Ever see blood in the moonlight, Will? It appears quite black.

[thehefner]

At Best Buy today, as we were buying a USB cord so we could finally start figuring out how to use the projector for the show I'm going to be performing in ten days oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, we discovered they had a music section, with a synthesizer for anyone to try out.

OH MY GOD I'M IN LOVE.

Thing is, I've always wanted to play an instrument, but I've never been able to really make my brain/hands do what it takes. But a synthesizer, man, I don't even have to do much with it, and it already sounds like I'm composing the soundtrack to an 80's Michael Mann film.

Of course, that's where my brain is today, after I attempted a rewatch of Brett Ratner's RED DRAGON to see if maybe it wasn't as bad as I'd remembered. Or at the very least, to see if maybe, just maybe, I've been wrong in thinking that Bryan Cox's Hannibal Lecter in Mann's MANHUNTER was superior to Anthony Hopkins' return to the role in RED DRAGON.

Pshhh, no to both counts:

Y'know, I actually made my preference of Cox to Hopkins' Lecter a line in my show, THE HEFNER MONOLOGUES. I love how, every once in a while, an audience member actually knows what the hell I'm talking about and smiles. And here I used to be worried that someone would pick a fight with me after the show.

One of the few plus sides of RED DRAGON is Danny Elfman's soundtrack, which is the very few times in recent memory that Danny Elfman has sounded like classic Danny Elfman, music that makes you want to frolic in a graveyard:

Too bad that Brett Ratner is such a hack that Elfman's music completely overpowers any middlingly directed scene from that film. But even with classic-style Elfman, damn it, I so vastly prefer the soundtrack to MANHUNTER.

Not only does it help that Michael Mann--like Scorsese and Tarantino--is one of the ultimate masters of utilizing music in film, but it's pure 80's synth awesomeness from start to finish (well, except for "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"). How I wish I had a high-quality copy of tracks like "Graham's Theme," which might be one of my favorite pieces of film music ever:

If I had a synth, the first thing I would do is learn to play that. Which, from what I've seen, probably wouldn't be that hard. But who cares? I want one more than Buffalo Bill wants a pretty new dress.



Eh, I feel lazy ending it on a SILENCE reference, as I honestly don't get the huge appeal of that film/book. Clarice is so boring compared to Will, and Dollarhyde is both more sympathetic and terrifying than Bill. At least, when he's played by Noonan. Ralph Fiennes was one of the only actors in RED DRAGON who wasn't actively sleepwalking, so cred to him, but I'd still rate him beneath Ted Levine.

Comments

[foxhack.livejournal.com]

Psssssssssst.

http://the-manchester-morgue.blogspot.com/2009/01/manhunter-music-from-motion-picture.html

*sneaks away*

[foxhack.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I loved Manhunter too. It was one of my first random DVD purchases years ago and I wish I had the two disc special edition that's been out of print for YEARS. :(

[foxhack.livejournal.com]

And if you can't get that file because you're on the road... I've got it and can send it to you later. :p

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Okay, I guess now's the time to finally ask, what's the best way to open a .rar file?

[foxhack.livejournal.com]

Winrar. Winzip. 7Zip. Only one of these is free, though.

http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Awesome. Awesome. AWESOME. Thank you!

I get to be the dissenting judge, woo-hoo!

[chickenhat.livejournal.com]

I can see why you prefer the original Manhunter, and I appreciate it, but I actually like what they did in Red Dragon better.

Re: I get to be the dissenting judge, woo-hoo!

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

What in particular did you prefer about it?

Re: I get to be the dissenting judge, woo-hoo!

[chickenhat.livejournal.com]

Cox is good at the role, but I prefer Hopkins. Possibly because I saw him in the role first and that codified it for me. I'm willing to call them equal but different. The movies aren't about Hannibal for me anyway, they're about the profilers that have to work with or against him.

Peterson as Graham was good, but I like Edward Norton's performance better. More analysis and less outward angst.

I loved what Ralph Fiennes did as Dollarhyde SOOO much better in Red Dragon. Noonan just portrayed him as just another unstoppable serial killer.

Re: I get to be the dissenting judge, woo-hoo!

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

I thought, for all of Hopkins' strengths in SILENCE, he was phoning it in for a paycheck this time around. But not as badly as Norton. I really disagree there. I know he can act, but damn, he felt like he was out of a high school theater production. I never got any sense of the internal struggle, that he was actually putting his soul on the line (not to mention his own family) by taking this job.

And no way did Noonan portray him as just another serial killer. Consider the entire subplot with Reba, how shy and meek he becomes around her, how this great monster suddenly becomes awkward and confused by her advances. Think about that look on his face as they have sex, and as they lie together in bed, his face contorting with terror and awe and, strangest of all, actual happiness.

And then consider that scene where he thinks he sees Reba kissing the other guy, and it's like Ralph Wiggum, you can actually pinpoint the moment his heart rips in half and the monster takes over completely. No subplot is needed. No superficial character history could give that any more depth. It's elegant, simple, and powerful.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

What's interesting about Red Dragon versus Manhunter is that - in addition to Ratner's hacked-out direction and Hopkins' bizarre self-parody of a performance (seriously, he acts and sounds like Katherine Hepburn in her head-on-a-Slinky later years at certain points) - part of what makes Red Dragon a worse movie than Manhunter is that Red Dragon is actually more faithful to its source material.

