Pixar and Me: A Toy Story Retrospective

Warning: this post contains spoilers for all three Toy Story films and some extremely emotional italics.

The first Toy Story film came out in the UK in 1996. I was 6 years old. Like a lot of six year old girls, I had more than a passing fondness for pink, princesses, Cinderella, ballerinas, that kind of thing.  I had a princess party for my sixth birthday, much to the joy of my male playmates.  When I tell people this now, it usually surprises them; as regular discerning readers may glean, I'm not so much one for romantic comedy, more one for spurious escapism powered by explosions.  So what happened?  The short answer is Toy Story.  Toy Story happened.

When my parents took me to see Toy Story, the excitement on their part was largely to do with this new form of animation, which was – gasp – done on a computer.  Maybe some of this excitement rubbed off on me because, so far as I remember, I was rather keen to see this funny-looking film, despite obvious lack of castles, dresses, oppressive patriarchy etc.  By the time the credits rolled, I don’t think I or either of my parents were even considering the artistic and technological advances in animation because oh my god Toy Story was the best thing we had ever seen.  To this day, the trilogy tops every list of favourite films I make: nostalgia value, artistic merit, tight writing, aesthetics, storytelling, voice acting, it's got it all.  You can keep Citizen Kane.  I've got Toy Story.

But my relationship with Toy Story goes beyond artistic appreciation. It had a huge influence over my development as a person: from the moment Woody and pals did their jerky early-CGI swagger into my life, princesses were discarded.  I was going to be a cowboy.  I then quickly amended this ambition to cowgirl.  Toy Story woke in me some dormant tomboy gene, a desire for adventure and thrills: it was the start of a whole new way of being that was very different to the narratives that Cinderella was feeding me.  There's nothing wrong with being a girly-girl, of course, but there aren't nearly as many good stories involved.  If all your fairytales end with a handsome prince, you're getting a very limited worldview to say the least.  Toy Story led to me devouring Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Pippi Longstocking, Roald Dahl and, not much later, Harry Potter in a way I wouldn’t have done before.  Fairytales were swapped for Greek myths: so much bolder and brighter, with gods and monsters and heroes and people doing things.  Suddenly, there were more colours in the world than pink.

You know the montage in the first film where all of Andy's cowboy stuff turns into Buzz Lightyear stuff?  That happened to me.  Discarded was my faithful Snow White costume and in came a swanky new Woody outfit, complete with sheriff badge and hat.  The plastic orgy of Barbies in various states of hard, shiny undress were converted from dress-up toys into complex societies of doctors, superheroes, witches, singers and actors with more back-stabbing, secret alliances and political manoeuvring than a Game of Thrones episode (though probably about as much nudity, I had been gifted a lot of second-hand Barbies but not many clothes to cover their dubious modesty).  The cherry on the cake of all this was my own Woody doll - much chunkier than the film's lanky rag doll, but I wrote my name on his boot nonetheless - and a shiny silver special edition Buzz.  I'll never forget the horror of a friend's younger sibling asking to borrow Woody and the reproving look on my mother's face as I turned my beseeching eyes towards her.  Woody came back minus his hat and with his pull string broken.  They bought me a new one that played guitar but it wasn't the same.  Woody as I knew and loved him was gone and it probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't done what my mother told me.  Goddamit, mum.  It was a dark chapter in my history and if you think I'm joking, only a little.*  I suppose the long and the short of it is that Toy Story taught me how to play. 

I turned 22 on Sunday.  For my birthday present to myself, I sat down with a close friend and a lot of pizza and watched Toy Story 3.  Before I address the film itself, I'll just say this: even at this age, it is my 7-year-old self that enjoys car chases, heists, prison breaks, explosions and shoot outs.  When I reviewed The Avengers, what I could not show you was my facial expression, which was one of pure childlike glee.  Toy Story's influence lives on also in my sense of humour: silliness, snarkiness and surrealism living comfortably side by side.  Buzz proclaiming, "Don't you get it?! I am MRS NESBITT" will never, ever not be funny to me.  We love talking about how Pixar invented the kids-films-secretly-for-adults genre, although as I get older I'm not even sure they're for kids at all.  I was severely disappointed in Finding Nemo when I first saw it at the age of 13, but as (more of) an adult the scene where Nemo turns around and tells his Dad, "I hate you" is extremely powerful.  Witness also the separation and reunion aspects of Monsters Inc, the bleak yet hopeful view of humanity envisioned in Wall-E, the obligatory mention of the first ten minutes of Up: I don't think Pixar is making kid's films at all, not even secretly-for-parents-kid's-films.  I think Pixar is making films to please itself and by god, I salute them.  Except for Cars.  Cars was a bit shit.

No matter what else it produces, though, the Toy Story Trilogy in its entirety is always going to be the pinnacle of achievement for Pixar.  For me personally, it holds a cachet shared only by one other series - Harry Potter (the books, obviously) - of having grown up as I have grown up.  Both series place strong emphases on friendship, courage and resourcefulness, both are funny and wildly imaginative.  I spent a lot of my teenage years emulating the dress and mannerisms of various fictional characters (Winona Ryder in Beatlejuice, take a bow) in the fruitless quest for self-identity that is adolescence but there's probably only one fictional character I've ever really wanted to be, and though I've put away my lassoo-skipping-rope now, I still hold that if I can be something like Woody - wisecracking, courageous, loyal, a leader, flawed but ultimately good – I could do alright.  In fact, much of the first film is driven by Woody's flaws; on my recent re-watch I was kind of surprised to discover how much of a jerk he is, so I guess Toy Story is also responsible for starting my worrying tendency to become a furious apologist for anti-social fictional men.  And on the topic of changing perspectives, when I was a kid it was Woody's fears of rejection and replacement that I related to - playground politics can be so cruel - but as an adult, Jesus Christ, is there anything sadder than watching Buzz's heroic breakdown when he realises he's not a real space ranger?  With the sad song and the window and the no! I will fly! moment?  And because Hollywood teaches us that if you really really want something and are an attractive twentysomething or an adorable cartoon character you can definitely always get it, we believe he's going to fly and then he doesn't?  And he loses his arm for trying? Blimey, Pixar, you ever think about pulling your punches a little?

And, of course, the films only get progressively darker and more spiritually wounding as they go on.  Most conceptual universes don't tend to examine the ins and out of the realities they create, but Toy Story 2 took the difficult questions of toy ownership - and sentient toys - and ran with it.  What happens when the kids start to grow up?  There's only really a few exits for toys from the playroom: donation, the attic or, most likely, in a bin bag.  The bottom line is that kids grow up and move on.  Toy Story 2 was one for the parents in this respect: the feelings of abandonment and rejection that Woody and Jessie experience are a poignant analogue for the knowledge that every parent faces - one day they too will appear "used" and "outgrown" to their children.  But the final message is redemptive: we cannot stop ourselves or our children from growing up but we can enjoy it while it lasts.  And if we are loved, truly loved with the special bond that Andy and Emily shared with their toys, that love can sustain us when the relationship is no longer as immediate or dependent as it once was.  And it's probably no accident that the weepy Sarah McLachlan ballad that plays over the heartbreaking montage of Jessie's abandonment by her owner also borrows heavily from the semantics of a romantic relationship ending.  Far from the usual Disney fare, in which walking off into the sunset is par for the course, the second lesson Pixar taught me with the Toy Story trilogy was that relationships ending is a fact of life, but it doesn't have to be the end of the world.  The final note is bittersweet, a relative first for children's entertainment, with Woody proclaiming that Andy's childhood "won't last forever" but "I wouldn't miss a moment of it".  Of course, then Toy Story 3 took those themes and turned them into a harrowing emotional black hole from which I barely managed to escape with my battered soul intact.

I never doubted that Toy Story 3 was going to be good.  It was simply far too important to fail, not just to me but to the thousands of kids in my age bracket who were now packing up their bedrooms to head off into the unknown.  Like that other fictional boy I grew up alongside, Harry Potter, Andy was now my age, or thereabouts, and now here was Pixar, showing us that we had not been forgotten, that they were here to close the final chapter on our childhoods.  I'm pretty certain I wasn't alone in practically pushing small children out of the way to get to the front of queue because goddammit eight-year-olds, you have no idea what this means.  I also spent a fair few minutes in conversation with the girl at the desk trying to sell me Odeon membership.  After some rapid and confusing exchanges about how much money I would be saving, I wailed in a loud and plaintive tone that sent heads turning across the foyer, "I JUST WANT TO SEE TOY STORY 3."  So to say I cried might be an understatement - from the opening sequence, taken word for word from the first two films, to the last half hour solid, I was pretty much a mess.

When I re-watched it yesterday, sufficient time had passed that I could also appreciate how breathtakingly well made it is.  The animation had progressed astoundingly compared to the original 1995 film; Pixar has always been shy about animating humans unless cartoonishly stylised first (Ratatouille, The Incredibles) but they seem to have conquered Uncanny Valley (explained in this post) with a vengeance because holy crap, look at all those emotions!  Look at grown-up Andy playing with Bonnie!  Look at Andy's mum tearing up in his empty bedroom!  Look at all these people.  The textures and tones were richer, the lighting beautifully rendered: eerie and flickering strip bulbs, sunlight through leaves, rainstorms, every single piece of debris in the furnace glowing and casting individual shadows.  It's a beautifully designed film.  It's also gleefully funny.  Just when one is ready to condemn the Americans for lack of wit, they go and pull something like Spanish Buzz which was, without a doubt, one of the best things on celluloid this side of the millennium, and probably the other as well.  The level of nuance in it is far greater than I'd appreciated: I'd thought the real emotional heft was contained to the last half hour but my friend and I were brushing away stray tears from the first act as the toys make one last ditch attempt to reconnect with Andy and fail resoundingly.  Even the only thing that I actively disliked about the film - the absence of Bo Peep - wasn't something I could fault artistically since it established that the years really hadn't been kind to our gang (but seriously guys, did you have to make the look on Woody's face when he said Bo was gone so painful?  and did you have to not even say what happened to her so maybe she wasn't even given away, maybe she got broken or something?  Stop fucking with my essential sense of narrative justice).  The film juggles genres with a nonchalance that Joss Whedon (a writer on the first film, by the way) has wet dreams about.  First it's an adventure flick, then that's a dream sequence, that it's all farewells and gritty emotional drama, then it turns into an eerie dystopia, then it's a prison break film with Mission Impossible overtones, then we reach the last half hour and holy fuck every known reference point for film goes out the window because I'm crying like a housewife with a bottle of gin and a DVD of Beaches.

