In a work so over-stuffed with ideas as Tony Kushner's Angels in America—an HBO movie adapted from Kushner's own Pulitzer-prize winning drama that liberally runs up to six hours—what more can there be to say of it except that it stuns: continually, unerringly, stubbornly, until your heart and brain swell and ache with the sheer volume of energy presented on screen. The time is 1985, New York City, and everywhere, in Kushner's world, people fret and dart about, sliced up by their interconnected bonds of disease, love, and politics. AIDS has just begun to ravage the city, and the millennium approaches; as many a character doth proclaim, history itself is opening up—"Anything can happen. Any awful thing."
At the center (and about him do the other elements and characters spin like spokes about a wheel) is Prior Walter (Justin Kirk, giving a luminous, ebulliently witty performance bristling with fervor and grace), who has just been diagnosed with the dreaded syndrome…and whose lover of four years, Louis (Ben Shenkman), has just walked out on him because of it—the latter man not being able to handle disease or its deteriorating effects. Alone, save for his friend Belize (Jeffrey Wright, in one of multiple roles, re-defining the stereotype of the ravishing 80s glitter queen by being even more ravishing and delightful), Prior begins to see visions of an angel (Emma Thompson, fluttering and declaiming with hair-raising power) who tells him that he is a prophet. His prophecy? A little irrelevant—save for that Kushner uses the device to probe even the neurosis of the guiding hands in Heaven.
The cast is large, huge even, but portrayed by a handful of principles in multiple roles. Those most important not yet mentioned: Meryl Streep, as the mother of a closeted Mormon (Patrick Wilson) who becomes un- after he falls in with a troubled Louis; Meryl Streep as Ethel Rosenberg, done all up in Kabuki makeup to see Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) off after the homophobe himself dies of AIDS; Pacino, aforementioned, who gives a turn of such startling clarity, eloquence, and stark heartlessness the audience can practically see his career jumpstart before their eyes; Wilson, also aforementioned, who's like Brendan Frasier—from Gods and Monsters—on sensitive-steroids; and Mary-Louise Parker, as Wilson's long suffering wife, Harper.
James Cromwell pops up here and there as Cohn's doctor, and occasionally a wax statue springs to life with a new face, but mostly the same eight individuals keep walking and talking for almost 360 minutes. Their anguish is palpable, and director Mike Nichols—no rookie himself, and a veteran to stage, screen, and stage-to-screen adaptations—frames shots and scenes around their marooning discontent, but the real star is Kushner, who writes speech in no way I've heard before; it's patterned in a way after the rambling Jewish neurosis of Woody Allen, or Allen Ginsburg, but it's also spiked-through with revelation and philosophy.
Kushner would go on to write Steven Spielberg's marvelous 2005 thriller/meditation-on-revenge epic Munich, but in Angels does he most prominently and purely display his gift. Monologues sprout like trees from within each character—organically, and stunningly beautiful; and the fantastical elements that come to eventually power the central narrative are both cooky and believable (aided by Nichols, who aims and succeeds for a tone of cynical hope). Sliced into two three-hour halfs—"Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika"—that have their share of problems, Angels in America is a delectable, miserable, contradictory, exemplary dissection of life on a island, wherein each individual deludes themselves into thinking they are alone, and lonely.
"Perestroika" lags, and grows a bit thematically murky after the clarity and force of "Millennium," but it concludes with a climax of awesome, shattering implication. Confronted by a table of fretting principle angels who implore their prophet to allow himself and his race to "stop moving" in order to allow the world to heal itself Prior doesn't even miss a beat to shake his head in refusal. "Bless me…I want more life." So too, will each viewer after finishing Kushner's masterpiece: more life in this dank, tragic, ecstatic little piece of rock we call Earth.
"There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics," Louis spouts near the end of the first half—and so it may be. But there's also us, humans, vibrant and joyously, messily, alive. Kusher and Nichols, with their cast, make the act of living in this modern century a promise fulfilled.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Bad Education: B+
In the cinematic universe of Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar, it is pretty safe to say that a tranvestite with a secret is about as innocuous as bubble-wrapped glass -- and that the suspenseful, erotic/romantic/familial tensions created by such a "dreadful secret" are about as weighty as...well...the air said tranny would breath. Almodóvar doesn't create films, building them scene-by-scene; he envisions them -- full of irony and sass, insolence and sexuality, brash swagger and a delicious visual palette -- and they spring like Athena from the head of Zeus: fully-formed and marvelous. Or so is said. They are tricky things, his movies, and I'd be the first to admit I wasn't completely won over by the auteur by what'd I seen of his work. Yet in Bad Education, his noir-set-on-low-simmer crossed with a meta-critique of the Catholic Church, there's finally a discernible depth and passion to his work. Nothing is static...and nothing, I feel quite validated in saying and still remain spoiler-free, is what it seems.
