Goddammit, Stephanie Meyer, read the play. All of it, not just II:ii.

I've been bombarded with commercials for the latest film adaptation of the Twilight novels, which is pretty obvious, considering it opens at the end of the month. I know it's getting to be gauche to talk about how hard Twilight sucks, but holy Christ it's getting to the point where I want to murder myself. Oh, you like to read, do you? Anything besides R&J? Especially because R&J isn't really a romance, it's a comedy?

Twilight is another entry in a long tradition of using Romeo & Juliet as an ideal romance between two people destined for each other despite incredible hardships, family disapproval, pain, and death. But it's not. It's nothing like that. It's a comedy, all the way up to Act 3 scene 1 when Mercutio bites it. And it's a hilarious comedy.

Romeo's not a cultured lover, he's a stupid ponce who hangs out in the woods all day writing crappy poetry about a girl who won't fuck him. His dad and Benvolio don't know what to do with him because he seriously does this all the time.

Juliet's a 13 year old girl who's being wooed by a wealthy and prodigious nobleman. And by woo, I mean that Paris is bartering with her father for her (incidentally, I think Paris kind of gets the short end of the stick, because not only does he never really do anything wrong, he's gets killed while just trying to keep this crazy murderer away from the body of the guy he murdered. And on top of that they usually cut that scene for performance. Just saying). Being a 13 year old girl, she doesn't do terribly much in the play except insist that Romeo marries her before they bang, and bitch about how she should hate him for killing Tybalt, but doesn't.

They meet at a party Romeo's crashed, which he goes to to see the aforementioned girl who won't fuck him. And then he sees Juliet, and waxes lyrical about how beautiful she is. The only issue here is that it's a masquerade, so she's wearing a mask, so apparently the 13 year old has a slamming body. And then he proceeds to talk about how beautiful she is for four more acts. Seriously, that's all he freaking does when she comes up. Even in the tomb, when he's getting ready to kill himself, he takes a couple minutes to mention that even dead she's still really, really good looking.

How terribly romantic. Really, aside from the balcony gag, it's pretty much just dick jokes and swordfights until it turns into women complaining and murder-suicide.

So next time you go see Romeo & Juliet, you can duck out after 3:1. Everybody fun dies, vanishes, or stops making jokes and starts complaining. Plus they usually put an intermission right there anyway.

Oh, and Stephanie Meyer: stop writing. Seriously. You're bad at it, and you're making little girls think it's okay to be in a horribly abusive relationship as long as the boy tells you he loves you so much it hurts. They should find that out for themselves when they get to high school.