The Silence of the Lambs
The Basic Plot in Five Words or Less: Sewing freaks, moths, cannibals, eek.
My Basic Ramblings: As many, many of you know, I haven't been happy with the Academy Award Best Picture results lately. Let's review them real quick.
I'm quite surprised that Anthony Hopkins has been able to have a real career beyond this movie. I'd think that with the phenomenal job he did as Hannibal Lecter, he'd be type-cast for life. (Wouldn't Nixon and The Mask of Zorro have been quite different movies if he'd played a psycho cannibal? Watergate might have ended a bit differently....)
Jodie Foster, as I'm sure you know, recently gave birth to her first child, a boy. Charles Foster. Wonder if his nickname'll be "Kane". If I'm not mistaken, she has blue eyes, and the actress who played Clarice as a little girl had brown eyes. Either that or the other way around. (An aside: Cammie King, the actress who played Bonnie Blue Butler in Gone With the Wind had brown eyes, while Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable both had blue eyes. The director solved this genetic problem by having Bonnie always wear blue, and by creative lighting. No one noticed.)
This movie was very big with my friends and me my sophomore year of college. We'd go around saying "I went to Vassar, it's not a charm school" in a West Virginian accent. We'd randomly assume the "all the police officers pointing their guns in random directions right before they discover the cop strung up outside the big cage" pose. (Where did they find a cage that big, that quickly? Had the city recently been attacked by a large ostrich?) We'd wander around academic buildings at night with the lights off, imitating the "Jodie in the dark" scene. We were weird.
I'm assuming y'all have seen the movie, so I'm not going to surprise anyone by discussing Jame Gumb's little women-skin outfit. I suppose he should be admired for his determination; if I was trying to make a suit of women's skin, I'd probably get about half way through, make a mistake and just give it up, like I do with all my other sewing projects. (Sitting on my sewing machine is a half-finished dress I planned to wear to my wedding rehearsal dinner. I got married nine months ago.)
One little part of the movie that I liked was the scene near the end with the ringing doorbell (we see Jack Crawford ring the doorbell, Jame Gumb hears the doorbell ring, but the two events aren't related). Usually a scene like that would seem like a great big cheat, but it works here.
The goofy entomologists are so cool. My great-uncle was an entomologist. He got bitten by mosquitoes so many times that he became immune to them.
I've heard many a time that The Godfather Part II is the only sequel of a movie ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Apparently they don't consider this movie to be a sequel to Manhunter, which was based on the book Red Dragon by Thomas Harris and directed by Michael "Miami Vice" Mann. In this movie, Hannibal Lecter is played by Brian "Argyle Wallace from Braveheart" Cox, and Jack Crawford by Dennis "Various People in Movies I Haven't Seen" Farina. I saw part of it on TV, and in the one scene I remember, Hannibal was on a prison telephone with no pushbuttons, and he had rigged the phone to dial to the operator, and he was trying to convince said operator that he had no arms and couldn't dial the phone so could the operator please dial a specific number for him?
I read recently that a sequel to this movie is in the process of being under way. Cool. Usually I'm afraid of what sequels will bring (Babe 2, for example. I'm petrified), but this one could work. It could involve all the actors and actresses who've played FBI agents in Silence of the Lambs, The X-Files and Twin Peaks. You'd have Jodie Foster and Kasi Lemmons and David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson and Nicholas Lea and Mimi Rogers and Kyle MacLachlan and Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland wandering around solving crimes, and bossing them around you'd have Scott Glenn and Roger Corman and David Lynch and Mitch Pileggi. You could do a movie with all these people's characters, and they could drive around in a big van and wear ascots. An alternate universe Scooby-Doo. (Chris Owens, who plays Agent Spender, can be Scrappy-Doo.)