Hannibal
To paraphrase a pretentious philosopher concerning a very pretentious movie, Ridley Scott perhaps loves Hannibal more than Hannibal would love Ridley Scott if it came to life. It's the sequel that sucks more than most, perhaps any other sequel, and not only because SoTL was damn near perfect, but because Hannibal cannot be sustained as a main character and every movie with him in it afterwards, and yes even Red Dragon, sucks complete ass because it tries to do this.
Anyway, the story, as far as I can make it out:
Clarice and a team of FBI/DEA crime busters are after a drug dealing Mob Momma with AIDS and her baby which she carries around with a baby backpack as a body sheild. Things go awry and Clarice guns her down, which causes a public relations hiccup because the FBI doesn't cotton to agents blasting and laughing away like Ma Barker in broad daylight at a Mob Momma spraying and praying with a MAC-10.
I thought Clarice wanted to go into the Behavioral Science Department, in fact she was pretty adament about that in SoTL, and killing Buffalo Bill and graduating with top honors would kind of cement that ambition. I guess somwhere along the apocryphal timeline between SoTL and Hannibal Jodie Foster inspired a cannibalistic cabal of copycats and just decided to abandon the whole serial killer thing when Harry Conick Jr. got involved.
And, also, she might just be turned off with serial killers in general:
Anyway, the story, as far as I can make it out:
Clarice and a team of FBI/DEA crime busters are after a drug dealing Mob Momma with AIDS and her baby which she carries around with a baby backpack as a body sheild. Things go awry and Clarice guns her down, which causes a public relations hiccup because the FBI doesn't cotton to agents blasting and laughing away like Ma Barker in broad daylight at a Mob Momma spraying and praying with a MAC-10.
I thought Clarice wanted to go into the Behavioral Science Department, in fact she was pretty adament about that in SoTL, and killing Buffalo Bill and graduating with top honors would kind of cement that ambition. I guess somwhere along the apocryphal timeline between SoTL and Hannibal Jodie Foster inspired a cannibalistic cabal of copycats and just decided to abandon the whole serial killer thing when Harry Conick Jr. got involved.
And, also, she might just be turned off with serial killers in general:
Clarice is put back on the Hannibal case by Ray Liota, not because the FBI wanted to catch Albert Bundy Fish but because for over a decade the FBI just plumb forgot about him. At some point Mason Verger has to pay someone off to even get Hannibal back on the Most Watnted List. Liota is also paid off by Verger, an old victim of Hannibal's, played by Gary Oldman with thankfully enough makeup and versatility to let me forget it's Gary Oldman and replace him with a disfigured Hoggle from Labyrinth. He looks like what would happen if ABC picked up Tales From the Crypt and wanted an adorable, puppy-like Crypt Keeper.
Mason wants Hannibal because Hannibal doped him up with Amyl Poppers and persuaded him to cut his face off with a shard of glass. I don't know what this says about Amyl Poppers but if I learned anything from Hannibal it's to leave that shit alone. I can understand Mason wanting some cold-dinner-revenge, but why has he waited apparently ten years after Hannibal escaped to do anything?
When he does look in the mirror and realize "I don't have a fucking face!" he gets down to business, bulding a pig farm with hogs the size of ROUS which he aquired in the noncannon SoTL fan fiction. He then trains them to eat people with a dummy and boombox that screams, all additions from the original Hannibal rough draft stolen by Brad Pitt and Francis McDormand and subsequently blackmailed into the plot. How they got someone to scream for the Pavlov-reaction they're looking for is secondary to the stupidity that the boars are trained to eat when Hannibal starts screaming, which he wouldn't do unless they were already eating him.
Meanwhile Hannibal is at a university in Florence, seeking some chiar or otherwise unwise postion complete with all the pomp and circumstance unbecoming a notorious serial killer on the lamb. Hannibal at this time would be so sought after by every bounty hunter from Dogg to Django the only place he could hide would be Las Vegas, the last place even Clarice says he would be, yet is herself oblivous to the fact that that's exactly where he would be. Not to mention the 1-800-Hannibal-Hotline Mason set up manned by a 24/7 staff, just in case of the 4 a.m. I Spy Lecter on the Sly phone-tag that involves a extensive and inexpedient parlay of the terms concerning the capture of Hannibal of the "Human Skin Mask Dillinger Escape Plan".
