¡Qué horror! 2013 Candidate #14

¡Qué horror! 2013

Candidate #14

HANNIBAL

(April 2013)

For the record, I love Bryan Fuller’s TV work (though the Mockingbird Lane pilot did leave me wanting), and the show of his I really, truly, and completely loved was Wonderfalls.

So the fact that Caroline Dhavernas is part of the cast of Fuller’s adaptation of Hannibal is all sorts of awesome.

Of course, that’s not the reason why I’ve singled out Hannibal--another TV series (after Les Revenants)--for a ¡Qué horror! candidate slot this year; Dhavernas is many things, but a “horror” she most certainly is not.

Hannibal is here because this is a solid adaptation of Thomas Harris’ serial killer novels featuring Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter.

Ostensibly, Red Dragon is the main source material for the show, a novel which has already been adapted to film twice, in 1986 by Michael Mann under the title Manhunter, and in 2002, by Brett Ratner.

According to Fuller’s roadmap of the show though, Hannibal Season 4 would be the adaptation proper of Red Dragon, while, if the stars align, we may actually see a television adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs,* envisioned as Season 5 of the show, should we get that far.

And if the level of creative quality remains constant (or hopefully, actually increases), then that’s a future I’d very much like to see. 

In Season 1 alone, we’ve got some heavy directorial hitters like David Slade (whose excellent Awake Pilot was one of last season’s TV highlights), Michael Rymer (who solidified his geek cred with his work on Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica), and 75-year-old Peter Medak (who scarred many an audience member with the chilling quiet horror of 1980’s The Changeling).

Then there’s Guillermo Navarro, frequent cinematographer for Guillermo del Toro (including the upcoming Pacific Rim), who won a whole slew of awards--including the Oscar--for his work on El Laberinto del Fauno. Navarro had previously worked with Fuller as DP on the Mockingbird Lane pilot, and here, he directs a trio of episodes (as do both Slade and Rymer, taking a lion’s share of the season between the three of them).

Some Twin Peaks episode helmers are also in here: James Foley (who also brought us the big screen adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross) and Tim Hunter (no, not the Books of Magic kid).

All that livewire creativity and talent behind the camera, and we haven’t even gotten to the excellent cast.

The cold, clinical detachment Mads Mikkelsen brings to his Hannibal is a fine offset to the twitchy, tortured nature of Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham. And, you know, Mikkelsen had to walk in the intimidating footsteps of both Brian Cox and Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Plus, there are those guest star turns:

Gillian Anderson, who enters at the midpoint of the season, under the beautifully unlikely name of Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier;

Fellow Chris Carter alumnus, Lance Henriksen;

And other past Fuller collaborators: Raúl Esparza, Eddie Izzard, Ellen Greene, and Ellen Muth (but that was a pretty evil way to wrap up her guest starring stint, Mr. Fuller, an evil way…).

So with both Dhavernas and Muth having made their appearances, all we need are either Lee Pace or Anna Friel (or both) to enter Hannibal’s world, and we’ll complete the Past Fuller Leads Trifecta.

Hurrah!

In a world where TV procedurals have reached well beyond saturation point, one of the things that saves Hannibal from the potential pitfall of becoming just another one of those “serial killer of the week” shows is the serialized nature of its narrative.

Coming into the show with a general idea of the overarching narrative (from the Harris novels and the previous film adaptations of the material), the audience is hooked. They want to see how the cards fall, they can’t wait for the other shoe to drop, for Graham and company to discover exactly what kind of a monster Lecter really is.

It’s the same approach to story that was successfully utilized in Smallville (at least, for the first few seasons), and more recently, in Bates Motel.
We all know Clark Kent eventually becomes Superman, we all know Norman Bates eventually kills his mother and a whole string of unfortunate motel guests, we all know Hannibal Lecter eventually ends up in the loonybin where he gets to play cat and mouse with Clarice Starling.
Part of the fun lies in watching how we get there.

And thus far, this is some morbid, gruesome “fun.” (Network television is getting away with a lot these days…)

If I could ask for something though, I’d ask for a bit more psychopathology; the show doesn’t really bother to explain the whys of their killers. We meet them fully (mal)formed, without any significant idea of how these sick puppies got so ill, without knowing the twisted road they walked to get here.

It’s almost as if Fuller and company are saying, serial killers really are inexplicable.

It’s almost like they’re saying, there is no “Why.” Serial killers simply are.

And that’s a truly horrifying thought…

* A possibility that both intrigues me (because there were some bits of the novel that were dropped in Jonathan Demme’s adaptation; among them, Jack Crawford’s turmoil, the seeds of which, have already been planted by Fuller and company in Season 1) and terrifies me (because The Silence of the Lambs is one of those brilliant lightning in a bottle moments in cinema, where everything seemed to align exquisitely).

