Hannibal

[Reed Rothchild]

Saw Hannibal last night and thought it was an interesting sequel which stood up as a good film in it's own right.
      I've never read the book, so the question is: what's different with the ending? A few critics cited they hated and couldn't accept what  Starling's character did, but what did she do that earned so much venom? Fall in love with him? Share that brain and onion stir fry? What was it?

[Chadzilla]

Reed Rothchild wrote:
>
> < Fall in love with him?
> Share that brain and onion stir fry?

Yes and YES (Clarice even asks for seconds).  Hannibal and Clarice then run off together and hide out in South America and have lots of hot sex and cultured nights on the town.  A lot of people hated the ending, but I loved it (it creeped me out and robbed me of a good night of sleep, something that no other book has ever done).  I think that Thomas Harris was playing a sick, black joke on reader expectations of some kind of Starling saves the day ending and rubbing our faces in the sick love to the two shared in the previous book and movie (Harris himself states he was not comfortable with the ending, but could not find another one that wasn't cheap or contrived).  Whatever you do, don't dance with the devil (the novel ends with the two love birds actually engaged in a a dance).  The primary reason Jodie Foster refused to do the movie was the novel's ending, which she hated.

[Steven Millan]

                    After Hannibal carries her away from the massacre at Mason Verger's place,Clarice falls in love with hannibal,they have hot sex,and she eats Kimble's scrambled brain's along with hannibal,and they ride off onto South America together.
                   That was the original ending,as opposed to the film's more literal(sequel-sense)ending.
                   Apparentely,Thomas Harris has gotten bored with the Hannibal concept,and decided to take it to outrageous extremes,since many fans more idealize with Hannibal(and any other movie monster),and just decided to have Hannibal get the girl,and sex it up with her.
                  Personally,I thought it was a nice,original take on the typical horror story ending(after all,the Frankenstein monster in "Young Frankenstein" also gets the girl,and beds her),though doing something very challenging,but original,for the genre for a change..

[Reed Rothchild]

Cheers, guys. Jeez, I was joking about the sharing of the brains - ewwwwwww!

[Neville]

Get the damn book, it is surely worth a reding. My personal opinion is that Harris decided to have a lot of fun at the studio's expense selling them the rights of an unfilmable book, filled with dark humour, wild, impossible plot twists and gore. It even makes fun of Jodie Foster! Really, at one scene Verger asks to one of the people to do research over Clarice, and the asks him if she is a lesbian! I athink Foster was angry with Harris for this rather than the ending.

About the movie, it has its ups and downs, but acting is solid and I just loved the scenes in Florence, dark & gothic, and the cat-and-mouse between Lecter & Pazzi. I also though the ending was very interesting, and overall I consider it a seriously underrated movie.