HINDSIGHT IS 20/21: HANNIBAL

For this instalment of Hindsight is 20/21, I revisited the most controversial film of the Hannibal Lecter saga, simply titled Hannibal. Released in February 2001 and set ten years after The Silence of the Lambs (1991), it broke the record for the largest opening weekend for an R-rated film by more than $15 million; safe to say, audiences were highly excited for the continuing adventures of everyone’s favourite cannibalistic serial killer. Anthony Hopkins, who had won an Oscar in 1992 for the role, returned to his most famous character, yet Hannibal was rather a critical disappointment upon its release, receiving mixed-to-negative reviews and dissatisfying plenty of casual fans with its gruesome violence, grotesque imagery, and gross distortion of the characters. Much of the criticism for the film originated with Thomas Harris’ source novel, published in 1999 to controversy and discontent, and having read it just prior to rewatching the film, it’s easy to see why: not only does the plot, involving disfigured Lecter victim Mason Verger seeking vengeance, tend toward the ghastly and grisly, but the character assassination done unto the ostensible heroine, FBI special agent Clarice Starling, is borderline blasphemous.

Top Ten Tuesday: Neo-Noirs

Such is the great influence of the film noir cinematic style that its visual and thematic legacy persists even today, more than fifty years after the cycle officially ended. To distinguish movies paying homage to the original form from the actual examples of such, film scholars and historians have adopted the term neo-noir to refer to contemporary (in this case meaning anything from 1960 onward) works. Genres as varied as science fiction and spoof comedy have had the neo-noir qualifier attached to their description, affirming the versatility and popularity of the form. With the long-awaited sequel to 2005’s excessively stylized neo-noir Sin City, subtitled A Dame to Kill For, finally releasing this weekend, I counted down my ten favourite examples of the oft-used mode.

Top Ten Tuesday: Dystopias

After a couple of weeks off for holidays, Top Ten Tuesday returns this week with a particular genre favourite of mine: dystopias. As opposed to utopias, which portray an idealized world without war, disease, or poverty (think the Earth of Star Trek), dystopias depict a nightmarish future, where the government or some other bureaucracy has created a rigidly-controlled, disquieting society. A list of these films feels especially apropos this week as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the latest in the sci-fi franchise, releases in cinemas and Snowpiercer, Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s post-apocalyptic train actioner, hits video-on-demand (still no word on a potential Canadian theatrical release, unfortunately); these two movies can both broadly be considered dystopian works, taking place in dark and terrifying futures. The best movies of the genre have a way of eerily reflecting and satirizing the contemporary world, warning of the potential dangers to come; on that cheery note, I present my ten favourite dystopic films:

Top Ten Tuesday: Monster Movies

As long as horror films have existed, there have been movie monsters. From the silent German expressionist terrors of the 1910s and ’20s through the Universal horror icons of the ’30 and ’40s and the giant radioactive beasts of ’50s B-movies up to the extra-terrestrial villains of the modern age, cinematic monsters have always seemed to reflect and manifest the anxieties and fears of a particular era. As such, the appearance and characteristics of these fantastic creatures has only grown stranger and more terrifying with time, evolving from the anthropomorphic Nosferatu in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic of the same name to the Lovecraftian kaiju of last year’s Pacific Rim, directed by noted monster movie aficionado Guillermo del Toro. This Friday, another reboot of the Japanese atomic monster Godzilla arrives in cinemas, so for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, I present my favourite monster movies.

One note before I begin, though. As the definition of monster movie is so broad that it may encompass the entire horror genre, I’ve decided to stick to only creatures that are outliers from the accepted sub-genres of the form; that means no vampires, no werewolves, and no zombies. Basically anything else is fair game, although I also tried to emphasize only movies that I haven’t discussed ad nauseam before (i.e. John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, etc.). Since those films are only cursory monsters movies anyway, I don’t feel as though I’m being unfair.

Top Ten Tuesday: Evil Computers

Science fiction cinema, over its hundred-year-plus history, has returned again and again to time-worn tropes, simply because they just work. One of the most common of these is the evil computer – an artificial intelligence, created by man, which eventually gains sentience and turns against its creator, for whatever reason (the most common being some sort of programming error, causing a paradoxical loop in the machine’s logic centre). Over the years, this trope has expanded to include killer robots, assassin androids, and even an entire race of assimilatory cyborgs; the latest variation, to be seen in the upcoming release Transcendence, finds an AI scientist’s (played by Johnny Depp) consciousness uploaded into a computer in order to save his life, only for the subsequent cybernetic being to inevitably turn evil and power-mad. With that in mind, I assembled a list of the ten most evil computers in cinematic history.

A small note before I begin, though. I made a point to distinguish between ‘computer’ and ‘robot’. Though ostensibly both manmade artificial intelligences, the latter implies an actual corporeal body, while the former just refers to an ethereal, electronic collection of ones and zeroes. This is far more terrifying and potentially immortal than a destructible metallic form, so I chose to limit myself and focus only on computers. This means no Blade Runner, no Metropolis, and no Transformers (for all of you hoping for such). Anyway, without further ado, the list: