The Twilight Saga: Eclipse - Discussion and Grading

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by Dream, Jun 29, 2010.

  1. Gaith

    Gaith Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I agree that that's a factor, though I'd argue that in most stereotypically male-centric cultural stuff (Halo, 007, Trek even), there are core values of serving the greater good, unlike Meyer's fantasies.

    Ironic, isn't it: the protectionist impulse which makes many of us men loathe Twilight is the narrative foundation of the series itself! Reminds me of a top FML:
    :rommie:
     
  2. Kegg

    Kegg Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Wait what?

    I'm sorry, but nobody needs to justify their fantasy or their entertainment with the notion it has 'core values of serving the greater good'. It's entertainment; not a sermon. And there is plenty of stuff that's exceedingly popular with teenage boys that is, ah, downright immoral.

    The Grand Theft Auto series, for example. What sort of inspiring core values does that teach? Damned if I care; I'm not the biggest fan of the franchise but I've enjoyed them myself since my eye-opening experience just running around a city hitting people with a bat in III.

    But heck, if I need inspiring core values, I can pretty much chuck half the cultural detrius that is my entertainment in the sewer. So long, Kind Hearts and Coronets. Fare thee well, Oscar Wilde. It's just a very contentious notion to maintain, frankly.

    And there are guys who have married virtual avatars. There's always going to be people who confuse and conflate fantasy and reality in any sufficiently large fandom.
     
  3. Thestral

    Thestral Vice Admiral Admiral

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    If it helps I was first introduced to the Twilight-dislike by a feminist woman who's currently engaged.

    Besides.... this.
     
  4. ParticleMan

    ParticleMan Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    If I were the FML dude, I'd be breathing a huge sigh of relief that I was no longer associated with an individual who is apparently incapable of understanding normal human relationships or distinguishing between fact and fiction...
     
  5. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    I've watched "Manos: Hands of Fate"'s MST3K version dozens of times. I wouldn't call it my favorite movie.
     
  6. Gaith

    Gaith Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Maybe with adults, but I believe in the value of presenting children with moral instruction via art. You may now assail me to your heart's content.

    Your implicit suggestion that sermons can't entertain is totally absurd. A righteous message, well-argued, is a singularly thrilling thing.

    Well, I believe that the vast majority of recreational video games, especially GTA, at best debase and dehumanize by wasting precious life-time, so I don't think you'd like to start that argument here without veering a good ways off-topic. For the record, I disapprove of letting children watch Twilight or play GTA.
     
  7. Kegg

    Kegg Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I think that's up to parents, not you, frankly. And Twilight is marketed and sold as aimed at teenagers; not children. Thankfully I had more leinent parents then that, I think; I remember reading The Iliad at age twelve and being blown away at the depth and complexity of the work. I still have a deep fondness for Hector; a loving father and husband who was also mercilessly brutal on the battlefield.

    But no, I guess I should have read Harry Potter (I'm not sure if it had been invented yet, aber); and given some of the philosophy reading of my teenage years a pass. Anything even remotely antinomian, heaven forfend!

    Actually my implict suggestion is that entertainment need not be sermons. If I was against the very idea of sermonizing entertainment why would I be a Trekkie?

    That's just plain ridiculous. I could understand this argument if you were against video games and/or entertainment sui generis; but you think it's a waste of people's time to enjoy entertainment that isn't moralizing at them? Entertainment is pretty much by definition a timewasting activity; it's what we do for fun. Maybe some people's ideas of fun involve elaborate mental games or narratives that demand to be interrogated; maybe trashy guilty pleasures; maybe middling middle-brow entertainment; maybe staring at a damn brick wall; maybe all of the above (brick walls can be pretty interesting.)
     
  8. Dream

    Dream Admiral Admiral

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    One thing I really liked about the Eclipse movie was how they handled Riley.

    In the book, he just shows out of nowhere and is first named during the final battle. But in the movie, they show much more of Riley's background, his family, him getting vamped, and there are actually scenes with Riley building the army. The actor also did a good job. I thought Xavier Samuel made a more convincing villain than Bryce Dallas Howard's Victoria.
     
  9. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    It seems this is a theme in the Twilight movies, the secondary characters get a lot more attention than the secondary ones. Along the same lines, as I understand it, the "bad vampires" in the first movie just showed up at the end of the book/at the ballgame but in the movie the director/writer had the intercut scenes of the vampires coming towards Forks.

    But damn, the Vampire Bride Killing Spree thing would've made for an awesome movie, or even the Civil War Vampire dude, hell I could watch an entire movie of Alice pitching a baseball :drool: in the Cullen's vampire baseball play. Anything secondary in this movie series I'd much rather watch than what the central focus of these movies is.
     
  10. Rii

    Rii Rear Admiral

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    I've used films that way with my younger brother on occasion. Time was I had mild concerns about him wrt racism and drug use; nothing serious mind you, just trash talk with friends for the most part that he'd as likely as not have grown out of anyway, but a potential issue. So in both cases I nipped it in the bud by sitting him down with American History X and Requiem for a Dream respectively, age advisory tags be damned. :lol:

    That was a 'shock and horror' approach, though. If the attitudes and behaviour of a child or teenager can be altered by mere osmosis in the form of exposure to a few novels depicting less than healthy relationships, then there mustn't have been much in the child's head in the first place, either wrt relationships specifically, or more underlying values. I'm no expert on parenting, but rather than forbidding children and teenagers to indulge their curiosity or base interest in stuff like Twilight, I'd seek to ensure that they were also presented with alternative examples and messages in the form of other fiction, real relationships, subtle parental guidance, and so on.

