No, no, no, old review below! You bad old review, you!

lol. I’m even annoyed that I used The Quote in that otherwise damning review, ‘cos I was gonna start with it this time around. Oh well, I’m gonna do it anyway.

“Would you ever say, ‘Stop. If you loved me, you’d stop’?”
“Not in a thousand years.”
“Not in a thousand years … that’s my girl …”

Quite honestly, I could end the review right there. That single scene alone goes through me like electricity every time I see it. I’m sure everyone at some time or other has read a book or seen a movie or watched a TV show and wanted the story to go some way it never … not in a thousand years … would conceivably go, right? Well that scene for me, every time I see it, is just one of those inconceivable deliveries for me.

It’s the scene that always comes to mind when I tell people that this is one of the most romantic movies ever; what I always even forget myself is how romantic the rest of the movie is too. Sure, people are dying and those deaths are being investigated … but it’s always Florence or Sardinia etc … Lecter’s hand brushing Clarice’s hair on a carousel … it’s just got such a romantic approach to everything it touches. Even Hans Zimmer’s score knows it. I just love it.

1st September, 2005:

I still love the ending of this movie (“Tell me, Clarice, would you ever say, stop, if you love me you’d stop?” “Not in a thousand years.” “Not in thousand years…. that’s my girl … this is gonna hurt …”), I just get such a kick out of the fact they took the whole love story thing to its weird but perfect conclusion (my favourite moment in Silence of the Lambs is when Lector’s finger brushes Clarice’s) but the rest of the movie is pretty dull. It’s all interestingly designed and slickly produced and the acting is all round stunning, but for some reason it still drags.

One thing I do love about the movie is its dream-like quality – there’s almost no other way the movie could’ve worked, so literally insane is the direction the novel takes. Almost the entire movie here feels to me like Clarice’s flashbacks in Silence, and that makes so many of the movie’s flaws (eg. no matter how good Julianne Moore is as Clarice, she’s no Jodie) somehow palatable. However, even viewed this way, after a while it just feels a little pointless.

The classic. I think. This is one of those movies I’ve watched so many times both for fun and for study that I can’t help but quote vast chunks of it out loud as it plays. There are just so many things about this movie that, to my surprise every time, lift it far above the quality genre pieces the other installments in the series are.

It’s a perfect screenplay, to start with. Syd Field talked a lot of nonsense (I realised, eventually) about screenwriting and his “paradigm” is broken down with every recent passing week, but one of his books I’d still recommend is “Four Screenplays” which simply broke down four screenplays – this one, Thelma and Louise, Terminator 2, and Dances with Wolves – and showed why his system worked, owing a lot of course to Joseph Campbell, whose thoughts on mythology are overwhelmingly present here too – I think Jodie Foster in particular is fond of talking about the mythical aspects of this movie whenever she’s asked about it.

It’s interesting to me to notice that all those four screenplays, all produced between 91-92, have some seriously powerful women in them – Clarice Starling, Thelma and Louise of course, Sarah Connor, Stands with a Fist – and one of the most stand-out things about Silence is that it was made at a time when doing the whole feminist thing still actually meant something, before people started to see such things with an eye for cynicism and post-modernism.

I like the lightness here too, though, and it’s something I noticed while watching Hannibal is yet another thing I think they got right (in comparison to the very straightlaced Red Dragon and Hannibal Rising) there; “If this door should fall down or – heh-heh – anything else …”, “No … no, you ate yours,” – I think part of the reason I for one really didn’t object to Thomas Harris thinking a romance was spawned here is because of how the sharp minds of Clarice and Hannibal right from the off even resembled one another in the humour department.

It’s really just one of those perfect movies you can’t say much of for or against, being as it’s there in front of you as it is and it couldn’t be any other way. Even though I practically know it by heart, I still love it, could even watch it over again right now just a few days after watching it before. It’s classic Jodie, definitive Hopkins, perfect in genre; basically, more deserving of the Oscars it received than just about anything since. What else is there to say?

