Stephenie Meyer's novel has been flying off the shelves, the soundtrack's topping the charts, and Robert Pattinson -- a 23-year-old Brit whose only previous claim to fame was playing Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter movies -- has been anointed the hottest pinup since the Jonas brothers.
All of which is very good news for Summit Entertainment, the independent outfit that backed the movie at the relatively modest budget of $30 million.
Will the book's fans mind that the effects are decidedly low-tech, that there are no famous faces and that the whole show hasn't been transplanted to glossy Los Angeles? I doubt it.
Director Catherine Hardwicke -- who made "Thirteen" and "The Lords of Dogtown" -- hasn't made a great film or even a very good one, but she has stayed true to more than the letter of the novel. She obviously got it, and the movie gets it too.
Got what, you say? Well, that "Twilight" isn't about special effects or horror, for a start. It's a Gothic romance reconceived for 21st-century teens. Bella Swan (played by Kristen Stewart) is the new girl in Forks, Washington, where she's moved in with her dad. Forks may not be Wuthering Heights, but it's wild, and it's wet, and her lab partner in biology class has a Heathcliff-Darcy-Rochester thing going for him. When she sits down beside Edward, he looks like he wants to throw up.
Pattinson is enjoying the lion's share of the spotlight, and it's not hard to see why. Hardwicke shoots him like a sex god, in enraptured slo-mo and lingering close-ups. (It's how Michael Bay shot Megan Fox in "Transformers": gaga.)
All of which is very good news for Summit Entertainment, the independent outfit that backed the movie at the relatively modest budget of $30 million.
Will the book's fans mind that the effects are decidedly low-tech, that there are no famous faces and that the whole show hasn't been transplanted to glossy Los Angeles? I doubt it.
Director Catherine Hardwicke -- who made "Thirteen" and "The Lords of Dogtown" -- hasn't made a great film or even a very good one, but she has stayed true to more than the letter of the novel. She obviously got it, and the movie gets it too.
Got what, you say? Well, that "Twilight" isn't about special effects or horror, for a start. It's a Gothic romance reconceived for 21st-century teens. Bella Swan (played by Kristen Stewart) is the new girl in Forks, Washington, where she's moved in with her dad. Forks may not be Wuthering Heights, but it's wild, and it's wet, and her lab partner in biology class has a Heathcliff-Darcy-Rochester thing going for him. When she sits down beside Edward, he looks like he wants to throw up.
Pattinson is enjoying the lion's share of the spotlight, and it's not hard to see why. Hardwicke shoots him like a sex god, in enraptured slo-mo and lingering close-ups. (It's how Michael Bay shot Megan Fox in "Transformers": gaga.)
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