Twilight Mania

Twilight graced the most recent cover of Entertainment Weekly, stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have been on the promo trail for a couple of weeks now, and the film is set to drop on the 21st and make a boatload of cash, raising more "the next Harry Potter" talk.

For the uninitiated, Twilight is easy to explain -- it's a four-book series about an ordinary girl named Bella and a really hot teenage vampire named Edward who fall in love with each other.

The problem is, Harry Potter was a phenomenon that was actually good -- the first couple books were entertaining and inventive, and then the writing matured, the story got deeper, and the ending was enormously satisfying.

Twilight, by all accounts I trust, is not good -- it became a phenomenon by tapping into average teenage girls' fantasies about a really hot guy falling desperately in love with them, pledging his undying love to them, vowing to protect them from bad vampires, etc. And the final book of the series got atrocious reviews. And the clips from the movie I've seen so far have been pretty underwhelming, especially as far as the '90s-grade special effects go.

But I'll get off my soapbox. If I see the movie and end up liking it, I'll be mighty embarrassed.

Pattinson and Stewart seem to have been waging an inevitably losing battle not to let the mania go to their heads. Pattinson has been trying to sound as unappealing as possible in interviews (he told MTV he hadn't washed his hair in six weeks), while Stewart prefers giving incoherent interview answers and avoiding questions about whether she's a fan of the book series. I'm actually interviewing her this coming week for another outlet, so I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.

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