This "Twilight" Madness has gone too far!

I blame not hearing about this nonsense before today on being sick and out of it for the latter part of December.

Washington state's once sleepy little res town is supposedly getting its own reality tv show! This saddens me more than you can know.

Okay, I don't really blame the residents of Forks. Before Stephenie Meyers and the Twilight juggernaut, this town was poor and really pretty depressing. So I get that some/all of the folks that live there want to cash in on this thing as much as they can, while they can. But damn does it seem exploitative and gross.

Most of the town's shops and businesses have turned over to some kind of Twilight themed nonsense like the once quaint Pacific Inn, whose Twilight themed room is shown in the picture below. So even though this reality show will supposedly not focus on the books/movies and just be about the "regular folk" in Forks, there's no way that it won't end up being bad for all involved.

And it's all going to crash and burn within the next decade and I think Forks will end up being even worse off than they were 5 years ago. So while I will continue to travel out on the peninsula to the Pacific coast, I won't be going back to Forks anytime soon. I'm not interested in Bella Berry smoothies or Cullen caramel.

Coming around on "Twilight" the movie

I have been hesitant to talk or get excited about the upcoming Twilight movie. Although I was aware of the fanatical popularity of the Stephenie Meyer YA vampire book series before this year, I only started reading the “Twilight” books after first reading Meyer’s first entrée into “adult” fiction, 2008’s “Host”. I enjoyed this book enough to check out what all the fuss was about regarding Meyer’s vampire books. I’ve only gotten through the first two (Twilight and New Moon).
I admit that if I was 13, I would LOVE these books. If Meyer had been writing these in the early 80s I would gladly have abandoned the trite Rice novels and gotten swept up with the Cullen family of vampires and the love story between Edward and Bella. I can totally see what all of the tweens have been freaking out about.
That said, the books and the story are just... alright. I haven’t been super impressed by the first two that I’ve read and I’ve heard that the third and fourth books are the more disappointing of the series so I’m not really looking forward to finishing them.

Anyway, the upcoming film has been hyped and promoted to within an inch of its life. And I’ve been avoiding all of the media crap as much as possible. A couple of weeks ago I overheard a conversation between two teens in a Magnolia Starbucks dissecting every aspect of the upcoming film from the choice of actors (thumbs up for Robert Pattinson and his wacky-ass hair as Edward, concern about “nobody” Kristen Stewart (who?) as Bella), to the concern that not enough of the book will be included in the movie blah blah blah.
Besides Pattinson and Stewart the only actors in the cast that I had heard about was that Billy Burke was playing Bella’s dad the sheriff (I immediately got depressed that one of my long-time crushes was playing the main character’s dad – I’m OLD!) and that the insufferable Elizabeth Reaser, who I have an irrational hatred of, was playing the Cullen family matriarch. So I knew that I was probably going to see the movie eventually but I wasn’t really that keen on seeing it in the theater.
That all changed this morning when I found out that Peter f*cking Facinelli is playing Carlisle Cullen, the vampire patriarch. “The Fatch”! Woohoo! I love Peter Facinelli so much and am so happy that perhaps this movie will mark a resurgence (surge?)in his stalled career. But I love that he doesn’t seem to care about said career dips. And I love his marriage to Jennie Garth; he’s a Brad Pitt-level DILF.
I don't even care that his hair seems to have been dyed a hideous lemon yellow for the role. I'm just super-psyched about seeing Facinelli on the big screen. Yay!