Posted on 11/23/2009 5:35:21 AM PST by Dr. Scarpetta
"The Twilight Saga: New Moon" features long, steamy, smoldering gazes by handsome, shirtless young men who are vampires or werewolves.
Despite those lingering, lustful looks the film includes only four kisses and not a single sex scene.
Women and girls, who made up 80 percent of the opening weekend audience, said that is one reason "The Twilight Saga" appeals to them.
"I actually like that, the fact that they don't have bedroom scenes or anything," Gabrielle Rivera, 15, said.
Clearly the storyline is working. In the first three days, the box office raked in $140.7 million, according to studio estimates.
That places "New Moon" third behind "The Dark Knight" and "Spider-Man 3" on the highest-earning films for an opening weekend on the domestic charts.
The movies are based on the "Twilight" books, written by Stephanie Meyer.
Meyer, a Mormon, wrote her lead character, Edward, to be a chaste and noble protector of his love interest, Bella.
This may explain why the movie is a hit among so-called "Twilight Moms" who have described Edward as "the perfect man."
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Ah, Barnabus. I heard they were trying to ressurect Dark Shadows, I wonder if it’s still in the works.
If they ever put that on Hulu, my daughter would probably watch it. I wonder if they even FILMED it though, or if it was purely live-action?
The bottom line - These books/movies rae dumb (unless you like that sort of thing)
The Lord of the Rings books/movie - dumb (unless you like that sort of thing)
Star Wars Saga - dumb (unless you like that sort of thing)
Any book by Stephen King - dumb (unless you go for that sort of thing)
It’s all about whatever floats your boat. What’s the point of even debating it? The only provable fact is that love-sick pre-teen to young adult women love sappy love story movies and will drop a ton of cash on them - ie Titanic and Twilight.
I’m just glad in our capitalistic (for now) society businesses can make money of these chicks. It’s a good thing.
The number of worthwhile films is always a minority. Same goes with books, music...
Truer words were never spoken.
You’ve got it. Far too many want to apply their own personal taste to others; As in, if you don’t like what i like, or if you like something i hate, you are a loser dweeb without a life. Anyone that expresses that sentiment is a loser dweeb! LOL!
That implies there are no objective standards. Sometimes something just isn’t very good. Regardless of how many people like it.
and whether Twilight is objectively GOOD is of no moment to those who enjoy reading the books and seeing the movies. there are plenty of ACCLAIMED works that i simply have no interest in seeing. what does it matter?
It is the difference between literature/CINEMA and just plain ENTERTAINMENT. Not a soul on the planet is claiming Twilight is the former, but the success at the box office proves that it performs in the latter category.
To those who care about a shared culture it does matter.
A shared culture? what do you mean? Do you propose minimum standards imposed on books/movies and those not meeting the standards, what then? whose standards? are we permitted individual taste? I honestly don’t understand what your concern is.
I’m saying that ‘it’s just people’s opinions so who cares’ doesn’t get very far. What’s the point of discussing anything then? Henry James is a better writer than Stephen King no matter how many people prefer the latter to the former. An uninformed opinion is exactly that. Bad taste is bad taste.
And in America, last i checked we were permitted to have bad taste. Again, literature vs. entertainment. If one wants to feel smug that he/she won’t stoop to reading anything less than literature, he/she can go ahead and feel superior and most people won’t be bothered by it. It says more about the one feeling the need to feel superior than anyone else, IMO. I am saying that there is room for dreck, always has been and always will be. if this book/movie series had pretensions claiming to be literature or cinema, i’d say it was open to criticism. It doesn’t. it is what it is, and IT IS, if nothing else, financially SUCCESSFUL.
Except of course if nobody is reading Henry James then it’s not really part of the shared culture. By the very nature of the beast the shared culture tends towards the lowest common denominator. So the more approachable authors like King are going to be more of a part of our shared culture than the “artistically superior” authors like Henry James. Now 90 odd years after his death King will probably be completely forgotten, and James will probably still have the same level of following then as he does now (ie the literati), but there will be a new shared culture then, and it will be ruled by a new version of King not a new version of James.
What is the upshot of your lament? you are wishing everyone had better taste? that these type of movies weren’t successful, weren’t MADE, because you don’t consider them up to your standards? how does this square up with freedom? yeah i know, NO ONE’s talking about censorship, that’s been said here repeatedly, so what ARE you talking about then? just a general moaning about the degradation of the popular culture?
Who said we weren’t? I’m not claiming ‘there oughta be a law’ I’m claiming that educated people should know better than to espouse the ‘everyone’s opinion is equal’ canard. And actually, the Twlight films do have pretensions to seriousness. That’s certainly how their audience takes them.
I guess that guy’s not the werewolf.
There has always been junk made for the mass market. There always will be. But that doesn’t mean that people who know better shouldn’t call it as such. I’m making an argument against Aesthetic Relativsm.
It seeps into the mass culture via influence on other writers. The masses may not be reading Jane Austen but her influence on pop culture in the last 15 years is abundant.
We have SO many problems confronting us in the area of moral relativism, I can’t possibly worry about aesthetic relativism at this point! in a perfect world, maybe! The Twilight series, as some have pointed out, arguably has a prolife message and certainly does not involve premarital sex. So pap though you may consider it, aesthetically— it is arguably moral.
It’s books and movies designed to entertain people and make money. I doubt the agenda goes much further than that.
That is probably the dumbest post in the history of Free Republic.
I am saying that everyone is entitled to their own TASTE in entertainment. The smug pretentious types are free to look down on the masses, and their BAD TASTE, but I say everyone is free to read, write, produce whatever their heart desires in our free country/
Aesthetics are a moral question! :-) Stendahl said that bad taste leads to crime.
Never said they weren’t.