Clarice is blackballed again when Mason pays Liota 500,000 dollars to plant a love letter from Hannibal he claims she kept to HER SELF because she's head over high heels in love him. She has to give up her badge and gun in the "give up your badge and gun" trope but stays on the case in the "I'm going to stay on the case anyway" trope which eventually becomes the "He loves me but he eats people and it's my job to catch people that eat people but he is so fur curling charming" trope. We've all seen that one before.
Meanwhile, I think, back at subplot 1 subdivision 2, an Italian detective spends a lot of time figuring out Dr. Fell looks exactly like Hannibal Lecter, but he has to double check his intuition that Dr. Fell might be Hannibal by logging on the FBI's Most Wanted site where, lo and behold, there's Dr. Fell!
He contacts Mason and arranges a Hannibal Hiest which involves Mason's incompetent goons and the Itlaian detective's own strategy of buddying up to Hannibal and introducing him to his tasty wife. This is where Hannibal starts breaking the fourth wall like the Kool-Aid Man in a wrestling ring by talking to himself about eating people and suitcases being as heavy as bodies. No serial killer, ever, would say "Okie Dokie!" before diembloweling a man in an electric dolly and then hanging him from a balcony.
What is this, Hannibal Lecter's Day Off?
When he does look in the mirror and realize "I don't have a fucking face!" he gets down to business, bulding a pig farm with hogs the size of ROUS which he aquired in the noncannon SoTL fan fiction. He then trains them to eat people with a dummy and boombox that screams, all additions from the original Hannibal rough draft stolen by Brad Pitt and Francis McDormand and subsequently blackmailed into the plot. How they got someone to scream for the Pavlov-reaction they're looking for is secondary to the stupidity that the boars are trained to eat when Hannibal starts screaming, which he wouldn't do unless they were already eating him.
Meanwhile Hannibal is at a university in Florence, seeking some chiar or otherwise unwise postion complete with all the pomp and circumstance unbecoming a notorious serial killer on the lamb. Hannibal at this time would be so sought after by every bounty hunter from Dogg to Django the only place he could hide would be Las Vegas, the last place even Clarice says he would be, yet is herself oblivous to the fact that that's exactly where he would be. Not to mention the 1-800-Hannibal-Hotline Mason set up manned by a 24/7 staff, just in case of the 4 a.m. I Spy Lecter on the Sly phone-tag that involves a extensive and inexpedient parlay of the terms concerning the capture of Hannibal of the "Human Skin Mask Dillinger Escape Plan".
Clarice is blackballed again when Mason pays Liota 500,000 dollars to plant a love letter from Hannibal he claims she kept to HER SELF because she's head over high heels in love him. She has to give up her badge and gun in the "give up your badge and gun" trope but stays on the case in the "I'm going to stay on the case anyway" trope which eventually becomes the "He loves me but he eats people and it's my job to catch people that eat people but he is so fur curling charming" trope. We've all seen that one before.
Meanwhile, I think, back at subplot 1 subdivision 2, an Italian detective spends a lot of time figuring out Dr. Fell looks exactly like Hannibal Lecter, but he has to double check his intuition that Dr. Fell might be Hannibal by logging on the FBI's Most Wanted site where, lo and behold, there's Dr. Fell!
He contacts Mason and arranges a Hannibal Hiest which involves Mason's incompetent goons and the Itlaian detective's own strategy of buddying up to Hannibal and introducing him to his tasty wife. This is where Hannibal starts breaking the fourth wall like the Kool-Aid Man in a wrestling ring by talking to himself about eating people and suitcases being as heavy as bodies. No serial killer, ever, would say "Okie Dokie!" before diembloweling a man in an electric dolly and then hanging him from a balcony.
What is this, Hannibal Lecter's Day Off?
The Hannibal Hiest goes foul and leaves the detective in aforesaid condition, Hannibal killing one of the goons with a raptor claw knife and skidaddling back to America. He slips in Clarice's house and leaves her some modern art he made with a magazine add, thus adding plausibility to the fake love letter Mason wrote. Then Hannibal calls her and she gets a gun she keeps in her closet just in case she had to give up her badge and gun but wanted to stay on the case anyway.
