Hugh Dancy | the m0vie blog

Hannibal – Savoureux (Review)

Posted on August 30, 2013 by Darren

That was one impressive first season. Hannibal has developed from something that seemed like an idle curiosity – a police procedural based around the over-used cannibalistic serial killer? – into one of the best new American dramas of the past season. I suspect a lot of that is down to the decision to structure the season across thirteen episodes, instead of a larger (more traditional) network structure of twenty-or-more. To be fair, there were a few missteps early in the first season as Hannibal tried to balance the expectations of a procedural drama with the demands of an intimate character study, but it found its feet almost half-way through the season and it has never looked back.

Hannibal has been tightly plotted and cleverly constructed from around about Coquilles, and it’s remarkably how the show has found a way to weave its “serial killers of the week” into the over-arching plot. For example, Georgia from Buffet Froid winds up being a vital piece of Hannibal’s plot to incriminate Will. The clock that the sinister psychiatrist asked Will to draw in that episode is used to generate some exquisite tension here. Everything seems to have been building towards this point, and Bryan Fuller has done a simply tremendous job constructing a thirteen-episode Rube Goldberg machine that pays off beautifully.

Portrait of the killer?

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Buffet froid, Caroline Dhavernas, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, murder, NBC, serial killer, silence of the lambs, will graham | 4 Comments »

Hannibal – Relevés (Review)

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Darren

For a show about a serial killer and the FBI’s Behavioural Analysis Unit, Hannibal is often surprisingly deep. That’s not much of a surprise, given the quality of the staff working on it, but the show is absolutely stunning meditation on identity and personality. In a way, that’s one of the smartest things about Fuller’s first thirteen episode season, building on the foundations set by Thomas Harris to construct something that fits quite elegantly while remaining its own distinct entity.

Relevés is the penultimate episode of the first season, and the point where – having used Roti to clear away some of the clutter – the show starts tying up a lot of those loose ends. Perhaps one of the most impressive things about the episode is the amount of suspense that Bryan Fuller and his staff can wring from the set-up – despite the fact that we know how this story ends, Hannibal manages to engage us so completely in the telling that what we already know seems almost irrelevant.

Things are heating up…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Anderson, Bryan Fuller, Georgia, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Hugh Dancy, jack, Lecter, Mads Mikkelsen, murder, serial killer, thomas harris, will graham | 2 Comments »

Hannibal – Roti (Review)

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Darren

Roti is the point where Hannibal really starts to gear up for its finalé. The decision to thematically name each of the first season’s episodes after a part of a meal seems oddly appropriate, as the whole season can be seen as a banquet, each of the courses painstakingly prepared to ensure a rich bouquet of flavour and a pleasing array of tastes. Each course is individual, and yet it remains part of the whole. It’s all one gigantic and enjoyable experience, just broken down into sweet digestible chunks. Each serves a clear purpose, like a chapter in a book, or a course in a meal.

Roti features the return of Abel Gideon, the show’s obvious homage to Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Doctor Hannibal Lecter. It also positions Will precisely where he needs to be for the first season’s rapidly-approaching climax.

A piece of the action…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Anthony Hopkin, Bryan Fuller, Eddie Izzard, Gideon, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Hugh Dancy, Lecter, Mads Mikkelsen, NBC, Roti, serial killer, Sherlock, silence of the lambs | Leave a comment »

Hannibal – Trou Normand (Review)

Posted on August 21, 2013 by Darren

Trou Normand has a rather beautiful twist, and one which caught me – and, I suspect, a significant portion of the audience – completely off-guard. It’s not overstated or overplayed, but it manages to pack one hell of a punch. It fits surprisingly well with everything we know about the show and the characters who inhabit it, while still serving as something of a game-changer. It doesn’t change the rules of Hannibal too much, but only because the show has been so dedicated to playing with audience assumptions.

In any other show, Abigail Hobbs would be the victim that Will Graham so desperately needs her to be. Jack Crawford’s cynical suspicions would prove to be as completely off-base as his absolute faith in Hannibal Lecter. It would provide a nice moral victory for Will, even if only the audience ever knew about it, and serve as foreshadowing to Jack’s only blindness. It’s a neat narrative hook, we’ve become so subconsciously familiar with the way that these sorts of narratives work that we have come to expect it.

However, Hannibal isn’t any other show, and it demonstrates it by pulling off a particularly shrewd (and nasty) character twist.

A monument…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Abigail Hobbs, Eddie Izzard, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Hugh Dancy, Jack Crawford, Lance Henriksen, murder, Raw material, thomas harris, Will, will graham | Leave a comment »

Hannibal – Fromage (Review)

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Darren

With Fromage, Hannibal walks a bit of a fine line. One of the obvious conflicts in the first half of the season was between the procedural “serial killer of the week” elements and the more intriguing character-driven parts of the show. I think that, past the half-way point of the first season, the show begins to balance those two aspects much better. However, Fromage can’t help but feel a little bit contrived. It relies a rather convenient overlap between Hannibal’s world and Will Graham’s investigation.

Still, it works quite well as a continuation of the themes hinted at in Sorbet, and takes advantage of the fact that the show has completely embraced its lead character’s darker side. If Entrée and Sorbet pushed Hannibal from the periphery of the story into the spotlight, then Fromage allows him to actively drive the story. It’s the show’s first serial-killer-heavy story that is driven more by Hannibal than by Graham.

