Okay. This is the big Eclipse post.

Ten Things About Eclipse has covered the bases.

Yesterday, my piece about The Decline and Fall of the Twilight Empire went up at Tor.com. There, I discussed the fact that as the fandom grows, the quality of actual filmmaking seems to sink like a stone.

(I will be honest, though, looking at my notes for New Moon, I’m not sure if endless music-video tracking shots are any worse than establishing shots with voiceover that then cut to a different location/scene entirely. Still, Eclipse had more to work with and did less with it, so it’s probably still the worst movie of the three. I’ll have to think about this.)

But first, as always, there was The Line.

The line for Eclipse was, in many ways, the smoothest this operation has been run.

Theatres are now aware of what can happen if you keep the long lines bunched up together for hours (STAMPEDE), and this was one of the multiplexes big enough to have it showing on at least seven screens, so they did what any smart theatre would do: they lined up everyone outside by theatre, three deep across the sidewalk, and wound around a city block by 9:30pm, when we did a fly-by and immediately ran away.

The good news is, unlike the first year I went there and it was the fucking Mines of Moria, there were actual plans in place. As soon as the final showing of that theatre’s normal movie was over, they let that theatre in. It was a foolproof plan to minimize crowds, normalize lines at concessions, and make this a smooth operation.

Then they turned off the air conditioning. Let me tell you, when they turn off the air conditioning in a two-story movie theatre full of pining women, it is not pretty.

Also not pretty: the Team Edward/Team Jacob fighting, which reached a fever pitch in our theatre, and proved that keeping everyone penned together outside would probably have led to a battle royale. (Have you ever seen the poster for The Warriors? It was like that.)

Apparently the thing to do this year was to wear an Eclipse Burger King crown with the image of your favorite dude on the front. I counted at least fifty in our theatre alone.

(Bella was also on the crown; no one ever, ever had her in front.)

Two girls had a fight just outside the bathrooms, with one pointing accusingly at the other’s crown: “Of COURSE Edward is the best for her! How can you be Team Jacob? I THOUGHT YOU WERE MY FRIEND.”

Teenagers: holy crap.

At one point on the way inside, two girls had a Team Edward/Jacob sing-off to “The Boy is Mine,” pointing to their crowns. They seemed to be friends, so it wasn’t particularly invested, and they sort of wandered past the theatre employee, who looked after them for a second, sighed, and said, “Just…what the shit.”

I still think the line winner was the girl in a Cullen crest shirt, looking very displeased with her friends: “I was here early IRONICALLY.”

These kids speak for all of us.

And then it was time for the movie. Oh, was it ever.
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And the Eclipse postmortem begins! First up: Ten Things You Should Know About Eclipse, at Fantasy Magazine. This information might just save your life. (Or, two hours. Whichever.)

4. Howard Shore did the music.
You’ll know because whenever Bella and Edward make out, it sounds like every pervert in the Shire is creeping up on them.

His hand looks like a questing, half-hidden octopus, doesn’t it? (Go ahead, unsee it. I dare you.)

I have an article forthcoming at Tor.com about the franchise in general and the trend in cinematic quality (hint: yeeeeesh), and last up will be the line report and blow-by-blow, because seriously, you guys? YIKES.

People often use the phrase, “Ambitious, but flawed” to describe a movie. I use it a lot; it helps hint at a film that was trying to be more complex than The Blind Side or something, and depending how you put the emphasis, it can mean anything from “there were a few things that didn’t sit quite right” to “what a magnificent collection of moving images that had no discernible narrative cohesion”. (Oh, Sunshine.)

Splice tries very hard to be a Frankenstein for our times; a CGI creepfest; a meta-horror; a complex dissection of parenting norms; a parable of nature vs. nurture. At the same time. (You can see already where we’re going to have problems.)

As for how well it did at any or all of those things…how big can I make “Flawed”?

And 3D text, if you have it.
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This weekend, I saw Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time. It was exactly as good as people have said, which means it was a complete wreck.

The saddest thing is, even if you get over the whitewashed casting, and the nonsense plot, and the laborious action scenes (save the first big one during the city raid, which was genuinely exciting), there’s still nothing there. It’s all so calculated and flat and recycled.

The other saddest thing is watching this cast try to sell what they had to know was a total dog. Richard Coyle managed to do a lot in his three minutes of screen time, and Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton were trying SO HARD, but it was just never going to happen. I’d like to see them in something else. (Particularly in something else that is not the sequel to this movie. Ever.)

Thing I can’t find photo proof of but which is totally true: the Alamut CGI looks exactly like Mont-Saint-Michel.

Not sure why, but we’ll go with it! (This was said a lot during pre-production, I expect.)

Check out the whole thing over at Tor.com.

[This is the first of three movie reviews that were won in the auction, which assists fans of color who want to attend SFF conventions, principally WisCon.]

So, when won one of my movie reviews, I can only assume she picked Hong Kong action flick Vampire Effect (aka Twins Effect, for reasons unknown to me) because she thought it was the worst movie ever and she wished, more than anything else in her whole entire life, to make me suffer.

She must not have been aware that I have been working on getting “shitmazing” into wide usage, as the word to use when something is so spectacularly bad that it passes all descriptions of “awful” and eventually becomes its own sort of surrealist masterpiece that makes you question an objective universe.

With this word in hand, I was more than ready to tackle Vampire Effect: The Twins Effect (even the title’s shitmazing). It’s a breathtaking kaleidoscope of wonder about a mysterious world in which defeating vampires requires liberal application of banana extract.

For serious.

This is vampire prince Kazaf and his vampire butler Prada (for serious). Here, Prince Kazaf wants this movie to promise something it just cannot promise.

There is, in fact, endless sucking in this movie.
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