By Comtesse de Bussy

Red Riding Hood
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke
Starring Amanda Seyfried, Michael Shanks, Gary Oldman
Release date: March 11, 2011

It seems that updating classics and age-old stories has become something of a fad. Only a few years ago the film Brothers Grimm was released, and three more films, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Brothers Grimm: Snow White, are in the works. Not to mention all of the Disney cartoons that transform the original, often dark material into a colorful, sugar-coated, happy-ending cartoon with music whose soundtracks will sell hundreds of copies. Such movies rarely retain the core of the story they tell, and instead become an excuse for an entirely different kind of tale, one that takes away from the screenwriters the necessity of coming up with an entirely original plot, characters, and setting. This seems to be the case with Red Riding Hood, a film in which the story of a young girl and a wolf are used as an excuse to create a Twilight-esque tale in which a beautiful young woman must choose between two men. And the real shame is that this could have been a good movie, but instead got stuck with a terrible plot and an atrociously ridiculous setting.