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with comments by David Bruce

NO CHRISTMAS DISPLAY IN WASHINGTON
Subject: Re: Washington DC
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000
From: Legendy

In a message dated 12/15/00 4:46:21 PM Pacific Standard Time, Legendyo writes: "Important Bulletin There will be no living Nativity scene in Washington this year. This has nothing to do with a Supreme Court or for religious reasons. They simply cannot find three wise men or a virgin."

INACCURATE BUT SPELLBINDING
Subject: INACCURATE BUT SPELLBINDING! Gladiator
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000
From: Helena Sullivan skutter8@hotmail.com

Hi all!
I loved this film, even though it reminded me of so many others. But why does Hollywood insist on re-writing history so often? Take for example Saving Private Ryan- you would think that the USA was the only country to land on France! And in another recent film Hollywood erroneously attributed the capture of the Enigma machine, and the breaking of its code, to the US when in fact it was the UK who did both!

Here again, a lot of poetic licence is employed, but at least there is an acknowledgement to the fact put at the end of the film! Commodus was indeed murdered, but not until he had reigned for 12 years. As for the character of Maximus, I understood that Roman soldiers were forbidden to marry-? (Was this revoked at some time? Or was it different for Generals?). The daughter of Marcus Aurelius was banished and later killed by Commodus, yet in the film she survives him. And the death of Commodus did not welcome in another Republican era, rather his murderer became Emperor in his stead. Anyway, it is still a great story, I just don't know why ALL the characters weren't fictional from scratch, like Maximus. Why bother putting in characters from history and then re-writing their lives? Why not just invent new ones?!

The battle scene at the beginning took me back to another film, though not one that would be immediately compared with this one!- The battle of Agincourt, in Kenneth Brannagh's HenryV echoes here: in that film too, the battle is shown in all the mud and rain and dirt; none of the shiny armour of earlier films! The skill of the archers is highlighted, the screams and noises of battle are there, all underneath a rousing score. At one point, again, just like in Gladiator, the action slows down, the noise fades, and the music swells as the viewer is thrown back from observing the fighting in detail to feeling the sadness of the desperate scene. Throughout Gladiator, Maximus is seen to bend down, pick up some of the soil and meditively fold it in his hands before fighting. This too, is in Brannagh's Henry V; before Agincourt, the king and his soldiers kneel and do the same.

It was brilliant to see the realistic, un-glorified portrayal of battle taken to greater heights with the greater budget of Gladiator. Certainly any other film will be hard put to find a more thrilling opening scene.

As to the comments regarding the statuettes of his family, it is quite probable that Maximus would have had these, given to him as a gift, a safe-keeping, when he left his wife for service to the Emperor. A modern day equivalent would be to take photo's of loved ones with you when leaving home for war. They might have meant a little more than just a reminder; more like a connection home. Having Maximus praying to his 'Blessed Mother' and 'Blessed Father' isn't something just thrown in to heathenise the prayer scene; he might have been addressing some of the Roman deities, or he might have been addressing his dead parents; in the same breath he says 'blessed ancestors I honour you' and this, coupled with the fact that many Roman soldiers of this time were loyal to the god Mithras, seems more likely.

As to the comments regarding Maximus being christian, if only with a small 'c' (!) I really appreciated the way a Roman warrior and heathen was shown to have a loyal, vulnerable, respectable and likeable character. The message here is that there is good and bad in all peoples, and that a person is loveable because they are loved; what matters most is that you know yourself and are true to yourself: ALWAYS HAVE THE COURAGE OF YOUR CONFICTIONS.

Helena Sullivan. Isle of Sheppey, England, UK

THE EVANGELICAL TRAP
Subject: Thank You
Dungeons and Dragons
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000
From: "Wes Wilson"

Thank you for not falling into the evangelical trap of condemning Dungeons and Dragons on the sparce accusations of few convicted felons and spiritual schizophrenics. I lived a very religious youth and remember many fond all-nighters with my friends playing Dungeons and Dragons in my parent's basement. I have read too many ill-advised spiritual warnings based on disproven urban legends and am tired of hearing this elaborate tabletop game equated to a satanic set of training wheels. Your even-handed approach is a welcome, and your search for guidence in the mundane is to be applauded. I hear this movie is trite garbage, but I'll probably go see it for the special effects alone. Just the name makes me dream of dungeon crawls and political intrigue. Even as an adult, I yearn to find time to play again... because is my youth, we wrote our own adventure novels.
Wes Wilson

