The Hunger Games: theatrical trailers

Having read all three books at a rate of knots over Christmas last year, I am getting somewhat over-excited for Jennifer Lawrence‘s turn as Katniss Everdeen. Fabulous news that the folks at Lionsgate have decided to open the movie on the same day in the UK as the US (March 23rd).

It remains to be seen whether the widespread talk of Twilight-level box office figures will pan out, but regardless, I will be heading to my local Picture House on opening weekend to contribute.

Disappointingly, given that the UK Premiere (14th March) is due to be held at the BFI IMAX in Waterloo, there are no current plans for the venue to screen the film publicly. A bizarre turn of events in my opinion – especially given that the (U.S.-driven) marketing collatoral is proclaiming ‘in theatres and IMAX from March 23rd’ – but there we are.

Until then, let these whet your appetite:

And if you haven’t yet picked up these engrossing page-turners from Suzanne Collins, get reading.

Room to Read makes the Big Book Swap the new Book Club

Room to Read supports a cause very close to my heart (children’s literacy in the developing world), and is an organisation I am proud to support. Their premise is simple, clear to understand and significant: World change starts with educated children.

In recent months, my close group of girlfriends from school – whom I love dearly and who, lucky for me, I still get to see on a regular basis – have started a bit of a book club. It’s basically just another excuse to meet up over a bottle of wine, share good food and a good old gossip but, as well-educated young women, we also love a good read. And, we came to realise, we don’t read enough.

Well, imagine if we couldn’t read at all? Imagine if our fathers insisted that as soon as we were old enough to work in the local village, we dropped out of school and earned a decent wage instead? What if we couldn’t get to a school because it was so darn far away? Or because we had to look after our pain-in-the-ass younger brother instead?

I’m not going to get all charidee on you, but it’s worth thinking about, which is why I think Room to Read’s Big Book Swap is such a genius invention.

As a fundraising mechanism, it is a completely fluid concept, which is namely, this: instead of all going out and buying brand new copies of the same book, take your £8.99 (let’s round it up to £10) and put it in a central Big Book Swap pot for Room to Read. Then bring along a well-loved, well-read copy of your favourite book, and share that with the group instead. You learn a little bit more about each other’s past, reading habits and experience, you hopefully get introduced to a brand new title and you get the fuzzy warm glow of having given to charity.

And get this: every £10 you raise (give or take, that’s the price of one shiny new book in the UK) will buy you TEN local language books in Africa. TEN.

What’s not to love about that?

You can set up a small Big Book Swap with three of your closest friends. Or you can set up a table at work and get the whole building involved over the course of a day. You could host a fun singles evening at your local pub (bonus: all attendees will have at least one thing in common from the get-go, a love of books) or even a tea party for your kids and their friends after work. Take the concept into your school, university, office building or local sports club.

Or just use it as another excuse for a bottle of wine and a gossip.

But find a way to do it. The official day is Tuesday 29th March, and thy want to see as many events happening on that day as possible, but don’t be restricted by the day – the important thing is that you get involved. And to find out how to get your dosh to the nice folks at Room to Read (and to tell them about what a rip-roaring success your event was afterwards), email london@roomtoread.org.

And come and tell us what you think on Facebook too.

Lady Dior: when literature shapes fashion

I had a feeling my Links of London post wouldn’t be the last LFW ad to grace this blog.

Flipping through the FT‘s fashion special of its weekly portion of riches, How to Spend It last weekend, I was again savouring all the luxury brand creatives as much as (if not more than) the editorial pieces between. Typical marketer I guess.

In the opening spread, the enviable elegance of the magnifique Marion Cotillard seeped from the Dior pages. But this time it was the choice of prop that caught my eye.

© Dior / FT

Granted, the striking red and black contrast of the composition called for a book jacket of the same – peeping out of Cotillard’s arm candy to add a subtle hint of literary culture to her undeniable beauty. But was Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye the only one the stylist could lay her hands on? Or was there something deeper that informed the choice?

I noticed it because Catcher happens to be one of my top three books of all time. The intensely human centre of the narrative has made it one the preeminent novels of the twentieth century. Perhaps the implication is that, like the book, Lady Dior and her purse of choice are truly iconic. So was it chance that the Penguin cover design happened to fit so sharply into Dior’s latest creative?

