Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke, 2011)

Walked into this most certainly wanting it to be Catherine Hardwicke's masterpiece -- the fullest expression of her love for teenage sexual awakening and all the sometimes messy, sometimes amazing, always pushed to the forefront, emotions that come along with it. One scene succeeds so greatly that I am willing to cut the rest of the movie, which manages to stuff itself to the gills with ideas, yet never quite completes or satisfactorily fleshes out any of them, a lot more slack than I probably otherwise would. But that one scene, or I guess sequence, is so charged with emotion and erotic tension that it makes me wonder if all the other teen movies about sex are directed by people who maybe never had sex when they were teenagers. Or, if they did, don't remember what it was actually like. But, unlike her previous Twilight, it approaches the idea of dangerous, bad boy teenage infatuation with more straightforward adoration, rather than the teeter-tottering ambivalence that made Twilight so surprising and unfairly maligned. Red Riding Hood's love for bad boys is more about the attractiveness of teenage infatuation, rather than curbing that infatuation with the knowledge that teen sexual obsession can also be weird and gross and unhealthy.

My biggest complaint is that the film's narrative structure holds back the expression of most of the ideas. The paranoia and fear-mongering of possible attack from an unknown assailant awkwardly evokes the condemnation of the Patriot Act (certainly something we can all agree with, but is handled rather poorly) and the amount of joy gained from certain mysteries about the identity of the wolf, and the fact that it could be any of the men in Amanda Seyfried's life isn't enough to make up for the fact that keeping the mystery going the entire film's length prevents many of the ideas from achieving any kind of maturation. Especially because the finale, while handled somewhat clumsily, introduces a brand new concept that is one of the most worthy of exploration, suggesting something sinister and incestuous about fatherly protectiveness over the burgeoning sexuality of teenage daughters. This slyly evoked metaphor is absolutely worthy of exploration, but by the time it comes up the mystery has been solved and the movie, therefore, feels it must end. A better movie would've been able to keep the mystery, but trim it down to the first half -- excising Gary Oldman completely would be a start, as his status as an outsider come in to straighten up the town and prepare it for attack undermines the idea of national paranoia in times of panic -- and spend the second half evolving the previous theories on teenage love and its strange, and often creepy, facets.