Hannibal

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AlexHansen
Joined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 10:39 pm
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Re: Hannibal

#126 Post by AlexHansen » Wed May 14, 2014 9:18 pm

It's presented whole on the set. Can't recall any differences between the overseas broadcast I saw and the one on disc.

Movie-Brat
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Re: Hannibal

#127 Post by Movie-Brat » Sat May 17, 2014 2:56 am

I kind of thought what happened to Mason Veger would happen in a future season but I guess I should have known they'd do it now than later. This feels like the appetizer to the main event i.e. the last episode and really, it's one I've been waiting for since the season started. What triggered the fight.

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George Kaplan
Joined: Mon Jan 31, 2005 7:42 pm

Re: Hannibal

#128 Post by George Kaplan » Sat May 17, 2014 4:06 am

"Enchanted and terrified!" indeed.


flyonthewall2983
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Re: Hannibal

#130 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Fri May 23, 2014 5:55 pm

Season finale tonight. Very excited to see where things go from here. I'd like to see next season as the "manhunt" so to speak, rather than Hannibal in jail already.

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Re: Hannibal

#131 Post by Movie-Brat » Fri May 23, 2014 10:19 pm

Funny, I had a theory that'd be the next season.

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AlexHansen
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Re: Hannibal

#132 Post by AlexHansen » Sat May 24, 2014 12:49 am

Traumatic. Grue-tiful and traumatic.

flyonthewall2983
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Re: Hannibal

#133 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sat May 24, 2014 1:23 am

That was a very emotional, well-earned and well-crafted cliffhanger.
Last edited by flyonthewall2983 on Sat May 24, 2014 8:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Hannibal

#134 Post by Movie-Brat » Sat May 24, 2014 1:41 am

You got that right. Just...damn. What a way to end on a high note this year.

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Finch
Joined: Mon Jul 07, 2008 5:09 pm
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Re: Hannibal

#135 Post by Finch » Sat May 24, 2014 6:19 am

And not just one but two nice twists as well. Nicely played Bryan Fuller. The third season should be very interesting indeed.

flyonthewall2983
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Re: Hannibal

#136 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Thu Jul 03, 2014 10:08 pm

Season 2 Blu-ray hits September 9th.

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R0lf
Joined: Tue May 19, 2009 7:25 am

Re: Hannibal

#137 Post by R0lf » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:29 am

I finally figured out who the Gillian Anderson character reminds me of...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXNXQJ2oQvQ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

flyonthewall2983
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Re: Hannibal

#138 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Fri Jul 25, 2014 4:25 pm

Season 2 Blu-ray details, which will include a feature-length segment on the making of episode 5


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Re: Hannibal

#140 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Fri Aug 01, 2014 8:28 am

Two volume soundtrack of the first season to come out next month.

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Re: Hannibal

#141 Post by Movie-Brat » Fri Aug 01, 2014 9:28 pm

To be honest, I was hoping the soundtrack for season two would be released this year as well if only because, I really dug the music in the final moments of second season finale as it was a beautiful mix of the visuals and music that I felt was really powerful.


flyonthewall2983
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Re: Hannibal

#143 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Thu Sep 11, 2014 12:29 am

Two more volumes of Brian Reitzell's music for the show, from season 2, are already available to purchase on Amazon MP3, with CD's coming out later in the month.

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Re: Hannibal

#144 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Sep 16, 2014 10:30 pm



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Re: Hannibal

#146 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Oct 19, 2014 11:42 am


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colinr0380
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Re: Hannibal

