"They (critics) should always be ignored, because all they ever do is interfere with the personality of the author and the independence of the reader"
Anton Chekov

Dir: Ridley Scott. Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, Giancarlo Gianinni, Gary Oldman (Frankie R Faison) Ray Liotta

This is a bad cinema week for over-eaters. "You’ve waited 10 years for the main course" says the radio trailer for Hannibal, thus reducing ‘Silence of the Lambs’ to appetiser. Well, stick to the appetiser; the main course is larded, large and overdone. The credit sequence (another appetiser) tickles the palate but the film slides downhill into the fevered ravings of viral sequelitis, a sort of bin-end sale. Must go! Please do. Florence is culture, gore is mixed with the Michelangelos; blood and brilliance the twin features of the Renaissance for sure — no shit, Sherlock — and Hannibal himself more cultured than anyone he eats. This obsession with gustatory rough trade, is it a perversion of a perversion in itself? Why can’t a man of his broad culture casserole a concert violinist or a congratulatory in Greats? Does Hannibal melt before great flesh? Feel less than, his high culture hiding low self-worth? Does he represent America? Ravenous, devouring the world, homogenising it with exported American junk, while hankering after yer real culture? Is this film a discussion of Godard’s apercu "Europe has history: America has t-shirts"?

Nope.

It’s a trip down gore Avenue or through the pathology lab specimens to tickle our morbidity, tickets this way please with product placement for Gucci. Very profitable, morbidness, and no bad thing when leavened by wit and imagination, but there’s precious little of that around. Hopkins wanders the streets of Firenze in a fedora and long coat like a luvvie fallen on social security, struggling against a dead script to inject some dynamic into the predictable. Gary Oldman (Frankie R Faison in the credits) enjoys Mason Verger, millionaire psychiatrist and paedophile, who in a daft flashback is persuaded by Lecter to take drugs, shave off his own face with a shard of mirror and feed it to his dogs. Thus Mr Faison, formerly Mr Oldman, motors through the rest of the film under a pile of grotesque prosthetics giving everyone a tough time. But why not? ‘Nil By Mouth’ is the best British film of recent years and I admire Mr Oldman’s willingness to send Mr Faison in to play a talking fish for funds for his next project. Good luck.

‘Silence of the Lambs’ with its poodle-loving, wannabe-transsexual killer (brilliantly played by an actor whose name I have forgotten — sorry, such is the fate of most actors) beavering away to hard rock, running up a skin dress in the labyrinth beneath his blue-collar suburb home, with his next victim fattening in a pit to increase her skin elasticity, was loaded with nightmarish sickness. Filmed in winter, colours drained, everything dead, the relationship between Lecter and Starling writhed like seething worms. Jodie Foster’s Starling was all sexual diffidence and embarrassed late virginity, a sensitive presence for whom menstruation was a disturbing invasion; one felt Hannibal was the first man to trigger some hideous sense of contact in her. He drowned her and she had to fight to stay afloat. Lecter was not the target in ‘Lambs’ as he is in ‘Hannibal’ and that’s part of the problem. In ‘Lambs’ he was oblique, insinuating, a siren voice drawing Starling off the track into unimaginable fears. In ‘Hannibal’ it’s toe-to-toe in nice locations.

I left ‘Silence of the Lambs’ with an idea of what Clarice Starling was like, because Foster gave us an acting performance, created a person. Julianne Moore gives us postures. Her much vaunted Starling has progressed from damaged girl/woman to just another tough guy FBI maverick, out-ballsing the guys, hitting the ‘Guinness Book of Records’ for FBI agent with most kills — Dirty Harry with no dick — and off she goes in hot pursuit of the beast, to the inevitable confrontation in the kitchen. The climax had me and the American audience I was in lost in titters. I’m not revealing what happens. Let’s just say things have got to improve for Ray Liotta.

