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*

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.

[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:

[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?

[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.

[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).