Indeed, Hopkins is much more in line with Harris' Lecter overall, in all three films, since as soon as I read Hannibal, I realized that Lecter was Harris' own Canon Villain Sue, even before he successfully converted Clarice to his point of view (and Holy Jesus God, that whole scene read like some shitty borderline-self-insert fanfic written by a teenage Lecter fangirl who was too busy jamming her hands down the front of her panties to catch the point of The Silence of the Lambs), once I got to the chapter where Lecter goes shopping and I realized, "Oh, good Christ, Harris just charged me money to read his wishlist from Hammacher Schlemmer."

I'll still defend Silence, not only because it was my first acquaintance with Lecter, but also because Hopkins' acting was much more restrained than it became in Hannibal and Red Dragon. More importantly, Hopkins' Lecter was a fucking revelation; I mean, nobody had seen anything like him onscreen before. After an entire decade in which all our cinematic mass-murderers were openly deranged and deformed psychopaths so slavering that goddamn Freddy Fucking Krueger came across like the Cary Grant of the bunch, relatively speaking, here was a guy who was unquestionably evil and unquestionably insane, and yet, as one reviewer put it, if you met him at a dinner party, you'd still want to impress him. Yes, movies had shown us plenty of gentlemanly villains before, but never with such an extreme disconnect of a gulf between their genteel dignity and the sheer animal savagery that they were capable of. I still get chills when I watch Lecter's breakout scene in Silence, where he switches from humming along with the classical melodies and exchanging polite remarks with the police officers to beating the one with his own nightstick with this look of total I-can't-even-put-into-words-what-the-fuck on his face, teeth bared and eyes completely blank like everything that made him human had just emotionally checked out for the day.

I'm also quite fond of both Clarice and Bill - Clarice because, in Silence, we see that she manages, in very brief moments, to persuade Lecter to try and behave more humanely (albeit filtered through Lecter's Orange and Blue Morality of what "humane" behavior means), because there was a small part of him that actually wanted to be a decent human being for her, and Bill just because of The Dance:

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

And I wish I could find a YouTube clip of the opening moments of Red Dragon, because for as much as the rest of that film sucked, GODDAMN, that scene between Lecter and Will alone was almost worth the price of admission, not only for actually SHOWING us the friendship that these two men once shared, of two peers in their field acknowledging their mutual respect for and enjoyment of one another's company, but also for the slow-burn buildup of tension as Will's realization just keeps edging closer and closer to the terrifying, brain-breaking truth about his friend, which leads to the best, most unnerving lines of dialogue in the whole goddamn film ...

Will: Something still doesn't make sense to me, Dr. Lecter. You're the best forensic psychiatrist I know ... and yet, somehow, in all our time together, this possibility never occurred to you.

Lecter: Well, I am only human, Will. Perhaps I made a mistake.

Will: You don't strike me as a man who makes very many mistakes.

Lecter: Now, I'm sorry to think I might no longer enjoy your full confidence ...

Will, shaking his head distractedly: What? No! No, I didn't say that, I ... I don't know what I'm saying. I'm very, very tired. (pauses, blinking) I ... I almost had it.

Lecter, smiling: It'll come to you. In time.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Rereading RED DRAGON recently (which spurred my desire to give the film another chance), I realized that the things MANHUNTER cut out really leave a lot of Harris' threads and arcs hanging. From a craft perspective, that means the original novel is a better put-together story.

And yet, as an actual work of art, I feel like MANHUNTER is superior, because it becomes far more of a pair of character pieces that live and breathe better thanks to Mann, Petersen, and Noonan than what Harris originally did alone. Dollarhyde's whole subplot with his grandmother and eating the painting and faking his death and coming back to kill Graham? Watching MANHUNTER, I kinda go, "Huh, we didn't really need all that, did we?" Less was more.

Interesting to think of Lecter as Harris' Canon Villain Sue, though. From HANNIBAL, I dare say you're certainly onto something. I don't even want to imagine what HANNIBAL RISING was like. In either version.

Every time I've watched SILENCE, all I've ever come away from it was that it felt cold, dirty, and soulless. There was none of the humanity from RED DRAGON, and it's that humanity that really works as a sharp, powerful contrast to Lecter's inhumanity. I can still appreciate the escape scene, as that's the only one that really stands out to me for reasons you mention (actually, from the way you paint that picture, I think I really do need to rewatch it soon), but the rest has all the emotional impact of a bleaker, danker prime-time police potboiler.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

See, I feel exactly the opposite about Silence, which, if anything, felt very human to me. As much as Harris held up the flaws and foibles of rural America to critical examination in Silence - the row of sheriff's deputies giving Clarice an appraisingly sexist once-over, and the dirt-poor dead-end lives of victim Frederica Bimmel's family and friends - both the novel and the movie nonetheless showed a moving empathy for those country folk, from Clarice discovering the panty-shots of Frederica (which made Clarice "root for her," since she was a "fat girl" who was trying to assert her own sexuality) to the kindness and sensitivity of the morticians who examined her body, all the way up to the cops caring steadfastly for their own in the wake of Lecter's escape ("THAT'S JIM PEMBRY, DAMMIT!!! NOW TALK TO HIM!!!").