There’s a back story that’s slightly more interesting than the main plot. Giancarlo Giannini’s defeated Italian detective, driven by his young beautiful wife’s need for a better life than a passed-over cop can provide, stumbles onto Hannibal and the corrupting enticement of Verger’s $3m reward. He blocks Starling’s attempt to trace Hannibal so he can nab him, win back lost respect from younger colleagues and buy his wife a box at the opera. Giancarlo would thus have to overcome his own sense of defeat to capture Hannibal, the struggle against Hannibal would be a struggle against himself etc etc (yes, get on with it. Ed.) but of course it ends predictably with his viscera slapping the statue of David and we move onto the main bout of the evening.

One other minor cavil. As far as I know Sechzuan cuisine is not big in Chiantishire, so why is an Italian cop eating a Chinese take-away for lunch and not downing veal in a trattoria off the Duomo or Annunciata discussing the Viola’s chances of the Scudetto? Surely Ridley Scott has two houses in Toscana?

The door is left open for another sequel. The virus continues. But Hannibal/Hopkins would be old. Mellowed out? Changed perhaps? Now vegetarian and founder of a 12-step re-hab and fellowship for people with dangerous eating problems — CannAnon. Perhaps Starling could seek him out, having had the full conversion from Foster’s damaged inner child bereft by the fate of the lambs, through Moore’s man with tampon, to full blown surgically transexualised, sado-masochistic male homosexual with powerful devil worship and cannibalistic tendencies. Her (his) arrival at re-hab with Lecter’s hand in a silver pickle casket round her neck, derails Hannibal who has a massive slip and after sampling the nurse as a buttock and marmite triple-decker, eats himself. A chastened Starling completes treatment and emerges humble and determined, one day at a time, not to do another sequel. Amen.

Dir: Lasse Halstrom. Screenplay: Robert Nelson Jacobs from the book by Joanne Harris. Starring: Juliette Binoche, Judy Dench, Alfred Molina, Lena Olin, Johnny Depp, Carrie Ann-Moss, John Wood & Leslie Caron.

My wife is American and feels many Americans will actually believe ‘Chocolat’ is a French film, which no doubt is half design on the part of the producers. I used to wonder how Hollywood could produce so many moronic films, until I sat in an American cinema audience. I have, however, had the same acquaintance with mass moronism in Camden Town and I don’t think American audiences are so dumb. I just think some film-makers and studios behave as if they are. (Broadway audiences are infinitely sharper than National Theatre audiences).

What a wonderful film ‘Chocolat’ might have been if the French had made it instead of those dreary Brits and Scandinavians. Of course they would have made it in French which is not market-friendly. ‘Chocolat’ is being marketed as sexy and classical. Cinematic Abercrombie and Fitch.

Its meretricious static has attracted the fluff of admiration; Juliette Binoche is, of course, an Academy nominee — is that really a recommendation now the Academy is chocka with populists who made bad films in the eighties and have worked hard at lowering the bar ever since? For the life of me, I don’t get this Binoche schtick. The clamour that her blank canvas communicates vividness, enigma and depth, passes me by. To me her blank canvas communicates a blank canvas. I’m totally underwhelmed by her blank canvas, but she has the journos ejaculating all over their articles, to the moans of genius, complexity, vividness, depth, enigma, beauty, blah blah blah... Paraphrasing Orwell, I find it nothing more than the sounds from a private room of critics straining to lend solidity to pure wind.

’Chocolat’ is a story about how the repressed, unhappy citizens of a small French town are spiritually liberated by Binoche’s humanist example and the magic of her chocolate which she whips up to ancient Mayan recipes. Binoche has arrived in town courtesy of the North wind. Fateful flatulence. Through much of the film my mind wandered to a parallel universe in which Rab C Nesbitt liberates the sad souls of Govan with the giddy thrill of deep fried Mars bars and battered pizza.

The locals in village chocolat speak Franglais: stilted dialogue with a soupcon of ‘Ello, Ello’. Apart from Johhny Depp, who essays the one European accent Americans do with confidence: Irish. He is the gypsy Roux — that’s one of the O’ Rouxs from Roscommon — a free-spirited, party-loving, guitar-playing bargeman who melts Binoche’s sticky fingers. ‘Riverdance’ with Django Rheindhardt.

