Aside from the fact that Joel Schumacher's THE LOST BOYS is still being talked about twenty-five years after it's initial theatrical release, despite the fact that the mayor of Santa Cruz, California has deemed July 25 as Lost Boys Day, despite the underground fandom, from the diehard to the weekend warrior, that keeps the movie afloat, despite the mullets abound and the 80s clothes galore, THE LOST BOYS still lives on and still gets credit for being the fanged catalyst of current teen vampire movies.
THE LOST BOYS made vampires sexy, riding around on motorcycles, clad in leather. It stopped being about ugly Nosferatu sleeping in dank cellars and corrupting the virginities of maidens everywhere and started being about the sex appeal. Most girls and women have a bit of a bad boy complex. 'Sleep all day, party all night, never grow old, never die' became an anthem for all who are young, wanting to live an epic life with no consequences, so fears and no death. Mix the two together and you're not only pulling in a swarm of ladies salivating for a ride but even the guys that want to be total bas asses.
Dwayne, the only non-blonde, was the only one that could ever be considered brooding but that's just not the right word for it. 'Stoic' is a term that comes up often in the fandom. He doesn't sit around and piss and moan about his life all day (night?). He just doesn't talk much. And he'll eat your face all the same.
Like the article said, THE LOST BOYS made vampires fun. It clawed them out of the dirt graves and made them appealing to both sexes. It was the unsuspecting Michael they ended up roping in, not some clumsy little halfwit that would have barely been a consideration for a snack let alone an eternal love object.
So I'll say this again, just in case some Twihards didn't hear me: THE LOST BOYS WIN. Period. Let's see if people are talking about TWILIGHT with the same adoration in another twenty years and we'll re-evaluate this position if the need arises. Until then, you can take your glitter pixies and smoke 'em. NEAR DARK did the fangless vampires twenty years before TWILIGHT, Louis was getting his period about his eternal damnation about thirty years before Edward blew out his hair and only the ever-spilling guts of THE LOST BOYS glitter after they've been stabbed in the heart. Or drowned in a bathtub filled with holy water.
So blow me. I'll keep my Twisted Sister-looking, motorcycle-riding, Boardwalk-playing, coastal California-living vampire savages over your staring-mournfully-out-a-rainy-window, "vegetarian," college-love-song-writing, wingless glitter pixies any day.
OR
The only thing they have in common is a popped collar. Kiefer's smirk versus Robert's lack-of-bowel-movements face? Gee . . .
You know, I don't like Twilight. Read my reviews of the series to find out the details of my reasonings but I think I make it pretty clear. But I have my cousin to thank for introducing me to those literary abortions because she had them first. Then her mom borrowed them. Then my mom borrowed them. And, well, since they were in my house, I might as well see what all the fuss was about, right?
After I recovered, she dragged me to the movies to share in the pain that was epic constipation faces at super close-ups followed by really spinny screens. The spinny screens probably wouldn't have been so bad if we weren't sitting so close. But god, I was like in the movie and not in a good way. Soon after that particular foray was Christmas and thus began the Twilight one-up. Who could get the other the worse of the Twilight gifts.
She started it with the movie picture companion book, t-shirt and keychain. I followed with the second movie picture companion book, craptastic Jacob crap and a parody book for balance. I couldn't, in good conscience, give all that pain without easing it a little. And it went from there.
This year, though, try as I might, I couldn't really find anything good. Of course, as I was from the beginning, I was on the lookout for a life-sized cardboard cutout of one of the characters because, you know, walking into her house with that thing all done up would have been epic. But I hadn't been able to find one. And this year was scant on Twilight shit anyway since the movie and the holidays didn't coincide.
But trust my cousin, the evil human being she is, to find the Twilight shite like the guided sparkle-seeking missile she is. Here I am, going to the likes of Hot Topic and Barnes and Noble, for they never failed me before, until now. She? She goes to iParty and there, laying upon the isle like a feather mecca off the west coast of Brazil, Twiheaven. Or hell, depending on who you are. Oh thanks to iParty you can have a whole Twiparty, complete with being able to eat off of Edward's face. But what did she find that I could never? What did she get to first and bestow upon me like herpes in a whore house?
That's right. It's life-sized, it's constipated and it's guaranteed to scare the shit out of anyone that walks into your house. It's so horrifying, even my dog wanted to kill it.
So where does this monstrosity stay? Face to the wall in the recesses of my closet, otherwise I might have nightmares.