#147 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Nov 30, 2014 8:26 am

This is old news to anyone, but I’ve finally blasted through the first season of Hannibal in a day and liked it a lot. I was a little concerned early on about the Will Graham with pre-existent mental problems addition (something which was commented on early on in this thread), which felt a little too shoehorned in and thankfully gets backgrounded after the first couple of episodes (In some ways it allows Lecter a get out clause in simply manipulating a pre-existing illness rather than consciously twisting a healthy, but empathetic person's psyche. And I also have issues with the current trend, especially used in TV series, to have Autism/Aspergers used as a shorthand for a 'quirky' character! It is a shorthand too quickly and easily grabbed for: presumably you can be cantankerous and/or brilliant and/or prefer to be alone without having a specific mental problem! So I much prefer the idea that Graham is just more perceptive and has his issues twisted as much by those around him as by his own psychology or medical issues, which is one of the reasons that I preferred by far the second half of the season when that starts actually happening. Though I’m frankly far less interested by the Will Graham character here than I was in either Red Dragon or more particularly the portrayal in Manhunter, though of course there is a long way to go with the character yet in the series). In fact the first five episodes left me rather cold and concerned about the series, with the murder of the week plotting and the CSI-style lab team adding a bit of light relief, although this rather clichéd group get better throughout the series when the characters individually get more to do than just give silent “what a screwball!” looks at each other as Graham gives yet another gnomic pronouncement across the autopsy table. And while on the subject of Graham, I’m not a big fan of the sequences of Graham ‘understanding’ the crime scene, which even late on in the series still play more like nutty psychic flashes than actual deductive reasonings, only there to allow Hugh Dancy seemingly to act like a killer while still being a heroic lead. (It also concerns me with these 'vision' scenes that the series occasionally seems to want to jump on the, currently in vogue, ghostly and supernatural events genre, with all of the attendant jump scares) But I guess the series needed these episodes as a foundation to create the web of connections and trauma to move on from.

Then at episode 5 the series grew on me a lot, and I can pinpoint it down to the subplot between Jack Graham and his wife in that episode. Even more specifically the shot of the dawning realisation on Laurence Fishburne’s face during the interview with the 'angel' killer’s wife, which was fantastic. The next few episodes start throwing great little moments like that throughout, with the ‘murder of the week’ mostly taking a secondary role, but also the murder usually being something which ends up commenting on the wider ongoing themes of the show (I did like the Franklin mini-arc very much! Especially that moment of Lecter perhaps consciously sending Graham off to his death by directing him to the killer. And I loved that the tense showdown scene between Lecter and the killer gets interrupted when our hero barges in moaning about the events in the shoehorned in romatic attraction sub-plot!). For example I wonder whether the bathroom, and Graham’s vision of the murder, in the organ harvesting episode was intentionally meant to recreate Room 237 from The Shining? (While I have issues with the Graham ‘visions’, and also the sometimes-too-silly moments involving the deer I felt that this one worked. There is potential here for the series to go from just feeling like Twin Peaks-lite to actually going off-kilter and into truly dangerous territory of say Twin Peaks-proper, although that I felt that it wasn’t really fully mined as of the end of the first series).

I also loved the ‘guest star’ parts, not just Gillian Anderson doing a Sopranos-style role of a ‘psychiatrist’s psychiatrist’ (and a role which contrasts neatly with her current investigator role in the BBC series The Fall), or another Chris Carter-alumni Lance Henriksen popping up and immediately reminding me of his Millennium series, but also in particular seeing My Girl’s Anna Chlumsky for the first time in years (I haven't gotten to the Armando Iannucci series Veep or In The Loop yet) all grown up and in a role as an ill fated young investigator that anticipates both Clarice Starling and Will Graham’s eventual discovery of Hannibal Lecter’s crimes.

So I’m interested so far, and especially loved the run of episodes from 5 through 9 (my interest ended up waning a little again when the Garret Jacob Hobbs plot came back to the fore), particularly those episodes directed by Tim Hunter and James Foley. I'm very much looking forward to Vincenzo Natali's episodes in the next series. And while episode 10 was where I became less gripped by the show I loved that, with the episode's focus squarely on Will Graham's mental decline, John Dahl seemed to be doing a mini-remake of his much maligned film Unforgettable!

However I’d like to see some much more in depth cookery segments on the show!

