Red Riding Hood

I went to the cinema today with two good friends to see this film. I had seen the trailer and got worked up that this would be a good film. However, it is not as good as it could have been. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy some of the film. Amanda Seyfried, Shiloh Fernandez, Max Irons and the excellent Gary Oldman acted brilliantly in the film, and the effects for the Werewolf were pretty fantastic as well. However, the rest of the cast let this film down and although it is classed as a "horror" movie, there is only really one jump-worthy moment. I don't want to give away the secret of the wolf, but if you listen closely, you can easily tell who it is...

There is a bit of gore, but if you are into some of the supernatural stuff (especially Twilight, even though I'm not a fan), you should give it a shot and might like this... but horror-lovers, keep well away, you might end up feeling a bit ripped-off...

Just returned from a nearly sold out theater and I must say the film was somewhere between decent and good!

I've read quite a few reviews here and was truly surprised about the supremely negative feedback. "The Grimm brothers would roll in their graves," someone wrote. My response to that is: "Really, would they now?" I believe a bit of research on the subject would do some quite a bit of good. The brothers Grimm -which weren't the original story tellers of 'Rotkaeppchen' as they called it- told folktales, not fairy tales…they were the very first tabloid writers and although their stories all had a grain of truth at the very core, the brothers wrote them to feed into peoples believes, superstitions and prejudice in central Europe in the 1800…their tales were often capricious and usually cruel, showing very little moral. It took generations of translations and retelling to soften the originals enough to be considered bedtime stories because the originals would have provoked nightmares in grown man at their time. Does anyone know what the significance is of the name Peter and why he wears black throughout the entire film?? I'd love to read your ideas about that. The film is a nice translation…yet another one. And by far closer based on the Grimm brothers vision than the stories we all were told as kids. I did see a bit of parallel to Twilight but only because both, this film and all the Twilight movies were filmed in Vancouver and surely used the same scenery. The Storyline is based on the folktale and (in my opinion) it has been done rather well.

The plot of Catherine Hardwicke's "Red Riding Hood" revolves around a series of massacres and a pressing question. The said massacres being caused by a werewolf and the said question being who the wolf is. But as I watched it, the question that kept on running through my mind was not who the wolf was, but rather who cares who the wolf was? This is a very flabby-footed, self-delusional mess of a movie that succeeds in making even the great Gary Oldman look as unnatural in his performance as Steven Seagal.

"Red Riding Hood" suffers from a poorly-constructed screenplay, one that seems was written within a handful of days and not given a single second of revision. The writer, David Johnson, was a production assistant on Frank Darabont's masterpiece "The Shawshank Redemption" but his talents seem to be more focused on polishing up a movie rather than spinning up a story. The plot of "Red Riding Hood" is contrived, flat, and lacking any zest. In fact, even though the denouement has great potential to be a real shocker and (I'll be honest) caught me by surprise, it was handled and executed so sloppily and the writing that summarizes it all up was so flimsy and manipulative, that it registered no impact on me whatsoever.

There are no characters worth caring about and next to nothing in terms of acting. The titular character is played by an up-and-coming starlet by the name of Amanda Seyfried, although if all of her performances are as uncharismatic and dull as this one, I cannot imagine why. In this performance, at least, she did not strike me as being a natural actress. Then again, she has nothing to work with in Mr. Johnson's screenplay. She also has two romantic interests, one played by Max Irons and the other by a wooden-faced Shiloh Fernandez. They are just as boring as their characters. They have absolutely no chemistry whatsoever with Miss Seyfried; I never felt any passion. Even Gary Oldman, so good so many times before, is awful here, hamming up and chewing apart every scene that he is in. His introductory moment, where he explains his experiences with werewolves, is handled by him in a way that is so over-the-top, almost like a really bad vaudeville performance. It's hard to believe that this is the same actor from "The Dark Knight," "The Book of Eli," and the Harry Potter movies.

If there is one good performance at all it is by Julie Christie, who is just as magnetic and wonderful as she was when she graced the screen in David Lean's "Doctor Zhivago" forty-six years ago. She has a powerful star presence and quality that allows her to overcome even the trashy dialogue and nothingness that she was supplied.

