Bits and Pieces

Cannon Movie Tales: Red Riding Hood, One project that's been percolating for a good long while is some kind of look at film versions of fairy tales. It's meant watching a lot of off the beaten path flicks. Producers Golan and Globus who built and burnt through a film empire in the eighties, exemplified by such product as the increasingly absurd Death Wish sequels and the Mission in Action franchise, tried their hand and a series of live action musicals based on classic fairy tales. Featuring an actor or two who were hot at the moment but could rarely sing and being a cheery musical while being quite faithful to the dark Grimm storyline these should be a lot more weirdly enjoyable than they are. Instead they're just odd, like a comedy sketch that got out of hand.

To make the Red Riding Hood story stretch to 80 minutes they added Craig T. Nelson as a pair of twin brothers, one good and long absent from the kingdom and the other the villainous local lord. He tries to woo the reluctant Lady Jean (Isabella Rossellini) and his right hand man is a sinister figure who can transform into a wolf at will. Again, this never takes flight either into something genuinely entertaining or camp. The songs are inoffensive but unmemorable and even though these where shot in Bulgaria none of the Gothic local color seeps through and the film remains as sunny and fresh scrubbed as something filmed in Southern California. For a magnificently mad Cannon musical, pick The Apple.

Get thee behind me Satan(ically bad writing)! One compensation for Monday is the weekly posting of Evangelical Christian Fred Clark's whipping of the execrable Left Behind series of books. A Christian more concerned with what Jesus of Nazareth actually said than with genital politics his barbed commentary on the appalling theology and even more appalling storytelling is never less than wickedly funny.

Ooh Shiny. I got me one of them tumblr thingys.