Red Riding: 1974
2/7/10
The British sure do know how to make a made-for-TV-movie. It’s hard to believe something as smart and dense as the Red Riding Trilogy originated on the small screen, but that’s Channel 4 for you.
As a stand-alone film, 1974 is a solid, if sometimes maddeningly complex (and borderline cheesy), period thriller that slowly explains itself just when you’re about to give up. Before you know it, you’re roped in for the next two films (which I’ll be seeing tonight and tomorrow). How it works as a smaller piece of a larger story remains to be seen.
I’m a big fan of the production concept, though: shooting three films back to back and releasing them all at once. Great for my instant-gratification instincts that have been groomed by the internet since we got AOL in 1994.
