New Moon

If you've ever wondered what an auditorium full of girls sounds like when a newly-buff werewolf peels his shirt off, this is your lucky day:



As you might guess, Audry and I went to see Twilight: New Moon last night. It was the 7:00 showing, so the theater was filled to bursting with girls aged 9 to 19, and they put on quite a show. As for the movie itself (what I could hear of it, anyway), it's not bad considering it's laboring under the book's numerous plot problems. Chris Weitz is a more polished director than Catherine Hardwicke, but the rough edges were part of what made the first film so exceptional. New Moon is slicker than Twilight, with considerably more action sequences and special effects, so replacing Hardwicke was probably a good financial decision, if a poor artistic one. The cast is uniformly good, with Michael Sheen delivering the campiest performance of his career, and Dakota Fanning briefly showing that she may yet make quite a good grownup actress some day. Taylor Lautner is the standout as wolf-boy Jacob. He's likable, believable, and MAN are his teeth white. The computer-generated wolves are not good, and I'm beginning to think that CG has reached the threshold of what it can accomplish with furry things. As with the first film, New Moon has has a couple of unintentional laughs, particularly Alice's vision of Bella in the future, which was met with hoots of derision from the ladies in the house. But they went absolutely berserk at the film's last line of dialogue, so bring on Eclipse!