But you know, I was thinking, in order to make it more palatable, maybe I should dress it up a little. But I'm not sure how. That's where's you guys come in. You all need to give me some ideas about how this bitch could be prettied up. A wig? Clown make-up? A tutu? All three? Help me de-sparkle-lax my apartment. The form below will guide you through the dressing process. From the suggestions I get, I will chose the best suggestion per body part and throw them all together like a jigsaw puzzle from hell. What do you get for participating? Peace of mind that at least a little, tiny piece of Edward has been stamped out forever. And you'll get to see the end result.
First, who the hell is Bree Tanner in the greater expanse of the Twitrocity? Is she one of the rogue vampires in the third book? Why the hell was a novella dedicated to such a speck of a character?
Anyway, it appears that while selling 350,000 copies in the first two days is nothing to snuff at, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner is proving a parasite for indie bookstores. Outside of the big online retailers and the fact that the story is up for free on one of SMeyer's websites until July, it certainly doesn't help those smaller bookstores any who had no help in the promotions department when it came to getting the word out about this newest addition to the hysteria.
With smaller retailers selling only low-end single digit copies of the books, they're not going to be left with many options when it's time to rotate the book out. Mark this shill 11,000 for SMeyer but down 1 for the indies.
Since I'm practically drooling on my laptop I'm so tired, I'll just leave you with a, uh, different variation of Twilight. *snerk* McTwilight. Oh god. I shouldn't have said that. Now they'll be giving away little Edwards in Happy Meals! Dammit! Oi.
Dammit! I thought that was supposed to make it stop! WTF?
Ok, but seriously, can we stop with the Twilight shit please? It's getting a little fucking ridiculous. I mean, I don't even think New Kids on the Block were this into merchandising, and that's saying something. But really, is the publisher that hard up to get Wuthering Heights off the shelves that they feel it needs to be re-jacketed?
Bella and Edward's favorite book? One, Tedward never said he liked Wuthering Heights. That was purely Bella's game. Two, Wuthering Heights is something you slit your wrists to. I, personally, would not recommend it. Three, WTF do the flowers have to do with the story other than the books having contracted Twiherpes? Twirpes? Twarts . . . ? Syphilcullens. Nah. That's curable. Unless it's advanced . . . hmmmmm . . .
This just makes me want to introduce my head to a solid object. Preferably something made of brick. Twilight has officially turned into the cheap trick on the corner with the gut hanging out of her half shirt, one shoe (preferably a 5 inch clear stripper shoe), torn fish nets, make-up smeared across the side of her face and her front four teeth removed in an attempt to make the knob job better. The whore is worn out, man.
I love the mock re-jackets this site has but the scary thing is, considering the Twitards are delusional enough to think that SookieStackhouse is a ripoff of their beloved tome, they're fully capable of convincing themselves of this -
How many of them know that the officially sanctioned sequel to Dracula is coming out within the month? Alas, another ripoff, I'm sure. Nevermind even the sequel is an amalgam of stories Stoker himself created while he was still alive, over 100 years ago. Time machines! Duh!
At least Twilight doesn't have pins the size of dinner plates with Tedward's face on it! NKOTB has the leg up there. Shit . . . I just gave them an idea, didn't I? Damn and blast!
Just to give you an idea of just how ginormous these buttons were -
Those small ones look like your standard 2.5" pin. Dude, I wasn't lying that you could eat dinner off of those things.
Second, there was a part of him - and I didn't know how dominant that part might be - that thirsted for my blood.
And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.(book cover blurb)
Initially when I picked this book up off of a table in Barnes and Noble, I read that blurb and put the book right back down. Not interested. I only finally picked it up to read because my mom was borrowing it from my cousin and it was in the house. Why not? I wanted to see what all the hype was about. I plowed through it in a matter of days. Nice to know I can still read at warp speed. Granted it helped that the book was as dense as air.
This is one of the most thoroughly superficial books I’ve ever read. Is Twilight written as good as Harry Potter, since people are so inclined to make that comparison? I don’t think so. HP had depth right from the beginning. The world, both real and magical, were much more solid and right from the beginning the characters were deeper than puddles. I automatically sympathized with Harry because he was treated so horribly by the very people that were his family and it was done for no other reason than because he was the son of Petunia’s sister.
Twilight? Bella’s mooing about moving to Forks from Arizona and I don’t find out why she actually imposed the move on herself until, is it the second or third chapter, when Edward asks her why she moved. I was six pages in and calling my mom who’d already read it, making her explain to me why she was forcing this move on herself when she obviously didn’t want to make it. It bothered me that much.
