Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: Red Dragon (2002)

[quote name="Jerry Whorebach"]Remember that scene at the end of Get Shorty, the one where the Dennis Farina character turns around and he's Harvey Keitel and we realize that we're watching a movie <i>within a movie?</i> Well I got that same vibe from Red Dragon, starting about when the Dennis Farina character from Manhunter shows up near the beginning and this time he's played by, yeah, Harvey Keitel. He's soon followed by a parade of other famous actors apparently trying to one-up their predecessors in the most James Lipton-friendly fashion possible. For instance, at one point we cut to Keitel lying down on his character's couch, reading, when his character's phone rings. First he pantomimes finishing a paragraph, then he marks his place and closes the book, takes off and folds his reading glasses, stands up (with much difficulty since, presumably, his character's <i>getting too old for this shit</i>), composes himself, and finally answers the goddamn phone. All this AFTER Ed Norton makes the revelation that was supposed to kick the plot into high gear. I'd like to think the whole film was some kind of Dungsroman-enraging post-modern Andy Kaufman critique of remakes themselves, although a safer bet would probably involve young director Brett Ratner getting trampled underfoot a bloated celebrity cast. He probably could have turned in a decent picture with his more docile Rush Hour 2 stars Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan in the leading roles. Enough has probably been written about the pussification of Hannibal Lecter over the years - how it parallells the descent of the Terminator and, perhaps more accurately, Godzilla, into the luke-warm public bath of anti-heroicism - so I'm not even going to comment on that. Except to say that these movies have been all downhill since the decision was made to keep in Tony Hopkins' improvised verbal assault on Jodie Foster's white-trash handbag. SUMMARY: It's too bad Hollywood didn't catch on to Brian Cox before he got too old to be of use to anyone :([/quote]