Battle Royale Presents: Bad Call of the Week

Welcome friends to our inaugural installment of "Battle Royale Bad Call of the Week", where we will examine some of the more questionable choices made during the week.

I thought about using this space to give my thoughts on the Adam Lambert fiasco that is hot news around the town, but I decided against it due to the incessant commentary. (In a nutshell here are my thoughts: Obviously America doesn't have a huge problem with sexually diverse artists, see: Elton John, Freddie Mercury, but Lambert pushed the bounds of decency too far, he needs to realize he is an entertainer, and entertainers need fans. It's usually a good idea to build a good rep behind you before you go and start controversy. Lambert doesn't have the rep that say, Eminem does, he won't get the same groundswell of support if he continues to cross the line.)

So, rather than comment on Lambert, I decided to tackle a different pop star's questionable moves, Miley Cyrus.

Now, while Miley obviously has had her share of controversy (between the Annie Leibovitz photo shoot and her own personal photo shoots) she also hasn't been quite the train wreck that some previous young pop stars have been. She seems to have gotten through the controversy better than Vanessa Hudgens got through hers, and of course, there is always Lindsay Lohan there to make everyone else look better.

However, Miley has had a rough week. First, of course came the tragic accident that claimed the life of one of the tour drivers. A sad occurrence, and one that Miley obviously had nothing to do with. However, later came reports that Miley ripped into a fast food worker when he failed to recognize her when she placed her order. You can get away with saying "do you know who I am" when you are Jerry Seinfeld on Larry King, it doesn't go over so well when you are an underage pop princess who thinks she is important.

However, for the truly Bad Call of the Week. We turn to Miley's recently released comments about the Twilight series. In a Tuesday interview on Sirius Satellite Radio, Miley commented that she feels the Twilight craze is "a cult" and that "people get too into it".

As opposed to Hannah Montana...

Now, I'm not a Twilight fan, and It's tough for me to defend a film franchise that is vastly overrated, but Miley may want to rethink some things here. First of all, many people (myself included) could say: "excuse me, Miss Cyrus, but weren't you also the benefactor of a huge craze among young people, who viewed you and your brand with the same psychotic love that the Twilight series now generates?"

Hannah Montana was as much of a pointless craze as the current Twilight craze is, and seemingly Miley has forgotten this fact.

Secondly, I'm not a huge fan of throwing the word "cult" around about actors in a movie. There is a big difference between Rob Pattinson playing a Vampire in a movie, and the tragedies that were "Heaven's Gate" and Jim Jones and his Kool Aid. I may not be a big fan of the Twilight movies, but I realize that they are indeed just movies, and not some sort of nefarious scheme to take over the minds of teenage girls.

He drinks blood, not Kool Aid...

Overall, the last two incidents have made Miley come across as prissy, and self-important. Those qualities have a habit of leading to bad things in young female pop stars. Miley would do better to imitate the easy-going, down-to-earth style of Taylor Swift, rather than the self-important ways that plagued Britney, Paris, and Lindsay.

So, Miley Cyrus, you get the first Battle Royale Bad Call of the Week, here's hoping you manage to stay off the list in the future.


-Latin

The Review Column: New Moon

Today, for the first entry in our weekly review series, I will be examining The Twilight Saga: New Moon. For all you Twihards out there who were well pleased that Taylor Lautner was lauded as Personality of the Week yesterday, buckle up, because you're in for a ride here.


Let me start off by giving you an inclination as to how I felt about the first Twilight movie: it was, in a word, bad. That's not to say it wasn't entertaining; surely I was intrigued by where the story was taking me, and it held my attention for the duration of its two hour run. Upon a second viewing, however, once I already knew everything that was going to happen, I couldn't help but notice how poorly it was made. The editing was choppy, the shot composition left something to be desired (a few too many extreme close-ups, if you ask me), the direction was sub-par, and the acting was pretty stinkish. I did get a good laugh out of Edward's initial reaction upon seeing Bella though. And vampire baseball? In postproduction, somebody must have thought "This concept on its face isn't quite ludicrous enough. I know... let's play 'Supermassive Black Hole' by Muse over the scene. That should make it suitably ridiculous." I won't even get into any of the other absurdities, but I can say that in a movie full of unintentional humor and bored actors, Billy Burke as Charlie Swan and his bits of comic relief were just that: a welcome relief. Ultimately, Twilight was a reasonably engaging but poorly produced story. But enough about the first movie.

I found that, in some areas where Twilight failed, New Moon succeeded. For example, the acting wasn't quite as bad this time around; Robert Pattinson wasn't a total spaz and, at points, seemed to actually care about what was going on. For most of his time onscreen, though, he was his normal aloof self. Kristen Stewart put in what was probably the best performance of her life; at times it almost seemed like she too was more than just a drugged-out robot. Maybe it's just the moody tone of the movie or the brooding natures of the roles, but both Pattinson and Stewart rarely show any emotion via facial expressions, which gives their characters all the personality of two dry chunks of wood. In Pattinson's defense, I think it may just be the role, because I saw a trailer before the movie in which he was featured, and he seemed pretty animated. Stewart, on the other hand, may as well have been playing Bella Swan when she starred in Adventureland, so I'm guessing her interest deficiency is rooted either in her acting ability or her own natural personality.

This is Bella's pensive face. It's also her happy face,
angry face, excited face, sad face, shocked face,
embarrassed face, relieved face, and hungry face.

Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black was also featured much more prominently in New Moon, and as I've already said, he's actually interesting and fun to watch. His character is real and human, someone you can actually relate to, which makes his time on screen that much more valuable than Edward's. Incidentally, Edward spends about half the movie away in Italy, which is just great, because Jacob's dynamic with Bella is far more engrossing than her surreal relationship with Edward.

The biggest problem with New Moon is that, even though it upped the quality a little bit in a few departments, it actually fails in most of the places where Twilight succeeded. My major complaint is that the pacing... in New Moon... is sooooooooooo... slooooooooooow. They took an hour and a half worth of movie and stretched it out to two hours and ten minutes by riddling the dialogue with a mind-bending number of pregnant pauses. Did I mention that there is a veritable metric ton of dialogue? Then there's the plot progression. In the first movie, a setting was established and events were moved forward, however angstily. Bella moves to Forks, Washington, makes friends, meets Edward Cullen, develops an awkward fixation for him, is conflicted by said fixation, learns he's a vampire, struggles to wrap her mind around that fact, spends quality time with his oddly accommodating family, and then, in the most interesting 20 minutes or so, gets chased by a gang of evil vampires who have been hunting people and sucking their blood before being cornered and caught in the middle of a relatively cool vampire fight scene. In New Moon... well, we find out that Jacob is a werewolf. And about half an hour in, after Edward leaves, Bella and Jacob talk. A lot. A majority of the movie is a giant DTR (that's "define the relationship," kids) conversation between Bella and Jacob... and this, aside from the few werewolf action scenes, is the most interesting stuff that happens in the whole film (again, thanks in large part to Taylor Lautner).

Effectively though, I can't really figure out exactly what happened in New Moon that warranted making it its own installment. Aside from the conflicting signals that Bella consistently gave Jacob, the revelation that Jacob was part of a really cool unit of werewolves, and Edward running off to Italy to be an emo kid, basically nothing really happened at all. In fact, speaking of Italy, I don't even know what bearing that sequence had on the rest of the movie. I could plop New Moon into Windows Movie Maker, completely cut out the entire half hour chunk where they go to Italy to see the Volturi, and the continuity of the film would be totally unaffected (if I did that, though, you'd miss out on Dakota Fanning's glorified cameo, wherein she stared intensely at Edward for a few moments). If they don't introduce zombies as another movie monster faction in Eclipse and build up to some kind of apocalyptic war between all these groups, I'm not really sure where this story is gonna go.

Charlie Swan's backyard in Breaking Dawn (fingers crossed)

Upon my initial viewing of New Moon, I decided it was better than Twilight, and by and large, the production quality actually was improved. After digesting it for a while, though, I've concluded that the reason I liked it more at first was because Jacob is just a cooler character than Edward, and this movie features Jacob. The film achieves very little in the area of plot progression, the pacing is way too slow, and it failed to draw me in, even in the capacity that the first one did.

The Verdict:

AWESOME
Sweet
Okay
Meh
Poopy



-Billy

Personality of the Week: Taylor Lautner

Every week we'll be choosing one individual (real or otherwise) as our Battle Royale Personality of the Week. On this fine Wednesday, I get to do the honors by selecting the inaugural personality. The first person to receive this lofty award is none other than every teenage girl's favorite werewolf, Taylor Lautner.

Left: Taylor Lautner
Right: The reason I chose this picture

But what makes Taylor Lautner worthy of such high-profile praise? The reasoning for my decision was based on the following principles:

1. New Moon is kind of a big deal
If you haven't heard, The Twilight Saga: New Moon (to use its full name for formality's sake once in this post) pulled in 140.7 million dollars in the U.S. in its opening weekend, placing it third on the all time list behind The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. Thanks to an army of rabid female fans, Taylor was part of a project that was about $17.8 million away from making history. Just being associated with something like that is enough to raise awareness, but being one of the stars helped secure his title this week. I haven't actually seen New Moon yet (I'm going today, and I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about it, in due time), but honestly, at this point it doesn't really matter whether or not it's even any good, at least for the purposes of this award; it's become a cultural phenomenon of which Taylor Lautner is a part.

2. He was the best thing about Twilight
Someone please tell me why "Team Edward" even exists. Who in their right mind would pick a pasty, prissy, metrosexual vampire toolbag who perpetually seems either bored or confused by his surroundings and spends much of his time making sure his hair has that perfectly messed-up look over a down-to-earth, naturally friendly guy who is secretly a werewolf? What's that you say? Edward sparkles in sunlight? Shame on me for forgetting that most paramount of vampire characteristics, that makes ALL the difference. But seriously, even from a the standpoint of a potential heterosexual friend, Jacob Black is way more likeable (not to mention approachable) than Edward Cullen, and though he had only a small part in the first film, he stood out to me as the most interesting thing about it. The only downside to Jacob in Twilight was that his hair was ludicrously long, but they rectified that for New Moon, so all is well. I realize that all the things I just detailed are traits of the characters played by Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, not of the actors themselves, but then again, I think part of the reason that Edward Cullen looked so bored/confused throughout the movie was because Robert Pattinson's not that great of an actor. Taylor Lautner, on the other hand, gave me at least a believeable performance.

3. His acting abilities don't limit him to playing werewolves
Don't try and typecast Taylor Lautner as one type of human/animal hybrid:

Exhibit A

4. He's dating Taylor Swift
This one's a no-brainer. I mean come on, it's Taylor Swift. Not only is she beautiful (albeit freakishly tall), but she's winning every award imaginable (I mean sure, she hasn't gotten the Battle Royale Personality of the Week award yet, but we gotta take this thing one Taylor at a time). As a guy, I have to give major props to the one who can rein in Taylor Swift, and the fact that they share a first name just gives them extra novelty points.

And there you have it. If you don't think those reasons are good enough, go soak a rope in kerosene (all this early Christmas spirit is apparently getting to me). Next week you'll get to see Danny Latin's first pick for Battle Royale Personality of the Week, but we've got plenty more coming for you in the days before then, so don't forget to gather all your friends and come back tomorrow.

-Billy