It’s really more like Hannibal sinking into the depths of depravity, but that’s not as good a title.
Our story begins in 1941, in Lithuania, of all places. No, Hannibal isn’t a Lithuanian name, nor is Lecter, but there we are. The character is now Lithuanian, so get over it. The point is that Lithuania isn’t a good place to be in 1941, as the Russian troops are retreating through the country, chased by Nazis, and the Lecter family must flee their castle and take refuge in a hunting lodge in the woods. Refuge doesn’t last long, though — a Russian tank stops there for water, a German plane attacks it, and all the Lecter adults are killed, leaving young Hannibal and his little sister Mischa (also not a Lithuanian name) as the only survivors.
Then a group of disgruntled locals arrives, would-be SS officers who are looking for shelter. Unfortunately, there isn’t much food, and it isn’t long before hunger drives them to look for…unusual sources of nourishment. All right, yes, they decide to eat Mischa. The movie avoids saying it in so many words for quite some time, but we all know what’s going on. (“He ate my sister” is kind of an awkward line to say anyway.) And yes, it’s terrible, though sadly probably not too uncommon in that time and place. It still seems like an odd plot point to me, though — I would think that having had a close relative eaten would be much more likely to turn a person into a vegetarian than into a cannibal, but maybe that’s just me.
We next see Hannibal (now played by Gaspard Ulliel) back in the family home — as just another one of the orphans being “cared for” there by the Russian overlords. Communism apparently makes them lazy, however, as Hannibal one night discovers a packet of letters his mother left behind eight years earlier, just sitting in a drawer. After escaping the orphanage, he uses the letters to find his uncle’s home in France. Hannibal’s bad luck holds, though: his uncle is dead. (Yeah, yeah, we get it, filmmakers — his life sucked.) Things turn around when he discovers that his very young-looking, beautiful aunt (Gong Li, from Farewell My Concubine, who’s actually 41, according to imdb.com) is still alive. She takes him in, and they quickly develop a close but seriously disturbing relationship.

“I never drink… wine.”

At this point, things were still interesting. It was still more a character-study sort of film, making some effort to get the viewer to understand Hannibal, if not actually sympathize with him. (I mean, he was a child being terrorized during a horrible war. How could you not root for him?) But somewhere along the way, it turned into a standard revenge movie, and I started losing interest. They also tried much too hard to pay homage to the other films and books — Hannibal’s targets have all gone on to peddle flesh in one way or another, from taxidermy all the way to white slavery, and the bit with the mask is just silly.
His aunt teaches him some swordplay, though she must have skipped mentioning anything about a samurai code of honor. He kills his first victim (the poor guy brought a knife to a swordfight) for her sake, and she helps shield him from Inspector Popil (Dominic West, from The Forgotten), who’s on his trail. Strangely, the inspector doesn’t really try too hard to catch him, and seems to trust him to a scary extent. I guess that’s just what happens when the police officer isn’t the hero.
It might have been a better film without the mythos of Hannibal Lecter hanging over it. Gaspard does do a good job of playing a psychopath, but there are things about the character that don’t quite mesh with the adult Hannibal. He tells his aunt, apparently sincerely, that he loves her, and his tortures are only reserved for the bad guys. He’s wracked with guilt over the fate of his sister, and while this helps explain his madness, I think I liked it better when we didn’t quite know why Hannibal was the way he was. He’s much spookier that way.
This one gets two and a quarter idols. It isn’t completely terrible, but I had much higher hopes for it, and much more could have been done with it. Larger moral issues are touched upon (there’s a scene where a convicted Vichy collaborator asks the inspector where the police were during the Nazi atrocities, for instance), but never expanded upon, and that was a serious missed opportunity as far as I’m concerned. And it’s hard to pull off a film where the hero is also the villain — once you lose sympathy for Hannibal, and it’s likely that you will, the movie just slides downhill. You also shouldn’t expect to want to eat any beef roasts for a while after watching this.

This week I worked on a bunch of short films. These may all seem short, but I actually extended most of them for you.

• Dark Standoff 44 seconds. Broad low strings.
  
• How Swing 50 seconds. Nifty piece. Check it out. Originally written for a 1920’s British audio drama.
  
• Disconcerned
  Flute choir… Rhythm from Beethoven, structure from Holst.
  
• Feral Chase Orchestral chase music
  
• Hamster March Cartoonish pep
  
• Plain Loafer Similar to “No Good Layabout”, but not at all similar. I need a new genre for things like this…
  
• Radio Martini I really like this one. A cheery sort of ditty. The presence of the clarinet means you probably can’t use it under scenes with dialog, as they occupy about the same frequency range… but the piece I wrote this for didn’t have any dialog, so it does a good job of filling in the space. Also, I love clarinet.
  

