A matching set

Canada has hurtled from last place in overall medals into 17^th, racking up one of each in the last twenty-four hours. A gold in wrestling, a silver in rowing and a bronze in wrestling.

I watched Manhunter last night. I’ve never seen it before (and still haven’t seen the remake). It’s pretty dreadful. Except for a couple of instances of a familiar four-letter word, this could have been a made-for-TV production. The acting was uniformly wooden. I like William Petersen as Grissom a lot, and there were times in reading that book that I thought about Griss, but he is really bad in this movie. The aforementioned four-letter word was uttered almost exclusively by him as a substitute for emoting anger of frustration. His occasional rages when he “connects” with the killer were almost embarrassing. And the soundtrack was wretched. Too loud and too “Tangerine Dream” in all the wrong places.

I’m not the kind of person who usually notices bloopers in movies, but I caught a big one in Manhunter. About halfway through, there’s a scene where Will Graham is standing in a grocery store aisle explaining to his son why he was in a psychiatric ward. There are a couple of cuts back and forth between father and son, who are stationary. In the first cut, Will has cereal behind him, and Kevin is standing in front of boxes of Jell-o. Back to Will—cereal. Back to Kev—hmmm. Where did that Maxwell House coffee suddenly come from? Back to Will—he has clearly moved beyond the cereal, which is only visible in the margin of the shot.

The film is mostly loyal to the book up until the ending. Kevin (not Willy) is now a son instead of a step-son. The journalist dies without saying anything, whereas in the book he gets to deliver a vital piece of evidence in spite of his anguish. Little things. The major changes take place from the instant Dolarhyde sees Reba outside her house with the guy who drove her home. Everything from that point on is different. Not in a good way, in general.

I wonder if Brian Cox looks back on his performance as Lecktor (huh?) and says, boy, I really phoned that one in, didn’t I? It certainly lacks menace and any hint of insanity. He’s glib at times, but I didn’t come away from his scenes feeling anything about him at all. Anthony Hopkins owns that part.