REVIEW: Broken Beds! Bloody Placenta! Breaking Dawn ? Part 1 Goes to Crazytown ? Almost

![]()
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part I is such a departure from the previous three Twilight pictures that you could almost consider it a rogue offshoot. Director Bill Condon steers the franchise away from visions of wan, suffering teens and fake-fur werewolf tussles and brings it closer to — if not necessarily close to — something resembling human adult sexual obsession and its attendant responsibilities and anxieties. It’s like Jules and Jim for the Tiger Beat set.
In fact, even Twilight naifs, those who haven’t read Stephenie Meyer’s blockbuster vampire-romance novels or seen any of the other pictures in the series, can probably step into Breaking Dawn — Part I and get at least a small charge out of it. It’s the most imaginative picture in the franchise, and I say that as a fan of the first picture, Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight, an irony-free adolescent romance that took the idea of teenage erotic fantasy seriously. (I loved the entrance Hardwicke gave Robert Pattinson’s vampire heartthrob Edward Cullen: A pale effigy with brooding eyes and a blond quiff, he strode in the school cafeteria looking like a cross between Elvis and Simon Le Bon.) But the second installment, Chris Weitz’s New Moon, suffered from an excess of cheap, fake werewolf fur — what’s so suspenseful about being attacked by a pack of trappers’ hats from Target? And in the third, David Slade’s Eclipse, the actors looked all but ready to pack it in…
Britney Spears Brittany Daniel Brittany Lee Brittany Murphy Brittany Snow Brittny Gastineau Brody Dalle