Pitchers and Vampires Report

Old enough to be Cy Young

So I broke down and watched Twilight recently. It only seemed fair to actually see the film that I had intuitively decided to mock over the past few years... and now that I have -- all guilt is gone. What a crap-tacular movie!  

In a nutshell, the story revolves around Bella Swan, a morose teenager who moves back in with her father, a sheriff in the small Pacific Northwest town of Forks, when her mother decides to go on the road with her minor league baseball playing boyfriend. 

There, she encounters the mysterious and uber-pale Cullen clan, who we learn are the adopted children of Mr. Jennie Garth, so there's nothing at all anyone, including school guidance counselors, should find creepy about the fact they all seem to be dating each other -- except for odd-man out Edward. Eventually, as you would expect even without being familiar with the story, Edward and Bella fall in love, which leads to much moping around and long scenes of sadness, since -- shocker -- Edward and his family are vampires. 

Actually, some of the new takes on "being a vampire" are somewhat refreshing... for instance, they can go out in the sunlight, but don't because doing so causes them to "sparkle" and thus would reveal their true identity. Hence, the reason they chose to live in a perennially overcast area. That's at least a creative way of not having to have every scene take place after curfew.

Shoeless Joe was on Team Edward

However, any chance the movie had at succeeding to capture my heart flew out the window when Edward takes Bella out on a date to play baseball with his family. And no, that's not a lame cover story the couple tells her naive father so they can go off on an illicit rendezvous. No,  apparently, vampires in Twilight actually love to play baseball -- but since these immortals are also super-strong, they can only play baseball during thunderstorms so that the "crack of the bat" from their Ruthian blasts does not draw attention to their exploits. 

(And of course their choice of uniform is reminiscent of the Chicago White Sox -- after all, they wouldn't have been able to go to any Cubs games until 1988 for fear of sparkling. Now that I think of it,  Glenn Close in The Natural must have been a vampire! Oh, no! Poor Roy Hobbs.)

See how she sparkles!

Anyway, the baseball game goes on for far, far too long, and probably would have gone on even longer except that suddenly the Black-Eyed Peas show up and want to eat Bella along with their peanuts and cracker jack. The rest of the movie involves the Cullens trying to keep Bella from getting stepped on like a leprechaun.

Some other stuff happens, but quite frankly, I've already forgotten... hopefully, there will be some sort of recap at the beginning of New Moon, which is next on my DVR queue. I'll let you know soon...  but in the interim, feel free to mock away!

"I Gotta (Bad) Feeling...