    Re: adults and trash. I once read a document by a feminist author arguing, amongst other things, that the reason men like lesbian pornography is because they place themselves in the scene and fantasise about converting the women to heterosexuality via the sheer power of their penis. Needless to say, this is a classic case of overthinking the problem; but it's not difficult to understand how the author arrived at the idea. The notion that lesbians are women who simply haven't met the right penis is out there; in its most harmful form giving rise to so-called 'corrective rape'. Depending upon its form of expression, the idea can be absurd, distasteful, or abhorrent. But in any case, it's not a nation to be enjoyed.

    So when it cropped up in Sin City (Marv: "Lucille's my parole officer. She's a dyke, but God knows why. With that body of hers she could have any man she wants.") I should've been offended. Or disturbed. Or something. But I wasn't, because it was too goddamn funny. From the picturesque lipstick lesbians with breasts glistening in the moonlight, to the protagonist's rough growl of a voice, it was all so knowingly, gloriously masculine that it transcended offensiveness to come full circle around to being awesome again. Male power fantasies are everywhere; but rarely so unabashed and exuberant as Sin City. And that very quality allowed me to enjoy it; to indulge in attitudes and behaviours that in most other contexts I find distasteful. In being so clearly a fantasy, I was able to treat it as such and disengage my faculties for the duration. It wasn't moral, or enlightening, but I doubt I came out of it any worse a human being than I was going in.

    In the same way I expect girls and women can enjoy Twilight without having their attitudes wrt relationships and sexuality warped in the process.

    I haven't even seen most of my favourite films that many times. :lol:
     
  11. Dream

    Dream Admiral Admiral

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    The first book is really funny. HALF the book is about how hot/wonderful/perfect Edward is. Entire paragraphs can be skipped without missing anything. I was amazed that they were actually able to make a movie out of it. The only interesting parts for me were about the vampires. I really think most people wouldn't give this series a second look if Edward and Jacob were just normal dudes instead of monsters.
     
  12. Gaith

    Gaith Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Oh, absolutely. One mark of successful parenting of young girls today: you have a teenage daughter who has no interest in Twilight, or, if she must, enjoys it on an appropriately mature and sardonic level. If, on the other hand, you have a daughter, especially aged 8-14 or so, who actually thinks it's a work of art, and not a juicebomb, well... some remedial parenting may be in order. :p
     
  13. Brent

    Brent Admiral Admiral

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    I saw it, guess its the best one of the series so far, I've never read the books so I don't know how it compares. It was entertaining enough, held my attention, definitely feels a little juvenile though. However, I really like how Edward is so passionate about waiting until marriage, it is rare to find conviction like that in movies these days. So thumbs up to that. I hear there is a really graphic sex scene in the novel though, interesting to see how they pull that off in the upcoming movie.
     
  14. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    I don't see how it's great or "passionate" that Edward wants to wait, the sex part, I mean... Should he really be praised for doing the right thing?

    It's my understanding they have sex in the book pretty much "off screen", i.e. it's not described in any detail. However:

    Edward impregnates Bella while she's still human, the baby/vampire hybrid gets its vampire superpowers in the womb and eventualy causes Bella some internal damage when it comes to term (oh, it gestates quickly too). Over the course of the "delivery" Bella vomits a "fountain of blood", gets her pelvis shattered and eventualy the baby snaps her spine. Dying, and in severe pain, Edward is forced to rip open Bella's uterus with his teeth to extract the baby, he then injects her with vampire venom which causes her to heal and change into a vampire. Meanwhile, Jacob "imprints" on the infant. IIRC over the course of the book the baby hyper-ages to 17-year-old when it stops aging and stays an underaged baby/vampire chest-burster hellspawn lovechild for Jacob.
     
  15. Dream

    Dream Admiral Admiral

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    It's been announced that the next two movies will be PG-13. They'll definately be toning it down if that want to keep that rating. Not sure how much the story will change or still the same though.
     
  16. Gaith

    Gaith Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Okay, about that ending...

    If the baby is half-vampire, and will speedily age until she appears 17 and then, according to Wikpedia, stop aging, will she be immortal and still appear 17 when Jacob dies of old age, or will Jacob go half-vampire too? Of if she does age...

    Never mind, I just Googled it; apparently Meyer says that werewolves can also live forever if they want to. So basically the four of them don't ever have to get old or die. That's even stupider than I though BD was, and I didn't think that possible.

    Wow.
     
  17. Trippy

    Trippy NaNoWriMo Victim Admiral

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    For all the information you seem to have at your fingertips, I had assumed you had read the novels. There are two sex scenes that happen while Bella is still alive that do not happen 'off screen' and one once she has turned.

    I imagine, though, they will be 'off screen' for the film to keep the rating.
     
  18. Dream

    Dream Admiral Admiral

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    The movie can have sex scenes and still keep the PG-13 rating. They just can't show too much.
     
  19. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    I've not read the books but have read and seen a lot about them, from what I recalled the "sex scenes" in the book were either off screen or pretty much nothing to write home about.
     
  20. FPAlpha

    FPAlpha Vice Admiral Premium Member

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