I’m a lawyer not a lit major, and prefer the criminally low-brow to the criminally SMUG ; )
The novels of Robbe-Grillet made me want to kill.
Only because there’s a handful of movie producers that keep making movies from her books. Mostly bad movies, and still not nearly as many as have been made from King’s books over the same time period (oddly enough also mostly bad movies). But for good or ill King is a much bigger part of modern culture than Austen, because he’s more read, and movies made from his stuff are more watched. He might not be as good a writer as Austen (although frankly I couldn’t even finish the cliff notes of Pride and Prejudice, quite simply the most painfully boring book I’ve ever put in front of my face), but he is more a part of our shared culture.
Well good grief, no wonder you are Jorge Luis! I was a latin american studies major undergrad. You make sense to me now, in all of your literary smugness! j.k!
First of all there’s more of King to adapt compared to Austen’s six complete novels. Second of all it’s not just the straight adaptations of Austen but stuff like Clueless, Bridget Jones’s Diary and ‘Bride and Prejudice’ and something currently in rpoduction called “Jane Austen Handheld”. Not to mention literary take offs like the recent “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. I would say that in the last 15 years more people have seen stuff based on her work than King’s. There is a veritable Jane Austen industry with tons of supplementary material on prominent display in bookstores.
Understand that some of that stuff, especially P&P&Z is actually making fun of Austen. And volume of available material really is immaterial, this is the cinema world that has twice released 2 movies based on the same book nearly simultaneously (Haunting of Hillhouse by Shirley Jackson). And really if you want to talk about a veritable industry with tons of supplementary material that IS King. The guy is the Kiss of authors, he’ll greenlight any thing. An Amazon search on Dark Tower comes up with 8000 items and almost all of them actually are related in some way to King’s series.
Making fun of her in an affectionate way. Austen was a satirist/comic genius to begin with and would get a kick out of it. She made fun of Gothic novels the same way. There aure actually much more adaptations of King than Austen but a lot of them are obscure short story adaptations made for Tv or straight to video that very few people have heard of.
If you say so. To me Austen wrote about the kind of woman I never liked and never wanted to spend time with and wrote the worst book I’ve ever tried to read. I know others worship it, but P&P bored me in ways I’ve never been bored before or since. I don’t really think the King adaptations are of anything obscure, his books sell way too well to be obscure. Yes a lot of the adaptations are of short stories, but those short stories tend to appear in collections that sky rocket to the top of the best seller list. And about the only stuff that goes direct to video is spinoffs of adaptations, the the Children of the Corn series, only the first and most recent were really based on the story, the 6 in the middle were just franchising. I count 34 theatrical releases based on Kings stuff on the wiki page, skipping remakes and sequels many of which didn’t go theatrical. King is the horror part of our shared culture right now.
I meant that the King adaptations themselves are fairly obscure. Probably the best known from the last 15 years is ‘The Mist’ and that didn’t exactly set the box office on fire. Jane Austen was making gentle fun of those types of women and the culture that shaped their expectations.
1408, the King movie before The Mist, pulled in $130 million. Riding the Bullet, the movie before 1408, $134 million. The Green Mile was 10 years ago and pulled $280 million. Yeah he’s got a lot of movies that pulled in $30 million-ish, but he’s got a few major successes also. As for Austen, again, if you say so. I suffered through 100 pages of P&P and wanted to gouge my eyes out, it was nattering hens blathering inanely, I will never touch another Austen book again, much less actually read one. Maybe she was making fun of them, I don’t know, I don’t care, it was the worst book experience of my life.
I forgot about ‘The Green Mile’.
Mark Twain defined a good library as a ‘building with no Jane Austen novels in it’. :)
I agree with Twain about a lot of stuff. Unfortunately King is a bigger part of our culture than Twain also.
Part of the culture in the sense of ‘mass’ maybe. But King’s writing is never quoted nor has he created any indelible characters that live apart from the page the way that Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn or Elizabeth Bennett do.
And the King characters that people think of are actually distinct actors’ performances which depart from his arid texts considerably. Jack Nicholson in The Shining and so forth.
I wouldn’t say King’s writing is never quoted. On average how many replies does it take for an H1N1 thread to have somebody mention Captain Trips. I hear a lot of people refer to mean dogs as “cujo”. The Pet Cemetery resurrection trope has become pretty common place both in horror and satire. Since I hang out with authors Annie Wilkes and Richard Bachman are characters frequently referred to. I probably hear references to King books 10 or 20 times more often than Twain.
I meant actual quotes from the texts themselves not titles or factoids about his pen names.
Quotes are only part of the picture though. You also mentioned characters. And you should have mentioned situations. When people mention Captain Trips during discussions of a disease getting a lot of press, or call someone their Annie Wilkes, or refer to something they did under another name as a Bachman book, those are King’s works clearly being a part of our shared culture.
I must admit I have no idea who Captain Trips is.
Captain Trips is the nickname given the super flu which wiped out humanity in The Stand (IMHO still his best book).
Thank you for all that info! I plan on seeing the movie when the crowds have thinned out.
We saw it too and thought it was boring at times, plus way tooo long.
We went Monday at 5:10pm, and 10 minutes before the movie started the theatre was less than 1/3rd full; we got there about 15 minutes early and got our favorite seats.
LOL, whatever. I was 13 at the time, get off your high horse. At least I wasn’t still trying to sound out Dick and Jane books like many children I was in school with. People who get high minded about the books a voracious child reader reads amuse me.
And parents talk about censoring their children’s TV viewing or books or movies. Live TV shows are censored. I used the term loosely. What would you rather have me call it? I can change my vocabulary if you wish.
I think it's using sex to promote chastity. After all, sex sells.
That’s nice of you to take your family.
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