Film
Let's cut to the guts of this review: Red Dragon is infinitely superior to last year's Hannibal.
Based on the first of Thomas Harns' novels to feature Lecter, Red Dragon is a Silence of the Lambs prequel focused on the desperate attempts of former FBI profiler Will Graham (Edward Norton) to track down a family-slaying serial killer (Ralph Fiennes) dubbed 'The Tooth Fairy' by the pesky media. Attempting to get inside the villain's mind, Graham, in much the same way as Jodie Foster's character before him, consults with Hopkins' psychiatrist-turned-cannibal Lecter. The difference here, though, is that Graham is not a novice, nor is he out of his league with Lecter, as we see in a witty prologue set several years earlier, which establishes the original Graham/Lecter battlezone, this agent actually catches him, adding an element of malice to their mind-games that was absent with Clarice Sterling, an entertaining element for the audience to really get their teeth into.
Hopkins uses every conceivable actor's tool to dominate his scenes: a cunning trickster playing a cunning trickster. Norton never tries to compete with Hopkins on the same plateau, but his quiet and stealthy style works and it's great fun to watch him furtively circle Hannibal's mental ivory tower and suddenly attack. The gifted Mr. Fiennes again proves his presence as the pathetic 'Tooth Fairy', although his brutally methodical slayings are rather implausibly traced to a literally emasculating grandma. Despite powerful performances, there's room for only one icon in this film, and his name is Hannibal Lecter.
The film's actresses are even less lucky. Mary-Louise Parker is wasted as Graham's understandably nervous wife, and the luminous Emily Watson is also short-changed as a blind woman who befriends Dolarhyde in director Brett Ratner's clumsy representation of our slasher's "aww-you-see-he's-alright-really" side. One feels that giving Fiennes an unfortunate speech impediment or a hideous facial deformity may have been a more subtle way of vying for the audience's pity. Oops, no, sorry... they already did that.
Despite this, Ratner is competent and he has the good sense to leave the artistry to Dante Spinotti's chillingly beautiful cinematography and Danny Elfman's eerie musical score. Plus, he does do an infinitely better job than Ridley Scott did last year, with Red Dragon trafficking in savagery without leaving the bitter aftertaste of the god awful Hannibal. By now it is impossible to duplicate the shock of the 11-year-old Lambs, but the new film succeeds, with the help of a dream cast and first-rate script from Lambs adaptor Ted Tally, at raising this third entry in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy well above the average serial-murderer thriller.
And that is surely something worth toasting with a nice glass of Chianti...
Three is the magic number in director Duncan Roy's ambitious digital video portrayal of identity fraudster Dean Page (Leitch). Miserable in his middle-class life in Romford, Essex, with no chance of going to college and an abusive father, 18-year-old Dean is mesmerised by the glamour of the high-class clientele in his mother's posh restaurant.
Through a succession of lucky breaks, Dean slithers his way into the upper echelons of London's fashionable Eaton Square, where he is adored by the camp aristocracy. Soon he too is wearing expensive clothes and eating in exclusive restaurants, all paid for on a bogus credit card. Dean's naïvety leads him into a homosexual Bermuda love triangle with fellow con man Benjamin (Youngblood Hills), on the run from obscurity and family troubles in small-town Texas, and David Glendenning, a detestable free-loader who lives by the axiom that he makes even the royal family look "positively middle-class".
But Dean's masquerade soon melts under the heat of passion and the pursuit of two credit fraud investigators who hunt him down following his lavish spending trail in London, Paris and the south of France. On the brink of being accepted into the high society that he craves, Dean ultimately faces a choice between love and society status.
Roy tackles this re-working of his own true-life experiences with a refreshing vigour of originality. The entire film is presented in three simultaneous square frames, which show the action from concentric camera angles - sometimes in sync, sometimes ahead of each other, like a Bruce Nauman video installation at Tate Modern. The first twenty minutes of viewing is consequently very demanding, but one soon adapts to the format and appreciates the nuances it allows. The action appears to be filmed from three cameras recording at the same time, but the triangulation reveals that each frame represents a different take - as if three versions of the same story are happening at once.
The end product is a visual banquet; but Roy's writing is at times unbelievable and potholed. Despite flashes of genuine humour and pathos, it is nowhere near as accomplished as Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley, but perhaps this is a deliberate move to mimic the crass falsity of polite society. Nevertheless, the sheer bravado with which the film ravishes class posturing in late-1970s Britain makes it more than worth a three-way look.
Dir: Rob Cohen; Starring: Vin Diesel, Samuel L Jackson
Bursting with testosterone, this pumped-up action flick sees hard-man newcomer Vin Diesel save the world., without so much as a well-crafted screenplay to help him.
RELEASE: 18th October
Dir: Mike Leigh; Starring: Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville
Latest collaboration between director Mike Leigh and lead Timothy Spall, who plays an unsuccessful cabbie living in the dead end of alienation and misery in modern Britain.
RELEASE: 18th October
17th Oct 2002