Y’all may remember that a few weeks back we at the Murkworks had us a Sparkly Evening of Vampire Sparklyness: a group viewing of Twilight. I got asked by 
marzipan_pig
Short form, honestly: not as godawful as I was expecting. It is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it did have occasional okay moments in it.
Going in, even though I haven’t actually read the book, I nonetheless had an overview idea of what would happen. So nothing was really a surprise, which I grant may have lost me something in the movie viewing experience. My attention was caught therefore not by the events playing out, but rather how those events were depicted.
For example, the Big Reveal where Edward makes with showing Bella the sparkling: not nearly as visually striking as it should have been. Edward looked like he had a flashlight on in his shirt pocket, and the beam was reflecting off his chest. Not at all what I was expecting–though I’ll also grant that if they’d gone more obviously Sparkly it would have looked even cheesier, so hey.
Not much better implementation of Edward’s speed, either. Watching him scramble up a tree with Bella clinging to his back was making us all go “wait, vampires are howler monkeys?”
But of course the main point of the story is the relationship between Bella and Edward. Which is in turn of course the whole issue I have with the story to begin with: I just don’t buy it. I will freely admit I am biased from my Joss Whedon fandom here, but with Buffy and Angel, I’ve already had a much more intense and dangerous relationship between a teenage girl and a vampire a lot older than she is. With Angel, especially in Season 2 of Buffy, you believe that this guy can and will at the slightest provocation rip Buffy’s throat out. Not so with Edward. Young Mr. Pattinson is very pretty, I’ll give him that, but I never believed that his character was actually dangerous to Bella at any point. It didn’t help either that half the time the boy looked more constipated than dazzling, too.
I did say that the movie had a couple of halfway okay bits, and I’ll stand by that. Cheesy though it might have been, I kind of liked Vampire Baseball after solarbird
All in all it’s a fun movie to watch in a group that isn’t taking it seriously, especially if there’s MSTing to be done. It does fall into that range of badness that makes it excellent for the Mystery Science treatment.
But I still ain’t reading the book. ;)