Given the recent spate of horror-movie prequels, we can at least be grateful that the makers of Hannibal Rising, in perhaps their sole moment of clarity, decided that Hannibal: The Beginning might be a tad obvious. As it turns out, the title, with its priapic agency and whiff of retribution, is the high point of a back story that ought to have remained firmly in our imaginations. Like Leatherface and Freddy Krueger, Hannibal Lecter is a monster who thrives in the dark; probe his past, and there's a danger of finding only banality.
But this is America, where all pathologies must be excavated and neutralized, so we're off to 1944 Lithuania, where the Lecter family is facing down Nazis, Russians, Vichy French and wild boars. The arrival — and subsequent dinner plans — of a gang of starving thugs swiftly disposes of young Hannibal's little sister and awakens his cannibalistic cravings. Eight years in a Soviet orphanage do little to rehabilitate. "You do not honor the human pecking order," the warden tells Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel). ''You're always hurting the bullies." Clearly he's more disturbed than we think.
Scarcely pausing to wonder which wine goes best with East European thug, Hannibal sets out to avenge his sister and devise recipes. His mission entails a detour in a Parisian medical school to hone his slicing technique, as well as a sojourn with a Japanese aunt (Gong Li, 鞏俐) who's unperturbed when he beheads a butcher who has insulted her honor.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF CMC
''You smell of smoke and blood,'' she tells her nephew fondly, struggling with dialogue that would make Jessica Simpson demand a rewrite. Silly, slack and unforgivably tedious, Thomas Harris' screenplay is padded with interminable flashbacks and a bombastic score that telegraphs every emotion Hannibal represses. And there are a lot of them.
Evidencing too much respect and too little energy, Peter Webber directs this operatic mess with none of the subtlety and wit he brought to Girl With a Pearl Earring, a less brutal but no less perverse project. Burrowing into the id of pop culture's most repulsive gourmet demands a sanguinary glee that Webber may not possess; for all the movie's spurting gore, there's no accompanying rush of blood to the head.
Almost everyone involved seems deadened by the literalness of the material, especially Ulliel, whose lanky, effete avenger may snack on the cheeks of his victims but never hardens into a genuine horror. He's like Anthony Hopkins's brain-damaged sibling.
Conceived in the clamor of the marketplace, Hannibal Rising, like its predecessor Hannibal, makes a star out of a character who should exist only in the margins, a peripheral terror made larger by mystery. The success of The Silence of the Lambs depends on a dense mixture of psychological intrigue and stylized flashes of brutality, glimpsed only from the corner of the eye like fleeting hints of Lecter's psychoses. Hannibal Rising drags these into the light and applies a magnifying glass, reducing one of our most mythic villains to a callow, dysfunctional chef.
"Oil of cloves," the French detective announces, sniffing one of Hannibal's victims. Even in the age of C.S.I. there are some clues only a Frenchman can be trusted to decipher.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist