It’s hard for many avid film fans and industry insiders to know how to read the insanely successful  weekend of “New Moon” (unless you’re Summit, the Weitz family or a distant cousin of Taylor Lautner’s,  in which case the only thing you probably need to read at the moment is your bank statement).

On the one hand, it’s hard not to feel some validation at at the fact that a film is in the middle of the pop-cultural conversation — to again see proof that for all the advantages Oprah and Letterman and CNN and a host of other popular TV brands have by regularly entering our homes, there’s still nothing like a bigscreen phenomenon  to galvanize the masses.

Now even locking up your daughters won’t work. IFC confirmed today that it had acquired rights to the first post-Twlight Rob Pattinson movie — the indie dramedy “How to Be” — and will release it via its Festival Direct program.

Basically, you’ll be able to see the movie as on-demand, pay-per-view program via many cable systems (the reach will be about 30 million, according to IFC) starting on April 29. It’s not the day-and-date tentpole release that cable execs have been talking/dreaming about for years. But there’s enough heat right now for Pattinson — and a low enough risk for the distributor (this wasn’t going to be a 2,000-screen opener anyway) — that it may be just the experiment that on-demand needs to go from indie curiosity to serious moneymaker.

As for Pattinson, from the marketing footage it lookgs like the movie will show a more sensitive side than his Edward Cullen role (yes yes, we know he was sensitive as a vampire too). Oliver Irving’s pic — made before Pattinson became Pattinson — is a twee British effort about a postadolescent struggling to find himself (check out the trailer, via CelebTV, below). It looks like what you’d expect it to be — a movie you’d normally see only at a festival  — but the IFC release  will be an interesting test of Pattison’s newfound star power. The indie record company that has the soundtrack is even going all out with a deluxe CD (Pattinson sings a few of the songs).

Essentially, it’s everything you imagined a microscopic indie to be — married to everything a celeb-magazine pinup can bring. We’ll see how many bless the union.

If you thought Rob Pattinson looked brooding and serious in "Twilight," you ain't seen nothing yet.

The moussed-one is currently in talks to star in a movie called "Memoirs" for "Twilight" studio Summit. The picture deals with a young romantic relationship, but no campy vampire sequences here –these are relationships touched by tragedy (two, in fact, according to the logline). Jenny Lumet — she of light comedic romp "Rachel Getting Married" — is doing a rewrite on the script. It even has a serious _name._ This is a no-nonsense turn for Pattinson.

It's no surprise, after the runaway success and cacophonous squeals that came with "Twilight" that Summit would want to be in the Rob Pattinson business. The actor, now with Endeavor, overcame early blog-world skepticism to generate tons of fan enthusiasm and media in his role as the goodhearted, if opaque, teen vampire.

But what Pattinson-mania doesn't address is his post-"Twlight" drawing power — a time that is coming sooner than you'd think, given that three of the four potential movies in the franchise will have come out by next summer. Sure, tons of teenage girls went to see him in "Twlight," but they went to see him in an  adaptation of a book they've adored and re-read. Will they flock to him when he's not an unattainable, chaste member of the undead?

He'll have his work cut out for him, at least in a couple projects he's already shot. Viewers can see Pattinson in May in Regent Releasing's (they of foreign-language fare like "Departures") arthouse title "Little Ashes, in which Pattinson plays Salvador Dali, that ol' hunky pinup.  And those who don't want to wait even that long can hit the fest circuit now, where a small indie called "How To Be" is currently making the rounds. The pic is a dramedy about a man with an existential crisis who calls upon a self-help guru. It won an honorable mention at Slamdance, to give you an idea.

You see, Pattinson, for all his media celebrity, is caught in that weird netherworld where he's on the cusp of major stardom but still has movies that came out of a less heady time in his career. That transitional period could be embarrassing for young actors (see under: Anne Hathaway in "Havoc") or it could just be surreal (literally; see under: Pattinson as a Spanish surrealist).

The bigger question is what happens to Pattinson after this wave, with the choices he makes now – does his career go commercial or critical, pinup or Oscar? And does he become a box-office draw in his own right?