I don't know about you...

... but I thought Twilight sucked. Am I missing something here?

I have not read the book, though I have it. As soon as I get over my disappointment over the film, I might go ahead and read the book to see what all the fuss was about. Because frankly, the film version did not deliver.

Overall, I found the movie to be painfully slow moving, taking forever to set up the relationship between Bella and Edward, but falling way short of evoking the sense of deep connection between the two. Are we to take the many long, awkward looks between the two as the sign that their very souls were connecting? For all their tree-climbing and baseball-playing, Bella and Edward did not seem like the star-crossed lovers in their portrayal. Mina and the Count successfully displayed a much more authentic connection in Bram Stoker's Dracula, and did so with less screen time.

It did not help that Kristen Stewart, who played Bella, seemed incapable of any facial expression other than the scowl she had on. She literally looked like she was in varying levels of pain the whole time.

Did anyone else find the Cullens' almost ridiculous level of paleness distracting? You don't even have to look too closely to see the layers of white foundation heaped on the actors' faces, especially Peter Facinelli, who played the family's patriarch.

To me, the real appeal of any vampire flick lies in its particular take on the vampire mythology. Where do they come from? What can they do? How can you fight them? In Twilight, we got little by way of the Cullens' backstory. There was a mention of an interesting history with the Quileute people, who supposedly descended from wolves. But it stops there.

Worse, these vampires seem impotent, even ordinary, shredding any ounce of vampire mystique that the film might have had going for it.

Any good film adaptation of a book needs, at the very least, to be able to stand on it own, to be able to tell its own story. Viewers shouldn't have had to read the book to understand the nuances of the characters, nor the intricacies of their story.

Overall, Twilight left me feeling unsatisfied, with a sneaking suspicion that perhaps there was something else there that simply ended up on the cutting room floor. But to blame the film's weaknesses on the harsh reality of filmmaking also does not suffice. The movie could have been a fresh re-telling of the age old story of ill-fated love. It could have been our introduction to a modern day vampire, a contemporary Dracula, dashing and young. But it was neither. Instead, Twilight is a sappy love story told at a turtle's pace resulting in a film that is altogether unimpressive.

I'll take an episode of HBO's True Blood over this any day.