Twilight

"No way! I just saw him last week at a Lupus event! RIP! RT @dietcokebottle: Did you see Corey Haim died? So sad =("

Soleil Moon Frye:

"RIP Corey Haim. Nobody made listening to 80's music back in the day look so good…Save a dance for me up there."  

Sinbad:

"I always dug the young funny corey haim.....wish he could have enjoyed life a little more than he did."

Sarah Colonna (writer and comedian): 

"I feel bad about Corey Haim, but I'm more depressed that this is the last season of '24.' That may make me a bad person."

Lisa Marie Presley: 

"I'm here, guys. And I am very saddened by the death of actor Corey Haim."

 Caissie St. Onge (writer/producer of "Best Week Ever"): 

"Adored Corey Haim as a kid. Think we can all agree young stardom is harmful. Enough. Time for science to develop synthetic child actors."

Nick Zano (actor in "Melrose Place" and "Catch Me If You Can"):

"Corey Haim. This is a dangerous industry it plays w ur head & sadly he lost, u have 2 b happy w u & that goes w any profession. U define u."

Melissa Gilbert (star of "Little House on the Prairie"):

"Corey Corey Corey. You will be missed. May those who love you find peace knowing that there is no more torture for you…no more pain. My heart aches for your mother. Fly well, dear talented boy." 

He announces his aversion to lady parts while talking about the NSFW photo spread he did for the magazine, which features female models in various states of undress. He goes on to say:

But I can't say I had no idea, because it was a 12-hour shoot, so you kind of get the picture that these women are going to stay naked after, like, five or six hours. But I wasn't exactly prepared. I had no idea what to say to these girls. Thank God I was hungover.

A gay male friend e-mailed to offer his exegesis:"That's the exact same thing I said when I came out to my mom!" Indeed, Details does have a reputation for being an in-the-closet men's magazine.

Ah, but take heart, Twihards -- maybe he was just making a bad joke! As a Gawker commenter points out, there's a British joke about a man complaining to his doctor that he has a vagina allergy, because every time he sees one, his penis swells. Ah-ha-hah, hilarious. Of course, if that's what he was going for, he butchered the line. Then there's the possibility that he's a raging misogynist in real life -- kind of like the much lusted-after character he plays in "Twilight"! Or maybe constantly being surrounded by rabid female fans of all ages has simply made him a little vagina-weary.

But, no matter. If Bella can get over Edward's all-consuming desire to kill her, R-Pattz fans can hardly let homosexuality, misogyny or a bad sense of humor get in the way of their love, right?

What kept them going? Well, the fire of rock 'n' roll, of course. Perhaps also the nebula-hot celebrity of Kristen Stewart, a phenomenon that seems to baffle the young lady in question but has produced unmanageable hordes of paparazzi at numerous screenings and parties, undermining any pretense that this is a trimmed-down and refocused Sundance. Playing laconic, androgynous rock legend Joan Jett in music-video director Floria Sigismondi's feature debut may have struck Stewart as an antidote to "Twilight's" demure Bella -- Jett would just kick those preening vampire dudes in the nuts and stomp away -- but it was Stewart's presence that turned what would already have been a hot-ticket premiere into a mob scene.

Those half-frozen girls and I finally got seats, Sigismondi came teetering out on her eight-foot, fashion-vixen legs to say hello, and Stewart and the real-life Jett, both of them teeny-tiny, waved to the crowd and set a thousand iPhones and Flipcams whirring. Eventually it was time for the movie, and while I wouldn't call it a letdown -- Sigismondi shoots with style to burn, and the costumes, sets and hair are all meticulously, artfully correct -- you don't actually need me to tell you the story. Kids from busted homes start a rock band, meet a sleazy-genius manager, become too famous too fast, do a bunch of drugs and make some bad decisions, see the whole thing come crashing down. (Repeat as desired.)

Yes, of course there was one crucial difference between the Runaways and just about every other mid-'70s band, and that difference changed rock history, 20 years or so before the riot-grrrl meme. I think Sigismondi gets that aspect of the story just about right. Creating an all-girl band that actually rocked, and whose members would strut the stage like the Stones or Aerosmith, was the joint inspiration of Jett and producer-manager Kim Fowley (played with delicious, scenery-chewing abandon by Michael Shannon). They needed no grasp of feminist theory to understand that things were changing in mid-1970s America, and that an all-female band that actually rocked hard, and wasn't a transparent cheesecake gimmick, could hit the big time virtually overnight.

