As I get older, I've found the saying about there being nothing new under the sun to be mostly true. Sure, there's your occasional record-breaking, revolutionary concept like Michael Jackson's Thriller, the first Matrix movie, or iPod, but on the whole, life tends to repeat itself over and over and over again with almost predictable frequency. Take this whole Twilight thing. A lot's been said and written about the movie and various books. My personal theory is that the movie is this decade's equivalent of James Cameron's Titanic (remember how all the tweens and teen girls were so into Leonardo diCaprio?) which means that we probably haven't seen (or heard) the last of Edward and Bella. I've read the Twilight book and plan to see the movie once I can Netflix it. They're certainly entertaining. The book was...meh. Not bad, but I thought the last quarter of it was far better than the preceding 3/4. Maybe it's because I'm a guy and I'm missing that particular base pair or something, but I found the first 3/4 of the book to be a lot like an author's extended cut of super-sized foreplay. Don't get me wrong. Foreplay's nice and certainly has its rewards, but at some point you gotta get to the good stuff.
I know the story's about first, forbidden love (and let's face it, that's the only kind of love that qualifies as tragic, isn't it?) between a vampire and a girl, but there's only so much fawning adoration ('Edward's such a God') and teen girl fluttery heart stuff ('Edward touched my cheek and the EKG machine went haywire again') that I can stand.
Particularly in a 500+ page romance story that happens to include a vampire as a main character. Especially in a book with a vampire as a main character. Why? Because vampires are so undeniably, automatically cool, like Billy Dee Williams or Samuel L. Jackson or Al Pacino or...
You get the point. If you've got a vampire in a book or movie, you gotta eventually let him or her be the badass they're supposed to be. Cursed-with-a-soul Angel and reformed-Spike-with-a-soul is all well and good, but it's when they're baddies (or fighting one another about the things they did when they were baddies) that they were the most fun to watch.
And now that you've read that previous paragraph, you know that I'm certainly not immune to the vampire's bite, either. Some of my all-time favorite shows have been about vampires (was that a rimshot I just heard?), with the Buffy/Angel shows at the top of the list. And my favorite series this Fall has been the HBO show, True Blood. Like Twilight, it is about a young girl who falls in love with a vampire and the challenges they face as a couple. There are a lot of similarities between Twilight, True Blood, and Buffy, but since True Blood is an HBO show, it's the raciest (and raunchiest) of the three. I like True Blood a lot, so much so that its caused me to break one of my own time honored and cardinal rules by reading the series of books by Charlaine Harris (The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries) upon which the series True Blood is based. I'm only about halfway through book one, but so far my decision seems to have been worth it. Season One follows the first book quite closely, with only a few noticeable (and enriching) changes. Time will tell whether I still feel the same since I've got another 6 books to read.
And so we come, full circle, back to the subject of time. It'll also be interesting to see which series of stories best stand the test of time. And who knows- maybe they will all be as watchable 50 years from now as they are today. I mean, if the Sci Fi channel can show 24 hours of Mork and Mindy (which, amazingly enough is 30 years old!) over this past Thanksgiving holiday break, I suppose anything's possible.
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