Hannibal — We got to talking about the books in a different thread, and it was on Netflix, so…
It's a better movie than book. I guess a bunch of the corners which are cut don't really offend as much in a movie as they do in a book. I expect less from movies. I expect that they're trying to make everything fit into a theater friendly run time. So it wasn't as bad. It was an entertaining movie. Julieann Moore is as good or better as Starling, Ray Liotta is perfect (but typecast) as government black hole Kendler, and Anthony Hopkins is still definitively the character he established in Silence of the lambs. As a Ridley Scott film, the visuals deliver a consistent lushness that the base material doesn't necessarily deserve.
The later dining room scene in the book that almost made me pass out is just about as shocking in the movie, but the cognitive dissonance was absent, so I was fine watching it. I also had to pause and unpause it repeatedly as my son kept coming into the room for god-knows-why reasons, and it ended up stuttering the emotional impact out of that scene.
They took the airplane picnic basket scene out of the middle of the book, where it works, and put it on the end of the movie which makes very little sense, but had a kind of quiet charm.