While the original idea was Jett's, it was Fowley who decided the band needed a hot blonde lead singer, and who picked a glam-rock teenager named Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) out of the crowd in a Hollywood nightclub. Interestingly, of the two front Runaways, it's Fanning's haunting performance as the ambivalent, damaged Currie that anchors the film. I don't know if the real-life Jett's involvement with the production complicated matters for the filmmakers, but Stewart's Jett remains a hooded figure, a tomboy rock 'n' roll cipher. We learn nothing about her family life, and the question of her sexuality and her relationship with Currie is veiled with hints and allusions.

I'm not sure that's exactly a criticism. We have no inherent right to the details of Jett's personal life, and I certainly don't think that probing psychological realism is the only way to tell a living person's story. It's more that Sigismondi has made a straightforward rock 'n' roll biopic that's fluid and exciting to watch, but clearly aspires to something more. It aspires, in fact, to the mind-blowing power that "Cherry Bomb" wielded over a distinctive subset of adolescents 35 years ago. Sometimes mind-blowing power isn't available, and a rollercoaster ride of stardom and depravity will just have to do.

Elusive British street artist Banksy is in Park City this week -- as the trompe l'oeil murals appearing around town attest -- but of course he did not reveal himself at the premiere of his first film "Exit Through the Gift Shop," another hot ticket this weekend. It's not exactly a movie about his own endlessly imaginative work -- which has included hanging his own paintings in the Tate Gallery and bending a London phone booth in half -- nor is it exactly about the ambiguous "street art" movement that has bridged the gap between graffiti tagging and the gallery world.

Well, it's a little bit about those things, enough to offer newcomers a primer in both subjects. But Banksy's inventive and genial film, narrated by Rhys Ifans in plummy, self-mocking documentary-narrator tones, is really about how he half-accidentally helped a strange little French guy in L.A., a vintage-clothing entrepreneur named Thierry Guetta, become Mr. Brainwash, an overnight sensation (and flashpoint of controversy) in the contemporary art world.

There's a real danger here of falling into the traps set by a professional prankster like Banksy -- some conspiracy theorists have suggested that Mr. Brainwash is entirely Banksy's invention -- but for the moment I'm taking "Exit Through the Gift Shop" mostly at face value. It's a rueful, comic exploration of what happens when artists like Banksy and his friend Shepard Fairey, who've set themselves up as opponents of the pretentious, big-money art establishment, see their own weapons used against them.

Despite their rebel, street-artist status, Banksy and Fairey cling to relatively old-fashioned ideas about craft, training and vision, and the explosion of somebody like Mr. Brainwash -- who has no artistic training or ability, little knowledge of art history and a miscellaneous aesthetic cobbled together from every prominent pop or street artist since Andy Warhol -- calls all that into question. As Banksy's London dealer muses late in the film, "Good for Thierry if he can pull it off. At the same time, the joke's on ... well, I'm not sure who the joke's on. I'm not even sure there is a joke."

Sticking with inscrutable British phenomena, something like Chris Morris' "Four Lions" is utterly unimaginable in America. Morris studied the cases of homegrown British Muslim terrorists with real or imagined links to al-Qaida, and turned the results into a very dark slapstick farce about a group of lovable but incompetent morons devoted to the task of launching jihad in the industrial north of England. Yes, it's "In the Loop" meets "Paradise Now," and Morris dishes out the ruthless satire in all directions: The hardass white Muslim convert, the wholesome Pakistani immigrants, the devout mosque-goers, the inept police, the studiously liberal British politicians -- they're all criminal-grade idiots.

You'll laugh uproariously at what seems like a nihilistic but good-humored film, until you realize that Morris isn't actually kidding about any of it, and that where "Four Lions" is going isn't funny at all. I don't think this is the near-masterpiece some Sundance critics have proclaimed it, and it's pretty hard to imagine an American audience of any size tolerating this film. But it's a first-rate example of the self-lacerating, take-no-prisoners current in British comedy. (Watch a clip here.)

