Pones and Bones: A Trip to Anti-Narnia.
March 23, 2015 8:15 PM Subscribe
Peter Watts (previously) tours the FX house responsible for Hannibal's bodies. Meanwhile Neil Marshall and Vincenzo Natali are to direct episodes of the show.
I didn't know Zachary Quinto was coming in for the new season, I hope his return to NBC is more Sylar than The Slap.
posted by 27kjmm at 8:39 PM on March 23, 2015
posted by 27kjmm at 8:39 PM on March 23, 2015
WHY IS IT JOT JUNE
posted by The Whelk at 8:52 PM on March 23, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 8:52 PM on March 23, 2015 [3 favorites]
Neil Marshall and Vincenzo Natali are to direct episodes of the show.
Didn't think I could be more pumped.
posted by brundlefly at 10:38 PM on March 23, 2015
Didn't think I could be more pumped.
posted by brundlefly at 10:38 PM on March 23, 2015
Here's a
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
for Bev
posted by thelonius at 4:09 AM on March 24, 2015 [5 favorites]
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
for Bev
posted by thelonius at 4:09 AM on March 24, 2015 [5 favorites]
Wow. I had assumed the sliced up Bev was at least party CGI, but it looks like, no, the body-makers are just really good.
posted by rmd1023 at 4:25 AM on March 24, 2015
posted by rmd1023 at 4:25 AM on March 24, 2015
Does Hannibal…get better? I watched the first couple of episodes and the writing was kind of painfully on the nose and the non-Hannibal male lead was ACTING so hard I thought he was going to strain something.
posted by murphy slaw at 5:14 AM on March 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by murphy slaw at 5:14 AM on March 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
Imagine that Hannibal takes place in a universe just slightly off-skewed to ours. Very dreamlike.
It's a very ~dramatical~ show, more so now than first season. I watched the first couple episodes and lost interest as well. I got back into it when I watched the Season 2 premier, and it's now my most favoritest show on TV. The art direction (and sound design) is gorgeous, the acting top-notch, the story is mesmerizing...
...I'm probably not the best person to give you objective reasons some of us are so giddy over this show. I'm about as objective about this show as Hannibal is about Will.
posted by Windigo at 6:14 AM on March 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
It's a very ~dramatical~ show, more so now than first season. I watched the first couple episodes and lost interest as well. I got back into it when I watched the Season 2 premier, and it's now my most favoritest show on TV. The art direction (and sound design) is gorgeous, the acting top-notch, the story is mesmerizing...
...I'm probably not the best person to give you objective reasons some of us are so giddy over this show. I'm about as objective about this show as Hannibal is about Will.
posted by Windigo at 6:14 AM on March 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
Hannibal got more... Hannibaly.
posted by Artw at 6:17 AM on March 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by Artw at 6:17 AM on March 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
This is about how objective Hannibal is about Will.
posted by Windigo at 6:23 AM on March 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by Windigo at 6:23 AM on March 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
Imagine that Hannibal takes place in a universe just slightly off-skewed to ours
Minnesota, for example, is a couple of hours drive from Baltimore
posted by thelonius at 6:34 AM on March 24, 2015 [8 favorites]
Minnesota, for example, is a couple of hours drive from Baltimore
posted by thelonius at 6:34 AM on March 24, 2015 [8 favorites]
Hannibal takes place in a universe where everyone wears gorgeous color-coordinated retro-flavored outfits and the third leading cause of death is Art Murder.
And prion disease doesn't exist.
posted by The Whelk at 7:09 AM on March 24, 2015 [12 favorites]
And prion disease doesn't exist.
posted by The Whelk at 7:09 AM on March 24, 2015 [12 favorites]
It was also interesting to watch the slow dropping of all the standard procedural police drama tropes as they developed their own feverish nightmare opera aesthetic.
And that aesthetic! One big problem with all the hot dramas and writing going to TV is that a lot of TV looks very flat and workmanlike - even shows known for having an eye for style Mad amen still pretty much adhere to some basic cinamatography - but the colors on Hannibal, the dream states, the objects emerging from the darkness, the invasive tight camerawork! It's so much fun to look at and, if nothing else, its completely over-fussy, rigorously applied aesthetics serves as a wonderful shopping guide.
posted by The Whelk at 7:22 AM on March 24, 2015 [9 favorites]
And that aesthetic! One big problem with all the hot dramas and writing going to TV is that a lot of TV looks very flat and workmanlike - even shows known for having an eye for style Mad amen still pretty much adhere to some basic cinamatography - but the colors on Hannibal, the dream states, the objects emerging from the darkness, the invasive tight camerawork! It's so much fun to look at and, if nothing else, its completely over-fussy, rigorously applied aesthetics serves as a wonderful shopping guide.
posted by The Whelk at 7:22 AM on March 24, 2015 [9 favorites]
I mean, you could try to recreate the wardrobe of the characters on a thrift store budget and end up with a pretty great wardrobe.
posted by The Whelk at 7:49 AM on March 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 7:49 AM on March 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
(Does it count as a Halloween costume if you allready owned the outfit and just added a cane?)
posted by The Whelk at 8:03 AM on March 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by The Whelk at 8:03 AM on March 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
A friend of mine is catching up on Hannibal now and she's stopped like two episodes short of the S2 finale, and hasn't quite gotten around to finishing it, and I am flailing at her so hard that even I am kind of annoyed by me. WHY WON'T SHE JUST CATCH UP ALREADY WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT MY FEELINGS.