I have to ashamedly admit I tried watching this last year and I fell asleep – and I hardly ever fall asleep just ‘cos I’m tired. But I still gave it the benefit of the doubt and figured since I plan to make Hannibal the centrepiece of my Valentine’s Day this year as has long been my intention, I may as well do the whole series beforehand, and fit a virgin viewing in to boot

“You’re not following the human order, Hannibal. You’ve got to stop hurting the bullies.”

With a line like that and a cinematic legacy like Hannibal Lecter, this movie should really be so much better than it is. I was wary about a movie that looked so much like it was going to extend the “waahhhh boohoo I’m a victim of the 20th century” excuse for Hannibal Lecter even further than Hannibal went. Like I’ve said before, I think Hannibal is one of the most romantic movies ever … more on that maybe on Thursday … but there’s a point where the 20th century excuse can be applied so broadly as to demand a line to be drawn. So if you think I’m weird for thinking what I think about Hannibal, lol, then you might wanna think twice before venturing here.

In all, this is ever so slightly better than I feared (having fallen asleep the last time, how could it not be? lol) ... but it’s ever too involved and procedural to the point of distraction. I was inclined at first to blame this on the adaptation process but as I followed that thought through I realised that actually, though the screenplay clearly tries to keep a lot of events in that could easily be cut for the screen, those events actually wouldn’t even be relevant even in the longer novel form. As the end credits rolled I realised Thomas Harris himself was responsible for the adaptation, so I guess either way the blame falls to him. There’s a good story here, but it needs to be so much clearer, if only to match the simplicity of what came before in the Lecter story onscreen, even going back to Manhunter.

It’s basically very up and down – for every moment worthy of the title, there’s something like the, “The little boy died years ago – his heart died with Mischa,” line that makes the psychobabble at the end of Hitchcock’s Psycho seem positively legit lol; for all the good that Rhys Ifans and Dominic West put in by being so totally different from anything else they’ve appeared in, there’s things like the mask thing … yes, it has more sense to it than my initial kneejerk reaction of “WTF, why would he willingly put that mask on back in the 1950s!??!?” lol … but again, it’s just not made clear enough what it is nor what it signifies; basically as if it’s purely been shot for the trailer.

But for all that up and down that preceeds it, the main “transformation” scene where Hannibal gets his first taste of flesh is actually quite beautifully done – Gong Li walking away, “what is left in you to love?” with his creepily familiar tilting of the head at her followed by the animal dive to bite at a cheek … I can’t deny it left me with something almost approaching what Hannibal left me with … albeit it far less romantic … it’s by no means a failure, and I’ll no doubt watch it again to see if there’s anything else to it.

I feel the need to clarify something I’ve whined about recently and here seems like the perfect place to do it, and it regards those movies that are nothing but technically impressive. The ones where the first thing you find yourself mentioning is how “beautifully shot” they are or how marvelous the visual effects were or how great the music was etc. I said that if you find yourself mentioning things like this before anything else, it’s probably not really a great movie. I guess that was a little harsh. What I should’ve said is, if you’re gonna make a movie like that, your name had better be Julie Taymor.

This is actually a lot more like Across the Universe than I remembered it, obviously not in story or anything, but inasmuch as its noble failings. The one shot I remembered from the first (and last) time I watched was of course that of Lavinia in the open plain following her disfigurement, the sticks on the end of her arms reaching out for her uncle as blood issues from her mouth over the camera. It’s still one of the most extraordinary images I’ve ever seen, and it’s not the only one to behold in these few hours.

After I’d first seen it, this scene and what follows made me think Laura Fraser’s performance was a lot better than it really is. In fact, it’s only as the mute that she really impresses me now – in the first half of the movie, her performance kind of collapses each time she opens her mouth, something in the way she delivers the Shakespeare lines that just gives away how lost she is amongst heavyweights like Hopkins and Lang.

And that’s kind of the movie’s problem too – luckily, the wobbly stuff here is mostly confined to the first half of the movie, prior to the scene where Lavinia is brought back to Titus. It’s also, it must be said, never quite as wobbly as the stuff in Across the Universe. The “everyplace, everytime” set-up jars about as often as it works – it’s at its best when the 20s jazz-style score sets up the travelling circus-like reveal of the heads of Titus’ sons, a moment that just about makes the many times it falls flat worth it. Alan Cumming jars almost every time he’s onscreen – but he’s Alan Cumming, so that too can be forgiven.

