Screenhead

Admittedly, when I went into New Moon this morning, I wasn’t expecting anything good.  My experience with Twilight was only a few months old, and it still hurt to think about that slow sludgy mess of sparkly emo boi vampires dragging the genre down with it.

But when I grit my teeth and walked in,  what I got was something somewhat different from what I was expecting.

Just to catch you up on the plot, we’re still with screechy loser Bella Swan and her sparkly emo boi vampire boyfriend Edward.  Only now, we discover that werewolves are also thrown in the mix (it was probably supposed to be a surprise but they tipped their own hand on this point MONTHS ago) and for some reason, both vampire Edward and relative newcomer werewolf Jacob Black are all very much into this pasty cipher of a girl who seems to exist for no other reason than to give the teenage girl fans in the audience an easy point for self-insertion.

Yes, there’s still plenty wrong with this whole thing.  One, none of these people can act worth a fart in a stiff wind–Kristen Stewart still seems dazed by the whole thing and is acting like she’s been suffering a concussion since about ten minutes into the first movie.  Robert Pattinson is a willowy mess–when he takes his shirt off and reveals his new “six pack” it looks like nothing so much as a man in desperate need of a SANDWICH.  Taylor Lautner is the girliest macho man I’ve ever SEEN.  He’s trying DESPERATELY hard to be some kind of bad-ass but then everything he tries is toned down so hard for the consumption of the tweenagers in the audience.  It’s like someone told him, “Be a bad boy, but don’t actually be THREATENING.”  He’s doing his best, I think, but he’s doing it under terribly strained conditions.

Also, why isn’t White Wolf suing holy hell out of Summit, Stephenie Meyer, et al for copyright violation?  I remember the nature-boy werewolves and cosmopolitan corporate vampires back when I was one of the handful of people playing the Rage card game back in 1995!  Now all of a sudden it’s a major motion picture and I don’t think White Wolf’s getting any taste on this.  They DO still have the license at last report even if it’s been sold more times than real estate.

But, like I said originally, this was better than I expected.  If for no other reason than the only way it could be much worse is if Stephenie Meyer personally came to theaters at random and gouged out the eyes of one of the viewers.  There was more action in this, and a developing storyline that still seems rather limited (White Wolf, for Pete’s sake, it’s werewolves versus vampires.  You did ALL this long before them!), but is actually somewhat bearable.

There’s still plenty of slow parts in this, though, and lots of reason to be unhappy, though not nearly as many as the FIRST Twilight installment gave us.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, naturally, agrees with me and hands over a five out of ten to a vampire franchise that may well be starting to look up.  If it continues improving at this rate, Breaking Dawn’s going to be a non-stop bloodbath and even I’ll be impressed.

New Moon.

Yeah, I know, I’m pretty bummed out about it myself.  At the rate this thing is going it’s going to DWARF the original Stoker.  Dracula is going to get pushed out by…Team Edward.

A little part of me just died typing that.

But it’s no less true for my squeamishness.  The number one pre-selling title of all time, at least as far as Fandango goes, is New Moon.  In fact, at the rate it’s going, there’s a good chance that theater owners will be resorting to little-known techniques like interlocking the reels to reduce the length of show times, or even running continuous loop showtimes, in which there’s no, or at least a minimum of, time between shows to get the most possible in a day.

One way or another, this thing is going to be one of the biggest movies of the year.  The Twifans have already bought their tickets and there will be virtually no competition on that weekend.  The only alternative is Planet 51 and a handful of limited release titles.  Thus, there’s pretty much no way that New Moon won’t take top spot this weekend.

First off, yes, Kristen Stewart DOES in fact have an action figure, based on her character Bella from the truly godawful Twilight series that everyone seems to love despite all logic and good common sense.

But anyway, she’s not terribly happy with that action figure, and you won’t believe why.

It turns out it has…ahem…larger attributes than she does.  I’ll let her be more specific:

“I think she has a much bigger rack than I have,” Kristen said. “I also think she looks much older than me.  I guess I can live with that. In fact, I’m getting used to the bigger rack.”

There are a great many things that could be said at this point but most of them would likely get me sued by somebody for some reason or another.  I’ll just suffice it to say that Hollywood’s weirdness truly knows no bounds.

Of course, purists and fans of the Darren Shan series, which we’ll be talking about today, already know that The Vampire’s Apprentice, which is basically a kind of Twilight aimed at tweenage BOYS rather than tweenage GIRLS, actually came first.

But when it comes to the movies, the first-mover advantage is crucial, and one thing’s clear–Twilight got it.

Anyway, we’re talking The Vampire’s Apprentice, which features one of those tweenage boys I was talking about who visits a freak show with a friend, only to discover that the freaks are a lot more real than he could have imagined.  And when one of them offers our boy–Darren Shan by name–the chance to become a vampire, he jumps at it.

