Tag Archives: Bill Condon

Film Review (plus a Twilight Primer): The Twilight Saga – Breaking Dawn, Part I (dir. by Bill Condon)

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

“Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.” – Stephen King

I have a problem with the notion that says you have to have someone in your life in order for your life to be considered perfect or grand. I’m of the mind that you step into the world alone and leave it the same same way. Even if you are surrounded by your nearest and dearest friends when you pass, you’re still the only one making that trip. And while I love the notion of Romance, I don’t believe it needs to translate to “Omigod, if you’re not near me, I’m going to jump off this building, I swear it because I can’t talk about you without stammering.” or the other obsessive notions that Twilight seems to bring up. This doesn’t mean I outright hate everything that Twilight is, but I’m not totally fond of the overall message it conveys. Perhaps I’m just emotionally cold that way.

And yet, I may know more about Twilight than any other guy in the known universe. It’s an enigma, I know.

A little background on why I, a guy, am writing a review for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, which is pretty much geared for girls. Note that I’ll refer to the film just as Breaking Dawn, because I really don’t see Twilight as a Saga by any means.

In the early 90’s, I hit a “Vampire Phase”. Between playing games of Vampire: The Masquerade and reading every Vampire Chronicle novel that Anne Rice wrote up until Tale of the Body Thief, I was pretty involved. I grew up with Vampires that were monsters to be feared (and sometimes admired), and dodged the sun more or less. I even owned two vampire encyclopedias. Somewhere between Mark Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” (a book I still haven’t finished) and Andrew Davidson’s “The Gargoyle”, I picked up a hardcover copy of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” from Barnes & Noble. I didn’t think much of the books, save that they were quick reads. Meyer and her vampires were far from Rice and her universe lacked the erotic flair of Laurell K. Hamilton’s earlier books in the Anita Blake series. They were more or less books for teens, but they had vampires in them, so I pretty much inhaled all four books (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn) twice in Hardcover. I even went so far to read Meyer’s “The Host” and have seen all of the other Twilight films in the theatre. While they all seem to be really close to the source material, there’s something strange in the translation. What made sense on paper really didn’t on screen (Sparkling Vampires jump to mind), but I guess that’s for an Editorial.

So, when it came to reviewing Breaking Dawn, we at the Shattered Lens drew straws. While we hold to the tenet that any movie can be reviewed by anyone even if the movie was previously reviewed by anyone else (for alternate viewpoints), this was a film that was pretty much off our collective radars. I think we all secretly wanted Lisa or Erin to take it, but both Lisa and my cousin gave the argument that I could probably give a different perspective on the film than all of the girls who planned to see it, most of whom would sprout something like the following:

“I love Edward so much, and that he took his time with Bella was just so heartfelt that I wanted to cry. I felt so bad for Jacob that he could haven’t have her. He deserves better than that!! If anyone doesn’t like what I’m saying, then I will come to their houses and stab them with rusty blades in their beds because no one – I mean no one – gets in the way of my Twilight Love!! You haters could suck it! Team Edward/Jacob Forever!!!!”

So, here I am, writing this. Let’s see what becomes of it, shall we?

For those of you who managed to avoid the Twilight books and movies like they were Sutter Cane novels, here’s everything you’ll ever need to know.

Twilight is the story of Isabella Swan (Kristen Stewart) who moves from Arizona (where Meyer lives) to Forks, Washington to live with her Sheriff father, Charlie (Billy Burke). While in school, she meets an interesting but strange fellow in Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). After being saved from a near fatal car crash in an impossible fashion by Edward, Bella becomes intrigued with who and what he may be. A little big of Googling and book buying leads her to discover that Edward is in fact, a Vampire. He explains he’s dangerous. She doesn’t care. He states he’s a killing machine. She loves the danger. He steps into the sunlight to show he doesn’t burn, he just sparkles. She’s just mesmerized.

The original Twilight was Bella’s introduction to The Cullens (who are more or less Vegetarians in that they don’t go after humans, but animals instead):

Carlyle (Peter Facinelli) – Father figure and Doctor. He recruited the rest of the family.

Esmee (Elizabeth Reaser) – Carlyle’s Wife and Mother Figure.

Emmett (Kellan Lutz) – The Muscle of the Family and companion to Rosalie.

Rosalie (Nikki Reed) – Emmett’s Companion and is pretty much opposed to Bella up until Breaking Dawn, for reasons she explains in Eclipse.

Alice (Ashley Greene) – Companion to Jasper and has the ability to see the decisions that others make before they make them.

Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) -The newest vampire of the group and companion to Alice. Has the ability to manipulate the emotional tides of others.

