![Red Riding Hood [2004]](http://homepage.mac.com/shoat/movies/r/red-riding-hood-2004.jpg)
Red Riding Hood [2004]
Come back Hoodwinked!, all is forgiven! Within 10 minutes of this one – which I was actually looking forward to seeing – I had taken back all the problems I had with the ‘updating’ work in the latest animated adaptation of the story. First point: if you’re gonna make a musical anything, don’t use a midi sound module in place of an orchestra – especially if you’re in the 21st century. Nothing infuriates me more than bad music in a movie, and if it’s a musical, well, nuff said. Seriously, musical aside, the music here is horrendously tacky. Only one movie I can think of has got away with dodgy midi-ish sound – and that’s Trey Parker’s Cannibal: The Musical, and the reasoning there is self-explanatory.
This is before we even get to the songs – when Red first bursts into song atop a lighthouse, there’s a moment of, “oh, maybe this won’t be so bad afterall …” but it’s cut short; then, when Debi Mazar starts singing, you know it’s gonna be a tough 70 minutes – personally, I nearly died laughing. Call it a coping mechanism.
My instinct is to say, “I can’t believe the guy who made Grease has lost his grasp on the musical genre so badly …” ... but the fact is, I’ve never liked Grease that much. For me, Randal Kleiser has just never topped Blue Lagoon – itself a pretty awful movie from the wrong angles, but it has some amazing aspects if you look close enough (and I’m not talking about Brooke Shields no matter how much that sounded like I was, lol – if you want an example, how about the phosphorescent plankton?).
Oh, and let’s play my favourite movie game!! Where’s The Only Laugh?? It’s here – “The cellphone user you’re trying to contact is either unavailable or has stepped out of the service area, down the shortcut, and into the dangerous part of the wood.” In all fairness, I thought that was a pretty great line. But maybe I was just desperate.
April 6th, 2007 at 3:26 am
[...] Ouch. I was kind of cringing before this one even began lol. Let’s just cover the basics – the girl who plays Red is way too old, and just as in the later Randal Kleiser version, considering it’s a musical, well . . . the music sucks (okay, it’s a teeny bit better than the Kleiser version – but I can’t help but compare this one with Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” which had hit Broadway just two years previously). In a way, it’s kind of commendable how they’ve managed to stretch the story out, but I personally can’t think of the audience that would actually care about this point. In the end, it’s basically overstretched (basically, all you need to know is, it takes about an hour for Red to hit the road) – the average child is either gonna be bored out of their mind or old enough to feel insulted by this thing. It does a few interesting things towards the end, regarding the whole eating of Red / cutting open of the wolf dealie … but by then I was really past caring. This, like the Kleiser version, should come packaged with Giacomo Cimini’s horror version of the tale, for balance, lol. [...]