Spoiler galore - seems the only thread is about the box office. Surely I’m not the only one who has seen this?
General impression: OK so I actually saw it twice. I was later yelled at by someone who explained some complicated machination through which Twilight caused Prop 8. Sorry, I didn’t know.
I pretty much thought the same thing I saw when I saw Twilight - a fairly well made movie that clearly was based on fairly bad source material, with some decent effort by people who knew what they were doing was dumb but tried to do it well anyway. I liked it a bit better than Twilight because 1) I saw it in a real theater and not on myipod 2) Taylor Lautner had much more screentime and 3) shirtless buff werewolves! The first time I was more amused, enjoying laughing at all the intentional and not so intentional funny bits. The second time I wasn’t as annoyed by the draggy bits towards the beginning, wasn’t as amused by the stupid bits, and just enjoyed it as a movie more.
Books: Never read the books, but I read the plot summary and have heard descriptions of the experience from fans so I knew basically what to expect and what the appeal was supposed to be.
Non fans: The first time I saw it with two reluctant people, my best friend, who is gay, thought it was stupid but enjoyed the shirtless werewolves - and my brother, who though it was stupid but enjoyed the soundtrack and the seven minutes of the film he thought was done well, which was the part with Virginia. The second time I went with another friend who wanted to go again and his girl buddies all of whom are die hard fans. They had already seen it more than twice, and still enjoyed it. They did giggle at some bits.
Sparkles: I thought they did the whole sparkling thing much better in New Moon, it was actually kind of cool. They also managed to portray the whole ‘marble’ thing pretty effectively.
Meta: There were a couple of scenes where they are talking about movies and it’s clear they were talking about their own movie. Made more amusing by their deridement of movies that are ‘self-referential’.
Werewolves: They were actually pretty cool. In some scenes they look a little CGI but in others they look kind of real. In one scene it looks like a real puppet, very close to the wolf puppet in Neverending Story. Jacob was very very buff, and I didn’t mind at all the silly ways in which they got him to take his shirt off, like making Bella’s head bleed so he has to offer something to hold against her head. I was actually surprised at how not buff the other wolves were. One was fairly buff, two were kind of skinny, and one had some paunch. Which is fine, but also amusing given how much press it got and the fact that they spend the entire movie wearing only shorts. Also found it amusing that they exploded their clothing every time they changed into wolves. Of course we never saw them change back because they’d be naked. But some how they always showed up with shorts on again. I guess they have batches stashed all over the woods.
Movie posters: The movies within a movie were amusing. The first was a zombie movie whose name I forget. Then there was “Love spelled Backwards is Love”, a romance movie Bella rejects in favor of the adrenaline filled “Face Punch”. The theater they are in actually has a poster for the Love movie, as well as another movie I thought must be a joke too, but turns ou tto be real: “Gambling, Gods, and LSD”.
So my verdict - something kind of silly, that the people working on it all knew was kind of silly, but put on a straight face and did their best with anyway, managing to make it a kind of guilty pleasure.