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colinr0380
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Re: Hannibal

#148 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Dec 08, 2014 2:41 pm

I'm as mixed on the second season as I was on the first, which moves forcefully into becoming both more of its own entity with the recontextualisation of events into its own world, and yet also gets too frustratingly wedded to TV cliches at the crucial moments as well (the incessant score for one thing - it is often beautiful, but needs to be applied sparingly not slathered all over the whole show like a sauce that takes away the flavour of the meat. But also the trope of falling back into the use of female characters as over emotional hotheads who screw everything up to provide cliffhanger moments and/or closure to storylines. And the other TV trope of futzing around dragging plotlines out over a number of episodes and losing all the tension when they would perhaps work better handled quicker). However despite those issues, I'm more positive than negative on the series, and there are still some magnificent moments, and at least one laugh out loud line reading:
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"Is that your Social Worker inside that horse?"
And after complaining about the ghost jump scare visions and the heavy handed deer metaphor, the visions get dialled back (though perhaps more due to circumstance!) and the deer metaphor actually gets developed into something coherent and meaningful. Plus, although it is also perhaps too symbolically heavy handed, I loved the river fishing metaphor for Will Graham (all the events and bodies rushing past him while he tries to hook out the individual killers), which near the end of the season gets to duel with the briefly sketched in introduction of Lecter's 'memory palace'.

In a bit of a turnaround from the first season, I much preferred the first half of the second season with Will Graham in the insane asylum to the second half when he is back on the beat. I loved that the theme of the first episode was of everybody dealing in their own way with the absence of Will Graham, and the way that Hannibal gets pressed into taking Will's place at the crime scenes. With the telling difference being that Hannibal is not able to empathise with either the killer or victims, but instead uses his practical and aesthetic skills to get by. Although his more artistic perspective perhaps leads him to make overconfident assumptions that turn out to be wrong? Or are they wrong because Hannibal is purposefully messing up solving the cases?

This is a great section of the show (and beautifully undermining usual TV conventions) as suddenly all of the 'murders of the week' start going unsolved for a couple of episodes at a time. Lecter's presence (and this is really the theme of the season, spreading outwards from destroying just Will in the first season) is corrupting both the FBI investigators and the murderers of the week. However Lecter seems less interested in helping kindred spirits and more about stocking up his larder!

Then we get into the section of the show revolving around the Beverly Katz character (which is by far the best section of this series), approaching Will to bring his investigative skills to bear on cases from his cell, which is a wonderful premonition (or, better, a reinterpretation) of Lecter in his cell from Silence of the Lambs. This is perhaps the first indication that the TV series wasn't just going to be doing the storylines from the novels and films again with a bit of Rob Zombie in Halloween-style prequel baggage added in beforehand, although I had not really cottoned onto it yet, as instead I noted to myself at this point that: "if Lecter ends up doing this very similar kind of scene with Clarice Starling later on would that add weight to the idea that Hannibal was still obsessed with Will, down to copying his actions here?" Now with the Verger material from the second half of the season added in, I think this series isn't going to be anything as simple as just a remake of the pre-existing material, but instead a re-interpretation in the best sense of putting different characters into different roles and seeing how events play out that way. So in season 2 we get scenes of characters eating themselves here, and characters trapped in jail sending proxy killers out to do their bidding there; someone, or something, crashing through a glass window in one scene; a firery corpse in a wheelchair rolling down the ramp of a parking garage in the next. The iconic elements are getting pleasingly scrambled up to mess with the audience's expectations as much as with the those of the characters.