VAN KAPPEN AND SATIRE
Subject: Dogma
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000
From: Jessi Marie

I don't know about this movie- I have yet to see it- but Van Kappen's posting was one of the funniest things I've seen today. Am I the only one who didn't take this seriously? I mean, talk about satire...
-Jessi Marie

MY TWO CENTS
Subject: Dogma
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000
From: Jessi Marie

to "Dogma Hater"- Matthew 1:24-25 "When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. But he had no sexual union with her until she gave birth to a son ." I don't know exactly how the Catholic church can teach that Mary was a virgin her entire life. Not only is it clearly untrue, it is totally unnecessary to giving the matter of the virgin birth any validity.
-Jessi Marie

ABOUT HANNIBAL
Subject: movie WARNING
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000
From: "tragar tragar"

Please read and spread the word about the demented message in this sick movie. Do not allow your teenagers to view this. It denounces anything good in religion and in mankind. Please read following reviews from people who have seen the screening.

The studio's behind Hannibal are beginning the slow drip marketing i.v. People who have seen the test screening say the brain eating scene is in the movie. Ray Liotta plays Krendler who gets the top part of his skull removed and the audience will see Hannibal as Julia Childs perform his culinary arts before our very eyes. Martha Stewart would huff at the mess left dribbling down Krendlers face. We know how tidy that woman is.

Are we sure we want to see this movie on the big screen? NO! Plenty O guts and gore for the whole family to munch on. If you're a parent DO NOT ALLOW your teenagers to see this movie. The psychological and visual content is extremely disturbing. Hannibal comes across as a garden variety American Psycho. More to the point, an extremely demented view (ala Harris's sick imagination. And to think people get paid for writing this garbage) of what might take place when lonely, rejected teenage boys bypass shooting everyone at their high school and grow up into methodical, anal retentive Jeffrey Dahmers. Hope my mini critic here scores me points towards those FREE preprogrammed darts.

Reviewer #2 I read the book, and by the time I was done my eyes had rolled so far back into my head I was checking out my medula oblongota. The big mistake was that the author fell more in love with his villian than he was with maintaining plot credibility. From all I've heard, the movie keeps that going. I'll wait for the video, or just pass on it. I thought the first movie was brilliant, and I don't want to spoil my memories of it.

Reviewer #3 The book is pop psychology bullshit Comment: The book is filled with pop psychology bullshit. It's as if Harris took a few PSY101 classes and then wrote the book. Since these shallow explanations probably won't be in the movie and the unrelentingly ugliness of the book probably won't quite make it either, I suspect the movie will be more tolerable. I've heard one interpretation of Hannibal as a big "F*** YOU" from Harris to the readers who'd been asking about a sequel for years. Sounds about right.

Q: Do you see Hannibal travel coach on the airline?

A: Yes. And there is a totally disgusting scene between him and a little curious boy.

Q: Do you, the audience, sympathise with Hannibal?

A: I almost did, until I see the disgusting things he does on purpose.

Next reviewer - I was also at the screening last night with Jack D. It was held at the UA Horton Plaza at 7pm. I personally didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the reviewer. I liked parts of it, but the ending was VERY disappointing. There were parts that were downright silly. I will not spoil anything, but I thought that the movie was lighter in tone than "Silence" (including some odd, out of place attempts at humor), but VERY gory. The ending sequence had some very rough cuts and I think it was to see if the audience could handle it. My girl friend couldn't and most of the audience seemed grossed out. All in all it was great to see Hannibal on screen again. The scenes in Italy were very good. On my score card I gave it a 3 (Good), but I think I was a little generous. I will probably end up seeing it again because I want to see what they change (hopefully the ending). I also will be interested in the score. Some of the temporary music they used was from "Basic Instinct".

More Q and A's -
Q: Is there a flashback of Verger and Lecter showing how he got his face mutilated?

A: Yes. We see Verger "flirting" with the doctor in which Verger gets drugged. Verger begins dancing around, busts a mirror and Hannibal hands him a piece of glass and tells him to peel his face off. Verger complies and Hannibal feeds pieces of it to his dog.

Q: Is it scary?

A: Yes. Audience members and myself jumped a few times and had to look away from the screen. Reviewer - and I thought Hopkins was hammy (in a whiney Paul Lynde style) and OTT. In the book "Hannibal" I was disappointed that they explained Lecter's condition, how he came to be the monster he is. In SOTL he says something like "You can't reduce me to a set of influences" but that is exactly what the WWII sequence in Hannibal does. I would rather he remained an enigma.

