Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
The makers of the 2011 stinker Red Riding Hood had a very stupid, very lucrative idea. They asked why the classic tale of a brave little who tangles with a wolf while attempting to visit her grandmother couldn’t also be the movie and book series Twilight.
Despite being famously terrible, Stephanie Meyer’s brainchild have made a LOT of people a LOT of money. It consequently stands to reason that if Red Riding Hood were to look and feel a LOT like Twilight then it too could make a fuck ton of money. To make things even more blatant, the geniuses behind this sub-par motion picture went so far as to hire the actual director of the first Twilight movie, Catherine Hardwicke to direct.
After making her name as a production designer for films like Three Kings and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Hardwicke made her directorial debut with 2003’s Thirteen, a hysterical youth gone wild melodrama that was treated at the time by many critics as a wake up call to the world to stop ignoring the problems of over-sexualized white American teenagers.
Then came Lords of Dogtown and The Nativity Story and finally the zeitgeist-capturing Twilight, which was as successful and terrible on-screen as it was as a series of uniquely god-awful fantasy novels. Hardwicke’s vision for Red Riding Hood was, unsurprisingly, a gritty fairy tale version of Twilight but she had other ideas as well. She set out to make a movie that was as dark visually as it is thematically.
We’re talking Barry Lyndon levels of darkness. Hardwicke set out to make a movie that looks like an old painting. Unfortunately she made a movie that’s every bit as kinetic as an old painting as well. Oh, and she also makes the old time village where everything takes place look exactly like the wintry Northwest of Twilight.
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