So what sucked specifically? Where to start..

• The actors appear to have been schooled in the wooden, unconvincing arts by the actor who played young Anakin skywalker from the newest Starwars movies: Hayden Christensen. That halting-having-to-think-to-move-lips acting devoid of any sort of normal behaviour patterns is unmistakeable. Perhaps the vaccine nutjobs are right and these twits caught autism from an on-set flu shot or something. All I can suppose is that they all performed admirably on the casting couch to get the roles.
• The romance plot: thousand years old and the vampire hair pile can only muster up vomit worthy lines that were probably plucked from that bastion of fine teenage drama: Beverly Hills 90210. They have done this because the target audience wouldn’t be old enough to have watched it. In fact, the Beverly Hills character Dylan has a number of parallels with the lead (much MUCH older than he looks, still hitting on teenagers, mopey brooding deserves a punch in the head demeanour, doesn’t really do much with himself except hang around brooding in lavish surrounds). That and I really don’t see how they can be so in love when they seem so perpetually miserable. The lead girl needs to stop hanging out with emotionless predators for a while and cheer the hell up. I dunno if the term “I need to feel like you’re in love” was ever uttered by the director during filming, but perhaps in their little wooden heads they thought they were naturally giving us intense chemistry. If this is the boyfriend of choice for hoards of girls worldwide: wake the fuck up! Might as well be going out with a passive aggressive plank of wood.

90210 characters

twilight actors

• The special effects were rubbish. All of them. Very not-special effects. Pay attention in physics class next time guys, or at least pay attention to how things fall. Straight line diagonal jumps of a hundred metres are not possible no matter how high on the eternal love of teenagers they are. The worst was probably the running up a hill bit (girl on the back). It might as well have been a cardboard cut-out on a slot car track. The only slightly cool idea they had was the baseball game and they managed to make that look like the cat was playing with the fast forward on the remote and once again the nonsense physics ignorant straight lines. I guess it matches the childishness of the plot at least, so it’s consistent. Next time I watch Knightrider or StreetHawk in “turbo mode” I’ll appreciate just how cutting edge those 80s movies were in their use of fast forward.
• Ridiculousness of the vampires in the movie: oh they’re vegetarians (well, not really.. they drink animal blood.. but let’s associate ourselves with our misunderstood mopey, emo target audience by claiming to be vegetarians rather than the equivalent of choosing pork instead of chicken). Quite why human blood (we’re animals too dickheads!) is so incredibly satisfying while other animals are the equivalent of tofu (Says hair-pile vampire #1: “it keeps you alive, but never truly satisfied” or some such guff). Oh and they’re all beautiful and 90% hair gel and make-up. And their eyes change colour. Oh and they sparkle like diamonds in the sunlight just to be original. So think of planks of wood with over styled1 hair and glitter! I preferred it when vampires died in sunlight: at least we have medical conditions that get close to that. Oh and they can suck out their own venom despite that whole bullshit idea falling out of favour for snakebites for many decades now because it doesn’t work and when a person is twitching/feverish and changing: dunno quite how you un-do all that just by sucking a bit of blood out of their arm.
• School-yard interaction cliché overload. With all the sledgehammer subtlety of “Revenge of the Nerds” Twilight portrays a school-yard full of stereotypes. Stereotypes save time, in this case they help you along to the conclusion that the like.. writing’s like a bit.. like.. shit n’ like really shit.
• The gratuitous X-men style unique powers. Hair pile #1 is strong, emo chick #3 can see the future (don’t even get me started on that bullshit), bad guy #1 can track people no matter where in the world they go and one of the others can fly off into a bitch session with no provocation etc etc
• Did I mention the plot? I’ve heard there are a bunch of books and the readers of those books can sleep easy as the plot was in no way removed from said books.
• Wasn’t the slightest bit concerned whether any of the main characters died. Worse, I kinda wanted them to come to a sticky end. That’s a problem for a movie. About the only ones I cared for were the supporting characters: e.g. the father having to put up with such a hurtful void of a daughter. Like a desperate furry parent animal trying to revive its dead road-kill child that had it coming because it spent all day sitting stupidly in the middle of the free-way. That girl (ok, I finally looked it up: BrendaBella) is created in the very best model of “girl who is nothing without boy”. The ease at which she throws away any possibility of a self-driven future to pursue a subservient, possibly late night snack existence is somewhat sickening if you prefer less weak willed (desperate to give up any possible normal future- just so we can hang out together!) female characters.

