I waited four years for a decent sex scene, and all I got was this crummy over-the-shoulder shot.

If you're reading this, you know me, and you know what an unashamed Twi-hard I am. I can promise you, however, there is more substance to this review than a discussion of pecs and abs and hair or lack thereof. I actually took a pretty critical stance on this film, and will openly admit it was a disappointment. Read on to see why...

Breaking Dawn doesn't deliver, but you'd probably suck too if you worked with this source material.

Film: Breaking Dawn (2011)

[Drama]

For months, Twilight fans have been drooling over leaked photos and teaser clips of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1, but last night, all that build-up came crashing down in an anticlimactic heap. The film is the first half of the final installment of the series based on Stephenie Meyer’s vampire-human romance novels. Now that the glittery vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and his human girlfriend Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) have survived the usual high school drama (evil vampire attacks, suicide attempts and biology tests), the couple will be entering into wedded bliss. But not so fast, this Christian-inspired romance doesn’t put out without a price, and in this case, we’re talking about teen pregnancy.

Along with their marriage, the honeymoon, pregnancy and birthing scenes have all garnered anticipation from fans and haters alike. When it was announced that Dreamgirls director Bill Condon would be interpreting the penultimate film, fans had high hopes for what is undoubtedly the messiest of saga’s novels.

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Unfortunately, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1was not worth the year-and-a-half hype, and if the books are any indication of Part 2, it seems as if the series will end on a low note. To be fair, Breaking Dawn is about 100 pages of entertainment and 600 pages of every bad idea Meyer could have had for the series, so Condon started out at a loss.

But with the bulk of the saga’s most anticipated material scheduled to fill out this film, it was almost more impressive that Condon was able to make the wedding and honeymoon underwhelming. And where fans might have hoped screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg would have used creative liberty for good — such as removing the totally awkward pre-honeymoon skinny dip — they were instead offered a superfluous fight scene. The biggest thumbprint he and Rosenberg left on this installment was their exclusion of a narrator. The first three films used a voiceover to capture some of Bella’s emotion, and the first three novels are told from Bella’s perspective, but the last novel switches between hers and Jacob’s. Breaking Dawn: Part 1 could have seriously benefitted from a continuation of this technique.

Two critical scenes felt very detached: the wedding night “human minutes” and the “burning man.” Just before Edward and Bella break the bed (literally) and consummate their marriage, Meyer details Bella’s outright panic attack at exposing herself to Edward for the first time and losing her virginity, an important revelation for a character many criticize as one-dimensional. Condon chooses to “complement” this scene with the Noisette’s “Sister Rosetta,” a punky, up-beat rock song that completely alters the tone. It feels a little like applying “Wipeout” by the Surfaris to that scene in Braveheart where Mel Gibson and the gang go running across the field.

Similarly, in the book, we get a picture of Edward as a tortured man whom Jacob describes as like a victim being burned at the stake. This is the biggest display of sympathy we ever see Jacob offer toward Edward, but it is swapped in the film for an angry Edward and unyielding resentment from Jacob.

Other omissions that readers might miss include the explanation for setting the honeymoon in South America — think hot weather versus cold vampire — and the smack talk between Jacob and Rosalie, which gave readers more to think about during the pregnancy besides how idiotic Bella seems to be. But in compensation, the creepy dog portrait in Bella’s room makes a reappearance.

The award for most unintentionally funny scene in the film has to go to the werewolf powwow/ pissing contest in which all the dialogue is filtered through a distortion technique that makes all the wolves sound like Bruce Wayne when he switches into Batman mode. It’s all very cartoonish, and those who thought the shimmering vampire skin in Twilight was the abyss of CGI, think again. Homeward Bound was more believable.

The visual effects for Bella’s baby bump, however, were the best thing to come out of Condon’s efforts. Because the Franken-fetus Bella is carrying is half vampire, it begins depriving her of blood, and Bella begins to wither. In a matter of weeks, Bella wastes away to skin and bones, and that is exactly what she looks like with a sunken face, protruding shoulder bones and knobby knees, not to mention the bruises on her stomach from the baby’s superhuman kicking.

The birthing scene is just as good, and it can be argued as the one outstanding accomplishment for the film. Dealing with a broken spine, C-section by vampire teeth and reanimation by vampire venom sounds too farfetched for live-action, Condon somehow pulls it off. The sound of Bella’s bones crunching is enough to make the popcorn and Raisinets churn in weak stomachs, but the gore is completely necessary.

Anyone who has never watched the other films and is considering seeing this movie will almost certainly be confused, so do your homework and watch the others first — or ask just about any 13-year-old on the street for a detailed synopsis before you go; it’ll be about the same quality as the source material.