I'm pretty excited about every bit of casting and directing news thus far.
posted by Stacey at 9:06 AM on March 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
I'm pretty excited about every bit of casting and directing news thus far.
posted by Stacey at 9:06 AM on March 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
We're doing a season two Rewatch on Fanfare, up to episode three now
posted by The Whelk at 9:14 AM on March 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 9:14 AM on March 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
People who go in expecting Hannibal to be a procedural often don't know what to make of it.
CSI is basically a direct descendent of the movie Manhunter, which is based on the novel Red Dragon. You can trace the origin of a lot of hardware-heavy/procedural forensics shows back to Red Dragon.
The problem with taking that approach again is that it's been done to death by now, 20-ish years later. It looks like it's going to be a procedural, but pulls that rug out from under you gradually. We've gotten used to the conventions of the procedural genre, which is why procedurals ring truer to us than this show does, but that doesn't make procedurals any more realistic - it's just what we're used to.
Procedure and law varies by time and place, but human nature doesn't change. While everyone talks about how this show operates in "dream logic", it seems, to me, more like it operates in universals of human nature, like a parable. For this reason, I don't find it nearly as unrealistic as many people seem to insist it is. I think it's more realistic than the vast majority of shows I've seen in a while.
Instead of sharing a unified noble vision, all the characters have their own agendas. Instead of being universally heroic and competent, doing the right things and making the right decisions almost by default, each and every character has their own priorities that they work towards to the detriment of all else. They make bad decisions at the same rate as normal human beings do, and are swayed by emotion and spun by cognitive distortion despite their best, or worst, efforts at being objective. And so on. It's a study in human fallibility and sin, among many other things.
posted by tel3path at 10:50 AM on March 24, 2015 [5 favorites]
CSI is basically a direct descendent of the movie Manhunter, which is based on the novel Red Dragon. You can trace the origin of a lot of hardware-heavy/procedural forensics shows back to Red Dragon.
The problem with taking that approach again is that it's been done to death by now, 20-ish years later. It looks like it's going to be a procedural, but pulls that rug out from under you gradually. We've gotten used to the conventions of the procedural genre, which is why procedurals ring truer to us than this show does, but that doesn't make procedurals any more realistic - it's just what we're used to.
Procedure and law varies by time and place, but human nature doesn't change. While everyone talks about how this show operates in "dream logic", it seems, to me, more like it operates in universals of human nature, like a parable. For this reason, I don't find it nearly as unrealistic as many people seem to insist it is. I think it's more realistic than the vast majority of shows I've seen in a while.
Instead of sharing a unified noble vision, all the characters have their own agendas. Instead of being universally heroic and competent, doing the right things and making the right decisions almost by default, each and every character has their own priorities that they work towards to the detriment of all else. They make bad decisions at the same rate as normal human beings do, and are swayed by emotion and spun by cognitive distortion despite their best, or worst, efforts at being objective. And so on. It's a study in human fallibility and sin, among many other things.
posted by tel3path at 10:50 AM on March 24, 2015 [5 favorites]
One of the writers said they always go for "emotional realism" rather than strictly logical realism cause that's more interesting to put on screen when you have actors and designers this good - what does it look and feel like to not trust anyone or worry that you're going insane, what if you really couldn't account for lost time ...and what if you found out this was being done to you by someone who says they love you? It's really a horror story of institutional violence and social aggression.
Plus, it also has an interesting relation to the source material - the Harris Books. More than any other thing I think of on right now, it has the most fan-sensibility take on the material- it fixes canon, explores dropped asides, recasts roles, and fills in holes. It's both very loving (I really like how much of Harris' words the characters get to say) to the book and other films but also not afraid to change and swap things around.
posted by The Whelk at 11:13 AM on March 24, 2015 [4 favorites]
Plus, it also has an interesting relation to the source material - the Harris Books. More than any other thing I think of on right now, it has the most fan-sensibility take on the material- it fixes canon, explores dropped asides, recasts roles, and fills in holes. It's both very loving (I really like how much of Harris' words the characters get to say) to the book and other films but also not afraid to change and swap things around.
posted by The Whelk at 11:13 AM on March 24, 2015 [4 favorites]
A stopped clock is 12 3 6 stgiobh ... ?