Work and play…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Benjamin Raspail, Bryan Fuller, Fromage, gillian anderson, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, NBC, Sorbet, thomas harris, Tobias, Vocal folds, will graham | Leave a comment »

Hannibal – Sorbet (Review)

Posted on August 16, 2013 by Darren

Hannibal took its time building up Hannibal Lecter as a serial killer. According to creator Bryan Fuller, there would have been a joke in Aperitif about Lecter’s culinary habits, but holding off on the sight of Lecter as a serial killer until the end of Entrée feels like it was a shrewd move. Not because it could ever fool the audience into forgetting that Hannibal Lecter is a murdering cannibal or anything like that. Instead, it builds up a certain amount of tension and suspense around the character, allowing us to see how those around him could have been blinded by his persona.

With a few obvious exceptions – knocking out Doctor Bloom in Potage or phoning the Hobbs household in Aperitif – we’ve mostly seen Lecter through the eyes of others. While the very premise of the show counts on the audience knowing who or what Lecter is, keeping him at a distance allowed the show a bit of breathing room in its first year. However, now that we’ve caught a glimpse of Lecter in action, Sorbet feels like its willing to pull back the layers on our eponymous epicurean.

Best served warm…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Anthony Hopkin, Bryan Fuller, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Hugh Dancy, laurence fishburne, Lecter, Mads Mikkelsen, Minnesota, murder, NBC, serial killer, silence of the lambs, Television, thomas harris, will graham | Leave a comment »

Hannibal – Entrée (Review)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Darren

It’s nice that we got this far into the season before Entrée was necessary. It’s the kind of episode that a show like Hannibal was always going to have to produce relatively early on, allowing it to air the laundry, so to speak, and to overtly and clearly distinguish itself from a popular predecessor. In this case, it’s The Silence of the Lambs.

Although we haven’t met Clarice Starling yet, although the credit at the start of each episode cites Red Dragon as the show’s inspiration, it’s hard to escape the shadow of one of the most popular horror films ever made. Many argue that The Silence of the Lambs was the first film to win the Best Picture Oscar. Even today, it remains a cultural touchstone, and there’s an incredibly large number of people who are only familiar with the character of Hannibal Lecter through that story and – in particular – through the film adaptation.

Hannibal hasn’t been shy about referencing The Silence of the Lambs, nor should it be. Crawford’s office from the start of Aperitif seems arranged in homage to the film, while the arrangement of two of the victims in Coquilles couldn’t help but evoke Hannibal’s dramatic escape from his cell at the film’s climax. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that Entrée exists mainly to allow the show to indulge and engage in the imagery and iconography of the film, so that Hannibal can truly distinguish itself.

“Oh, goodie…”

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: amy adams, Anthony Hopkin, anthony hopkins, Christopher Nolan, Clarice Starling, Eddie Izzard, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Henry Cavill, Hugh Dancy, Jack Crawford, laurence fishburne, Lawrence Fishburne, Mads Mikkelsen, man of steel, red dragon, Ripper, serial killer, silence of the lambs, superman, will graham | 2 Comments »

Hannibal: Coquilles (Review)

Posted on August 12, 2013 by Darren

I feel a little bad now. I spent a lot of time in Amuse-Boche and Ceuf complaining about the possibility that Hannibal might turn into a serial-killer-of-the-week procedural, at a time when the networks are over-saturated with that sort of forensic drama. However, Coquilles manages to be a pretty superlative hour of television despite feeling like a pretty conventional “catch the serial killer” story. The key is in the execution, with Coquilles serving as a rich character-driven drama that just happens to involve the hunt for a gruesome serial killer.

It also helps that the “angel maker” feels like a refugee from an early draft of a Thomas Harris novel rather than a bland psychopath of the week.

Served…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Bryan Fuller, christmas, Federal Bureau of Investigation, god, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Hugh Dancy, jack, Jack Crawford, laurence fishburne, Mads Mikkelsen, NBC, red dragon, serial killer, silence of the lambs, thomas harris, will graham | 2 Comments »

Hannibal – Ceuf (Review)

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Darren

Ceuf is somewhat overshadowed by the controversy it generated, an episode of Hannibal pulled from broadcast following several national tragedies (including the Boston bombings and the Newtown tragedy). In the wake of these two high-profile incidents, it was felt that broadcasting the full episode so close to the events would have been a bit much. This move naturally generated a host on on-line commentary with various people adopting various positions on the topic of whether or not Bryan Fuller was right to pull the show from the air. In a way, Ceuf is far more interesting for what it ended up being than as a chapter of Hannibal.

Something to chew over…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: arts, boston, Bryan Fuller, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Ceuf, Fuller, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Hugh Dancy, Jack Crawford, Molly Shannon, NBC, serial killer | Leave a comment »

Hannibal – Amuse-Bouche (Review)

Posted on August 5, 2013 by Darren

Second episodes can be tough. Pilots tend to establish the core themes and characters of a show, offering a very clear blueprint going forward and perhaps hinting at the direction that you want to take things. They are grand mission statements, couched in broad terms and delivered with a sense of novelty. Second episodes are a bit less exciting. They are about putting that plan into action, defining the edges a bit, expanding outwards where necessary and refining as needed. It’s with the second episode that you really get a sense of what a show is going to be like in a more practical week-to-week sense.

By that measure, Amuse-Bouche works quite well at giving us a sense of putting the show’s feet on the ground and helping prepare us for what lies ahead for the rest of the season.