Twilight!

(no spoilers, don't worry!)

First of all I have to say that I love love love love LOVE the Twilight books.  I read the first 3 last October in about a week.  Then I bought them for myself for Christmas, and read them again a short while later.  Then I reread those three in preparation for Breaking Dawn coming out.  And I read Twilight for the fourth time in preparation for the moving coming out.  And every time I read them again, I keep thinking that since I already know the story I'll be able to casually read them in my spare time.  Wrong!  Every time I read them, I get sucked in, unable to do anything else besides the bare minimum to keep myself & my children alive.  And I am not unique in my love & obsession for these books!  When Breaking Dawn came out, pretty much every woman in my neighborhood was reading it & talking about it for quite a while following the release!

So I went to the movie with high hopes.  I went to the midnight showing, for crying out loud!  I don't think I've stayed up that late other than a handful of times in my brief unmarried college student life, >7 years ago!  I was very, very, very excited!  I get in trouble with Dan for expecting a movie-based-on-a-book to be too exactly like the book.  His explanation is that "they are different tellings of the same story."  I tried to go to Twilight with an open mind about it.  But I know the book so well, and remember so many details about it, so every time the movie wasn't quite on, it jumped out at me!  So as I noticed so many differences between the book & the movie, I tried to look at the reason for the difference.

Some differences I totally understand.  You just can't fit every detail in a movie & still keep it a reasonable length.  Things that were omitted or altered for that reason I grudgingly allowed.

Some things are changed to make more exciting for a movie.  I'm not sure how I feel about those.  I don't want to put any details at all in my post, so I'll have to just be vague about it.  But there are defintely some things that were altered just for entertainment factor.  I guess I can see why they might do those.  But come on, the book has clearly done well without them!  And your biggest audience is going to be people that love the book, so why change it from what they know the story to be?

The smallest differences were the most irritating to me.  When Stephenie Meyer describes what they're wearing, for example, THEY SHOULD BE WEARING IT IN THE MOVIE!  When she describes the color of walls, THEY SHOULD BE THAT COLOR!  The reason those things were SO SO SO irritating to me is that they're pointless!  They need to wear clothes, why can't they wear what the author said they're wearing?  I don't get it.  Either the costume person didn't know what the book has them wearing, and is stupid & ignorant (read the book, duh!).  Or the costume person knew what they were wearing in the book and thought that he/she could choose better, and is incredibly self centered.  Either way, it's really irritating that they couldn't follow the book on those small little details!

I guess the differences are my main complaint about the movie, becuase the book was so good that the movie should be just exactly like it!  My other complaint is the acting.  There were a lot of times that lines weren't delivered very well (and not just because it wasn't how I imagined!).  And there were lots of times that the characters' behavior wasn't as subtle as it should have been.  Maybe they thought we're all stupid and couldn't understand things unless it was overacted.  Or maybe they're just bad actors.

Overall, I just don't think they did a good job capturing the feel of Twilight.  They had the story line (sometimes mixed up), but Twilight is so much more than that.  Something about it makes grown women neglect their home & family to lose themselves in the world of Forks.  They didn't make that happen for me. I'm disappointed, because it's not like they can just try again to make it better. It just didn't turn out that great, too bad. Hopefully they'll do a better job on New Moon.

I will go see it again with my mom & sisters, though, and I'll try to have lower expectations this time.