UNCLE KENT - Mumblecore, softcore, borecore

While kicking up a riot at Scoundrels Chicago, I managed to break out and detox for a little over an hour in the mecca for all film reviewers - The Gene Siskel Film Center. I wandered in to the first film showing - which happened to be Joe Swanberg's mumblecore flick, UNCLE KENT. Just as its genre conventions require, UNCLE KENT is a low-budget lo-fi drama basically consisting of a bunch of financially comfortable but emotionally illiterate twenty and thirty somethings whining about their personal problems and jacking off. That might sound dismissive and I think the genre does have a tendency toward self-indulgence and baggy-narratives. However, when in the right hands it has managed to throw up movies of real warmth, depth and honesty. Think Alex Holdridge's IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS and the Duplass brothers' CYRUS - both of which made it to my Best Of lists.

Unfortunately, UNCLE KENT is no CYRUS. In fact, at a 72 minute run time including credits, it's barely a feature length film. It stars Kent Osborne (real-life animator on Spongebob Squarepants as "Kent" - a commitment-phobe jack-ass in the body of a forty-year old who dresses ten years too young. As with most mumblecore flicks, Kent espouses a kind of slacker freedom and mediates all his personal relationships through the internet. As the film opens, Kent picks up a girl called Kate (Jennifer Prediger) on Chatroulette - a website usually known for men jacking off on webcam - a point later demonstrated in the film. Still from such unpromising beginnings, the pair to seem to have a genuine connection. The tragedy is that they can only express it by having a threesome with a girl they meet on Craigslist. And as the weekend winds up, the downside of "slacker freedom" is painfully obvious to us and to Kent - not knowing where you stand - not being able to speak honestly about feelings, but constantly speaking openly about sex.

The movie looks better - more tripod shots - than in Swanberg's previous work, although he still uses POV shots and handheld cameras to annoyingly trite effect. The narrative is baggy and meandering and bores, even though the run-time is short. Most of all, while the movie did contain flashes of honesty about how my generation dates via the the web, it didn't really get under the skin of their emotional lives. One day, Swanberg is going to have to sit down and write a proper script and move beyond superficial "wisdom" about the distancing effect of the internet.

UNCLE KENT played Sundance 2011 and was released on a variety of media in the US earlier this year. It is currently playing at the Gene Siskel Center in Chicago.

World Film Locations: Tokyo

I heard from Chris MaGee of Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow that the book he edited, World Film Locations: Tokyo, is now available for pre-ordering on Amazon.  It is part of a new Intellect Books series called World Film Locations which plans to examine cities from around the world as movie locations. The first wave of releases is set for late summer and in additon to Tokyo will also include Los Angeles, London, and New York. Join the World Film Locations Facebook Page to keep up to date about these books' release dates and future installments in the series.

World Film Locations series will explore and reveal the relationship between the city and cinema by using a predominantly visual approach inspired by The Big Picture magazine’s ‘On Location’ feature.

Alongside short bite-sized texts about carefully chosen film scenes, each book will be illustrated throughout with evocative movie stills and be complimented by short but insightful essays about themes, ideas and key historical periods relating to each individual city.  (source)

Of the 50 film scenes examined in the Tokyo book, I choose the images and did the write ups for 5 films:

Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad 

(東京オリンピック, Japan, 1965)

Wim Wenders's Tokyo-Ga 

(東京画, Germany, 1985)

Dorris Dörrie's Enlightenment Guaranteed 

(Erleuchtung garantiert, Germany, 1999)

Kentaro Otani's Nana 

 ( ナナ, Kentaro Otani, Japan, 2005)

Tomoyasu Murata's Nuance

 (ニュアンス, Japan, 2006)

It was a lot of fun working on this book because I got to write about such a variety of film styles from documentary to popular feature films.  Locations covered include the Tama River, the Koshu Kaido, Shinjuku, Yanaka Cemetery, and Tokyo Tower.  There are 6 images above because I also tie-in the Nana manga and anime in my write up about Nana.  Most of the films in the book are well known feature films, so it was really great of Chris to let me do one indulgent write up of an alterntive animation piece - Tomoyasu Murata's Nuance.  This short was Murata's contribution to Image Forum's Tokyo Loop (2006).  The book promises to be a visual feast for the eyes.

