Okay, this movie is not intended for me, at the ripe age of 40.

When I heard about this series of books, I sniffed at it as abstinence-porn. Given the media onslaught and rabid mania, I slung more than my bodyweight of vitriol at the whole enterprise over the last year. But experience has shown that if I tear into something with zest, there’s something deeper fueling me, and diving in to explore may be rewarding.

Sitting in a theater with my spouse, sister-in-law Erin, and her husband Patrick, there was a lot of time to reflect. Frequent outbursts behind us during the previews from someone (who apparently doesn’t go to moving pictures very often) happily subsided by feature time. For the best, as it hurts the anecdote if I got into a fight at this movie, but was the one who slapped first.

I’d watched about the last 2/3 of ‘Twilight’ on DVD, enough to think that vampire baseball was a really neat idea. Then snorted and laughed at the rest. Sparkly! Aaaaa, so dreamy…

Still, I’d be lying to pretend to have been always above this.

In high school, chances are high that me and my above-it-all friends would have passed these books around and snarked heartily, after reading all of them cover-to-cover.

For two years in high school, I was involved in a relationship that fostered all the hormone & adrenaline charged drama and emotion two intelligent teens could muster. Proclamations promising the metaphysically impossible, wrung-out poems, 6-8 hour phone conversations (sometimes with half-hour long measured silences), nocturnal sneaking, exhilarating reconciliations, crying jags, pleading, yelling, counsel & support, quiet confidences. And at the time, we meant every syllable and exertion (paths diverged, all lives turning out happily and full).

I can’t cast stones in the region of heightened adolescent melodrama. Billions of teens before went through it, billions will go through it now and in the future. The pituitary gland is an agonizing mistress/master.

So, now that I’ve checked myself out of being snarky about 85% of the content of these ‘Twilight’ movies, what’s left to say?

For starters, Jeepers Christmas I cannot abide the pent-up dry-humping blue-balling abstinence fixation that throbs and rubs through these stories. Vampires who are exquisitely pained to give just one kiss, for fear of being stirred to more! Same for dog-people, apparently. Get too hot, and a were-boy has to leave the room lest his clothes fly off. And the dudes still end up with their shirts off, a lot. Pants are ALWAYS on, though. Quelle frottage!

I’ve been told, and have read plot summaries (Wikipedia FTW!) that Edward & Bella eventually do what their bodies are screaming at them to do, after marriage, but the longed-for deed gets conspicuously skimmed over, only to jump into a horrifying, bloody birth that leaves poor Jacob with one of the worst dating/dance cards ever.

Not a fan of abstinence-only education or perspective. Unwanted pregnancy rates rise where those programs flourish, and only drives kids to thinking they keep their virginity if they limit themselves to oral sex and doing it in the pooper (too ashamed to get prophylactics, natch). Teens will do what their bodies want them to do, and it’s dumb to not teach them broadly about all their options. Back to the fangs…

I laughed at a scene where two werewolves are scrapping in a forest, and there’s a shot setup as if the CGI tussle had knocked the camera down.

I respect that Taylor Lautner fought like hell and beefed up to keep his elevated role in this movie. He’s not charismatic onscreen, but serviceable, and naturally sympathetic when you know about the shit hand his character will be dealt at the end of the fourth book.

Robert Pattinson is okay. How a dude can be put in his spot and strike those poses and keep his wits together is a miracle. Given that brooding and tragic airs are required, the guy gets a pass there, too. And it lets me feel that Cedric Diggory is actually okay, if a bit glower-y.

But wowie, why does every other female student in that high school seems LOADS more tolerable and interesting than the lead character, Bella? I begrudge her the pain and the howling and other manifestations of high emotion, but she’s still a pill to hang around. Even as a tormented teen, I could usually pull my shit together for consecutive hours of unalloyed hilarity.

She’s largely passive, too: why does everyone ELSE seem to drive Bella’s pickup truck more than Bella? Appropriate, given all the other characters drag her along, or that things happen to her, but she rarely causes anything to happen. Maybe the DVD will have several deleted scenes of her driving her own damned truck.

How many movies have been made where the sole purpose a US citizen goes to Europe is to confer or be judged by some gilded/marbled room full of weary Europeans isolated from anything vital? Of course, when the US citizen doesn’t like the decree, shit gets busted up.

And the dad is there as the sanity-saver for those of us who are not Twi-hards (ironic phrase!), Twi-Moms, or there to admire beefcake. Clearly, Bella’s dad gets better and more solid sleep when she disappears for days on end. Maybe that’s why he approves of these supernatural hyper-drama boyfriends.

So, lousy movies, but I have a better understanding what the stories are about, my visceral revulsion toward them, and how they got hooks into several of my friends.