at this point the phrases “TWILIGHT series” and “ridiculous bullshit” are pretty much synonymous. last year i listed the top five silliest things about TWILIGHT, but that didn’t begin to scrape the surface of the levels of absurdity in that film — and didn’t even take into account the second film in the series, NEW MOON.

while NEW MOON may lack vampire baseball, it more than makes up for it in teenage angst, crappy cgi werewolves and a disturbing lack of shirts. much like TWILIGHT, the second film in the series is a bottomless barrel of foolishness, but one moment in particular stands out in my mind above all others — the magical pizza/wrench cut.

shown above on a constant, mind-numbing loop is one of the strangest editing choices i’ve ever seen. director chris weitz may have intended this as a homage to the “hey, that bone turned into a spaceship” shot from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, but kubrick’s famous transition was relevant to the story, having what some might refer to as “a point.” NEW MOON‘s bizarre mid-flight transformation of a piece of pizza into a tool cannot make the same claim. while i’m guessing the intention was to show the passage of time (this shot occurs at the beginning of a montage, depicting bella and jacob’s summer long motorcycle-repair-fueled romance), why pizza turning into a wrench would signal that we’re no longer in the same day is beyond me.

i can’t help but find both film entries in the TWILIGHT saga to be “so bad they’re good.” i don’t enjoy them in spite of confusing moments like that depicted above — it’s because of them. so keep it up, TWILIGHT movies… ECLIPSE better damn well contain such bizarre interpretations of the language of film that no one can tell what the hell is going on and enough sparkly vampires to leave me optically and neurologically damaged. that is my dream, and i am confident it will come to pass.