Simmons, an educator who specializes in raising girls' self-esteem, lays out what parents and teachers are up against. "Among the cringe-worthy morals of this story: When you're in love, the only thing that matters in life is your man. If you get dumped, your life is over, so feel free to act suicidal to get him back. Even if he tells you he never wants to see you again, manipulation and game-playing are effective ways to get his attention. Your friends are only ornaments; just kick them to the curb when he comes back." The marketing campaign for the movie pits "Team Edward" (the vampire) against "Team Jacob" (the werewolf), but as Carmen D. Siering wrote in Ms., "few young readers ask, 'Why not Team Bella?'" That's because the whole point of Bella's existence is earning the suffocating love of supernatural hotties; even if you think her obsessive devotion to Edward might waver in the face of were-love, you know you're never going to see her throw them both over to stand on her own two feet. (In fact, given that her only noteworthy quirk is clumsiness, she can't even be trusted to do that literally without male supervision.) And yet, seemingly every girl in the country under 16 -- to say nothing of grown women -- wishes she could be Bella. Fantastic.

Simmons advises adults looking to counter the messages of "New Moon" not to "come down like a ton of bricks on it. That's a debate we're sure to lose." Instead, she suggests asking leading questions like "If you were introducing Bella to your friends, how would you describe her? What are her interests and hobbies, for example?" or "Who is Bella besides Edward's girlfriend in this movie? Does she have another identity?" The post offers some excellent advice but doesn't answer the main question that's been haunting me ever since I broke down and read the first book: What is it that makes girls go nuts for this crap? I feel like I have a pretty good memory of being an angsty adolescent, but if I ever had the kind of personality that would have made me a rabid "Twilight" fan, I've definitely lost touch with that part of me.

In an e-mail, Simmons told me, "I think the Bella Swan character is so appealing because, from what I can see, she's stripped down to the core emotions an adolescent girl feels: excluded, lovestruck, and misunderstood. In adolescence things are experienced in extremes; it's either yes or no, black or white. It's difficult to find the gray or the nuance. The fact that Bella experiences things in such extremes -- she has to give up her soul, he'll kill himself if she's dead -- lights up a girl like a Christmas tree... developmentally speaking, that is." Okay, that makes sense. But still, my friends and I channeled our lovestruck, misunderstood outcast feelings into listening to Sinéad O'Connor and watching "Dead Poets Society" 700 times. Are there no better current pop culture offerings for today's girls to hang their tortured souls on, or does "Twilight" really speak to them in a way I just can't fathom? "This is a generation raised on Bratz, cell phones and low-rise jeans," Simmons explained. "They've been told that being empowered is about shopping, looking sexy and being catty. In 'New Moon,' you don't see a single kid texting and there is barely a sassy remark. The 'Twilight' saga ends up being a refuge from the 'mean girl' behavior that girls supposedly love to pay to watch."

Well, yeah, Bella's not mean, I'll give her that much (although Team Jacob might disagree), and I can appreciate the desire for an alternative to vicious social power games. But then, that reminds me of another favorite from twenty years ago, "Heathers," which skewered mean girl culture (and certainly hit on the extremes of adolescent emotion) with brains, black humor, and a heroine who's not sorry to see her manipulative, homicidal boyfriend blow up at the end. Maybe after worried parents have finished going through Simmons' suggestions for discussing "Twilight," they should try arranging a screening of that. The female protagonist swears, drinks, has sex and kills people, sure, but I'd still pick her as a better role model for teenaged girls than Bella Swan any day.

That's the message one Michigan guy took from it, anyway. At a Friday showing of "New Moon," he sat directly in front of Erin Westrate and her friends, and throughout the film, she says, he would occasionally "lean back and make a sexual comment that was very unnecessary and not needed." (Point of clarification: There is no such thing as a necessary sexual comment between a grown man and teenage girls.) On the way out of the movie, "he grabbed [Westrate] by the back of the hair and pulled her down and bit her on the neck." Whether you're a high school student or a professional writer, I'm pretty sure the only appropriate response to that is, OMGWTF? 

The bite didn't break Westrate's skin, but not surprisingly, the dude freaked her right out -- and that wasn't even the end of it. The man also followed her to the parking lot and watched her get in her car to drive away. In an interview with her local ABC affiliate (video below), Westrate said, "He was just, like, smiling at me -- it was so creepy, it wasn't even funny. That's not right. I know that's not right." 

Police are now looking for the creep, who faces assault charges. 

All right, I'll officially say that's a good thing. And now Sady Doyle, occasional Broadsheet contributor and blogmistress of the fabulously named Tiger Beatdown, has gone and given me yet another feminist angle on "Twilight" to consider. ("Twilight" is officially the new Sarah Palin: I hate everything it stands for, but since so much of the reaction to it is sexist, I keep feeling compelled to defend it. Sigh.)

