Another November, another “Twilight” movie stumbling its way into the frenzied hordes of fervent, feverish teenage girls (…and twenty-somethings…and soccer moms…retirees…). All is well with the world.

What to say about this film?

I avoided the opening weekend, partly for fear of losing my faith in humanity and partly because I’m just not sure what else I can add my well-documented thoughts on this series. “Ha ha, Edward’s still creepy and blank-faced!” just doesn’t have the same ring it did a year ago, I guess.

But nonetheless I felt it was my duty to go ahead and sit through the two hours of intense staring and brooding and awkward stuttering. Maybe I did it because some part of me wanted to see if somehow this film franchise could be redeemed by a new director (…meh), or maybe the soundtrack, or maybe I’ve mellowed over the course of the year and my heart’s grown more gentle. Or something.

Or maybe I was just hoping to enjoy 2009′s great comedy of the year. Actually yeah, that’s exactly what I was hoping. Would the screen go blank for five seconds while Powerpoint slides clicked through “October,” “November,” “December” like in the book? Would there be any more of the fast-forward/slow-motion sharp cuts that I remember so fondly from the first film? Would writer Melissa Rosenberg scavenge painful lines of dialogue from the book so they could pass through the reluctant actors’ lips like last year’s “lion fell in love with the lamb” bit?

So I guess you could say I was looking forward to another installment to the virtual minefield of comedic gold that was the first film.

But I was, to some extent, disappointed. “New Moon” is a much darker book than its predecessor, and like its adaptation, this film was faithful to its source material. And like in the first film, this was frequently to its detriment.

Adapting a well-known and well-loved book or story to the screen is always a two-sided coin; the question that faces the writers, producers, and director is what to take and what to leave. When it comes to a story like New Moon, the built-in audience has already read the story (probably multiple times) and has likely imagined every line of dialogue, every longing glance, every whispered sweet nothing many times over. Any change to that would be sacrilegious in the opinion of a fan-base as rabid as this one.

So for the most part in “New Moon,” they continued to follow the course set by “Twilight” — which is to say, they remained as true to the book as possible.

Of course, the problem in this case is that nothing happens in the book. In fact, there’s an entire section devoted to how Bella does nothing, says nothing, hears nothing, is nothing without Edward. So you might imagine that going the direction of “look how distraught Bella is! She’s just sitting there!” doesn’t exactly make for compelling storytelling.

Unsurprisingly, it completely kills the pace of the movie. And though it picks up, the effort required to climb back from the intentional lethargy meant to represent Bella’s total and complete destruction of self makes it hard to stay awake long enough to appreciate Jacob’s storyline and Taylor Lautner’s performance.

Ah! We’ve reached a good thing. Taylor Lautner is adorable, acts decently well, and his character (like in the books) is the best written by a mile. Not only does he have a personality, but manages to be sympathetic, engaging, and his actions and words actually make sense. But yeah, back to the personality! He has one! By the time he gets some screen time in the movie I’d almost forgotten what that is.

Oh yes, here’s the other big problem of the film. In the books, Bella is left purposefully blank — she’s a vessel given minimal characteristics so that she is easily identifiable for the readers. And Edward is supposed to be every girl’s ideal snugglebear dreamboat, and as such isn’t given much of a personality himself (Envision the following: “What? Edward thinks fart jokes are funny? Gross! He’s so gross!” Personalities: They’re dangerous.).

The only problem with this is that characters without personalities do not traditionally come across as particularly charismatic on the silver screen. As such, the lines like “You are my life” and “I couldn’t live in a world without you in it” feel as hollow as they do in the Star Wars prequels, where two puppets speaking in monotone deliver such lines as “I love you like someone who loves you a lot.”

And in the absence of having any remotely likable or intriguing characteristics to work with, actress Kristin Stewart has only her weird Vulcan eyebrows and unfortunate shortage of eye drops with which to bring Bella to life. Sadly, this means that she spends her time mostly blank-faced and blinks a lot and we are informed that this is called “being sad” and “damaged.”

It is hard to understand why either Edward or Jacob would find Bella’s mopey, miserable mien so alluring. Despite her voice-over telling the audience that she loves Edward or that she feels better around Jacob, there is no discernible difference between her sullen blank stare when she’s kissing her boyfriend, her sullen blank stare when she’s looking out the window for five months, or her sullen blank stare when she is reunited with Edward at the end of the film.

Still, her inability to form words without eight false-starts and the classic Kristin Stewart move of “I’m anxious and upset, look how I’m running my hands through my hair to show this” is infinitely preferable to Robert Pattinson’s pinched and pained performance that was cringe-worthy in just about every scene.

I get that Edward longs for Bella’s blood and that for some reason he loves her a whole super lot and so on and so forth, but really the only thing I got from Pattinson while watching him with Bella was that he kept jizzing in his pants. They kiss for five seconds, he groans and dramatically pulls back. He inhales her hair, suddenly his face twists in something like pain and he turns away. She gets a papercut and I find myself relieved that it’s a bust shot.