I am willing to admit that, like every other person in that cinema, I truly believed they were going into that furnace.  Even if you said afterwards you knew all along they were going to be fine, you're lying because a tiny part of you deep down was preparing to say goodbye to these characters forever.  Which is then exactly what we had to do ten minutes later.  God fucking dammit, Pixar, how dare you have such puppet-master-like control over my heartstrings?  How dare you?  And do you know why it worked?  Because having the toys melt into bubbling plastic globs would have been easier.  It would have been the cheap emotionally manipulative ending that we're so used to seeing Hollywood pull.  No, forcing us to confront the terrible, bleak, mentally-scarring reality - that we'd always have memories of childhood but we weren't allowed to be children anymore, that it was someone else's turn to be a child - that is so much crueller.  Damn you, Lasseter.  Damn you, Pixar.  Damn you all to the special hell.

So maybe what sets Toy Story 3 apart as a film, that cements the trilogy's place in my heart, is that it's neither for children nor for adults: it's for us, those in-betweeny, hard to place 'young adults' who grew up with the original films.  That doesn't mean no-one else can enjoy it - my mum walked in on the last ten minutes and started crying immediately - but it is for us.  For which one can only say, along with Andy, thanks guys.  You're all really special but I have to go away now.  And if we're really lucky, we get to see someone else enjoying the thing that we once enjoyed, and if we're really really lucky then we get to see them loving it, and that love doesn't fade or lessen even if time is against us in all other respects.

Blimey.  Batman Batman Batman.  That's better.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to stockpile some tissues and go watch Wall-E.


*EDIT: Since posting this, my mother has informed me that I wasn't actually there when the request came for temporary possession of my Woody doll, so I can only assume that what I'm remembering is outrage as only a seven-year-old can be outraged, along with a seven-year-old's morality which disregards things like kindness and common courtesy because everyone else should just stay away from my toys.  I'd also like to point out that I've neglected to mention that Toy Story was a hugely important series not just to me but my whole family - say "Mrs Nesbitt" to any member of my family and they'll laugh.  Or cry.  Damn, I think I'm starting again.

Cheekbones in Space: Prometheus Review (Spoiler-free)

I don't really get people who automatically discount science fiction.  Yeah, I wasn't always a fan.  But even in my tenderest youth, I have never scanned a film poster for the slightest hint of tentacle or laser or teleportation and gone, "How dare you?!  You, sir, are trying to make me watch a - gasp - science fiction film."  Even when it didn't interest me as a genre, I never treated the entire collective as though if I touched it, the Facehugger of Deadly Nerddom would jump out and facerape me into a John Hurt-style coma where eventually an ugly geek child version of myself would burst its way out of the chest cavity of what used to be a nice, normal girl before she got mixed up in all that - gasp - science fiction.  I mention this because a) I have actually encountered this attitude in people in real life and b) Ridley Scott has created a film that is extraordinarily beautiful, both visually and otherwise, and you should go and see it, like, right now.

The most common criticism of sci-fi seems to be that it's too unrealistic to relate to and, indeed, there are two ways you can go with this.  You can acknowledge you're in a science fiction movie and just have fun with whooshing doors and phasers and unintentional dystopias where everyone dresses the same and nobody comments on this sinister conformity.  Or you can look at the potential within science fiction to transcend that genre, and build something that no other genre gives you the sheer freedom to imagine.  Come to think of it, that's why people who 'can't relate' to sci-fi confuse me.  Empathy.  Imagination.  Your special gifts as a member of the human race.  Use them.

Because ultimately science fiction is all about environment.  It's saying, "Yeah, this is set in a world like ours but not ours, and the go-to explanation for weird shit is science.  (If the explanation is 'a wizard did it', you're looking at fantasy.*)" It's world-building.  And what Scott does best, of course, is world-building.  Blade Runner isn't really a significant cinematic achievement for its plot or characters (Harrison Ford eats Chinese food a lot, looks cool, bangs robots) so much as its vision of our dystopian, corporate-run yet grimly beautiful future.  The world-building in Prometheus is off the charts.  We are taken from one stunning environment to the next, from bleak, haunting vistas on the Isle of Skye (Scottish Tourist Board, Ridley will accept with cash or cheque) to the clean, threatening lines of the Prometheus ship itself - the design of which is reflected in everything from the dark blue minimalist space suits to the silver-plated champagne bottles to Michael Fassbender's new Aryan hairdo - to the depths of an otherworldly colony, the twisting black gooey textures of which will recall some familiar creatures to those who have seen the previous Alien films and seriously unsettle those who haven't.  It is a miracle of design from beginning to end, though for me the standout moment (without giving anything away) concerns Fassbender's lonely robot David standing inside a holographic projection of all the terrifying, awe-inspiring majesty of space.  It's a beautiful moment of seamless design, effects and acting combining to make me go a little bit wibbly.

And speaking of awe-inspiring majesty, all the awe and majesty and awesome and majestic bobbins on show here are no accident.  Voltaire said (and if your inner Adolescent Philosophy Student Alert Alarm is going off right now, I don't blame you) that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.  Neil Gaiman wrote an entire novel based on the concept that faith is a creative energy, constructing gods out of things that we put our belief in.  Prometheus runs along the same lines, juggling hefty questions about our origins and what it means for God and faith if we start finding answers: discount religion entirely or keeping believing nonetheless?  The questions it raises are thoughtful but also lead to one of the few minor criticisms I had of this film, that all this faith-religion-science stuff is just a bit too nebulous to amount to anything tangible.

Fortunately, the cast is universally strong so you can just focus on the human drama if you like.  Noomi Rapace is excellent as Dr Elizabeth Shaw, all bright-eyed curiosity and calm capability and, crucially, possesses at least a modicum of common sense that makes her intensely rootable-for.  Logan Marshall-Green as Boyfriend Doctor Charlie Holloway is less likeable as the film's purveyor of Dickish Hubris but puts in a good performance.  Idris Elba is the film's Cool Black Dude (there's one in every Alien film, go check) but he is the Coolest of the Cool Black Dudes.  The more I think about Charlize Theron, the most I liked not only her performance but her character Meredith Vickers, the icy bitch-queen of Weyland Corporation.  Guy Pearce is slightly odd casting as the ancient Peter Weyland, founder of said corporation, and one of the rare decisions that doesn't hold up (what have you got against actors who actually, like, old, Ridley?  Enquiring minds want to know).  The standout performance is Michael Fassbender as aforementioned lonely robot David, who just wants to be a real boy.  Sort of.  I'm not sure if Fassbender's characters always start out as the most interesting ones or whether he just makes them that way by dint of sheer acting.  Seriously, that guy must be exhausted from all the bloody acting he does.  Actually seriously though, it's a fascinatingly detailed performance and I'm unsurprised that my cursory google turned up an interview where he stated avoiding watching the androids of previous Alien films and taking the Blade Runner replicants as his reference point, because that's exactly where my brain went.  He combines the Rutger Hauer arrogance with the Daryl Hannah childlike naivety and is thoroughly compelling throughout ("thoroughly compelling" - that's a thing that people say in reviews, right?).  It also doesn't give anything away to say that of the two blockbusters I have reviewed this summer, both contribute to the trend in sympathetic be-cheekboned villains with really shit sort-of dads.

Prometheus  has received mixed reviews from the press, largely because "it's not like Alien".  I can't help but think much of these are missing the point.  No, it's not Alien.  It's a totally different genre to Alien.  I'm not sure what genre it is, except maybe pseudo-philosophical-aren't-we-profound-here-are-some-pretty-things-to-look-at-so-you-might-not-notice-we-don't-know-what-the-fuck's-going-on (also included: Danny Boyle's Sunshine).  If I sound like I'm making mock, well, only a little.  Prometheus aims for something huge and succeeds on many many levels, enough to make a stunningly well-made film and, for a film where a lot of violent shit goes down, a strangely uplifting paean to human endeavour and courage.

Gosh, I've gone all serious.  Batman.  There, that's better. Though if I use Batman to drag things back from the brink of attempted profundity, my review for The Dark Knight Rises is going to be a very confused affair.

*Sorry for stealing your joke, Simpsons.  Your penetrating understanding of nerd culture is too much for me.

Jane Shakespeare Watches Buffy: Seasons 1-2

Gather round, kids, it's confession time.  Now, this is very hard for me.  I, Jane Shakespeare, have always proudly called myself a Joss Whedon fan.  Hell, I might even say I'm a fangirl.  (If you don't know the difference, you clearly haven't been on the internet very much.) But in all my nearly twenty-two years on this planet, I have never watched Buffy.

GASP TURN IN YOUR GEEK LICENSE RIGHT NOW, YOUNG LADY.  ALSO YOUR FEMINISM LICENSE WHILE WE'RE AT IT.

But Officer, let me correct myself.  I have never watched Buffy....until now.

Because I, in a fit of what I term 'productivity', have been mainlining episodes of this sweet, televisual goodness like all the illegal streaming sites are going down tomorrow.  Which they may well do if SOPA has its way. (Your slightly outdated satire quota of this blog has now been completed.  Thanks for reading.)

And what I must say is this: YOU GUYS WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME.

All those times when someone went "You've never watched Buffy?" and walked away from the conversation leaving me in no doubt that they thought a little less of me as a person, I kind of assumed that they were being weird because, like, it's a just a TV show and certainly I have always been measured and grounded and suchlike about fictional mediums and not at all prone to sweeping overreactions and abuse of the capslock button.  I'm so sorry, universe, I retract everything.  I now realise I've been letting you down by not engaging with one of the finest on-screen portrayals of attractive teenagers that our times had to offer.

Btdubs, from here on in there be spoilers for Seasons 1-2 and a bit of Season 3.  Spoilers that are fifteen years old and that everyone in the known universe has seen except me but spoilers nonetheless.

So the very first thing I am struck by is how incredibly 90s everyone looks, which makes me happy and sad at the same time because on the one hand the 90s were a truly tragic era for self-expression but on the other, hello childhood.  Seemingly all this 90s chic has wormed its way into my subconscious and thus my wardrobe, because once I start watching I spend the next week looking like Monica from Friends circa Season 3 or, on better days, Linda from Press Gang.

