Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

everal random things up here, none of which are relevant enough to describe as "news" and then the Hannibal review below.

¤ It figures. After I wrote all of that illustrated blab about the Pop Cap game Dynomite, most of it discussing how virtually-impossible level 18 is, and how I'd only passed it once ever and only gotten close three or five times ever... I nearly passed it two out of the next three times I played, and have passed it about 4 times in perhaps 15 games since last week. 

With several of the other difficult levels in the game, there was a definite tipping point. I died on them initially, but once I got a good strategy for them and found out what worked best I went from dying every time to passing them almost every time, almost at once.  It was odd in that there was no transition period.  I didn't go ten games of gradual improvement, and then finally master it, with occasional regressive failures. On the contrary, I lost every time, angrily, and then I got good enough to win virtually every time, and in such easy fashion that I was left wondering why the hell it took me multiple failures to figure out how to do the level in the first place.

I could accept that, but I didn't think that would apply to level 18, since I figured out the strategy fairly quickly; I just kept dying time after time since I virtually never got the green and red eggs I needed to clear out space before I drowned under useless eggs of other colors.  It wasn't my technique or strategy, it was just bad luck.  Or more exactly, typical luck, since you need exceptionally good luck, in the form of good egg colors, to pass that level.

That being said, and luck being what it is (random) I'm at a loss to explain why I've passed it four or five times in the last 15 tries, after passing it just once in the first 50 or 60 tries. Is my run of luck just chance, or was I really screwing it up in some way previously, and I've improved on it without realizing why?

Clearly, this quandary can only be resolved with additional research.

¤ In other gaming news, Blizzard has just begun the World of Warcraft Beta, much to my surprise.  Given how long Blizzard takes (to get things right?) on every title, how much internal chaos they're reeling from with the ongoing ownership nightmare and damn near all of Blizzard North quitting, and how complex an MMORPG is, I was in no way surprised that they didn't make their "4th quarter 2003" estimate.  Hell, I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd missed 4th quarter 2004.

I haven't been following the WoW news at all, so the only way I even knew the beta was underway was the appearance of an emails from Blizzard notifying me that I'd been selected to participate, and then a second one with the authorization code and other information.  I didn't sign up for the beta, but since I'm a charter member of their fansite list and have long been on their beta list, I didn't need to. *smug fuck*

As they did with the War3 Expansion beta, they're doing the whole thing as a download, rather than burning and mailing out thousands of beta CDs like they did with Diablo, D2, D2X, and Warcraft III. With War3X it wasn't a big deal, since it was just a couple of hundred meg DL.  Big, but not undoable over a modem. The WoW beta is a bit larger:

Once you have selected a destination folder, the application will go to work downloading the World of Warcraft client. Make sure to set your Internet connection speed from Connection Speed drop-down menu. The client is approximately 2 gigabytes in size, so depending on your Internet connection speed, the full download may take many hours to complete. Please be patient. You should only have to download it once. If you have to, you can stop the download and resume it at a later time. To resume the file, simply connect to WorldofWarcraft.com, login with the Account you just created, and choose the download link to the right. When asked for download location again, simply choose the directory selected previously.

Yes, that's 2 gig.  Like bigger than most hard drives about 8 years ago.  It would take them 4 or 5 CD-ROMs to hold it, so you can see why they didn't go that route.  They're doing it with some sort of bit torrent thing, and you must agree to download and upload at the same time.  So in theory, the more users who are getting it at once, the faster it is for everyone, since it's being shared out in every direction across the internet and using all of our bandwidth for it.

I say "in theory" since I'm now pulling it at 11k/sec, and it's estimating 83 hours to completion.  So um... see you in Azeroth Monday evening?

I have no idea how much I'll even play it, but I'll at least give it a look.  Malaya wants to check it out as well, but I'm writing a novel and she's writing a book and honestly, I think we'd both rather just play Diablo II for an hour than tinker around with a new time sink of an MMORPG that we'll never have the time or interest to play when it's released.  I imagine it'll be pretty and all but since neither of us has the time to spend getting deeply-involved in a game now, we're going to be far from ideal beta testers.