Bella has a tendency to pity herself a lot, she doesn’t have much by the way of self-esteem and I swear if I read that she’s clumsy one more time I’m going to scream. She also has a tendency of characterizing people by their looks, especially Edward. Is everyone else that lacking in personality that it’s the only way to recognize people?
Her friends are as one dimensional as the broad side of a piece of paper. Their problems and bickering arguments are as petty, boring, asinine and overdone as fishing for belly button lint. And holy crap is Bella just one of the weakest characters you’ve ever met? Can she do nothing for herself except cook? If she’s not crying, pining over Edward or noting how clumsy she is, she’s being rescued by any number of phallus-swinging humans fawning after her. And it’s amazing how how plain she seems to be yet she has all those guys flocking to her. Are people in Forks inbred or something?
And then there’s Edward whose, at this point, only redeeming quality is his gorgeousness. He’s hot, beautiful and any other number of synonymous adjectives you can come up with. Aside from that, he’s commanding with Bella, ordering her around when he’s not sneering at her or moving vehicles out of her way or laughing at her. Oh yes! Where can I get twelve just like him? Is there a store? He’s an ass and yet she just can’t get enough of his looks. It seems to be the only thing she’s attracted to since it’s the only thing she mentions when he’s not around her (and even when he is). Maybe if Bella actually sat and thought about how he was treating her, you know, using her head for something other than air storage, she’d see just how he’s freakin’ treating her! But I guess looks overpower all. Good message to send.
By the end of the book both Edward and Bella are as one dimensional as they can be as characters, and I think that’s giving them too much credit. I didn’t care about them in the slightest. I wanted more information on Alice, who had no idea what her human life was like until she watched a short video on Bella’s beating. Or Jasper who’s the newest member of their group and has the hardest time controlling his hunger. There’s conflict, there’s unknown, there’s at least a second wall to the makeshift cube. Carlisle, Rosalie and her obvious conflict, Alice and Jasper, were far more interesting than Edward and Bella ever hoped to be.
I’ll give Meyer credit in giving the vampires something new to pine over and some new characteristics. I liked the skin in the sunlight idea even though it was a little too floofy for me. The whole “vegetarian” (in a fish-eating sort of way) concept, while isn’t new, is front and center so points for that even though I’m much more interested in drawing the beast out of Edward instead of watching him pine his way through 3 more books. But that’s just me.
The writing itself was nothing to write home about. Very mediocre and elementary, words in their simplest forms to portray characters in their simplest sketches.
What really bothered me about this book was the overwhelming lack of individuality and identity that Bella adopted once Edward was in her life. It’s downright scary, not romantic, to watch even a fictional teenager profess her undying and eternal love for a boy and claim that she only lives for him. Every moment away from him is pure agony. It takes what I’m sure many teenage girls feel when they think they’re in love (I know I was in that group a few times), exaggerates it and makes it ok. It’s scarily unhealthy to be that engrossed when you’re an adult, letting the other aspects of your life fall by the wayside to be replaced by a love interest but to watch a teenager do it, who's much more impressionable, is terrifying. The last thing any girl of any age should do is define herself by the boy or man she’s dating.
Yes, I understand this is a romance. Obviously. But really, is it impossible to have a romance, and a good one, where the female has a sense of self?
And Bella is just downright stupid. Edward obviously knows what he’s talking about. He’s been alive for 100 years. He’d be dead already if he were walking around with his head up his butt. Bella doesn’t listen to a damn thing he tells her, convinces herself of the exact opposite, doesn’t think things through clearly, is entirely irrational in the extreme and is constantly sacrificing herself for “his good” when he’s ready to put his head (and possibly hers) through a wall constantly telling her the contrary. I feel frustrated for him. I wanted to put my hand through the pages and backhand the twit for actually believing that the tracker had her mother, for only one example. Duh.
Yet, despite all of this, I couldn’t stop reading. I finished the book, including the preface and first chapter of New Moon in a couple of days. I still haven’t figured out what was compelling me to keep reading. Maybe it was hope that Bella adopted a sense of self although I highly doubt that will ever happen, even in the final book. Maybe it was purely for the cheese factor that I know is coming up. I have no idea but I've cranked through them and have one more to go (that I'm procrastinating on).
Maybe I see it as one disastrous train wreck and I just can’t take my eyes away from it. That might work.
