I’ll let Joe finish him; however, we’ll start with a bang by revealing that the apostle of indie movie and detractor of big hollywood movies, in his fact a sucker for the geekiest ones…

Let’s start by talking about that one time when after a long morning shoot of special effects where Peter showed his Eraser Head signature haircut, he and the guys there convinced me to trade a lovely afternoon with my beloved girlfriend to go see Star Trek Nemesis… Peter has every Star Trek movie on DVD, and even if I have to admit that he didn’t take part on the “what quadrant have they discovered yet” or he wasn’t standing in tears when the robot died, he still enjoyed the movie a lot…

To go back on the geeky part and not to piss off the other fanboys, I have to say that Peter, Joe and I went to see Star Wars Episode 2 Attack of the Clones on opening day… and even if it’s Joe who brought his toys collection, it’s Peter who was playing with the action figures…

But I’m not making fun of Peter to hurt him, Peter is a very cool guy that would not let a brother down, or shall I say would not leave a buddy sleeping in a car… After a long night of playing video games leading to the screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at the fanciest Seattle movie theater (ah College, I miss thy)… While waiting in line one of our fellows fell asleep in the car and as we all said to let the poor dude sleep in peace, Peter insisted to wake him up and drag him to the movie… where the fella fell asleep…

Joe is taking over…

I’m sure you remember when he made us watch The Last Starfighter, at your apartment. An interesting choice for a bunch of grown up guys in their 20’s. He’s convinced to this day that it’s one of the best movies ever.

Another funny thing about Peter is that he sleeps with a DVD playing on repeat in his room, a fact you’ll become well aware of if you ever crash at his place. It’s all well and good if the movie is something quiet like A River Runs Through It, but one night Frenchie and I were subjected to that epic space opera, The Wrath of Khan, played on repeat the entire night. Every couple of hours we were awakened by the voice of Shatner bellowing “Khaaan!” out into the depths of space and to the futon I was trying to sleep in.

Peter’s 5 Tips to Survive a Horror movie:

Must be a virgin
Like the movie scream, a virgin always seems to survive the onslaught.
Must treat others more than yourself
It seems that if you care more for others than yourself you have a tendency to survive more
Must be unaggressive at first, but display an aggressive base.
Most leads are terrible unaggressive at first but seem to be assertive. When a situation arises you know that they are going to survive
Must be naive but aware of things around you.
Most leads are aware of wrongdoings, but are completely naive to the issues at hand.
Be able to withstand the first blow.
Some leads are able to withstand the first blow and get away. If you cannot then you are doomed.

Joseph’s 5 Tips to Survive a Horror movie:

Never separate.
It’s a basic law of survival that has existed since the invention of carnivores — Stay with the flipping herd, people. And what are you doing investigating weird sounds at night, anyways? Are you an idiot?
Don’t be a Paxton.
You know, the guy who’s always jittery and saying stuff like “game over, man,” or generally cramping the style of the group with their cowardess.Those people are usually the first or second to go, depending on what point the group decides to seperate to investigate weird sounds.
If you’re black and it’s the mid-90’s or earlier, you’re fucked.
Anytime more recent than that and you should be fine, especially if you’re Ice Cube.
Quit saying “there’s got to be a perfectly rational explanation for all this.”
Did you not just see your girlfriend’s cousin levitate and vomit her own entrails? What the hell is wrong with you? Wait a minute, are you seriously going off to investigate a sound right now? You know what, nevermind, carry on. I want to watch you die.
It’s called preparedness.
How’s the battery doing in your car/flashlight? Did you keep track of how many bullets you have? Do you remember which key unlocks the front door or starts the car? And here’s a thought: try looking behind you every now and then. It couldn’t hurt.

My 5 Tips to Survive a Horror movie:

Run… but not into the woods
The biggest problem is people lock themselves into homes and barns, as a general rule any enclosed space is a death trap, so just run away… but not in the woods, that’s like a giant death trap… the most recommended is a well light road or an international airport.
Forget about your friends
You know that hot blond girl you always had a crush on that in the face of danger told you when this is over you’ll be together, or your friend Jerome, the one that allows you to say that your not racist cause you have a black friend… well forget about them cause there is no way in hell they will live through this… it’s called dead weight for a reason… By the way, I include fuck buddies in friends… having sex is a death sentence, so forget about them too.
Don’t accept the help from hillbillies
When you are running on the road and a friendly buck tooth slack-jawed yokel offers you help, just keep running, the more time you talk to them the more chances you have to finish as meat in their freezer.
Find the link
Is your house built on a pet cemetery, have your parents burned a child killer before you were born, or are you a councellor at Camp Crystal Lake? Finding why and what is out to get you is your only path to salvation… forget fighting, a silver bullet and holly water can work in some cases but for the most part they are as efficient as blowing a kiss to stop a bullet train… find the link to you or one of your teammates and what you are up against and you’ll know how to defeat it.
When you think it’s over keep running cause it ain’t over yet…
Remember that in most cases you have to face something supernatural, and that you’ll more than likely won’t know the difference between being inconcsient and being dead… so when you think it’s over… use that time to go ahead and escape even further, cause by the time you’ll realize it’s not over, more than likely you’re demise is already happening.