As with all Bliz games in beta, the demand is scorching for this one, but I don't imagine I'll sell it, even if that sort of thing were legal.  Ebay doesn't allow the sales of beta products, so the only auction for WoW Beta on there now is a joke, with a $99,999,999 price.  And I believe that's a bit beyond the allowed limits of a PayPal transaction.  I've also been beseeched regularly by my two long time gaming website coworkers, who run a WoW site in addition to the D2 site, and currently have 3 betas and 12 site workers, an who would like me to give it to them for redistribution if I'm not using it myself.  I imagine the WoW beta will run through the summer, as long as it will take to work out the kinks, bugs, server crashes and miscellaneous balance issues in as massive a project as an MMORPG, so I can see people playing this beta for longer than they play most completed games, before growing sick of them. If I/we do get sick of it I guess I'll give the cd-key to Elly, unless some reader out there is just rabidly hungry for it and offers to mail me like $500 cash.  Since after all, I'm pretty much a whore.

I'm not really looking forward to playing this one so much since if there's any lesson I took from playing UO for 6 or 8 months, and have seen again and again as others talk about their experiences with Everquest and DAoC and other MMO games, it's that there's really no point in playing an MMORPG if you aren't going to devote about six hours a day. Anything less than that and you're forever stuck in the backwaters, lapped by people who can play virtually every waking hour, and who join up in guilds that work together to dominate all single players and casual players. Supposedly, Blizzard has learned from the way past MMORPGs worked, and they've designed WoW to be fun for solo players, and people who don't have the interest or time to powergame.  We'll see, though I doubt I'll see, since I'm not planning on playing it anywhere near that much.

There is some good news though; my download is up to 122k/sec, which means I've only got 4.5 hours to go!

(I did find a way to make it go faster, after some experimentation.  And I posted about it in a forum thread on WoW.net.  It'll be funny if rabid fans from there follow the "Flux's blog" link back and read this update.  And by "funny" I mean "death threats will be issued.")

¤ At CostCo yesterday on the way home from Davis, I was thinking about getting some soda, and low and behold, right by the entrance they had a couple of huge pallets of just the product I had in mind.  Pepsi and Diet Pepsi, and for $7 you could get a 36 can rectangle large enough to double as a cat carrier. Remember when there were only 6 packs of soda cans?  And then they started selling cases, which were 12, way back when. At some point those became just 12-packs, and cases were 24, usually comprised of four 6-packs in a cardboard tray and shrink wrapped.  The last time I bought Pepsi, a couple of months ago, it came in a 30 pack, in a large cardboard rectangle, and that was the biggest single collection of soda I'd ever seen.  Now they're already up to 36.

I suppose there's some natural limit, perhaps when they reach the point that your average housewife can't physically lift and carry the container, but they're up to nearly 30 pounds now, they don't seem to have reached that limit yet. Clearly, the gluttony of your average American can not be assuaged with any reasonably-sized consumer product. (As for me, I bought it since it was cheap, and what the hell, I'll drink them eventually.)

Perhaps the soda manufacturers will get into a size battle, much like the men's disposable razors are in, where once they had one blade, then two blades, then three, then three with special features like moisturizing strips, and now they're up to four.  There was a prescient article on The Onion about one manufacturer going up to five blades, but I can't find it to link to it. Bah.  I use an electric myself, so pay no attention to that sort of thing.

Anyway, has Coke yet responded to Pepsi's ground breaking work in packaging ever more cans of sugar water in a brightly-colored cardboard box? Will they launch their new Coke Brick™ with an astonishing 42 or perhaps even 48 cans of syrupy fizz?  A container whose contents outweigh (temporarily, at least) the whining, frequently-hyperactive child it's being purchased for in the first place?

America's consumers are thirsting for the battle to be joined!

Incidentally, doesn't this make you want to go into the vending machine business? Imagine the profit vending machine owners are making? It's generally a dollar, or more, for a can of soda.  Yet anyone can buy 36 of them for $7 at CostCo, and if you buy in bulk you can get them for a lot cheaper straight from a distributor. Even at the $7 for 36 I paid (plus the 5 cent per can CRV, to be completely accurate) that's $.19 cents per can, or 24 cents after the CRV.  So they're looking at a profit per pack of around $27 per pack, with the only expense whatever the electricity costs to run the machine.  Vending machines aren't very expensive either, since you can buy them right at CostCo for like $700, or less for smaller models.  Pay for itself in a month in a busy location, and it's pure profit after that. Forever.

¤ Saw this link on Iron Circus. Sleeve clothing! AKA fake ugly tattoos.

