Talking to MTV, Ratner revealed that he's been won over by Pattinson's dreaminess himself:

He just feels like he belongs in that world. I don't only see him as a vampire, he's a really good actor... [Pattinson] could do anything. He just has that look. I picture him on Youngblood, for sure.

But don't assume that any reference to Pattinson having "that look" means that the occasionally shallow Ratner's adaptation of the infamously style-over-substance Rob Liefeld comic won't be a challenging, deep movie, according to the director:

My vision for it is: We're going to make a very edgy, cool film... We're not soft-peddling it at all.

I should hope not! After all, how could you even try and soft-pedal this?

Brett Ratner Wants 'Twilight' Star Robert Pattinson For 'Youngblood' Movie [MTV Splash Page]

After waiting hours in line and sitting through trailers for gorey slasher films, Twilight fans were rewarded with two clips from the sequel New Moon. Did they get their money's worth? Only if they like staring at half-naked vampires and werewolves.

So here are the clips we watched:

Team Jacob Fanservice

At La Push, a long-haired Jacob is teaching Bella how to ride a dirt bike. As he tells her to release the clutch slowly, she sees an apparition of Edward at the handlebar. She falters, nearly falling off the bike. Jacob is about to halt the lesson, but she says, "Let me try again."

This time, she takes off, but she sees another apparition of Edward, and she watches him as she rides by. Apparently, Jacob's lesson didn't include keeping your eyes on the road and not on phantom ex-boyfriends. She starts to lose control, crying to Jacob for help. "Bank it!" he shouts. "Hit the brake!"

The bike catches on the edge of the path and Bella goes flying face-first into a rock. Jacob hops on his bike and catches up with her. He pulls her up and tsk-tsks, "No more bikes."

Bella touches the blood streaming from her forehead. "Oh, I'm bleeding," she says, and then automatically adds, "I'm sorry."

He gives her a bemused look. "Are you apologizing for bleeding?"

"Oh yeah, I guess I am."

"It's just blood, Bella."

Of course, all this business of blood and rocks is a mere set-up for the most fanservicey moment of the clip, when Jacob pulls off his shirt and just stands there for a moment, showing off all the hours of gym work Taylor Lautner put in for the film. The pause is, I assume, to allow sufficient time for the screaming to die down. Finally, he bends down and uses his shirt to wipe the blood from Bella's brow.

She looks at him dazed with what could be lust or a concussion. "You're so beautiful," she tells him. The audience seems to agree.

And he replies, amused but wary, "How hard did you hit your head?"

Team Edward Fanservice

Alice — looking like an undead Audrey Hepburn in her sun-shielding scarf and glasses — is driving through the narrow streets of Venice, while Bella is having a panic attack in the passenger seat. Bella asks why everyone outside is wearing red robes and Alice explains that it's for the Saint Marcus Day Festival, the perfect opportunity for Edward to reveal himself and provoke the Volturi. When she can't drive any further, she kicks Bella out of the car to chase down Edward. Bella protests, but Alice insists, "You have to do this, Bella. You're the only one he won't see coming."

Bella races through the streets toward the Piazza Grande, shoving red-robed celebrants out her way as she goes. Finally, she reaches the piazza and spots Edward, in the entryway of a building. Slowly, he slips off his dress shirt. His abs are much paler than Jacob's, but the crowd doesn't seem to be complaining. As he steps forward to reveal himself in all his sparkly glory, Bella cries out, "Edward, don't!"

But Team Jacob scored a point during the Q&A session with director Weitz. When asked how filming in Vancouver compared with filming in Portland, Taylor Lautner complained that both places were cold and wet. "Don't get me wrong, they're both beautiful, but it's no fun to be filming there with your clothes off."

