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THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE The Twilight Saga: Eclipse isn't the best of three, but neither is it the worst. Instead, this adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's book falls somewhere in the middle, between the nicely captured teen angst of 2008's Twilight and the ill-fated emotional oasis of 2009's The Twilight Saga: New Moon. The series is often only so much melodramatic glop, but at its best, it also taps into that essence which informs youthful, blinding love. The canniness of the franchise is that it uses its protagonist, Bella Swan (Kirsten Stewart), to literalize these desires, as she must choose between sparkly emo vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and hunky werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). There are a number of ingredients likely to earn titters, from some overripe lines to several of the characterizations; yet for all the film's flaws, there's much that it gets right. The visual effects are vastly improved, and Stewart again makes Bella a watchable heroine. And while Pattinson and Lautner may not be the most accomplished actors around, they're desirable for these roles, especially in the scenes in which Pattinson's ethereal angst bounces off Lautner's robust earthiness. No, Eclipse may never sparkle as brightly as its centerpiece vampires. But neither does it suck like them. **1/2
VAMPIRES SUCK Despite that blanket title, don't expect any digs at Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee or Anne Rice, and True Blood and The Vampire Diaries are dismissed with one brief gag apiece. No, this is strictly all-Twilight-all-the-time — thus, in the town of Sporks, we find Becca Crane (Jenn Proske, the best thing in the movie) falling for the sparkly vampire Edward Sullen (Matt Lanter), with wolfboy Jacob White (Chris Riggi) sniffing at her heels with a bad case of puppy love. While I've already seen worse movies than Vampires Suck this year, it's doubtful I'll see another as lazily constructed as this one — even a homemade YouTube video simply capturing a dog chasing its own tail displays more effort and imagination than anything here. Because this is an obvious ploy to con money out of all the Twilight haters out there, writer-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer don't even try to come up with clever ways to mock the material in the biting manner of, say, MAD magazine or early Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. Instead, they merely plop down some sequence practically lifted wholesale from the first two Twilight movies, add a gross-out gag, a piece of knockabout humor or a pop culture reference that will seem hopelessly dated in just a few years, and leave it at that. *
WINTER'S BONE Memorable movie characters often pop out at us from the most unlikely of places, and this understated indie effort surprises by serving up such a figure in Ree Dolly. Ree, played by Jennifer Lawrence in a breakthrough performance, is 17 years old, smarter than everyone around her, sports a lip that sometimes gets her into trouble, and takes a screen beating as impressively as anyone since Brando's Terry Malloy got clobbered in On the Waterfront. But Ree won't back down. Living in poverty somewhere in Missouri's Ozark terrain, she learns that her dad has skipped bail after putting up their house for collateral. Not thrilled by the prospect of being homeless, she sets out to locate her wayward pop, running into resistance from all manner of dangerous and ignorant people. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize (as well as a screenwriting award) at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Winter's Bone, adapted by writer-director Debra Granik and co-scripter Anne Rosellini from Daniel Woodrell's novel, is suffused with pungent backwoods flavor (the film was shot on location), which adds an unsettling authenticity to Ree's quest. An assured directorial effort from Granik, the picture offers a rare look at a region that will seem as foreign to most moviegoers as the forest moon of Endor. ***1/2
