The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Director: Jonathan Demme

Cast: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

Have I Seen it Before: One doesn’t start a Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins) podcasts without coming across this one at some point in their past.

Did I Like It: Can a review of this film over thirty years after its release add anything new to the discourse about it? Probably not, aside from the need to say that whatever you remember about the film, it’s better than that memory feebly maintains.

It’s such a singular cinematic experience that our episode of Friendibals did kinda, sorta descend into an effuse-fest.

And I’m actually okay with that! The movie is that good, and stands far and ahead above any other attempt to bring the character to life, with the exception of—against all odds—the tv series Hannibal.

But after that bloom of rediscovering the film withers even slightly (it’s been several days since I screened the movie and recorded the episode), are their complaints that I can reach for?

A reflexive criticism I could see is that it, at the most basic level, implies some very not-nice things about transgender people. The film doesn’t do nearly enough (or at least as much as Thomas Harris’ novel) to make explicit that Jame Gumb’s (Levine) is a monster who thinks he is a transgender, not that trans people are akin to monsters.

That all might be forgiven, and a degree of nuance is on display here, if only the film weren’t so good that it isn’t just an extremely good way to spend two hours, but that it singlehandedly re-defined the serial killer genre through the present. We could (and I, inevitably, will) talk about the glut of Hannibal Lecter sequels and prequels we got in result to the film’s ubiquity*, but nearly every serial killer movie in the last thirty years. Just look at Instinct (1999), a movie I was only 50% certain I was remembering correctly before looking it up. Any film featuring crime of any sort absorbed the sounds, but not the language of this film. Just look at Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994). There’s a mean-spirited, at best, but ultimately hatefully violent myopic discourse regarding the trans community now, and while it would be exceptionally reductive to blame that all on this film, every stunted attempt by filmmakers to give their monsters more dimension for three decades might very well have done so.

If only the film weren’t so good.

*Another thing I forgot during the podcast: In the book and in Ted Tally’s screenplay, the iconic muzzle placed on Lecter was written as a hockey mask. One could imagine why that didn’t survive to the final cut.

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones

Have I Seen it Before: Yup.

Did I Like It: So, lately I’ve been listening to many of the later (read: preposterously impossible to be adapted to film) Tom Clancy novels via audio book and before we get into this film, I think now is as good a time as any to get some things off my chest. Never have I ever been through such a more progressively ridiculous set of events in my life, and I include both the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Trump presidency in that statement. Why have I subjected myself to these interminable tomes? Well, I had purchased Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears (read, those Clancy books which were begrudgingly—by all parties—adapted to film) on Audible and with my reading goal for 2021 well passed, I could take some chances on some books I only bought on an ill-defined impulse. By the time I was in the middle of Fears—which at least partially hinges on a subplot involving Ryan’s bout of erectile dysfunction*--I was “Jim-ing” an unseen camera so often, that John Krasinski’s eventual casting finally made sense. I kept going because the knowledge that Ryan’s supreme intelligence and only-honest-man-in-town-ness propels him into the Presidency… for reasons. It’s time I’ll never get back, and by the time of Executive Orders when Ryan addresses the nation and applauds his fellow citizens for making responsible decisions for themselves in the efforts to stem an outbreak of airborne Ebola, I laughed so hard at my car’s stereo, I fear I may have hurt my Honda Civic’s feelings.

Tom Clancy is garbage. He continues to be garbage, and he’s been dead for nearly ten years.

But, here’s the good news! None of the later—and even occasionally posthumous—absurdities of the saga of John Patrick Ryan are here. This is a brilliantly constructed spy thriller, where Jack Ryan (Baldwin – could you imagine him, or for that matter Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, or Krasinski portraying Clancy’s latter-day Reaganesque fever dream of a President?) is the perpetually under-estimated smartest man in the room… or boat.

While I might say that the story ultimately halts more than it concludes, the trip to that anti-climax is engaging enough, and all of the people involved aren’t bringing to the proceedings the same baggage as the source material** that it’s extraordinarily difficult not to like the film, despite my steadily increasing antipathy for the character.

*Clancy sure knew his audience. I’ve got to give him that.

**To be fair, part of the film’s strength is that the direct source material is far and away Clancy’s strongest book. It came before he started to buy his own press.

The Right Stuff (1983)

Director: Philip Kaufman

Cast: Charles Frank, Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Lance Henriksen

Have I Seen It Before?: Maybe? There’s a half-remembered viewing on cable back in the day when people would watch movies on cable, but I couldn’t swear to it. I have read the book, though.

Did I like it?: In assessing the movie, I think I only have two complaints. First, I think the long runners at the beginning and the ending involving Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) were extraneous. It really delays the film from where I am sitting, and doesn’t Yeager deserve his own feature, not just the short before this true story develops?

Second, tragically, there is no way a film features synthesizer music and isn’t either made in the early 1980s, or insists on making us think it was made in the 1980s. Thankfully composer Bill Conti kept his worst 80s impulses (see some of the early Rocky sequels for more examples of how bad it could get) in check for the most part and only a few scenes date the proceedings with their production, and not their settings.

Aside from that, the film is terrific. I blanched at its three-plus hour run time, mainly because I wasn’t sure what could be shown about the Mercury 7 that couldn’t be wrapped up in a tight two hours. I may have been right about that, if I focus on my complaints about the Yeager section, but aside from that the film zips around. The film is perfectly cast, with Ed Harris particularly equating himself well as the politician (and at that point, potentially future president) in pilots clothing, John Glenn. It’s a unique balance to fill a cast with character actors who also manage to pull off a job that is almost exclusively the province of big-name movie stars: remaining charming, even when they’re acting like complete assholes.