© Dior / FT

Either which way, the choice was interesting. While high fashion houses like Dior spend hundreds of thousands on advertising creatives inventing a luxury world which its audience buys into (the classic, ‘buy the lifestyle not just the product’), essentially they do need to shift sales. When said product is included in shot, you can bank on every effort having been made to draw your attention to it.

Does the bag have the same presence of focus in the image with the book removed?

Thus, arguably, in this particular composition, Catcher has a greater starring role than Cotillard.

But for those more interested in the bag than its contents, you can snap up the ‘Le 30′ black lambskin leather number with ‘Cannage’ embroidery for a mere £1,550 from Dior.com now. Random fact? The Le 30 range owes its name to the number 30 in Christian Dior’s Avenue de Montaigne address.

My favourite? Well, it has to be the pink really doesn’t it. And just a snip at £1,290:

© Dior.com

Douglas Coupland: an insight

So after a total age I finally finished Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma today (worth a read but be prepared, the end gets whack).

Anyway, Harper Perennial the publishers have this cool addition to all his works where they give bit of back story to each novel and some stuff on Coupland to finish off the book. The timing was funny – I was just walking along thinking I really should learn more about the man himself and his life in order to further understand his works when I came across a quickfire Q & A in the back of the book.

So here it is:

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Right now. Where I am. At home.

What is your greatest fear? That God exists, but doesn’t care very much for humans.

Which living person do you most admire? Vaclav Havel. [yeah, I didn't have a clue either]

What objects do you always carry with you? Earplugs.

What single thing would improve the quality of your life? Everybody I like and love all living in the same city.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you? We have time and we have free will. Otherwise we’re just animals.

Which writer has had the greatest influence on your work? Jenny Holzer, an American artist whose work is text-based (what a dismal term. How tightly can you compress an idea? Where do ideas end and you, as a person, begin?

Do you have a favourite book? Non-fiction, The Andy Warhol Diaries. Fiction, it’s either Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers or Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age.

Where do you go for inspiration? Four-hour drives in my car, usually into the interior of British Columbia, into the desert cordillera that stretches from BC down into Mexico. Believe it or not, Canada has cactuses/cacti.

Which book do you wish you had written? The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm.

What are you writing at the moment? A new novel, Eleanor Rigby.

And if you want a few more daily gems, follow the man himself on Twitter @DougCoupland.

Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi: it’s always the real thing…

Marketing Week today issued a story revealing the latest brands to top Brand Finance’s Global 500 list of the world’s most valuable brands.

Wal-Mart topped the bill, if you’re interested, bumping incumbent Coca-Cola from the top spot, which the soft drinks giant had held since research began in 2007.

But it was the Coke vs. Pepsi battle that caught my eye:

It’s not all bad news for Coke, however. It is still the dominant beverage brand on the list. While Coca-Cola’s total enterprise value of $104.5bn (£71.2bn) is just 22% greater than that of Pepsi (which is 21st in the table), the Coke brand is 118% more valuable than its arch-rival.

What exactly makes a brand more ‘valuable’ than another is another post entirely, but the above should at least introduce you to the difference between a brand’s market or enterprise value (financially) and its commercial value in comparison to its rival(s).

But what this reminded me of in the main, was a fun little experiment that I have been meaning to post for a while, that I extracted from Rob Walker‘s excellent work on the relationship between who people are and what they buy, Buying In. Walker was writing just last year, but for some time prior, traditional advertising methods were well on the way to being usurped by their younger digitally native upstart cousins in the social media space – invoking mass fear across the industry that brands and branding in the traditional sense no longer held the sway they once did.

So, taking the world’s biggest Superbrand (as it was then) and its arch rival, Pepsi, scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine put brand loyalty to the test amongst the disenchanted, anti-establishment student population. The results were, I thought quite remarkable.

First, they conducted the classic blind taste test – white-labelled, un-branded Pepsi vs. white-labelled, un-branded Coke. Unsurprisingly, given the very similar ingredients, the split was more or less half and half (with a slight slant in favour of Pepsi).

In the second round however, the subject had to choose between a labelled can (Pepsi for some, Coke for others) and an unlabelled one. Properly labelled, Pepsi again finished in a tie with its unknown competitor. But Coke on the other hand was by far the decisive favourite above its mystery rival.

