Killing Them Softly is a gangster movie with delusions of complexity. While I suppose that it's clever to correlate a gangwar with the economic crisis from 2008, repeatedly hitting the viewer with this message makes the entire effort simply annoying. Good acting, semi-decent plot, bad direction. That said, I can watch just about anything with Brad Pitt in it.
A good movie from 1947 starring James Mason and Robert Newton (in a supporting role) which is set in Ireland. It has unfortunately not aged as well as it could have. But it is nevertheless worth the watch.
According to Wikipedia, Harris wrote this prequel (of Red Dragon, another prequel) because a movie producer threatened to have it written by somebody else. The drop in quality is palpable. The story is about Hannibal's childhood and coming of age and flits exotically between Lithuania and France with an even more exotic Japanese character thrown in the mix along with a garnishing of Japanese literature and poetry. The resulting soup is very contrived.
While this 1981 prequel to The Silence of the Lambs does feature Hannibal Lecter, he plays more of a cameo and is not a central character. This immediately downgrades the novel into one of those run-of-the-mill serial-killer tales, albeit about ten times more macabre. There are also a couple of largish plot holes that are difficult to digest.
On the whole, a disappointment.
The sequel to Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal is not as tight in terms of plot. But it more than makes up for it in character. I was simply bowled over by Dr. Lecter's character and especially, but the non-standard ending.
I wish I could give this a higher rating. But the plot got a little too unbelievably contrived in certain areas.
While Hopkins and Foster add the je ne sais quoi to the movie, The Silence of the Lambs, that end up making it better than its source, Thomas Harris' book is quite phenomenal. In many ways, watching the movie before reading the book helps visualise things better as Hopkins and Foster leave such an indelible mark on your memory.
This is a must read.
If the book wasn't bad enough for you, the movie is even worse. Avoid unless you are a fan or profess sadistic tendencies.
This movie leaves out the few things in the book that are actually interesting and leaves us with a dull hodge-podge of a film. Only watch if you're curious. I expect that the English adaptation will be far better.
This is the Swedish adaptation of Stieg Larsson's book of the same name. I watched it a couple of years ago when it came out and rated it a 6. However, now that I've read the books, I decided to give it a rewatch. Oddly, I could barely remember much of it. But, I do now know that it's quite a ridiculous adaptation of a good book. There are way too many changes and some of them are drastic. Characters are killed off. The police are involved in matters which were hushed up in the book. The Daniel Craig adaptation appears to be a work far truer to the book than this one.
A film that teaches you that if you have the balls (and tons of money), you can get away with all kinds of shit. A good watch with solid performances by Richard Gere and the delectable Brit Marling of "Another Earth" fame. The casting is good and the direction is tight.