All turns out well, of course. The frozen heart of mayor Fred Molina is set against Binoche’s warm toffee. He almost destroys her and everything she represents: life, love, liberty, red as this year’s colour (and the first person I have to learn to love is myself...) Finally the mayor has a catharsis among the Thorntons, gets to act a bit, and emerges, shaken, stained, but a better man. And they all have party. The acting is just above semaphore level: with a few exceptions, there is no psychology in most of the performances (what used to be called ‘character’) no sense of inner lives or even the sense of people having no inner lives. When given the chance to emote, they grab at these moments like life-rafts. As it stands it seems a perfect pitch for another musical — Thrill to the hit song ‘The North Wind Brings My Fudge.’

And the music. Also nominated. The music, my God yes, very pleasant the music. Chocolatty. And plenty of it.

We Brits are quick at self mytholgy and promotion. Government ministers and the Film Industry rarely miss an opportunity to publicly declare the depth of talent which our country produces (‘Billy Elliot’, Sam Mendes, Michael Caine, Stephen Daldry, old Uncle Tom Cobley and all...) but it strikes me the real English-speaking talent is in the American Indie movement.

Dir: Kenneth Lonergan. Starring: Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick.

The raft of Indie films that examine the American way of life, constitute a kind of American cinematic Chekov (Chekov of the short stories) and ‘You Can Count On Me’ is the latest: modest, truthful, humorous. It opens here on the 25th of March; would that it might shut up the never-ending din over ‘Billy Eliot’.

Two parents die in a car crash. At the funeral the two children sit together; the girl holding it together, the brother disintegrating. Cut to 20 years later. The brother (Mark Ruffalo) comes back to visit the sister (Laura Linney). His life is a shapeless mess; he drifts, but he has his strengths as well as his weaknesses. Linney is in control of her life (apparently) has maturity (apparently) and a child (Macaulay Culkin’s little brother — the second pea in the pod and utterly twee-free and real throughout) She works in the local bank where the routine is disturbed by the arrival of a new manager with a house-sized anal complex (Matthew Broderick).

Ruffalo is the adult male in Culkin’s life and loosens him a little from what he sees as his mother’s controlling bonds, takes him to meet the father he never knew, accelerates the growing process from which his mother has over-protected him. And of course this brings conflict.

However, beneath the tidiness of Linney’s life buds of inner chaos peep out, open, then burst into blooms of nuttiness. She nearly marries someone she doesn’t love, argues with her boss and temporarily arrests his Freudian analism by having a wild sexual affair with him while his wife gives birth.

The person with whom she wants the real relationship is her brother — the past absence of a family is never laid on with a trowel, only noticed in the corner of the film’s eye — but circumstances and the difference in their needs makes this impossible and the film which starts with his arriving in town ends with his leaving. She has found enough staying in the small town where she was born, he is looking for ‘it’ elsewhere. Nothing is over-dramatic, nothing is epic except the glimpse of people dealing with ordinary problems in ordinary lives. What runs through You Can Count On Me is the honesty; all the characters are real and the general humanity of the piece woos us into their lives.

Kenneth Lonergan has run up a few dollars as screenwriter on a few big films. Here he tacks away beautifully from contrivance and also makes an impressive appearance as the local minister, who is brought in by Linney to talk to Ruffalo about his fecklessness. One can easily imagine such a scene degenerating into sub-Jimmy Dean indulgence, but it doesn’t; it startles us with its honesty and reasonableness; the minister is no closed mind, nor is he a radical, just a bright man with some insight and the Ruffalo character is willing to listen, has views which he expresses and subtly communicates that he is in search of some answers on how to live his life. These people are real. That’s what makes it so arresting.

When I saw it there were only four other people in the cinema, but there is a nice coda to the film, which I heard while still in America. Mark Ruffalo has been a stage actor till now. His boyish Latin good looks will no doubt suck him into the Hollywood millionaire brat-package and he may never get the chance to make another film like ‘You Can Count On Me’ again. However, the story goes that recently he walked into an LA restaurant and the diners stood and gave him an ovation. So, Americans aren’t as dumb as their mainstream films. I hope he isn’t a noisy eater.