Red Riding Hood

Catherine Hardwicke ("Thirteen") directs this reimagining of the classic fairy tale.  Amanda Seyfried ("Chloe") plays Valerie, a grown-up version of the titular heroine. Valerie and her family live in a medieval village bordering woods inhabited by a ferocious werewolf, and for years a peaceful pact has kept the evil creature at bay.  But now, the monster is thirsty for blood and the townsfolk are being picked off one by one.  Meanwhile, Valerie has been betrothed to the blacksmith's son, but is secretly in love with the poor, lowly woodcutter boy she grew up with.  Valerie must now choose who to give her heart to, but will she survive long enough to get her happily ever after?  This film so shamelessly tries to cash in on the “Twilight” phenomenon that it’s embarrassing.  From the hokey love triangle (complete with sincere good boy on one side and dangerous bad boy on the other), to the werewolves, to the wide sweeping shots of gorgeous, mountainous tree lines, it’s like Hardwicke followed her own template for creating an angsty-romantic-horror movie for the tween set.  The similarities end there, though, and without a decent plot or characters to rely on, the story goes nowhere fast.  Seyfried does her best naive-beauty-with-a-dark-side act, but comes across as insipid and prosaic.  Then there’s the boys: Max Irons (son of Jeremy) is adequate as the unrequited (read: Jacob) side of the love triangle; Shiloh Fernandez, on the other hand, is so irritatingly surly all the time that it’s impossible to take him seriously.  Lastly, I had to scratch my head at why the great Gary Oldman makes an appearance here… it seems he has developed a penchant recently for bad scary movies with supernatural forces at hand that only he has the power to stop.  Or maybe he just likes to show up for quick scenes where he gets to make grand entrances in mechanical elephants and yell at everyone for being far less intelligent than he is.  Who knows.  Either way, this unimaginative and trite retelling is one bedtime story worth skipping.


2 out of 5 stars

Chloe

From director Atom Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter”) comes another lurid tale of forbidden sexual desire.  When Catherine (Julianne Moore) suspects her husband David (Liam Neeson) of cheating, she hires a beautiful escort named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce him and report the details back to her.  Chloe does her job faithfully at first, but soon she’s doing her job a little too well.  As Chloe’s stories about David become increasingly intense, Catherine finds herself unexpectedly aroused by her husband’s infidelity.  Soon Catherine and Chloe are entrenched in their own affair and you begin to wonder what Chloe’s endgame is.  The film is beautifully shot and heavy on style, but at times it feels like one step above late-night Cinemax (a.k.a. Skinemax) and less like an art-house film.  Egoyan delivers on the hot-and-heavy, and the steamy sex scene between Moore and Seyfried lives up to the hype, but there’s not enough insight into Chloe’s ulterior motives to make this a satisfying psychological thriller.  Moore does an excellent job of bringing Catherine to life.  Catherine is an extremely lonely woman who realizes she and her husband have drifted apart but feels powerless to stop it.  Even though I disliked the character of Catherine at first (she is such a doormat that she can’t even confront her husband and ask him outright if he’s cheating, and on top of that she lets her morose teen son walk all over her), Moore portrays her with such a sadness and quiet desperation that you can’t help but end up sympathizing with her.  Seyfried does her best playing the enigmatic seductress, but we never get a feel for what Chloe is really about.  I think the mystery around Chloe may have more to do with how the character was written and less with Seyfried’s inexperience with playing a femme fatale.  Instead of being fierce, Chloe comes off as vulnerable and confused, and maybe even a little mentally unstable.  In the end, I felt like there was a missing element from this movie that was always just out of reach, and it leaves you feeling a little cold instead of hot and bothered.


3 out of 5 stars

Jennifer's Body

A combination of Diablo Cody's witty dialogue from "Juno" and your run-of-the-mill teen horror film.  The script definitely elevates the movie beyond the usual fare you'd expect, but I'm not sure how well the two styles mesh.  Still very enjoyable, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Megan Fox didn't suck.


3 out of 5 stars