My second reaction is to curse how wrong I was.  Somewhere back in the early 2000s I got the impression that Buffy was a show about Sarah Michelle Gellar being hot and giving teenage goths something mainstream to call their very own.  Which it is, but it isn't.  I should have known from Firefly, really, that Whedon doesn't take on a genre unless he can subvert the hell out of it.  His recent forays into super heroics should have taught me that.  It isn't perfect.  There's some really dud episodes, like the one with the Internet Demon Robot, which I guess is Joss Whedon's equivalent of a Stranger Danger After School Special or something.  In fact, most of Season 1 plods along at a nicely goofy pace and the monsters are fun rather than scary.  The praying mantis/femme fatale thing is well done, the one where Xander gets possessed by a hyena demon confirmed all my worst impressions of him, and even the one with the ventriloquist's dummy (usually a fast-track into my nightmares) is just kind of silly.  Also having 'The Master' as your boss fight villain just makes me think that no self-respecting Time Lord would be seen in such passé attire, no matter how evil he was.

The show really grows some balls throughout Series 2 though. I particularly liked how much they upped the seriousness of Angel and Buffy's relationship, playing off that teenage intensity, and then going "OH BUT YOU THOUGHT THERE WOULD BE NO REPERCUSSIONS, EH?" Without making obvious comparisons with certain contemporary teenage dramas concerning romancing the undead, it's a tremendously clever way of using a sappy teen romance to further plot and character development.  In fact, you could say that of the whole show: it has this gleefully self-conscious B-Movie feel about it - for every bit of "Monsters in High School!" cheesiness, there's a snarky one-liner commenting on how cheesy and ridiculous it is.  My favourite so far is in the Series 2 opener from some kid in the hallway: "This is going to be our year for the football team! If we can just practice really hard, do well, and hope the unusually high death rate goes away!"

I love the characters too.  It's sort of impossible to dislike Buffy, even if I have started to tune out during her "my life is so hard" episodes.  I mean, obviously it is, but it's taking screen time away from characters I like more.  Xander starts off sort of awful but has become less awful as it progresses.  The bit of me that painfully identifies with Willow at that age kind of gets it though as he is pretty nice to look at, and would be comic relief were it not for the fact that everyone's lines are at least as funny, all the time.  Willow is adorbs and would definitely have been my favourite had I watched the show at a younger age.  By pop cultural osmosis, the two things I know about Willow are that she's a lesbian and she's a witch and so far neither of those things are greatly in evidence so I guess Joss really goes in for this whole 'character development' thing.  It's almost a shame because I really, really like Oz and have a dim memory of confiding in a schoolfriend that I kind of fancied Seth Green in the Austin Powers movies (well, the good ones anyway) and her asking if I watched Buffy because he was a cute werewolf in that.  So yeah.  I guess.  Cordelia is also sort of great and I am enjoying her horror at finding herself in a relationship with Xander (taking a bullet for womankind there, one feels).  I spent the first series being surprised at how swoony I found Angel and his throaty-voiced angst but then it became apparent that David Boreanaz ages at thrice the rate of a normal human being and I've kind of gone off him now.  Also, is his soul on elastic or something?  Jesus, man, get a grip.

And Giles!  Giles is consistently excellent and hey, he's a British character on American TV who isn't evil or sporting a completely ridiculously accent so that's progress, I guess.  Though speaking of ridiculous British accents, I was sort of aware that Spike had Billy Idol hair and a leather jacket but holy crap, that voice was not at all what I was expecting.  By which I mean, I did not expect to spend the next hour wandering delightedly around my house bellowing, "OI'M SPOIKE, THE COCKERNY VAMPOIRE, SO OI AM, SO OI AM.  MOI GELFREND'S NAME IS DROOOOSILLAH.  OI'M A BAD, ROOD MAN."  Seriously, he sounds like a cross between Michael Caine and Dick van Dyke.  (Try saying any of this to a female who was in her early adolescence at the time of airing and they look at you like you've just kicked a puppy.)  Drusilla is a product of Whedon's apparent fascination with pretty girls doing bad Mockney, I guess (see also River Tam).  We've also been introduced to Faith and considering that Eliza Dushku was seriously grating on me by the time I got to the end of Dollhouse, she's not too bad here.

But mainly I am struck by how much I would have enjoyed this had I watched it as a kid.  Maybe not when it first aired (I would have been seven and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was already scaring the crap out of me and my over-stimulated imagination) but in my early teens.  Thus all my reactions to the show came accompanied by the voice of little thirteen-year-old me, who - bespectacled, dead straight long hair, bookish - would have had no trouble identifying with lovely, insecure Willow, safe in the knowledge that I would never be as cool as Buffy, no matter how many times I almost threw someone in my after school judo class, and would probably end up spending my days watching the Xanders of my life lust after every other girl but me.  Thirteen-year-old me was remarkably accurate in her predictions.

So to finish, I leave you with this touching scene, of a nominal adult failing to live up the expectations of her younger self.

Now Jane (21) and Then Jane (13) are sitting on a cloud somewhere, eating popcorn.  No wait, that makes it sound like they're dead.  On a sofa, watching Buffy.  Yeah, that'll do.

Now Jane: So Xander is pretty much the worst, right?  He just needs to stop.

Then Jane: I like his eyes.

Now Jane: Oh god, no.  Honey.

Then Jane: He's funny.  We like funny guys.

Now Jane: Yeah but there's a difference between funny and just an awful human bei- holy crap, is that Xander in that tiny bathing suit?  I do not recall any of the nerds I know being that ripped.

Then Jane: Is that - why are you drooling?

Now Jane: Don't worry about it sweetie, you won't have your sexual awakening until Pirates of the Caribbean comes out this year.

Then Jane: Anyway, Xander is a better life choice than some bad boy who just broods and is all mysterious and -

Now Jane: Shut up, Angel is onscreen.

Then Jane: You are a very disappointing future version of myself.

Now Jane: Sorry.  If it makes you feel any better, your generation's angsty vampire-human romance is so much better than the next generation's.  You see that there, when Buffy says that being stalked isn't a big turn on for a girl?  Remember that, Young Jane.  There will come a time when that isn't taken for granted.

Then Jane: I've just started identifying myself as a feminist, you know.

Now Jane: And in a couple of years you'll actually know what that means.

Then Jane: Future Me...

Now Jane: Yes?

Then Jane: I know I said that liking bad boys was stupid...

Now Jane: Yes?

Then Jane: ...but Spike makes me feel all funny inside.

Now Jane: Ah.  I was afraid of this.  I think we need to have a frank and open discussion about the facts of life.

Then Jane: I know about sexing, I'm not an idiot.

Now Jane: Jesus, no.  I'm talking about something much more devastating and potentially life-ruining.  I'm talking about cheekbones.

Then Jane: That sounds exciting.

Now Jane: Oh, it is.  At first.  But pretty soon it's all you can think about and then before you know it you're losing whole days on Eddie Redmayne.  You drift off in the middle of a lecture because the tutor says something that sounds like 'Fassbender' and when you wake up, it's dark.  Cheekbones are dangerous.  You shouldn't be messing around with that shit.

Then Jane: Pfft, you're such a square, Future Jane.  I bet I'll be fine.

Now Jane: Oh, honey.  We can but hope.  Anyway, you're kind of right about bad boys not being worth the effort.  While Future You will be drawn to Spike's nigh-on Michelangelan bone structure, you will also harbour a secret soft spot for Oz.

Then Jane: Oz? Oz? Future You, I think there is something you are not telling me.  Are you on the marijuana?

Now Jane: No! Though, FYI, not nearly as big a deal as they tell you in PSHE.  But yes, Future You will be drawn to this guitar-playing teenage werewolf and feel really weird about fancying Seth Green, even if he is all young and cute and quietly deadpan.  And then Future You will reveal this aberration to the world in the form of a blog that combines pop culture with rage and far too much spare time.

Then Jane: What's a blog?

Now Jane: Trust me, you can wait eight years to find that one out.

Then Jane: Hey, Future Me, can I ask you something?  About the future?

Now Jane: No, you don't get married to Orlando Bloom but you'll also be pretty over him by the end of the year.

Then Jane: No...how does Harry Potter end?

Now Jane: You cry for three hours.

Then Jane: Yeah.  I thought so.

Finis.

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE: CAPSLOCK MINIMAL (Spoilerific)

Spoilers, my pretties.  So many spoilers.

The Avengers is five star, solid gold, Class A blockbuster entertainment.

There, I wanted to get the obvious bit out of the way.

But THAT WAS THE COOLEST THING EVER, YOU GUYS.  Sorry, I'll ease up on the Capslock after the hammering it took in my reaction post.  (There are, in fact, subtle references to two of the Avengers in that sentence.  Answers on the back of a postcard.)  I don't think I've anticipated a film this much since Toy Story 3 and while it didn't shred my psyche into weeping shards of emotional shrapnel like that one did, it certainly pushed me well into 'hyperventilating nerd' territory.  For those of you in doubt, it's not a great look.  In terms of plot, it's a standard three-act structure: threat is set up, threat is contained, threat breaks loose for epic final battle.  If I had one niggle, it would be that the 'threat is set up' part takes a while to get going but then again, there's a lot of story to get in there, given that it ties in to every single film from the franchise so far.  And while I predicted that the Tesseract (last seen being retrieved from the Arctic in Captain America, and then making a cameo appearance in the stinger for Thor) would be the film's chief MacGuffin, it was a) actually not a MacGuffin and b) extremely clever as it gives each of the Avengers some form of personal investment.  Captain A already had to face-off with it once, it emits gamma radiation so Bruce Banner must provide his particular form of big green wisdom, Iron Man's dad was the one that yoinked it from the depths in the first place, it's a Nordic god thingamabob so Thor has to get involved, and Hawkeye gets zapped by its blue glowy powers in the first ten minutes so Black Widow spends much of the film silently vowing revenge for her squishy-faced companion.

Despite the line-up of A-listers and superheroes, the real star of the show is Joss Whedon.  He keeps the plates spinning so deftly that it never feels like there's any fan-based Avenger favouritism going on.  Iron Man's heroic sacrifice in the closing minutes of the battle does not, for example, feel like a writer pandering to one of the Internet's favourite characters but rather the necessary ending to his character arc.  If you are reading this without having seen the film and are suddenly stricken with doubts over Tony Stark's fate then I'll just say that Iron Man 3 is set for release next year and I was really definitely not at all taken in by it, not even for one tiny little second, not me, and it would have been extremely silly if I had, say, whimpered a little.