As you can tell once you're looking at larger images of it, you're buying a piece of very sheer, flesh-toned cloth, with silk screened tattoo images on it, and wearing that with other clothing so that it appears you are covered in enough tattoos to give your mother a heart attack.

I think the full length sleeves, not to mention the full top, are a bit much for most people.  It's hard to find anyone who wants to look like that outside of a Nü Metal band, biker gang, or prison. However if they start doing these for other areas of the body; like a sock that would go from clam diggers down to the shoe or ankle bracelet, or a girdle thing to add a belly/small of the back tattoo, they might really become popular. For people who are fashion victim enough to chase the current giant ugly tattoo trend, but with just enough common sense to not do it permanently.

Spoilers! This review contains numerous plot spoilers about the book and the movie, since I'm basically comparing their similarities and differences.  Stop now if you don't want the beginnings, middles, and ends spoiled.

This review/discussion will touch on both the book and the movie, as I compare the differences between the source material and the movie they made from it.  I saw the movie in theaters, and have seen it several times since then, but I only read the book for the first time a week or so ago.  Of the three novels/movies, Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, the third makes by far the most changes between the novel and the movie.

Like most people, I think Silence of the Lambs is just about a perfect movie, and is probably the best horror/suspense film every made.  It didn't win best actor/actress/picture/director for nothing, though I'm a bit of a hypocrite for even bringing that up, since I annually ignore the Academy Award winners since the acting roles are almost invariably given to some overwrought, heart-tuggingly emotional performance in a movie no one will actually see (as they were this year), and the best picture is usually some grandstanding epic, or a clever little picture about nothing that's forgotten in two years while much more enjoyable films from that year that didn't even get nominated endure in our memories.  This year I happened to have seen and liked the best picture, but that's a rare exception.

Anyway, Academy Awards aside, Silence of the Lambs is a great movie; great on a number of levels. And with it clearly being the defining film of the Lecter trilogy (though Red Dragon the book hardly even mentions him), and casting such a gigantic shadow over Hannibal and Red Dragon, it's hard to comment on either of those films on their own merits.  This is usually the case with sequels though. One of them is the best, and the others might not be bad, but in comparison they never measure up.

I actually don't think Hannibal the movie is bad.  It's not great, but the plot of the novel is far less interesting than Silence was, since there's no real compelling plot. It's just Lecter running around trying to avoid capture while taunting his pursuers, and Clarice being jerked around like a puppet on strings by Mason Verger as he tries to catch Lecter.  It's got interesting characters and some cool stuff in it, but it's sort of a plotless freak show, compared to Silence, where you had the fascinating series of verbal and intellectual confrontations between Clarice and Lecter, and the overall plot of the FBI trying to catch Buffalo Bill before he could kill the kidnapped Senator's daughter.

Hannibal suffered for the same reasons Red Dragon did; not enough face time for Lecter with someone he could interact with as an equal.  It's not so much fun to watch him dominate the weaker minds he runs into in the 1st and 3rd book, but it's great fun to see him spar with someone smart, and whom he respects in the 2nd book.  They tried hard in the Hannibal movie to work in more Clarice/Lecter stuff, since there's none of it at all in the book, (until the totally absurd conclusion) but a phone call where Clarice wanders around a shopping center and doesn't talk at all about herself since she's trying to be a hard boiled detective is no comparison to the long face to face confrontations that made Silence such a brilliant intellectual horror film.

I suppose I admire Thomas Harris for not just rooting through his own feces, by having Lecter conveniently captured again and Clarice go interview him.  But that doesn't mean the stuff he came up with instead is as good as that literary coprophilia would have been.

If you've not read the book Hannibal, you'll be surprised how different it is from the film.  It's a good book, if a bit absurd in places, but the fans are pretty unhappy with it, judging by the reader reviews. It's got a 3/5 rating on Amazon.com, from an astonishing 2762 reviews, and I'd venture to guess that at least 90% of the unhappy readers are that way due to the ridiculous ending. Sort if by lowest ratings and read some of those if you want a taste of things.

I wouldn't give Hannibal that low a rating, since it does have some good stuff and clever ideas and interesting characters, but the ending is very weak and so much of the book is so relentlessly over the top to the point of camp that it's basically impossible to suspend your disbelief.  You might enjoy it all the same, I did on some levels, but it's never the believable, gritty, and fascination story that Silence was, and that Red Dragon was, up until it's rather silly and cliche ending. I'd give Hannibal the novel a 3/5 on the Amazon.com scale, but with major disclaimers and asterisks.