In an essay on Henry Miller entitled Inside the Whale, George Orwell writes: “The historical Jonah, if he can so be called, was glad enough to escape, but in imagination, in daydream, countless people have envied him.” He goes on to say that the reason for this is because the whale (technically a large fish) in the biblical legend is, in essence, a man-sized womb, a warm, dark, blubbery cushion that guards the inhabitant from the constant horror that is reality. Carl Jung would agree that there are plenty of folk who on some level feel this way, and he called them introverts, though it’s not all that cut-and-dry. Orwell’s essay paints a picture of Miller as a “willing Jonah,” though he admits that Miller is not especially introverted, he is just someone who practices “a species of quietism,” a “je m’en fous” attitude of passivity that comes from “either complete unbelief or else a degree of belief amounting to mysticism.” This sort of attitude may be perfectly appropriate for a drifting bohemian writer like Miller, but it would seem that for a filmmaker, who must constantly be at war with different personalities and forces of nature, there is little room for reclusiveness or reverie, and this is probably the chief reason that these same themes are so often used in film.

What got me thinking about this was watching the deeply fascinating documentary, Crumb. There’s a scene where Robert Crumb is talking with his older brother Charles, a mentally disturbed man in his 50’s who never moved out of his mother’s house. He has done nothing since adolescence but read old books and down antidepressants and tranquilizers. Barely leaving the confines of his sad, stale room, he is without any articulated hopes or desires, and his libido is completely withdrawn, forever lost in some deep, impenetrable recess. “I don’t even get erections anymore,” he tells us, ambivalently. Charles’ story is like a more tragic version of the the life portrayed in the also-excellent documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and he is like a Daniel Johnston prototype who never left the nest. Charles’ younger brother Robert, the one who went on to become the “rich and famous” cartoonist, tells him “I always kind of envied your life, in a way,” which is perhaps the most revealing and poignant point in the movie. The film reveals R. Crumb as an artist from a troubled family who may have ended up as hopelessly reclusive as his two brothers became, had he not been as successful or prolific in the outlet of his art — though ultimately he seems ambivalent towards the direction his life went. Crumb’s feelings toward his success in the outside world is soaked with jaundice and misanthropy, and though he left his two brothers back in the mad womb behind him, there is still a part of him that has never truly left it. Like Henry Miller, he is someone who participates in the world but feels no meaningful connection or empathy towards it. As Orwell would have it, he is still inside the whale, but “the whale happens to be transparent.”

In a sense, this is the goal of the artist in recreating an abstraction of the world in a subjective way — an escape or detachment from reality. Objects found in real life are approximated in a way that can be controlled to fit the will of the creator, and film is the greatest expression of this secret, morbid desire — the desire to escape, to be unattached. Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is a great example of this. In the film the protagonist Sam has a dream where he is hanging from a rope leading to a caged woman that he is in love with, but his legs are held by a pair of brick arms that have emerged from the ground. That scene is similar to the opening sequence in Fellini’s 8½, in which the main character begins to float in the air to escape an urban gridlock, but he is held in limbo on a string by some men below who are treating him like a kite. Both of these films deal with a world weariness and frustration with the protocols and responsibilities that are thrust on the individual, and in both films, the main character ends up retreating, rather than confronting the problems or expectations placed upon him. In a recent interview, Terry Gilliam exclaimed that the ending of Brazil was a “happy ending,” though most people would not see it that way. Sam rides off with the girl of his dreams toward some postcard-like horizon, until we find out this is only happening in his mind, society has conquered him completely and he has gone mad, losing and all connection to reality — “but who gives a fuck?” says Gilliam. “He’s created a world that’s satisfying to him. The outside world can’t get at him and that, to me, is happiness.”

All of Gilliam’s films have this same theme, and the worlds he creates are fantastical, invasive, gritty, grotesque and absurd, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting of a Dickens novel. Often there is a struggle between reality and someone’s inner world, and the underlying desire is freedom from the hassles of the objective world, a return to a primitive or infantile state of subjective interaction that is experienced in childhood. A young child tends to interact with people the same way they do with “non-living” objects; action figures, dolls or even stones can have their own personalities, and often are more interesting than the “real” people around them, whom they have much less power over. The Surrealist movement in general is dedicated to re-creating that magical, subjective state of mind. Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer is a great example of an artist who recreates that world where mundane objects take on a surreal new life, where people and “things” are completely interchangeable, and often it is the “things” which ultimately triumph. The Brother’s Quay have followed in his footsteps. Their film adaption of the novel Institute Benjamenta is beautiful and intriguing, but difficult to penetrate — though I suppose that is the point. A more well-known, but equally-abstract artist, David Lynch has asserted that the films he makes are not intended to be analyzed in an intellectual way; they are meant to be felt viscerally. In most of his films, linear storytelling is abandoned completely in favor of creating moods and emotions. Bill Pullman’s character in the film Lost Highway states, “I like to remember things my own way. How I remember them; not necessarily the way they happened,” and in the unstable, shifting reality of the film we get the sense of a consciousness trying to escape the memory of something terrible, perhaps a tragedy or guilty knowledge of an unspeakable crime, though it is never clear what exactly is happening, what is real or what is imagined, or if the whole thing is some twisted dream.