In Twilight, Bella and the Family run into a trio of vampires, one of which decides he has to hunt down and kill Bella (because she’s food). The family is able to kill the vampire and get on with their undead lives, not before a final parting shot showing the vampire’s girlfriend and her desire to kill Bella in return. Bella decides it’s in her best interests to become a vampire and tries to persuade Edward to change her, but he refuses, citing she has many years ahead of her worth living.

In New Moon, Edward decides to celebrate Bella’s birthday at his place. After an accident occurs that leaves her bleeding, Jasper loses it and attacks her. The family is able to save her, but this convinces Edward that it just won’t work out and the entire family leaves town. Left on her own, Bella spends the next four months crying and screaming in her sleep over Edward until her father convinces her to hang out with her friends. She ends up spending more time with Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), a friend who lives on a nearby reservation that clued her into what the Cullens really were. They get closer as friends and eventually, she discovers that Jacob and his family are actually Werewolves. While cool, she also learns that the Werewolves don’t get along with Vampires and despise the Cullens. They haven’t killed the vampires because of a Treaty that was enacted long ago. Werewolves stay on their side, Cullens on the other and no humans get hurt. Victoria (the girlfriend of that dead vampire in Twilight) returns to town to kill Bella, but she’s protected by the Wolves. She ends up doing a little cliff diving, which catches Alice’s attention and she manages to reunite with the family, though learns that Edward plans to kill himself. Edward believes she died when she jumped off the cliff, volunteering himself to death by the Vampire Congress known as the Volturri.

Alice and Bella fly to Italy and intercede, rescuing Edward from his fate and meeting the Volturri. As Bella knows too much, the Volturri leader demands that within a year she has to becomes a vampire. This of course, excites Bella and annoys Edward, who throws in a “Let’s get Married First” clause into the works. The idea of this is to help give closure to all the humans in Bella’s life. She reluctantly agrees to it. Jacob catches wind of this and spends the next book & film, Eclipse, trying to convince Bella that she should live and that he’s the better choice of a love interest.

Okay, Eclipse. Victoria knows that she can’t get to Bella on her own without dealing with both the Werewolves and the Vampires. She finds a resident of Forks in Seattle named Riley Biers and changes him to a Vampire, convincing him that the Cullens are bad and killed her friend. He builds an army and they attack the Cullens en masse, but somewhere along the line, Victoria forgot to mention there may be giant dogs in the area. The Cullens and Werewolves join forces and defeat the newborns with ease. In the process, Bella learns more about the Wolves and their ability to “Imprint”, meaning they basically obsess over one person for the rest of their lives (much like whales, I suppose). Luckily, Jacob hasn’t Imprinted on Bella yet. Edward eventually dispatches Riley and Victoria, leaving the romance to continue. In Eclipse, the Cullens explain to Bella how they came to be, partially to help her what she has to look forward to, positive or negative.

And all that brings us to Breaking Dawn, Part I.

Of the Twilight movies, I still feel Eclipse was the strongest one. Breaking Dawn covers everything the 1st half of the book does and manages to do it without stepping past the PG-13 bounds it created. The film starts off with Edward and Bella’s Wedding, with different reactions from everyone. Jacob hates it, wolfs out and runs to Canada. The Cullens are ecstatic. Charlie manages to deal with it. The wedding ceremony is done well, and gives some screen time to all of the high school friends (who we won’t be seeing after the wedding). Stephenie Meyer herself even has a cameo here (and eerily looks like my mother). Even the honeymoon is done better than I thought it would. Anyone expecting Bella and Edward’s honeymoon to look like something out of a late night Cinemax series may be disappointed, but the romance is nice to see and there were some laughs in the audience. Again, it’s Twilight. I’m not expecting Jane Eyre or Sense & Sensibility romance levels. At least, that’s what the snoring mother sitting next to me who brought her kids felt, I think.

After the married couple’s wild honeymoon, Bella discovers she’s miraculously pregnant and even worse, the unborn child is sucking the very life from her. The wolves find out about this and feel that she needs to be eliminated, along with the rest of the Cullens, as it breaks the Treaty. Bella is rushed home while the Cullens try to find a way to save both the baby and the mother. Will Bella make it? Will the Wolves pounce on the vampires? Those are some of the questions brought to the table.

Jacob finds himself taking sides with the Cullens, which causes him to recall his Alpha Status in his wolf pack and stand alone (or nearly alone) against his family. In the book, this was done pretty well, but translated to the screen the scene with wolves telepathically yelling at one another seemed a little cartoonish. Just change back to people and talk it over. I guess it was done that way to show how animals have the whole Alpha / Omega relationship, and remains one embarrassing moment in a sea of scenes that were okay.