And here’s the twist. In this second round, subjects were told that the unlabeled drink might be Pepsi or it might be Coke. In reality, the labeled drink was always  competing against itself. Thus, branded Coke totally trounced its unbranded self . Bizarre.

And when we look at the neurology behind it (courtesy of BrandChannel.com), we actually get scientific proof of brand impact. Ready? Here comes the science bit:

When Montague gave a taste of an unnamed soda to his volunteers he found that more people preferred Pepsi. On the scan images the ventral putamen, one of the brain’s reward centers, had a response that was five times stronger than for people who preferred Coke.

The shock came when Read repeated the experiment, this time telling volunteers which brand they were tasting. Nearly all the subjects then said they preferred the Coke. Moreover, different parts of the brain fired as well, especially the medial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with thinking and judging. Without a doubt the subjects were letting their experience of the Coke brand influence their preferences.

The work of Montague and other studies prove that branding goes far beyond images and memory recall. The medial prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain known to be involved in our sense of self. It fires in response to something — an image, name or concept — that resonates with who we are. Something clicks, and we are more likely to buy.

 Brand immunity? We’re not there yet.

And while we’re on the subject of the big red machine, take a look at their 2006 – most successful ever – advertising campaign, The Happiness Factory(click on the screenshot below to view). It’s fab. So fab, that they they are now rolling out a multi-player game version of the concept as an iPhone application – on top of the interactive sitealready online. Brilliant.

A Generation X reading of Dangerous Liaisons

Two radically different novels, written over two centuries apart. And yet I found a commonality yesterday that I felt was worth sharing.

In Helen Constantine‘s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Laclos‘ most notorious and celebrated work, she touches on the aristocratic social pressures felt by Valmonte and Merteuil that prevent them from succombing to any ‘real’ emotion throughout the entirety of the novel. She summarises thus:

In that debased society love is viewed as a failing, a weakness, and something to be avoided at all costs.

Valmonte’s connection with Tourvel is the closest we get to raw emotion (for the pop culture translation, that would be the Sebastian/Annette, Ryan/Reese pairing in the Cruel Intentions adaptation), but he is forced to deny himself even that due to the restrictions imposed upon him by his upbringing and continued engagement with polite society.

In fact, this was possibly the greatest moment in the 1999 remake – the emtionally charged raw battle between Sebastian and Annette in her bedroom when he tears himself away, all the while belying his true feeling for her by the fact he can hardly stand the deception any longer.

© Columbia Pictures 1999

What did this remind me of? A couple of weeks ago I picked out a few of Coupland’s glossary definitions that he used to define his era of a nihilistic void to share on this very blog. And two of these, when combined together, exactly mirror Valmonte’s struggle, providing a deeper exploration of Constantine’s statement above:

1) Derision Preemption: a life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers

2) The Cult of Aloneness: the need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships, often brought about by overly high expectations of others

The former, when applied to Valmonte’s eighteenth century aristocratic setting, makes perfect sense – he is physcially unable to admit any form of emotional attachment for fear of derision from his peers, largely fearing Merteuil’s reaction (which is indeed mockery combined with a healthy dose of jealousy).

Valmonte’s expendable is his relationship (or potential relationship) with Tourvel, additionally fuelled by unrealistic expectations of her heralded by his previous relations with Merteuil. For Valmonte, no one will ever match up to Merteuil (he holds her somewhat on a pedastal), and in any case, his desperate need for complete independence from any form of attachment prevents him from committing to any kind of meaningful relationship with Tourvel regardless.

So what can we draw from this parallel? Was Laclos simply miles ahead of his time in his awareness of basic human emotion? Or has it taken 200 years for the inclinations and emotional withdrawal of eighteenth century French aristocracy to filter down to mass society? Or, and this is the one that I like the most, were both writers simply finely tuned to a fundamental of human nature?

Modern pop-psychology and relationship advisers, the likes of Greg Behrendt et al, would have us believe that the non-committal emotional ‘retardedness’ that both Coupland and Laclos touch on here is almost exclusively (or at least primarily) a male outlook. But surely the Marquise de Merteuil puts forward just as strong an example as Valmonte? Coupland’s definitions were not solely ascribed to Andy – would Claire have not sympathised in the same way? In other words, the girls can be just as bad as the boys – throw in a manipulative streak and possibly even worse.

