Twilight and Thirst

Vampire films have been around for decades and their recent resurgence has been able to put a few twists on the traditional storyline. In Twilight, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) moves to Washington state to live with her small town police chief father after her mother decides to travel around with her new minor league baseball player boyfriend. Swan is clumsy and introverted, not particularly funny or interesting, but every single smiley kid in school immediately loves her anyway since she looks like Kristen Stewart. She meets Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in biology glass, a pale and sickly looking lad who behaves stranger than the weirdest guy you can remember in high school. But she falls for him anyway. At one point she says that she is "irrevocably" in love with him. She should have said "inexplicably" since her actions (like everyone else in the film) make little to no sense . . .

The film spends over half its running time with a slow reveal that Edward as well as his brothers and sisters are vampires. This reminded me of The Sixth Sense spending a long time revealing that Cole can see dead people when that fact was used in the marketing. Not much makes sense in Twilight: Why do these teenage vampires even bother to go to high school? To act so strange that they expose who they really are? To skip out on sunny days thus drawing attention to themselves so they expose who they really are? Why does the whole family admit to being vampires and take Bella in, assuming her infatuation with Edward will last longer than all the other high school crushes ever. And why do the foster brothers and sisters "couple up" - to show how weird they are a provoke a CPS investigation? Does their vampire doctor father move his kids around every 4 years so they can repeat high school? Why bother?

Some might wonder why I should have bothered with this movie. Well, it seems like a minor cultural phenomenon and I try to understand trends going on out there. Twilight's mood shifts made me wonder if this is what it feels like to be a teenage girl. All the vampires overact (they must have been told to do this, but it's distracting) and plot feels truncated with leaps in logic the viewer is supposed to follow. It's like they had trouble adapting the novel and assume most of the audience has read the book and won't have a hard time following along. Stewart actually does an admirable job and holds the film together. And the film is watchable and pleasant without any real threat or suspense.

There's plenty of teeth, blood, suspense, and drama in Chan-Wook Park's Thirst, yet another spin on the vampire mythology that has a priest with a rare disease going under an experimental procedure that turns him into a vampire. Old Boy, Park's best film, was easy to follow because you had a relatable central character who's kept prisoner for 15 years for unknown reasons. When he sets out for revenge, you're with him all the way. In Thirst, the plot is too convoluted with many extraneous characters to be anything but exasperating. Toward the end, scenes felt like they were added on, as if Park didn't know where he was going from the get-go.

Which isn't say Park doesn't keep things exciting with unusual camera angles, terrific lighting, and some interesting scenes. Conflating religion and vampirism is an interesting conceit, but Park seems insistent on tearing down Christianity rather than exploring any similarities (such as the secular's unintentional formation of "religions" such as atheism and global warming). The story really needed a regular person that the audience could view the plot through (like Bella Swan). It started with an interesting premise but ultimately delivered very little except scene after uncomfortable scene with either gratuitous sex or ultra-violence. Both films, for very different reasons - C+.