Another test screen viewer - I was at Horton Plaza Comment: I was at the test screening. Yeah, it was scary and it was disturbing as hell (even for me, and I like horror). Here's a person with no brains - literally!

Read what this meatball for brain matter had to write. hmmm, better pack your bags people because as this reviewer implies we're all going to HELL in a basket anyway. We're all or want to be inheritantly EVIL without any redeeming qualities!

Reviewer- The ending did not suck Comment: Here's the thing about the ending of the book: Everyone is angry about the ending because evil truimphs over good, and Clarice runs off with the bad doctor and they live a life of cozy cannibalism in South America. All your conditioned little brains read it, and could not stretch to accomodate something so totally unexpected. The way I see it, the corruption of Clarice is the natural conclusion of the story. It makes perfect sense to me. The reason all you people love the books and movies is because you all love Hannibal. You are in such denial. You wanted him to win, and Harris was just rubbing it in your face. The whole point of the story, in my opinion, is that evil is seductive, and we all are seduced by it. Everyone in the story is seduced by evil in one way or another. Every character. We, the readers, are all seduced by Lecter, because he's so cool, so smart, so dangerous. Harris is saying we all want to be those things. That's why everyone loves to read About Lecter. Anyone who claims to hate the ending is only uncomfortable with Harris pointing out the truth about his or her own soul.

This is what it means to love the Devil, folks: The devil wins. If you think Lecter is cool, then what you really want is for him to triumph. Nobody likes to be told the truth about himself. That's the real reason you didn't like the ending. I totally respect Harris for having the balls to tell the truth about humanity. And how dare you declare what Clarice would or would not do. She's Thomas Harris' creation, not yours. He made her up, out of his own head. It seems pretty presumtuous to be indignant about it. As if. Who are you to say who she is or isn't? Not your job. You want a book where the characters all behave the way you think they ought to? Write your own. - Told you this one is a HEADCASE.

Another critic - What a load of horseshit. Who was shocked that Foster said no to being in Hannibal? Only idiots and the people who think Hannibal is the second in the series about Lecter were shocked that Foster passed on Thomas' crapfest book-to-movie. No Demme, no Foster, no Fujimoto, no way. **** Big opening weekend and then word will get out about Clarice screwing Hannibal and eating people and the box office will dwindle faster than a carton of Doritos in Oprah's house.********

Another Critic - hannibal ending
Comment: Welp, it sounds like they didnt bother altering the ending the way they said they would when they talked about making it in the first place. For those of you who haven't READ the book, I'll save you the trouble: DONT BOTHER. The ending of this book (and apparently the film as well) contains one of the worst character betrayals I have ever witnessed an author perpetrate on his creations. Thomas Harris is a sick f***, and deliberately twisting his audiences' nipples like this is not to be cheered. f*** him, f*** his shitty book and f*** this movie too if they didn't bother to tack on a different (not even necessarily better, just different) ending. -disappointed in ridley scott Viewer who saw test screening in San Diego - But HELL, I'll just be the first one to come out and say it: HANNIBAL is not a great film, and it certainly doesn't match the original Jonathan Demme masterpiece. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS had a story marked with a sense of emergency, as Buffalo Bill was on the prowl, and Clarice Starling was in a race to the death to save the next victim. It was also a psychological war between two great minds: Clarice, whose vulnerabilities somehow became her greatest strength, and Hannibal Lecter, the man who needs no explanation. HANNIBAL, however, has neither the immediate focus of the first film's storyline, nor the intense psychological love/hate buildup between the two leads. This isn't particularly Ridley Scott's fault, as the book source material was SO out there, that this is indeed perhaps the best movie they could have made. Don't get me wrong. It's good. But somehow there's something missing from all this. Whether it's from the story, the acting, the direction, I don't know, but the film just doesn't have THE SOUL that the first film did. Will it win everyone Oscars like the first film did? - Awwwww shucks, looks like Hopkins won't be getting that second Oscar he so craves. :( heh Hannibal lets it all hang out!

The scene where Pazzi tries to catch Hannibal, but instead of Hannibal getting caught, Hannibal tapes Pazzi to a dolly and just before Hannibal throws Pazzi over a balcony slits Pazzi's guts open for that added gross out scene of Pazzi dangling like a pathetic victim with his intestines exposed. Pazzi ends up hanging out the window with his guts falling out. Told you this is one sick movie. A great quote used by Oprah Winfrey, "When someone tells you who they are, believe them!"

