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Director James Mangold (the far more superior Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma and I don’t care what anyone else thinks but Kate & Leopold, too) could have toned down the constant jumping around from location to location (hooray for tax credits!) and focused more on creating a more substantive characterization for June and figuring out a way to not waste Peter Sarsgaard as a CIA agent out to bring down Cruise’s Roy Miller – a super-agent who may or may not have gone rogue.

There must have been a way to combine all the elements Mangold had at his disposal and create a much more compelling action comedy. It’s not by any means awful, but he just didn’t quite get to where he should have. Still, it’s harmless enough and even if this review is not a full endorsement, obviously much, much worse things have occurred at the multiplex this summer and they were expensive too. (Hello, Jonah Hex). With that said, Knight & Day is definitely a wait-for DVD.

To my pleasant surprise the Big Daddy accompanied me to opening night of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse – The IMAX Experience. And perhaps to the chagrin of my Webmaster/Editor, we’re going to review that one too. How’s that for a segue?

I would never describe myself as a TwiHard. That’s too much like admitting I have a substance abuse problem. I read the books and enjoyed them, finding them strangely addictive. I realize crack is also strangely addictive and it’s not good for you, and neither is Twilight really. But author Stephenie Meyer was able to create a world within these books that I wasn’t able to tear myself away from – I needed to see what was going to happen with these characters. All of this despite the fact that I couldn’t stand the character of Bella Swan and 95% of the time I wanted to slap Edward Cullen around. A lot.

These two kids are the awful side-effects of this particular habit. I was glad when Edward took a powder in the second book New Moon because 1) He was gone and 2) There were a lot less truly nauseating moments where Bella would continuously wax on about how unbelievably beautiful Edward was. Strangely enough, crap like that never stopped me, though. I just kept reading and enjoying. Maybe I’m more of a TwiHead than a TwiHard because TwiHards don’t know that it’s bad. I’m fully aware that it’s bad, I just don’t care. And I’m not sure what it is about these books (crack) that so fully command the audience’s attention.

My co-worker put it succinctly – “You either need to be a 14-year-old girl or you need to have been a 14-year old girl.” When she said that I thought back briefly to the masochistic hell I used to put myself through when I was a hypersensitive teenager, usually over some tragically mundane guy who deep down I probably knew wasn’t really worth it. Perhaps what all us TwiHards and TwiHeads relate to is that we know when we were teenagers that we were as perfectly average as Bella Swan. So wouldn’t it be great if we could (through Bella) tap into and relive all of that teenaged angsty super-emotion and this time feel it for one boy (or two) who was truly special and perhaps even deserving of all those feelings? I guess that’s why some call it Fantasy. And some call it crack.

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