Keep the comments and suggestions coming. Also jobs. I can use more jobs. :-)

Or, the Pang Brothers, Sam Raimi and Co. Try to Do for Sunflowers What M. Night Shyamalan Did for Corn.
First of all, I scare easily. Very, very easily. I watched The Others in broad daylight at a friend’s house, and I was still creeped out for weeks, waiting for my drapes to start opening and closing themselves. After seeing Signs, I spent the next few days leaping into bed so the alien hiding underneath couldn’t grab my ankles with its nasty claws. Don’t even get me started on the aftermath of the night when I unwisely let my friends talk me into seeing Thirteen Ghosts in that dark, dark theatre. I don’t REALLY think anything’s going to happen to me, but apparently I’ve never quite lost the last of my Calvin-esque imagination from my younger days.
So you can imagine my dilemma when I was faced with the two new movie options this week: a scare-fest, and the sort of comedy where the only three good jokes are usually in the previews and everything else is just slightly painful filler. You know, like Meet the Parents. It took a lot of soul-searching, but I finally decided that jokes about menopause, Diane Keaton’s weird glasses, and one of those interchangeable singer/actress/ingenue kids who become famous for no apparent reason had to be scarier than anything Hollywood might deliberately try to frighten us with. So I gathered up my courage and walked bravely into the theatre for The Messengers.
And you know, it really wasn’t all that scary. Excellent news for me, but bad news for anyone who buys a ticket expecting to be frightened. All the elements were there — edgy music, dark cellars, mysterious noises — but somehow, they never quite all came together to scare me half to death like I was expecting. Certainly the house was creepy enough. I know the point of the film is that kids see things adults can’t, but I don’t see how anyone of any age could look at that place and not think, “Haunted!”
The Solomons — mom and dad Denise and Roy (Penelope Ann Miller and Dylan McDermott) have packed up their kids and moved from Chicago to some town in North Dakota that’s apparently too small to need a name. Roy couldn’t find a job in Chicago (?) and has decided to go back to his roots, so to speak, and grow sunflowers like his dad. Teenage daughter Jess (there’s always a teenage daughter, isn’t there?), played for once by an actual teenager, Kristen Stewart, is of course resentful of the move, and the obligatory cute younger brother (played by twins Evan and Theodore Turner) won’t talk due to some vague trauma that isn’t explained until the end. In spite of not talking, though, the kid(s) give one of the best performances in the film. Yeah, that’s pretty sad.

Honestly, don’t these people know better than to go into that dark cellar?

As the bizarre supernatural events intensify, Jess is faced with the fact that her parents simply can’t see what she does and therefore don’t believe her. They make vague references to her past problems, which turn out to be much less interesting than I’d hoped, and assume that Jess is just out for attention. By this point, the movie is a weird mix of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and anything by our friend M. Night, complete with long silences and odd camera angles. And weird lighting. It looks like the first thing they did when they moved in was remove all normal lighting and put spotlights in random places. Day or night, the amount of light coming in from outside is somehow always the same — that is to say, not enough.
And yet, somehow, it really isn’t scary. The ghosts are mainly these vague shapes that skitter around, moving quickly but jerkily, like old stop-motion effects, and once I’d thought of that comparison, so much for getting scared. Mind you, some of the apparitions are really very unpleasant-looking, and I did jump in my seat more than once, but surprisingly, I’m not nervous about going down into my basement. If the apparitions are supposed to be the messengers of the title, though, which I imagine they are, then they really don’t live up to their name. They seem more interested in scaring poor Jess to death, or possibly convincing her she’s insane, than in trying to tell her anything. The fact that she does stumble on clues to the truth is more because she’s one of those silly horror movie characters who never seems to have the sense to run, or at least not to chase after the weird noises. Jess even chases the weird noises in the middle of the night, wearing pajamas and walking around in bare feet, with only her toddler brother for company. That’s stupid on top of stupid.
I have a feeling the movie may also have suffered from too much editing. There’s a banker (William B. Davis, who played the Smoking Man in X-Files), who has such a knack for appearing out of nowhere that he should really become a thief or something to try and take advantage of that talent. But after materializing twice and nearly giving Roy a heart attack both times, and dropping what I expected to be an important plot point, he then vanishes from the film. Maybe he’s a mutant. Jess’ boyfriend Bobby (who must have been thrilled to meet a pretty girl he wasn’t related to) also seems like something of an afterthought, so perhaps a lot of his scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, too. DVD extras, anyone?
I’ll give this one two and a half idols. I’m very grateful to the film for not scaring me to death, but in a horror movie, that’s something of a drawback. In spite of that, though, there were some good and fresh ideas buried under the movie cliches, and it’s just too bad they couldn’t pull them together better. Of course, if they had, I’d be trying to write this review while hiding under the blankets on my bed, and that probably wouldn’t have worked out.