Indeed, if anything, the contrast between Silence and Hannibal (the novel version) is like the moral reverse of the contrast between The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day - whereas Cameron went from showing the machines' victory as inevitable to giving humanity a second chance (and even grafting a humanity onto one of the machines), Harris went from showing Lecter as gaining respect for Clarice's integrity (and staying away from her because he didn't want to spoil it with his own monstrousness) in Silence, to Lecter brainwashing Clarice into renouncing all her old morals and believing that cannibalism was morally a-okay in Hannibal.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

And you've probably already seen these, but ...




Talk about a fusion between Harris and Elfman. :)

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Actually, I never have heard those before, but I've certainly heard OF them! Awesome. I'm curious to see how that could actually be on stage. That, and EVIL DEAD: THE MUSICAL. As someone who equally adores horror movies and musical theatre, this intrigues me.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

The first one highlights another very cool trait in Lecter - unlike movie villains who were either superhuman or else had insane resources to draw from, Lecter was just a goddamn MacGyver of violence. Oh, you left your ballpoint pen behind in his cell? Well, boo-hoo for Boudreau and boo-hoo for Blank, because that's all he needs to kill three cops on his way out of a building that's surrounded by the heat to a five-block-thick radius all-around.

[foxhack.livejournal.com]

I have those on MP3 too if you want them. :p

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

It's all good, they went through just fine! I'm a happy happy Heffie. Thanks! :)

[surrealname.livejournal.com]

While I no longer pull a strict Hopkins is better line in the Hopkins/Cox lector debate, we are still of 2 different minds about this. I now think that neither one is inherently better than the other, it is just 2 different tastes that both taste awesome for very different reasons.

All that said, Have I ever mentioned how much money I would pay to see Brian Cox play the Joker?

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

I'm coming around to actually appreciating Hopkins, but only as Lecter in SILENCE. The rest of the time, I'm not sure if he's phoning it in, or it's just that he's in crappier-made films.

Cox? Really, now? I'm not sure I can see it. Something out of DEADWOOD, perhaps?

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if anything, Cox is more '80s-era Luthor.

[themadhatter26.livejournal.com]

I do my best to forget the fact that Ted Levine was in Silence of the Lambs, due to my affinity for MONK and Leland Stottlemeyer.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Also Sinestro!

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

He didn't really stand out as Sinestro. As it was, I kept expecting Sinestro to do that weiner-tuck dance whenever he spoke.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

He sure as fuck stood out to me at the time, mainly because he sounded pants-shittingly scary instead of sounding like Snidely Whiplash, as everyone thought he sounded.

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

I agree with K-Box's comment above (http://thehefner.livejournal.com/641012.html?thread=6039540#t6039540) regarding the fanficcy nature of Hannibal. (My theory is that Harris, who doesn't publish very frequently--there were eleven years between Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal--wasn't particularly eager to write a sequel, but Dino de Laurentiis put some pressure on him to do so after the success of the movie, so Harris finally decided, well, if they wanted a new Hannibal book that badly, he'd give it to them good and hard. That, or, of course, he's run out of real creativity. And Ridley Scott really stepped up to the plate, especially letting Gary Oldman leave no scenery unchewed as the horrifically mutilated, pedophilic, sister-raping, own-nose-eating, killer-pig-breeding dude. Wonder why Oldman didn't take a screen credit?)

I tend to think that Hopkins is physically more like the description of Lecter from the novels, lack of polydactyly notwithstanding (it's an important plot point in the books). But Cox is more of a thinker and a plotter; that trick with the phone is straight out of classic 70s phone phreaking, complete with the social engineering to get Graham's home address. Hopkins is more of the übermensch who is simply faster and stronger than normal humans (something that Harris makes explicit in Hannibal); you'll notice that Cox's Lecter doesn't have the netting that physically keeps him from approaching the bars of his cell, which is described in the book (in the movie of SotL, that's changed to the solid plexiglass cell front). Also, yeah, he makes a handcuff key out of a pen in SotL (a paper clip in the movie), but his getting that in the first place depended on someone not following explicit procedures, so between that and the two Tennessee state troopers also breaking procedure, his escape requires three different people, at least, to carry the idiot ball. So, some of it is, I think, just the way the part was written.

Fun fact: Jeremy Irons was one of the people offered the part of Lecter (also, Sean Connery) before Hopkins. After the SotL movie came out, Irons (who was up for an Oscar for playing Claus von Bülow, which he won, the year before Hopkins won for SotL) played Lecter in a Saturday Night Live sketch with Phil Hartman. Can't find it online, but it was hilarious and deeply disturbing at the same time.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

To be fair, Chilton was the first guy who picked up the idiot ball, and he did so in a way that actually corresponded to his character - he was in such a mad rush to a) broker the self-serving deal with Lecter and b) prove his superiority to Lecter that he forgot the pen (and it's a pen in the movie, too).