There's some stunningly Whedonish dialogue too; even the throwaway lines sound like they've been culled from scripts for unaired episodes of Firefly ("Barton, take them down." "It would be my genuine pleasure, sir.") and, of course, it's extremely funny.  Thor and Loki get some pseudo-Shakespearian speeches that don't so much walk the fine line between the grandiose and the ridiculous as hop from one side to the other cackling with glee.  I already mentioned the "mewling quim" line in my reaction post but special points also have to go to Loki's villainous opening parlay: "I am burdened with glorious purpose.  And cheekbones like goddamn fish slices, seriously."  (Disclaimer: only half of that line was written by Joss Whedon.)  Being Whedon, he also gets to satirise his own writing with Iron Man gleefully snarking at Thor, "Doth mother know thou wearest her drapes?" Occasionally one sensed that there was a Whedon line struggling to get through the performance of a non-Whedon actor (cameos from Alexis Denisoff and Enver Gjokaj noted though) but really, you'd have to give many more fucks than I actually do.

It also became apparent what a good choice of ring-master Whedon was when the film opened with some hardcore Trekkie-style sci-fi.  Ok, so technically superheroes are science fiction but not in the same way as, like, aliens or whatever.  Which is odd, because Marvel comics have a long history of courting the extraterrestrial - the whole Phoenix Saga in X-Men, for example - and yet aliens have never really made it into the films in a big way.  Well, there was the Venom/Symbiote business in Spiderman 3 but given that its major threat seemed to be toward's Tobey Maguire's wardrobe, I think it's better off forgotten.  Joss, however, pulls off the alien invasion with aplomb, as well one might expect.

But as I said, the main part of this deftness is the way in which Whedon keeps every super-and-non-super-powered plate spinning for the full two and half hours.  In order to do them justice, let's examine the major players one by one.  Buckle up ladies, because oestrogen levels in your bedroom are about to go way, way up.

Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo)
Traditionally the hardest superhero to do onscreen, Whedon pulls off a masterstroke here by pointing out the intrinsic comedy value of a mild-mannered scientist with - as Iron Man puts it - "breath-taking anger management issues" combined with advances in Golum-style motion capture technology.  Ruffalo surpasses my (admittedly reserved) expectations in the role, finding something surprisingly touching in Banner's "I-just-want-to-be-good" Jekyll persona.  His explanation of the 'secret' to his control over "the Other Guy" left me a little baffled though - bounding away pre-Hulk, he turns and one-liners to Captain America, "You want to know my secret, Cap?  I'm always angry."  I guess there must be an in-depth explanation somewhere on the internet, but in the meantime I'm going to imagine this scene took place later:

Iron Man: Did Banner ever tell you what the secret to his whole rage deal was?
Captain America: Oh yeah, he says he's always angry, or something.
Iron Man: Jesus, guys, did you hear that?  Banner's always angry.  Wait, what does that even mean?  Holy shit, does that mean he's the Hulk like, all the time?  We've got to stop inviting that guy to our parties.

Or something.

Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans)
So, the good captain might be my least favourite Avenger, but he's still decent, in every sense of the word.  I think the problem is that he's a nice guy and he has a strong moral code and, oh yes, he uses a defensive weapon to show how he's a protector so we're all supposed to nod sagely and go "aaw, what a great guy" when secretly we're going "FOR GOD'S SAKE, ROGERS, BLOW SOMETHING UP."  My feeling is that he could have been a little goofier if they wanted to give him some more defining character traits (though the Wizard of Oz moment was very sweet) but they went with a leadership arc, which also worked fine.  Of the girls I went to see the film with, he was also the only Avenger who no-one wanted to sleep with, having been declared "meh".  Then again, it's entirely possible that we just can't get past a superhero called Captain America.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth)
I'm discussing Thor next because I kind of bracket him with Captain America in the big, dumb and good-natured category of superhero.  However, Thor/Hemsworth has something that Cap/Evans does not: comedy gold.  Whedon sends up the whole Norse god idea with tongue firmly in cheek and Hemsworth joins in with evident glee - because, seriously, I get that comic book writers were on a lot of crack in the 60s, but they took a very early lunch the day they went "Oh hey, let's just nick this whole Norse mythology deal.  Maybe we'll put some wing doodads on the helmet though.  Good work, Tim, no-one'll notice." Getting Branagh to direct the first film was also sort of genius and pretty much cements Thor as one of the best not-even-that-guilty pleasures of all time.  The only real beef I had with Thor was that Thor himself is such an unlikeable douche for the first half that my (admittedly morally unsound) sympathies gravitated so naturally towards Loki that they've kind of stuck there.  But post-Thor, the eponymous god has learnt some humility and is just really, really charming and likeable and funny.  Not my type but if he ever transcends the bounds of fiction and finds himself in South West London, I have a friend who would be very willing to give him the guided tour.

Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Junior)
How fucking cool is Iron Man?  Or Tony Stark?  Or Robert Downey Junior?  Individually they all have something fundamentally cool about them but combined, they create a tsunami, nay a firewall of charisma.  Downey Junior predictably gets the best lines too, coming up with several nomenclatures for his eclectic teammates that made me nigh-on weep with joy.  There was also some much-needed character development in play so we can all look forward to a slightly humbler Stark taking the helm in Iron Man 3, for which I now have high hopes.  Still cool though.  Still fucking cool.

Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson)
And one cannot mention cool without mentioning Samuel L Jackson in the same sentence.  It's actually illegal in six different states.  At one point, he holds a bazooka and shoots down a plane.  Off an airship. 30,000 feet above sea level.  Also, the dude is 60.  You can't argue with that.  There's no-one else who could play a man with no superpowers other than ineffable sang-froid, yet can keep reasonable control of a group of divas with planet-destroying abilities.  I mean that literally: when they rebooted the Marvel universe, the comic book artists purchased the rights to Sam Jackson's appearance just because they too knew that you will never find anyone better to play this role.  Ever.

Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg)
Continuing with the 'normals', Coulson might be the normalest normal ever to kick ass and take names in an extremely polite fashion.  Since I've warned for spoilers, I'll do my inconsolable weeping over his death now, thanks: WHY WHY WHY CURSE YOU WHEDON, DAMN YOU AND I HOPE ALL YOUR PETS DIE HORRIBLY.  That was a masterclass in making you like a character, just so that you could kill him off.  Gregg is understated and wonderful, his dialogue is sharp and sweet, his fanboying of Captain America is adorbs, and his badassery in his dying moments is tear-inducing.  Coulson, you'll be sorely missed.

Hawkeye/Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner)
An Avenger and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent with no superpowers, I've known I was going to like Hawkeye ever since his cameo appearance in Thor.  I didn't know I was going to fucking love him.  Hawkeye is so incredibly boss, I can't even form coherent sentences.  Renner is a) very funny and b) manages to make his uniform of sleeveless vest and bow-and-arrow convincingly heterosexual.  A couple of the film's finest "fuck, that was cool" moments belong to him, most notably the shoot-behind-you-without-bothering-to-look and the turn-and-shoot-as-falling-off-a-building.  Those old chestnuts.

Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson)
And we can't talk about Hawkeye without discussing Black Widow.  Again, in the interests of getting the blindingly obvious out of the way, Scarlett Johansson is very hot.  In fact, she's almost breathtakingly hot in this film.  But that is so, so, so, so not the point of Black Widow (much) because good lord, she's a killing machine.  I mean genuinely frightening.  I would willingly put the next few Iron Man films on hold if it means we can get a Black Widow/Hawkeye film first.  I want to see Budapest.  I want to see him going to take her out and deciding to recruit her instead.  I want more fights like the epic smack down in the control room.  I want to see her dark and mysterious past and all the delicious attendant angst that goes with it.  Gah, I want more.  Now.  Please.  Fourteen-year-old boys everywhere will thank me.

And speaking of delicious attendant angst, let's just take a moment to talk about our villain.

Loki (Tom Hiddleston)
I'll be brief, I swear.  Well, ish.  Now, I will put good money on a redemption arc for Loki by the time the Marvel Cinematic Universe is done.  Because Loki is basically a really shit villain.  He's hopelessly outgunned for the majority of the film, allows himself to be outmanoeuvred and manipulated countless times and - this is the kicker - everyone knows it.  Tony Stark takes great delight in pointing out that Loki has wilfully antagonised some of the most powerful beings in the universe and seems not to give a flying alien fuck.  Thor makes no bones about the fact that his little brother clearly just wants to play with his toys.  Even Coulson deadpans "you lack conviction" before promptly dying.  Add to this the fact that it's not even his own brand of divine retribution that he's putting into play - rather, he's more like a middle manager for the Chitauri's planned takeover bid - and, yeah, Loki really isn't a great villain at all.  His villainous demands amount to classic Youngest Child temper tantrums.  Even his undeniably pimpin' outfits fuel the overwhelming sense of "LOOK AT ME!  LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT MEEEEEE!  NO SCREW YOU, THOR, THE PEOPLE ARE HERE TO SEE ME."

Look, I don't know if it's Whedon's writing or Hiddleston's performance but Loki is still dancing ever so slightly on this side of the redeemable.  Not forgivable, but redeemable - probably through dying.  If there isn't some kind of heroic self-sacrifice waiting at the end of Thor 3 or The Avengers 2, then I'll eat my winged helmet.  It's in his nature.  Villain motivated by greed/lust for power/Iago-esque-for-shits-and-giggles (cf. the Joker, Doctor Doom) = timely defeat and the world breathes a sigh of relief.  Villain motivated by jealousy/insanity/extremely dysfunctional family relations (cf. Doctor Octopus, Two-Face) = humiliating defeat or redemption equals death.  I know my genres.  And so does Loki, I suspect.

Oh and by the way, if you were wondering whether Loki's villainous ineptitude tarnished my shiny, near-worshipful love for him, then what are you, new?  As far as I'm concerned, anyone with those cheekbones gets a free pass.  To be honest, I found him kind of endearing (mass-murder aside).*  Hiddleston sells the role with marvellous aplomb too.  He must have an assistant just to pick the scenery out of his teeth.

All in all, The Avengers is a sustained and exhaustive exercise in being as awesome as is humanly possible in 140 minutes.  And even if it wasn't, I was never going to hate a film that gave me a legitimate excuse to shout "AVENGERS ASSEMBLE" across a crowded club as a way of finding errant group members.  God bless you, Joss Whedon, and all that sail in you.

What an unfortunate mental image to finish on.




*Charlie Brooker compares Hiddleston's Loki to Mad Men's Pete Campbell, another fictional sociopath for whom I have unfortunately tender feelings.  The management would like to point out that a) tastes in fictional men do not in any way reflect tastes in non-fictional men and b) if anyone ever invents some kind of universe-warping raygun that melts the bounds between fiction and reality, I am fucked.