If such principles can cross centuries, cultures and oceans, permeating time and history just as fervently as the pop culture consciousness, then surely there must be something in it?

And just as an endnote – Blair and Chuck = Katheryn & Sebastian? Yes even Gossip Girl has jumped in on this particular battle of the sexes.

Generation X

[Claire]: Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.

- Generation X

How I managed to get through university studying literature – including a course on 20th Century works – and not read Douglas Coupland’s seminal piece, I’m not entirely sure. Or perhaps I’m doing my professors an injustice and it was on the reading list, but I was just too busy sleeping/partying/cheerleading that week to bother turning up.

Either which way, I just finished it and yes, it does live up to the hype. In short (and it is short, so won’t take an inordinate investment of time), it is well worth a read. As is well-known (expect to me apparently), Generation X  captures the bleak, hopeless emptiness ensconcing the lives of three children born to the baby-boomer generation, who find themselves to be utterly directionless on the cusp of turning thirty in the early ’90s.

I couldn’t at first place what it reminded me of but I think it might be the similarly blank, borderline-terrifying nothingness at the heart of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. And in the same vein as DeLillo, while the pointless and demoralising existence can become a little much at times (surely no one can give up so completely of really living?), there are hidden gems within the text that are worth sharing.

Many authors are credited with ‘defining’ a period, a theme or indeed a generation, but Coupland actually does – peppering his narrative with footnotes providing a glossary of terms of his own/popular culture’s invention that go some way to defining the times in which the characters find themselves.

Some of these are ace. So, for all those who know my tendency to obsessively record astute quotations of personal significance (or else, they’re just cool), here are a few to give you a taster of the book:

Cult of aloneness: the need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships, often brought about by overly high expectations of others

Derision Preemption: a life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers.

Option paralysis: the tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none

101-ism: the tendency to pick apart, often in minute details, all aspects of life using half-understood pop psychology as a tool

Rebellion Postponement: the tendency in one’s youth to avoid traditionally youthful activities and artistic experiences in order to obtain serious career experience. (Sometimes results in the mourning for lost youth at about age thirty, followed by silly haircuts and expensive joke-inducing wardrobes)

Tele-parabalizing: morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots (‘OMG, that’s just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses!’)

Obscurism: the practice of peppering daily life with obscure references (forgotten films, dead TV stars, unpopular books, defunct countries, etc.) a subliminal means of showcasing both one’s education and one’s wish to disassociate from the world of mass culture

Native aping: pretending to be a native when visiting a foreign destination

Personality Tithe: a price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring. (‘Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we’re going to watch the shopping channel.’)

And then a few fab little tit-bits from Andy’s narrative:

- ‘Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.’

- ‘We spend our youth attaining wealth and our wealth attaining youth.’

- ‘Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they’ll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective.’

How many of those can you apply to people you know, or even (like me) yourself? Kinda scary, huh. If you like it, buy it. It’ll be a fiver well spent.

The REAL top 100 books – how many have you read?

A little online meme currently doing the Facebook rounds is that, of the Top 100 books (as identified by the BBC in 2003), the BBC reckons that the average adult has only read 6.

This I felt was worthy of a blog for several reasons. Firstly, the list itself should be viewed by everyone, as all those who know me are aware of my enthusiasm for great works of English Literature (well, those and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series).

But secondly, when I came to post ‘the list’ here, I learnt that the listcurrently being promulgated by numerous Twitterers and Facebook users is not in fact the list that the BBC published6 years ago. Nor, to any end that I can discern online, did the Beeb ever make the claim that only 6 titles  have been read by the ’average adult’.

So here we have a classic example of an Internet meme- whereby content is spread instantly, virally and often inaccurately throughout the blogosphere, accelerated by the immediacy of the social media space. Thus, in the space of a week, the BBC’s actuallist has been replaced by the now prolific alternative version flooding Facebook walls and inboxes around the globe. A small-scale insight into how the blogosphere can re-write history faster than we can correct it, or remember it.

