Books

[Guest]

I haven't read any of those. Are the first three good?

Well, I've read Red Dragon now and I can say that I definitely recommend it. It's better than either movie (haven't seen the TV show or what they did with it)

Only saw the first season but for network tv it was well made. It's basically a police procedural, though, with Hannibal helping Will track down the killer of the week while secretly working his own plans on the side. Hannibal's badass though, beating the shit out of other whackos and eating them just because. Later seasons seem to have gone off the rails with Hannibal framing Will for his crimes and whatnot.

Seriously, the movie Hannibal was gay as fuck but Julianne Moore is much more fappable Clarice than that tomboy lesbian soccer player.

[Cuckara]

I'm not a big fan of the Red Dragon movie either. Manhunter was the better film. Red Dragon was just sort of...there. I mean, they only really made it so they could have all three novels adapted with Hopkins as Lecter and that's the only thing Red Dragon really has going for it over Manhunter. Apart from that, the casting choices are pretty uninspired. Ratner's direction is competent but nothing near the quality of Jonathan Demme's. They really should have gotten Demme to do it, because the way he did The Silence of the Lambs would have worked equally well for Red Dragon.

I'm forever mad that the studio hired Brett Ratner to direct Red Dragon. The screenplay was written by Ted Tally (the guy who wrote The Silence of the Lambs's screenplay) and the film had a solid cast (Edward Norton and Ralph Fiennes are excellent actors), but all of that potential was wasted the second the studio hired Brett Ratner. At his absolute best, Ratner is a competent but bland director. If the studio couldn't get Demme to return, they should've tried for David Fincher or someone of that caliber. Hell, some indie nobody who had made a couple of decent thrillers would've been a better choice than Ratner.

[Keith Chegwin]

Seriously, the movie Hannibal was gay as fuck but Julianne Moore is much more fappable Clarice than that tomboy lesbian soccer player.

Jodie Foster was very pretty in Silence of the Lambs. Certainly worth killing Ronald Reagan over.

I'm forever mad that the studio hired Brett Ratner to direct Red Dragon. The screenplay was written by Ted Tally (the guy who wrote The Silence of the Lambs's screenplay) and the film had a solid cast (Edward Norton and Ralph Fiennes are excellent actors), but all of that potential was wasted the second the studio hired Brett Ratner.

Eh, I'm somewhat ambivalent about Red Dragon's cast. Everyone carried over from The Silence of the Lambs was well cast but all the original to Red Dragon characters were less so.

Norton is otherwise a good actor but he didn't make it as Graham for me. Best example would be the scene where he recruits Lecter to help him catch the killer, it sounds like he's just reading lines. He doesn't have William Petersen's charisma in the role

As for the other parts, Harvey Keitel was a lacklustre Jack Crawford. Scott Glenn was the best Crawford, it's a shame that John Douglas (the guy Crawford was based on) fucked him up for life because he should have reprised the role. Whoever played Graham's wife was rather indifferent.

I want to say that at least Ralph Fiennes was good as the killer, but I don't remember most of his performance. The only part I remember is when he eats the painting because it was so bad that it was funny. The only part that was better than the original Manhunter was Emily Watson as the blind girl and part of that, for me at least, was because Joan Allen fucking reminded me of Lupa in the role.

The only great performance in Red Dragon was Anthony Hopkins, and in that respect the film did its job. They gave Lecter more scenes than he had in the book and greatly expanded his role so they could have one last big hurrah with Hopkins as Lecter.

What they really should have done is made the Red Dragon remake as the follow-up to Silence of The Lambs around 1995 or so. That way everything would have been still fresh and they would've made a better movie off the back of Silence's success, instead of waiting for Harris to finish the Silence sequel that ended up being horribly shit

[Cuckara]

I agree that Norton's performance in Red Dragon wasn't as good as Petersen's performance in Manhunter, but I blame that on Ratner's boring direction. I also agree that Red Dragon should've been made in the mid-90s instead of the early 00s. Manhunter flopped at the box office and didn't get a large cult-following until the 00s, so no one in the mid-90s would've complained that it was too soon to do another adaptation of Harris's novel.

[Keith Chegwin]

I would blame it on Ratner's direction but I feel that Norton wasn't right for the part. He was too young. Graham's supposed to be nearly forty and Norton, at that point, was still closer to thirty. In addition, Graham's supposed to be sort of world weary from all these horrible cases that he's done and I didn't really get that in Norton's performance.

The movie would've been better served if they'd gone with an older actor to play Graham.

[Kugelfisch]

Thinking back on it, I can really easily see Red Dragon working much, much better as a book. Most of what wasn't so great in the movie comes down to performance and things that just sound better when not actually watched, like wolfing down a painting. When you read that you don't really stop and imagine how goofy that might look IRL or question how an oil painting would be hard to eat.

[Guest]

Manhunter was top kino. I really should read the book. I read maybe a chapter or so when I first got an e-reader but dropped it as I do most things.

[Cuckara]

Well, there was some drama at the 2019 Hugo awards. Some Asian girl named Jeanette Ng won the John W. Campbell award for best new writer, and she said some really stupid shit in her acceptance speech. Here's the speech:

>John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist. Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, he is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists. Yes, I am aware there are exceptions.

>But these bones, we have grown wonderful, ramshackle genre, wilder and stranger than his mind could imagine or allow.

>And I am so proud to be part of this. To share with you my weird little story, an amalgam of all my weird interests, so much of which has little to do with my superficial identities and labels.

>But I am a spinner of ideas, of words, as Margaret Cavendish would put it.

>So I need say, I was born in Hong Kong. Right now, in the most cyberpunk in the city in the world, protesters struggle with the masked, anonymous stormtroopers of an autocratic Empire. They have literally just held her largest illegal gathering in their history. As we speak they are calling for a horological revolution in our time. They have held laser pointers to the skies and tried to to impossibly set alight the stars. I cannot help be proud of them, to cry for them, and to lament their pain.

>I’m sorry to drag this into our fantastical words, you’ve given me a microphone and this is what I felt needed saying.

These people will not rest until all of the "problematic" giants of genre fiction have been erased from history.

[Keith Chegwin]

The sad part is that most of the audience probably gave her a standing ovation after that speech

[Kugelfisch]

>horological revolution
I know Hong Kong is pretty much the watch empire but I don't think they are protesting for a revolution in watchmaking.
Sorry sweetie, if you want to use big boy words you better know what they mean.