• Mood: Pinky.
• Music: crown me king- teenage mutant albino lab mice

Over The River & Through the Woods.

When Terra & I were finished at the Museum of Modern Art, we headed over to Jenny's library, since we were in that neck of the woods anyhow. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the weird hole in the world that the Helmsley Building is-- seriously, right in the middle of the street? Totally a Fringe-esque incursion from another universe, right?-- but is was a pretty goofy walk over there. Hideous marionettes & lumbering golems for the win. We only hung out for a bit-- Terra had a train to catch for her Ultimate Slumber Party & the library was closing, so she split & I hung around reading the (absolutely awesome) Supergods until Jenny was ready to leave, & we took off. I wanted to go do some kind of a date thing but it was a hundred & three degrees Fahrenheit & humid as hell, & there was no way we were going to go out of our way. Jenny & I still came up with a good time-- when we got back to Brooklyn we decided to go to Peppino's & get some...wood-oven baked pizza? Why we decided the best idea to beat the heat was to go to a place with a giant indoor over I will never know, but it was nice. We split a bottle of wine, some antipasto, a pizza & a cheese steak. More than I could even begin to eat, actually, so there were leftovers for breakfast. After that we came home & watched Red Riding Hood. So, here is the thing: I thought Catherine Hardwicke did an awesome job with Twilight. She was tongue in cheek but respectful of the source material, which is a fine line to walk. Red Riding Hood is pretty blatantly an attempt to cash in on Twilight, but without a pop cultural touchstone to capitalize on. Instead you get a fairytale, but is both better & worse. Worse, because...I'm sorry, the "what big eyes you have" exchange really was irredeemably awful. Better because...well, you've got plenty of room to play around. In the end analysis, the movie was..."fine." It wasn't good, by any means, but it wasn't so awful. Amanda Seyfried is pretty great; I mean, she's everyone's favorite wide-eyed giant-eyed ingenue for a reason. Gary Oldman gets to chew up scenery. What else do you want? One nice bit-- Gary Oldman's soldiers are multi-racial, which I liked. It was a plausible way to have people of colour in the film, & I appreciate that. I don't appreciate the fact that they stayed subordinate, even in the epilogue. That was a let down. Oh, the fundamental werewolf story! I actually think the skeleton of the story is really great. The mythology of the wolf, the psychological element of the enemy among you, the witch hunt brought on by the outsider...there is great stuff there. I think as a werewolf story, it succeeds, but it ultimately falls short on any promise of being a good film.