Here's the official blurb:

World Film Locations: Tokyo gives readers a kaleidoscopic view of one of the world's most complex and exciting cities through the lens of world cinema. 50 scenes from classic and contemporary films explore how motion pictures have shaped the role of Tokyo in our collective consciousness, as well as how these cinematic moments reveal aspects of the life and culture of a city that are often hidden from view. Complimenting these scenes from such varied films as Tokyo Story, You Only Live Twice, Godzilla and Enter the Void are six spotlight essays that take us from the wooden streets of pre-19th century Edo to the sprawling 'what-if' megalopolis of science fiction anime. Illustrated throughout with dynamic screen captures World Film Locations: Tokyo is at once a guided tour of Japan's capital conducted by the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Samuel Fuller, Chris Marker and Sofia Coppola while also being an indispensible record of how Tokyo has fired both the imaginations of individuals working behind the camera and those of us sitting transfixed in movie theatres.

Pre-order today:

Tadanari Okamoto’s Home, My Home (ホーム・マイホーム, 1970)

Home, My Home (1970) was the first work of Tadanari Okamoto’s that I ever encountered. I arrived in Tokyo with my family in late 2004 – a few months too late for the National Film Center exhibition and retrospective of his career. Luckily for me, however, the paper sets and dolls from Home, My Home had been donated to the permanent collection at the NFC and were on display the first time I visited the museum.

Okamoto was famous for his constant innovations with animation techniques. Paper cutouts had been a popular medium in early Japanese animation. Cutout animation was cheaper and more time efficient than cel animation, so animators like Noburo Ofuji (1900-61) were fond of using this method. Cutouts also fit well with Japanese traditional paper traditions and patterned paper like chiyogami gave early films like The Village Festival (1931) a distinctive look. In this animated educational short for children, Okamoto takes the art of paper cutouts to another level by playing with depth of frame.  He preferred using an animation table which allowed him to add layers of depth on glass surfaces.

The film tells the story of a fox and a mole who are walking along and dreaming about their ideal home. The story is told by song – a popular format for children’s films in Japan. The catchy and amusing “Mogura to Kitsune to Akasakana” was composed by Seiji Yokoyama with lyrics by Yoshiko Kōyama. It is a duet between and male and a female with Kazuo Kumakura singing the story of the mole and Yoshiko Mari singing the story of the fox.

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.1

Home, My Home appears on this DVD

The characters walk from screen right to screen left with the fox above ground and the mole digging along underground directly under the fox. The ground is a collage of the real estate pages of the newspaper. The characters and the sets are made of craft paper folded into three dimensional shapes. The puppets were made by Sumiko Hosada, a longtime Echo (Okamoto's animation studio) employee who has also made puppets for Kihachirō Kawamoto.

The dreams of the fox and the mole are indicated by the placement of a circle of coloured dots in the foreground of the image, creating a kind of blurry picture frame. They dream  of cute Western-style houses with a wife, son, and daughter living in comfortable middle class homes with Western-style kitchen, living room, bedroom, and a modern Japanese-style bathroom.

Depth of frame was achieved using an animation table.

The mole suddenly sneezes, which startles the fox above and causes him to fall down. This triggers their dreams to turn dark and they envision the destruction of their dream homes with a dump truck crashing into the fox’s house and a military jet knocking into the mole’s house. The family homes are then carted off by construction vehicles and replaced by modern raised highways and industrial buildings. The sequence ends with a kind of black smog blotting out the screen. The fox and the mole turn around and walk in the other direction and wonder if they need to move to outer space. 

The first time that I saw this film, I interpreted it as having an environmental message about the destruction of animal habitats à la Pom Poko (Isao Takahata, 1994). Then I realied that the dreams that the fox and the mole have are not for animal dwellings but for idealized human homes. This suggests the film is really about deep-seated human fears about the effect that encroaching industrialization will have on their quality of life.

The design and execution of this animation is really top notch. The animation was executed by Hiroshi Tabata and Fumiko Magari. Two of the crew on this film, Sumiko Hosada (保坂純子) and Fumiko Magari (真賀里文子), are currently teaching puppet design and puppet animation at the Laputa Art Animation School.  Home, My Home and The Flower and the Mole (花ともぐら/Hana to Mogura, 1970) jointly won the Noburo Ofuji Award in 1971.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

This review is part of Nishikata Film Review’s  2011 Noburo Ofuji Award Challenge.

Taku Furukawa’s Speed (スピード, 1980)

It is amazing to think that Taku Furukawa’s award-winning animated short Speed (1980) is just over 30 years old because the style and the message seem just as fresh and relevant today as they did then. Our “high speed society,” as the opening title card calls it, has only gotten faster and more frenetic in the intervening years. 

