Red Riding Hood

Red Riding Hood directed by Catherine Hardwicke starring Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Lukas Haas, Billy Burke, Shiloh Fernandez, Max Irons, and Virginia Madsen.

Where to begin with this movie?

Trying to cash in the Twilight crowd?  Check, well let me redo that check, that's really a big CHECK.  First this movie gets the woman who directed Twilight to direct this movie.  Then it gets an actor, Billy Burke, who played Bella's dad in Twilight to play the dad of the main female lead in this movie.  Who seems to be pissed that he's wondered into the same kind of movie as Twilight was, only I think, as the movie goes on that releases he's actually happy that his daughter in this movie isn't as annoying as Bella was in Twilight.  Then there's another actor, Max Irons, who goes on to be in the movie Host based on a book written by Stephenie Myer. I don't  know if this last one actually counts but I just thought it was such a funny coincidence to not mention it.  Then the daughter of the editor of this movie, has a friend whose dog was in one of Twilight.  The costume designer has an uncle, whose son-in-law was a friend of a person who ran a restaurant that an actress, who waited tables there, was the third person seen in this one scene of one of the Twilight movies.  I am just shocked at to what lengths a movie studio will go to, to recreate another movie.  Now, to be fair I haven't actually seen any of the Twilight movies, so I'm basing all this hear-say and conjecture.  But, Red Riding Hood has an overall story of a girl torn in love between two male leads, which, to be fair considering I haven't seen Twilight, sounds a little bit like the story of Twilight: a girl torn in love between a two male leads - a vampire or werewolf.  I'm just saying they do sound eerily familiar.

If you haven't picked up on this already, I didn't really like this movie.  There was just so much not to like about it, but in the end I did find it amusing because there was just so much unintentional humor happening throughout the movie that it became an unintentional comedy.  Gary Oldman plays, essentially the bad guy, since the movie can't go around showing the werewolf terrorizing the town all the time.  So, the screen writer, in his infinite wisdom, decided the the best thing to do was write in the most cliched witch hunter that would storm into town and basically tell every town person they or the person next to them could be the werewolf.  Thus instant tension is born and thus was born Gary Oldman's character.  I just love villains who are only hardcore villains when they need to be, and then they go back to being just an insane, regular villain when needed to be. A good example of this from Oldman's character.  There's this person who stops one of Gary Oldman's troops from firing a crossbow.  What does Oldman do?  He kills the person.  Then a few moments later one of the main leads kick the crap out of a bunch of Olman's troops.  What does Olman do about this?  Essentially nothing, he just has the person thrown in jail.  That's real evil.  The logic just doesn't make any sense, but it did give me quite a chuckle.

Then Jess brought up a visual thing about this movie that I just couldn't stopping laughing at it every time it happened on screen.  One of the main male lead's has a hair style straight out of our time period, while every other male in the picture has a hair style to more or less fit that time frame.  So, every time the stylized-hair male came on screen I started laughing because it made no sense why his hair was that way.  I thank my wife for pointing that out because it did make the movie more enjoyable to watch, in a strangely perverted way.  

There were just little things like this that made movie way more fun to watch than I thought it was going to be, but it wasn't for the normal reasons that movie's creators made it.