I suppose I prefer a book like Hannibal, one that's brilliant in places, dreadful and silly in others, but full of vivid characters and amazingly-weird events, over a safe, plain, mediocre novel, even though I'd give them both about the same final review score.

As for the movie vs. the book, the essential story is the same, with some major changes to the characters, and totally different endings. In both Lecter is in Italy and Starling is in trouble over the drug bust turned mad shoot out. Mason Verger, one of Lecter's few surviving victims, is super rich and busy pulling strings to get Clarice into more trouble and to draw Lecter out. Lecter toys with and then kills the stupid Italian cop Pazzi in spectacularly ironic and gruesome fashion, and returns to America once Clarice is in trouble.  There he is eventually captured by Mason's men and nearly fed to boars before Clarice frees him and gets shot in the process, at which point Lecter rescues her. After that the movie and the book differ widely. Both have Krendler captured and lobotimized and his brain consumed, but other than that the whole end of the book is very different, with Clarice ending up happily living with Hannibal, and the two of them in love.  More on that in a minute.

There are tons of minor differences along the way, with the novel containing a lot more stuff and characters than the film.  Barney is a major figure in the movie, working for Mason for about a month, before quitting/being fired by Mason's insane, lesbian, bodybuilder sister. Who isn't in the movie at all. In the book she's practically as major a character as Lecter or Clarice, and gets more actual page time than Mason himself.  In the movie they eliminated her and changed around a lot of the things she did.  Most of them vanish, while others are done by Kordell, Mason's private physician, or else by Mason himself. (Such as when he recognizes Clarice's car by the sound of the engine, and asks her about it. The sister is an uber bull dyke in the book, and loves cars.)

I can't really argue with her removal from the film, since she's just a ridiculous character. She works okay in the book, but in a film she'd be too hard to believe, and much of the stuff she does is unnecessary.  The only things you miss of her in the movie are the details she adds to just what a sick fucking puppy Mason is (more childhood pedophilia stories, basically), and the truly twisted subplot of how she wants some of Mason's sperm to impregnate her girlfriend, so they can carry on the Verger family line with a full blooded heir.  She gets her sperm in the end, literally, as she uses a cattle prod to sodomize Mason's paralyzed body and cause him to electro ejaculate before she murders him by dropping his vicious pet moray eel onto his wasted body where it proceeds to savage his face before they die of asphyxiation together.  And yes, this is all really in the book. And you thought the brain eating stuff was impossible to film without getting an X rating?

Besides the sister and the major plot things she does, Clarice is much different in the novel.  She's a lot weaker and less interesting, and she really does nothing to catch Lecter herself.  He comes to her; she doesn't know where Lecter is until he's back in the US and gets kidnapped trying to leave her a bottle of wine for her birthday.  She never talks to Pazzi on the phone at all, and doesn't know he exists until Lecter kills him. The movie added much more of Clarice doing excellent detective work as she tracks down Lecter leads and almost catches him before Pazzi gets killed.  She does some good work tracking down Lecter by the pattern of his luxury item purchases, and might have caught him eventually, or at least flushed out one or more of his fake identities, if he hadn't come to her and gotten captured by the men who were following her first.

Lecter's behavior is much different in the novel also, and much more intelligent and logical. It's ridiculous in the movies that he looks the same; he'd be one of the most famous people alive after the serial killings and escape, and every news program on earth would do regular features on him, with our societal obsession with serial killers fueling their ratings. The books realize this, and in them he's undergone extensive facial surgery, as well as had his sixth finger surgically removed and his hand repaired.  No, there's never a mention of him having six fingers in the films.  I think that's just as well anyway, since giving an evil mastermind six fingers is a bit of a cliche. It's such a sign of the beast that you might as well give him a tail and cloven hooves, for the symbolic value.