Doyle admits to a fondness for Robert Pattinson, who plays vampire Edward Cullen in the series, although she does not admit it's partly because he's hot. Other than that, she covers the reasons why I, too, am fond of the surprisingly candid and self-aware young star -- "Robert Pattinson talks shit about the projects he is in. Robert Pattinson is honest about the fact that he is not the best actor" -- with a bonus articulation of something I'd never considered: "And Robert Pattinson's main source of employment is facilitating his own objectification, which he does, but also complains about all the time. Robert Pattinson is... Megan Fox, basically!

That Fox/Pattz comparison is so apt, Sady's not even the only ladyblogger in my Google reader who made it today. And the difference in our reaction to each of those actors' being subjected to an audience's lustful gaze says a lot about who's meant to be looked at and who's meant to be listened to in this culture. "People outside the superfan matrix don't tend to have strong feelings about The Pattz," she writes, "but they do tend to get all squirmy and giggly and uncomfortable with the way that so many women relate to his filmed image (for example, by screen-printing it on their underpants) and/or his person." All that raw, ridiculous, pointless lust is just so unseemly. And when The Pattz speaks in interviews about how strange and oppressive it is to be the object of a million fangirl fantasies, or how awful his character is ("the more I read the script, the more I hated this guy"), those of us outside the superfan matrix like him more for it. That poor guy! He can't go anywhere! People expect him to be something he's not, just because he's good-looking and plays such a one-dimensional character, desperate people can project whatever they want onto him. Isn't that sad? But that whiny, stupid Fox girl, on the other hand -- where does she get off complaining about getting paid to look hot? "We have no problem with objectifying Megan Fox," says Doyle. "We just have a problem with everything she says, and specifically the things she says wherein she takes issue with being objectified. We just hate her."

Much like we hate those women buying Edward Cullen underpants (among other products) and making Robert Pattinson's life difficult. "Because those women are acting in a way that is typically reserved for men. And they're treating Pattinson like a girl." The objectification of women in pop culture, writes Doyle, is both so common as to go unnoticed and inevitably "tacky as all hell, aesthetically."

[A]nd so criticizing it, in an aesthetic way, seems pointless. Congratulations, you went looking for art in a product intended to provide boners and came up empty. Surprise! But when girls do the exact same thing -- when they prove themselves capable of the exact same sort of objectification, and the exact same goofiness or tackiness or unrealistic fantasy in the name of getting off -- well, it freaks people out. It's weird. Why are they acting like this? Don't they know that Robert Pattinson is a person? Why are they treating him like a big chunk of meat? Why doesn't Edward Cullen act like a real guy would? Etcetera!

Let me be clear: I think those are all perfectly reasonable questions. It's just that I think they're perfectly reasonable questions to ask about the objectification of Megan Fox, and every other Action Movie Girlfriend in history, as well. Treating a man just as poorly as women have long been treated in films made for young male audiences is not the kind of gender equality that gives me hope for the future. But thinking critically about why folks become so offended when they see that happening might, in fact, lead to a bit of progress. Why is it so unsettling to see a young male actor dehumanized, but not his female counterpart? Why do we sympathize with a man saying it's hard to be nothing but a pretty face, but vilify a woman who says it? Whether or not you can answer those questions, if you can at least spot the difference, you are obliged to do one of two things. In Doyle's words: "Be less weirded out by the fact that ladies are getting all freaky about Robert Pattinson. Or be MORE weirded out by the dudes getting all het up about various lady movie stars."

For now, I'd recommend both. Ultimately, I'd love to see more movies made for all audiences that go beyond a cheap appeal to our basest fantasies; recognizing and resisting objectification of anyone in pop culture is a goal dear to my heart. But it would also be nice if, in the meantime, people recognized that women and teenaged girls have our own base fantasies, and quit acting like it's headline news that we have real human libidos, which are sometimes activated by pretty young things who stand around doing very little in blockbuster movies. Just as surely as "New Moon" has proven that catering to a female audience can be as lucrative as catering to young men, it's proven that one-dimensional sex objects can sell to lady audiences as well. So, while it may not get beyond one obnoxious stereotype of female desire -- violent, overprotective dudes get us hot! -- at least it busts the myth that there's no such thing.