Twilight, 3.5 stars

So here it is, my entry point to a phenomenon that simmered in the back of my awareness for the better part of a year (starting when I moved to a relatively Mormon area of the country). Of course, being the cinephile I am, I waited until the movie had come out and the clamor for it had died down. The film seemed the natural way for me to approach the story; if I can't find something to like in a film, it's unlikely that I will enjoy other forms of the story (especially if the novel forms have a reputation for sophomoric, adverbial writing).

The good news is that there is something to like in the film of "Twilight", and possibly several things depending on your gender and tolerance for teenage shoegazing. Catherine Hardwicke directs, and brings her usual deft touch for the feelings and inner workings of teenagers to this film just as she did with "Lords of Dogtown" and "Thirteen" (the latter is hearsay; I've yet to see it). She has a rare ability to take teenagers as seriously as they take themselves, while still taking the audience outside the most melodramatic moments and reminding us that, come college, none of the characters will remember most of what we're seeing.

The twist here is that many of her characters will be remembering these events forever. For those of you living under rocks for the last couple of years, the plot concerns the Cullen family, vampires who abstain from human blood, and the dangers arising when their son Edward falls in love with clumsy mortal Bella Swan. The setting is the Pacific Northwest, ideal for creatures averse to sunlight, and Bella has just moved to the tiny town of Forks. The rest of the story reads like a wish-fulfillment for any young woman who ever felt awkward or misunderstood in high school. (I think that would be all of us.) So many of the confusions of teenage boys are made literal in Edward: he can read minds, but not Bella's, which explains why he always knows the right thing to say but stammers and hedges when she is around. He disappears for long periods with no explanation (turns out he's hunting mountain lions to eat) and seems to love Bella one day and hate her the next (the result of his efforts not to suck her fragrant blood at any given moment). If only such reasonable explanations existed for the vagaries of real teenage boys!

The advantages of the film are its cinematography, which is appropriately gorgeous yet chilling, and the work put forth by all the actors to make a generically-written, underplotted young adult novel into compelling cinema. Much of the dialogue made it onscreen intact, which surely pleased fans but results in clunky, amateurish lines that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart mostly make believable through herculean effort. Pattinson in particular, like the other Cullens, is saddled with a pasty, caked makeup job that makes him look less like the undead and more like a deranged KISS fan. But the film is mostly entertaining, and its 2 hours don't feel limp in places or overlong like many teen movies today. After seeing the film I was inspired to read the books because of the curiosity the film implanted in me. I cared about these characters and wanted to know what happened to them next. The twelve-year-old girl in you may feel the same way; those without a 12-year-old girl somewhere inside them may want to seek entertainment elsewhere.