Vampires. They fascinate us. Whether it's Bram Stoker, Ann Rice, Josh Whedon or Elisabeth Kostova, writers keep finding ways to make the same old stories compelling, and we flock to bookstores and movie theaters or set our Tivos so we don't miss one gruesome detail.

The latest, Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, is a tale of vampires who deny their monstrous urgings to live among mere mortals. Meyer dispenses with traditional vampire characteristics like aversions to garlic or daylight. These newer, trendier vampires wouldn't be caught dead spontaneously combusting in the sun. Instead, they just go all sparkly.

As the movie begins, our heroine, 17-year-old Bella Swan, played by Kristen Stewart, has relocated from Phoenix to Forks, Washington, a town of just over 3,000, where the sun stubbornly refuses to shine for more than a few days a year, making it the perfect location for a vampire hide out (sun doesn't kill them, but they can't exactly go around looking like disco balls either). Enter Edward Cullen, played by Robert Pattinson, a super pale, super fast, super hot, 17-year old that Bella is immediately attracted to, even as he seems utterly repulsed by her. What follows is a heaping of teen angst, supernatural tricks, and a somewhat rushed encounter with a trio of vampires that are not so concerned with the moral drawbacks to eating people.

I like vampire stories. Dracula is a classic, I never missed an episode of Buffy, and I thought The Historian, by Kostova, was an epic and fascinating retelling of Bram Stoker. Ann Rice is not my cup of tea, but there are several million people that disagree. For me, the best part of the vampire legend is the classic battle of good versus evil with vampires representing the hedonistic--sex, drugs, rock & roll--side of human nature that sometimes it is just too damned hard to resist. And it is here that Twilight falls short. The main vamps in the story don't seem to struggle all that hard to be good. And the evil vamps are one-dimensional baddies that get little screen time.

But teenaged girls will love this movie. And since that is clearly the intended audience for both the movie and the book before it, I forgave the movie it's glossing over the eternal good/evil struggle and even it's frenetic and choppy pace. After all, it's hard to shove a whole book into a couple of hours, but the filmmakers had to know that fans of the novel would accept nothing less.

The setting is green and lush, the people are pretty, and there are a surprising number of humorous moments, most of them when Bella's dad, played by a wonderfully understated Billy Burke, is on the screen. If you've read the book, you've already gotten all the character development you need so it's easy to believe in the love story, especially with the smoking hot chemistry between Stewart and Pattinson. If you haven't, you might want to spend a few hours in the library first. Knowing the story going in will help you to forgive the movie's flaws.