Using his trademark sketchy, casually rendered illustration style, Furukawa depicts the various methods humankind has used over the centuries to do things more quickly and conveniently. Furukawa’s minimalist drawing style has much in common with the New Yorker illustrations of Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) or Ed Arno (1916-2008).

In the first section of the film, a man and a monkey sit at the foot of a tall, fruit bearing tree. The man shakes the tree in order to get the fruit. In order to obtain more, he climbs the tree. The monkey seems shocked by the man’s aggressiveness. The man does not share with the monkey. In fact, in his greed to have the last fruit on the tree he disregards his own safety and causes the branch to break. He falls with it to the ground. This scene is followed by a number of comical short vignettes which depict man trying to master skills such as starting a fire, fishing, making wine, and so on.

In the climactic point of this sequence, the man blasts off into outer space with the rocket ship landing in the eye of the moon in a visual reference to Georges Méliès’s pioneering film A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902). Coloured shapes burst like confetti from the mouth of the moon and the sequence of events appears backwards at an accelerated speed with a black background replacing the white and neon-bright coloured lines replacing the black lines (see comparison above).

Once the images are back at the beginning of the story, Furukawa reverts to the original black on white style and a new story of mankind’s advancing progess takes place this time with an emphasis on art and design. The third section of the film takes advances in transportation over the centuries as its theme. If Furukawa were making the film today, I could imagine him doing a fourth section with the theme of communication.

In the wake of the disaster at Fukushima, it would seem that we need to heed Furukawa’s warning more than ever: faster does not necessarily mean better, and perhaps we need to slow down and appreciate the world in its natural state and be respectful of the other living things that we share this planet with. Although it may have a serious message at its heart, the message is related with Furukawa’s characteristic sense of humour.

This review is part of Nishikata Review’s 2011 Noburo Ofuji Award Challenge.

Speed appears on the Anido DVD Takun Films. Please support this artist by purchasing his work.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Tokyo Joe (東京ジョー, 1949)

Made at the peak of Humphrey Bogart’s career, Tokyo Joe (Stuart Heisler, 1949) provides some rare glimpses into life in Tokyo under the American Occupation. Bogart plays Joe Barrett, a retired lieutenant colonel who ran a nightclub in Tokyo before the war and was married to the beautiful European singer Trina (Florence Marly). For reasons known only to himself, Joe left his wife and Japan shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the intervening war made it impossible for him to return.

Did they really label the streets with letters of the alphabet during the Occupation?

Several years afer the war, Joe decides to pick up the pieces of his life in Tokyo. Haunted by the song Trina used to sing, “These Foolish Things Remind Me of You”, he wonders what happened to his wife whom he believes must have died. He discovers that Trina has indeed survived the war but has remarried and has a child, and that he will need to deal with a lot of red tape, hassle, and prejudice in order to go back into business with his old friend Ito (Teru Shimada). He gets blackmailed by Baron Kimura (Sessue Hayakawa) into participating in an illegal smuggling operation and has to find a way to reconcile his personal life and ambitions with the precarious situation he finds himself in.

Bogart in a rickshaw with Tokyo streets rear projected behind him.

 It was impossible to shoot Tokyo Joe on location in 1948 – the first Hollywood shoot there wouldn’t happen until House of Bamboo (read my review of it) in 1955 – but Columbia Pictures was able to send a camera crew to Tokyo to shoot exterior footage. They were the first Hollywood camera crew to be granted permission to shoot there by the American Occupation. The opening aerial footage of Tokyo is quite impressive and Columbia pictures tries to give the film an air of authenticity with the street scene footage in the opening scenes when Joe first arrives in Tokyo. Sadly, these are rather awkwardly handled through the use of a Bogart body double and Bogart shot with rear projection of the Tokyo footage. 

A Bogart body double on the streets of Tokyo.

In spite of this, Tokyo Joe is an oddly likeable film. To be certain, it is not one of Bogart’s best performances and the plot and dialogue are a bit creaky at times, but there are enough interesting elements to keep fans of classic Hollywood films content. The story is a lot more believable than House of Bamboo when it comes to the portrayal of interactions between Japanese and foreign characters. As the actors were shot entirely in the Columbia Pictures Hollywood studios, there are the usual faux pas of characters wearing their shoes indoors but the interiors are more authentically staged than in House of Bamboo. In some ways they are the polar opposites of each other - the exterior shots in House of Bamboo were far superior to their interiors, and vice versa for Tokyo Joe.  In the name of realism, Bogart even takes a stab at speaking Japanese, which one would expect as the character that he plays lived so long in Japan – though he of course keeps the famous Bogart intonation. 