posted by Artw at 11:56 AM on March 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Artw at 11:56 AM on March 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
More evidence of the show's creeping influence into my aesthetics, I had some people over for cocktails and made these
(I really should've put some bird feathers or bleached skulls on the plates but this is Hannibal Entertaining on a budget here)
posted by The Whelk at 5:45 PM on March 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
(I really should've put some bird feathers or bleached skulls on the plates but this is Hannibal Entertaining on a budget here)
posted by The Whelk at 5:45 PM on March 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
The Whelk: We're doing a season two Rewatch on Fanfare, up to episode three now
Shit. I just started a rewatch and now I have to catch up.
posted by brundlefly at 12:56 AM on March 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
Shit. I just started a rewatch and now I have to catch up.
posted by brundlefly at 12:56 AM on March 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
An extremely techy and inside baseball talk with the cinematorphiers of Hannibal for Technicolor magazine (PDF)
posted by The Whelk at 10:28 AM on March 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 10:28 AM on March 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
It looks like it's going to be a procedural, but pulls that rug out from under you gradually.
This is exactly what stopped me dead on my first attempt. I was expecting a procedural, and the first couple of episodes hew very closely to that pattern, but the dialogue and delivery was off in a way that could be interpreted as incompetent if you assume the goal is naturalism.
On rewatch, I see that I was reading it as a heavy-handed, melodramatic police procedural, when it's actually a melodrama draped over the scaffolding of a police procedural, and as the structure of the melodrama starts to solidify, they start pulling away the scaffolding. I'm a little over 2/3 through season one and already they're spending more time on main cast interactions than on the case of the week, and sometimes not even bothering to tie up the case of the week in a single episode.
tl;dr - It does get better. It's got its hooks (antlers?) in me now.
posted by murphy slaw at 9:54 AM on March 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
This is exactly what stopped me dead on my first attempt. I was expecting a procedural, and the first couple of episodes hew very closely to that pattern, but the dialogue and delivery was off in a way that could be interpreted as incompetent if you assume the goal is naturalism.
On rewatch, I see that I was reading it as a heavy-handed, melodramatic police procedural, when it's actually a melodrama draped over the scaffolding of a police procedural, and as the structure of the melodrama starts to solidify, they start pulling away the scaffolding. I'm a little over 2/3 through season one and already they're spending more time on main cast interactions than on the case of the week, and sometimes not even bothering to tie up the case of the week in a single episode.
tl;dr - It does get better. It's got its hooks (antlers?) in me now.
posted by murphy slaw at 9:54 AM on March 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
It's like genre conventions are the water we all swim in, Murphy Slaw.
We don't usually complain that musicals are unrealistic, or question where the characters are hiding that orchestra or why people must express themselves in song rather than dialogue. We already know that a musical isn't striving for naturalism in that way.
Similarly, people in Shakespeare's time didn't really speak in rhyming couplets, but Shakespeare's characterization is generally considered pretty good.
But when we turn on the TV, we expect to see what we've gotten used to: idealized LEOs, never corrupt, never having to deal with corruption except as a shocking departure from the norm, following imaginary procedure to the letter. It might even be correct enough to get its fridge logic past an armchair critic with actual subject matter knowledge and a willingness to grant artistic licence. With that comes workmanlike cinematography, familiar tropes handled in familiar ways, and no surprises. And we accept that as realistic because it doesn't make us ask questions.
NBC Hannibal: not your mom's procedural.
posted by tel3path at 12:26 PM on March 26, 2015
We don't usually complain that musicals are unrealistic, or question where the characters are hiding that orchestra or why people must express themselves in song rather than dialogue. We already know that a musical isn't striving for naturalism in that way.
Similarly, people in Shakespeare's time didn't really speak in rhyming couplets, but Shakespeare's characterization is generally considered pretty good.
But when we turn on the TV, we expect to see what we've gotten used to: idealized LEOs, never corrupt, never having to deal with corruption except as a shocking departure from the norm, following imaginary procedure to the letter. It might even be correct enough to get its fridge logic past an armchair critic with actual subject matter knowledge and a willingness to grant artistic licence. With that comes workmanlike cinematography, familiar tropes handled in familiar ways, and no surprises. And we accept that as realistic because it doesn't make us ask questions.
NBC Hannibal: not your mom's procedural.
posted by tel3path at 12:26 PM on March 26, 2015
Yeah the way Hannibal evades capture to the point of having vampire wizard powers cause the system is so stacked in his favor is one of those depressingly realistic things
posted by The Whelk at 12:31 PM on March 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 12:31 PM on March 26, 2015 [3 favorites]
He's a Durst.
posted by Artw at 12:56 PM on March 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Artw at 12:56 PM on March 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
No, he's the absolute DURST!!
(hastily apologizes for terrible pun, backs out of the room)
posted by echolalia67 at 10:30 AM on March 31, 2015 [1 favorite]
(hastily apologizes for terrible pun, backs out of the room)
posted by echolalia67 at 10:30 AM on March 31, 2015 [1 favorite]
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