The Screening Room

1. Since the book was tackled by a screenwriter, there's considerably less of Stephenie Meyer's awful dialogue. (Don't get me wrong. Much of it is still there. There's just ... less.) Here are some gems from the book:

I couldn't feel anything but despair until I pulled into the familiar parking lot behind Forks High School and spotted Edward leaning motionlessly against his polished silver Volvo, like a marble tribute to some forgotten pagan god of beauty.

If I stopped looking for him, it was over. Love, life, meaning... over.

I'd thought Jake had been healing the hole in me--or at least plugging it up, keeping it from hurting me so much. I'd been wrong. He'd just been carving out his own hole, so that I was now riddled through like Swiss cheese.

Luckily, none of these especially terrible lines of Meyer dialogue made it into the movie.

2. The movie is less of a downer than the book. In the same way that Twilight was about finding love, New Moon is about losing love, finding it again, then losing it some more. It's essentially about depression. The movie glosses over much of the heavy depression of Bella from the book and leaves us with a mopey, emo Bella for the movie. Twihards may find this to be a less than faithful change, but I feel that it's one that benefits the movie by not making us watch someone be suicidally bummed out for two hours.

3. The extraneous scenes are gone. Most of the generally uninteresting scenes in the book are either missing or blended with other scenes. Jacob and Bella's boring afternoons fixing the bikes and doing homework? Edited into a neat montage. Jacob and Bella looking for the meadow? In the movie, it's just Bella and she finds it pretty quickly. Bella following Emily around La Push? Not there. The lengthy scene between Alice and Bella that takes place entirely on an airplane? Also not there. Various descriptions of naps or characters as they sleep? Thankfully, not there.

4. The music is simply outstanding. The book is so clunkily written and angsty that you expect a Dawson's Creek-esque soundtrack. Instead, we're given awesome tracks from Death Cab for Cutie, Bon Iver, Muse, Thom Yorke, The Killers and more. This crazy vampire flick may have just given the indie/alternative music scene the best compilation album of the year. (However, the mind-blowing soundtrack is used more sparsely in the film than I expected. Still, it's there.)

5. Jacob is a lot cooler. In the book, Meyer seems to constantly remind readers that Jacob is young and immature. He says and does stupid things, seemingly for the sole purpose of making Edward look that much more suave by comparison. But in the movie, he's much less dorky and more of a dependable, comfortable friend and legitimate sultry hunk. The movie belongs to Taylor Lautner, who may end up converting some Team Edward members, especially since Kristen Stewart and Lautner share much more chemistry than the Bella and Jacob of the books.