So Lecter looks different, and of course Clarice can't spot him on surveillance tape as she does in the movie. In fact Pazzi isn't entirely sure he's Lecter either, and has to do more detective work than just comparing a photograph.  He's not even positive when he gets the fingerprint and sends off the bracelet, and he doesn't dare dust it and run the print himself since that would compromise the evidence before Mason sees it and ruin his proof.  He figures out Lecter by observing his actions, seeing that he enjoys a view of Florence from the same location as a famous sketch Lecter did while in his asylum cell, and so on.  Pazzi isn't stupid, he's just overconfident and greedy.  He's also more layered in the novel, since he solved an infamous serial killer case early in his career (parallel to Clarice) but has since been screwed by higher ups, just like Clarice. He could redeem himself by capturing Lecter, but he elects to give up his career and take the $3m reward from Verger rather than going the official route. And pays the price for doing so, in a book scene that's just like the one in the movie. 

Mason Verger is pretty much the same character, but the method of his demise is very different, and his physical state differs as well.  He's far freakier in appearance in the novel; paralyzed from the neck down, able to control his TV and other things with just one working eye, and missing almost all the skin from his face, rather than just being covered in scar tissue like the movie make up. As for his death, he escapes the shoot out in the barnyard and never sees Lecter escape. He's back, safe in his room with Kordell, when his sister comes along and murders Kordell with a mallet, then gets cattle prod sodomized for his Verger sperm, before she kills him by tossing his vicious eel on him.  In the movie it's far less creative, with Kordell simply pushing his wheelchair into the pit, where the pigs finish him off quickly.  The movie is still somewhat ironic, with him being eaten by the pigs he intended to eat Lecter, but it's more so in the book with his precious, rare-fish-eating eel doing the honors, crowned with them both asphyxiating together. The one constant is that in both cases Mason was killed by a trusted servant/relative who resented him for his sickening cruelty and murdered him knowing that they'd get away with it since Hannibal would be blamed for it.

Krendler is much the same in the book as the movie.  In the book he's actually a bit coarser, greedier, less ethical, and much stupider, almost ridiculously dumb.  But he's in the same position, with the same aspirations for higher office (though it's made very clear in the book that Mason is the one pushing him to do that and financing him since he (Mason) wants a politician entirely in his pocket) and cruel lust for Clarice.  He meets a similar fate, though Lecter shoots him with a crossbow after the brain cooking scene, ensuring that he dies.  I always hoped that he lived on, actually, and it's not made clear if he does or not in the book.  I thought it would have been a far better punishment for such a piece of human shit to leave him alive and mostly lobotomized, rather than putting him out of his misery.  Let the idiot live on, drooling and hollow-skulled, an example to others and a pathetic shell of himself, hopefully with just enough intellect left to know what's been done to him, and that nothing can be done to repair the damage.

Crawford is much changed in the book as well.  In the movie he basically picks up where he left off in Silence, as a brilliant criminal profiler who is Clarice's boss.  He doesn't have much of a roll in Hannibal the film, but he's a strong, competent character.  In the book he's broken and depressed, still very sad over the death of his wife (she was dying during Silence, in a subplot that didn't make the movie at all) and completely unable to help Clarice when she's being professionally screwed. As things progress he has a heart attack, ends up in the hospital, then back home alone, and he basically commits suicide by feeling yet another heart attacking coming on and choosing not to dial 911, wanting to die in the bed that's been empty since his wife died, 8 years before.  It's quite depressing, really. 

But the big difference, and the thing that turned most fans against the book is the ending. I'm not going to cover it in exhaustive detail, and Malaya might launch a counterpoint since she thought it was much more logical and acceptable due to the differences in Clarice's character between the movies and the books, but basically Lecter drugs Clarice, puts her through extensive brain washing via mysterious mind-altering drugs, hypnosis, regression therapy, and other very high level psychological techniques, and the book ends with her a whole new person, one who loves Lecter and lives happily with him in Argentina. This remarkable change takes place over about 15 pages, in a hurried, glossed over section that felt like it was written the weekend before a proof of the book was due to the publishers, by Harris' research assistant.

It's not precisely brain washing, since Clarice isn't a zombie, she's just an entirely changed person due to Lecter's wild therapies completely purging her of her lifelong "living up to her dead father's memory" issues.  Once she's free of those, she can theoretically see herself clearly, and see objectively how evil and gutless her superiors in the FBI and Justice Department are, and has no problems throwing away her old life and heading off happily to a new life with the man who saw her through it and who loves her, Hannibal Lecter.

Groaning yet?

