TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND BLITHERING

I'm sure that it's simply because I don't belong in the target demographic of 14-year-old girls that the Twilight movies don't do very much for me. The first one was just about okay but ludicrously overlong at two hours; this one is actually even longer and doesn't even work as well.

Despite the vampires, the overall themes of Twilight Saga: New Moon, perhaps even more than in the first one, are emotional girlie teenage angst and swooning whenever Robert Pattinson is on screen. Me, I'm pretty much immune to such things but it is interesting than Pattinson and the vampire clan hardly show up during the first hour, leaving drippy Bella (drippy Kristen Stewart) to blither and moan, and develop some kind of relationship with hunky Jacob (hunky Taylor Lautner) who has a big monster secret of his own and tends to wander around with his shirt off (even though he's supposed to be sixteen) with his similarly buff and shirtless mates. The evil nasty vampires from the first movie are still around but only occasionally, and even though the movie has a natural conclusion before we even get to the hilarious vampire tribunal headed by a shamelessly camping Michael Sheen (continuing his habit of alternating real historical character pieces with ludicrous fantasy movies about vampires) it's still got another half hour of wet and waffly lovey-dovey sludge to wade through.

It's got slightly more of a sense of humour than its predecessor, though that's mainly confined to a disastrous trip to a cinema for a terrible action movie called Face Punch (which I now want to see) and some self-mocking clever-clever dialogue about horror films. But most of it is treacly stodge, even more treacly and stodgy than the first hour of Titanic (and even wetter than the second hour of Titanic), and it goes on for far too long. Then again, as I said, it's not really aimed at me so it's hardly surprising it missed.

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