All of it was so awkward that the two of them looked like Barbie and Ken dolls with bad makeup, staring at each other and delivering lines so woodenly that they might as well have been reciting the phone book. “I love you, 532 Cedar Lane, so much, area code 302..”

Any attempt at deeper emotion is laughably overwrought and overacted. It’s as though Edward has two expressions; the first, vaguely constipated and the second, “I’m upset but I just got Botox so yeah.”

Still, like in the first film, there are good moments. Any of Bella’s scenes with her dad were more emotional and well-acted than her scenes with Edward; Billy Burke’s subtle worry, pain, and fear for his daughter are more touching than any of the soap opera declarative statements that pervade Edward and Bella’s conversations.

And of course, the werewolves. The CGI was well-done and the wolves looked exactly as described in the book and the “phasing” between hunky shirtless Native American boy (take your pick of which, there were about six of them) to flowing-fur wolf was uniquely done and a pretty cool effect. Less cool was the “Superman”-like exit for each of the werewolves — if they’re about to head back to the reservation, they simply jogged off-screen in their “The Incredible Hulk” castoff shorts where I would assume that they turn into their wolfy alter-egos in a telephone booth somewhere.

And speaking of the shirtlessness, there was shirtlessness. And a lot of it. The whole thing with the Werewolf Club wrestling around half-clothed with their toned, jailbaity pecs and steroidy biceps was so homoerotic that I had a hard time even enjoying the view, and also I felt pervy since all Bella can talk about for the first half of the movie is how Jacob was sixteen.

And then in the last fifteen minutes of the movie, the first seedlings of plot emerge. In a fit of “I can see Edward’s ghostly apparition when I do stupid, dangerous things,” Bella throws herself off a fifty-foot cliff. In a sequence that takes about two minutes, she almost dies, Alice appears, O.M.G. Edward thinks Bella’s dead, and then suddenly they’re in Italy and Bella is racing against time to stop Edward from provoking the Vampire Fab Four into killing him since you know, he can’t live without her.

How does he provoke them? Well, he takes off his shirt and decides to reveal his sparkling bod to a crowd of disinterested humans and thereby commit the ultimate no-no of revealing the existence of boys with airbrushed abs who wear too much body glitter. (Spectator Sparkling: It’s a thing.).

Bella stops him and then they’re in front of the Simon, Paula, and Randy of the vampire world; Aro, portrayed by Michael Sheen, is the likable and actually dangerous-seeming one (Simon), Caius is Randy, mostly useless and forgettable, and then of course Marcus is Paula, who just mumbles incomprehensibly. Dakota Fanning plays Jane, a less-creepy Twilight version of Anne Rice’s child vampire Claudia who has the power of the Cruciatus Curse, or something.

The gist of the “climax” is this: Bella knows too much about the vampires and needs to get dead for this reason. But Alice tells the mind-reading Aro not to worry, that Bella will be a vampire, and then Aro’s like, “Oh, okay, no prob then. We’re totes cool.”

What a relief. For five seconds there I was afraid there was going to be actual conflict. What a tragedy that would have been.

So what’s the final word on “New Moon?” Not as funny as the original (a classic I say, a classic!), but about 123x more dull. If you have insomnia, watch this film. All you’ll have to do is imagine sheep jumping over the New Moon and you’ll be out in five seconds flat.

And, also, shirtless boys.

NEW YORK – Eli Szasz and Aaron Rasmussen created the perfect gamer invention in 2007 – an energy drink worth two Red Bulls packed in a potion-shaped bottle and titled “Mana.” It doesn’t get any better than that.

Now, a year after their initial release of the “Mana Energy Potion,” Szasz and Rasmussen introduced their new “Health Energy Potion,” a companion to “Mana,” at New York Comic-con.

The guys were nice enough to let me test a bottle of each of the energy drinks. Both are about a shot’s worth of liquid. “Mana” is blue and has a sour, berry flavor while “Health” is red and is flavored apple-cinnamon.

The “Mana” potion was probably the best thing that happened to me during the entire Con. Blast cohort Kellen Rice and I split a bottle after the “Up” screening and started talking about 100 miles per hour in less than five minutes. While the initial boost of energy eventually died down, we remained coherent and aware for the rest of the night after an exhausting day and little sleep the night before.

Because I cannot do justice to how the “Mana” and “Health” potions were described in their press release, I will just quote directly from it:

“While Mana Energy Potion gets you pumped up for a fight, quest or adventure, Health Energy Potion restores you after battle so you can get back into the heat of the action.”

Rasmussen described the new “Health” potion to me as a gradual boost of energy spread out over a five to eight hour period. “Mana” packs an initial burst of energy (that Zac Turgeon had to listen to while he, Kellen and I had dinner at a nearby pizza joint) and then levels out for the same length of time.

“Health” might work well for gamers, who need a continuous flow of energy to stay awake. But for a quick pick-me-up, “Health” didn’t make too much of a difference, and maybe it was just the exhausted state I was in, but I didn’t feel much more aware after the bottle of “Health” that I drank.

