Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Ashley Greene, Rachelle Lefevre, Billy Burke, Michael Sheen, and Dakota Fanning

"Sometimes you've gotta learn to love what's good for you."
-Charlie Swan (Billy Burke)

That's the wisest thing I've ever heard out of a Twilight movie.  More often than not, however, many of us still love what's not good for us.  Take the Twilight films for example.  They're full of horrendous acting, bland writing, and stale romance.  People strangely spend 12 bucks to see this hot mess when they could get the bad acting, the bad writing, and the bad romance for free on network TV.  They're called soap operas.  Nonetheless, millions of women go every November to see this crap, and every year it surprises me.  I was most surprised when New Moon was released because more people came to see it than the original Twilight.  That just baffles me.

It's now Bella Swan's (Kristen Stewart) 18th birthday, and all she can think of is her age and what it means for her relationship with vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson).  She dreams of growing older while her ageless boyfriend continues to look like a 17-year-old for all eternity.  Since it's Bella's birthday though, the Cullens decide to throw her a birthday party.  Things go terribly awry when Bella gets a paper cut and Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) goes crazy for her blood.  Edward and Jasper get into a scuffle.  In the process, Edward shoves Bella out of the way and straight into further injury. 

Afterward, a remorseful Edward decides that it's best to leave Bella so that she can live a happy, healthy life.  The Cullens leave Forks, and Bella is left on her own.  She goes into a deep depression and suffers from night terrors.  Her only coping mechanism is to send Alice (Ashley Greene) e-mails that are never delivered.  When her father threatens to send her to Florida to live with her mother because of her hopeless, despondent state, Bella tries to pull her act together.  She finds comfort in the arms of longtime friend and neighbor Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner).  She just doesn't know that he's carrying a dark secret.

I'd like to say that the actors have improved and grown.  I would like to say that the screenwriters penned some better dialogue.  I would even like to say that Bella's romantic entanglements are a bit more intriguing.  I can't say this though because New Moon is worse than the original Twilight.  The acting is as horrendous as ever.  The writing is anything but world-class.  Despite this new love triangle, the romance is still utterly boring.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson continue to butcher every word they utter on camera.  However, there's a new acting terror in Taylor Lautner's Jacob Black, and he's inconceivably worse than our leading lady and her vampire.  His acting is so atrocious that it leaves me wondering whether he ever bothered to read the script before getting on set.  There’s no emotion or any iota of depth to his acting.  Because of this, his performance is just so unbelievably bland.  It leaves me thinking that there's a teleprompter hidden behind the camera, and Lautner is just reading on screen for us.

The writing by screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg is just as horrible as Lautner's acting.  Stephenie Meyer, author of the novel on which the film is based, shares a good chunk of the blame as well.  The plot is fairly straightforward and predictable, but the romance is just poorly written.  The dialogue in the more romantic scenes is choppy, unpoetic, and uninspiring.  The dialogue lacks a soul altogether and renders the already unskilled actors unable to create any romantic sparks on camera with it. 

While the romantic dialogue is poorly written, the actors in this new love triangle make the starry-eyed scenes absolutely unbearable.  There's nothing in this lackluster film that makes me feel for the hole in Bella's chest or the romantic woes resulting from this vampire-werewolf love triangle.  When you combine three terrible actors like Stewart, Pattinson, and Lautner, only bad things can come of it.  New Moon is the byproduct.  Thank you Summit Entertainment for bringing such nightmarishly bad romance to the big screen.