Twilight Rant: They've Got It All Wrong

By Josh Tyler: 2008-11-19 03:41:51

Twilight hits theaters this weekend and despite the overwhelming, half-crazed fan reaction there are signs which say its distributor, Summit Entertainment might think it’s kind of bad. Sure they’re screening it for the press, but they’ve dropped such a heavy embargo on every critic who’s seen it that there’s no way anything even remotely resembling a real review will get out until Friday morning when it no longer matters. In fact I saw it tonight and I’m going to have to reread this mess carefully after I finish, to make certain I don’t accidentally tell you what I thought of it. See Summit? No opinions here. Move along.

What I can tell you is that Twilight has people nervous, and perhaps with cause. Though interest in this movie seems to be out of control, it’s hard not to notice that it’s all coming from a small group of hardcore fans, and not really anyone else. Meanwhile the studio’s tougher-than-usual embargo says that they expect vitriol from reviewers. Pre-screening reaction from most critics supported that notion. While waiting for the lights to dim, press section chatter was filled with a depressed sort of gallows humor, as if we were all headed towards the hangman and looking for a way out. More than one critic half-jokingly announced that he planned to show up drunk, as a way to blunt the impending, certain pain. For some, I’m not sure it was a joke. Summit meanwhile was more than willing to help them along the way to inebriation happy town and held the screening at one of the very few local movie theaters which just happens to serve copious amounts of hard liquor. Vampires with a side of Vodka? Give me another shot or two. Next time folks, spring for an open bar, booze works even better when it’s free. Beer goggles aren’t just for fat women. Hey, that vampire looks kind of like a girl! Hot.

Those drunken critics have had good reason to expect a cinematic hernia, and the blame for that falls not so much on the movie or the material as on whoever it is that’s in charge of marketing it. They have it all wrong. Those boring, banal, lifeless trailers you’ve been watching aren’t representative of what’s heading into theaters. They make it seem like some horrible clone of The Covenant, an empty-headed and already forgotten movie which existed solely in the service of some big final battle done up with barely passable CGI special effects. This isn’t that movie. They’ve got it all wrong.

Whether the film is better or worse than what you’ve seen in the trailers, I’m forbidden from revealing. I can only tell you its different and wonder if maybe, there might have been a better way of illustrating it. Those advertisements seem intent on showing us action, displaying Edward’s various feats of strength, as if they’re hoping to convince men this is halfway to being a superhero movie and thus something they’ll want to see. But we all know it isn’t. Guys aren’t fooled. This isn’t an action movie, what action there is in the trailers is fairly half-hearted. The posters seem to say romance, but the rest has been fairly uninspired. What they need to really push this as is the stuff of Beauty and the Beast. I’m talking Ron Perlman in the sewers Beast, not a dancing tea pot that sounds like it should be solving mysteries on Murder She Wrote.

That’s where the key to success for Twilight lies, in wooing women. Not just any women; squishy, gooey, girly types who still swoon a little whenever they see book covers featuring Fabio. This movie’s audience is the Patrick Dempsey fangirl, the comfortable bodied, wine-drinking ladies who made Grey’s Anatomy a hit. They’re the love obsessed women who bought tickets to Made of Honor, and then went home to wonder why their relationships never seem to work out like the ones they see in the movies. They’re the women who believe men are secretly, well, women… and are dead wrong. Many of these women are teens, whom Summit has done a good job of courting, but most of them are just lonely, besotted, and blighted by society’s unrealistic view of romance. Actually, maybe that’s everyone. We could all use a little Ron Perlman, and that national need for a sweet, sexy, Beast to go with Beauty has for years supported an entire industry of awful, repetitive romance movies. After years of watching Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant get married and remarried, they’re probably ready for something new, something which doesn’t involve the playing of “Here Comes the Bride”. Women need their emotion porn and with a different marketing campaign Twilight might have been the movie to deliver their fix.

Time is running out, but you’ve got three days Summit. Twilight’s existing Twilf fanbase will earn you money, but if you want a truly big, busty box office you need to start building a trail of rose petals right now. Send America’s women a Twilight strip-o-gram. Scratch that, better go with the candy-gram. Let them know you’re out there, and you’re sensitive. Make sweet, soft, vampire love to the world’s lonely ladies. Do it right, studio gigolo, and they’ll pay you handsomely in the morning.

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