Great camaraderie between Bogart and Shimada.

 The American pilots that Joe hires demonstrate the kind of prejudices and suspicion towards the Japanese that one would expect considering the brutality of the Pacific War. Any negative comments about the Japanese are counterbalanced by Joe’s broader experience of the Japanese – particularly his close friendship with Ito. Ito’s friendly, open nature is contrasted sharply by the slyness and manipulativeness of Baron Kimura. This role was perfect for Sessue Hayakawa, who had mastered the role of the villain during the silent period. This film marked the beginning of Hayakawa’s post war comeback in Hollywood. 

Sessue Hayakawa plays bad well.

 The use of Japanese and Japanese-American actors aids the authentic feel of the film. The dialogue might not be as snappy as Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and the plot might not be as tight as The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), but the film putters along at a decent pace.  Furthermore, it’s nice to see a more well balanced portrayal of the Japanese in a Hollywood picture than the faceless, nameless, soulless soldiers in the war movies of the day. 

I would recommend Tokyo Joe to people who are interested in the time period. It is certainly interesting to see how they depict the American Occupation. I’m not sure how realistic the plot points are concerning war criminals hiding out in Korea trying to sneak back into the country to plot a coup, but the rising fear of communism was certainly a key concern of the times.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Tokyo Joe [Priced-down Reissue]

RANGO - Wonderful, radical, revolutionary

RANGO is a revelation. It is one of the best films I have seen this year, one of the best animated films since TOY STORY, and must surely raise the bar in terms of what is seen as appropriate material for a children's film, and the level of ambition one can bring to the visuals in an animated film. I wonder if history will judge it as revolutionary as AVATAR in terms of bringing the craft of cinema forward and - contra AVATAR - showing us just how dazzling and immersive visuals can be without 3D, but when the CGI animators are guided by one of the best cinematographers working today, Roger Deakins (TRUE GRIT, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN).

The movie has been put together by the team behind PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN - director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp - and it's their best film to date - capturing the sheer energy and comedy of the original POTC film, but allying it to a stronger story and imbuing it with an indulgent love of cinema. For this is, above everything, a film for cineastes - a film about the joy of transformation - of being part of a story that you craft - and about living up to the Heroic Ideal. To that end, John Logan (GLADIATOR)'s screenplay leans heavily on the plot of 70s film noir, CHINATOWN, but lives in the shadow of all of those wonderful Clint Eastwood westerns, not to mention doffing its cap to FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and APOCALYPSE NOW among others.

Johnny Depp plays a pet lizard with no real friends but a vivid imagination. The lizard is the ultimate cinephile, indulging in wild cine-literate fantasies, but ultimately lonely and confused about who he really is. When a car accident leaves him wondering into a old western town in the Mojave desert, he takes the opportunity to reinvent himself as "Rango" - a gun-slinging hero along the lines of The Man With No Name. And boy does this town need a Hero. Some Evil man (obvious to anyone who's seen CHINATOWN) has been hoarding water, leaving the town to run dry, forcing humble farmers from their land....In order to sort this mess out, Rango has to over-come his fear, make good friends, and become a Real Hero, helped out by a wise armadillo (Al Molina) and a surreal dream featuring Timothy Olyphant as the Clint-like Spirit of the West.

What I love about Rango is its evident love for the genres it's referring to (in sharp contrast to the risible YOUR HIGHNESS) and its evident love for the textures of the western. I've never seen an animated film - typically full of shiny, bright, smooth CGI - look so dusty, weather-beaten and worn. The details of the fur, the clothes, the buildings is quite stunning and the film is drawn as if it really has been shot on old fashioned 35mm by the best cinematographer in the business. Add to that a story with real stakes and real emotional heart, voiced by actors at the top of their game. (Special mentions for Isla Fisher as Beans and Ned Beatty as the Mayor.) But most of all I love that this film neither patronises its young audience nor bores its adult audience - and yet doesn't pander to quick, cheap laughs with post-modern winks at popular culture - a trait I particularly detest in the SHREK films. Which other animated movie would dare to have a joke in which the word "thespians" is confused for "lesbians" - or a sequence in which the Hero cross-dresses?