Again, for the record, Demme’s Silence is, thus far, the only Harris film adaptation that I’ve been completely floored by. All the others--from Mann’s Manhunter, through until Peter Webber’s Hannibal Rising--haven’t come even close.

Here’s hoping Fuller’s Hannibal can succeed where all those others failed…

(Hannibal OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)

¡Qué horror! 2013

Candidate #9

MANIAC

(May 2012)

While Elijah Wood returned to the hobbit thing in An Unexpected Journey, he also revisited the whole serial killer thing in Franck Khalfoun’s redo of William Lustig’s 1980 slasher, Maniac.

Written and produced by Alexandre Aja (with help from frequent collaborators Grégory Levasseur and Maxime Alexandre), this one has some brutally effective kills courtesy of the awesome Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger of KNB EFX, plus it’s largely presented to us from the POV of Wood’s Frank Zito, the titular psycho.

As far as content and narrative elements, this is certainly not the most original of this year’s ¡Qué horror! candidates thus far, but it’s got a bunch of things going for it.

There’s that tricky POV cinematography (from the aforementioned Maxime Alexandre), a score by Rob* reminiscent of Georgio Moroder’s work for Paul Schrader’s Cat People remake, and an excellent callback to two of Jonathan Demme’s films. (Note: Playing what has become the signature theme to The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill may not be the smartest choice for a music cue after you’ve just invited a virtual stranger up to your apartment.)

* The Maniac score is available as a limited vinyl release from Mondo with "variant white vinyls randomly inserted."
How awesome is that?!

(Maniac UK quad courtesy of impawards.com.)

reVIEW (32) 
SUSPECT ZERO

I only recently got to see the amusing faux documentary Incident at Loch Ness on cable, which got me some good looks at one Gabriel Beristain (cinematographer on Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade II and David S. Goyer’s The Invisible) and one Zak Penn (who directed Incident). Since Penn co-wrote Suspect Zero, I thought, “Why not?”
A few years back, E. Elias Merhige gave us Shadow of the Vampire, the canny exploration of creativity set against the backdrop of the filming of the classic German silent film Nosferatu. Now, Merhige returns with Suspect Zero.

“A 50 foot shark. Ever see one?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

FBI Special Agent Tom Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart) has been relegated to the Albuquerque field office after a six-month psych evaluation following a much-publicized breach of Bureau protocol. As it turns out, Mackelway has become the obsession of Benjamin O’Ryan (Sir Ben Kingsley), a man who claims to be a former FBI agent, and is apparently a remote viewer, a psychic individual able to “see” things happening in distant locations. Shortly into the film, Mackelway becomes embroiled in the investigation of a man murdered by O’Ryan, a man whose eyelids have been sliced off.

If you’re beginning to get the impression that Suspect Zero is a grisly, disturbing piece of film, well, you’re partially right. Though certainly nowhere near as grisly and sordid as Seven was, Zero is a subtly disturbing exercise in the building of mood. With masterful editing and the use of eerie audio tracks and an eclectic and interesting musical score, Merhige manages to construct a movie that keeps itself afloat by virtue of atmosphere.

“Okay, but a serial killer, by definition, is condemned to repetition, isn’t he? I mean, isn’t that what he’s all about?”

Where Zero falters however, is its script (by Billy Ray and Zak Penn), which doesn’t allow itself to build any momentum to carry us forward. The fact that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of urgency to solving the case doesn’t help matters much either. Unlike The Silence of the Lambs or The Cell, where we are given a specific victim in current jeopardy to identify with, the victims in Suspect Zero are too much of ciphers for the audience to care about, except in the most abstract of ways.
Though not as handicapped as Seven is when stripped of its technique, Zero nonetheless lacks a certain something to make it a film of substance. Or perhaps, there is a little too much there to make it a tight, coherent piece. Much like the frantic and cluttered writing and art of O’Ryan, one detects a certain busy-ness of plot elements and details that only serve to obscure the merits of what could have been an excellent film.

Fortunately, we have Eckhart and Sir Kingsley to keep us occupied. Eckhart, with his past work with Neil LaBute (In The Company of Men, Possession), has proven to be an engaging performer, and Sir Kingsley brings both a borderline psychotic intensity and world-weary humanity to O’Ryan that is a privilege to watch. Given that, it’s sad that Carrie-Anne Moss, who proved in Memento that she can do more than just fancy martial arts on wireworks, isn’t given much to do by the script.

And once again, the script is the culprit, which I believe is the case with practically all the post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer thrillers, including its sequel Hannibal, and its prequel, Red Dragon. Not even Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter could save Copycat, and as I alluded to earlier, bereft of David Fincher’s moody technique, Seven’s script isn’t much to write home about either.

