DEATH OF TRADITIONAL CINEMA

Call it whatever you like, be it an overlong music video, or an idiot's guide to pregnancy, BREAKING DAWN PART 1 is both a hit and a miss. At first, it becomes sentimentally sweet, as director Bill Condon (DREAMGIRLS) lavishes us with the wedding scene set to the tune of "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" first heard during the prom scene in the first Twilight movie. Next, a mini-travelogue of Brazil that should have shown more landscape.  Then, the most poignant and tiring part: the pregnancy. Much ado about nothing. To be fair, I felt a little amount of understanding for the main characters' motivations: Bella wants to keep the baby and enforce her right to choose; Edward feels responsible, and guilty; Jacob feels doubly responsible, and his jealousy turns into sincerity, which is admirable. What more can we demand? The film wants to be cheesy and does exactly that. Of the four Twilight films already released, I liked the first one (because of its playfulness) a...

RED RIDING HOOD works well as a popcorn flick when you let yourself get whisked away with Catherine Hardwicke's storytelling focus on the small village with which the film takes place. Sure, RED RIDING HOOD is ridden with cliches and traces of Twilight, but it is a cliched film that is better than most cliched films, and certainly better than Twilight. Here goes your R-18 version of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Film critic Roger Ebert noted that he did not recall any "riding" involved with the kids' tale. I'm perfectly okay with a loose adaptation as long as it will not feel like an insult. Hardwicke's setting is dreamy. It's isolated, it's snowy, and full of trees- perfect for a semi-horror setup. Amanda Seyfried may very well be just a towering sex symbol,  and we do not necessarily have to admire her acting here (CHLOE remains as her only notable film outing). The presence of visual testosterone Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons only confirms what I jus...