Choose It/Lose It: A flick and a read

Choose It: The Book of Eli
It's the story of Eli, a "walker" wandering in the ruins of a future world, carrying the only known surviving copy of the Bible with him. Of course the forces of evil are bent on getting their hands on the book, which leads Denzel Washington to bust out some Batman-esque butt-kicking. (I always like it when fight scenes rely on swords instead of guns--although this flick had both.) I kind of expected this movie to either be cheesy or a ridiculous distortion of writings and events in the style of The Da Vinci Code. But it was neither.

It's got a post-apocalypse meets old-school Old Testament story line, a mixing of genres that I found pleasing, probably because the biblical allusions weren't disgustingly overdone (as so often happens when people try to "make Christian art"). Granted, Eli quotes Scripture at every turn--but he also shoots arrows through a potential rapist's crotch and steals shoes off dead bodies. I like that kind of tension in a character. Besides, it's got a good shot of mysticism and mystery and a twist at the end. Good work, Denzel. I'd watch that again.

Lose It: Twilight book series
I've been saying for some time now that Twilight had potential to be a good book--but instead, it is a second-tier piece of airport-novel trash. I say this because I don't think there's anything wrong with the story line--hey, who doesn't love a good vampire romance injected with werewolf fight scenes? The problem with Twilight is the writing itself--rambling passages that could easily be cut and never affect the main story line, lazy characterization that relies on physical description, too many adverbs, too much sloppiness in passages that say "very beautiful" instead of "dazzling." I knew it by the first paragraph of the book--four out of the five verbs in the opening are "was." (I maintain that you can tell a good writer very quickly by their verb choice. Good writers know precise, action-filled verbs. They only use "was" if absolutely necessary.)

Stephenie Meyer's fatal flaw was only ever writing one draft. What kind of writer only writes one draft? That's like a filmmaker submitting his raw footage to an audience without ever letting it hit the editing room. Only a hack would do something like that. And where were the editors on this thing? Couldn't they have seen a diamond in the rough and sent it back to Meyer for some polishing?

I don't know what makes me angrier: That Twilight actually could have been a good book, or that it made so much money as a bad one.