We enter on a prominent Madrid filmmaker, Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) as he's scouring the tabloid headlines for inspiration for his next project. Soon, a man comes into his office by the name of Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), an old school friend of Enrique's back when they went to school with the priests. Ignacio has brought a book he's written -- "The Visit" -- that explores the implications of his bond with those men of God, both when he was a boy and searching further, into a fictitious present. Enrique is curious about the project (we're told Ignacio was the man's first adolescent crush) but he politely dismisses Ignacio anyway, with a promise to read the manuscript. In the ensuing twenty-or-so minutes, "The Visit" comes to life on screen before us, Ignacio's life after he was molested writ large as he morphs into a junkie drag-queen named Zahara, as a film-within-a-head-within-a-film...and we're finally told Ignacio's side of the story. Or are we?
Crafted within the perfect tone of jaded impossibility, Education's unspooling events are never as certain as they seem. Soon after finishing Ignacio's tale, Enrique meets him and agrees there is a film within the tale to be made. But the director doesn't want his old friend to have the prize role: Zahara? Why? It turns out, possibly, Ignacio could not be Ignacio at all...and in that game of shifting identity, the tale of Ignacio's fate similarly shifts. We see his victimization, but also his flame-out, and the utter -- sympathetic, nearly -- fallibility of the man who attacked him. Told in over-lapping tales after Enrique has begun the movie, that is when the audience gets the whole story.
Almodóvar is up to his usual tricks with Bad Education; he hasn't gone so far as to abandon his core tropes. Drag queens (and their smoky, slurring, affectionate-insulting vernacular) are prominent, as is the graphic sexualization of a fine male specimen (in this case, and rightfully so, Bernal is alternately a snarling queen, a hustler in a blonde wig, and a teenager himself -- swimming nervously in his underwear under the wolfish gaze of Enrique). But the director doesn't entrance his audience with his faux-humor; he doesn't seal us off from the events on screen. And in unbottling the truth of his tale, he has presented to his audience the truth (or some version of it, surely) of the crimes of the Catholic Church.
Two years after Bad Education would come Volver...a complete 180-degrees, because where the former had an all-male cast complete with all-star pathos, Volver was outfitted with similarly nuerotic females, an interwoven clan of superstition. The latter film succeeded not because it shifted backwards for its director, tonally, (though it still did) but because of the fierce huzzah of its star: Penelope Cruz. She lit a fire behind the screen, lending -- if not tension -- then a center to Almodóvar's swirling storm of dead mothers, husbands, and ballad-belting latinas. Similarly, there is a center to Education, but it comes not from the cast (qualified as they are; kudos again to Bernal -- who was equally as exquisite as the sexually-uncertain teenager of Alfonso Cuaron's georgeous travelogue Y Tu Mama Tambien) but rather from the writer-director himself. There's finally more than just mandatory cinematic imaginación. There's pasión to go with it. With just a pinch of that key ingredient, his thriller really thrills; the tragedy in his evocation of the snarling bonds of love and blood actually touches, saddens. And the filmmaker himself, for once, authentically astounds.
We enter on a prominent Madrid filmmaker, Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) as he's scouring the tabloid headlines for inspiration for his next project. Soon, a man comes into his office by the name of Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), an old school friend of Enrique's back when they went to school with the priests. Ignacio has brought a book he's written -- "The Visit" -- that explores the implications of his bond with those men of God, both when he was a boy and searching further, into a fictitious present. Enrique is curious about the project (we're told Ignacio was the man's first adolescent crush) but he politely dismisses Ignacio anyway, with a promise to read the manuscript. In the ensuing twenty-or-so minutes, "The Visit" comes to life on screen before us, Ignacio's life after he was molested writ large as he morphs into a junkie drag-queen named Zahara, as a film-within-a-head-within-a-film...and we're finally told Ignacio's side of the story. Or are we?