Well… I finished off 30 audio pieces today ranging from 3-second sound design cuts to a 7-minute piece for a musical. I’ll assume you don’t want a sound effect of a talking fish and just post some music.

• Double Drift – a sort of world-hybrid piece.
  
• Hammock Fight – silent film score.
  
• Lift Motif – ballet-esque short piano waltz.
  
• Cartoon Battle – see notes below.
  

People have already asked what that drone instrument is in the bass. Well… I made it up. It is a combination of a tuba, a pitch-shifted bass trombone, and a trombone with a cup mute. The instrument in the melody is a soprano sax pitch-shifted up an octave.

Here I am, reviewing a movie with blood in the title again. Unlike its predecessor, though, this one really isn’t very bloody. The title is from a line in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf: “I had the taste of blood and chocolate in my mouth, the one as hateful as the other.” In case you never had to read that in school, it’s the story of a man trying to reconcile his cultured, rational side with the primitive, instinctual side. That’s definitely what our heroine, Vivian (Agnes Bruckner), tries to do in the film. It’s perhaps laid on a little thick in places, but overall, the struggle is worth watching.
As a girl somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, Vivian witnesses the deaths of her whole family, shot one snowy night by men who fear them for what they are: werewolves. (Sorry, apparently the term ‘loups garous’ is more politically correct these days.) Brought back to Romania, her birthplace, she is raised by her aunt and reluctantly caught up in the restrictive loup garou culture. From what I understand, the film is a pretty sanitized and very different version of the novel on which it’s based, so this may be one instance where it isn’t such a bad thing not to read the book first — lucky for me.
It’s mostly filmed on location in Bucharest, and now I want to go there. Nearly everything’s old, dirty, rusty, and/or is in bad need of a fresh coat of paint. Almost nothing is up to fire codes or handicapped accessible. But it’s all absolutely gorgeous and historical, and I just want to go stand in one of the town squares and drink it all in. As long as you don’t get on the loups garous’ bad side, it’s a great place.

See? Look how cool Bucharest is.

Vivian (who makes chocolates for a living) meets a young American expatriate artist named Aiden (Hugh Dancy), in Bucharest researching the legends of the loups garous for his comic book. (Sorry, graphic novel.) He’s instantly smitten, but Vivian knows that blood and chocolate don’t mix (no kidding) and tries to push him away. But you know he won’t meekly go away, and humans and loups garous end up colliding.
Their pack, so to speak, is now fairly small, and Bucharest is their last remaining stronghold. They must be getting terribly inbred, but perhaps that doesn’t matter so much with loups garous. Anyway, their alpha male, Gabriel (Olivier Martinez), has made strict rules to keep them hidden, and as insular as possible, emphasizing the bonds of blood above all else. They’re all expected to be loyal, obedient to their leader, marry within the family, and most of them all seem even to work in the same place, making absinthe, which is still outlawed in the U.S. Apparently being a loup garou is much like being in the Mafia. (I suppose ‘Mafia’ is politically incorrect now, too. Sigh. The mob, maybe?)
Vivian seems very cool and distant throughout the movie — not Keanu Reeves or Ben Affleck distant, because she’s not so wooden, but she does have something of the look of a lovely marble statue at times. Probably not too surprising given her upbringing, but she does occasionally seem a bit too stiff. Overall, she does a good job. I’m still not sure what to make of Aiden, though that’s no reflection on the actor, who also does quite well — the problem is that his character alternates between extreme brilliance and extreme stupidity, and there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason. Once he finds out what’s going on, he very intelligently arms himself with lots of silver, and yet at one point he closes himself into an old confessional booth, thinking for some reason that a rickety, half-rotted wooden structure will somehow stop the furious wolf outside from trying to rip his throat out. (It doesn’t.) I can’t even tell you the biggest stupid thing he does, as that would ruin a major plot point. Suffice to say that he seems to have multiple personalities at times.
I’m giving this one three idols — a nice, average score for a a nice, average movie. The culture clash is a bit overdone, as mentioned earlier, and the loups garous tend to be so spoiled and obsessed with their own coolness that you’ll probably want to smack several of them. (They also don’t seem to have any over-forties around — maybe they don’t get to go out and hunt with the cool kids?) And they all seem to like jumping so much that they might as well be were-rabbits — it looks like they can only turn into wolves when they’re not touching the ground. I also don’t see how they can blend so well when apparently just a few drops of blood sends them into a frenzy. (Don’t get any bad papercuts around them.) But in spite of a few awkward moments and a vaguely silly transformation effect, it was a good and entertaining picture. Now I’m going to go check prices for flights to Romania.