Another strike against the movie is the apparent lack of experience by its director, Catherine Hardwicke. She was a production designer before this movie (she designed the wonderful town reconstruction for "Tombstone" in 1993) but her skills with a motion picture camera are next to nothing. She doesn't seem to even know the basics about misc en scene and how to structure a sequence. Not even enough to know that a moment where Mr. Oldman gives a last minute warning to a stubborn old villager about the impending threat of the werewolf that she should have had a reverse angle to show the villager's reaction; instead she chooses to stick to the back of his head. There is no steady flow of images here, with too many medium and long shots and close-ups so claustrophobic that they enter the territory of being loony. One scene that was directed particularly badly was a laughable love moment between Miss Seyfriend and Mr. Fernandez. There is a problem with a romantic moment where the sight of two people making love is neither heart-warming, nor, obviously, erotic.

But Miss Hardwicke did coordinate well with her production designer, for the sets are quite good. And the special effects are decent enough in and of themselves. The werewolf, computer-generated of course, are much better than the cartoony wolves I saw in "Season of the Witch" earlier this year. It's only a shame that that wolf was not on-screen more.

"Red Riding Hood" has a feel of so many medieval melodramas of recent years: half-hearted and flimsy. It is also crippled by that haunting feeling that even the people who made the movie would not even want to see it. It feels like an assignment done by people hopelessly unhappy in their work, who just wanted to get through the dailies so they could go home and relax before getting up to do the same thing again the next day.

Has it become increasingly difficult to write an ending? Have writers suddenly forgotten that the climax is the high point of a story? Or is Hollywood getting lazy? Red Riding Hood is probably the most frustrating and unsatisfying movie I've been to, and the above reason is just one of many. While it certainly isn't bad, I haven't finished feeling so let down since Haneke's "The White Ribbon".

Of course, Hardwicke is a director who is willing take big risks. She did so with Twilight, which was a huge smash with teens everywhere. And she does have a good eye for a shot, and several scenes here show. If had to recommend the movie for one thing alone, it would be for the visuals. The look of the film has a gorgeous, lush and colourful palette that made this film worth seeing on the big screen.

The film's biggest problem aside from being anti-climatic is that the plot is just... a mangled mess. It reads like a really bad fanfiction. If you thought Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland was bad... .wait till you get a load of this movie. We have several plot points that come in and suddenly are left do die, one of which includes Father Solomon played by Gary Oldman, who is made to be a crazy bastard type character, and we don't see anything to prove it. To top it all off, it's rife with clichés, like the obligatory love triangle, the whodunit, damned protagonist.

The actors are a mixed bag. Seyfried does a good job here and has plenty of emotion in her performance. She has plenty of cheesy lines but she does a good job for what she has to work with. Gary Oldman was also great, but that was expected as he always shines with every performance. On the downside, Shiloh Fernandez gives one of the worst performances ever here. He spends the whole movie looking like he wants to punch someone and reads his lines like he's reading them off a paper. And Virginia Madsen just awful here as well, and is over-acting Billy Burke In short Red Riding Hood is a film that has plenty of promise, but sadly doesn't live up to it. It isn't a bad film by any means, but you are most likely to leave disappointed.

This certainly isn't the best werewolf movie you're ever going to come across (not by a longshot) but I thought it was better than you'd imagine from some of the responses the movie is getting. It's very loosely based on the old folktale of Little Red Riding Hood (which, by the way, goes back far into European history long before the now famous version by the Brothers Grimm; the first print edition of the tale dating to the late 17th century) and it also has one scene (really just one line) that for some reason chooses to pay homage to the story of The Three Little Pigs ("I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down" cries out one young man as others fall down around him.) Although you can't avoid those connections (and are probably intended to make the connection) it's probably best that you try not to, and watch the story in its own right.

It's the story of a small village that has arranged a truce of sorts with a local werewolf. Every full moon, they put out livestock for the beast to devour and in return the beast leaves the people alone. For some reason, though, the beast breaks the pact and people begin to die. The mystery revolves around the identity of the werewolf, once a werewolf-hunting priest (Gary Oldman) shows up in town and warns the people that the werewolf is one of them. The question becomes "who is it?" and the mystery is pretty decent. There are any number of reasons to suspect any number of people of being the beast, and the ultimate revelation of the werewolf's identity surprised me a bit - it was not my first choice.

I thought director Catherine Hardwicke made pretty good use of the setting of a small, isolated town deep in the mountains, and Amanda Seyfried was excellent in the role of Valerie (the Red Riding Hood character.) The movie also provides a pretty good depiction of paranoia and the ultimate consequences that paranoia can have, even (and perhaps especially) on people who know each other as well as the residents of this town obviously did.

This isn't really (in my opinion at least) a horror movie. It's more of a mystery, and as a mystery I thought it worked pretty well. I certainly think it deserves to be rated more highly than it is. (7/10)