Crafted within the perfect tone of jaded impossibility, Education's unspooling events are never as certain as they seem. Soon after finishing Ignacio's tale, Enrique meets him and agrees there is a film within the tale to be made. But the director doesn't want his old friend to have the prize role: Zahara? Why? It turns out, possibly, Ignacio could not be Ignacio at all...and in that game of shifting identity, the tale of Ignacio's fate similarly shifts. We see his victimization, but also his flame-out, and the utter -- sympathetic, nearly -- fallibility of the man who attacked him. Told in over-lapping tales after Enrique has begun the movie, that is when the audience gets the whole story.
Almodóvar is up to his usual tricks with Bad Education; he hasn't gone so far as to abandon his core tropes. Drag queens (and their smoky, slurring, affectionate-insulting vernacular) are prominent, as is the graphic sexualization of a fine male specimen (in this case, and rightfully so, Bernal is alternately a snarling queen, a hustler in a blonde wig, and a teenager himself -- swimming nervously in his underwear under the wolfish gaze of Enrique). But the director doesn't entrance his audience with his faux-humor; he doesn't seal us off from the events on screen. And in unbottling the truth of his tale, he has presented to his audience the truth (or some version of it, surely) of the crimes of the Catholic Church.
Two years after Bad Education would come Volver...a complete 180-degrees, because where the former had an all-male cast complete with all-star pathos, Volver was outfitted with similarly nuerotic females, an interwoven clan of superstition. The latter film succeeded not because it shifted backwards for its director, tonally, (though it still did) but because of the fierce huzzah of its star: Penelope Cruz. She lit a fire behind the screen, lending -- if not tension -- then a center to Almodóvar's swirling storm of dead mothers, husbands, and ballad-belting latinas. Similarly, there is a center to Education, but it comes not from the cast (qualified as they are; kudos again to Bernal -- who was equally as exquisite as the sexually-uncertain teenager of Alfonso Cuaron's georgeous travelogue Y Tu Mama Tambien) but rather from the writer-director himself. There's finally more than just mandatory cinematic imaginación. There's pasión to go with it. With just a pinch of that key ingredient, his thriller really thrills; the tragedy in his evocation of the snarling bonds of love and blood actually touches, saddens. And the filmmaker himself, for once, authentically astounds.
Rome: The Complete Second Season: A-
Ancient world history, re-done with a Sopranos twist...and a dash of Entourage, with just a splash of Dynasty and Dallas. Plus a massive-scale set, for flair. That's Rome -- the HBO drama that views a pivotal period of Ancient Roman civilization from an angle that can only be termed meta-modern: fleshed out as grand soap opera, played out over continents and years, and then spiked through with televisual flourishes reminiscent of the last twenty years of backstabbing prime-time bitchery entertainment, Rome is structured like it was thought-up by someone who watched way too much of all the best stuff to be offered by piquant, overstuffed, sensationally engrossing late-night melodramas. Which it probably was. And then they added the violence...and the sex...and the sandals.
Created by Bruno Heller, John Milius, and William J. Macdonald, the series sees in the chronicling of the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Roman Empire an elegant symmetry; spliced almost perfectly in half, season one dealt with Ceasar's (Ciarán Hinds, spread wide majestically on wings of noble megolomania) ascent and subsequent assasination. Season two picks up with the aftermath, and carries on through the civil wars over who would populate the power vacuum all the way to the triumph of Ceasar's great-nephew, Octavian (Max Pirkis, as the younger incarnation, and Simon Woods as the elder). Remember that nod to The Sopranos? It's evident in the ever-prevalent jostling for influence and political stability -- and writ large, magnificently, equally on the Senate Floor as in the villa of Octavian's mother, Atia (Polly Walker, turning in a performance of delicious villainy). What about Dynasty or Dallas? Just as both of those soaps follow a cast of rambunctious, morally unscrupulous people tethered together alternately by blood, marriage, money, scheming, or "affection," so too are the lovers, fighters, politicos, and women of this soap. Their shenanigans just take place 2,000 years previous. Huh.