Anthony Hopkins the lead actor in the movie Hannibal is truly a lost soul. Hopkins on playing the part of Hannibal, "the impression that was left in me is of a kind of dark angel of death." "I'm just very, very selfish. I'm a roamer. I think I'm a bit of a nihilist, really." (nihilist means the general rejection of beliefs in morality, religion, etc.) It is apparent Anthony Hopkins over the course of his career has a very confused view about life. The following interviews are taken from magazines, newspapers etc. A decade of vitriolic contradictions. Wanting people to view him like he were a virgin but in reality he is simply another egomaniacal media whore.

Interview excerpts from the past: *Orange County Register 2000 by Barry Koltnow- hopkins, "Most people in the business are bores and don't know what they're talking about." Amazing how much independence (arrogance) comes with an Oscar and Knighthood. *Authorized Biography by Quentin Falk- Hopkins the voracious reader. Books reflect his penchant for endless self-analysis, a need to dissect his own character, which Hopkins describes with disarming candor, as "immature, neurotic and self obsessed".

*vanity Fair 1996- I've been troubled for years, says Hopkins. I don't know quite with what. I am a very angry man. I wanted revenge. It's a pretty infantile way to go through life but I've done it." David Hare, "I think all Tony basically cares about is acting. If you talk to Tony for any length of time all his stories are about anger." Hopkins, "There was alot of tyranny in my grandfather, it's in me as well.

*Newsweek 1974 - When Hopkins walked out on the play Misanthrope. Diretor John Dexter wrote in his diary, "Shifty spineless Welsh c - - t!" also noting the similarity between Hopkins and Burton, the self deception, combined with ambition and cowardice.

*Harper Bazaar 1999 - Hopkins, "I like people in a general...a very general way. But I don't want to have friends."

*World Monitor 1992 - Hopkins, "Being a compulsive neurotic makes me think I'll never work again. so I never turn down work. I don't think about tomorrow." On Silence of The Lambs. Hopkins, "Clearly evil can be made alluring. The Lecter part came off the page into my brain, but the impression that was left in me is of a kind of dark angel of death. (Wait till you get a load of the movie Hannibal!)

*Unauthorized Biography by Callan - Hopkins first wife Peta Barker attested to Hopkins continuing , non-stop obsessive desire to win over English theater. Barker say they always joked about a Knighthood. Hopkins was disappointed when he only first received the Queens CBE.

* Vanity Fair 1996 - Hopkins, "they gave me an Oscar; the Queen gave me something (Knighthood), I don't know what for."

*Orange County Register - Hopkins, "I have very little tolerance for people who want to talk about acting. I pretend I don't know what they're talking about. I don't think much about anything when it comes to my career. On the movie Titus, "It's fun to look at and has plenty of sex and violence, he said. "What more could you want from a movie!" On Richard Burton, "Burton had gotten out of Wales and thats what I wanted to do. Later I realized what I really wanted was to escape from myself. What better way to escape from yourself than acting?"

*Biography - When Hopkins served in the British National Service. Tony could not put off national service any longer, and after a medical in swansea, at which he pretended, unsuccessfully, to be deaf, he was dispatched to Oswestry in feb. 1958.

*Vanity fair 1996 - Bob Palmer former publicist and friend, Hopkins doesn't thrive on people. It isn't that Tony is a alley cat and is playing around all the time. Not that much anyway. Hopkins, "Maybe I'm just full of shit", he adds brusquely. "I probably am. I'm just very, very selfish. I'm not a very good husband; I'm not a good father. I'm a roamer. I think I'm a bit of a nihilist, really." (note the term nihilist)

*Orange County register 2000 - Hopkins on winning his Oscar, "When I won it, my first thought was that I could now make bad movies and it doesn't matter anymore. I also assumed that I would no longer be unhappy again. that was wrong; now I want another Oscar." - - When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE DRUIDS
Subject: Mithras
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000
From: Thirunethran Govender

Hello, Mithra was one of the most important deities of Proto Hinduism, being seen as the preserver of Cosmic Balance as well as creator of the Universe. He was introduced to Rome by the Persians much as Indra, the Vedic God of Thunder became Dionyces the Greek God of Wine (Introduced to Greece by Selenius Nicator the first Governor of Taxilla) The teachings of Jesus is of sound principles but Christianity still retains much of the Ancient Religions and Paganism eg. The Easter Bunny, Mid Witer and Midsummer of Druidic Worship.
Thirunethran Govender
PS Please do not post my e-mail address on your website

Response: You are so right. And the Druids stand on other traditions handed down from the Adamic world.

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