BREAKING DAWN PART 1 (Bill Condon)

-

Call it whatever you like, be it an overlong music video, or an idiot's guide to pregnancy, BREAKING DAWN PART 1 is both a hit and a miss. At first, it becomes sentimentally sweet, as director Bill Condon (DREAMGIRLS) lavishes us with the wedding scene set to the tune of "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" first heard during the prom scene in the first Twilight movie.

Next, a mini-travelogue of Brazil that should have shown more landscape. 

Then, the most poignant and tiring part: the pregnancy. Much ado about nothing.

To be fair, I felt a little amount of understanding for the main characters' motivations: Bella wants to keep the baby and enforce her right to choose; Edward feels responsible, and guilty; Jacob feels doubly responsible, and his jealousy turns into sincerity, which is admirable.

What more can we demand? The film wants to be cheesy and does exactly that. Of the four Twilight films already released, I liked the first one (because of its playfulness) and this one (because of its maturity). I expected more action, but I guess it would be inappropriate to the storyline, and would seem irrelevant given the pregnancy. Just imagine Edward and Jacob lashing it out. What a caricature straight out of a soap opera, or maybe GREY'S ANATOMY. 

Good thing the film is saved by an open-endedness that leaves enough for the imagination. For those who read the book, the succeeding story is of no surprise. BREAKING DAWN PART 1 as a whole does not maximize its potential to become a full-pledge vampire movie, but at least it chooses a side in storytelling, a human side and stays there.

On the other hand, RENEESME? Stephanie Meyer, seriously?

RATING: 3/5

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TUHOG (Jeffrey Jeturian)

-
Image
Film within a film-structured movies are always interesting watch. Not only do they provide a much-needed deconstruction of form and content of cinema itself, but also that much-needed emotional punch a cinephile would surely love.  Like in BAD EDUCATION (Almodovar, 2004), we witness the characters tell the back story via montage, as if we are part of the cast of characters watching an actual movie. The form was successful in evoking pain and regret, and also of empathy. In TUHOG, Jeffrey Jeturian and screenwriter Bing Lao tackles sensational media in the Philippines, especially in cinema. The film opens as a film producer hears a pitch for a possible movie- a story of a grandfather who rapes his own granddaughter.  The director of the film soon after visits the victim of the crime, Floring (Ina Raymundo). Coercing both she and her mother, Perla (Irma Adlawan) to sell them the movie rights to their story, we witness as exploitation cinema unfolds. To think of it, capitalizing on ta
Read more

ANINO SA LIKOD NG BUWAN (Jun Lana, 2015)

-
Image
* English title "Shadow behind the Moon" The best term to describe Jun Lana's latest film would be a cinematic charade- a game of identities, of motives, of suppressed passions, and of uncertainty. Or the film equivalent of a Russian doll, if you will. "Anino sa Likod ng Buwan" only has three characters- husband and wife Nando (Anthony Falcon) and Emma (LJ Reyes) and military man Joel (Luis Alandy). What started as a seemingly routine banter among friends gradually and intensely escalated into an examination of society, where the definition of immorality is blurred during a time of insurgency.  And in fact, the film does discuss the subject of immorality from various paradigms. When does adultery become acceptable, and to whom? Is sexual liberation more heinous than murder? Why is immorality always a double standard? The film plays out the ideas in endless games. Or are they really games at all? Lana could have stopped there, but he didn'
Read more

A study of spaces in Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's 'Happy Old Year'

-
Image
Space is both an overarching theme and visual signifier in Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's Happy Old Year . Its protagonist, Jean (Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying) comes home from a lengthy stay abroad, determined to declutter her life, and along with it, old things that belong to a past she is desperately running away from. As we watch Jean plan the redesign of their family house into a more spacious and minimalist residential office, we also witness the transformation of the persons that inhabit the house, as well as their connection to other people, most of them absent from the frame. Jean the destroyer Millennials have often been criticized for being rash with their actions, and for having their way, no matter what. The filmmaker, a millennial himself, understands this stigma, and subliminally argues that millennials are the way they are because of a multitude of factors: rising cost of living, the evolution of discourse as a result of technology (such as film streaming se
Read more