And where's our dash of Entourage? It so happens that our two protagonists (though I apply the term loosely: Rome has a main cast of dozens, and the camera shares time equally) are Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two ex-soldiers in this Ceasar-less world who have found themselves still bound together, by duty and friendship, their bond strengthened and weathered more and more by the demands of a fractured upper-crust. (Late in the season, Vorenus is forced through pride to ally himself with Mark Antony -- portrayed by James Purefoy in a tour de force of debauchary, emotional immaturity, and sincerity -- while Pullo finds an older acquaintance with Octavian leaves him on the opposite side of the void.) They are us, wide-eyed but (somewhat-) noble in a society going to rot.
And we, the audience, are them. Which is probably the biggest success of Rome, even in its second -- shorter -- season. In a cast of top-tier performers, we sympathize and understand each and every one. From Cicero (David Bamber, whose beady eyes are put to fiendishly clever good use), the Senator who successfully plotted against the power bases of both Ceasar and Antony, to the Newsreader (Ian McNeice), who is as good to a narrator/news announcer/adman as a society several millenium ago was going to get, each character who speaks but one word is rich with care and precision; Rome's cast is a Dicken's dream team made flesh, wonderfully.
The first year was better, but only because it was more reliable; we all know the mechanics behind the character arc of Julius Ceasar. The second year was gloomier, more unstable, which translates in some etheral way to not as good -- denser somehow, murky without being wholly satisfying. Head writer Bruno Heller, who wrote eight of season one's twelve eps, isn't nearly as omnipresent, which could explain things. But really, just don't. Revel instead in a grand historical tapestry that interweaves fiction and fact into a memorable, staggeringly inrresistible, drama. Fatefully, Mere Smith (a former Joss Whedon associate, and a major creative force behind the middle years of Angel) contributes two scripts -- and they're two of the sharpest all series. "Deus Impiditio Esuritori Nullus (No God Can Stop a Hungry Man)" is both the penultimate installment, Smith's better of her two efforts, and perhaps one of the two or three best episodes of Rome, ever. It's scrappy, turbulent, sourly witty, and irrevocably authentic. If the real Ancient Rome wasn't this good -- this violent, or sexy, or frighteningly human-sized -- then it should only aspire to be.
Created by Bruno Heller, John Milius, and William J. Macdonald, the series sees in the chronicling of the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Roman Empire an elegant symmetry; spliced almost perfectly in half, season one dealt with Ceasar's (Ciarán Hinds, spread wide majestically on wings of noble megolomania) ascent and subsequent assasination. Season two picks up with the aftermath, and carries on through the civil wars over who would populate the power vacuum all the way to the triumph of Ceasar's great-nephew, Octavian (Max Pirkis, as the younger incarnation, and Simon Woods as the elder). Remember that nod to The Sopranos? It's evident in the ever-prevalent jostling for influence and political stability -- and writ large, magnificently, equally on the Senate Floor as in the villa of Octavian's mother, Atia (Polly Walker, turning in a performance of delicious villainy). What about Dynasty or Dallas? Just as both of those soaps follow a cast of rambunctious, morally unscrupulous people tethered together alternately by blood, marriage, money, scheming, or "affection," so too are the lovers, fighters, politicos, and women of this soap. Their shenanigans just take place 2,000 years previous. Huh.
And where's our dash of Entourage? It so happens that our two protagonists (though I apply the term loosely: Rome has a main cast of dozens, and the camera shares time equally) are Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two ex-soldiers in this Ceasar-less world who have found themselves still bound together, by duty and friendship, their bond strengthened and weathered more and more by the demands of a fractured upper-crust. (Late in the season, Vorenus is forced through pride to ally himself with Mark Antony -- portrayed by James Purefoy in a tour de force of debauchary, emotional immaturity, and sincerity -- while Pullo finds an older acquaintance with Octavian leaves him on the opposite side of the void.) They are us, wide-eyed but (somewhat-) noble in a society going to rot.
And we, the audience, are them. Which is probably the biggest success of Rome, even in its second -- shorter -- season. In a cast of top-tier performers, we sympathize and understand each and every one. From Cicero (David Bamber, whose beady eyes are put to fiendishly clever good use), the Senator who successfully plotted against the power bases of both Ceasar and Antony, to the Newsreader (Ian McNeice), who is as good to a narrator/news announcer/adman as a society several millenium ago was going to get, each character who speaks but one word is rich with care and precision; Rome's cast is a Dicken's dream team made flesh, wonderfully.
