RECOMMENDED: If you have not had a chance to interface with a theater full of screaming girls and the people who pay their mobile bills, riveted — positively riveted, I tell you — by The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, then you really don’t know anything about what America is about in 2010. First, let’s get the obvious out of the way: The entire Twilight franchise is Mormon propaganda, punctuated by moments of totally out-there wolfrape fantasy fiction. It’s fucking nuts, and it’s such a wild combination of madonna/animal fetishes that it’s a pretty sure bet that someone you love has been taken down completely by it all. They’re done. You shouldn’t ever sleep with them/engage in a real conversation with them ever again. They’ve blown out all the good parts of their brains. When they look at you, all they see is the most handsome kid to ever walk out of a Hot Topic, ever. Remember what the government did with crack in the 1980s when they pumped it into black communities, effectively stalling decades of progress? This is like that, except it’s happening to teenage girls and adults who never fully completed a “goth” stage. That said, Eclipse is really entertaining. (And yes, they said the same thing about crack.) In the first Twilight movie — perhaps the most camp, widely-seen film of all time — the production values were so WTF-low that you could see where they stopped applying makeup to the teenage vampires because they thought if they didn’t care, why should you? What nobody knew then was that this whole Twilight/True Blood industrial rape fantasy complex would one day become of bigger social and monetary import than the U.S. military. So suffice it to say, the production values have been really stepped up — the Pacific Northwest is every bit as much a star of the movie as the Shirtless Gay Baby Wolf Guy, James Dean’s No-Fun Corpse or I’m An Actress, Get Me Out Of Here. In this one — there’s two more Twilight movies to come, so dip in at your leisure — some red-headed bitch vampire is coming for I’m An Actress, Get Me Out Of Here, and the two wolfmen she loves vie for both preferred protector status and her attentions. How a tent scene where they are all stuck for the night does not erupt into steamy, wolf-on-vampire-on-Brigham-Young-undergrad sex is completely beyond me, but remember: Twilight is about denial and indulgence, and the amazing frappucino you get when you throw some Mormon sprinkles on it all. Fascinating!

ALSO NEW IN THEATERS: The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan‘s dismal adaptation of some shit only comic nerds care about; and Cyrus, a relationship movie wherein John C. Reilly seems to be reprising a less desperate version of his lonely cop in Magnolia, flanked by a worthy ensemble cast featuring Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei, and Catherine Keener.

For more recommendations on films currently in theaters, visit Philebrity’s Film Sweat archive. And click here for movie times.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 12:37 pm.