Who's Down with OGD? Yeah, You Know Me!

This post is a tribute to my Grandma Markelz, The Original Grandma Donna, who taught me the basis for this recipe. She calls hers Chicken a la King, and it is infinitely fancier and harder than my version, but you can't improve perfection, so I didn't try.

BONUS: If you stick around after the recipe, there's a treat for you. A little unpublished tale I told Ira Glass — not in person, but hey, email's a close second, right? — in an application for This American Life. No, I didn't get an interview, but I got this great personal story, which i probably would not have penned without the impetus. Fittingly, it's about the above-mentioned OGD. She's sounds and looks like a different person these days, and you'll read why, but she's still one of the strongest, toughest ladies I know.

What You'll Need

• Chicken (white or dark, but dark works and tastes better)
• Carrots
• Peas
• Onion
• Potatoes
• Heavy whipping cream
• Chicken broth
• Butter
• Salt
• Pepper
• Garlic powder
• Olive oil
• Buttermilk biscuits

How to Do It

1. You want to begin by roasting your chicken and getting it to that fall-off-the-bone state. This takes about 2 hours in the oven, but if you're pressed for time, you can just cook it through. Season it with the salt, pepper and garlic powder and if you like other spices that sound good (rosemary, thyme, oregano) you can add those, too.
2. Place it in a roasting pan with a lid and drizzle some olive oil on it. Put a little pad of butter on top — you don't need to go Paula Deen on this — to add some flavor.
3. Bake the chicken for 1 hour on 350. You can leave it for another hour at 220 to get it tender.
4. Put your biscuits in the oven. Watch out for those spoon-open cans; they'll get you worse than a jack-in-the-box every time.
5. Chop up your carrots, onion and potato. This is all by portion size and taste. I generally like a half onion for one person and 1-2 carrots. You want to sweat these, along with the peas, in a pot with 1 Tbl of oil on the bottom. Just get them tender, then set aside.
6. Add chicken broth to the veggies and get it simmering. I used about a half a cup of broth for one person and two pieces of dark meat.
7. When the chicken has cooked and cooled — make sure it's not hot, unless you lost the feeling in your fingers in an unfortunate accident and have awesome pain tolerance — and tear the chicken from the bones in a shredding motion. Two forks going in opposite directions works well.
8. add the chicken to the veggie soup pot and pour in any drippings left in the roasting pan. Add in half the amount of cream as broth, for me that's about 1/4 cup. Let it continue to simmer until it gets a little thick like gravy.
9. Add more spices if it's too bland. You want it to have a buttery, salty taste, but be able to taste the cream as well, so if it's too thin, add more cream.
10. Serve over the biscuits or side-by-side as show in the loverly photo above.

Okay, folks, here it is. Thanks for sticking around or for checking this post out solely for this story. And now, a little look into the eccentric life of Donna Markelz:

Last Christmas Eve, my father’s side of the family tried something different. We congregated at my cousin Tony and his wife Joanna’s new house — all 33 of us, not including the dog and one baby on the way. Despite the full house, one person was missing, and she was the reason we weren’t celebrating on the other side of town. My grandma, Donna, was lying in a hospital bed stuck with tubes and surrounded by beeping monitors. She had suffered a series of strokes three months earlier.

Christmas Eve had always been her night. For years she’d spoiled us with lobster and pasta, but not before a full spread of hors d'oeuvres, enough to fill up on. As a child of the Depression, food was sacrosanct to her. She used to tell us her after-school snack was a raw potato. We never figured out why she couldn’t have cooked it, but that wasn’t the point. Her life’s goal was to feed her family, and she more than succeeded. Each year we’d race from 4 p.m. Mass to relieve her anxiety that the food was getting cold.

In Grandma’s absence, my cousin Liz, her fiancé and I volunteered for the tall order of appetizer duties. When everyone bit into their first spatini — a delicacy whose recipe Grandma didn’t share with outsiders in case one of us opened a restaurant — the three of us finally understood Grandma and her holiday neurosis. We learned how Christmas chaos could make you crazy. It’s the mad dash to cook and serve 180 finger foods in an hour. The pressure of 30-plus grumbling guts. The need to please. The exhaustion when it’s over.

After eating ourselves into a well-deserved stupor and loosening up with a few drinks, Joanna, an art teacher, brought out an easel and suggested a game of Pictionary. We certainly had never played games on the holiest night of the year before; usually we just shouted “It’s what you wanted!” at each other as we opened gifts of socks and re-gifted blenders. But a competitive guessing game offered an equivalent opportunity for yelling, so we divided into teams willingly. Not five minutes into the game, accusatory fingers were shaking as jeers of “Cheater!” filled the house. Word to the wise: a room full of imbibing Germans and Italians does not make for a clean fight.

