In "Twilight," the new film based on the best-selling saga by Stephenie Meyer, the gray sleepy town of Forks, Wash., is inhabited by a family of vampires. People of Fountain, take heart, in comparison that reputation makes your sinkhole look like a Tuscan grotto.
Bella Swan is new to Forks, a town where it’s dark and overcast nearly every day of the year, but her lab partner Edward Cullen can help her acclimate. He’s an expert. He ought to be; he’s graduated high school dozens of times since becoming a vampire 90 years ago.
And so it goes in "Twilight" — the first film from the wildly successful teen romance series that has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide — that the lion falls in love with the lamb. A dangerous liaison, to be sure, even if the Cullen family has learned to adapt and survive by hunting only animals. But which is the more grave danger: a trio of nomadic vampires passing though who are not so well disciplined or Bella’s embraces that challenge Edward to cede to those same impulses?
We’ve seen trendy, well-executed, creature-of-the-night tellings before (1987’s "The Lost Boys" and "From Dust till Dawn," the 1996 Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration, for instance) but this film stands apart with its focus on the relationship. Successfully bottling the angst and forbidden love that is legend (and some awful Maybelline moments notwithstanding), "Twilight" may very well be a generation’s "Bucharest Side Story," if not its Carpathian "Rebel Without a Cause."
3 ? Honks
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"Twilight," starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, is now playing at the Chateau, Hollywood Stadium 12 and Galaxy 14 theaters. For show times, see Page B5
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violence and a scene of sensuality.