A director like Lynch’s purpose in filmmaking isn’t that much different from that of folk in so-called mainstream or commercial cinema, as different as the results may be. Sergio Leone had said that after a screening of Once Upon A Time In America, a man asked him why the first and last shot in the film was of Deniro in the opium den, and Leone suggested that, who knows, maybe the whole film was just a drug hallucination. The answer flustered the man, who walked off indignantly, but Leone was raising an interesting point about film in general, a point that Jodorowsky also made in the self-referencing ending to The Holy Mountain: it’s just a movie. Whether a film is considered a work of “realism” or “surrealism,” whether it’s purported to be a depiction of fact or fiction, ultimately the theater is a place where people go to have vicarious, impermanent experiences. We are entering a world that is a nice place to visit, but we wouldn’t want to live there. Death, torture, madness, heartache, hallucinations, explosions and absurdity are experienced from within a passive bubble — a transparent whale — and for a while we as viewers become like the angels: other-worldly, infantile, and indestructible. We laugh, we cry, we cringe and we marvel, but when it’s over, we wander back to the mundane world of cars, families, jobs, phone calls, funerals, televisions, and medical bills, with nothing really lost or gained, except for perhaps a light conversation piece to share in the fluorescent haze of our daily lives.

In short, if the chronological timeline would be, Hannibal Rising, Red Dragon, the Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, the cinematic timeline is entirely different.

 
Let’s start to talk about Manhunter… It’s a quite good movie, not stellar, but good, Michael Mann does a great job as usual, and all the actors are fairly convinving; unfortunately and as you probably realized it the movie is not as memorable as the others featuring Dr. Lecter (or Lektor as it was spelled in Manhunter).

Then came the quintessential Silence of the Lambs, with a brilliant Jodie Foster, and an unforgettable Anthony Hopkins’ impersonation of Hannibal Lecter; it’s an amazing movie and a outstanding adaptation of the novel.

The third movie released is Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, which is the straight sequel from Silence of the Lambs. It has a phenomenal cast, Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman, Ray Liotta, and replacing Jodie Foster, Julianne Moore. As a standalone feature, it is quite good, the problem I have with it is I cannot juge this movie solely based on itself; it is a sequel from another movie and is an adaptation of a novel; therefore there is no other choice than taking those into account… and that’s where it starts not being very nice… I believe the biggest problem is the hollywoodian extravaganza that Hannibal is, luxurious decors, and amazing cast, star screenwriter to pen the adaptation etc… But Julianne Moore as great of an actress as she is, doesn’t stand the comparison with Jodie Foster when it comes to being Clarisse: where Jodie Foster was a plain average looking character, like in the book, Julianne Moore plays a very attractive Clarisse, and the rural accent that was part of the character is simply gone… She is doing the best that she can and is very good; it is just not the right person for the part… And now the biggest flaw of the movie… it’s a terrible adapatation… The reason why Jodie Foster refused to reprise her role is mostly due to the changes made to the story by the screenwriters… wait for it this is a spoiler; the ending was changed!… Yes the ending the cherry on the cake of the book, which depicts Clarisse going to the dark side, and embrassing Hannibal’s kindness is simply… gone… also I will skip the movie script, removing Mason Verger’s sister who is a key character in the novel, and the whole psychological nature of the book, which explains why Hannibal is fascinated by Starling (and not in a romantic way) and how Clarisse goes into his world after being shunned by the corrupted office.

Red Dragon which is technically the prequel from Silence of the Lambs, is way better than Hannibal, the script is tighter and closer to the source material; no drastic changes, a fantastic duo between Edward Norton and Anthony Hopkins. It’s a great movie which outshines 1986’s Manhunter in every single way. It also features little winks to the fans of the series, especially at the end of it.

The last movie to date featuring Hannibal Lecter is Hannibal Rising, which is the lowest point of the series… both the book and the movie have been slaughtered by the critic… The main problem with both is that it a self indulgent franchise banking book, which seems to be made just to sell without staying true to the character; some events mentioned in the previous works are appearing, but it’s just a series of cliches and shock value sequences which don’t mix well together. On top of that the movie suffers from a really bad casting, with a main protagonist who isn’t able to fit in the role that made Anthony Hopkins an icon.