The Twilight Saga: New Moon

My Review
As a fan of the Twilight books, I was looking forward to watching New Moon for several reasons. First, I wanted to see what the new director did with the story since there was a much larger budget for it, second, I was hoping that the acting had improved from the first movie, and lastly, I wanted to see the relationship between Bella and Jacob develop on the big screen.

I've broken down my review into the four typical categories as used by yahoo movies: story, acting, direction, and visuals. I've rated New Moon as follows:

Story: B
Acting:C-
Direction: B
Visuals: B-
Overall: B-

Story:

Overall, the director stayed true to the original story that Stephenie Meyer created in New Moon. Because we're dealing with a movie we need to keep in mind that it needs to be concise and stay within a reasonable time frame. The movie was about 2 hours and 10 minutes, but it definitely did not feel that long to me. In fact, it felt much, much shorter than 2 hours, and that could be attributed to the fact that I enjoyed watching New Moon.

Some parts of the storyline were merely touched upon, while others were expanded in the movie for which I felt were unnecessary. One of those unnecessarily long story lines that bothered me was seeing Bella having nightmares and awkwardly screaming while sleeping. You could see the awkwardness on Kristen's face during those scenes and that just made me cringe while watching.

What did I want to see more of? I wanted more Bella and Jacob. This was the book where we would see more of Jacob and see how the relationship fully develops with Bella, but it was not elaborated in as much detail as I would have liked. Even though there wasn't much of Edward in this movie, I still felt that I saw too much of him when Bella was "hallucinating". I wonder if it would have been more powerful had we just heard his voice as she hallucinated instead of having to see his agonizingly painful face with those hot red lips (what's with the lipstick on Edward?) All in all, the story in the movie was pretty faithful to the original and that's a great thing. I must point out though, that this movie won't make much sense and it'll be hard to believe why Bella is so depressed after Edward leaves if you haven't read the books. Story: B

Acting:
Where do I start on this one? Well, there were plenty of characters in this story, but nearly everyone was minor in comparison to Bella (Kristen Stewart), Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Jacob (Taylor Lautner) which is a bummer since there was strong acting from others. For example, even though Dakota Fanning had very few lines, it was very evident that her acting skills are above and beyond those of Kristen Stewart. It's very tough to believe that Kristen has some acting experience since she's so horrible. I don't know how she manages to make nearly every scene so awkward, but that really bothers me especially since the whole story is about her and she's in nearly every scene.

Robert Pattinson wasn't in the movie very much, but in the scenes that he did have, you can also tell he's not a very good actor. Was he always supposed to be in so much pain? Well his face always had this expression of extreme pain even in scenes where he was supposed to look somewhat happy or even neutral. Too much for me. Robert needed to turn it down a notch. I'm sure with more experience, his acting will get better, I hope.

Go Taylor Lautner!!! He was the best lead actors in this movie. The feelings that he was trying to portray were very believable and I could feel his excitement when he would see Bella, and I could sense his anger/pain when he couldn't do everything he wanted to do for Bella. I also liked his transformation (I know, has nothing to do with his acting).... don't we agree Jacob looks much, much better with shorter hair?

Look at the pictures below and see if you can figure out what Jacob was feeling or trying to say.... Like I said, I think he did a good job. I was expecting to go from Team Edward to Team Jacob after having watched this film, but because I felt that there wasn't enough Jacob storyline (cut short for the movie), I didn't find myself switching to Team Jacob.
What about the other characters with small roles? I did like the wolf pack because they acted the exact same way that they were described in the book, and I'm excited to see more of them in the next installment of the twilight saga. Acting: C-

Direction:
Chris Weitz did a much better job directing this movie than Catherine Hardwicke did on Twilight. There were a few things that bothered me, and therefore, earning a B from me. In a few scenes are the camera is a bit shaky which I didn't think many people would notice since they are so entranced with the storyline. Also, because I easily get motion sickness, the scene where Bella is depressed and the months are passing by as she stares out the window... the camera rotates around her as the seasons change, but I had to look away since I was starting to get dizzy. I did notice the camera man reflected in the mirror before I looked away and waited for the scene to pass. Anyone else notice the camera man?

Isn't it the director's responsibility to expect superior acting from the actors? Like I said before, the acting was not good, and I feel that the director was to blame, at least, partially. He should have challenged and pushed Kristen Stewart to portray Bella Swan correctly, but as we can see from watching New Moon, Mr. Weitz was content with the mediocre performance from the leading lady.

Something that I really enjoyed were the action scenes. The Volturi really got the chance to shine, there was no Bella, and they were fast paced that they kept everyone's attention. The action spiced up the storyline even though they were somewhat tame when compared to the type of action you'd normally see in an action movie.

Lastly, some parts of the movie was too cheesy and really unnecessary. Mr, Weitz, did we really need to see this? Too silly and just lame. The audience burst out laughing for this scene. Direction: B
Visuals:
Not bad. At times the wolves looked really awesome, but at times looked super cute and not scary at all. I think the hardest thing to portray on the screen was the wolf phasing. Sometimes, it looked amazing and sometimes it was too cheesy. One of those cheesy moments was when Bella upsets Paul and he phases (which was kinda cool), but when Jacob comes to Bella's rescue and he phases, it's so lame. It just seemed too fake which translated to being too cheesy. Another issue that I had, was the sparkly vampires, but that's nothing new. That's the same issue that I had with Twilight. It's just so lame, and that part of the story doesn't translate very well to the movies. Visuals: B-

Overall:
In my book, this movie is a B-. When comparing it to the first movie, Twilight, it is much, much better. I think if the quality of the acting were better, this movie would have rated much higher. Remember, I am rating this movie based on the fact that I'm a Twilight fan and I've read all of the books. I'm not sure if someone who hasn't read the books will enjoy this movie, but as someone who likes the characters and the story, I did enjoy watching this movie very much.