The first year was better, but only because it was more reliable; we all know the mechanics behind the character arc of Julius Ceasar. The second year was gloomier, more unstable, which translates in some etheral way to not as good -- denser somehow, murky without being wholly satisfying. Head writer Bruno Heller, who wrote eight of season one's twelve eps, isn't nearly as omnipresent, which could explain things. But really, just don't. Revel instead in a grand historical tapestry that interweaves fiction and fact into a memorable, staggeringly inrresistible, drama. Fatefully, Mere Smith (a former Joss Whedon associate, and a major creative force behind the middle years of Angel) contributes two scripts -- and they're two of the sharpest all series. "Deus Impiditio Esuritori Nullus (No God Can Stop a Hungry Man)" is both the penultimate installment, Smith's better of her two efforts, and perhaps one of the two or three best episodes of Rome, ever. It's scrappy, turbulent, sourly witty, and irrevocably authentic. If the real Ancient Rome wasn't this good -- this violent, or sexy, or frighteningly human-sized -- then it should only aspire to be.
Breaking Dawn: B+
"...Reason and love keep little company together nowadays," goes the William Shakespeare quote that pops up not even a fifth the way through Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn -- and well they still don't, in this final volume of her vampiric romance novels; it's due to this resolute lack of the twining between the heart and the mind that most of what goes right in the novel does, in fact, go right. Compacted into a radical new structure (say what you will, negative or otherwise about Meyer's books, but each and every previous installment has been concieved and molded into the same pattern), the plot in Dawn has as many twists and kinks woven into it as Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse put together and the majority are born from that chasm between desire and pragmatic function, and they take flight beautifully, if slowly at first, until any reader would be hard-pressed not to be entranced.
Where we left our heroine, Bella Swan, was in that place where she always seems pre-emptively perched: a third the way to heartbreak, and three quarters down the road to joy -- such is her predicament as the sole human girl in the entire Western Hemisphere privy to the supernatural world of vampires, werewolves, and the like. This time, the perpetrator of her distress is Jacob Black, a local werewolf who also moonlights as her best friend; he's sad because he loves her and she loves Edward Cullen, a vegetarian vampire who also moonlights as the cause of her euphoria.
Whatever: save the fancy gothic archetypes for another plot...this is pure harlequin, a love triangle. Not for too long though. Meyer, affable and enchanting as she seems in interviews, is also capable of learning and growing as an author; she powers through the problem poised by the unrequited-ness of her characters' affection pretty early on, setting herself up with more formidable obstacles. Like Bella's mortality (she's gotten Edward to swear to turning her into a vampire after their wedding...a day, surprisingly, not too far off). And the issue of her BFF's "imprinting" (e.g., a werewolf thing that lets its user unconsciously find and devote himself to the love of his life).
Stuff starts to hit the fan in quick order, and what's more, the action is sliced up into three sections -- two narrated by Bella, with a bridge by Jacob. I'm going to go out on a limb (don't hate me) and say this: Jacob's POV is far more entertaining (or rather, less annoying) than hearing Bella in all of her...Bellaness. (It isn't her fault though, blame schizophrenia: she's been described by Meyer in these collective four books as, alternately, clumsy, affable, smart, reliable, emotional, caring, mediocre, average, controlled, and stubborn. Yeesh.) Plus, another leg up for Jacob is that through him, we first glimpse the pivotal hinge of the entire novel, and through him is Meyer's greatest trick realized; with her werewolf as a perfect bridge, she see-saws tonally (delightfully so, might I add) throughout Breaking Dawn, from Rosemary's Baby to that sex scene on the beach in The O.C. back to a grandiose action sequence that feels very much like The Battle of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.
...Which brings up the most interesting point of all, really: improbable as it may seem, and while always keeping the reader off-kilter with new characters and dire threats at every turn, Meyer has found a way to end her Twilight series happily for all involved. And that's her biggest plus. Her biggest minus is that she does such a superb wrap-up while nary exploring the dark, lushly romantic world she's let pour from her skull. Sales wise, she's the inheritor to J.K. Rowling's throne, but artistically? She has imagination, but no accompanying vision -- there's depth but no richness to the acres of her surrounding white canvas.