Later, in the press roundtables, we were able to talk to director Chris Weitz about stepping into Catherine Hardwicke's shoes. He says:

They're ladylike shoes... There's nothing wrong with that, there's nothing bad about [taking over a franchise from another director], if someone gives you a chance to make a movie that you know a lot of people are going to see. I've inherited a great cast, a book that people love, a screenwriter who adapted the first one successfully and did a great job of taming the huge amount of material from the first one. At first the notion of a male director was a tough sell to fans of the books. Little do they know how much like Bella I actually am. We all identify with being broken up, except for the part where you get them back in the end, it rarely works like that in real life.

We asked Weitz about how he approached the challenge of presenting the Volturi, the ancient vampire society, in the new movie. He said casting was the key piece of that puzzle. "I got a chance to add to this cast, and get Michael Sheen, Dakota Fanning, Christopher Heyerdahl (who's an extraordinary Canadian actor) and Jamie Campbell Bowers. If you get actors of that caliber, it's easy for you." As for the look of the Volturi's lair, "I wanted to take every cliche possible, and throw it out. You're not going to see Dracula's castle, and dripping wax, that sort of thing... Or if you do, you'll see it briefly on your way to something totally unexpected."

And did you know that Weitz's grandmother was a silent movie star in Mexico, who starred in the first Spanish-language Dracula movie? So he's a third-generation vampire movie person. (Well, I guess it skipped a generation.)

Also, in the new movie, Lautner finally gets rid of the wig that he had to wear in the first outing. "I was very excited to ditch the wig. I did not have a fun experience with it in the first film." Now, with shorn locks, he can "give some competition to Robert's spectacular hair." As for Bella's hair, Stewart told us:

I think my hair is kind of like this character in the movie. It's flowing, it's good though, because it's untouched. She doesn't want to change, she's so terrified of anything being different. By Breaking Dawn, it's just going to be at my feet.

Who really knows what happens between the teen stars of the Twilight franchise and the crew on the set of New Moon, but we suspect that if this behind-the-scenes video had a bit more dialog, it would go a little something like this...

Taylor Lautner: "So what's my motivation?"

(Director) Chris Weitz: "You just got a haircut. Do you feel it?"

Taylor Lautner: "Yeah, okay."

Chris Weitz: "How does it feel?"

Taylor Lautner: "Lighter."

Chris Weitz: "Good. Now go to that place in your soul and capture it. You've been living under the harsh yoke of long hair for years, and then the scissors came in. It's a metaphor for your soul. You're free, you must run and show Bella... Wait, what? Robert's here? Gotta go."

End Scene

[Via Kyle And Jackieo]

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that Twilight will break box office records and be remembered as some kind of groundbreaking movie that sets a new bar for vampire movies - although it might do the former. But, like The Dark Knight, Twilight is a mainstream blockbuster that wants to look like an indie film, is embarrassed by its genre roots, and leaves you feeling somewhat schizophrenic about it as you leave the theater.

The real star of the movie - again, like Dark Knight- is the direction. After a dizzying mess of an opening, the more grounded parts of the movie - which is to say, the bits without the vampires, the good bits - show director Catherine Hardwicke bringing a nice understated look to the film that recalls her earlier work onThirteen, with something approaching natural light and handheld cameras giving everything a virisimilitude that neatly gives Bella's entry to the overly supernatural town of Forks some gravity and reality... Something that's backed up by the performance of Kristen Stewart as Bella, who manages to make her character come alive and seem sympathetic despite writing that leaves her both frustratingly passive and annoyingly stupid. The other "normal" characters gain from similarly successful performances (Kudos especially to Billy Burke, whose take on Bella's father is wonderfully understated yet oddly noble in an emotionally stunted way), which would normally be a good thing... if the movie didn't fail so incredibly when it came to that whole "vampire" thing.