Ultimately, this is absolutely the movie to show disinterested kids to show them that Shakespeare’s anything but boring. Even I still now have to stop in places during this and ask myself, is this really Shakespeare, lol? Really? Reaaalllly?!?? The casting of Anthony Hopkins is almost cheeky; he of course is pretty much just Lecter again in the movie’s last hour or so. Do I care? Not a bit. This is one of the greatest revenge stories ever told – of course, I’d almost entirely forgotten the Sweeney Todd connection here, too, which extends far beyond meat pies – and Julie Taymor turned it into one of the greatest Shakespeare adaptations ever put onscreen. Right now, I think it’s second only to Branagh’s Hamlet in my mind.

It’s a rare movie these days that actually makes my jaw drop over gore, and this movie wins if only for making me do exactly that more than a few times over its duration. It’s as badly acted and cheesy as the other HG Lewis movies I’ve watched over the year, but alongside Two Thousand Maniacs it’s really the only one I’m ever likely to watch again.

The gore really is astoundingly vile, lol, and it’s incredible how like the old Lewis movies it really feels, despite being made decades after – like, these days, we still have bad acting in movies, but somehow Lewis managed to cast people here who deliver a whole different class of bad acting. I think that’s perhaps why it works better than the older ones for me; like, the reproduction of that feel of almost 40 years previous is almost a gimmick in itself … and 5 years before Tarantino’s Grindhouse, you’ve kinda gotta put your hands together for an near-80-year-old who can still deliver something so schlocky. It almost makes me want to check out the others again. The John Waters cameo is icing on the cake

After Two Thousand Maniacs, I was really looking forward to delving into Herschell Gordon Lewis’ other works. I guess I still am – I realise this was his first real blood fest so I’m still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt – but this was still a massive disappointment for me. It’s nowhere near as bloody as I expected, the acting is like an Ed Wood movie, and frankly, that doesn’t leave much else to be desired.

“A jaywalking iguana! That’s all we need now!”

This is essentially a replica of Holocaust with a bunch of hapless idiots venturing into the jungle to disprove the existence of cannibalism (place your bets on the outcome of that) intercut with a New York story which in this case does nothing but help make the movie feature-length. Where Holocaust, I found to my surprise, ultimately had something pretty heavy to say, however, this one is more interested in getting to the 10 minutes or so of gore in the finale.

The heroine staring into the camera at the end having denied the whole thing ever happened hints at the way Holocaust implicated the entire audience in the ordeal by virtue of their mere watching; and yes, that final gore is pretty nasty (I’m sure the movie makers were glad that girl had bigger boobs than Francesca Ciardi, lol …) ... but overall it’s all pretty pointless. Hmm … let me clarify that, since most of these movies are overall pretty pointless lol; I mean in a bad way here.

I spent half this movie trying to think of what it was reminding me of. Then it hit me – 28 Days Later ... it’s the gradual descent into inhumanity of the film-within-a-film documentary crew, the sudden realisation that people basically suck almost as bad as monsters. After my complaints about Jungle Holocaust, my strange, “hey, what’s so bad about cannibals,” thought, it seems here Ruggero Deodato was thinking the same thing too. This is an incredibly grim portrait of how basically animal people can become under the right (wrong?) circumstances. It’s far more visceral than Jungle; and though it seems odd to call it “slicker” ‘cos it’s still delightfully cheap, it is still more proficiently shot, and the music’s really nice. Gotta love the casting of a near totally-flat-chested woman in a role that calls for so much gratuitous nudity too, lol.

If weren’t for the fact that it’d probably be too much of an assault on the senses, I think this would make a great double bill with Last House on the Left. Both movies seem so much on the surface to be pure exploitation but the fact is they’re not. If you’re remotely titillated by what these movies have to offer (and frankly, I think a good majority of viewers would be lying if they said they weren’t) – they expose that part of you completely. “I wonder who the real cannibals are,” is the last line here, and it couldn’t be more succinct. It kind of embodies the movie as a whole – yes, as a line, like the movie it’s incredibly cheesy … but it addresses such an animal thing, and on this viewing at least, this movie just really worked for me much better than expected.