movie: Red Riding Hood

Oh my goodness, it is SO HOT today. I got into my car after work and thought my skin was going to melt off before the air conditioner kicked in.

This weekend's movie was Red Riding Hood. It was one of those movies that I figured could go either way. It would either be awesome or fall flat.

It fell pretty flat.

The story is - wolf has plagued the village for years. The villagers put out livestock every once in a while so it munches on animals instead of humans. Then the problem escalates when the wolf kills someone in the village. A werewolf hunter (Gary Oldman) shows up at the village with his team to get rid of the wolf.

Everyone soon realizes that the werewolf is probably someone who lives in the village. Red Riding Hood (Amanda Seyfried) suspects her boyfriend may be the wolf, but there are other suspects as well. Red Riding Hood's name is Valerie, by the way, which I think might be a strange name for someone living during the middle ages.

First, the positives. The movie is beautiful. The sets are very detailed and fairytale looking. The colors are vivid - bright red, yellow, and blue clothing, etc. Everyone's hair was unrealistically flawless. Perfectly coifed villagers. I don't what sort of styling products they used in the fairytale middle ages but that shiz WORKS!

This movie tried very hard to be Twilight-esque. Valerie and her boyfriend, who are supposed to be in love, spend a lot of the movie apart, so the romance didn't come off as strongly as it could have. I didn't buy the connection between them.

Too, the supporting characters weren't developed very well, including the boyfriend.

The action was meh. The story was meh. Good concept. Pretty colors. Lame execution. This movie would've been much cooler if they leaned more toward horror than romance. It gets a D.

On a completely different subject, here are a couple of links. The first one goes to a blog with phots of an abandoned Six Flags park in New Orleans. Some of the pics came up as black rectangles on my computer but the ones that loaded properly are wonderfully eerie and gritty. The second link is a slideshow of almost equally eerie nighttime shots of Alcatraz.

New Orleans Six Flags

Alcatraz at night.

Tomorrow we have a guest post!

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