“We saw things men shouldn’t see. Agony. Torture. Evil.”

In trying, among other things, to posit a new sort of serial killer for the new millennium, the metaphorical “50 foot shark,” which may exist despite not having been seen by mortal eyes, Suspect Zero only succeeds in giving us a muddied view of a grab bag of ideas that never quite comes together into a cohesive whole. Perhaps if Ray and Penn had trimmed down some of the story’s minutiae, focused less on ideas and more on the story’s rhythm, Suspect Zero could have been the film it clearly wanted to be. As it is, though it isn’t a total waste of time, it also isn’t an entirely satisfying cinema experience.

Parting shot: Eckhart, who was also great in Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking, will be seen in next year’s The Dark Knight, as D.A. Harvey Dent, a.k.a. The Man Who Will Be Two-Face.

(Suspect Zero OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

(The above review began life under the title, “A View To A Kill.”)

reVIEW (22)
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

This one—a slightly altered version of a review previously published in 2004 entitled “The Politics of Paranoia”—is being resurrected because whatever the film may be saying is still pretty important.

It’s an election year in the United States. From left (Fahrenheit 9/11 and a host of others) and right (George W. Bush: Faith in the White House and a smaller host of others), documentaries are being released to help spark debate, and hopefully, influence votes. Along with these documentaries are a handful of feature films that tackle political themes or subject matter. There is John Sayles’ Silver City, with Chris Cooper; though quite possibly the highest profile of these batch of films is Jonathan Demme’s remake of the 1962 Frank Sinatra-starrer The Manchurian Candidate, which was, in turn, based on the novel of the same name by Richard Condon.

Updating the Cold War scenario of the original, Denzel Washington is Major Bennett Ezekiel Marco, a Desert Storm veteran who is beginning to doubt the veracity of his memory. Marco’s dreams are telling him that something is not quite right in his head, and the heads of the members of his former unit, among them, Congressman Raymond Prentiss Shaw (Liev Schreiber), poised to become the next Vice President, under the careful, guiding hand of his mother, Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep).
What Marco uncovers is an apparent conspiracy to position a brainwashed puppet President in the White House, dangling on the strings of Manchurian Global, a “private equity fund” which is described by one character as a “geopolitical extension of policy for every president since Nixon.” (Though I’m sure PoliSci grads out there know exactly what that means, as a mere plebeian, all I got from the context in which the line was delivered was that this was a Very Bad Thing.)

With a cast like this, one expects sterling performances, and none of the principal three disappoint. Washington’s Marco is normally a capable and confident soldier, but when faced with the possibility of being betrayed by his own brain, he is understandably on edge. Schreiber is astoundingly convincing as a charismatic political candidate, secretly chafing at the control his mother has over him. And Streep, of course, is Streep. Her Eleanor Prentiss Shaw is the proverbial power behind the throne, the matriarchal manipulator who will see her son in the White House, no matter the cost.
Sadly, Dean Stockwell and Miguel Ferrer are among the underutilized members of the cast, particularly Stockwell, who does little more than stand around and frown.

Now, as a thriller, The Manchurian Candidate is not as taut as I had hoped it would be (Demme, after all, gave us The Silence of the Lambs). In addition, the plot, in certain instances, gets either a tad predictable, or takes an all-too-convenient turn.
The film does, however, get plus points for technique.
With a script structured in fragments that usually end in a fade to black, Demme successfully emulates the nature of memory: we don’t recall every single detail. We remember things in blocks, in chunks of sight and sound. Also, to heighten the atmosphere of paranoia that runs throughout the film, Demme occasionally uses close-up shots of characters speaking directly to the camera—to us, the off-camera character they are addressing.

Now, if it isn’t quite clear, let me spell out the fact that though The Manchurian Candidate is a thriller, it is not of the characters-chasing-one-another-down-crowded-city-streets-to-a-pounding-techno-beat school, nor does it have any significant plot twists to play mindgames with the audience. Much of the tension and conflict is internal and relational: Marco struggling to maintain his sanity despite the X-Files-like conspiracy he suspects is taking place; Raymond Shaw, caught between his own best intentions, his mother’s ambition, and Marco’s increasingly agitated claims.

Regardless of the film’s pros and cons though, I do think it’s a rather sad statement that in the original 1962 film, the motivation for putting a sleeper in the White House was ideology. Today, just over four decades later, it’s economics. It’s to ensure that the man in the Oval Office will keep the perpetual war running so the people making the money off the conflict continue to do so.
At least when the Chairman played the paranoia game in `62, it was because of a belief in something far larger than a piece of paper with an arbitrarily-assigned value attached to it. Ah, well, the times do change things, don’t they?

