You Better Hold on Tight Spider Monkey!

OK, my wife and just about all of her friends had read the Twilight series.  When the movie was about to hit the theaters I decided that I would jump on the bandwagon and see what it was all about.  The books weren’t terrible, but they weren’t Harry Potter.  It seemed like they always took the long way to get to a point, but that’s a different discussion.  I want to talk about what happens to books that become movies.

We went and saw Despereaux and I really enjoyed that the book and the film were separate entities.  I appreciated that the film adaptation evoked the feelings of the book without feeling compelled to retell the book line for line.  I never made it out to the theater to see Twilight, but I just watched it on DVD.  I think that the movie doesn’t stand on it’s own.  The movie was like watching a cliff notes version of the book.  They left holes and I never really felt that the relationship between Edward and Bella developed enough.  When displaying his powers, the way that Edward stopped the van was great, but the scene with him running on his back was TERRIBLE!  That scene was the beginning of the end for me, and it all started with Edward jumping out the door with Bella on his back and he turned to her and said, “You better hold on tight spider monkey”.  ummm WHAT?!!?!  wow, I am now officially going to use the phrase “Spider monkey” as a term of endearment.

The video is not the best quality, but it’s exactly the scene that I’m talking about.

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