NOTE: This post discusses Twilight, the movie, and the Twilight book series (particularly the latest book, Breaking Dawn), and is SPOILER HEAVY. If you've not read the books and don't want to read spoilers, do NOT read this post until you've read them. It's also longer than my usual column, as I had a lot of ground to cover, so if you hate reading long pieces, skip it. Thanks.

You're probably aware, even if you're not into books about vampires and clumsy, average teenage girls falling in love with one, that there's a popular book series called the Twilight Saga, and the first book in the series, Twilight, is being adapted for the big screen by director Catherine Hardwicke. What you may not be aware of is the little undercurrent of female writers decrying the series as inherently anti-feminist.

The Twilight series grew in popularity, mostly off the radar of the feminist set, until it got so popular that the feminists started to take notice -- and offense. I first became aware of this anti-feminist backlash when Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries (among other girly books) responded on her blog to readers writing her to ask what she thought of the series, thusly: " I didn't take my husband's last NAME when we got married. Do you honestly think I'd like a story about a girl considering changing SPECIES for a guy? No offense to any of you, but as a feminist, I just can't go there... "

I found Cabot's take interesting because I'm a feminist myself, who also didn't take my husband's last name when we got married, but I don't happen to find the series inherently anti-feminist. Nonetheless, since the release of the fourth book in the series, Breaking Dawn, on August 2, the feminist mutterings have started to escalate to a dull roar.

Bill Lobdell, longtime writer and editor for the Tribune-owned LA Times and its subsidiaries, has an excellent, insightful piece up on his new blog titled "42 Things I Know," outlining why exactly he left his cushy corporate job and what's wrong over at the LA Times. Much of what Lobdell has to say is pretty much what those of us who work in new media have been saying for a long time now: that print media (in particular, the overfed layers of managers who spend most of their days having meetings about meetings so they can plan more meetings, thereby justifying their spendy salary-and-benefits packages) don't know what the hell they're doing when it comes to the real world in the age of the Internet.

The most telling of Lobdell's "42 Things" are the following:

Newspapers were unbelievably slow in embracing the Internet, even though younger reporters have been pleading with their bosses for years to embrace the Web.

Amazingly, it took until 2005 for top editors at The Times to realize the Internet not only wasn't going away but might lead to the demise of newspaper.

Prior to that, the Internet operation at The Times was used as a place to hide reporters and editors who had fallen out of favor.

Earlier today, Peter wrote up a piece on movie mogul Harvey Weinstein explaining how The Weinstein Company created their division Third Rail as a dumping ground for movies they feel have only "ancillary value." Harvey and his younger brother and business partner, Bob, have been under a bit of an attack since ditching Disney/Miramax for their own shingle back in 2005, with a lot of sharks swimming the waters surrounding them, just waiting for enough money to bleed through the Weinstein's fingers.

An article over at the Sunday Telegraph by Tom Teodorczuk goes into some fairly good detail about the troubles facing the beleagured brothers. You can read the full piece yourself to see his analysis; suffice it to say that the Weinsteins have yet to bring that old Miramax magic to their independent shingle, probably for a variety of reasons, not the least of which include the troubles facing the indie film world generally. As Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells, quoted in the piece, notes, "The Weinsteins have suffered from the same pressures affecting the indie film sector that everyone else faces. There is a glut of product owing to hedge fund firms now investing in films."

The Life Before Her Eyes, the latest film by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog), opened this weekend in limited release. In part as a response to the negative reviews by a number of critics, Perelman said recently in an interview that he's decided that it's better for audiences to know the ending going in (I did confirm with Perelman that he actually said this, because I was rather surprised that he would). And while I understand Perelman's desire to counter the critical response to the film in this way, I decided to take a look at what the negative reviews actually say.

First, I'm going to largely ignore the reviews (good and bad) that came out of the Toronto International Film Festival last year, because the cut of the film in theaters now is different. So let's look at what critics have to say about the current cut. Let's look at one titled (ever so objectively) "Hollywood and the War on Women", by Prairie Miller over on News Blaze. Miller starts her "review" of the film with a five-paragraph rant that tries to tie films about the Iraq war into a perceived "war against women" in Hollywood, going so far as to make the accusation that this war is fueled, in part, by male directors and producers whose coffers are being drained by alimony and child support payments. Uh, what?

I've been mulling over the whole issue of the Atlas Shrugged film adaptation, which, at the moment at least, seems to be churning ahead to start filming later this year, and I wanted to talk about something several commenters have mentioned: whether it would be better to film Atlas as a miniseries, as opposed to a two-hour-or-longer movie. Of course, attempts have been made to bring Ayn Rand's most famous book to the screen before, and they've never made it past the script stage.

Why? Well, first of all, there are a lot of politics around this book. The Ayn Rand Institute and Leonard Peikoff have been notoriously protective of it for years, and trying to make a film that's going to please both the hardcore Objectivists (those who follow Rand's philosophy) and the average moviegoer who just wants to be entertained is, in my opinion, just an exercise in futility. Then I read this interview over on The Atlasphere with John Aglialoro, producer and CEO of Cybex, International, who paid $1 million for the film rights to Atlas.

One of my favorite bloggers, Jim Emerson, gives Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells a virtual bitchslap for a recent post Wells made on his favorite topic: how he doesn't believe guys who look "normal" (i.e., to him, fat and ugly) really score with beautiful women. In a post last month titled "Eclipse of the Hunk," Wells starts off by talking about the opening of the Judd Apatow-produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall, then goes on to mourn the loss of sexy, buff leading men and the success of Judd Apatow's films, in which dorky guys like Seth Rogen and Jason Segel get the hot chicks. Emerson excerpts my favorite quote from Wells piece:

"Taking their place are guys who look like real guys, which means almost never slender or buffed, and frequently chunky, overweight or obese. And usually with roundish faces with half-hearted beard growth, hair on their backs, man-boobs with tit hairs, blemishes, and always horribly dressed -- open-collared plaid dress shirts, low-thread-count T-shirts with lame-ass slogans or promotions on the chest, long shorts and sandals (or flip-flops), monkey feet, unpedicured toenails."