Visually, Eclipse was a serious step up from both Twilight and New Moon. Breaking Dawn seemingly returns to the look and feel of the original Twilight, right down to Carter Burwell’s score. With the exception of the Bella’s Lullaby theme (which worked incredibly well, especially at the last two minutes of the film), the music felt a little weak to me.  I actually preferred Howard Shore’s score to Eclipse. Don’t get me wrong, the movie goes where it’s supposed to, but you’d expect things to look a little better as it goes along. It would be nice if they improved on that.

One other thing I’ll give this (and that’s all of the Twilight mess) is the audience. I live for seeing audiences react to what they’re seeing on the screen, and I can’t remember a more reactive audience set since Captain America. Some of the girls who go to see this really go wild over it, and some of the guys grumble loudly. My theatre was packed, right down to the front seats where you have to crane your neck up to see everything. It’s the closest to a Midnight Movie experience you could have at a Matinee.

The big problem Breaking Dawn Part II will have will be trying to be exciting, because there isn’t a lot that occurs in the second half of the story that’s worthy of stretching it out to nearly two hours. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with that.

Overall, Breaking Dawn doesn’t really break any new ground in Vampire myths or anything like that. For anyone unfamiliar with the Twilight movies or books, it may feel slow and even a little boring at times. For it’s target audience (readers of the book), it gives them just about everything they wanted.

10 (Plus) Of My Favorite DVD Commentary Tracks

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It seems like I’m always taking a chance when I listen to a DVD commentary track.  Occasionally, a commentary track will make a bad film good and a good film even better.  Far too often, however, listening to a bad or boring commentary track will so totally ruin the experience of watching one of my favorite movies that I’ll never be able to enjoy that movie in the same way again.  I’ve learned to almost always involve any commentary track that involves anyone credited as being an “executive producer.”  They always want to tell you every single detail of what they had to do to raise the money to make the film.  Seriously, executive producers suck. 

However, there are more than a few commentary tracks that I could listen to over and over again.  Listed below are a few of them.

10) Last House On The Left (The Original) — Apparently, there’s a DVD of this film that features a commentary track in which stars David Hess and Fred Lincoln nearly come to blows while debating whether or not this movie should have been made.  The DVD I own doesn’t feature that commentary but it does feature a track featuring writer/director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham.  The thing that I love about their commentary is that they both just come across as such nice, kinda nerdy guys.  You look at the disturbing images onscreen and then you hear Cunningham saying, “We shot this scene in my mom’s backyard.  There’s her swimming pool…”  Both Craven and Cunningham are remarkably honest about the film’s shortcomings (at one point, Craven listens to some of his more awkward dialogue and then says, “Apparently, I was obsessed with breasts…”) while, at the same time, putting the film’s controversy into the proper historical context.

9) Burnt Offerings – When Burnt Offerings, which is an occasionally interesting haunted house movie from 1976, was released on DVD, it came with a commentary track featuring director Dan Curtis, star Karen Black, and the guy who wrote the movie.  This commentary track holds a strange fascination for me because it, literally, is so mind-numbingly bad that I’m not convinced that it wasn’t meant to be some sort of parody of a bad commentary track.   It’s the commentary track equivalent of a car crash.  Curtis dominates the track which is a problem because he comes across like the type of grouchy old man that Ed Asner voiced in Up before his house floated away.  The screenwriter, whose name I cannot bring myself to look up, bravely insists that there’s a lot of nuance to his painfully simple-minded script.  Karen Black, meanwhile, tries to keep things positive.  The high point of the commentary comes when Black points out that one actor playing a menacing chauffeur is giving a good performance (which he is, the performance is the best part of the movie).  She asks who the actor is.  Curtis snaps back that he doesn’t know and then gets testy when Black continues to praise the performance.  Finally, Curtis snaps that the actor’s just some guy they found at an audition.  Actually, the actor is a veteran character actor named Anthony James who has accumulated nearly 100 credits and had a prominent supporting role in two best picture winners (In the Heat of the Night and Unforgiven).

8 ) Cannibal Ferox – This is a good example of a really unwatchable movie that’s made watchable by an entertaining commentary track.  The track is actually made up of two different tracks, one with co-star Giovanni Lombardo Radice and one with director Umberto Lenzi.  Lenzi loves the film and, speaking in broken English, happily defends every frame of it and goes so far as to compare the movie to a John Ford western.  The wonderfully erudite Radice, on the other hand, hates the movie and spends his entire track alternatively apologizing for the movie and wondering why anyone would possibly want to watch it.  My favorite moment comes when Radice, watching the characters onscreen move closer and closer to their bloody doom, says, “They’re all quite stupid, aren’t they?”

