TV/Movies Megathread

[Ideologue]

Wait, Scott Thompson is in Hannibal?  That's fantastic!

[The Brain]

Spider-Man is on TV. Peter Parkour is CGI-ing all over the place.

[katmai]

Okay Vinraith.

[Ed Anger]

Okay Vinraith.

I saw him post on Quartertothree the other day.

[Savonarola]

Just Pals (1920)

This is a very early John Ford film (he'd use the name "Jack Ford" in the credits until 1923.)  Bim is the town bum somewhere in Nebraska.  Bill, a young boy who rides the rails into towns gets adopted by Bim.  In the course of the films fifty minute run time they pal around, are castigated by society, save the pretty schoolmarm from accusations of embezzlement, foil a robbery and reunite an orphan with his parents; plus the kid gets grievously injured and Bim nearly gets lynched.

Ford obviously doesn't know how to tell a story yet; there's about enough story for four films.  Still the chase and fighting scenes are well done and the even the bit parts have a bit of sparkle to them.  You can almost imagine the John Ford that will be at points.

This film comes from more innocent times; when no one would bat an eye at a grown man and a boy that he had just met bunking together in a barn or think that the title "Just Pals" would be ironic.

[PRC]

A TV tracking shot?  I bet it ain't no big deal.

You'd be so wrong.  Just re-watched that fourth episode of True Detective.  That closing scene was fucking brilliant. 

I had no idea Matthew McConaughey had these acting chops in him.  Admittedly I haven't seen his most recent stuff like "Dallas Buyers Club" which has some buzz, but i've only really known him as the romantic comedy guy / "Two for the Money" guy.  Dazed and Confused had been his best work to me.  He's really taken it to the next level.

[Queequeg]

"I am so done talking toy you like a man" was also just a fantastically awesome line. 

Of course, I'm not knowledgeable enough to talk about the realism of the psychiatric angle of the show, but that doesn't worry too much; I usually only ask that the science aspects of a show be believable, not exact - I won't be able to tell anyway.

See, there's a problem.  It's not "believable."  It's simultaneously self-consciously "purple" (kind of over-violent, slightly camp, like a Giallo movie) but also tends towards Jungian and mythological archetypes.  This helps explain, with Spoilers:
[spoiler]I can't get you out of my head." That's what FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) tells people-eating psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) in the season-two premiere of Hannibal. If TV shows could exist like people, I would say the same thing to this NBC series while backing away slowly: I can't get you out of my head. At which point the series might reply, in Mikkelsen's honeyed aperitif of a voice, "Why don't we sit down and have dinner and discuss it? I made you something special."

Drawn from the fiction of Thomas Harris, this brooding drama from Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies) seemed a bad idea on paper—especially if, like me, you found the Howard Roark–like Hannibal the Cannibal more tiresome with each book and movie sequel and the Diabolical Serial Killer genre intellectually and aesthetically bankrupt, with a few exceptions. But in practice, this program is serenely unlike anything else on TV or anything that ever has been on TV. Although it's intricately plotted and packed with strong actors playing psychologically complex human beings—including Caroline Dhavernas as psychiatry professor Alana Bloom, who adores and wants to save Will, and Laurence Fishburne as Jack Crawford, the FBI's agent-in-charge of the Behavioral Science Unit—it goes against the grain of so much so-called quality TV, in that it is not interested in being a mere script-delivery device.

The story is compelling, and it cut off near the end of season one with a cliffhanger that was genuinely startling, not just for the speed with which it showed Will realizing that Hannibal was a devious killer (a twist most series would've saved for season two or three) but for the way it messed with our collective image of Lecter as the killer from The Silence of the Lambs, an incarcerated fiend dispensing bons mots to visiting FBI agents. In season one, Hannibal frames Will for murders that Hannibal himself committed or abetted, to the point of literally planting an incriminating ear inside Will's alimentary canal; at the start of season two, Hannibal takes Will's place as FBI profiler and occasionally visits him behind bars to ask for his "help" with ongoing cases, inquire about his well-being, and otherwise glean information that can permit him to sustain his deception.

Intriguing as these variations are, though, they're not the source of Hannibal's specialness; in fact, Fox's much dumber and clumsier serial-killer drama The Following pulls off similarly "shocking" twists each and every week, in its determination to be Se7en meets 24, or some such thing. It's a classic example of script-delivery TV, signaling every scare with a shrieking music cue, covering action and dialogue with multiple shaky cameras, and otherwise behaving as if horror's only purpose is to set up sledgehammer-obvious scares. Hannibal, in contrast, approaches similar subject matter in a thoughtful way. It does not restrict itself to The Following's tedious binary of "Something horrible is about to happen" and "Oh my God, that was horrible!" You could say it's as close as a broadcast network has gotten to the personal artistry of the best premium-cable shows, if it weren't bolder and more elegant than anything on pay cable right now, including HBO's own serial-killer drama, True Detective.