All of this makes RANGO at once marvellously old-fashioned in its cinephilia, its textures and its wonderful photography, but also marvellously modern in its subversive adult humour and willingness to use surreal dream sequences. This really is a wonderful film - and one can only hope that other animated features rise to the challenge of matching its attention to detail and depth of vision.

RANGO is on global release in all bar Japan where it opens on September 23rd.

YOUR HIGHNESS - Worst. Spoof. Ever.

YOUR HIGHNESS is an attempt at the kind of broad, slapstick spoof comedy so brilliantly done by Mel Brooks in his classics, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, BLAZING SADDLES and, to my mind, SPACEBALLS. The first problem is that while often as crude, or indeed cruder, than Brooks, it lacks the consistency of good jokes. The second problem is that it lacks a close observation of the material that it's spoofing. Because, as we all know, a spoof is really a kind of love-letter, and the best spoofs are wonderfully detailed in how they take apart genre-conventions. When you watch YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN you just know that Mel Brooks was a great fan of James Whale. Just as when you watch THE HOLY GRAIL, you know the Monty Python team was immersed in Medieval history at school. But in YOUR HIGHNESS you don't really feel that director David Gordon Greene or writer Danny McBride had a soft spot for epic quest flicks. The plot may have the right feel - two princely brothers go on a quest to rescue the elder's abducted bride to be, and fight wizards and ogres on the way. But the detail is all wrong.

So we are left with a movie that is as much of an embarrassment as the caveman spoof starring Michael Cera and Jack Black, YEAR ONE. In fact, it's worse because the cast is of so much higher quality, and many of them featured in one of my favourite flicks of 2008, PINEAPPLE EXRESS. The humour is broad - which is fine - I'm not a snob for elitist intellectual jokes. But they are not funny, and worst of all they aren't really aimed at the genre they are spoofing. Take an early example. Why does the wise old man who directs the quest with his gift of a compass have to be an alien? What does that add? Nowt. Or further along, why does there have to be a bunch of butt-naked cavewomen types? That's not medieval. It's just an excuse to show some tits. Not that I'm against showing tits - but let's at least attempt to have a genre-appropriate reason! What more can I say? James Franco, Zooey Deschanel and Natalie Portman should be thoroughly embarrassed that they chose to appear in this shit. And producers take note: Danny McBride, just like Zach Galiafanakis, is best used in small doses to spice up a movie, rather than being a lead role in which there juvenile aggressive antics will inevitably grate. And directors take note: improvisation works if you're Mike Leigh. If you are writing a joke-filled spoof, make sure the script is nailed down BEFORE you start shooting.

YOUR HIGHNESS was released in the US and Canada on April 8th and in the UK on April 13th. It will be released in Portugal on April 21st; in South Africa on May 13th; in Turkey on June 3rd; in Malaysia and Singapore on June 23rd; in Hungary, Norway and Sweden on July 8th; in Finland on August 5th; in the Netherlands on August 18th and in France on September 28th.

Keiichi Tanaami’s Favourite Animation

Since I was a child, I’ve always loved Disney movies and cartoons in general. Each time I draw a picture regardless of what it’s for I always think about how it would look if animated. That’s why animating my drawings comes quite naturally to me. – Keiichi Tanaami (Tokyo, 3 August 2009)

The words that most often are used to describe Keiichi Tanaami's artistic style include “pop art,” “surreal,” “psychedelic,” and “experimental.” Watching his animated films, it is easy to make comparisons with Tanaami’s mentor Andy Warhol, other experimental filmmakers of the 60s like Stan Brakhage, and masters of abstract animation like Len Lye, Oskar Fischinger, and Norman McLaren.

In fact, Tanaami has been influenced in equal measures by both mainstream animation and experimental fare. During his interview for the DVD/book Set A Portrait of Keiichi Tanaami, the artist speaks of his childhood passion for Disney movies and shorts. On the 2003 Laputa survey, Tanaami listed a wide range of animation styles as his top animations of all time. Not only do American animated classics like Steamboat Willie, Superman, and Mr. Bug Goes to Town make his list, but also some of the best of world animation including works by McLaren, Suzan Pitt, Raoul Servais, and Paul Grimault. Tanaami also lists early experimental animation by  Fischinger,  Hans Richter, Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Porter.

In his commentary about his selections, Tanaami writes that the films of Oskar Fischinger have made a significant impact on him as an artist, influencing many aspects of his own animation. Of Raoul Servais’s Nocturnal Butterflies, he says that the film has a certain “je ne sais quoi” – a special quality or depth that one cannot achieve in digital formats. Tanaami does use computer technology in the editing process of his films today, but he and his frequent collaborator Nobuhiro Aihara still prefer to draw their films by hand.