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE (IN MY PANTS) (NO PLOT SPOILERS BUT MANY FEELINGS)

HERE, THESE ARE ALL MY FEELINGS ABOUT THE AVENGERS, WHICH I HAVE JUST SEEN THIS VERY NIGHT:

1) PEW PEW PEW GUNS AND EXPLOSIONS AND WHEEEEE THINGS BLOW UP GOOD TIMES YES NOW. OW, I HAVE A HEADACHE.

2) SCARLETT JOHANSSON IS HOT.  BLACK WIDOW IS ALSO HOT BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY MORE BADASS THAN CAN BE REASONABLY SUMMARISED IN A SHORT AMOUNT OF TIME.

3) TOM HIDDLESTON'S VOICE GOES STRAIGHT TO THE KNICKER AREA.  THIS IS SCIENTIFIC FACT, PROVED BY ALL THE SCIENCE RESEARCH I DID.  TOM.  TOM.  SAY "ON YOUR KNEES" AGAIN.

4) HULK CAN BE DONE SUCCESSFULLY ON FILM BUT FIRST JOSS WHEDON MUST POINT OUT HOW INTRINSICALLY RIDICULOUS HE IS.

5) NOOOOOOOOOOOO, DAMN YOU WHEDON.  OF FUCKING COURSE THAT IS WHO YOU WOULD TARGET FOR YOUR DEMONIC WHEDONISH PURPOSES.

6) THERE MUST BE A HAWKEYE/BLACK WIDOW FILM NOW PLEASE PLEASE NOW I MUST SEE MORE OF THEIR PAIRED AND SHARED AWESOME, AND I MUST KNOW MORE ABOUT THEIR MYSTERIOUS AND SEXY PAST.

7) HAWKEYE HAWKEYE HAWKEYE.  RENNER, YOU SQUISHY-FACED PART-ELF ANGEL.

8) IRON MAN CALLS HAWKEYE 'LEGOLAS'.  THIS IS NOT EVEN THE MOST AWESOME THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE FILM.

9) SAMUEL L JACKSON HOLDS A BAZOOKA AT ONE POINT.  REPORTS INDICATE THAT THIS IS TOO MUCH BADASS FOR THE UNIVERSE TO CONTAIN AND IT WILL BE IMPLODING SHORTLY.

10) JOSS WHEDON AND LOKI VALIDATE THE COMPULSORY MIDDLE ENGLISH COMPONENT OF MY COURSE WITH TWO WORDS: "MEWLING QUIM".

11) LOKI IS SO FUCKING PIMP.  EVEN IN THAT FUCKING STUPID HELMET.  NAY, ESPECIALLY IN THAT FUCKING STUPID HELMET.

12) CAPTAIN AMERICA UNDERSTANDS ONE POP CULTURE REFERENCE AND WE ARE ALL VERY PROUD OF HIM.

13) TONY STARK'S EGO CAN ONLY BE SATED BY A PHALLIC SYMBOL THAT TOWERS ABOVE THE NEW YORK SKYLINE AND BY GOD, I WOULD NOT HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY.

14) STILL NO-ONE HAS MADE ANY GIANT HAMMER JOKES ABOUT THOR.

15) LOKI JUST NEEDS A HUG.  I WILL GIVE IT TO HIM.  SERIOUSLY, I WILL MAKE THAT SACRIFICE.  FOR THE TEAM.

16) THERE WAS ACTUALLY QUITE A LOT OF HOMOEROTICISM AND I REALLY THOUGHT THOR AND LOKI WERE GOING TO KISS AT SEVERAL POINTS, AND ALSO CAPTAIN AMERICA AND IRON MAN.  I, FOR ONE, WELCOME THIS MORE FLUID APPROACH TO SEXUALITY IN MAINSTREAM MEDIA.

17) NOW THAT THE RAINBOW BRIDGE HAS BEEN DESTROYED, THOR TRAVELS BY THE POWER OF PLOT CONTRIVANCE.

18) I CANNOT REALLY SAY MUCH MORE WITHOUT SPOILING THE PLOT.

19) WAIT, WAIT, ONE MORE FOR LUCK.

20)  LOKI. GOD OF ARMANI.


I'm seeing it again on Tuesday.  I'll probably do a proper review then.  Don't hold your breath though, it's probably just going to be the word "awesome" copy-pasted 500 hundred times.

The Twilight Experiment: Part 3 - Eclipse

So after last time's downer of an instalment, the saga continues with Eclipse and, boy, was this an adventure in screaming silently for 90 minutes. Word on the supernatural grapevine is that they tried to make Eclipse a decent film with realistic dialogue and sensitive cinematography and moral complexity. All I'll say is that it's lucky somebody told me because I sure as fuck didn't get any of that from the actual movie. I mean, this is just horrible. I really suffered for this one. Really. You can thank me later.

Enjoy.

The Twilight Experiment: Part 3 – Eclipse

Much to my delight, we open with news of a serial killer on the loose in Forks. By this point, the Edward-has-a-fridge-for-the-bodies-of-young-women jokes are really just writing themselves, so just pretend I said something about that here, okay? But no, apparently this is an actual serial killer. Btdubs, this is, like, the third time Meyer has used the plot device of a mysterious threat that definitely isn't a vampire turning up corpses that we never get to see because that might actually be cool. At least in New Moon, we briefly thought the werewolves might have done it. (Yeah, I forgot to say because I was talking about Jacob's abs. Sue me.) Except they didn't because werewolves are rad and, as always, it is the vampires who both metaphorically and literally suck.

The serial killer stuff doesn't last, obviously, because there are conversations about marriage between a teenage girl and her 80-year-old lover to be had. I am initially surprised because Bella acts like she almost has a mind of her own for all of 30 seconds. Edward proposes again, she says no. I can only assume that whatever judgement-altering narcotics Edward has her under are starting to wear off. Presumably they are the same narcotics that Tom Cruise uses for Katie Holmes. Oh snap. Scientology burn.

Anyway, Bella then provides her flawless reasoning for not wanting to get married: 1 out of 3 marriages end in divorce. Wait, what? Bella, honey, there are plenty of reasons why you shouldn't marry Edward. I have them prepared in thirty-one page document. Colour-coded. With footnotes. This, however, is not one of them given that you literally want to spend eternity with him anyway. Eddie says he'll vampify her if she marries him. Okay, that's win-win, right? That's what she wants. No, that's coercion, she says. Honey. Much as I appreciate your attempts at becoming more than just a mindless dummy strapped to Edward's groin, coercion is what he's been doing to you for the past two films. This – and it so pains me to agree with Edward – is a compromise. Ugh. I hate you both.

Then we get a scene with Charlie, who I like more and more, because he doesn't like Edward and he does like Jacob. In fact, he likes Jacob so much that he ungrounds Bella so she can go see him. Yay! Jacob! Will Jacob be in this more? Soon? Yay! Jacob, however, does not pick up the phone so Bella straps herself into her truck to go find him. It doesn't start. Then she hears a thud on the roof. At last! Classic horror movie territory! And sure enough, BAM! Pale, overly-intense male with countless social disorders sitting in the passenger seat, asking in the husky tones of one who walks a fine line between sanity and throat-ripping if she was about to go and see her only other friend in the whole entire world.

Run, Bella. Run.

But she can't, because Edward disabled the engine. He explains that the werewolves are super dangerous and he has to protect – NO WAIT BACK THE FUCK UP. He disabled her truck? This is the tragic story, ladies and gentleman, of a promising young woman, her induction into a cult and eventual murder at the hands of her sociopath, abusive, controlling boyfriend. This. Is not. A love story.

On a side note, what is all this about the werewolves having no control? Since when? So there was the (rad) werewolf fight between Jacob and Paul (Paul the Werewolf. Really.) that I also kind of skipped over in New Moon because, hey, Jacob took his shirt off and it has been scientifically proven that neither man nor woman can retain basic cerebral functions when Jacob Black's shirt hits the floor. As I recall, Jacob leapt wolfishly to Bella's defence, preventing her from being flattened by an oncoming werewolf. Also he turned into a wolf in mid air, which was by far cooler than anything Edward has ever done. But still, they keep having all these conversations about how Jake could lose control and hurt Bella. We know that Edward apparently finds it a constant effort to resist Bella's super-delicious blood (probably it tastes like strawberries or that amazing sauce from the chinese restaurant round the corner from my house), but we also know that Edward, amongst his many other faults, is a hypocrite. We've seen him flip out when they were getting down with it (even if I do suspect it was more to cover up the fact that Edward is a colossal virgin). And Jasper's freak-out because of a paper cut made the Cullens move away (look, there was a lot of New Moon I neglected to mention). Not to mention every new vamp we come across seems to feel the need to dedicate their unlives to ripping Bella's head off, but that could just be a natural reaction. But werewolves? Nope. Apart from Paul the Werewolf, they have done precisely nothing to indicate that they could be threat to her. Vampire Threats: 70 billion and 2. Werewolf Threats: 1.

Bella goes to visit her mum, which is nice because her mum treats Bella like an 18 year old girl and not a toddler made of porcelain like a certain pouty sparkling someone I could mention. She also does a v good job of explaining why becoming a vampire is a bad idea. Actually, let's just take a moment to think about this: our main character actually wants to become a vampire. I'm confused. Maybe I'm thinking too much along the lines of traditional horror movie tropes, but aren't we always tying to, y'know, avoid becoming vampires? Isn't humanity always better, in the end? The sun on your skin, the taste of food, body temperature above zero? That kind of thing? What kind of effed-up mind wants a girl at the beginning of her life to freeze herself forever in time, locked in an eternity of attending high school with her high school boyfriend, incapable of having children or grandchildren, unable to get a job because she'll always be an unqualified 18-year-old, unable ever to see the only good friend she's ever had, cut off from her parents and loved ones because they think she's dead? Who would want to portray that as a good thing? Oh hi, Stephanie Meyer.

Ah. I've just found this, from the lady herself, on her website:

“I am not anti-female, I am anti-human. I wrote this story from the perspective of a female human because that came most naturally, as you might imagine. But if the narrator had been a male human, it would not have changed the events. When a human being is totally surrounded by creatures with supernatural strength, speed, senses, and various other uncanny powers, he or she is not going to be able to hold his or her own. Sorry. That's just the way it is. We can't all be slayers. Bella does pretty well I think, all things considered.”