“Mana” combines a variety of vitamins like Vitamin C, Vitamins B1, B3, B6 and B12 and Pantothenic Acid with their own special “energy potion” and enzyme blend to come up with their drink. “Health” uses Vitamin C, Vitamins B1, B6 and B12 and adds Elderberry, ginseng, biotin and folic acid to make a constant flow of energy.

Each potion is 25 calories and contains 1.69 ounces of liquid.

The potions are $3.45 a bottle and can be purchased at Hot Topic, ThinkGeek.com or at the ManaPotions.com webstore.

Terminator Salvation director McG showed up at the New York Comic Con yesterday to present a reel of never-before-seen footage from the unfinished film and to hold the geek equivalent of a town-hall meeting in the long campaign to win over the existing Terminator fan base.

In the process, he cheerfully suffered heckling over everything from his name (which is a old-hat subject by now and one that McG explained with a lot of expletives) to the recently-exposed Christian Bale blow-up. In brief, McG said that emotions running high on a movie set made freak-outs like Bale’s inevitable. Especially, McG added, because Bale’s a “very serious actor,” a line that prompted several members of the crowd to shout choice quotes from the audio clip. He went on to say that in his experience, getting in someone’s face when they’re in the middle of an explosion was never the best way to handle it, and that he and the producers had decided to simply wait for Bale to calm down.

“That remix is pretty hot,” he continued, drawing laughs from the attendees, and assured everyone that “(Christian and Shane Hurlbut) were fine that day” and that the two are “buddies” who worked successfully together for another month after the incident.

He made light of the blow-up later in the Q&A, when an audience member with a strong accent asked the first question. “What don’t you fucking understand?” he shouted. “We are done professionally!”

Jokes aside, McG made it clear that he was seeking a discussion about the film footage and impressed the die-hard Terminator fans (myself included) by insisting that he wanted to hear the fans’ suggestions on the material. He was going to take those suggestions, he said, to the cutting room floor.

The reel was about eight minutes long and contained a ton of footage of the machines that Terminator fans have only gotten to see in brief clips in previous movies. McG talked at length about the goals of the film, one of which was to portray the evolutionary steps leading to Skynet’s Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator model (the “T-800″). Another goal, he explained, was to show how Kyle Reese becomes Kyle Reese, how he becomes the man who would sacrifice himself for John Connor. And to be honest, that potential character arc alone is enough to embolden my faith in the film.

And if those eight minutes are anything to judge by, Terminator Salvation promises to be an adrenaline ride with a lot of explosions. There were some unfinished action sequences in the reel that I can only imagine will be thrilling when the effects are completed.‚ 

McG fielded a surprising amount of questions after the viewing and answered one of the fans’ most pressing questions about the film; namely, to what extent were the events and timeline of the lackluster Terminator 3 versus that of T1 and T2 honored in Terminator Salvation. In brief, McG assured audiences that the spirit of the film was true to Jim Cameron’s original works but that there were aspects of the third film, such as the way Judgment Day comes about, that he incorporated into his movie.‚ 

A representative from an Arnold Schwarzenegger fansite (who McG invited up to the stage for wearing a Cyberdyne tee shirt) asked appropriately about the possibility of an Arnold cameo. McG revealed to the audience that they were working on a revolutionary technique for “doing something with that” and that he wasn’t sure if it would even work. And while he didn’t answer the question directly, McG made it clear that they were working on getting some version of Arnold (but not the Arnold of “today,” which drew chuckles) in the film as part of Skynet’s development. Personally, a Terminator film isn’t a Terminator film without Arnold, so I hope that this revolutionary technique works.

All in all, McG was eager to convince the tough crowd that he was honoring the Jim Cameron films and that he, like us, was a Terminator fan. Based off the footage that I saw (combined with his self-deprecating and expletive-laden humor) I have to admit that I am finally starting to believe. The film looks great, the cast looks great, and all in all it seems like McG’s Terminator Salvation might actually be a true Terminator film – not just an action flick, but a movie that says something profound and makes you think.‚ 

So McG — if you let me down on this one, we are fucking done professionally.

Blast reporter Kellen Rice and myself teamed up with David Chen and Devindra Hardawar of /Film Saturday evening to discuss a New York Comic-con exclusive showing of the first 46 minutes and 14 seconds of Pixar and Disney’s upcoming film, “Up.” “Up” opens in theaters on May 29.

Twilight fans, it is only three days and 11 hours until the long awaited release of “Twilight.” To keep you on your toes, Blast has a special issue for this last week to help sate your “Twilight” needs.

Today we post our interview with Robert Pattinson from the Saugus Hot Topic event.

A review of “Twilight” by myself will be up Wednesday, November 19. Kellen Rice, one of Blast’s bloggers and a critic of the “Twilight” series, will have her own review up later in the week.

Expect a “Top 10 Things the Movie Did Right” and “Top 10 Things the Movie Did Wrong” on Friday, as to avoid spoiling the movie for anyone.

Until then, enjoy our video from the Saugus event with clips of Robert Pattinson himself.