The Twilight Saga: New Moon

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Movie Details

• Genre: Action/Adventure, Horror
• Release Date: 2009-11-20 Nationwide
• Running Time: 130 min.
• Director: Chris Weitz
• Cast: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Ashley Greene, Jackson Rathbone, Nikki Reed, Kellan Lutz
• Writer: Stephenie Meyer, Melissa Rosenberg
• Distributor: Summit Entertainment
• Official Site: The Twilight Saga: New Moon Official Site

Worry not for the purity of your tween girls, mothers. Where Catherine Hardwicke's irreverent take on the first book in the Twilight series at least made room for a few suggestive winks, the sequel is stuck in the abstinence mud with author Stephenie Meyer. Melissa Rosenberg, who wrote both movies, is nothing if not respectful of Meyer's vapid prose. The movie, directed by Chris Weitz, is professional filmmaking applied to sub-literary euphemistic trash, in this case couched in the jejune crush-fantasies of a Mormon mom stranded at home with three little boys. Bella (Kristen Stewart) continues to yearn for the neck bite that will buy eternal supernatural bliss with Edward (Robert Pattinson). Discharging fluttery mini-kisses, Edward mysteriously retreats to vampire country, then returns in ghostly form to protect Bella from . . . not much, unless you count her three months' moping in bed, until, discovering risky behavior, she hitches a 100-yard motorbike ride with a stranger, then settles for bike assembly with buffed Taylor Lautner. Enter werewolves and a short display of bare-fanged competitive masculinity, followed by a trip to something resembling Italy, with lots of red-robed, Dan-Brownish Catholicity. There, in a movie almost totally devoid of humor or passion, waits Michael Sheen, king of the evil Volturi, who alone of all the earnest players in this turgidly euphemistic melodrama, has grasped that the only way through this choked-up virginity is to carry it way into camp.