Hannibal: He slices AND dices!

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The NBC TV series Hannibal is a show that shouldn’t work. It’s a show that’s based on a book series that inspired a mega-popular set of films. And the title character of Hannibal as portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in these films is cemented in popular culture with spine-tingling lines like, “I ate his liver with some fava beans,” that still resonates today. And the fact that Hopkins won an Oscar for his portrayal of Hannibal doesn’t hurt either.

hannibals3-3So anything like a TV show that has a central premise of doing a revision on Hannibal Lector’s backstory as well as having a different actor in the title role should have crashed and burned in an episode or two.

Yet Brian Fuller’s version of Hannibal is so much different than anything that’s come before and is so well written and acted instead of being terrible is one of the best things on TV today.

While there seems to be a lot of material produced on the character of Hannibal Lector, before the TV series there really wasn’t. There were really only four novels that featured the character; Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006), all of which were turned into movies at various points.

And the stories these books tell starts with the Hannibal character caught and already in prison in Red Dragon, his escape in The Silence of the Lambs, on the run in Hannibal and then Hannibal Rising went back in time to a much younger Hannibal and revealed how he got the taste for human flesh.

But other than some flashbacks none of these Hannibal stories dealt with just what Hannibal was doing at his medical practice before he was caught for his crimes and sent to prison. Enter the Hannibal TV show.

Know this: the Hannibal show IS NOT a TV version of the 2001 Hannibal movie. The TV series follows a pre-jail Hannibal where he’s a trusted asset to the FBI in hunting serial killers.

“You’re not my friend. Even the light from friendship won’t reach us for a million years.” Will Graham on Hannibal Lecter

In the first season Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) and FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) along with special agent Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) together track serial killers across the US. And with Hannibal’s inside information of being a serial killer but no one knowing this yet and Graham’s weird ability to almost literally enter the minds of the killers the team are very successful at what they do.

But no one suspects that in reality Hannibal is one of the worst serial killers on record, the Chesapeake Ripper. And that slowly Hannibal is setting up Graham to take the fall for his killings.

“I wanted to surprise you. I knew you wanted to surprise me.” Hannibal Lector

hannibal_ver9The second season of Hannibal dealt with Graham in prison trying to prove his innocence, which is tougher that you’d expect with someone as detail oriented as Hannibal who’d spent months setting Graham up, and then he and Crawford trying to entrap Hannibal and jail him for the killings.

Think Sherlock vs Moriarty, except that if Sherlock loses Moriarty eats Sherlock and you’re close to what the second season of Hannibal is.

Where Hannibal is different than every other serial killer drama that’s on TV today, and boy are there loads of bad ones, is that Hannibal goes places none of those other shows dare to tread. Be it with characters questioning the very nature of reality to gorgeous yet disgusting set design to the idea of what exactly is good and evil.

Lesser series rely on cliched plots where the good guys always gets the bad guys. Hannibal instead relies on clever storytelling and plot twists.

“When it comes to nature versus nurture, I choose neither.” Hannibal Lecter

The third season of Hannibal is set to premier Thursday, June 4 on NBC and deals with Hannibal on the run as well as elements from the Red Dragon story. But whatever the third season of Hannibal has in store I can only imagine that it’ll be fascinating and cringe worthy and as exciting as the previous two seasons have been.

Wolf Hall

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wolf-hallI’ve been watching the TV series (mini-series?) Wolf Hall on PBS lately. I like it but I feel like I’m missing some of the story intracacies since I’m weak on my 16th century British history. I feel like if I’d grown up in the UK then I’d know my Cromwell’s from my Boleyn’s from my Seymour’s. As it is I’m aware of who these people are but honestly have no real idea of how they fit with each other in a historical context.

It’s like with the series TURN on AMC about the American Revolutionary War. The creators of that show don’t go into a lot of historical detail of the hows and the whys since here in the US those things are mostly already known. And I get the feeling that’s happening a lot on Wolf Hall too for audiences in the UK.

That being said I do like Wolf Hall. The characters are well drawn and the story is interesting. I just feel like when certain historical things are going on I’d be gleaning more information from that story than I am if I’d be able to base it in more of the real historical context.

As a side note…it is interesting to see a series about at the time one of the strongest countries on the planet being ruled by a bunch of 20 and 30-somethings. The series could easily be more soap opera-ish, which it apparently was with the Showtime series The Tudors, but here that’s just another fact of life when the average lifespan was someplace in the 40s.

 

Mad Max: What a lovely day

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It took me a lot of years to fully appreciate the movie Mad Max (1979). I saw that film many times on TV during the 1980s but if you would have asked me back then if I’d preferred Mad Max or its sequel The Road Warrior (1981) I would have gone with The Road Warrior every time.

BKBKRH Film Mad MaxIt wasn’t until Mad Max was finally released on DVD in its unedited and undubbed form that I began to see the strengths that movie had and slowly began to consider it the best Max movie of the bunch.

Since the fourth Max Max movie Mad Max: Fury Road is out May 15 I decided to watch the original Mad Max again. This time through I noticed something interesting that I hadn’t taken note of before. In Mad Max there’s a long stretch of film that has almost no dialog for more than 10 minutes. Which might not sound like much but in Mad Max which on its surface seems to be nothing more than a b-grade Western with cars instead of horses it’s something special.

In Mad Max, it’s the near-future and Max (Mel Gibson) is a police officer who gets on the bad side of a gang of bikers who murders his wife and child in retribution. Max, who goes “mad” as the Australians say “crazy” as Americans do, heads off on the hunt for the gang to kill each and every one of them.

Max is run down
Max is run down

Which by all accounts is b-grade material that’s been used in loads of revenge movies/stories for years and years and years. But where Mad Max is different from what’s come before are those 10 minutes.

Over that stretch we see the bikers go about their activities bar hopping and stealing gas all the while being stalked by Max. Who eventually catches them on the open road and runs some of them down. The surviving bikers start looking for Max, ambush him and shoot him in the knee and run over his arm.

Here’s where the only bit of dialog in those 10 minutes comes in. There’s a total of nine words spoken between the two biker leaders as Max lays helpless on the road:

Toecutter: “Quit toying, Bubba.”
Bubba: “Easy, I know what I’m doing.”

The Toecutter
The Toecutter

And that’s it. Max gets the upperhand, kills Bubba and in a spectacular real-life stunt chases the Toecutter with his car mere inches from the back wheel of the bike as the two scream down the road. Eventually the Toecutter crashes and is killed by a semi.

Then Max goes off to find the last member of the gang Johnny the Boy in a final scene that’s back to dialog.

But those 10 minutes are something to behold. It seems today that every movie, be it action or otherwise, is chock full of dialog. And it’s easy to see why. It’s simpler for a character to tell the audience what’s going on (“We need to go over there!”) rather than showing them doing it. And with movies that have a lot of story this is an easy way to save time.

A chase in Mad Max
A chase in Mad Max

Where this technique goes askew is with modern action movies that are so complex the characters need to literally tell the audience what’s going on to keep them from becoming confused as to what’s happening on-screen. Things are exploding and there’s heroes fighting here and villains fighting there. And if someone’s not telling the audience what’s occurring it all becomes a mess and the viewers can become lost.

When I wanted to become a comic book artist I once read an article that recommended watching movies with the sound off. It said that if you can understand what’s going on with without dialog then the writer/director’s done their job well.

Which is what I thought about the last time I watched Mad Max. This whole 10 minute chunk of the movie plays out perfectly well with perfect visual clarity. There’s not a question as to what’s going on or why Max is going after these guys on screen. I was never confused as to what was going on and any extraneous dialog would have added nothing to the scene.