The films

Twilight
My sister persuaded me to see this finally. I’m as fond of vampires as the next person (we taught a lot of vampire stories in Gothic Horror) but I’d been avoiding this teen phenomenon, which is ironic since my sister does not like anything fantastical but claims to like Twilight because it has a basis in a “real place.” It exceeded my expectations, but I still find the fact the vampires “sparkle” to be ridiculous. It shares a lot of themes with Being Human. Edward is written to be absolutely irresistible to girls of a certain age. Here is my rather snarky haiku:
Twilit twits moan, angst-
pale across silver forests.
Enough already.

Star Trek
I finally saw Star Trek. I never watched much of the original series, but I kept up pretty well during my youth with all subsequent visions (up through Enterprise, in fact). As Johanna said, it was worth seeing for Zachary Quinto alone, but . . . I’m not sure. It was entertaining, but when all was said and done, rather slight. I know you could accuse several of the Star Trek movies of that. To be sure, it looked good. The pseudo-‘60s look was nice. There were amusing moments. I think they went a little overboard in that department, though! I got very confused as to canon and wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to take it as an alternative universe or not. As far as villains go, and many of them in Star Trek as of late have been bad, Nero was cardboard. Oh well.

Ponyo
Ponyo is Mihyzaki’s latest film and though I haven’t seen the majority of his oeuvre, I do own Princess Mononoke. This was trippy but sweet. Ponyo is a goldfish-princess-mermaid and Soske is the extremely bright five-year-old who causes her to become a girl. My favorite part was when the sea turned Devonian and was full of coelacanths and trilobites, but it was also a source of terror for me as I didn’t want a mosasaur to come out of the water and eat the kids!

Watchmen
I saw Watchmen on the plane ride back. It was very faithful to the comic. Too faithful, perhaps, as it seemed to lack a certain directorial boldness, reproducing scene-for-scene some of the panels and scenes from the book (which, perhaps, is how Alan Moore likes it?). I was annoyed by the rather too-obvious soundtrack. The special effects were able to achieve Dave Gibbons’ art, which is rather a feat, and I liked the casting of Patrick Wilson as Dan/Nightowl. I will say it was about 20 times better than Sin City!