So, if you’re going to watch The Manchurian Candidate, see it for three things: the performances, the storytelling technique, and—mind you, this could be paranoia talking—the metastory I suspect is being told: of the horrifying ease with which people can be bought and owned by third parties. That the Manchurian Globals of the real world don’t need anything as sci-fi as subdermal implants nor as James Bond as post-hypnotic commands. All they need is the right amount of money to throw at greedy, weak-willed people, and they’ll have their puppets in place, dancing to the tunes they play, ready and eager to roll over when the order is given.

Parting shot: For fans of Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, Hitchcock pops up here in a minor role, which isn’t the first time Demme has cast a musician in his films: Chris Isaak played a SWAT team leader in The Silence of the Lambs.

(The Manchurian Candidate OS and DVD cover art courtesy of impawards.com.)

HANNIBAL

RISING

(Review)

This has to be said: After the Oscar grand slam win* of The Silence of the Lambs, there really wasn’t anywhere to go but down.
Thus, Hannibal and Red Dragon** came nowhere near their predecessor. And neither does the prequel, Hannibal Rising.
So the question is: Is Hannibal Rising at least a worthwhile film?
This latest film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ work has, at the very least, more merit than either Hannibal or Red Dragon. That doesn’t stop it from being underwhelming though.

Hannibal’s back story begins in 1944, Lithuania, where his parents and later, younger sister, are killed, casualties of the raging war. This is the film’s brief initial section, a pivotal moment in the serial-killer-to-be’s life.
Cut to 8 years later, and Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel, from Christophe Gans’ Le Pacte des Loups—Brotherhood of the Wolf—and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Un long dimanche de fiancailles—A Very Long Engagement) is a young man growing up in an orphanage located (ironically enough) in what used to be the Lecter family castle. It seems young Hannibal refuses to speak, the only sounds he makes, when he is gripped by nightmare, as he screams his sister’s name.
Escaping the orphanage, he makes his way to the home of his uncle, only to find his uncle has already passed away, leaving behind his widow, Lady Murasaki Shikibu (the luminous Gong Li). Reminded of her late husband by this young stranger, Lady Murasaki takes Hannibal in, setting the stage for the first, coldly violent killing which will be the initial step on the road which will eventually lead him to Jodie Foster and Oscar glory…

The problem with Hannibal Rising is, ultimately, it’s not a very involving film. We’re watching an amoral character going about killing people and we’re not really going to sympathize with him, are we? There is something about Hannibal’s portrayal here that makes him an entity distant and unknowable by the audience.
And we have no Clarice Starling this time around to identify with; Hannibal Rising’s law enforcer, Inspector Popil (played by Dominic West, a regular on The Wire, who also starred in The Forgotten alongside Julianne Moore, and is in the upcoming 300), though an interesting character, isn’t really given enough of a presence in the narrative.
Meanwhile, the mutual attraction between Hannibal and Lady Murasaki (love has always been a twisted theme where Hannibal is concerned) isn’t mined for all its dramatic worth either, causing a distinct lack of internal conflict within the young man. He knows he’s out for blood, and he doesn’t waver from that cold knowledge.
The audience knows this too, so we know what choice he’s going to make in the end (this is, after all, a prequel). The key would have been to make it a torturous journey, with a wrenching choice at journey’s end. But everything seems coldly preordained. There is no human interest here. As Popil points out, the boy who was Hannibal Lecter died during the war. All that is left for us to view is something they didn’t have a name for yet back then…

Hannibal Rising does, however, take pains to establish motifs and character traits cinema audiences have come to associate with the good doctor. Thus, the drawings, and (in a chilly bit of foreshadowing) a section of a samurai mask.
This fixation on continuity does have its drawbacks though, as the scene where Hannibal turns the tables on his interrogator and questions Popil feels stilted and contrived.

Though this is the first time writer Thomas Harris has actually adapted his own novel for the big screen, there’s not enough going on in the narrative to make the experience interesting. Director Peter Webber (Girl with a Pearl Earring) doesn’t really bring anything particularly noteworthy to the table either. (Though it must be said that he’s a far better choice than getting Brett Ratner again; it still boggles the mind how he bagged the Red Dragon gig.)

Since it isn’t atrocious though, I imagine Hannibal Rising would be of interest to any Lecter completists out there.
Let’s just hope that this is it for our favorite cinema cannibal. He’s definitely overstayed his welcome.
Sorry, Doc. All out of fava beans and Chianti.

* This is when the same film wins all five major Academy Award categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress.

** Actually the second time Harris’ novel was adapted. The first time Red Dragon came to the screen, it was under the title of Manhunter. Directed by Mr. Miami Vice himself, Michael Mann, Manhunter starred Brian Cox (seen recently in Ryan Murphy’s Running with Scissors, also reviewed here) as Hannibal.

(Hannibal Rising OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)

(Originally posted 021507)