From the NYT:
The film, directed by Neil Jordan and written by him and Angela Carter, based on her story, begins as a dream prompted by a young woman's sense of sibling rivalry and then, within the dream, opens up into a series of tales within tales. Some of these are told by the dreamer Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), the contemporary young woman who becomes Red Riding Hood, and some are told by Red Riding Hood's eerily kind, actually menacing old grandmother (Angela Lansbury).
Mr. Jordan, his set designers and his special-effects people have made a movie that looks like a cross between something by Jean Cocteau, not at peak form, and a horror movie from Hammer Films. It's set mostly in a wonderfully artificial-looking studio forest, stocked with trees that turn into houses, toads that are life- size but toadstools that are 12 feet tall, plus rats, snakes, owls and wolves - dozens of them, many disguised as men.
The central Red Riding Hood story as played out here appears to be taken fairly straight from the Brothers Grimm. The film makers, however, have more than fleshed out the character of Grandmother, who is full of esoteric advice, such as ''Beware of windfallen apples and of men whose eyebrows meet.'' She also knows a thing or two about wolves. ''The worst kind of wolf is hairy on the inside,'' she says. ''The wolf who ate your sister was hairy on the outside, and took her straight to heaven.''
No comments:
Post a Comment