I have to say, the movie is better if for the only reason being that we're no longer constantly in Bella's head. No more insufferable inner-monologue. So much more tolerable although Rob Pattinson's dead wombat hair was pretty distracting.
My next three reviews will be for Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse (I haven't read Breaking Dawn yet but it's haunting me in my TBR pile). They are, um, not flattering. If you've been reading my reviews, you know I don't hold very much back. Stephenie Meyer is no exception. And no, I'm not reading too deep into anything. Every book that I've reviewed has only been read once. Everything that I pick up is from a single pass and I don't go in thinking "how can I pick this apart?" I just don't have that kind of energy. Being a rabid reader didn't take me to this level. Immersing myself for years in writing and editing did. It's good and bad. Some of the joy in reading kind of faded but I can definitely still read for fun. I can pick up a lot off of a single pass. But two is when I start diving deeper. The Twilight books only got a single pass each so everything in the reviews is at first glance. I don't know anyone that can "read too deeply" into something off of a single reading, especially considering, statistically speaking, you're only capable of remembering 70% of what you see on a first look anyway.
So, needless to say, I didn't like them. I'll leave the reviews for more detailed reasons. I liked Alice, Jasper, Emmet, Rosalie, Carlisle, at times Esme (she wasn't really around much, was she?) and the Volturi. To an extent. They were good starts. Edward, Bella and Jacob, well, yeah. No.
I'm also not a fan of Stephenie Meyer either. I don't know her as a person but I've seen her interviews, read her responses and heard/read about how she composes herself as an author, especially as an author in the face of adversity and I have to say, I just don't like it. To not even acknowledge people asking legitimate questions about her work is just wrong (the infamous period question comes to mind, or how the laws of science seem to evade Forks and its surrounding areas, I know it's fantasy but even the rules within the fantasy need to make sense and remain consistent, there was also the petition that fans, fans, wanted to send Meyer asking for explanations on her writing which was blocked by her brother and then slandered as cruel, unthoughtful and a variety of other not nice words by him).
I could go on, but I won't. The Twilight series is an extraordinarily guilty pleasure (think 25 to life without the chance of parole, guilty) for me. I've never read a book where I so absolutely despised the main characters and read only for the instances of secondary characters. And I'm convinced the pages are laced with crack. It's the only way I can logically explain why I kept reading. But beyond that, I just didn't like it and I just really disagree with how Meyer holds herself in the author pool. I'll give her credit to the fact that she did something right with these books but I have no idea what it is. If she didn't do anything right, they would have flopped. That's only logical.
So consider yourself warned. Feel free to disagree with me intelligently but please don't be a Twihard (and I don't mean a fan of Twilight, I have nothing against Twilight fans,I mean the rabid Twichos that tear at their skin when they meet Rob Pattinson so they can bleed for him or the putzes that can't come up with any semi-intelligent means to defend the series other than with innane 'omgur so jelusstefanymiar is teh best ryter in teh world you so stoopid' or just downright nasty vitriol. Save it. I welcome discussion and even arguments, so long as they're done intelligently but I have an industrial strength fire extinguisher for the flamers.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Now onto the kindred spirit. I bet you're wondering who it is. Now, I don't know why the movie people made Rob Pattinson emulate this guy. I think they liked his ultra-fantastic cheekbones but I just don't know how smart the move actually was. It's eerie, though. As if Edward and his twin spirit were separated at birth. Perhaps Carlisle has more children than he's letting on. Or Edward's really a coal-miner's son that decided to stay out of the limelight. What do you think?
I mean, it's eerie, isn't it? And look, they even share the same expressions!
Spooky!
Now, aside from the fact that I so *heart* Photoshop, if you're a fan of Edward, you might think I'm being mean, especially with the good looking quote. I've heard people say there's more to Edward than looks but I'm still trying to figure out what. Is "stalker" a good quality? Anyway, just so you know I'm not making it up, here's Mr. Zoolander himself expressing that very line--
And you know James is Edward's arch nemesis, just as Hansel is to Derek. Perhaps this should have been Edward and James's final epic battle--
If you're still not getting the joke, for the love of god go rent Zoolander. No, just go buy it. It's probably on the $10 rack at Target. It'll be the best money you've ever spent. And just to keep the funny note going, a little *snerk* to send you off with--
I don't give books star ratings; I give them bite ratings. This is a bite. A book can get up to five of these evil-looking chompers, including half bites.
You can attribute your own wording to the ratings. Five's the best, three's decent, one and under isn't worth the gas to go to the library. I'll leave it to you to fill in the blanks.