By now, you've probably seen enough trailers to have guessed that Robert Pattinson isn't the greatest actor in the world. And that's true, but once you see the film, you'll understand just how incredibly bad he is - Like a black hole of talent, optimism and... well, everything aside from good looks, his every appearance on screen as the movie's hero Edward manages to suck in everything that you might have enjoyed about the movie. It's not just that his performance is flat, emotionless and entirely unconvincing (Although it is); his pale make-up, the special effects when he uses his abilities and pretty much everything else about him just kills whatever momentum and credibility the movie had each and every time he appears. It's fitting, in a way, because if there's one thing that the movie manages to convince you by the end of it, it's that this movie really isn't about vampires.

What was the clue that gave that away? It wasn't that the vampires in the movie are more X-Men than vampires (One of them is a telepath! Another can see the future! Oh, and they can so hang out in the sunlight; they just shine like diamonds when they do. Ain't it poetic? They even have a baseball game where they use their powers, just like the X-Men of my youth), or that - Edward's occasional, melodramatic protestation aside - vampirism is portrayed more as a weird different faith than being undead bloodsucking monsters. No, what drove the point that this movie is most definitely not about vampires home was the fact that the audience I saw the movie with (which was, a handful of reviewers aside, made up entirely of teenage girls who loved the book so much that they'd dressed as prom versions of their favorite characters, and who screamed when the movie's title appeared on screen) laughed at the vampire-centric parts of the movie. Edward shows off his abilities? They laughed. Edward shows that he glows in sunlight? They laughed. Any place in the movie where vampires were suggested as something different or unusual or supernatural was met with derisive, nervous laughter - and, given the shoddy sub-Smallville "Oh look, he's running fast" special effects, derisive laughter may be the appropriate response.

No, what this movie is all about is the strange, twisted fantasy love story that promises young girls that, yes! You too could seduce and tame a mysterious, dangerous man who loves you - and must struggle with his overwhelming animal lust for you - despite your humdrum normal life, and all without doing anything other than just being you. It's a curious mix of female empowerment - You can achieve your goals! - with just the opposite - Don't take control of the situation or want anything more than a grand romance.There's an earlier scene in the movie where Bella tells one of her friends that she is a strong, independent woman. Why is she telling her that? To make sure that she asks out a boy. Being in a relationship is its own reward in this movie, and also the bestest thing in the world ever; all of Bella's high school friends exist to either crush on Bella or crush on those crushing on Bella - They literally have no other reason to be there. Again, the reaction of the preview audience, the movie's fanbase underlines this: while Edward's awkward pronouncements of the horrors of being a vampire got laughed at, the equally-awkward pronouncements of love were greeted with screams and sighs and other noises made by mid-20th century women when Elvis swiveled his hips.

That Twilight the movie makes such little effort to convince with the quasi-vamp mythology shows that it understands its target audience - but also that, ultimately, it doesn't care enough about those who haven't read the books to offer up anything more than a Harlequin Romance bodice-ripper dressed up for a superhero audience. It does what it wants to very well, and very interestingly - but that's not enough to make it a good movie for everyone.

When asked by the Chicago Tribune if he would be up for the part of the infamous time traveling quick-witted Doctor, Pattinson replied:

That would be quite cool. I didn’t know he was leaving. The Doctor is great…yeah, maybe. I did grow up watching it. I loved it when I was a kid. In fact, I met one of them the other day, Sylvester McCoy [the seventh Doctor]. He’s one of the few people I’ve asked for an autograph.

Mother of god. I don't know if I can handle that many screaming girls while I'm trying to enjoy my TARDIS. Will this happen, who knows, but all in all you I'd like to think that he's a wee bit young to take on such a lofty job. Still stranger things have happened.

But meanwhile, only a few more days remains until the Earth cracks open with the sonic power of the squee heard around the globe. But I think more than my simple words, the art of dedicated Twilight fan (and cool chick) Julia Carusillo best demonstrates the overall fan sentiment that is hurry up before I claw my eyes out — enjoy!

