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Memo, July 23 2003 TO: CSB I just had a long talk with Tammy, and let me tell you: I learned some things. Back to Red Dragon. So Silence of the Lambs was a film. It was successful enough to permeate pop culture and leave its mark forever. It is instantly recognizable and considered one of the greats, certainly of the nineties. And there has never really been another movie like it. And after two sequels, there still hasn't. "But COME ON you crazy bastard!" say all you cynical readers, "They're SEQUELS. They're not going to be as good as the original, they're going to be cheap knock-offs!" That's a harsh lesson we've all learned many times over. Most sequels are utterly uninspired. Many of them do not appear to have taken any effort. Some of them seem utterly unwarranted (see previous memos). Some of them expose how thin the original's premise was in the first place (see local theater RIGHT NOW and guess which goddamn movie I'm talking about). Some of them seem to miss the point entirely as to why the original worked. And then there are the most frustrating, the most depressing... the ones that drop the ball on recreating the easiest elements of the first installment. I must reiterate; I have NOT SEEN Terminator 3. BUT the reaction I get from what I have seen is this: how fucking hard is it to get a Super 35 camera and shoot Arnold from a low angle with cold blue lighting? JUST HOW FUCKING HARD IS IT! No, I know James Cameron didn't want to make 3. But the story I keep hearing is that the flick has kind of a cool story. Well okay... you want to make part 3, you want to continue the story, then WHY are you eschewing the most superficially effective aspects of the first movies? WHY does the world of the Terminator films SUDDENLY LOOK UTTERLY DIFFERENT?! WHY DOES ARNOLD LOOK LIKE AN AVERAGE-SIZED MAN WHO JUST KIND OF SHOWED UP WEARING LEATHER!? WHY OH WHY OH WHY GOD DID THE GUY FROM SCREAM DO THE MUSIC SCORE AND NOT THE GUY FROM, oh I dunno, THE TERMINATOR! WHY DID YOU MAKE TERMINATOR 3 LOOK AND SOUND JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER MOVIE OUT THERE THIS SUMMER! WHY DO YOU INTEND TO MAKE MONEY OFF A FILM THAT MADE MONEY AND NOT EVEN FOLLOW ITS QUITE ESTABLISHED FORMULA! WHY ARE YOU APPLYING THE FORMULA FOR OTHER MOVIES WHERE IT DOES NOT APPLY! WHY ARE YOU SURPRISED IT'S NOT MAKING THE COLOSSAL AMOUNT OF MONEY YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD?!! WHY OH GOD WHY DO I THINK TERMINATOR 3 WAS MADE BECAUSE OF THE MATRIX! Note that the last question was rhetorical. However, if I travel from the future to answer that question in this present and then grow old and then go back in time to right now and answer the question and then just continue to live in a loop, does the question cease to exist? Okay, what if I create a machine while I'm here that then tries to destroy the earth in the future and sends a machine back in time to kill my mother and then its existence allows me to invent it... doesn't that mean that the machine always existed and that the act of traveling through time is actually the act of being in the present and there is no way to change the future because the future has both already happened and is a part of the present? Fuck it, let's put in a car chase. So it looks like T3 all but ignored its predecessor. Like another certain sequel that I'd like to speak of... This sequel is called HANNIBAL. Now, Hannibal the movie does improve upon the book. It is, occasionally, an effective movie. Ridley Scott hasn't been the visionary in the today that he was in the yesteryear, and his latter-day visuals reek of Bruckheimer/MTV influence, but he can still create some points of interest. And the Italian guy was cool. And it's impossible to say if it would have been better if Jodie Foster and Jonathan Demme was involved, since the lack of Jodie Foster does lower expectations enough that the movie does not necessarily dissapoint, and hell, Jonathan Demme hated the book so much he might have made the film less in the style of Silence and more in the stlye of, I dunno, Married to the Mob. Oh dear. But Hannibal is clearly a film made far from the model set by Silence. The universe looks different. The white fluorescents and mortuary tones are replaced by grainy natural lights and a reddish palate. There is a run-dunt-dunt score. The camera is an action-movie cam; slow-mo, high shutter, hand-held, trying to create action rather than be intrusive and unnervingly intimate, like the first film. There is no hard lighting on the actor's faces while they stare into the lens. And Clarice has changed from a smart, resourceful, and gifted economical actress to a repressed redhead with two speeds; stoic, strong, and pissed, followed by vulnerable, scared, and weepy. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Julianne Moore. In Safe. And Boogie Nights. And Short Cuts. And Cookie's Fortune. She did a pretty complete job of embodying the unrealized potential of a content '50s society wife in Far From Heaven. And I remember thinking she was sexy in The Fugitive and that awful I mean awesome Madonna movie. But she was a poor excuse for the character in the first film and a piss-poor excuse of a Ridley Scott heroine. So HANNIBAL... decided to not even bother with the recreation of Silence. They went on a whole new road and created a movie that just doesn't seem to fit the original. They just don't go together. And considering what happened next, that just might have been an admirable move. Because RED DRAGON thinks that it is channeling The Silence of the Lambs. Every stylistic choice reeks of a bunch of guys who said, "But remember in the first movie..." It is copycat work. And it SUCKS. OH DEAR JESUS this is going to be a three-parter! Saints preserve us!! That's what I get for digressing. I'll finish this one up eventually, but I'm going to have to go through League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and then every fucking aspect of Red Dragon to get there. Whew. I don't even drink coffee. And I need some coffee. Brew me a pot with Ratner's contract for Rush Hour 3 as the filter, and don't forget to tell people how to get in touch with us. |