HOODWINKED

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Infectious Family Fun!
Red Riding Hood Rides Again
By Cole Smithey

 

On first look, this animated revamping of the Little Red Riding Hood story seems to farm the same well-tilled soil as the plethora of big studio animated features. Yet there’s much more of a rich homegrown quality to this little animated pearl that kicks with a spicy zing emanating from its original songs.

Anne Hathaway does her best little blasé Janeane Garofalo voice as "Red," a bicycle-riding delivery girl for her Granny’s (Glenn Close) baked goodies. An unknown thief has been stealing pastries from around the forest at the same time that Red discovers a cross-dressing wolf in her Granny’s bed.

Screenwriter and co-director Todd Edwards caresses the fun with 27 brilliantly poppy songs that range in style from driving rock to hip-hop, funk, surf, country, folk, Bossa Nova, teen pop, and inspired instrumental orchestral motifs. The soundtrack alone is enough to make the movie a winner.

These Little Red Riding Hood characters are full of personality surprises. The movie opens with Red arriving at her Granny’s house only to confront the big bad Wolf wearing a Granny disguise that our quick-witted lass sees right through.

Red questions the Wolf at length before the scene comes to an abrupt finale when her gagged-and-bound Granny pops out of the closet just as a Woodsman bursts in with his trusty ax. Detective frog Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Stiers) arrives at the scene to weed through four interweaving testimonies told by Red, the Woodsman (Jim Belushi), Granny, and the Wolf (Patrick Warburton).

It’s revealed that the Wolf is not the drooling monster we traditionally think of, but rather a reporter researching the spate of bakery robberies. The Woodsman is really an actor rehearsing for a role as a Woodsman when he isn’t driving a schnitzel truck. Granny has a knack for extreme sports. Red has some kung fu moves up her sleeve that come in handy against some villainous humans with their own grudges against our snowboarding Granny.

Anne Hathaway ("Brokeback Mountain") cinches the film’s enjoyable tone with a vocal characterization that breathes with comic life. Andy Dick does a neat vocal turn as a quirky bunny rabbit, and Jim Belushi’s intonation is downright hilarious as pictured through the clumsy guise of the muscle bound Woodsman. The animation is state-of-the-art CGI that the filmmakers contain in a consistent palate of visual smartness. Cory Edwards, Tony Leech, and Todd Edwards all did dual duties of scripting and directing the movie, and their euphoric collaboration carries an unmistakable stamp of unique talents working in harmony.

The film’s cheerful songs are immediately memorable. Although the version I screened was not in 3-D, "Hoodwinked!" is due to be released as a 3-D feature film. With or without the 3-D, "Hoodwinked!" is a clever screwball take on the Little Red Riding Hood fable that speaks to the kid in all of us.

Rated PG. 80 mins. 

THE BROTHERS GRIMM

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Troubled Fairy Tale
Terry Gilliam's Career Stays Immured
By Cole Smithey

Terry Gilliam’s much anticipated narrative effort, behind his famously doomed attempt at adapting "Don Quixote" for the big screen, is a visually impressive but viscerally blank movie thanks to Ehren Kruger’s irksome script.

Without concern for the celebrated authors of such fairytale classics as "Cinderella" and "Rapunzel," Kruger weaves a loose canvas where he paints the erudite Grimm brothers as fictional nineteenth-century opportunists who make their money fooling German villages into believing in bogus monsters that only they can be hired to "exorcise."

The gypsy brothers, cynical Will (Matt Damon) and gullible Jacob (Heath Ledger), are found out and captured by French authorities who assign them to dispel the mystery behind the disappearance of young maidens in the village of Marbaden, near an enchanted forest.

Audiences other than preteens will be sorely disappointed at Gilliam’s over-massaged vision of a tediously gimmicky script.

Grime flies onto Ledger’s and Damon’s era-perfect costumes in rainy opening scenes that foreshadow the opaqueness of their cartoonish characters. With a page torn from a Hardy Boys story, the Grimm brothers perform a barn-enclosed exorcism that employs the use of a manned monster that swings from a contraption of pulleys to convince the barn’s owner that he has spent his town’s money wisely.

The sequence gives the movie a false start and predisposes the audience away from accepting the fairytale aspects of the story that compete with hollow comic efforts toward an unrewarding climax.

Jonathan Pryce is mechanically villainous as Delatombe, a commanding member of Napoleon’s Army overseeing a bumbling torturer named Cavaldi (Peter Stormare). The Army suspects the brothers for the disappearance of numerous girls from Marbaden. The military give the brothers a death-wish opportunity to prove their innocence by solving a mystery. Will and Jacob are left to convince Angelika (Lena Headey), a local huntress, to guide them through the thick forest for clues.

A mausoleum-like tower in the middle of the forest shifts the movie into a too-little-too-late spree of Grimm Brothers’ fairytale iconography. Owned by a murderous king and his "Mirror Queen," the impenetrable tower holds the answer for the brothers to reverse the Queen’s spell and make the area safe for young girls. Gilliam takes obvious joy with scenes involving a catapult device that sends Jacob flying through the air and inside the tower. There, Jacob gets more than an eye full of Monica Bellucci’s ancient queen.

"The Brothers Grimm" fails on three essential points; it doesn’t fulfill its title’s promise of teaching something about the actual Grimm Brothers; it comes no where close to achieving the clarity of any of the Brothers Grimm’s brilliant allegorical stories and lastly, it tarnishes Terry Gilliam’s already sketchy career.

Monica Bellucci steals the movie as The Mirror Queen a 500-year-old immortal ruler intent on attaining eternal beauty by way of a magical curse requiring the lives of 12 young maidens. Matt Damon’s morphing sideburns and eyebrows carry on their own surreal subplot while Heath Ledger diligently attempts to single-handedly carry a children’s movie with a 60 million dollar budget. Terry Gilliam and his adoring audiences would have been better off if he had just directed a faithful version of "Hansel And Gretel."

Rated PG-13. 118 mins.