This is more of an issue with the second half of the series, particularly with the introduction of the Vergers, and in a way I'm unsure about how to feel about it. This series (perhaps consciously?) appears to be strangely working to demythologise the Hannibal Lecter cult as built up in the novels or films. The power of the shocking moments has been divorced from their original context, and is replaced with a sense of iteration. What should be horrific punctuations to entire dramatic arcs gets played out as a joke
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(such as the flaming death of Freddie Lounds being retracted, or someone having themselves for dinner with no third party there to act as an audience surrogate)
or just as televisual cliffhangers, that are crucially important one moment, and hastily forgotten in the rush to the next one. I think that this is shown most obviously in the Verger mini-arc in the second half of the season, which seems to delight in swapping events around so that the opening situation that Mason is in in Hannibal becomes the denoument instead.
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I must admit though that I hadn't even considered Will's dogs as factoring into the climax! That was a great twist that completely blindsided me!
Where is there to go from here except into repitition? Can Verger really try feeding Hannibal to his pigs again after this, or would he have to find a newly imaginitive way of getting revenge? So what to do, now that the climatic imagery has already been used up? Will the series go into fresh and newly horrific imagery to try and top the imagery which Thomas Harris used in his novel? That could work, but it could just as easily end up coming across as a TV producer's idea of extreme imagery, less baroquely imaginative and potentially more derivative than the source material, and looking worse for the comparison. This might seem a harsh pre-judgment, but I think it is more of a warning, particularly as this second season also at various points seemed to be stealing imagery from The Cell while thinking that no one was looking:
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The early murderer of the week turning his victims into doll-like figures. The murder of Beverly Katz, cut into pieces and mounted in plexi-glass like a Damien Hirst exhibit. And even Mason Verger at one point is playing jajouka music at his pigs in order to rile them up into a killing frenzy!
So if the Thomas Harris novels and The Cell have been plundered so far, all that is really left is the Saw series to provide future extra material to weave into the narrative!

I was also a little bit less interested in the guest stars this time around, whilst still being glad to see the actors in the roles. I just guess that Amanda Plummer and Jeremy Davies (along with Katharine Isabelle and Michael Pitts as the Vergers from a younger generation of actors) are perhaps a little too obviously a 90s-era casting director's actors of choice to portray mentally unstable characters! Though it was great to see Plummer and Davies on screen again after not seeing them for a while! It was also nice to see Martin Donovan pop up for a single scene too, as Laurence Fishburne's confidant!
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And unfortunately the episode in which Anna Chlumsky's character appears again ends on such a sour note I understand why her character just disappears from the series again at that point. Which was a shame.
However there are still a lot of flashes of interesting stuff in the series: I'm much more interested in the Will Graham character in this series than I had been in the first,
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and although I kind of predicted that he wasn't going to have killed Freddie Lounds and crossed the final rubicon to stand with Hannibal, I did like that the series pushed things to that edge to such an extent that it was kind of disappointing that it pulled back to spare Will again. In those few episodes I'd gone through a cycle of "what the hell are you doing, you idiot?" to headslapping "not again, he's gone nuts" to suddenly realising that Will was so determined to bring Hannibal down after all of the betrayals that he might potentially have been willing to become a murderer himself. If it meant sacrificing himself to prove his loyalty, which itself would taint Hannibal with guilt, I could see Will doing that. But then of course it got retracted to some extent to turn Will back into a flawed antihero again rather than a man willing to sacrifice others to ensure he caught his bigger fish.
Unfortunately the Alana Bloom love triangle bit wasn't that great:
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though this did allow for Vincenzo Natali to do a few excellent abstract sex scenes in his episodes, including one in which both of the two couples appear to be engaged in an orgiastic foursome of fluid, melting bodies and identities! That was perhaps worth the whole Alana Bloom subplot in itself!
That plays into the way that I loved the occasions where Will and Hannibal were intercut performing similar actions, as if they were doubles of each other. Such as Hannibal preparing a meal while the asylum slops stuff into a tray for Will; or both getting formally dressed up to go to Will's trial.

Oh, and the cookery scenes were just as great as usual. Is it wrong that I usually like to have a plate of bacon sandwiches to hand whilst watching? I still think though that, in terms of sheer outré weirdness, that in a world in which a jawdropping game series like D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die has redefined my notions of investigative nuttiness, Hannibal still has some work to do!

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Andre Jurieu
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:38 pm
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Re: Hannibal

#149 Post by Andre Jurieu » Thu Dec 11, 2014 3:13 pm

OK, flyonthewall2983 is slacking on the latest-proof-of-how-awesome-Hannibal-is-compared-to-everything-else-ever-created front, because AV Club just named it the Best Show of 2014.


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