Leaving aside the hilarious unintentional truth of the first sentence and the deluded falsehood of the last, this makes a lot of sense about Meyer. She's dreamed up this race of special, shiny, super-powered beings that no human can compete with; how terribly, terribly sad. Genuinely, I am sad for her that she has so little love for humanity. Humanity has a nuance to it that no monster we've ever come up with can beat – probably because monstrosity is always a distorted reflection of an aspect of ourselves. Even if your vampires are beautiful, strong, fast, immortal, can read minds, they just aren't...human. Can you imagine a vampire – especially ones as uptight and po-faced as the Cullens – on a bouncy castle? Failing a test? Getting dirt under their fingernails? No, because vampires exist in fiction to say uncomfortable things about who we are at night, in the dark – who we don't want to be. It's not a life we're meant to choose – at the end of Dracula, Jonathan Harker offers to become a vampire to keep his wife Mina company in eternity, even though it will cost him his soul and probably his sanity, and it registers as a sacrifice. Giving up your humanity is meant to be a sacrifice.

Besides, this fundamental misunderstanding of what monster fiction is for reveals how little understanding Meyer has of how to tell a story. In science-fiction, when the heroes are outnumbered by aliens with superior technology and numbers, do they shrug and go, “Yeah, you're right. We can't really compete with you guys.”? Does Buffy put down her stakes and go, “Y'know, I guess it would be better if the whole world was converted into immortal blood-suckers.”? Nope. Because that would make terrible drama. There's no conflict in shrugging and giving in. Sometimes, if you want a good story, you just have to fight. Besides, having your teenage everywoman, so bland that the average tween girl can easily insert herself into her place, turn around and talk about how much being 'normal' and 'human' sucks and she wants to upgrade to sparkly super-powered vampdom? And then actually letting her do that (uh, yeah, spoilers, I guess)? Houston, we have a problem. It's a horribly backfiring moral.

Yeah. Anyway. Back to the movie.

So the Cullens are chasing Victoria or something. Seriously? She is not a good enough villain for this to be her third movie. Also, I know I didn't mention in my New Moon review (like most of the film, then) but she really didn't even need to be in it at all.

And 18 and a half minutes in – it's Jacob! Yaaaaay! Edward asks Bella to stay in the car. She gets out. Yaaaay! Jacob is in the rain. Yaaaay! Jacob tells off Edward for lying to Bella and keeping information from her that concerns her. Yaaaaay! Bella agrees with Jacob. Yaaaaaay! Bella wants to talk to Jacob and he brushes her off. Yaaaay! Bella leaves Edward to hop on the back of a motorcycle and ride off with him into the sunset while Jacob flips Edward the bird and they have sex. On the motorbike. Because werewolves are awesome. Yaaaaay! Ok, that's not what happens.

Instead, Jacob takes Bella to wherever it is the werewolves hang out. I cannot overstate how much I prefer the werewolves to the Cullens. They tease each other. They kid around. They don't hold grudges. They don't respond melodramatically to paper cuts. Paul (snigger), who tried to kill Bella in the last film, greets her with a shrug and a “hey”. We also meet Leah, a girl werewolf who is bitchy and moody and is mean to Bella so that means a) she probably fancies Jacob because who doesn't? And b) we aren't supposed to like her. Too bad, Meyer. She's a bitchy, moody girl werewolf who is mean to Bella. So. Kind of shot yourself in the foot there.

Bella and Jacob have a conversation about imprinting, which is the werewolf version of love at first sight. I don't like this, mainly because it makes cool werewolves sound like Edward. Anyway, Jacob hasn't imprinted on anyone yet. Spoiler alert: when he does, it's going to make us all very, very angry. Bella tells Jacob she's going to get vamped after graduation. Jacob responds with “not in a month, not before you've even lived” and “he's got his hooks in you so deep”. Are they even trying to present Edward as a good thing at this point?

Speaking of which, back at Bella's house, we get some super-creepy shots of someone fondling Bella's bedsheets and sniffing her clothes. Turns out to be some other vamp but we're clearly supposed to think it's Edward. Edward shows up and immediately realises someone's been in there because when he smells Bella's dirty laundry, he always folds it back up neat so she'll never know. The Cullens once again rally round to protect Bella because they have nothing better to do. Bella points out that, thanks, but she has her own personal werewolf bodyguard. Naturally, Eddie hates this but vamps and wolves form some kind of alliance because Bella is so super-special, her safety is a greater priority than keeping a thousands of years old peace treaty.

So there's some kind of weird (symbolic) hostage-exchange handover where Edward (symbolically) gives Bella to Jacob, who is (symbolically) half-naked. “Doesn't he own a shirt?”snipes Edward. Oh Eddie, does the wind own a shirt? Do the trees? Does the moon? Jacob Black is a force of nature. A thrill ride through the howling, visceral but oh-so-alive forest on a starlit night. Baby, you can't stop him 'cos those abs just won't quit.

Scuse me, I think I need a shower.

So Edward does the douchey I'm-kissing-my-girlfriend-in-front-of-you thing (for a guy that's 110 years old, he sure does know how to do a very good impression of a seventeen year old) and drives off to hunt while Jacob enfolds Bella in his huge, manly arms and takes her to a werewolf party. Werewolf party. Bella Swan, I hate you.

At the werewolf party, we get the backstory on the originals of Werewolves v Vamps: Supernatural Smackdown – a long time ago, some vamps attacked the tribe, so the tribe shapeshifted into big fuck-off wolves and tore them apart. Fair enough. Also, some broad stabbed herself to distract the last vamp in time for her husband to kill it. Right, but why did she need to stab herself in the heart? We saw in the flashback thing that her dead son was in her arms, I know it's callous but couldn't she have sliced him up a little? He only just died. Or if it does need to be living blood, again, why the heart? We saw earlier than a paper cut would do it. Actually, if the vamps been attacking the village, shouldn't there be blood everywhere anyway? Whatever. Werewolves are still cooler than vampires because the entire point of their existence is to defend innocents from vampires. So tell me again, why is Edward the good guy?

Oh look, plot! More killings. Emmet thinks they should go to Seattle and deliver a can of whoop-ass. And he's mean to Bella. I like Emmet. He's practically a werewolf.

There is an Edward/Bella scene so boring it's not worth reporting.

It's Jacob! Yaaaay! This scene reads like a checklist of good and bad things to say to your girlfriend:

• I'm in love with you and I want you to choose me – kind of clingy but fine, whatever.
• I know you feel something for me, you just won't admit it – ok, let's not start getting Nice Guy about this, Jake.
• I'm going to fight for you – ok, not a problem.
• You won't ever have to change yourself for me or say goodbye to anyone – GOOD! GOOD!
• He probably can't even kiss you without hurting you – YEP!
• Feel that? Flesh and blood and warmth – I'LL SAY!
• Let me force myself upon you in a kiss that you clearly don't want - WAIT, WHAT?

Ugh. It's like SMeyer realised that she'd accidentally written a completely likeable character who had much more going for him than her pasty charisma vacuum of a leading man and went “Well shit, this is a pickle. WHAT CAN I DO TO RUIN HIM?”

Oh Jacob. And we were getting on so well. Mind you, Bella then tries to punch him in the face (lady, violence doesn't make you a strong woman. It makes you unhinged) and fails hilariously.

Jacob drops her home and Edward gets all angry because Jake tried to kiss his girlfriend. I find this hilarious that he's getting uppity about Jake kissing her against her will (“next time, wait for her to say the words”) when he only knows about it because he's reading minds left, right and centre (I mean, presumably?). Hey, hey Eddie. Next time you sabotage her truck, wait for her to say the words. Or, um, how about sneaking into her room and watching her sleep? Wait for her to say the words. Or forbidding her from seeing her friends. Wait for her to say the words. This is a fun game.

Anyway, Eddie and Jake have a bit of a fight and neither cover themselves in glory because they act like Bella isn't even there. Despite myself, I wait for Bella to say “hey guys, I think I kind of get a say in this”. Nope. It is to dream.

Daddy Cullen patches her up and Emmet jokes about Bella's clumsiness. I like you Emmet. Then she says she punched a werewolf in the face. No, Bella. You tried to punch a werewolf in the face. You failed hilariously. Emmet says “badass” and Rosalie walks out in a huff and I like Emmet a little less and Rosalie a little more. Of course, we then get Rosalie's backstory because Bella feels the need to confront the one person in the whole universe who doesn't think she's super-special and sparkly. Turns out Rosalie doesn't hate Bella. She envies her. Jeeeez. Turns out Rosalie was vamped back in the 20s (maybe? the flashback looks like a low-budget Gatsby remake) when her fiance and his friends apparently raped her and then beat her up which, I must admit, is pretty hard-hitting for Twilight. Or it would be if we didn't get a nice sanitised version where no actual pain is shown. Daddy Cullen was passing by and decided to vampify her because she was dying. Fine but – why doesn't he do that for everyone? He's a doctor. He must see dying people every day. Does he vamp them too? Why settle on one random chick in the 20s? Isn't it kind of worrying that the only dying people he's vamped were attractive teenagers? Anyway, we then find out Rosalie murdered her attackers horribly while wearing her wedding dress, which is so stupid and cliched, I have to laugh. But basically, Rosalie is sad because she can't have babies. Yawn.

Somehow it turns out that the Volturi – or at least Dakota Fanning – are behind this. Or something? They're there anyway. This plot is weak and confusing. I feel sleepy. And hungry.

Bella graduates and once again, Best Frenemy Jessica reinforces the idea that being a human with your whole life ahead of you is pretty great. Bella manages to miss the point spectacularly. Jacob rocks up at the grad party, apologises, and says he was an ass (when does Edward ever apologise for his actions? Like, ever?) - and then Alice takes over Jacob-cockblocking duties with a convenient vision.

It turns out the Seattle vamps are an army of newborns (i.e. new vampires) that are deadlier than the regular kind, so vampires and werewolves must team up to learn how to fight them because there is a special way or something and I don't really care because VAMPIRE WEREWOLF TRAINING MONTAGE. For some reason, Jasper is fight master and we get to see the cullers attempting to take him down one by one. I like Emmett, so obviously he doesn't succeed. I don't like Alice, so obviously she does.

We then get Jasper's backstory, which is marginally cooler than Rosalie's. Apparently he was a Confederate soldier (rocking the cowboy hat, I must say) who was vampified by some wandering women of the night in scandalously diaphanous gowns to take charge of a – shocker – army of newborns. Then he meets Alice and becomes good. Did I mention I dislike Alice? She foresaw their relationship or some such bollocks. Why? Did he decide it? Cute. Fuck off, Alice.