According to Variety Twilight accounted for 85 percent of tickets sold at MovieTickets.com on Monday, which means I will not be going to see any movies this weekend. Here's a full report on the crazy lines:

To all of the supporters of Hot Topic and fans of TWILIGHT:

Although no explanation will correct the situation that occurred in Chicago today at the Orland Square Mall, I wanted to attempt to explain what happened from our point of view.

We do many signings all over the country with large crowds so we have processes and systems in place to ensure a smooth experience for our customers. The mall developer was a partner in the planning; however, as of two days ago, they told us they would not allow any fans to line up prior to 6AM. They required them to be off the premises.

On Monday at 6AM at the San Francisco event, the fans became disorderly and stormed the mall entrance. Mall security, numerous police, fire officials and our team from HT stepped in to calm the crowd and create a safe environment for the fans. The event was revised and went forward with the exception of the planned Q&A.

Monday’s event caused all of us to re-group and review the process. Allowing a “mob” to develop was dangerous and frankly, not an option. The mall developer (GGP) consented to allowing an orderly line to form prior to 6AM outside of the remainder of the malls on the tour. When our crew arrived yesterday at midnight, approximately 500 people were already lined up to purchase tickets. By 1AM, there were 700 people in line. It was about 30 degrees and raining. We had to make a call. We knew the first 500 would get wristbands and felt it was the right call to allow those waiting beyond 500 to go home and avoid the cold, wet weather for the remainder of the morning. Given the demand, anyone arriving after midnight would have been too late to obtain a wristband.

We understand your frustration and anger, but from our standpoint, we had no choice but to change the rules after Monday’s event. We knew some would feel it unfair as they were told one thing and when arriving on the scene, something else was reality. But given the choice of risking a disorderly crowd, a dangerous situation and canceling of the event, we made a decision that we felt was the right thing to do. I support our team and the mall for making safety and, given the weather, health the priorities.
...
We sincerely apologize and hope that the facts help you to better understand the situation.

Betsy McLaughlin
CEO, Hot Topic

So the fans that showed up on time did not get a chance to meet the sad faced boy Robert Pattinson because they had already given out all the bracelets, aw sadness. But seriously...there were 700 people waiting in line at 1 AM...in the rain...was he showing up naked? This has gone to a whole new level of insanity. But the Twilight fans have taken to the commenter boards to voice there anger, here is a sampling:

Taterbuggy Says:

This would have been nice to know 2 days ago.

Jennylee Says:

It didn’t satisfy me. They can apologize for it after the fact but there are a lot of girls that came and ended up jaded. If they really wanted to atone for it, then they would re-do the event. Tisk Tisk.

still mad Says:

Well what about Dallas, a lot of girls that were there first were scr*wed over! People waiting for 5 hours didn’t get in vs. people that were there for 15 minutes did. Seriously, it shouldn’t be this hard, girls line up and first 500 get a wristband. It’s not like this is the first event people have waited for hours and hours for. Maybe HT should have taken pointer from the professionals and not winged these events. I have gotten sooo many things from HT but I’m seriously so jadded that I’m no longer going to shop there…EVER!!!!

ondiv Says:

“the fans became disorderly and stormed the mall entrance.”
“Allowing a “mob” to develop was dangerous”

Wow, for the first time ever I can say I’m honestly embarrassed to be a Twilight fan.
Way to go for confirming every Twilight fan stereotype.
None of these signing events is coming anywhere near my city (Salt Lake City), but with things like this happening I wouldn’t even attempt to go if they did.
I have been to countless fan conventions, store promotions for movies, and the like for actors and musicians WAY bigger than Robert Pattinson and nothing like this has ever happened.
A MAJOR kudos to the mall security team, local police men and women and the local Hot Topic team for keeping things from becoming worse then they did.

I'm really starting to enjoy following this crazy mob of vampire fans from city to city, hopefully the next appearance he'll throw the crowd a t-shirt to which will incite them to burn the city to the ground. Twilight 4 EVA.

[via Twilight Lexicon Blog]

Image via Jake Carter @ WaveCrestMedia.com