Mirror Mirror is about as postmodern as a postmodern version of a fairytale gets these days – “It’s been focus-grouped!,” the prince protests, as the princess defies tradition and sets out to save him. So why is it so very white? It’s especially jarring when Indian director Tarsem Singh ends the movie with a Bollywood-inspired dance number – it’s a Technicolor celebration of cultural diversity by a cast that doesn’t seem to have any, save a dwarf or two who barely stand out from their pack.
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In the vigilante fantasy Gone, Amanda Seyfried plays Jill, a young Portland woman who can’t shake the memory of her abduction a year ago. She managed to slip through the guy’s clutches – he’d been holding her at the bottom of a deep pit in a sprawling local park – but the local cops, after finding no evidence of said hole (it’s a very big park), decided she made the whole thing up. Then one night Jill’s sister (Emily Wickersham) goes missing in a similar fashion: When Jill goes to the cops for help, they eye her warily, all except newbie detective Wes Bentley, who purrs at her creepily, in a red-herring sort of way.
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The most striking observation made during a recent chat with Shiloh Fernandez is that the 26-year-old is a gentle and thoughtful soul in person -- sincere, open, and regretful of comments he made recently about his run-in with Kristen Stewart years ago when reading for the role of Edward Cullen in Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight. Fernandez may not have been meant to play the famous sparkling vampire, but he got another shot at working with Hardwicke when she cast him as the village bad boy in Red Riding Hood, the first romantic lead role in his young career to date. (Plus, he's an avid Movieline reader. So, you know -- bonus points!)
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After departing the phenomenally successful Twilight franchise that launched star Kristen Stewart into the stratosphere along with then-unknowns Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, director Catherine Hardwicke set her sights on another supernatural teen romance: Red Riding Hood. Starring Amanda Seyfried as the titular heroine, Hardwicke's take on the age-old fairytale becomes a medieval murder-mystery with a current of seething sensuality bubbling beneath the surface -- just one of many subjects the director discussed in a frank conversation with Movieline about Red Riding Hood, post-Twilight pressure, her critics, and more.
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Shiloh Fernandez makes Amanda Seyfried swoon with his bad boy ways in Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood, but when Movieline met with the 26-year-old actor in Los Angeles he revealed his softer side with a favorite moment from a romantic '90s-era classic -- and turned on the charm with a touch of good, old-fashioned flattery. "I read Movieline!" he exclaimed before diving into a nostalgic round of My Favorite Scene.
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Fairytales are meant to teach lessons -- and the older you get, the more twisted those lessons become. Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood -- featuring a virginal Amanda Seyfried in that iconic red cloak, enveloped in the crimson of sensuality and blood lust, a young woman inexplicably drawn to the big, bad wolf -- isn't the first film to take the fairytale's latent messaging to darker, and we mean really dark, places.
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Twilight fans who flock to see Drive Angry 3D this weekend in support of Billy Burke are in for a bit of a surprise, as the actor -- who plays the calm, mustachioed father to Kristen Stewart's Bella in Summit's Twilight Saga films -- swaggers his way through the South as a sexually-charged Satanic cult leader. To put it plainly, Burke's Jim Jones-meets-Jim Morrison villain gives co-star Nicolas Cage a run for his money in the anti-subtlety department, and Burke clearly relished every second of the departure from Charlie Swan.
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