The Silence of the Lambs 1991
I don’t when I last saw Silence of the Lambs, but it had been many years. It is a movie that makes a lasting impression and no movie since has swept the Oscars for both lead acting awards as well as picture, director, and writing. Knowing some of the major surprises, the movie loses a lot of impact, but the performances are still great and it is a pleasure to watch Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. With such acclaim, it is no surprise that AFI put the movie in its top 100 movies of all time. Even with decades of police procedurals on TV, the movie still holds up, now 27 years later.
The Blu-ray is now available as part of the Criterion Collection and I have no doubt that is the better version, but I was able to get a pretty good version of the movie from Target for $4 and was happy to see it includes a lot of extras, some of them kind of funny and dated like an Anthony Hopkins phone message you could put on your answering machine. I watched an hour long making of that was good and showed a lot of what went in to making the movie, but also the accolades and even problems it caused. The movie came under fire for villifying a transsexual, with protesters saying why can’t a gay man be a leading man for a change. And as Ted Levine (the really creepy villain, who went on to become Captain Stottlemeyer on Monk) points out, the director, Jonathan Demme, went on to direct Philadelphia and Tom Hanks got an Oscar for playing a gay leading man.
Written: 25 Sep 2018
Owned on: Blu-ray