Poor old Chris Weitz. Once considered a promising film-maker, round about the time he successfully transformed Nick Hornby's pleasant and enjoyable novel About a Boy into an equally pleasant and enjoyable movie starring Hugh Grant and that kid from Skins, he now finds himself working as a hired hand on film number two of the Twilight saga, the hugely popular but strangely bloodless series based on Stephenie Meyer's romantic books about a schoolgirl who falls in love with a vampire. The critics are predictably nonplussed by a movie that stretches to more than two hours, at least half of which is the celluloid equivalent of hanging out with a female Kevin the Teenager.
Heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) only gets a few moments of happiness at the beginning of the film before events unfurl to leave her lovelorn and miserable as abstinent bloodsucker Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) hotfoots it off to Italy in an attempt to provide her with a normal life. In his absence, she strikes up a friendship with her newly buff childhood pal Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who harbours a supernatural secret of his very own.
Beyblade online game tournament. 'Constrained by the plot of the novel, the film keeps the two lovers apart for quite a spell, robbing the project of the crazy-in-love energy that made Twilight, the first entry in the series, such a guilty pleasure,' writes the LA Times's Kenneth Turan. 'Weitz makes the vampire trains of Melissa Rosenberg's capable script run on time, but he almost seems too rational a director for this kind of project. This lack of animating madness combined with the novel's demands give much of New Moon a marking time quality.'
'There are some entertaining things about New Moon: Stewart is developing as an actor in a way Pattinson isn't, and there are droll scenes in which some characters go and see films,' writes our own Peter Bradshaw. Download software gratis full. 'But the franchise is looking a little anaemic.'
'Under Weitz's direction, the actors have gained some confidence, and this chaste love triangle among creatures of the night has all the requisite looks of tortured longing,' writes The Telegraph's Tim Robey. 'What it misses is any animating pulse: we just wait and wait for the bleeding obvious.'
Of course, none of the above is really catering for New Moon's target audience, so perhaps a fairer representation would be the reaction from fans who attended the film's first public screening in London's Leicester Square last week. Skip forward to around the 40-second mark in the video below for a battering of youthful enthusiasm.
New Moon, for me, is a marginal improvement on its predecessor, if only because Pattinson, an actor whose technique consists entirely of a sort of fixed, narcissistic pout and sullen-toned delivery, is absent for much of the movie. Stewart, in the pivotal role of Bella, actually does pretty well with very little material to work with. It's been clear since her beautifully understated turn in Greg Mottola's excellent Adventureland that she has the ability to play these type of damaged but enigmatic characters without resorting to histrionics.
Ultimately, however, New Moon is just way too long, and despite the odd visual flourish from Weitz – a shot in which a painting of some vampires comes alive is a nice touch – this is basically Dawson's Creek with more blood and teeth: enjoyably vapid entertainment for a hungover Sunday afternoon on the sofa, perhaps, but hardly worthy of a big screen outing.
I also have a major problem with what seems to me to be Meyer's ruthless exploitation of foetal teenage emotions. The story seems to encourage young people to hold on tight to their first love, no matter how much of the rest of their life is left in ruins. By the end of New Moon, as an intelligent 18-year-old, Bella surely ought to be girding her loins for some form of higher education and a whole new world of adventures. Mvci firmware update. Instead she is angling to be turned into a vampire herself so that she may spend eternity with her undead lover. The film's objectionable suggestion is that it is acceptable to make major life decisions when one is barely out of one's teens.
What did you think of New Moon, if you caught it over the weekend? Are the critics right to dismiss it? Or are you siding with the legions of teenage fans for whom R-Patz and K-Stew can do no wrong?