@AL-ReviewBody:The Twilight Saga: New Moon Director: Chris Weitz Starring: Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner
You might almost miss the pivotal point in The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Midway through the movie, the heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) and her sometime school friend Jessica (Anna Kendrick) emerge from a movie theatre in their small town of Forks, Washington, and scoff at the quality of the film they've just seen.
"It's a zombie movie," sighs Jennifer, before adding with a sneer, "but it's supposed to be a metaphor for consumerism!?" By articulating the charge against this film within a film - that it is over-burdened with self-conscious metaphor - Jennifer also lays the groundwork for an ironic defence of New Moon itself. Few films in the history of the medium have been so concerned with metaphor and allegory (often at the expense of drama) as this strangely anodyne adaptation.
The metaphor here, as it is in the entire best-selling, four-part book series that inspires it, is one of abstinence. The Twilight series was written by the 35-year-old Mormon Stephenie Meyer, and has become a global phenomenon (the first book has sold more than 17 million copies and been translated into 37 languages) precisely because it is constructed around the never-ending romantic tension between its two teenage protagonists.
The metaphor that fuels the tension is vampirism. Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) is a 108-year-old vampire trapped in the body of a 17-year-old Forks High School student who falls passionately in love with his classmate Bella Swan. Edward and Bella share a couple of extremely chaste kisses, but whenever they feel their passions overtaking them they must fling themselves away from each other lest Edward succumb to his primal vampiric nature and fatally attack Bella.
The premise sustained the entire first movie in the saga, Twilight, which last year scooped $384 million (Dh1.4 billion) at the global box office and proved a quietly kitsch pleasure. However, the sight of two teen paramours, one year on, being prized apart by the contrivance of metaphor and narrative chicanery is beginning to wear thin. In New Moon, Edward decides Bella will only be free from danger if he leaves the country. The first act is barely done before he flees to foreign parts, eventually resurfacing in Italy for a wearisome, final-act climax involving a preposterous bunch of Renaissance-era vampires.
In the meantime, Bella becomes close - platonically at first, but then quasi-romantically - to the family friend and local beefcake Jacob (Taylor Lautner). Here again, the story is thrust into metaphor. Jacob, it quickly transpires, can never be close to Bella because he is - yes - a werewolf. There is a chance that Jacob might maul her to pieces. Just like Edward.
In moments like these, especially when Jacob reveals his werewolf nature to Bella (he bursts out of his clothes while transforming, in a flash of CGI histrionics, into a giant grey wolf), the movie cries out for some self-deprecating levity, or at least a witty comment from someone. Anyone! Instead, it is all played with agonisingly straight faces. When Jacob eventually faces Bella with the heart-felt cri de coeur, which Lautner delivers with soap-opera intensity - "It's not a lifestyle choice, Bella! I was born this way!" - you really don't know where to look.
The movie, which claims to take some structural nods from Romeo and Juliet, ends with an idiotic resolution in rural Italy. The lack of narrative sense is almost as galling as the lack of invention.
Of course, the movie will be a huge smash, and the teenage target audience will no doubt thrill at the sight of wooden performances, leaden direction and a damp-squib visual aesthetic as long as they serve the romantic stasis of Bella and Edward. And maybe that's the point of Twilight: that nothing happens. That romance is never gratified. That everything remains idealistically and perfectly possible.
Our legal columnist
Name: Yousef Al Bahar
Advocate at Al Bahar & Associate Advocates and Legal Consultants, established in 1994
Education: Mr Al Bahar was born in 1979 and graduated in 2008 from the Judicial Institute. He took after his father, who was one of the first Emirati lawyers
MATCH INFO
Championship play-offs, second legs:
Aston Villa 0
Middlesbrough 0
(Aston Villa advance 1-0 on aggregate)
Fulham 2
Sessegnon (47'), Odoi (66')
Derby County 0
(Fulham advance 2-1 on aggregate)
Final
Saturday, May 26, Wembley. Kick off 8pm (UAE)
The Energy Research Centre
Founded 50 years ago as a nuclear research institute, scientists at the centre believed nuclear would be the “solution for everything”.
Although they still do, they discovered in 1955 that the Netherlands had a lot of natural gas. “We still had the idea that, by 2000, it would all be nuclear,” said Harm Jeeninga, director of business and programme development at the centre.
"In the 1990s, we found out about global warming so we focused on energy savings and tackling the greenhouse gas effect.”
The energy centre’s research focuses on biomass, energy efficiency, the environment, wind and solar, as well as energy engineering and socio-economic research.
How to register as a donor
1) Organ donors can register on the Hayat app, run by the Ministry of Health and Prevention
2) There are about 11,000 patients in the country in need of organ transplants
3) People must be over 21. Emiratis and residents can register.
4) The campaign uses the hashtag #donate_hope
How green is the expo nursery?
Some 400,000 shrubs and 13,000 trees in the on-site nursery
An additional 450,000 shrubs and 4,000 trees to be delivered in the months leading up to the expo
Ghaf, date palm, acacia arabica, acacia tortilis, vitex or sage, techoma and the salvadora are just some heat tolerant native plants in the nursery
Approximately 340 species of shrubs and trees selected for diverse landscape
The nursery team works exclusively with organic fertilisers and pesticides
All shrubs and trees supplied by Dubai Municipality
Most sourced from farms, nurseries across the country
Plants and trees are re-potted when they arrive at nursery to give them room to grow
Some mature trees are in open areas or planted within the expo site
Green waste is recycled as compost
Treated sewage effluent supplied by Dubai Municipality is used to meet the majority of the nursery’s irrigation needs
Construction workforce peaked at 40,000 workers
About 65,000 people have signed up to volunteer
Main themes of expo is ‘Connecting Minds, Creating the Future’ and three subthemes of opportunity, mobility and sustainability.
Expo 2020 Dubai to open in October 2020 and run for six months
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Lamsa
Founder: Badr Ward
Launched: 2014
Employees: 60
Based: Abu Dhabi
Sector: EdTech
Funding to date: $15 million
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
The story in numbers
18
This is how many recognised sects Lebanon is home to, along with about four million citizens
450,000
More than this many Palestinian refugees are registered with UNRWA in Lebanon, with about 45 per cent of them living in the country’s 12 refugee camps
1.5 million
There are just under 1 million Syrian refugees registered with the UN, although the government puts the figure upwards of 1.5m
73
The percentage of stateless people in Lebanon, who are not of Palestinian origin, born to a Lebanese mother, according to a 2012-2013 study by human rights organisation Frontiers Ruwad Association
18,000
The number of marriages recorded between Lebanese women and foreigners between the years 1995 and 2008, according to a 2009 study backed by the UN Development Programme
77,400
The number of people believed to be affected by the current nationality law, according to the 2009 UN study
4,926
This is how many Lebanese-Palestinian households there were in Lebanon in 2016, according to a census by the Lebanese-Palestinian dialogue committee
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
