by Maggie Miller

Created on: June 04, 2009

As I switched off the MTV Movie Awards, I couldn't help but feel shocked, disappointed, and confused. I watched an ethereal-looking, intoxicated Kristen Stewart drop her award and stagger up to the stage a second time with the entire cast to snatch up the "Best Movie" title, trumping Slumdog Millionaire. It made me seriously question the criteria for "Best Movie" and wonder if it was more of a Box Office popularity contest than an honest inquisition into the movie's strengths and weaknesses.

As a reader of the Twilight series (and as a person who knows the movie never does the book justice), I was excited to see how the characters would be portrayed on the big screen and how the actors would bring them to life (even though half of them are actually dead). The books expounded on the somewhat trite concept of a vampire/human relationship, only Meyers introduced some new twists along the way and pursued the relationship from the perspective of an average, high school girl. On her website, she cites a dream as her inspiration for the series, saying that she awoke from a particularly vivid dream where a couple sat talking in a meadow. The boy was a vampire, and he was ineffably beautiful, the girl was a plain Jane, and the two were trying to work out the logistics of their seemingly impossible relationship. Despite this idea, which had some good potential, the books are poorly written, the characters are flat and unrealistic, the plot is sometimes convoluted, if not absent altogether, and the outcomes are predictable. So the movie could have gone in one of two directions: one, it might have actually enlivened the themes and people in the book and given the story a brighter countenance, or; two, perfectly represented the book in all of its drab, prosaic glory. Twilight, the film, took road number two.

Actors make millions because they're good at what they do; they convince us that the character they're playing is real. They spend hours studying scripts and researching and picking the character apart in order to merge with him/her or get into the brain. Heath Ledger locked himself in a room for hours poring over comic books that depicted the debut of the Joker. He studied mental illness and researched quirks that the character might have. Dustin Hoffman studied autism before Rainman. Even movies like Sex and the City are replete with believable characters. A round, vibrant, realistic character is one that comes to life. That's why we get attached to them.

There

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