Wouldn’t you?

Anyway, he discovers that vampirism isn’t all bloodsucking and cool powers, as he’ll learn the secrets of his new life while becoming the vampire’s apprentice.

Sounds cool, sure enough–vastly better than the nonstop parade of drama and suck that is the Twilight saga.  But will it pack the same kind of appeal the Twifans can bring to the game?  Only one way to find out–and we’ll find out this October when The Vampire’s Apprentice starts up.

I love the whole “vampires suck” pun.  I really do.  And I use it as often as I can because the whole thing is just so apt.  And then I discovered that Robert Downey Jr., who apparently got off the crack and got on with his career, is taking a whole new role–the vampire Lestat.

Oh yes…The Vampire Lestat will be coming our way on the order of eventually.  But this isn’t the first time an Anne Rice novel has been converted to film, either–Lestat was also played by Stuart Townshend back in that godawful tripe Queen of the Damned.  Chances are they’ll start at the beginning of Rice’s vampire hegemony and start with Interview With The Vampire.

I can’t deny that Robert Downey Jr.’s got some real acting chops, especially since his Ally McBeal days.  His time as Iron Man has been downright amazing, and even I’m prepared to be at least provisionally interested in a new Lestat piece.  Provisionally, mind you–this is the kind of vampire movie I generally hate.  But it’s worth keeping an eye on!

Normally, I hate vampire movies.  Why do I hate them?  Well, it’s not too hard to say why–most of them look exactly the same except for a handful of exceptions.  Blood Wars, meanwhile, proves why I hate this sort of thing.

Blood Wars puts a mild-mannered college student in the midst of a war between a group of vampires and a group of vampire-hunting warlocks.  The vampires have their own problems as members of the group vie for supremacy, but the hunters don’t seem to have these problems.

You can pretty much imagine where this goes–the vampires will act like pompous jackasses, their hunters will act like self-righteous jackasses and the random college kids that occasionally get involved will act like, well, jackasses.  Everyone in this movie is a complete jackass, and that makes me wonder why I’m even bothering to watch it.  It’s a horror movie that’s not scary, a thriller movie that has no thrills and a romance movie that falls flat.  And don’t even get me started on the waste of Tony Todd.  Seriously, don’t–you won’t like it.

The Screenhead Ten Scale takes this vampire movie that truly sucks to task and gives it a one out of ten.  Unless you’re up for wasting ninety minutes with the results of a vampire LARP so godawful that even college kids wouldn’t cop to it, there’s just no reason to even bother.

I am not a fan of movies like this, but I am sure some of you are. Thirst is getting raves from horror fans. I should warn you, though, that the trailer is age restricted. Yikes!!!

Vampire movies are all the bloody rage. Having seen a slumber for the past few years (possibly due to the awful Queen of the Damned, or Buffy and Angel overdosing us), the genre of sunlight-intolerant bloodsuckers is seeing a resurgence in the last year or so. The key player is Twilight, which transposes notions of abstainance upon a figure that traditionally represented a fear of sexuality, and its sequels are already confirmed. A remake of the Manga film Blood: The Last Vampire is in production. HBO series True Blood got great reviews and a commendable portion of the audience. Outside of the US the Norwegian film Let the Right One In received much acclaim and is already set to see a Hollywood remake. And now Korea is in on the resurgence.

Park Chan Wook is best known for the inventive and excellent thriller Old Boy, not to mention the other two parts of his Vengeance Trilogy. After making the minor I’m A Cyborg… the director is back on track with Thirst. It’s the atmospheric tale of a priest who gets turned into some sort of vampire creature as part of a botched experiment. The best vampire films are the ones who use it as a metaphor for some social or personal malaise. And this film seems to use the vampire figure to represent repressed religious feelings or a sense of doubt. The trailer is in Korean, but the visuals are strong enough to make Thirst seem like an intriguing tale. Thirst will appear in this month’s Cannes Film Festival, and should see a worldwide release later in the year.

Artist on Artist: Robert Pattinson & Hayley Williams

Check out this interview as Paramore founder Hayley Williams chats it up with actor Robert Pattinson in this exclusive MySpace Artist on Artist interview.

The Twilight star met with the “Decode” singer at The Velvet Margarita in Los Angeles to talk about former jobs (Pattinson was a hand model!), how they handle fan’s attention and to share their love of music and their desire to record a duet.

There are actually some personal insights that pretty real and cool to watch. 

Bloody Disgusting carries word that Spyglass Entertainment is preparing a new horror-comedy dubbed Blood Brothers.

Essentially a buddy comedy in the vein of Rush Hour and the like, but the catch is that one of the buddies is a vampire and the other a mortal. One of the scenarios I can imagine is how the mortal can feel scared of his buddy thinking he might suck him dry.

Owen Wilson is set to star in and produce the picture. The project does not have a start date as of yet.