Bella has a dream and works out that Victoria was behind this all along. Edward says Alice would have seen it in her visions but Bella says she's hiding behind the army and letting someone else make the decisions. Wait, what? In what world does that make sense? I get that Alice sees futures when people make decisions about stuff. But didn't Victoria need to make decisions to come up with that plan? And if she's letting someone else make decisions about her little operation, how is she in charge at all? What if they make the wrong decision? This is stupid. Twilight is stupid. Jacob hasn't been onscreen for nearly ten minutes and I hate everything.

There's some kind of convoluted plan to keep Bella safe by getting Jacob to carry her around because his wolf scent will cover her Bella scent but I'm not really listening because I'm laughing at the plot contrivances that get Bella, once again, up close and personal with naked Jacob. Edward obviously isn't happy but a) he can't walk around shirtless because everyone would feel sorry for him, and b) Jacob is more capable of keeping his girlfriend safe than he is. While carrying Bella through the woods, Jacob talks about their relationship again, casually dropping the bombshells that a) he can sense how Bella feels around him (he uses the word “nervous”, presumably because “supremely horny” would endanger the PG-13 certificate) and b) he let alpha-wolf Sam become the leader of the pack because he's just that cool. Jacob Black doesn't need a pack. He's a lone wolf. He wants to run free, wild, alone through deeper and darker landscapes, experiencing fierce and savage joys no mere human could ever comprehend, as the moonlight shines off his biceps and lights his torso with a nigh-on godlike glow.

I'm going to take another shower.

Also Jasper comes back to report the success of the plan, only now he has an inexplicably Texan accent. Giss huntin' newborns jest brings the old country floodin' back, dun't it? (I don't know, I'm from Wimbledon.) Alice shows up and blithely tells Bella that she's tricked her dad (who she calls by his first name) into basically leaving Edward and Bella alone together in the Cullen house. “You're welcome,” she winks. Alice Cullen: Super Pimp.

But, of course, our chaste teenage heroes, take the opportunity, AGAIN, to talk about their relationship. Jeez. There are so many things wrong with this conversation, I don't even want to touch it but it ends with Bella begging for sex so much that she agrees to marry Edward, basically just so they can bone. Eddie does his best to outright condemn sex before marriage without ever saying the words “true love waits” by explaining that he is literally saving her soul. Oh man. This is hilarious. Wait wait, Eddie. Hey, Eddie. So it's cool that Bella stood by while hundreds of innocents were murdered in Italy before her very eyes (almost) but she can't hop on the good foot and do the bad thing with you, despite the fact that you're going to spend eternity forever anyway? Because that's going to send her to fiery damnation? By that count, she should looking forward to a good roasting on account of all the lying, not honouring her mother or her father, and she sure as hell has been indulging in a bit of coveting the local werewolf's...ass.

But wait, it gets better. He explains that he's from a different era. He wants to court Bella, and ask her father's permission to propose, and wait until they are sanctified as one in the eyes of God before indulging in sinful, lustful carnal embraces. Wait, what? THIS MAKES NO SENSE. Edward isn't even that old, for a vampire. He's 110, he says. So he was vamped some time around 1917. He only lived in that society for seventeen years before becoming, essentially, a fixed point in time, and thus fully capable of rolling with the changes of each new decade. He's not a time traveller suddenly dumped into the fast and loose ways of the 21^st century. For god's sake, the Roaring 20s started a few years later, and they weren't no church service. This is why Americans make crap vampires. They have no history to live through. Jasper's Civil War story is about as good as it gets.

Anyway, the upshot is that Bella agrees to marry Edward like we always knew she would, so all that wrangling about not wanting to be a teenage marriage statistic was pointless and token and really infuriating.

Anyway, none of this really matters because next comes my favourite scene in the whole thing. For some reason that I wasn't paying attention to, Bella is spending the fight in a tent way above the battleground. Does this mean we don't get to see the fight? BOO. Anyway. It's freezing and Edward, having the skin temperature of an ice lolly, can do nothing but watch as Bella slowly freezes to death. (On a side note – is cuddling Edward fun? Would having sex with be fun? Or just really, really cold?) But surprise, surprise, Jacob to the rescue because he comes in – shirtless, because werewolves scorn blizzards – and after a little face-off with Eddie, who has absolutely no moral ground to stand on here, jumps into Bella's sleeping bag to warm her up against his muscular, naked body. “After all,” he says to Edward, “I am hotter then you.”

Now, you;d think I might be nodding in agreement here - which I am - but mainly, this scene is just brilliantly, hilariously, unintentionally, smoulderingly homoerotic. Jacob Black, I am going to hold a ticker tape parade in your honour but you might want to stop staring at Edward with such animal intensity while you stroke Bella's hair. Things get even better when Eddie and Jake converse while Bella sleeps. “Could you please at least try to control your thoughts?” snaps Edward like a prissy vicar's wife. Jacob grins and calls him out on his mind-invasion things. Jacob Black, I love you. Stephanie Meyer didn't really write you, did she? Some poor editor who probably lives in a bedsit with two cats invented this glorious, decent, funny, strong character, and she has to sit back while you get all the credit. Poor thing. I think her name is Barbara.

They converse some more about super-sheshul Bella is and how hard it would be to lose her and yadda yadda yadda. Why? Bella has got to be the most undeserving heroine I have ever come across. I get that S Meyer wanted to create an everywoman character, someone with who the reader could easily put themselves in her place, but fuck's sake. Bella isn't even an empty frame, she's horrible and ungrateful and moody and manipulative and can't stand up for herself and apparently can't tell the difference between an abusive relationship and true love. Grrr.

Jacob insists again that she's in love with him too, she just won't admit it to herself. Jake, I don't like when you talk like this. You sound pushy. You sound desperate. You sound like Edward. Eddie admits that if they weren't natural enemies and Jacob wasn't trying to steal his “reason for living” (I thought you were dead), he might like him. Boys, boys, this sexual tension is unbearable.

Mercifully Jacob brings us back from insanity-land by telling him that even if Eddie weren't planning on vamping Bella, he still wouldn't like him. Because Edward is a whiny, fussy, uptight, over-protective, stalkery, controlling old man, and Jacob is a living god. Just so we're clear.

Next morning Edward really pulls off that gold medal in douchebaggery he's been gunning for by tricking Bella into revealing the engagement to Jacob. “He deserves to know,” he says unapologetically. Yep, it's definitely Good Ol' Jake's wellbeing that you're looking out for there. Then, just for extra credit, he tries to pull Bella back from going after him. Nice.

But then in a bid to stop Jake running off and killing himself (because apparently no-one in this series can handle a little teen heartbreak) Bella tells him to kiss her. AT LONG BLOODY LAST. And I don't even need to tell you how it's a million times hotter than Eddie's chaste fumbling, but I'll say it anyway. Because it is.

Thankfully, we do get to see the fight scene, and I have to say, it's pretty cool – even if they do manage to avoid real bloodshed by having the vampire limbs shatter like porcelain. Then again, I guess vampires don't have blood...but then where does the blood they drink go? I'm guessing they don't really have digestive systems, they don't seem to go to the bathroom or do anything too icky and bodily because then they wouldn't be so shiny and superhumanly perfect. So does the blood just sit there? Does it evaporate? Wait, how can Edward even have sex with Bella if – to put it delicately – vampires don't have circulatory systems? That's that moral dilemma solved, I guess. Huh. Vampire anatomy. Who knew.

Anyway, then Victoria and her sidekick – the one who was making all the decisions, so is technically the boss, remember? - show up and a slightly less cool fight scene occurs. A baby werewolf call Seth rips the arm off sidekick guy (it is honestly not worth learning his name), which is badass and Victoria goes to run away. Wait, what? How is this character even a villain? How is she worth three films of being the antagonist? She wants to kill Bella – Bella is right there! Edward has to goad her into coming back to fight him! For the 728^th time, this series makes zero sense.

Anyway, they fight and it looks like Eddie will lose (oh no) until Bella remembers her old campfire stories and stabs herself in the arm to distract Victoria. Well, at least she had her brain in gear for once and didn't go for the full heart-stabbing deal-y. Maybe the story woman was just super theatrical and in the moment it just felt right. So Edward rips Victoria's head off. He's still not cool though. Then he sets fire to her, which, if you recall, is the only way to kill a vampire truly and properly. Except what he does is just chuck a lighter (where did he get it? He doesn't smoke. He wasn't even supposed to be in the fight, so it's not like he was carrying it around on the off-chance he'd have to flame a vampire corpse, is it?) on her body – literally throws it through the air of a cold, windy mountaintop – and not only does it stay alight but her entire body goes WHOOSH immediately. Are vampires made of gasoline? Do they have petrol instead of blood? Is that vampire anatomy? I JUST WANT SOMETHING TO MAKE SENSE.

Alice has a vision of Dakota Fanning approaching and it sends a dread chill into her heart but then again, we all have bad memories of War of the Worlds. Then, out of nowhere, one last vamp shows up and Jacob gets half his ribs smashed. No! Use strained plot contrivances to inject some semblance of dramatic morphine into the turgid corpse of this film if you must, but leave Jacob out of it! The Volturi show up because...I honestly don't know. I think they're supposed to be some kind of vampire police but – and buckle up here, because I'm about to agree with Edward for the second time in the film – as Eddie points out, if they'd shown up half an hour earlier they could have, y'know, done their job.

Making up for lost time, the last of the newborn army gets flamed by the Volturi (the Cullens stand by and watch like the horrible apologists for murder that they are) and Dakota Fanning says the Volturi don't give second chances. Wait, what? Yes, you do! Edward – in a really stupid, half-assed way, admittedly – was prepared to reveal your existence to humanity and you let him waltz off with a coy smile and a promise to be good! You said that Bella had to become a vampire and she's still human! You – you – you are terrible antagonists! Jeeeeeeez.

Bella remembers that her best friend got half his bones smashed up for her and stops by to visit while Daddy Cullen patches him up. I'm hoping for another werewolf make-out session but instead we get – predictably – another conversation about relationships. “Edward isn't as perfect as you think,” says Jacob. “I know who he is,” says Bella. Oh, honey. I almost feel sorry for you. “I am exactly right for you,” says Jacob from his manly, sweaty bed of pain. “With me it would be as easy as breathing.” Jake, Jake, Jake, we know. We get it. But some people, y'know. It's like trying to reason with Creationists. My advice is forget her and move on. Maybe with someone with a slightly greater range of facial expression. Someone who writes a Batman-flavoured blog about pop culture and has her very own cat, perhaps.