Mason has Hannibal kidnapped, only Clarice figures out that Mason would want revenge and somehow got his hands on Hannibal and attempts to capture/rescue him. I can't honestly for the life of me figure out what her primary motivation is. Anyway, Hannibal is tied to a gurney and the hogs don't eat him but eat their shitty smelling handlers instead. Mason's butler dumps Mason into the pit, complete with his Rascal, and then the pigs, totally out of their pig-character, just established seconds ago, DO eat him although they clearly only eat shitty smelling things (not to mention they never go after the goddamn boombox, not once, they pay it no mind) and don't tell me this movie is all of the sudden being metaphorical out of fucking nowhere. Hannibal escapes with a damselized Clarice, which leads to:
The Hannibal/Merry Romantic Chase Plot, the Clarice/Liota plot, the Clarice capture/rescue plot which somehow involves in different aspects the other two, and the Mason plots, which thank god Mason's dead because keeping track of his own three subplots, and the also dead detecitve's THREE (dealing with Hannibal, dealing with Mason, dealing with Clarice) and I know there's at least one I'm forgetting ... oh yeah, Hannibal's Tenure Plot, his Hospital Excursion and whatever happened to the FBI/DEA drug sweep thing, this ... is ... ALL JUST WAY TOO MUCH SHIT GOING ON IN ONE TOIELTTE!
Anyway it all caps off- I'm not sure but I think for the most part all the other plots are dead or forgotten about- in the single most awkward dinner I have ever seen involving three top-notch actors. Hannibal is his usual sophisticated self; Clarice is drugged and in a dress she must hav Xanaxed herself into, otherwise Hannibal or Liota put her in it and let's not go there please; Ray Liota, god bless him, has his cranium sawed off, also drugged out of his mind, yet still sexually harrassing Clarice as if anything is ever going to change about that after calling her a country cunt or something, which he does again, sans cranium. Hannibal proceeds to cut off Liota's brain, and cooks in front of him and Clarice, and Liota is the only one interested in eating some.
Liota dies, I think but don't hold me to it, and Clarice tries to capture Hannibal but Hannibal escapes by cutting off his finger. And that's it, other than Hannibal feeding a five year old some Liota brains for no goddamn reason at all.
And people wonder why I refuse to watch the show....
Mason has Hannibal kidnapped, only Clarice figures out that Mason would want revenge and somehow got his hands on Hannibal and attempts to capture/rescue him. I can't honestly for the life of me figure out what her primary motivation is. Anyway, Hannibal is tied to a gurney and the hogs don't eat him but eat their shitty smelling handlers instead. Mason's butler dumps Mason into the pit, complete with his Rascal, and then the pigs, totally out of their pig-character, just established seconds ago, DO eat him although they clearly only eat shitty smelling things (not to mention they never go after the goddamn boombox, not once, they pay it no mind) and don't tell me this movie is all of the sudden being metaphorical out of fucking nowhere. Hannibal escapes with a damselized Clarice, which leads to:
The Hannibal/Merry Romantic Chase Plot, the Clarice/Liota plot, the Clarice capture/rescue plot which somehow involves in different aspects the other two, and the Mason plots, which thank god Mason's dead because keeping track of his own three subplots, and the also dead detecitve's THREE (dealing with Hannibal, dealing with Mason, dealing with Clarice) and I know there's at least one I'm forgetting ... oh yeah, Hannibal's Tenure Plot, his Hospital Excursion and whatever happened to the FBI/DEA drug sweep thing, this ... is ... ALL JUST WAY TOO MUCH SHIT GOING ON IN ONE TOIELTTE!
Anyway it all caps off- I'm not sure but I think for the most part all the other plots are dead or forgotten about- in the single most awkward dinner I have ever seen involving three top-notch actors. Hannibal is his usual sophisticated self; Clarice is drugged and in a dress she must hav Xanaxed herself into, otherwise Hannibal or Liota put her in it and let's not go there please; Ray Liota, god bless him, has his cranium sawed off, also drugged out of his mind, yet still sexually harrassing Clarice as if anything is ever going to change about that after calling her a country cunt or something, which he does again, sans cranium. Hannibal proceeds to cut off Liota's brain, and cooks in front of him and Clarice, and Liota is the only one interested in eating some.
Liota dies, I think but don't hold me to it, and Clarice tries to capture Hannibal but Hannibal escapes by cutting off his finger. And that's it, other than Hannibal feeding a five year old some Liota brains for no goddamn reason at all.
And people wonder why I refuse to watch the show....