Sunday 4 August 2013

The Bitesize Twilight Saga

The first time I wrote about a film on the internet (outside of comments sections and forums) was not last year's Film of the Year awards. It was actually four years ago, on DeviantArt of all places. And, believe it or not, it was about Twilight.

Twilight, and its four sequels, are almost entirely terrible (I say "almost" because the third one actually has some good bits). I genuinely could not believe how terrible the first one was when I saw it. I felt deeply insulted. Not as an audience-member or as a film-lover - I felt insulted as a human being. The fact that this unbelievably tedious, badly made, badly written, badly acted thing was being sold as entertainment was an insult to the intelligence of our species as a whole. The fact that it was phenomenally popular made me want to abandon and possibly murder that species.

But, instead of a killing-spree, I put my energy into warning others not to watch it. I made a comic-strip version of the movie, so that anyone who was curious could experience the plot and tone of the film without actually subjecting themselves to the torturous eternity it takes to watch. I called it "panart", because there isn't actually a word for fanart born of hatred.

For those unfamiliar with DeviantArt, it's a sort of online art-gallery, where you can post any and all kinds of art and it can be viewed and appraised by other users. In practice this means it's mostly horrifying porn, but that's true of the entire internet. What's important is that you can also write accompanying text to explain the art, and that writing the text for my Twilight comic was essentially the first time I tried to review a film. It wasn't much of a review - it's barely two-hundred words and it's mostly just insults - but I'm pretty sure that's where the seeds of this blog were planted. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Since then, I've also done comics for New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn (part 1), and I used the text to talk about those movies, too. Each review is longer and more reviewy than the last - they're still mostly just insults, though.

Happily, the nightmare is now over. Just last night I posted my final Twilight comic - Breaking Dawn (part 2) - to DeviantArt, and wrote a ridiculously excessive two-thousand words to go with it. Still mostly just insults.
To mark this final conclusion to the series that first got me reviewing movies, and to celebrate the fact that I will never have to watch this poison again, I'm posting the whole series on the blog that it eventually inspired. Here, in all its tedious glory, is the saga of Bitesize Twilight:

Bitesize Twilight
Bitesize New Moon
Bitesize Eclipse
Bitesize Breaking Dawn (part 1)
Bitesize Breaking Dawn (part 2)

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