Awoken (2013) by Serra Elinsen - Book Review

Given how it’s been almost three years since publication, and the persons involved have been quite open about it since, I’m once again going for the fact behind the veneer with this one. Serra Elinsen, as a person, doesn’t exist. As a writer, she is the pen name of the initially titled 50 Shades Of Green project, headed by  Team NChick (Lindsay, Nella and Elisa). After the monster success of 50 Shades Of Grey, they got together and basically crowd-sourced the next worst paranormal romance fiction book for teens, getting ideas for character and plot and so for forth from their many Twitter followers. It’s rare that I’ll go into a project and know pretty much every little intent of the piece itself, which you’d think would make looking at a book that was, by authorial admission, meant to be terrible a lot easier than the media I usually cover on here. Well, as I have shown previously during Meta Month, intentional badness is an abnormal form of writing but it is one that shares no fewer potential pitfalls in its execution. If anything, this material is far harder to pull off than it may seem. So, let’s get started with this Lovecraftian love story, featuring hot Cthulhu.

Fifty Shades Of Grey (2015) - Movie Review

It seems like there’s a lot of need in the world of internet criticism to find the next Twilight; a romantic film or series of films that can capture the cynical zeitgeist and bring us so many reiterations of “This is so bad, it’s hilarious” that we inevitably grow tired of it in record time. We’ve had a couple of flashes in the pan in recent years, like The Host and a myriad of other YA adaptations, but nothing has really latched on with audiences yet or at least in the same way Twilight did. Well, when news that the most successful Twilight fanfiction of all time (no, seriously, that’s what it started out as) was getting a film adaptation, there was much frothing at the mouth that this might be just what the doctor ordered. But how does it actually turn out?

Still Alice (2015) - Movie Review

In the world of cinema, there are a number of things that have become acceptable targets for ridicule by pretty much everyone: Battlefield Earth, Plan 9 From Outer Space and The Room are all great examples of this. One such thing that has its hunting season sign up all year round is anything connected with the now-dying phenomenon of Twilight, whether it’s the films themselves, the actors who starred in them or the people who are responsible for them. It may have grown tired, given how readily the world rightfully rained down on the series for years on end, but the after-effects still linger to this day. With the female lead from Twilight, Kristen Stewart, in today’s film, I find it hard to avoid talking about the connection, especially when it feels like the film itself is daring me to do so. After the jump, I’ll explain why.