7) Race With The Devil – Race with the Devil is an obscure but enjoyable drive-in movie from the 70s.  The DVD commentary is provided by costar Lara Parker who, along with providing a lot of behind-the-scenes information, also gets memorably catty when talking about some of her costars.  And, let’s be honest, that’s what most of us want to hear during a DVD commentary.

6) Anything featuring Tim Lucas — Tim Lucas is the world’s foremost authority on one of the greatest directors ever, Mario Bava.  Anchor Bay wisely recruited Lucas to provide commentary for all the Bava films they’ve released on DVD and, even when it comes to some of Bava’s lesser films, Lucas is always informative and insightful.  Perhaps even more importantly, Lucas obviously enjoys watching these movies as much as the rest of us.  Treat yourself and order the Mario Bava Collection Volume 1 and Volume 2.

5) Tropic Thunder – The commentary track here is provided by the film’s co-stars, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, and Robert Downey, Jr.  What makes it great is that Downey provides his commentary in character as Sgt. Osiris and spends almost the entire track beating up on Jack Black.  This is a rare case of a great movie that has an even greater commentary track.

4) Strange Behavior – This wonderfully offbeat slasher film from 1981 is one of the best movies that nobody seems to have heard of.  For that reason alone, you need to get the DVD and watch it.  Now.  As an added bonus, the DVD comes with a lively commentary track featuring co-stars Dan Shor and Dey Young and the film’s screenwriter, Bill Condon (who is now the director that Rob Marshall wishes he could be).  Along with providing a lot of fascinating behind-the-scenes trivia, the three of them also discuss how Young ended up getting seduced by the film’s star (Michael Murphy, who was several decades older), how shocked Condon was that nobody on the set seemed to realize that he’s gay, and why American actors have so much trouble speaking in any accent other than their own.  Most memorable is Young remembering the experience of sitting in a theater, seeing herself getting beaten up onscreen, and then listening as the people sitting around her cheered.

3) Imaginationland — As anyone who has ever listened to their South Park commentaries knows, Matt Stone and Trey Parker usually only offer up about five minutes of commentary per episode before falling silent.  Fortunately, those five minutes are usually hilarious and insightful.  Not only are Parker and Stone remarkably candid when talking about the strengths and weaknesses of their work but they also obviously enjoy hanging out with each other.  With the DVD release of South Park’s Imaginationland trilogy, Matt and Trey attempted to record a “full” 90-minute commentary track.  For the record, they manage to talk for 60 minutes before losing interest and ending the commentary.  However, that track is the funniest, most insightful 60 minutes that one could hope for.

2) Donnie Darko – The original DVD release of Donnie Darko came with 2 wonderful commentary tracks.  The first one features Richard Kelley and Jack Gyllenhaal, talking about the very metaphysical issues that the film addresses.  Having listened to the track, I’m still convinced that Kelley pretty much just made up the film as he went along but its still fascinating to the hear everything that was going on his mind while he was making the film.  However, as good as that first track is, I absolutely love and adore the second one because it features literally the entire cast of the movie.  Seriously, everyone from Drew Barrymore to Jena Malone to Holmes Osborne to the guy who played Frank the Bunny is featured on this track.  They watch the film, everyone comments on random things, and it’s difficult to keep track of who is saying what.  And that’s part of the fun.  It’s like watching the film at a party full of people who are a lot more interesting, funny, and likable than your own actual friends.

1) The Beyond – This movie, one of the greatest ever made, had one of the best casts in the history of Italian horror and the commentary here features two key members of that cast — Catriona MacColl and the late (and wonderful) David Warbeck.  The commentary, which I believe was actually recorded for a laserdisc edition of the film (though, to be honest, I’ve never actually seen a “laserdisc” and I have my doubts as to whether or not they actually ever existed), was recorded in 1997, shortly after the death of director Lucio Fulci and at a time when Warbeck himself was dying from cancer.  (Warbeck would pass away two weeks after recording this commentary).  This makes this commentary especially poignant.  Warbeck was, in many ways, the human face of Italian exploitation, a talented actor who probably deserved to be a bigger star but who was never ashamed of the films he ended up making.  This commentary — in which MacColl and Warbeck quite cheerfully recall discuss making this underrated movie — is as much a tribute to Warbeck as it is to Fulci.  Highpoint: MacColl pointing out all the scenes in which Warbeck nearly made her break out laughing.  My personal favorite is the scene (which made it into the final film) where Warbeck attempts to load a gun by shoving bullets down the barrel.  The wonderful thing about this track is that Warbeck and MacColl enjoy watching it too.