Here are Tanaami's best of animation picks:

Superman

(スーパーマン, Dave Fleischer, 1941) 

Asparagus

(アスパラガス, Suzan Pitt, 1979)

Night on Bald Mountain / Une nuit sur le mont chauve

(禿山の一夜, Alexandre Alexeieff / Claire Parker, France, 1933)

Mr. Bug Goes to Town

(aka Hoppity Goes to Town / バッタ君町に行く, Dave Fleischer, USA, 1941)

Blinkity Blank

(線と色の即興詩, Norman McLaren, Canada, 1955)

Le petit soldat 

(小さな兵士, Paul Grimault, France, 1947)

Le roi et l’oiseau 

(王と鳥 やぶにらみの暴君, Paul Grimault, France, 1948)

Studie Nr. 1-13

(スタディ , Oskar Fischinger, experimental series, 1929-33)

Nocturnal Butterflies/Papillons de nuit

(夜の蝶, Raoul Servais, 1998)

Rhythm 21

(リズム２１, Hans Richter, Germany, 1921)

Steamboat Willie

(蒸気船ウィリー, Ub Iwerks/Walt Disney, USA, 1928)

Source: Laputa Top 150 World and Japanese Animation (2003)

A Retrospective of Keiichi Tanaami's animated films will be screened in Toronto on April 23rd with the proceeds going to earthquake/tsunami charity.  The retrospective will then travel to Winnipeg and Montreal.  Click here to learn more.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

RED RIDING HOOD - sexless

With her self-consciously naive re-telling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale, TWILIGHT director Catherine Hardwicke undoes all the good work of Angela Carter in bringing Charles Perrault's original story up to date with modern sexual mores. For, as she revealed in her brilliant short story, which was itself made into the film, THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, Red Riding Hood is really a story about a young virgin fearful of the bestial sexual appetites of men. In the original fairytale, the young girl is taught to stay well clear of men, lest she be raped and murdered. But in Angela Carter's retelling, the young girl takes control of her fate, fucks the wolf and lives happily ever after. Unfortunately, in this strange new world of teen cinema, where teenagers fall in love as if their lives depended on it, but no-one actually has sex, there is little room to explore the themes of The Little Red Riding Hood story. The resulting film is strangely neuter - strangely childish - a lot of fuss about nothing.

In this film Amanda Seyfield (MAMMA MIA!) plays Valerie aka LRRH as a drippy emo teenage girl, desperate to get it on with her dishy boyfriend Peter (Shiloh Fernandez - a poor man's Ed Westwick) but affianced to the similarly dishy Henry (Max Irons - a poor man's Robert Pattinson). She nearly fucks Peter, and flirts a little with Henry, but the potential for anyone with brown eyes to be the Big Bad Wolf obviously puts a dampener on things. Is it Peter? Is it Henry? Is it Julie Christie's gothic-loopy Grandmother? Who knows? Who cares? The movie grinds through its hokey whodunnit plot and the big reveal turns out to be dull and sexually uninteresting.

Amanda Seyfried is, I suppose, passable as the drippy teen, but both Max Irons and Shiloh Fernandez are wooden. Virginia Madsen as the mother and Gary Oldman as the sinister inquisitor are wasted and Julie Christie is in hammer-horror territory. The soundtrack, with music by Fever Ray, is suitably atmospheric, and Mandy Walker's photography is suitably moody, but she is let down by Thomas E Sanders' (Coppola's DRACULA) too shiny, too over-designed Alpine village set. I particularly hated screenwriter David Leslie Johnson's attempt to critique the use of torture in a war on terror (I kid you not!) and as I said before, his refusal to deal with the sexual subtext is just bizarre.

Overall, RED RIDING HOOD is just absolutely zero. A movie with no soul, no heart, no sex, no tension and no resolution worth its name. The only possible reason to watch it is for the comedy gold moment when you realise that the Reeve is Colonel Tigh!

RED RIDING HOOD was released in March in the USA, Singapore, Canada, Iceland, the Philippines, the USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Bulgaria and Denmark. It was released earlier in April in Turkey, Armenia, Australia, Kuwait, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Portugal, Slovenia, Colombia, Spain and the UK. It opens next week in France, Sweden, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Italy and Venezuela. It opens on April 28th in Greece, Hungary and Estonia. It opens on June 10th in Japan, and on June 24th in Poland.