crookback Reviews

Red Dragon (2002)

= The Tooth Fairy to Manhunter's Red Dragon

[2/10 · 30 May 2006]

I'm sitting here in absolute horror watching Red Dragon: I never expected it to be as good as Manhunter, not in a million years, but this is just terrible - Edward Norton was great in AHX, but he's appalling in this, weak, insipid, boring, William Petersen was fantastic, sure, but there's no excuse for a performance as embarrassing as that...I was expecting some of the secondary performances to be better, but no: the new Reba isn't as good as the old Reba, Anthony Hopkins isn't a patch on Brian Cox (even though they've expanded his part, ridiculously so in fact) and totally ruins the telephone scene, Fiennes is okay but not remotely in Tom Noonan's league, the new Lounds is horrible, Harvey Keitel is barely even there as Crawford and the less said about Graham's family, the better. It's almost mesmerising seeing a film so comprehensively inferior to its original, it feels like Michael Mann had someone on the inside to deliberately sabotage proceedings - the nearest comparison I can think of was Van Sant's remake of Psycho, but even that had the merit of adding one interesting subliminal image to leaven its awesome crappiness.

Some incomprehensible omissions for a film which is ostensibly more faithful to the novel than Manhunter, too - for some reason they don't show Graham placing his hand on Lounds in the Tattler photo (that's the entire point), and they completely eliminate all the tensions in Graham's family (again, that's kind of the point). Lecter is so up his own fundament in this film it's unbelievable: in the novels he's clearly fallible for all his brilliance and makes calculated errors at least some of the time, but in this one he's like some kind of pantomime wizard.

Even the music is off - Danny Elfman, for goodness' sake? Maybe they should have shot it as a claymation with Wallace and Gromit as crossover characters.

Lifeforce (1985)

Lifeforce the Great and Tewwible

[7/10 · 8 October 2005]

A very peculiar film, this: as previous reviewers have mentioned, it is brimming over with ideas and over-specific exposition, and as a result of this the slash-slash-slash-style editing leaves much to be desired. It feels very much as if there was genuine thought and intelligence behind the project, but that the superabundance of material overwhelmed the director: a classic example of this is where Carlsen reveals to the unfortunately-named Doctor Fallada that he is in psychic contact with the vampire; Fallada responds with "Then you may be able to lead us to her...if I were to hypnotise you", whereupon a cursory secondary character chimes in with "He's tired - perhaps in the morning." Two seconds later, before the scene even fades out? It's morning, and hey, who'd have guessed it, there's Carlsen and Doctor Fallada with some kind of shiny oscillating mirror - "You are feeling sleepy." I defy anybody not to laugh at that transition.

Other unintentionally funny scenes do crop up - Steve Railsbeck's over-acting in some places lowers the tone beautifully, most notably in a scene with Patrick Stewart, where the camera juxtaposes the latter with Mathilda May and Railsbeck protesting hysterically "Let me go! Let me go!" before the inevitably comic kiss arrives. Frank Finlay is also quite terrible in much of this film, and hams it up with the best of them.

Yet all this is besides the point - this is a tremendous film in places. The opening shots of the approach to Halley's Comet are terrific; Mathilda May is as beautiful as she is convincing and enigmatic; Railsbeck's awfulness is more than compensated for his brilliance in the scenes on board the Churchill; the dystopian shots of London in chaos as the terrible spreading form of the alien ship deploys above it...all amazing. This is a film it is all too easy to dismiss - it might have been better, true, but in places it is unsurpassably good.