So we finish with Bella and Edward sitting in a meadow of wildflowers talking about their wedding. Since you can probably imagine what it cost me to type that, I don't need to say much more. Edward tells her that she's giving away too much, trying to make everyone else happy. That's funny, because to me responding to queries about the guest list and reception with “who cares?” kind of suggests, I don't know, the exact opposite. Bella says that the choice between him and Jacob is "the choice between who I should be and who I am". Wait, what? THAT MAKES NO SENSE. Recognising flaws in your character is not a bad thing, Miss Bella Perfect-Special-Monster-Bait Swan, it really isn't. She continues to justify her terrible life choices by saying she's "had to face death and pain and loss in your world, but I've never felt stronger or more myself". Bella, why does everything you say make me want to hit you in the face? Here's a handy clue: if death and pain is making you feel stronger, it probably isn't really happening to you. What you mean is that a few random people you didn't really know died and now you get to make some pseudo-profound observations on life. Congratu-horrible.

“I want to tie myself to you in every humanly way possible,” says Eddie. Oh, just shag. “Starting with our wedding,” he reminds her. Jeeeez. Eddie, you've managed to cockblock yourself. You awful, awful, prudish, boring fictional creation.

And then it doesn't even end with them kissing. They just kind of...touch faces.

In conclusion, for a movie that's supposed to be the “good” one of the series, this is just horrible. It's not inadvertently funny enough to mock like the first one, nor does it have anything genuinely enjoyable about it like the second one. Great characters (Jacob) do contrived, horrible things and NONE OF THE PLOT MAKES SENSE. The fight scenes are pretty cool but they are few and far between because didn't you know? This story is about romance.

If you are acquainted with any young girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen, pay attention. Now, if you are over thirty and not related to any of them, go and take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask yourself some difficult questions. The rest of you, listen up. Do not stop your young children/sisters/cousins etc from reading and watching Twilight. It really isn't worth the sweat off your liberal, mature brows. But at the same time, try and slip them a copy of Little Women or Anne of Green Gables or Jane Eyre so that when they inevitably grow out of the franchise, good books that don't hate women will be waiting for them, along with Wuthering Heights which will deconstruct everything they ever thought was romantic.

And if, on the very small off-chance that they have not grown out of the series by the time they hit their late teens (for teenage girls are not stupid creatures, only full of hormones), if on that very small off-chance, they are seventeen and still taking the series at face value - kill them.

A Pop-Cultural Confession

I love bad TV. And bad films. And bad books. And bad songs. And bad sandwiches. No, wait.

Actually, I love a certain type of bad TV/film/literature/music. When you say "bad TV", you probably think of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding or Take Me Out or my sister's latest favourite, some show with an awfully punning name that I can't remember where gay man have to sprint back into the closet for money by fooling a heterosexual woman into having feelings for them. I think it's called "Where Taste Goes to Die".* But these are artlessly bad telly. They know what they are. They make no pretensions to greatness, and thus are curiously humourless - despite their abundance of ribaldry and 70s era Brighton postcard naughtiness. I'm talking about the programmes that are preposterous. Absurd. Almost surreally bad. So much so that you're sure someone is wiping away tears of mirth behind the camera at the expense of the poor saps who actually pay the licence fee. If this was America, I'd say these are the programmes knocked out between the hours of the 11am cocaine break and 11.38am when it's time to take an early lunch and also more cocaine. Being Britain, it's more likely that these are the shows knocked out between a nice cup of tea and a biccy at 4.30 in the afternoon and weeping over your BA in Arts History at 5.15.

My criteria for detecting such shows (and films and books) is simple. If, at any point, I lean back in my chair, pull my (sometimes real, sometimes imaginary) glasses down my nose, chortle and say firmly "SILLY", it's a winner. Sometimes good shows have "SILLY" moments. Sometimes they have entire episodes of "SILLY". Being Human falls prey to this more than I'd like. Doctor Who too, especially in the Russell T Davies era. That episode with Agatha Christie and the giant wasp. I'd say that on paper they thought it sounded charming and off-beat but I've just typed it out here and it sounds like a parody of a Doctor Who episode. And a better parody than that Lenny Henry one with the Margaret Thatcher dalek. Saying that Maggie Thatcher is a life-destroying emotionless ooze encased inside a metal outer shell constructed by supremacist masters isn't satire, it's just fact.

Sorry, think I got some politics in your pop culture, there.

As I said, there's a difference between SILLY television/film/etc and downright bad stuff. There's the bad stuff like Take Me Out (upon my first viewing, I was reminded of a line from Jane Austen**: "Man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal." If the premise of your show aligns with the sexual politics of the late 18th century, you need to take a long hard look in the mirror). It's joyless. It's crass. It's (incoming snob alert) Lowest Common Denominator television. I'm aware that many watch Take Me Out et al because they find it hideously compelling, sort of like driving past a car crash on the motorway. I get this. I'm on board with this. And the game show format means you can catch the occasional episode here and there and not feel hideously guilty.

I differ in that I watch whole series that I think are badly written, acted and filmed. I follow the plot. I root for the characters. I decide it would be better if x happened to y instead of z. People are - understandably - puzzled by this. I don't advocate this relationship with the gogglebox: it's terribly unhealthy and please let us remember I am a terrible freak of nature and my mother should probably never have let me out of the attic. "But why?" People ask me. (In my head. Nobody actually cares about what I watch on TV.) "Why spend so much energy on shows you don't even like?"

Oh-ho, I say. Shows that are bad, yes. Shows I don't like? No, no, no. Merlin. The Tudors. Whitechapel. These are my crack. Silly, silly shows full of ridiculous dialogue, flimsy premises, unbelievable plot twists (yes, even in Merlin where they can explain things away with magic). And I love them. I love kicking back with a bottle of something cheap, a gal pal and iPlayer (or whatever) and roaring sniggery, joyful commentary at Rupert Penry-Jones pretending to have OCD because someone thought it would give his character on Whitechapel depth.

Whitechapel is especially dear to my heart, actually, because it started out pretty well. The first series operated on the premise that someone was imitating the Jack the Ripper murders with such exact detail and unstoppability that people started to think he'd come back to life. This worked. Jack the Ripper stands pretty tall in the Murderer's Hall of Fame. He's scary because he was never caught. There's a ton of theories about him. And the slight suggestion of the supernatural gave it a nice edge and saved it from being too...Red Riding-y, I guess. Then it got a second series. About the Krays. Yes, the Krays were famous people who did bad things who lived in Whitechapel. That's about as far as anything made sense. Copycat Krays...don't. The Krays did naughty murders because they were building a criminal empire. It was to a purpose. A bad purpose that we at Jane Shakespeare do not in any way condone, no matter how much I might casually drop into conversation my family's spurious connections with the Mafia, but a purpose nonetheless. So they spent an entire series avoiding asking the huge, glaring, obvious question:WHY? Why in heaven's name mimic the not-at-all-famous individual killings of two gangsters? As serial killers go, that's one spending a lot of time in the library. The third series is airing right now and they've basically run up against the wall that most of us saw coming a way back: there are no more crimes in Whitechapel to imitate. Instead, they've opted for a 'crime archive', run by Steve Pemberton, wherein is contained a record of crimes from the world over, many of which bear shocking and convenient resemblances to the crimes being committed in modern day Whitechapel. Hey. Psst. Rupert Penry-Jones. I'd start investigating the guy from The League of Gentlemen, if I were you.

They even have to spell this out in the first episode. "Are you saying it's another copycat?" asks RPJ handsomely (he does everything handsomely, he can't help it). "No," says Steve Pemberton, making sure the audience are paying attention, "but we can use reports of crimes that happened centuries ago or abroad in different social and cultural contexts to help solve ones happening specifically in a very small area of London today." Except that's preposterous and you're ridiculous and god I love this show. Every innovation they make is hilarious: they try and find RPJ a love interest and his initial (handsome) reaction is always along the lines of "Good God, a woman! Get it away! It might use its pheromones or wiles or breasts on me. I hear they have those." Whitechapel (as I said) is also a pretty small area of London, these days mostly populated by upper-middle-class hipsters who consider themselves daring for moving to East London and a handful of belligerent actual East End natives. Whitechapel on TV is a shadowy world of outrageous murders every week or so, Kensington Gore being slung around like it's going out of style, and a "community" of "locals" who are apparently something akin to the villagers in The Wicker Man as every week Salt-of-the-Earth Lady-Policeman reports back that "the word on the street" is that hapless innocents are being stalked by fell agents of darkness for Lucifer's own infernal damned purposes. And they always seem to remember murders that happened in the Victorian era. "It were a dark time," they shake their heads and say, staring traumatised into their builder's tea. Whitechapel: gotta love it.

It's not just crappy telly though. Films are not exempt. Again, I'm not talking obviously shite romantic-comedy-by-numbers bilge like New Year's Eve or whatever Jennifer Aniston is in now. I mean films that have ideas, dangerous ideas, that they wish to achieve. Take Thor. Since posting my review of it (here), where I was fairly "eh", if I recall, I have since watched it more times than any other superhero film I own. Including Iron Man, including The Dark Knight, including X-Men: First Class, all of which are legitimately good movies, which Thor is not. But it has Asgard! Shiny, shiny, camp Asgard! It has a rainbow bridge and a giant hammer and frost giants and I'm already laughing because it is so goddam gloriously ridiculously brilliantly SILLY that I enjoy it with a level of unholy glee good movies can't quite match. I even got over the whole Thor-isn't-really-my-type thing when I decided that Loki was really the main character but Kenneth Branagh didn't want to make Chris Hemsworth jealous. What? What?

The point is, you should try it. I'm not against crap TV, far from it. But there are degrees of crapness. Instead of watching My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding paint an entire culture in what can be generously described as broad brushstrokes, watch Primeval. It may be tosh of the highest order, but it's not exploiting anybody (except you, probably). Instead of popping on Twilight (which, by the way, doesn't count as enjoyably bad because the SILLY moments are outweighed by the THAT'S NOT OKAY moments), why not dig out Heart and Souls, a painfully 80s (despite being produced in 1993) comedy wherein Robert Downey Jr must help four dead people complete their unfinished business before his girlfriend dumps him? What I'm saying is that crap TV can be an innocent guilty pleasure. You too can sit for hours in front of Merlin's uncomfortable shirtless scenes, stuffing your mouth with popcorn and roaring indistinctly "SILLY". Live the dream, people. Live the dream.

*Apparently actually called Playing It Straight. I prefer my title.

** Yes, I'm aware of how pretentious that sounds. Come at me, bro.