her new high school, she's smitten with the fair Edward (Robert Pattinson) because he's drop-dead gorgeous. She's rather attractive herself, so he notices her as well.
Edward has to be careful. He must be cautious even during foreplay. He fears that if he makes serious love to her, he will kill her.
And that's the movie. A touch more than two dreary hours of it. There are far too many scenes of the swooning Edward and the kind-hearted Bella talking, and so much unintentionally hilarious dialogue, by Melissa Rosenberg (no, she's not Joan Rivers' daughter), that only your laughter might keep you from being totally bored.
As poorly directed by Catherine Hardwicke, the film creaks along not quite toothless, but definitely fangless.
If "Twilight" is about anything, it's about teen abstinence, even though one of the high school students is, I think, 114 years old.
"The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas," by Irish writer John Boyne, is another novel for young people. For its United States release, the new movie drawn from its pages has Americanized the spelling of the sleepwear. So we've got "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," a wrongheaded film whose main goal is to provide a message to children about German concentration camps.
It's told from the perspective of an 8-year-old boy named Bruno (Asa Butterfield). His father (David Thewlis) is a Nazi soldier who is awarded the position of commandant of a concentration camp, a working farm where Jews toil in striped uniforms. The family moves to a large house outside the camp.
Bruno becomes lonely, until he sees another boy his age, Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), behind the barbed wire fence on the farm. Bruno is curious about why the other kid wears pajamas while playing outside. He has no clue as to what's going on, and neither does his mother, which is difficult to believe.
Bruno befriends Shmuel, and we're supposed to derive something heartwarming from their relationship and learn something about understanding people's differences. It's almost as if novelist Boyne and the film's writer-director Mark Herman want the result to be a case of "Out of the mouths of babes," or "A little child shall lead them."
You're expected to believe Bruno can spirit himself in and out of the camp with ease, under the eyes of the guards, his clueless father, his doubly clueless mother and his annoying older sister. Bruno will challenge his father about the events on the "farm." His mother will slowly awaken from her know-nothing stupor. None of this stops Bruno from visiting his new friend, witnessing brutalities and becoming a pipsqueak philosopher.
What happens next? All I'll write is that one of the buildings is a gas chamber. Farming was not the main purpose of a Nazi concentration camp.
"The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" asks the audience to suspend disbelief far too many times. I was also annoyed by the British accents almost everyone had. Why no German accents?
And I don't care how well-intentioned a movie is, when a subject is as serious as wartime atrocities against civilians, and you want to send a message to young readers (or young moviegoers), dump the metaphors and paint a real picture. Kids appreciate honesty. Not distilled pap. Not playtime amidst the bones of a generation of innocent people.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | November 25 2008 |