I'm quibbling; I'll stop. At the heart of Bella's tale, the primal power its allure, has always been its gooey fairy-tale "Awww," factor. Which I didn't so much love. (Really, though, it was the repetition inherent in Meyer's act of shoving such goo down my throat, that irked me.) What I do love is being guided and tricked, pleased and scared, tensed and saddened -- that's the mark of a true storyteller, folks. And Stephenie Meyer is one, even if she is also a resolute fan of her own coyness. (Sex-less sex scenes? Puh-leaze.) Witty when it gets out of its own way, heartfelt and earnest when it comes to any form of any relationship, unexpectedly creepy -- morbid even -- in all the unexpectedly right places, and perfectly structured from opening preface to final chapter, Breaking Dawn is as apt a title as any for this conclusion. Not because it has much Sun involved (Hello kids! Forks is the Rainy Captial of the U.S.), but because the image is perfect for the career of its creator: huge, meteoric in its ascension, and occasionally brilliant.
Where we left our heroine, Bella Swan, was in that place where she always seems pre-emptively perched: a third the way to heartbreak, and three quarters down the road to joy -- such is her predicament as the sole human girl in the entire Western Hemisphere privy to the supernatural world of vampires, werewolves, and the like. This time, the perpetrator of her distress is Jacob Black, a local werewolf who also moonlights as her best friend; he's sad because he loves her and she loves Edward Cullen, a vegetarian vampire who also moonlights as the cause of her euphoria.
Whatever: save the fancy gothic archetypes for another plot...this is pure harlequin, a love triangle. Not for too long though. Meyer, affable and enchanting as she seems in interviews, is also capable of learning and growing as an author; she powers through the problem poised by the unrequited-ness of her characters' affection pretty early on, setting herself up with more formidable obstacles. Like Bella's mortality (she's gotten Edward to swear to turning her into a vampire after their wedding...a day, surprisingly, not too far off). And the issue of her BFF's "imprinting" (e.g., a werewolf thing that lets its user unconsciously find and devote himself to the love of his life).
Stuff starts to hit the fan in quick order, and what's more, the action is sliced up into three sections -- two narrated by Bella, with a bridge by Jacob. I'm going to go out on a limb (don't hate me) and say this: Jacob's POV is far more entertaining (or rather, less annoying) than hearing Bella in all of her...Bellaness. (It isn't her fault though, blame schizophrenia: she's been described by Meyer in these collective four books as, alternately, clumsy, affable, smart, reliable, emotional, caring, mediocre, average, controlled, and stubborn. Yeesh.) Plus, another leg up for Jacob is that through him, we first glimpse the pivotal hinge of the entire novel, and through him is Meyer's greatest trick realized; with her werewolf as a perfect bridge, she see-saws tonally (delightfully so, might I add) throughout Breaking Dawn, from Rosemary's Baby to that sex scene on the beach in The O.C. back to a grandiose action sequence that feels very much like The Battle of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.
...Which brings up the most interesting point of all, really: improbable as it may seem, and while always keeping the reader off-kilter with new characters and dire threats at every turn, Meyer has found a way to end her Twilight series happily for all involved. And that's her biggest plus. Her biggest minus is that she does such a superb wrap-up while nary exploring the dark, lushly romantic world she's let pour from her skull. Sales wise, she's the inheritor to J.K. Rowling's throne, but artistically? She has imagination, but no accompanying vision -- there's depth but no richness to the acres of her surrounding white canvas.
I'm quibbling; I'll stop. At the heart of Bella's tale, the primal power its allure, has always been its gooey fairy-tale "Awww," factor. Which I didn't so much love. (Really, though, it was the repetition inherent in Meyer's act of shoving such goo down my throat, that irked me.) What I do love is being guided and tricked, pleased and scared, tensed and saddened -- that's the mark of a true storyteller, folks. And Stephenie Meyer is one, even if she is also a resolute fan of her own coyness. (Sex-less sex scenes? Puh-leaze.) Witty when it gets out of its own way, heartfelt and earnest when it comes to any form of any relationship, unexpectedly creepy -- morbid even -- in all the unexpectedly right places, and perfectly structured from opening preface to final chapter, Breaking Dawn is as apt a title as any for this conclusion. Not because it has much Sun involved (Hello kids! Forks is the Rainy Captial of the U.S.), but because the image is perfect for the career of its creator: huge, meteoric in its ascension, and occasionally brilliant.
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