Twilight

Generally speaking a movie is targeted to a specific audience. Sometimes I fit those demographics. Sometimes I do not. For instance, I am probably not the target audience of Teletubbies - the Magic Pumpkin. Nor is my 9-year old daughter the target audience of the latest bare-breasted Kate Winslet movie.

That being said, I was a bit skeptical about Twilight, the "romantic" vampire movie. Everyone said it was an awesome book and an awesome movie. Whenever something gets hyped up that much it usually sucks. And this is the first in a series of movies, so you know they're going to leave you hanging.

The movie starts off innocently enough. A girl moves in with her father and starts a new school. On her first day of school she ends up sitting next to this pasty white emaciated boy with wall-to-wall carpeting over his eyes. They don't hit it off very well and she obviously thinks he's a freak. I never got past my first impression.

Make-up boy later returns and is friendlier than ever and from there the attraction grows. However, she eventually finds out that he's a vampire (no secret to the viewers unless you've been hiding on Facebook for a year). Now she's caught in a world where she knows too much and can't go back, but she's also in love.

One of the main problems here is that vampires like to eat people. To me this is like having a crush on a slice of pepperoni pizza. Eventually one of us is going to get eaten. Can she date a vampire, or will their love for each other be divided by their circumstances?

The movie was made with many colors filtered out so that all images are mostly white, grey, black, and blue. It's an interesting effect and appropriate for a movie about vampires and darkness and all that. Twilight stars Kristen Stewart (Into the Wild, What Just Happened?) as Bella and Robert Pattinson (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) as Edward Cullen, the mysterious vampire boyfriend. The movie was directed by Catherine Hardwicke who also directed The Nativity Story and 13.

Twilight is 122 minutes long and rated PG-13 for violence and sensuality.

Overall, the movie kept my interest, but I think it was more because people told me it was supposed to. I found the movie to be fairly predictable and the screenplay a bit too artistic. If you like this kind of movie, then you will probably enjoy Twilight. I, however, like to be forced to think about the movie and be surprised by plot twists, or just slap me in the face and make me laugh. This one did neither. I give this movie 3 stars. Not great. Not horrible. It's average.