Hannibal redux...
Feb. 24th, 2002 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpI just went back to reread my first impression of Hannibal, which I deliberately did not read prior to jotting down my impressions of a second viewing, one year later.
Wow. What a difference a year makes, eh?
To be sure, the book is tons better than the movie, but I'm getting tired of saying that, about any movie. In the end, the book and the movie are two different entities that answer to separate criteria. I'm coming to the realization that bitching about the gap between the big screen and the small page doesn't change the basic premise that the Gap is There, and Will Remain.
In my memory, only one movie I've seen ever appeared to follow the print version of the story, and that was Inherit the Wind starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, based on a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. I suppose it's not hard to imagine a play transferring directly to a film format, but still...
I guess I still would go along with my assessment that the climax of the film would leave some viewers confused, especially those who hadn't seen (or read) Silence of the Lambs. Sure, there'd been hints dropped along the way in this story that there was "something" between Lecter and Starling, but unless you'd seen that "something" in Silence, you pretty much had only the word of people in the plot as to what it might be. Then again, that might explain the slinky dress Starling wears at the end of the film: a way of showing the really clueless rubes in the audience that there's some kind of love interest brewing.
Those in the audience who had read and seen Silence might have wished, as I did, for a different direction for the development of the climax, but as the man says: "You can't always get what you want."
Time to get to sleep. Obviously, I did nothing to finalize the translation since my last post; I'll have to get to it tomorrow.
Cheers...
Wow. What a difference a year makes, eh?
To be sure, the book is tons better than the movie, but I'm getting tired of saying that, about any movie. In the end, the book and the movie are two different entities that answer to separate criteria. I'm coming to the realization that bitching about the gap between the big screen and the small page doesn't change the basic premise that the Gap is There, and Will Remain.
In my memory, only one movie I've seen ever appeared to follow the print version of the story, and that was Inherit the Wind starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, based on a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. I suppose it's not hard to imagine a play transferring directly to a film format, but still...
I guess I still would go along with my assessment that the climax of the film would leave some viewers confused, especially those who hadn't seen (or read) Silence of the Lambs. Sure, there'd been hints dropped along the way in this story that there was "something" between Lecter and Starling, but unless you'd seen that "something" in Silence, you pretty much had only the word of people in the plot as to what it might be. Then again, that might explain the slinky dress Starling wears at the end of the film: a way of showing the really clueless rubes in the audience that there's some kind of love interest brewing.
Those in the audience who had read and seen Silence might have wished, as I did, for a different direction for the development of the climax, but as the man says: "You can't always get what you want."
Time to get to sleep. Obviously, I did nothing to finalize the translation since my last post; I'll have to get to it tomorrow.
Cheers...
