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 the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated