Baker’s dozen (2/21/01)
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Hannibal. [Ridley Scott, 2001.]
The further adventures of Hannibal Lecter, played mainly for grisly laughs: the good doctor, long incognito as an art critic, is unmasked in Florence by an ambitious but unwary Italian detective [naturally the mark goes down hard, though for some reason it takes a third of the picture to have done with him], motivating the master psychiatrist’s return to America and his interpolation into the political difficulties which have befallen his — uh, protege — FBI agent Clarisse Starling [this time the redoubtable Julianne Moore], who has been busted off the force thanks to the insidious machinations of billionaire Fiend Without A Face Gary Oldman, a Lecter victim only partially, and by himself consumed, now perhaps understandably obsessed with the project of luring the cannibal genius back to Virginia to be fed to a penfull of wild boars. Complications ensue. — The rather heavily underscored subtext of the romantic connection between Lecter and Starling [who share, it is made clear, an inhuman integrity and strength of purpose that sets them apart from everyone else in the story] sets up the punchline: a letter-perfect quotation of the fireworks display that lit up the Riviera sky behind Grant and Kelly in
It Takes A Thief; I laughed helplessly in the dark. — Really, if you can hold your gorge, this flick is quite a yuck, and Scott is relatively restrained by contemporary standards: the Farrellys must already be plotting something involving the Three Stooges and meatcleavers.
As for protests over the gruesome fate of the Bad Fed: much ridicule has been unjustly heaped upon the French critic who exclaimed, in a moment of excessive enthusiasm, that Charlton Heston was “an axiom of the cinema!” — for there are, after all, certain axioms of the cinema, and there are certain persons who embody them. Whatever they may be [and I doubt I could enumerate them], I think it goes without saying that one of them must be that, whatever happens to Ray Liotta in the final reel, he had it coming.
____________Paint by numbers (2/16/01)