Hannibal has his own reasons for being obsessed with Clarice, and aside from some physics mumbo jumbo about how he wants to find a way to run time backwards to erase the years since his childhood, Lecter has come to equate Clarice with his dead sister.  And of course she couldn't just be dead, she was killed and eaten by starving peasants in the last days of World War II, starving peasant rabble who had come to hide on the Lecter family estate in Europe and had taken a number of children hostage and who were eating them one at a time to survive the freezing winter.  They rejected Hannibal since he was too skinny, in preference for his plumper sister, and he lived to escape that horror, in some way that's not covered in the novel, despite Lecter's frequent flashbacks.

So he still loves and cherishes his dead sister's memory, and somehow imagines that she'd have grown up to be someone much like Clarice, and while he likes and admires and lusts after Clarice, it's only as he merges her reality with the fantasy memory of his own sister that he decides he must have her.

Groaning again?

The entire issue of Lecter's childhood traumas, and the obvious seeds they planted for his adult actions are another point of contention amongst the fans.  I thought they were interesting, but I didn't need to hear them.  It was better when we knew less about Lecter, and could only conjecture about his childhood.  He's so brilliant and powerful and commanding that it did nothing but lessen him in my mind to know that he was just like all of the other serial killers; turned psychotic and evil by events in his childhood. I want to see Lecter as superhuman, above such petty weaknesses and failings.  Making him more human by revealing his horrible childhood just made him less interesting and more common, and I think it was a bad idea by Harris.  It's like he wanted everything to wrap up so impossibly-neatly that he had to put in a dead sister, and Lecter's inexplicable thoughts about entropy and time running backwards in the collapse of the universe, and then tie that in to Lecter's attraction to Clarice and his ridiculously-effective and unconventional therapy techniques. (Lecter actually exhumed Clarice's dead father and had her confront his bones at one point, in a scene that left me groaning in cheese-induced pain.)

I was perfectly fine with Lecter just being a man with an attraction to the pretty Clarice.  She's about the only person he's ever met who he could treat as an equal, he admires her dedication to her work, he admires how she's overcome her poor childhood to make herself a great FBI agent, etc. That's plenty; the whole "becoming his dead sister" subplot was just silly and unnecessary.

On the whole, the book is better until the ending, and while the ending of the movie isn't any good (Lecter can do everything else, but can't get off a pair of handcuffs with a full kitchen worth of tools at his disposal?) it's at least not a complete betrayal of all we've come to know and like about Clarice's character. Plus it's much more fun to think of Hannibal still out there, alone and devious, with the hope that Clarice might still be in the FBI, and hunting him.

I don't see any way for a 4th Hannibal novel, and at the rate Harris writes it's almost irrelevant, since Hopkins as Lecter is what makes the series work for me, and he'll be too old to play the character believably by 2010. Possibly Lecter could become an aged monster who manipulates and acts entirely with his mind, but that's a long shot. And anyway, how can the plots be reconciled?  Hannibal the book ends with Lecter and Clarice happily living together in Argentina. Hannibal the movie ends with Lecter cutting off his own hand (rather than Clarice's) to escape a pair of handcuffs and then fleeing on a commercial airliner (as if his face and bandaged stump wouldn't be recognized by 92% of the people in the airport). I can't see how Harris could write another book about them, unless he had them break up and Clarice revert to her former self, and there's no way that's going to happen.  I suppose she could die or be murdered and Lecter could return to his serial killing ways and a new FBI person could be introduced and put on the case, but that would be rather cheesy, though I certainly wouldn't put it beyond Harris, after Hannibal.

My final word on Red Dragon was that you shouldn't read it or watch it unless you were prepared to do both, since comparing the differences between the two was the most interesting part. That's partially true of Hannibal as well, though there are so many differences, major as well as minor, that it's no fun to compare unless you are captivated by the screenwriting and novel writing process, and like to think about how they made various choices to add or subtract features. It's interesting to compare analytically, but not so much just for a casual fan.  The book has more stuff and more interesting stuff, but it's also got more groaningly absurd and disappointing stuff.  The movie plays it a lot safer, and is visually pretty satisfying, and is much more similar to Silence and Red Dragon, but it's ultimately dissatisfying after the brilliance of Silence.

As I said in the intro, the biggest problems with Red Dragon and Hannibal is that they are inevitably compared to the brilliant Silence, and found lacking by that metric.

And as always, comment or disagreement is welcome.

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