Rating: NNNNN
New releases
hannibal (2001, MGM/UA), dir. Ridley Scott w/ Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore. Hannibal was doomed even before the cameras rolled. Author Thomas Harris’s outlandish follow-up to The Silence Of The Lambs is bursting with absurd acts of violence, and it sets Clarice Starling up to become Lecter’s love slave. Ouch. Clarice (a subdued Moore) is allowed her dignity, but that — plus the cartoonish gore and a very tedious Lecter — is about all we get. Hopkins sinks into his character, giving the serial killer a reptilian edge, but now that we’ve spent so much time with him, the mastermind has become a bore. This sequel should never have been made. NNN
Big-screen rating: Scott keeps the first 75 minutes moving relentlessly but doesn’t quite nail the ending. NNN (JH)
le dernier combat (1983, Columbia), dir. Luc Besson w/ Pierre Jolivet, Fritz Wepper. Besson’s (Subway, The Fifth Element) first feature is a black-and-white post-apocalyptic tale of a lonely survivor (Jolivet) who teams up with a doctor (Wepper) to barricade themselves against attack from a nasty Jean Reno. What’s interesting about this accomplished debut, which hasn’t been available on video for years, is that it’s silent (the characters have lost the ability to speak), so Besson keeps our attention by coming up with bizarre concepts — fish rain out of the sky, a tribe of suited businessmen herd together in the desert. Cool. NNN
Big-screen rating: N/A
say it isn’t so (2001, Fox), dir. James B. Rogers w/ Chris Klein, Heather Graham. Klein and Graham are lovers who may also be brother and sister. The Farrelly Brothers produced this lazy, inept gross-out comedy that fails to come up with one smart gag. It’s beginning to look like There’s Something About Mary is really the Typhoid Mary of the gross-out genre — it initiated a disease that’s spread out of control. N
Big-screen rating: The jokes fall in the mud and go splat. N (JH)
water drops on burning rocks (1999, Seville), dir. François Ozon w/ Bernard Giraudeau, Malik Zidi. Adapted by Ozon from a screenplay written by Rainer Werner Fassbinder when he was just 19, this cruel love story tracks an older man (Giraudeau) who is emotionally abusing his young lover (Zidi). It’s a glimpse of Fassbinder’s emerging creativity — his interest in sexual game-playing, his attraction to violence and cruelty. But the performers plumb depths that Fassbinder fails to reach in his script their commitment to the story saves it from collapse. NNN
Big-screen rating: Ozon taps the same throbbing spleen that juiced Fassbinder’s pitiless love stories. NNN (CB)
Also this week
Goddess Of 1967
Reptilian
Upcoming
August 28
Company Men, The Dish, Exit Wounds, Joe Dirt
September 4
Blood: The Last Vampire, The King Is Dancing, The Lord Of The Rings (re-release), Memento
DVD pick of the week
the silence of the lambs (1991, MGM), dir. Jonathan Demme w/ Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins. Foster’s last strong role had her chasing serial killer Buffalo Bill with the dubious help of Hannibal (the Cannibal) Lecter. The Silence Of The Lambs has become a new classic not for any particular brilliance, but for precise craft all around. This is an efficient thriller that takes itself just seriously enough. And it features two focused performances, including Hopkins’s Lecter, the shortest Oscar-winning best-actor performance in history.
EXTRAS: This new disc competes with the Criterion version. MGM’s Special Edition means 20 minutes of deleted scenes, a documentary featuring new interviews with Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster and others, a 1991 “making of” doc, an outtake reel, photo gallery, trailers and Hopkins’s famous Hannibal Lecter phone message. In wide-screen or pan-and-scan. 118 minutes. NNNNCAMERON BAILEY