The show's greatest asset is its mastery of tone, a quality most shows don't have the time or inclination to get right. Hannibal's formal daring is never empty showmanship; it's always in service of making the whole series feel like an endless lucid nightmare. Its events feel emotionally "real"—the upcoming revelation of exactly how Hannibal got that severed ear inside of Will does for medical tubing what Psycho did for butcher knives—but in terms of "this happened and then that happened," you can't take any of it literally, any more than you could take Blue Velvet or Dead Ringers literally. Its decision to live entirely inside dream-space lets it depict plot developments of laughable absurdity, and violence of intense savagery, without opening itself to charges that it's too unbelievable or violent. The characters morph into ancient archetypes: the angel, the demon, the shape-shifting trickster. Every room is darker than a ­real-world room would be. The blinds or shades are drawn, the better to encourage Hannibal, his patients, and his own psychiatrist (X-Files star Gillian Anderson, who else?) to speak in conspiratorial whispers, their faces etched by chiaroscuro. Hannibal appears to Will in the form of both a magnificent stag and a hideous half-man-half-demon with antlers. The show's most exciting sequences are not its murders, chases, or fights (these are more often depicted as horrifying or sad) but those uneasy instances in which things seem mysteriously yet palpably off, even by Hannibal's standards. Brian Reitzell's score starts to burble and moan like Hell's orchestra tuning up, and you lean forward in your seat, knowing you're going to see an eruption of art for art's sake: a God's-eye-view shot of corpses laid out like shrimp on a wedding platter; Fishburne and Mikkelsen's faces reflected in Hannibal's carving knife; Dr. Bloom guiding Will in a memory-recovery experiment, her face becoming dark and demonic yet still somehow lovely.

In the end, this show is not about cops and killers or even reality and dreams. It's about how art affects the mind and body. It explicitly likens its subsidiary serial killers to striving artists struggling to perfect their style and be noticed by the public and appreciated by critics (the FBI). The killers work in mixed media: wood, steel, soil, plants, flesh, bones, teeth. When Will describes an especially elaborate murder scene as "a canvas made of bodies," in which "each body is a brushstroke," he's describing Hannibal itself.[/spoiler]
Link.

Fuller doesn't have that much of an interest in realistic people catching realistic serial killers.  That's not really what the Hannibal books are, though. They're out there.  There's things that are flat-out invented (Graham's "pure empathy"), and Hannibal himself has a lot less to do with real serial killers than Dracula or Satan.  I actually admire Mikkelsen and Fuller for going in that direction. 

For example, Graham and Fishburne's character are way dumber than Hannibal. I get that he's got to be the one manipulating them, but they don't need to be so stupid and gullible - in particular when they are supposedly some damn smart men themselves. The show also uses Graham's problems too often as an excuse for him behaving like an idiot, undermining himself, and furthering the writers' goals. It's cheap.

Graham has an empathy disorder and [spoiler]Anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis.[/spoiler]  He lives at home, alone, in the middle of nowhere, with like 10 dogs.  It didn't take a genius like Hannibal Lecter to[spoiler] fuck him over.[/spoiler]  Crawford is too busy and driven to look at Hannibal as a suspect, and I suspect that [spoiler]ultimately Crawford will reach the correct conclusion.  He's smart and capable, and I don't think anyone would suspect that the man trying to convince your wife to undergo chaemotherapy and who brings you to dinner ever week also butchered your star pupil.[/spoiler]

[Queequeg]

I also think you're overstating the case on Hannibal being a great character.  Like Sheilbh said, he's kind of a stupid person's idea of a smart person.  I don't think Thomas Harris is a great intellect, and frankly I don't think he has the ability to get in to the brains of actual, realistically depicted psychotics like Patricia Highsmith or depict all-out crazy Godlike evil like Cormac McCarthy.  In the wrong hands he can be boring (Red Dragon), or campy (Hannibal the movie).  It's probably easiest to do something like Brian Cox and throw out the core fantasy around the Hannibal character in favor of a far more realistic depiction of a psychopath. 

[Queequeg]

I read a few books on psycopathy and saved you all the full brunt of my weekly obsession, btw.  And one on [spoiler]Anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis that is specifically referenced on the show.[/spoiler]

[garbon]

You dropped us a wall of Ide text and you save us the full brunt of your obsession?

[katmai]

You dropped us a wall of Ide text and you save us the full brunt of your obsession?

[Neil]

Wait, Scott Thompson is in Hannibal?  That's fantastic!

Yeah, that was an unusual role for him to take, wasn't it?

[Queequeg]

I mostly did that for the lulz.  I wanted this topic to look like it was redacted by the[spoiler] NSA. [/spoiler]

[garbon]

I mostly did that for the lulz.  I wanted this topic to look like it was redacted by the[spoiler] NSA. [/spoiler]

Wouldn't they generally leave a word or two?

[Ideologue]

Wait, Scott Thompson is in Hannibal?  That's fantastic!

Yeah, that was an unusual role for him to take, wasn't it?

I like how he's basically doing Buddy Cole as a CSI dude, though.

There's things that are flat-out invented (Graham's "pure empathy"), and Hannibal himself has a lot less to do with real serial killers than Dracula or Satan.  I actually admire Mikkelsen and Fuller for going in that direction. 

Can't read your spoiler-filled, me-like wall of text because I'm watching the show now, but with this part I agree.  They go basically full cartoon supervillainy in the first episode and don't stop, which makes it all the more enjoyable.  (And if they didn't with the first, they did when they had the guy who was making mushroom people.  I mean, okay. )

Hannibal is best as a movie monster, and really has never been and cannot be played any other way; even in Silence he was a highly stylized figure.  His cartoonish elements don't mean he's not an excellent character, any less than anyone could reasonably argue that James Bond or Tony Stark is not a great creation.  They're stupid people's idea of a spy or inventor, but verisimilitude is not usually a criterion for a pop culture icon.

Anyway, I liked the part where Hannibal asks Will twice in the pilot if he may come in.