When it was my turn to step up to the easel, I took my paper from the designated word writers. Upon unfolding the slip, a distinct memory came to mind. The paper read “Dr. Wall,” and to any other family, that would not have satisfied the Christmas theme of the game. But to us, it couldn’t mean anything else.

My dad is a notorious gift-returner, and I am proud to say that one of the only Christmas gifts he ever kept, I picked out. About five years ago, his sister, my aunt Denise, asked my advice, and for once, I knew what to say: he wanted a portrait titled “An American Girl in Italy,” an iconic Ruth Orkin depicting a woman walking through a throng of leering Italian men — one of them clutching his crotch. She ordered the photo from Deck the Walls, a franchised art store. About a week before Christmas that year, Grandma answered the phone when the order came in. Denise wasn’t home, so she took a message. Keep in mind, this is the same woman who carried on full conversations with robo-calls, so it shouldn’t have surprised us that she misheard the clerk. Nevertheless, for days the message baffled my aunt. Who was “Dr. Wall,” and what order had she placed with him?

To this day we still laugh when we see a Deck the Walls store. When I drew a doctor and my best attempt at a cube with an arrow pointing at one side, I knew it wouldn’t take long for someone to understand the clue. Liz and I locked eyes, she shouted the answer, and the room went to pieces with laughter. If you had taken a picture of our family in that moment, you wouldn’t have known there was anything wrong. Grandma had been entertaining us for years with her cooking, and she continued to entertain us in our memories.

This story is special to me because it reminds me of the incredible warmth that filled me and that room on our first Christmas Eve without Grandma. I have always been a traditionalist, and that night, though we made new traditions, we honored the old.

Goal: Incorporate the insult, "he's not a full shilling" into regular speech.

This film was another member of the True/False lineup. Gotta say I was cringing from the start and that feeling didn't let up until the credits rolled. My biggest problem with it, though, was the quality of the filming, which often was extremely reflective of the director's videography roots. Most of it looks like a series of strung together home movies, but not in any kind of spectacularly inventive or authentic way.

KNUCKLE is a lightweight among True/False contenders

Film: KNUCKLE (2011)

[Documentary]

Never was the term “Fighting Irish” more appropriate than in Ian Palmer’s KNUCKLE, a tale of puts bloody faces to the names Quinn McDonagh and Joyce.

The two are members of Ireland’s Travelers, a small nomadic population often poor, illiterate and fiercely prideful. Their lives are consumed by a never-ending family feud in which cousins, uncles and brothers pummel each other for money and recognition.

For as barbaric as the bare-fisted scrapes can look, there is order in the chaos. “Fair fights” are arranged after one clan instigates with a video threat or smack talk. A time and place are set, and referees hired. Then all that’s left is 20 minutes of “noses and mouth broken in and 15 to 16 stitches” worth of damage.

Watching this film is like being subject to an experiment in systematic desensitization. In the first feud, between James “The Mighty Quinn” McDonagh and Paddy Joyce, audible hisses cut through the theatre with each landed punch. The audience can only pull quick bursts of air through gritted teeth as the sickening soft thuds of skin on skin and token spatters of blood assault the senses.

This is nothing like a greased up Brad Pitt in Fight Club (1999) who manages to look good with half his teeth knocked out. This is hairy, flabby, sweaty men and boys who don’t come to the fight looking for one-time catharsis, but rather the continuation of a decades-old dispute. The images are gritty and the fighters’ techniques scrappy. It is rough-and-tumble — and they do tumble, often — and each brawl is more pathetic than the last.

At one point, Big Joe Joyce, the oldest and most revered fighter of the Joyce clan, comes out of retirement to fight. His style is to “leave [his opponent’s] face like a butcher’s block.” Palmer narrates with a resigned tone that as he watches two grandfathers beat each other up, he’s had enough.

His admission sounds a lot like James’ many empty promises of final fights. In the end, neither director nor subject can quit.

The film is full of ironies. From the images of Catholicism, such as a large portrait of Pope John Paul II, that hang on nearly every wall, to the fact that the Traveler tradition of intermarrying forces generations to switch sides, the nonsense of it all is plain to see. The families aren’t oblivious to the foolish nature of the “tradition,” but to them, hoping for resolution is even more inane.

Whether Palmer’s characterizations or the pure 97 minutes of violence are the cause, it’s disturbing that by the end of the film, the audience is audibly more stoic and you can find yourself rooting for one of the Quinn men in the film’s last fight. No matter the influence, one thing is certain: the experiment was a success.