Movie Night: No Chicks Allowed Edition

Well, Wifeypooh's off at a dinner for one of her clubs, so we've got Chez Kal all to ourselves. Put the kids off to bed after a nutritious dinner of frozen pizza and black cows (with extra-special whipped cream because Kal is a whipped dad and The Girl whined until I relented).

This Stag Edition of Movie Night is brought to you by: Tums - our best friend at 3:30 in the morning when the pizza is working its way through...

Tonight's feature: Michael Mann's 1986 version of Tom Harris' book Red Dragon; Manhunter, starring Gus Grissom William Petersen!



Manhunter is a pantheon Kal movie. I fell in love with it when I first saw in on HBO, and William Petersen's portrayal of Wil Graham is still one of my favorite male roles of all time. (Fortunately I get to see Petersen doing Petersen doing Graham every Thursday night on C.S.I.) (Actually, that's not fair. C.S.I. is more Petersen doing Bill Smitrovich's portrayal of the documents expert Llyod Bowman.) (But I digress...)

Anyway, I love Manhunter. I love everything about it:

From the 1980's set design - the stark, all white modernist institution where Lecktor is kept,

To the period costumes - 1980's keys abound; the black shirts with light, thin ties, Lound's ridiculous mushroom cap perm. The only way it could have been more authentic was to have Reba the blind girl in legwarmers. and,

the acting - Petersen's Graham. Tom Noonan's wonderful Francis Dolarhyde. And Brian Cox's breakout role as Lecktor.

Manhunter was the subject of one of my first blogs ever, where I broke down a comparison between that movie and Red Dragon, the 2002 remake starring Edward Norton (ugh) and Ralph Fines Finnes Fiennes (ick). (Which is incidentally still my most popular blog, due to the number of bad spelling straight women or gay men who google "Ralph Feinnes naked").

Anyway, as you can guess, Manhunter ain't going to garner a lot of Sandras©.

In fact, I give it...



0 Sandra Bullocks!

(as you know, the Sandra Bullock scale was devised to rate a movie's sleepability, due to my inability to stay awake through any Sandra Bullock film since Demolition Man. A perfect score represents a movie's a) stupefying boredom combined with b) a lack of even token nudity despite hot chickage.)

Ah, but we're not done.

We've got a new rating system for certain movies here at Kal's World. We'll be using it more over at The Garage, but I wanted to give it a spin over here first.

The Ronnies (patent pending) will judge a movies '80s-ishness. From set, to costume, to dialogue, ambiance and plot, a 5 out of 5 Ronnie movie will exemplify everything we love, or not, about the 1980s.

I looked long and hard for a standard by which to measure, and, while opinions may differ and there are a number of movies which would score 5 out of 5 on a Ronnie scale, I think we're going to assign Top Gun, and The Breakfast Club, as co-exemplars of the genre.

So how does Manhunter measure up?

As we've mentioned, the movie's ambiance is totally 1980s. It was directed by Michael Mann, who cut his teeth on Miami Vice, and, before that, music videos. You've even got fashionable stubble on Wil Graham. the set design and costuming is right out of the 1984. All the movie needed was a denim skirt and a Baby on Board suction cup thingy for the car window.

I was toying with giving 4 Ronnies, because I thought the plot was kind of non-temporally specific; it could've popped up in any decade. But, when you think about it, serial killers, and the FBI behavioralists who chase them down, really came to the fore in the 1980s after Ted Bundy was caught in Florida.

Here's Bundy, and seemingly normal, intelligent and charming man. He's not the freakish John Wayne Gacy-type character that had been the archetype of earlier serial killers. The 1980s saw the rise of fear of the intelligent monster. And Tom Harris rode that fear to three best-sellers and four movies. This is a quintessential 1980s movie, so we're going to give it:



5 of 5 Ronnies!

Ciao.