That said, both the amended list (duplications aside) and the original list (below) are both worth perusing to asses your own accomplishments. Certain Facebook buddies of mine have taken to marking those read with an X and forwarding their total to friends…

(OK, so I make it 42 from the list below – so far).

See how you fair…

1.   [ ] – The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2.   [ ] – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3.   [ ] – His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4.   [ ] – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5.   [ ] – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6.   [ ] – To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7.   [ ] – Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8.   [ ] – Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9.   [ ] – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. [ ] – Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. [ ] – Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. [ ] – Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. [ ] – Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. [ ] – Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. [ ] – The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. [ ] – The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. [ ] – Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. [ ] – Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. [ ] – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. [ ] – War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. [ ] – Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. [ ] – Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. [ ] – Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. [ ] – Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. [ ] – The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. [ ] – Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. [ ] – Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. [ ] – A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. [ ] – The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. [ ] – Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. [ ] – The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. [ ] – One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. [ ] – The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. [ ] – David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. [ ] – Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. [ ] – Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. [ ] – A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. [ ] – Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. [ ] – Dune, Frank Herbert
40. [ ] – Emma, Jane Austen
41. [ ] – Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. [ ] – Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. [ ] – The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. [ ] – The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. [ ] – Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. [ ] – Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. [ ] – A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. [ ] – Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. [ ] – Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. [ ] – The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. [ ] – The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. [ ] – Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. [ ] – The Stand, Stephen King
54. [ ] – Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. [ ] – A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. [ ] – The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. [ ] – Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. [ ] – Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. [ ] – Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. [ ] – Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. [ ] – Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. [ ] – Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. [ ] – A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. [ ] – The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. [ ] – Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. [ ] – The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. [ ] – The Magus, John Fowles
68. [ ] – Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. [ ] – Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. [ ] – Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. [ ] – Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. [ ] – The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. [ ] – Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. [ ] – Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. [ ] – Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. [ ] – The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. [ ] – The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. [ ] – Ulysses, James Joyce
79. [ ] – Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. [ ] – Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. [ ] – The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. [ ] – I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. [ ] – Holes, Louis Sachar
84. [ ] – Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. [ ] – The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. [ ] – Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. [ ] – Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. [ ] – Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. [ ] – Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. [ ] – On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. [ ] – The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. [ ] – The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. [ ] – The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. [ ] – The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. [ ] – Katherine, Anya Seton
96. [ ] – Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. [ ] – Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. [ ] – Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. [ ] – The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100.[ ] – Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

The endless talents of Rob Pattinson

© Copyright InStyle.com

As if landing a lead role in what will surely be one of the most lucrative movie franchises of the decade wasn’t enough, Robert Pattinson seems keen to show the world that he is more than just a one-trick pony.

Hidden away on the powerful soundtrack that accompanies the Twilight motion picture, is a folksy, contemplative little track named Never Think that is disarmingly moving. Sitting somewhat out of place alongside the angsty bands of my teenage years – the angry, crashing beats of Muse and Linkin Park – Never Think is more Jeff Buckley/Alexi Murdoch. The kind of track that would be right at home alongside the mellow soul-searching numbers that dominated the numerous soundtracks to The O.C.

It was only on my third listen to the iTunes preview of it, while contemplating purchasing the soundtrack to the film, did I take in the artist – none other than a certain Rob Pattinson. That one track sold me the entire album. Have a listen – see if it does the same for you (if not, then a reminder of Muse’s immense Supermassive Black Hole just might).

A talented young actor with a precocious musical gift currently taking Hollywood by storm… and you might have noticed that he’s a bit of a looker too. Twilight-addict that I am rapidly becoming, personally, it is Rob’s debut album that I’m most excited about, and it surely can’t be far behind the second movie.

Expect BIG things.

The beauty of Twilight

© Copyright Peggy Sirota / Vanity Fair

As the enchanting magic of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series of novels has been captured for the big screen, the beauty of the movie and its talented young cast has in turn now been immortalized by Peggy Sirota for Vanity Fair.

A visit to the VF Twilight shoot slide show is an absolute must for any fans of the show or its attractive starlets, with lots of other goodies such as Q & A’s with the cast and exclusive behind-the-scenes video of the photo shoot.

And for all you eager beavers who can’t wait to get your hands on the movie of the year, pre-order the Special Edition DVD now, to be released on 21st March (UK fans may have to wait a little longer).