Anyhow, I could go on and on but I’m sure the next however many will be just as appalling so I’ll get on with something more visual:

Where's Blade when you need him?

And this little spoof got a chuckle out of me:

The acting is spot on. It’s like looking into a mirror. Oh wait, vampires can’t see themselves in mirrors. Or maybe the ones that sparkle like diamonds can.

And a facebook spoof thread of note:

A Twilight facebook thread (most likely fake, but hey would be deserved I think).

Disclosure requirements

I think this idea raises some important questions about the need for journalistic standards among bloggers. Disclosure of payment for mentions/reviews etc is very important from an ethical standpoint and to avoid destroying reader confidence in the blogger.

I remember being approached a few years back to promote an enterprise software product by the marketing firm (“we have a small budget to spend on marketing, so we’re looking at blogging to promote our product”). I politely refused because I knew nothing about it and would be polluting the things I wanted to talk about with ad postings indistinguishable from the normal content. Something akin to a technique I’ve noticed on sporting and radio broadcasts where the hosts of the program segue headlong into pimping a product.

So if someone was going to go down the path of pay per post: they’d better clearly disclose that that’s what they’re doing.  Otherwise they’re burning credibility for dollars.

The spam equivalence

People don’t want to be tricked into receiving ad content for the same reason they dislike spam. Spam is advertising trying to sneak into your brain via donning the clothing of meaningful content in your inbox for those people too silly to get a gmail address. One could argue that all advertising is this really, but the majority of advertising is forced to play by the rules: ads on tv are generally fairly easy to separate from shows, ads in magazines are forced to be different enough from content (e.g. the pretend article ones have a notice along the top) and web ads are generally any element on the page that’s macromedia flash animations of monkeys or anything poker related.

Polluting the social networking sphere is most definitely on the minds of advertisers. When the pollution is done through content creators themselves (rather than banner ads) they know very well that it becomes harder to tune out. So to be fair to readers/viewers the best idea would be to ensure that a blurring of the normal and advertising content does not occur.

The TV show in question: review

Now onto “Lie to me” the TV show. Disclaimer: I didn’t receive payment for this blog although I’d very much like to.

It’s produced by Fox to round out their offerings with a fictional show about lies. This is to go nicely with that prick Bill O’Reilly’s show (which if you haven’t seen it is pretty much non stop lies and bullshit insane bullying but thankfully occasionally cops a spanking).

I think it’s an interesting show, good set of actors and original spin on the “detective” genre. Unlike other attempts at “incredibly insightful detective” series this one doesn’t stoop immediately to “complete and utter bullshit” like say ones involving psychic powers, number crunching, talking to ghosts etc etc and appears based on something real from law enforcement.

The story is based around a lead guy (Tim Roth as Dr Cal Lightman) who is a world famous facial and body expressions/microexpression reading ninja who naturally trained deep in the jungles of Indonesia/deserts of Morocco before some sort of colossal cock up resulting in his fall from grace at a government agency (allowing him to start a very expensive consultancy firm doing more of the readings that presumably lead to the big mess in the first place). These microexpressions are involuntary movements of various muscles in the face or other body language. Think a cheese lite version of David coruso (sans sunglasses) meets House with a tiny dash of Californication (the ever so mature father daughter relationship).

Some things they do well in the series so far:

• They pour scorn on lie detectors which appear useless
• they emphasise the notion that different people have different types of cues to pick up on for lies
• they show off some technology to do voice stress analysis (from my experience: insurance companies are starting to integrate this into their call centres)
• they’ve obviously spent a lot of time getting the actors to work on their expressions
• Not too much “Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46″ video gimmickry (bonus points for anyone who knows where that is from?)

On the idea of microexpressions, try a test here to see how you go: http://www.cio.com/article/facial-expressions-test. There’s something similar that pops up in the series in the first or second episode. There’s a healthy spattering of footage of politicians and celebrities lying (according to the microexpressions anyhow). I’ve watched a documentary on these microexpressions in the past (again picking on politicians: in particular Bill Clinton) and it seemed consistant with what I remember of that.

Anyhow, it’s a series I’ll watch more of and I didn’t get paid to say anything good about it. Although if anyone wants to send me money now that I’ve plugged the show, by all means.