MLIT: Mr. Cullen Goes To Washington

Sooner or later, someone is going to have the good sense to read Breaking Dawn chapter 18 on the floor of the House of Representatives.

BD chapter 18 is the chapter in which (SPOILER ALERT) a hugely pregnant and dying Bella Cullen (nee Swan) gives birth to a healthy paranormal baby. It is a grotesquely gory scene, full of vomited blood and broken bones (a full breakdown of which will be posted on my blog in a day or two). Bella's body is crushed and torn to rags and in the end, she dies. She comes back as a vampire, but for a while she's just a dead pile of skin and blood and splintered bones.

In this sense, Bella is exactly the kind of wife Republicans seem to want; they so actively devalue the life of the mother over the lives of children that this scene, in which Edward bites open his wife's stomach to save the life of his child, should represent some kind of twisted Platonic ideal. Before this, Bella rather nobly eschews her own health for the sake of the baby at every turn, and prepares to die in order for it to live. This is outrageous to Jacob who is, obviously, a minority.

MLIT: Careerism pt. 1

Let's say you're a 20-something actor whose career has been launched by a vampire film franchise. No, not you, Chris Massoglia! I'm referring to Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Ashley Greene and Jackson Rathbone. If you were one of those people, what would you do with all of your newfound fame and clout? Would you blow it on cheap rom-coms? Would you throw yourself into another surefire franchise only to have it blow up in your face? Would you just buy some blow? Or would you try to forge a real career for yourself, blow all your critics away? For the stars of Twilight, that is an open question that really will be answered after Breaking Dawn wraps in a few months. But a glance at projects said actors have already completed between installments might give us an indication of what they are thinking. Today we look at Ashley Greene, A.K.A. Alice Cullen.

MLIT: Real Wedding Planners Plan Bella's Fake Wedding

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn pt. 1: First Blood will be released to theaters on November 18, 2011, in sha' Allah. If you are interested in the boring black-and-red "title treatment" to the film, which was released to much fanfare this morning, then, well, fuck you. But here it is. Spoiler Alert, but Breaking Dawn more or less opens with a wedding scene. Edward Cullen, the mind-reading vampire who is also a skilled negotiator, has basically argued Bella into a corner and she agrees to make their love legit in God's and the state's eyes in order to achieve immortality and an orgasm.

(That god's wishes matter to vampires is a little weird, no? Religion is strangely grafted-on to the Twilight Saga. The drama over impending nuptials eclipses a majority of the ostensible plot of Eclipse [see what I did there? You're welcome] which is theoretically mostly about an attack from an army of zombie-like newborn vampires. That book is the most galling example, but it's present in earlier ones, too. Marriage and souls and Jesus and they way all three relate raise up their ugly heads at odd intervals. It raises questions about Stephenie Meyer's brain, or editor, or both.

MLIT: Vampire Film School 101

Say what you will about the original Twilight film. True, the pancake make-up is laughably bad (though it gets better as the film goes on, almost as if they were running out toward the end). True, a lot of misguided effort went into practical effects (like, say, a complex-looking treadmill system used to make the vampires move quickly in sequences that were ultimately shown in slow motion, WHOOPS). True, Robert Pattinson doesn't have a grip on his American accent yet. But in many ways, it's an admirably weird film, especially when you remember that it was hugely popular with pre-teens. Most films popular with that set are slick, glossy-looking artless things. Twilight (directed by Catherine Hardwicke) is scrappy and nervy. The color palate is almost entirely blue, green, and black (including, weirdly, a few sequences set in Arizona).

I'm particularly a fan of the (admittedly) corny scene in which Edward forces Bella to speak aloud her suspicions that he is a vampire. It's a popular one among the Twi-Hards because it's quotable. "How long have you been seventeen?" Bella asks. "A long time," Edward replies. Ha ha. But someone like me can get behind it too, because the editing is way bizarre, and kind of... awesome?

For comparison's sake, take a look at a sequence of shots from the sequel, New Moon (directed by Chris Weitz):