Twilight

Watched the Twilight movie last night. It was wretched, of course, but not actually quite as bad as I thought it would be. The movie fixed a lot of the pacing problems the book had, at least. Bella and Edward were just as creepy and annoying as the book. (Although it wasn't the actors' fault - they were clearly doing the best they could with awful material.) But the minor characters were almost uniformly delightful. In the book, they were all cardboard distractions from Bella and Edward's DESTINED TWU WUVE!!!1!. In the movie, the actors are actually all adorable and breathe real life into their characters. I love the dad, and the vampire sisters, and all the boys who inexplicably flock to Bella's siren lure of dazzling beauty or something. Somehow, they all managed to have personalities and agency they just didn't have in the book.

An odd note, though - Forks had an awful lot of minorities. On one hand, I like seeing characters be Asian or black or whatever like it's no big deal and has no bearing on who they are. Color-blind casting is great. On the other hand - Forks is supposed to be rural Washington. Are the demographics really that diverse? (And of course, it's easy to slide a lot of minorities into three-line roles. It's not like any of the main characters were anything other than white.)

Oh, also, there's no way a town of 3000 people in the middle of rural Washington where everyone but one vampire has blue collar jobs can afford a prom like that. Just sayin'.